Drawing maps: history and geography in contemporary black British art

For contemporary black British artists, history is a recurring and significant concept in their lives. This is the imperial and colonial history of the enslavement, exploitation, and oppression of non-white populations. Geography is conceptually twinned with history. European colonial enterprises necessitated the movement of people as well as goods across oceans and between continents. Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Americas were conquered, carved up, and mapped out by European powers. This geography is a legacy for those people whose ancestors and relatives were enslaved and/or displaced. It is equally important to those people directly affected by economic and political instability in their homelands, immigration, and/or racism. Artists Yinka Shonibare, Godfried Donkor, and Lubaina Himid appropriate centuries-old images and cultural as well as racial stereotypes to question accepted historical narratives with regards to black populations. Zarina Bhimji, Sonia Boyce, and Sokari Douglas Camp are more concerned with how history impinges upon them personally.     

South African cinema after apartheid: A political-economic exploration

Abstract

When South Africa was emancipated from the oppressive apartheid regime in 1994, it was a severely divided society in need of an inclusive national identity to bind its citizens and maintain peace. Therefore, the state targeted the cultural industries, including film, as a means of promoting symbolic representations of national unity. The film industry was further identified as a priority sector for economic growth and as a potential platform for equitable redress. This article discusses existing and emerging finance, distribution and exhibition structures in the post-apartheid film industry. It considers government interventions in the form of film policies and development strategies with the purpose of examining the influence of globalising forces, in particular neoliberalism, on the apparent market-orientation of such interventions. The results presented indicate that the post-apartheid vision of equality, freedom and diversity does not always sit comfortably with the neoliberal, free-market principles promoted in the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) programme of 1996. Moreover, it suggests that in this commercial environment, the voices of the historically oppressed black majority, rather than enjoying a sense of artistic and creative freedom, can in fact encounter commercial censorship through the commodification of films for an export-orientated market.     

The rise of film production and the politics of the star system in South Africa

ABSTRACT

The rise of film production and the ubiquitous presence of the ‘new wave’ of South African films on the international scene in recent years have raised expectations amongst local film stars hoping to get their biggest break by taking leading roles in major South African productions. However, most of these films – particularly co-productions – have continuously used foreign stars in leading roles. As a result, local stars have constantly voiced concerns about the proliferation of foreign artists in leading roles in South African productions. Many explanations have been offered in trying to understand why filmmakers tend to cast a foreign star when a local one could probably do a better job (in, for example, portraying a local icon like Nelson Mandela) and still command a lesser fee. However, this article puts forward that most of these arguments are based on intuition rather than on the real dynamics and externalities governing this practice. The article attempts to make sense of this issue by arguing that the rationale for this practice stems from a film being a high-risk investment that it is driven by the broader financial imperatives of film production. The article offers empirical evidence to suggest that stars do not add economic value to the film, but to themselves (see Elberse 2005), since the bulk of the money goes towards their appearance fees. It is concluded that the traditional model guiding film finance and the logic behind it need to be looked at afresh, given the fact that several films have failed at the box office, both locally and internationally, despite featuring major foreign stars, compared to the massive success of some local films (e.g., Jerusalema, Tsotsi and Yesterday) with local stars in the leading roles.     

对实用艺术作品著作权保护之法律探析——完善我国《著作权法》立法建议

我国《著作权法》及《著作权法实施条例》中,对实用艺术作品均没有任何明确的规定,实用艺术作品的法律保护至今仍为空白。我国应结合国际公约、条约和国外一些国家的法律规定,在《著作权法》中应明确规定对实用艺术作品的著作权保护的具体措施。     

To Live Outside the Law: Frank O'Hara

This essay reflects on the New York School poet Frank O'Hara in terms of the idea of law. I suggest that art depends on a notion of an immanent law: that for language to become artistic is to become a meaningful part of an order which announces its autonomy from the surrounding world. O'Hara exploits this fact by making the most unlikely pieces of language into poetry, and thus giving the law to the life from which his words are taken. But he is also constantly improvising his own rules of art, drawing the law of poetry from the whim of the moment in radically individualist fashion. The gamble of O'Hara's writing is that the reader will submit to this profoundly personal law for the duration of a poem. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

论新时期寻根电影思潮的发展历程

新时期寻根电影对传统文化,或批判或皈依,都充溢着浓郁的文化意蕴。从1980年代的“电影民族化”大讨论开始,到90年代新民俗电影的兴盛,新时期寻根电影思潮的发展历程依稀可辨。80年代中期以后,电影界自觉地呼应文学界的文化寻根运动,一批寻根电影相继问世,展现了这一思潮的创作实绩。进入90年代以后,在主旋律电影和商业电影对艺术电影的挤压和吸附的生存困境中,电影依然充溢着绵延不断的寻根精神,一部分呈现出强烈的皈依趋向,另一部分如新民俗电影集中对传统文化进行批判,产生了广泛的影响。     

Film noir’s ‘gal producers’ and the female market

ABSTRACT

This article surveys publicity surrounding the work of three female producers active in Hollywood in the 1940s and early 1950s: Joan Harrison, Virginia Van Upp, and Harriet Parsons. All three produced key titles in the cycle of film noir that emerged during this period. Publicity that emphasized their work behind the scenes on these productions was part of broader attempts to cultivate a female audience for film noir. Marketing campaigns suggested that ‘gal producers’ catered to unconventional feminine appetites for criminality and violence, all the while celebrating their ascendance in the traditionally male-dominated profession of producer. Such profiles would have been particularly appealing to female moviegoers during the Second World War, when many women held jobs previously dominated by men, and in the immediate postwar period when they sought to retain those lucrative positions.     

‘The film gone male’: women and the transition to sound in the British film industry 1929–1932

ABSTRACT

Taking its cue from Dorothy Richardson’s essay, ‘The Film Gone Male’ written for the critical, Left-wing British film publication Close Up in 1932, this article looks at women working in the British film industry during the transition from silent to sound cinema between 1929 and 1932. It considers the effects of new sound technology on women’s roles in front of and behind the camera from production to reception and critique. It also questions whether sound technology further marginalised women as producers of cinema and interrogates whether synchronised sound masculinised film as Richardson asserted.     

丽藻穷雕饰：论唐初诗歌对藻饰之美的追求

在初唐前期诗坛,传统儒家"雅"、"颂"的诗歌观念的复归并没有影响到当时诗人在诗歌艺术领域里的探求,"丽藻穷雕饰"成为诗人们的共同创作观念和努力目标;与此同时,"清辞巧制"也为诗人普遍接受.这使得在艺术风貌上,此一时期的诗歌表现出追求辞藻的雕琢、体制的精巧和诗风的清雅等鲜明特征.     

The arc and the zip: Deleuze and lyotard on art

Lyotard and Deleuze made extensive use of modern art to mount a critique of representation as part of their attack on the enlightenment subject. Art breaks out of received rules, conventions, forms, and cliches and is an instance of ethical if not revolutionary activity. Lyotard first developed these ideas through the concept of the Figure, which Deleuze later adopted. Figure is the desire or force that transgresses and deforms the good form of mimetic representation. Using Cezanne and Francis Bacon as paradigmatic examples, they argue that art creates new feelings and desires (Lyotard) or intensities and sensations (Deleuze). For Deleuze this is the model of ethical behavior -- the creation of new, productive forms of life free from the negativity of judgment. While Lyotard and Deleuze started from a common point, Lyotard changed his position in his later work on the sublime. Rather than positing a subject of purely affirmative desire and ideally free of the limitations of judgment, he posited a subject seized by and limited by the law. The subject is by nature divided: always already seized by and hostage to an Other, an unrepresentable excess or remainder. He is under an obligation to recollect and respond to the Other by bearing witness to it. The sublime experience of seizure by the law is exemplified in the paintings of Barnett Newman. While Deleuze would have done with judgment, Lyotard can never have done with it.