Search

This article asks: how do art practice and research give form to changing dynamics of conflict? Its argument is two-fold: art's contribution can be developed from empirical considerations (what art finds out), and from methodological ones (how art finds something out). Bringing in art practice and the research methods it informs into political science helps understand conflict and its changes: by engaging simultaneously with the interaction between the collective and the personal, art practice and research elucidates those complex and layered narratives used by various actors in conflict that often resist approaches rooted in social and political sciences. By paying attention to everyday interactions and emphasizing dynamism, art provides a different way to chart changes in armed conflict. Art documents discourses that are difficult to communicate otherwise and allows us to detect and engage with the grey areas, transformations, processes and ambivalences of conflicts that escape neat categorizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses that film director Chris Marker's documentary film "Level Five" can be understood as a non-representational historical documentary and how this film interrogates representation concerning the form's ability to communicate historical events. It mentions how Marker's emphasis on the experiential dimension of images goes hand in hand with a desire to make historical films outside the strictures of chronology by cutting, trimming, and splitting.

A recurring feature of Patrick Keiller's work is the lack of human presence and activity. Throughout his films, Keiller delivers a vision of England as a desert island, depopulated and unoccupied. Scrutinizing Keiller's early shorts and feature-length films, this article argues that the absence of human subjects allows the filmmaker to articulate a broader discourse on space, so that the films can be described as "spatial fictions." Keiller, by aligning his work with various strands of utopian thinking on space — from the surrealists to Henri Lefebvre and the situationists — forces us to think the relationship between cinema and space and offers a geography of absence as the precondition for the imagination of a new space. The article shows how this framework informs Keiller's visual grammar, including his emphasis on a deliberate scarcity of gestures and the invisibility of the cinematic apparatus. By withdrawing from the production of the image, Keiller suggests that the absence of a sign always functions as the sign of an absence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-revolutionary Iranian cinema has been praised for its emotional immediacy and compositional simplicity. The work of Asghar Farhadi stands as an exception to this canon. His films focus on domestic conflicts and cultural contradictions in urban life and are marked by emotional complexity and intricate narrative structures. Focusing on these characteristics, critics have stressed his proximity to mainstream American cinema. The article analyses this proximity by discussing the thematic parallels that Farhadi's work enjoys with classical Hollywood films, as conceptualised by philosopher Stanley Cavell. The article explores the limit of this approach by connecting Farhadi's films to pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, a body of work that, despite the little attention it has received, can nonetheless provide significant insights into Farhadi's oeuvre to date, whilst bringing to the fore the heterogeneous tradition of Iranian cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite considerable differences, Stanley Cavell and Jean-Luc Nancy share the demand for a renewal of thinking produced through and with the concept of the world. Their articulation of the legacy bequeathed by Heidegger and Wittgenstein begins with an understanding of the world in excess of knowledge and insists on this impossible mastery as the most productive incentive for thinking. Inasmuch as philosophy has understood itself as producer of worldviews, systems and principle, philosophy has constantly suppressed the thinking of the world, for any worldview absorbs and dissolves the world in its vision. For both Cavell and Nancy an insistence on this suppression leads to an emphasis on film. Two gestures can be said to intertwine in their thinking of film: to recapture our relation to the world as one that is not based on knowing as certainty, but on the reception of the singular; to recapture thinking as that which is attracted and called for by the insurgence of the singular, by the seam(s) in experience. Nancy and Cavell reverse the idea of cinema as completing the regime of representation stressing how cinema produces a step away from thinking as representation in view of what the article namesthinking as patience.The article concludes by asking: what does it mean for philosophy to understand itself as patience? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are Imazighen: The Development of Algerian Berber Identity in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture, Fazia Aitel (2014) University Press of Florida, 324 pp., ISBN-10: 0813049393, $74.95 From Francophonie to World Literature in French: Ethics, Poetics, & Politics, Thérèse Migraine-George (2013) Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 237 pp., ISBN: 9780803246362 Trajectoires et dérives de la littérature-monde: Poétiques de la relation et du divers dans les espaces francophones, Colloque de l'APLAQA, Cécilia W. Francis and Robert Viau (ed.) (2013) 1st ed., Amsterdam: Rodopi, 608 pp., ISBN-10: 9042036877, h/bk, £84, ISBN-13: 9789042036871, $122 Language and Literary Form in French Caribbean Writing, Celia Britton (2014) Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 256 pp., ISBN: 9781781380369, h/bk, £70 Les écrivains maghrébins francophones et l'Islam. Constance dans la diversité, Najib Rédouane (coord.) (2013) Paris: Editions L'Harmattan, 460 pp., ISBN: 9782343017204 Critical Conditions: Illness and Disability in Francophone African and Caribbean Women's Writing, Julie N. Ngue (2012) Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 208 pp., ISBN: 9780739151143, h/bk, $80/£49.95 A Poetics of Relation: Caribbean Women Writing at the Millennium, Odile Ferly (2012) New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 222 pp., ISBN: 9780230120440, h/bk, $95 L'Humour et l'ironie en littérature francophone subsaharienne. Des enjeux critiques à une poétique du rire, Vincent Simédoh (2012) New York: Peter Lang, 169 pp., ISBN: 9781433115431, h/bk, £47 From Sugar to Revolution: Women's Visions of Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, Myriam J. A. Chancy (2012) Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 358 pp., ISBN: 9781554584284, h/bk, $85 France's Colonial Legacies, Fiona Barclay (2013) Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 260 pp., ISBN: 9780708326671, h/bk, £95 Rethinking Reading, Writing, and a Moral Code in Contemporary France. Postcolonializing High Culture in the Schools of the Republic, Michel Laronde (2014) Lanham: Lexington Books, 222 pp., ISBN: 9780739181669 Mythes et Erotismes dans les littératures et les cultures francophones de l'extrême contemporain, Efstratia Oktapoda (ed.) (2013) Amsterdam: Rodopi, 314 pp., ISBN: 9789042037624, p/bk, £55.62 What is Québécois Literature?, Rosemary Chapman (2013) Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 292 pp., ISBN: 9781846319730, £70.00 After 'Rwanda'. In Search of a New Ethic, Jean-Paul Martinon (2013) Amsterdam: Rodopi, 308 pp., ISBN: 9789042037113, p/bk, £58.50 Les français d'ici et d'aujourd'hui. Description, représentation et théorisation, Bigot, Davy, Friesner, Michael et Tremblay Mireille (sous la dir.) (2013) Canada: Presses de l'Université Laval, Les Voies du français (coll.), 260 pp., ISBN: 9782763797700 Bilingual Being. My life as a Hyphen, Kathleen Saint-Onge (2013) Montreal, Kingston, London and Ithaca: McGill-Queen's University Press, 328 pp., ISBN: 9780773541191 Cousin K, Yasmina Khadra (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith and Alyson Waters) (2013) Lincoln NE: Nebraska University Press, 85 pp., ISBN: 9780803234932, p/bk, US$15.95 Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary, Régine Michelle Jean-Charles (2014) Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 320 pp., ISBN: 9780814212462, h/bk, $69.95 Écritures féminines et dialogues critiques: Subjectivité, genre et ironie, Françoise, Lionnet (2012) Ile Maurice: L'Atelier d'écriture, 315 pp., ISBN: 99903-36-68-7 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elio Petri’sTodo Modo(1976) – based on Sciascia’s novel – features Marcello Mastroianni as a priest in charge of a group of politicians from the ruling party of the Christian Democracy on a spiritual retreat in a hotel. Here they begin to die one by one in unexplained circumstances. Petri’s declared aim was to damage the party as much as possible. The intention – which also motivates the distance from Sciascia – was to delimit a specific reality so to embed its distortions into the fabric of the film. However, the film was received mainly as an allegorical representation. This article argues thatTodo Modois both an effective example of European political cinema from the 1970s, because of the specificity of its analysis, and a lesson for political cinema in general. The film shows the need for political cinema’s pedagogical efforts to embrace reality’s distortions, rather than attempting to elucidate them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article identifies and elaborates on two models of resistance evident in JiaZhangke's film corpus. The deployment of different cinematic strategies produces an experimental calling into question of the value of truth and of truth as value. In the films here analysed Jia moves from resistance through organic observation to a model of resistance structured around a series of fabulations. If the first regime addresses the truth of ideology, then the target of the second is the ideology of truth. It is in this passage that Jia enters political cinema, collapsing the distinction between factual and fictional and opening up a space that belongs to no collectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies Marco Ferreri's original contribution to cinema as a gesture aimed at exposing the 'end of the world'. This expression should be understood - aside from millenarian connotations - as a reopening of sense in excess of acquired significations. Ferreri supports this gesture through images that deliberately defy conceptual validation, so that his films often move from the meticulous description of ordinary situations to the collapse of meaningful references. In order to contextualize the framework described above, the argument traces Ferreri's trajectory back to neo-realism, highlighting elements of continuity and moments of rupture. In particular, the article highlights how Ferreri delivers the humanism expressed by neo-realism to a world without thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critique is presented of films such as "Faces" by director John Cassavetes, focusing on their relation to the the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy regarding sense and understanding. Cinema vérité, Cassavete's use of close-ups, and philosopher Martin Heidegger are mentioned, as well as the philosophy of reason, reality in motion pictures, and the social aspects of film.