Afgespeeld
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Buona Pasqua! This is a special Easter edition of Cinema Italiano, with an audio essay on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, exploring this excitingly anachronistic tale of Christ with themes and motifs that recur throughout Pasolini’s filmography. Links: The Gospel According to Film – April 2018 essay comparing three films about the […]
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This week, I touch on an ongoing argument: the difference between watching films in motion picture theaters vs. on a digital home device. My idea on this topic is that motion picture theaters provide a hypnotizing effect that you can’t get anywhere else. The definition of hypnosis says that it is a trance state where someone can be manipulated both physically and emotionally. This is used to control how we feel in theaters by utilizing images and sounds as, metaphorically, the pocket watch that hypnotizes us.
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This week, I approach my analysis differently to what I usually do by looking at a film through a cinephiliac moment or privileged moment. Paul Willemen states that a cinephiliac moment “has something to do with what you perceive to be the privileged, pleasure-giving, fascinating moment of a relationship to what’s happening on the screen.” In this episode, to explain this concept in film analysis, I look at Nicholas Ray’s "Johnny Guitar" (1954) and share a dramatic personal experience from my own life.
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This week, I talk about the auteur theory and expand on the argument suggested by Graham Petrie in his article “Alternatives to Auteurs” where he wrestles with how can we attribute credit where it belongs? Or how can we know we are giving credit to the person that is responsible for the visual style of the film? In other words, why do we give all the credit to the director when many professionals from different departments make a motion picture?
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The film movement emerged on February 3rd of 2006 when the National Congress approved the first Ecuadorian Cinema Law and, as a result, an institution called the CNCine was established to fortify the audiovisual industry of the country. This organization began supporting upcoming directors, the ones who will in due time create the Ecuadorian First Wave.
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The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe's 1958 Things Fall Apart transformed the world by vividly imagining the story of an African community in English, the language of the colonizers, and yet on its own terms. It transformed not only the English language but allowed millions of readers to enter into a civilization and worldview that is at once highly specific yet resonant with universal themes. Manthia Diawara, the Mali-born and European and American-educated renowned filmmaker, most recently An Opera of the World, and author of many books himself, including We Won’t Budge: An African Exile in the World, explains why Things Fall Apart ranks among the great novels of all time. Manthia brings the book powerfully to life, and shows how reading this book brings you face-to-face with the great challenges and joys faced by all humans at all times. Read more.
Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It"
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I met Dr Miriam Driessen at Oxford University where she works at the China Centre. We spoke about her wonderful new book Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia (Hong Kong University Press, 2019). Through unprecedented ethnographic research among Chinese road builders in Ethiopia, Driessen finds that the hope of sharing China’s success with developing countries soon turns into bitterness, as Chinese workers perceive a lack of support and appreciation from Ethiopian laborers and local institutions. The bitterness is compounded by their position at the margins of Chinese society, suspended as they are between China and Africa and between a poor rural background and a precarious urban future. Workers’ aspirations and predicaments reflect back on a Chinese society in flux as well as China’s shifting place in the world.
I started our conversation asking a short introduction on her background and the origin of the book. We mentioned the influence on her research of the work by C.K. Lee and particularly the book Against the Law. Miriam explained how she ended studying the Ethiopian case and road construction over other sectors. We then moved to her findings on the resistance and agency of African workers and the ‘hopes and bitterness’ of the Chinese workers. We discussed how it is possible to identify different classes among Chinese workers in Ethiopia (as well as in China) and the varieties of migrants, each with different background, ambitions, working conditions and destiny.
We concluded our conversation addressing the controversial topic of China’s presence in Africa and whether this should be defined as neo-colonialism or not. Revealing the intricate and intimate dimensions of these encounters, Driessen conceptualizes how structures of domination and subordination are reshaped on the ground. The book skillfully interrogates micro-level experiences and teases out how China’s involvement in Africa is both similar to and different from historical forms of imperialism.
Miriam also told us about her new project as she is about to move to Ethiopia for another year of fieldwork. Thanks to her bright anthropological skills and her ability to communicate in both Amharic and Chinese, it will be yet another amazing scholarly contribution.
Miriam Driessen is an anthropologist and a writer of literary nonfiction in English and her native Dutch. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate within the China, Law and Development Project, hosted by the University of Oxford China Centre. Miriam completed a DPhil at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at Oxford (2014/15), and held a fellowship at Peking University (2014–2016). She has also been a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies (SIAS) and a Junior Research Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford.
Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies.
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