You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Why have films with diasporic family narratives increased in popularity in recent years? How do representations of the diasporic family differ from those of more dominant social groups? How does diasporic cinema negotiate the conventions of film genres commonly associated with the representation of the family? In the age of globalisation, diasporic and other types of transnational family are increasingly represented in films such as East is East, Le Grand Voyage, Almanya - Welcome to Germany, Immigrant Memories, Couscous, When We Leave, Monsoon Wedding and My Big Fat Greek Wedding. While there is a significant body of scholarship on the representation of the family in Hollywood cinema, this ...
When Head-On (Gegen die Wand, 2004) won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, it was hailed as a turning point for German cinema. Not only was this unconventional love story the first German film in eighteen years to win the prestigious award, but the success of writer-director Fatih Akin was also celebrated as the revival of German auteur cinema. Meanwhile Turkey claimed Akin as its own prodigal son and his film a victory for Turkish cinema. Daniela Berghahn provides a detailed and entertaining account of the film's artistic inspirations, its production history and the debates that surrounded it in the German and Turkish press. Arguing that much of the media discourse on Turkish German identity politics detracted from Akin's remarkable artistic achievement, Berghahn instead situates Head-On in the critical contexts of global art cinema and transnational melodrama. This comparative approach excavates new layers of meaning and offers highly original insights into Akin's landmark film.
A critical reassessment of the aesthetic strategies and cultural value of exoticism in contemporary transnational cinemas.
This book is a representative history of East German film culture from 1946 to the present, examining both DEFA's celebrated classics and the most acclaimed post-unification feature films by East German directors. As Berghahn shows, East German cinema occupies an ambivalent position between German national cinema on the one hand and East European and Soviet cinema on the other. It includes a wide-ranging exploration of post-unification cinema from East Germany, including cult films such as Sun Alley and Goodbye, Lenin! and provides contextualized readings of twenty significant films, referencing one hundred and ninety East German films in total, along with numerous West German and East European classics.
Screening the East considers German filmmakers’ responses to unification. In particular, it traces the representation of the East German community in films made since 1989 and considers whether these narratives challenge or reinforce the notion of a separate East German identity. The book identifies and analyses a large number of films, from internationally successful box-office hits, to lesser-known productions, many of which are discussed here for the first time. Providing an insight into the films’ historical and political context, it considers related issues such as stereotyping, racism, regional particularism and the Germans’ confrontation with the past.
By the time the Berlin Wall collapsed, the cinema of the German Democratic Republic—to the extent it was considered at all—was widely regarded as a footnote to European film history, with little of enduring value. Since then, interest in East German cinema has exploded, inspiring innumerable festivals, books, and exhibits on the GDR’s rich and varied filmic output. In Re-Imagining DEFA, leading international experts take stock of this vibrant landscape and plot an ambitious course for future research, one that considers other cinematic traditions, brings genre and popular works into the fold, and encompasses DEFA’s complex post-unification “afterlife.”
This collection brings together international experts on the cinema of migration and diaspora in postcolonial and postnational Europe. It offers a comprehensive theoretical and analytical discussion of a highly productive creative sector and documents the spectrum of this area of exploration in European, transnational and World Cinema studies.
Based on ethnographic work in a Moldovan winemaking village, Wine Is Our Bread shows how workers in a prestigious winery have experienced the country’s recent entry into the globalized wine market and how their productive activities at home and in the winery contribute to the value of commercial terroir wines. Drawing on theories of globalization, economic anthropology and political economy, the book contributes to understanding how crises and inequalities in capitalism lead to the ‘creative destruction’ of local products, their accelerated standardization and the increased exploitation of labour.
Across the West, the explosion of social movement activity since the late 1960s has constituted a “participatory revolution” that has posed profound challenges for formal political parties. Through an analysis of new interviews, institutional documents, and a host of other largely unexploited sources, Daniela R. Piccio provides a rich and empirically grounded exploration of the wide-ranging responses to these movements. Focusing on Italy and the Netherlands since the 1970s, Party Responses to Social Movements demonstrates how political parties have incorporated the demands of movements to a surprising extent, even as both have grappled with fundamental and inevitable tensions between their respective roles and aims.
Introduction -- CONFIGURATIONS OF STEREOTYPES AND IDENTITIES: NEW METHODOLOGIES. Daniela Berghahn: My big fat Turkish wedding: from culture clash to romcom -- David Gramling: The oblivion of influence: mythical realism in Feo Alada's When we leave -- Marco Abel: The minor cinema of Thomas Arslan: a prolegomenon -- MULTIPLE SCREENS AND PLATFORMS: FROM DOCUMENTARY AND TELEVISION TO INSTALLATION ART. Angelica Fenner: Roots and routes of the diasporic documentarian: a psychogeography of Fatih Akin's We forgot to go back -- Ingeborg Majer-O'Sickey: Gendered kicks: Buket Alakus's and Aysun Bademsoy's soccer films -- Nilgan Bayraktar: Location and mobility in Kutlu Ataman's site-specific video inst...