Contemporary Cinema – serie

In The Cinema of Catherine Breillat, Bélot offers a detailed analysis of Breillat’s past and recent films. Breillat is one of the most internationally renowned French women filmmakers whose notoriety is built on her explicit representation of women’s sexuality. Most of her films rely on a female protagonist’s personal and intimate search of her self, characterised by her sexual journey. Facing censorship and controversy, Breillat’s films do not easily fit classification and place the viewer into an uncomfortable position. This study looks at Breillat as an independent cinema auteur entertaining a close relation with her films by exploring and positing women, from adolescence to adulthood, as sexual beings reflecting her films’ identity emanating from Breillat’s personal or intimate scenes.

Film festivals around the world are in the business of making experiences for audiences, elites, industry, professionals, and even future cultural workers. Cinema and the Festivalization of Capitalism explains why these non-profit organizations work as they do: by attracting people who work for free, while appealing to businesses and policymakers as a cheap means to illuminate the creative city and draw attention to film art. Ann Vogel’s unprecedented systematic sociological analysis thus provides firm evidence for the ‘festival effect’, which situates the festival as a key intermediary in cinema value chains, yet also demonstrates the impact of such event culture on cultural workers’ lives. By probing the various resources and institutional pillars ensuring that the festivalization of capitalism is here to stay, Vogel urges us to think critically about publicly displayed benevolence in the context of cinema—and beyond.

The film District 9 made waves as an allegory of apartheid on the big screen, but it has not yet been given its rightful place as a landmark depiction within broader visual cultural studies of Johannesburg and cities in the Global South. In this book, Landi Raubenheimer argues that District 9’s portrayal of Johannesburg reverberates within a larger body of representations of the city, collectively shaping a unique visual ‘idiom’ for the post-apartheid city as nostalgic dystopia. Delving deeply into District 9, Raubenheimer brings to light the fascination that images of the city as nostalgic dystopia has held for filmmakers, photographers, viewers, and lovers of Johannesburg alike.

“The best way of being an artist is not to serve a particular art.” The film critic André Bazin believed artists create without boundaries in mind. Literary criticism should be no different. This book is a unique collection that critically reflects on the complex, non-unidirectional, and organic relationship between cinema, literature, photography, and the other arts.With essays by David Damrosch, Laura Marcus, Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Maria Dabija, and Michael Makarovsky among others, this volume establishes a much needed dialogue between the fields of world literature and world cinema.