Dominique Nasta – författare

Over the last decade, audiences worldwide have become familiar with highly acclaimed films from the Romanian New Wave such as 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), and 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006). However, the hundred or so years of Romanian cinema leading to these accomplishments have been largely overlooked. This book is the first to provide in-depth analyses of essential works ranging from the silent period to contemporary productions. In addition to relevant information on historical and cultural factors influencing contemporary Romanian cinema, this volume covers the careers of daring filmmakers who approached various genres despite fifty years of Communist censorship. An important chapter is dedicated to Lucian Pintilie, whose seminal work, Reconstruction (1969), strongly inspired Romania's 21st-century innovative output. The book's second half closely examines both the 'minimalist' trend (Cristian Mungiu, Cristi Puiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, Radu Muntean) and the younger, but no less inspired, directors who have chosen to go beyond the 1989 revolution paradigm by dealing with the complexities of contemporary Romania.

Dans une confrontation inédite des approches francophones et anglo-saxonnes signées par des experts internationalement reconnus aussi bien que par de jeunes chercheurs, Le mélodrame filmique revisité propose d’ouvrir le champ d’études vers de nouvelles perspectives historiques et esthétiques. En effet, le mélodrame souffre, depuis ses débuts cinématographiques, d’une exploitation péjorative qui restreint le « mode mélodramatique » à la manipulation des émotions du public et à une representation excessive sur le plan esthétique. Minimisé, expédié, ce genre mérite pourtant d’être enfin l’objet d’une revalorisation à travers des approaches innovantes et un corpus élargi à la télévision, l’animation et l’internet. Revisiting Film Melodrama brings forth pioneering French and English-speaking approaches from internationally known experts as well as by young researchers, aiming to broaden the research area through new historical and aesthetic perspectives. Indeed, film melodrama has too often been under-estimated, most surveys having essentially focused on the audience’s emotions and on excessive representations, often neglecting the complexities of the «melodramatic mode». More than ever, melodrama as film genre requires a comprehensive, multi-layered re-appraisal which includes references to the genre at work on television, animation and the internet.

Cet ouvrage propose une analyse originale sur les relations cinématographiques entre Cuba et le Mexique à la période classique, à travers la construction de l’imaginaire particulier du mélodrame de cabaret, peuplé de danseuses de rumba au sang chaud et au cœur tendre. Les films dont elles sont les héroïnes sulfureuses s’enracinent dans les traditions génériques de l’industrie du cinéma mexicain, retravaillées par l’apport cubain à travers la musique, la danse, les paysages et les cabarets. Ils façonnent des personnages féminins originaux, introduisant des représentations inédites de danseuses et de femmes fatales qui luttent pour leur autonomie, et jouissent d’une grande liberté dans leur rapport avec leur corps. Cette coopération cinématographique s’explique par la volonté des producteurs, distributeurs et metteurs en scène mexicains de s’imposer sur les écrans cubains, tandis que les Cubains espèrent bénéficier de leur savoir-faire technique et artistique pour jeter les bases d’un cinéma national encore embryonnaire. Toutefois, l’atmosphère « tropicale » mise en œuvre dans les films s’avère un trompe-l’œil commercial lié au regard mexicain qui exotise Cuba. Un postulat dénoncé par les critiques et cinéastes cubains, en particulier au lendemain de la Révolution qui souhaite rompre radicalement avec ce cinéma commercial. La réception et l’historiographie de ces films en font ainsi de puissants révélateurs des imaginaires nationaux qu’ils contribuent à façonner et à véhiculer.

Understanding how meaning mechanisms are unleashed in film has been at the center of numerous theoretical surveys of the last few years. Emphasis has especially fallen on seeing as a constructive, meaningful activity and on the diegetic implications of vision.This book is an attempt to extend film theorizing into a new realm, where hearing proves as important as seeing and where the relevance of filmic narrative is differently explored. New paths for future research are suggested by means of associations with the works of linguists or philosophers who have never addressed film theory directly in their writings. Nonetheless, several concepts posited by them (relevance, natural versus non-natural meaning or the notion of Mental spaces) find their application in the present survey.A wide range of examples starting with point-of-view and editing occurrences, passing through the use of music and sound and culminating with the study of whole filmic ensembles, enables the reader to re-examine code-bound or, on the contrary, deviational structures. These are often drawn from familiar sources, proving that not only art films of the Eisenstein or Godard type enhance innovative meaning spaces.Finally, the viewer is seen as a «pragmatic protagonist», an active not passive receiver of textual structures who relies on patterns of known visual or aural backgrounds open to an unlimited field of perspectives.

The burgeoning field of trauma and cinema is an exciting development within contemporary trauma studies. The author of this book describes the complex relationship between cinema and the trauma of defeat in war. An asymmetric and non-binary comparison of two test cases, post-World War II New German Cinema and post-Vietnam War American cinema, illuminates the indirect and intriguing ways these societies have dealt with the enormous psycho-cultural difficulty of acknowledging their defeat and understanding its manifold meanings. This book draws on psychoanalysis, masculinity studies, and corporeal feminism to explore the bodily experience of defeat. It examines themes and representations of body and sexuality to create a theoretical framework that reveals anew the link between defeated masculinity and nationalism. Building on an original analysis of such varied films as The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, The Tin Drum, and Paris Texas, the author suggests new criteria that highlight the characteristics of post-traumatic cinema.