Browsing by Subject "Transnational cinema"

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Bahman Ghobadi's hyphenated cinema : an analysis of hybrid authorial strategies and cinematic aesthetics
(2012-05) Major, Anne Patrick; Kumar, Shanti; Ramirez Berg, Charles
This thesis examines Iranian-Kurdish filmmaker, Bahman Ghobadi’s authorial strategies and cinematic aesthetics through the theoretical and methodological lens of hybridity. According to Homi Bhabha, hybridity can be understood as a “third space,” in which cultural meanings resist binary either/or logic, and are instead negotiated through a logic that is neither one, nor the other. Thus, Bhabha’s concept of hybridity as a “third space” provides a fruitful framework to analyze Ghobadi’s authorship and cinematic style. By analyzing Ghobadi’s neo-realist treatment of Kurdistan’s cultural and physical landscape and hybrid cinematic aesthetics in his first two features, A Time for Drunken Horses (2000) and Turtles Can Fly (2004), this research calls attention to intercultural processes that generate cultural meaning through indexical and material as opposed to symbolic registers. In addition, this thesis applies Hamid Naficy’s concept of “shifters” to examine how Ghobadi’s hybrid authorial strategies and narrative reflexivity garners international audiences in his two latest features, Half Moon (2006) and No One Knows about Persian Cats (2009). This project also examines how Ghobadi’s use of a digital camera and employment of digital cinematic techniques to capture Iran’s underground rock music culture in No One Knows about Persian Cats, testifies to the authenticity of this cultural space while simultaneously structuring the film as a global vehicle for these Iranian musicians’ performances. Ultimately, Ghobadi’s hybrid authorial strategies and cinematic aesthetics function as a means to enunciate and globally circulate diverse Kurdish and Iranian cultural identities. In doing so, this thesis illuminates hybrid modes of cultural production and hybrid cultural subjectivities that have emerged in the contemporary globalized landscape.
Writing foreign stardom under autarchy : affect, nationalism and the Americas in early Franquista Spanish culture
(2018-05-04) Norton, Diana Ruth; Borge, Jason, 1965-; Robbins, Jill, 1962-; Pérez, Jorge; Harney, Michael; Ramírez Berg, Charles
This dissertation questions the assumption that foreign films solely provided modes of escapism or opportunities to subvert societal norms under the early Franco regime. In essence, I show how complex political operations underlay the reception and marketing in Spain of foreign films and transnational star images. Using archival research, I examine the way that the Spanish press wrote about Hollywood and Latin American film actresses between 1945 and 1953, taking as case studies the star discourses of Joan Crawford, Dolores del Río, María Félix, Rita Hayworth, Carmen Miranda and Ava Gardner in Spain. In effect, the symbols of Spanish nationalism fostered by the Franco regime—including an imperialist notion of Hispanism—came to circulate in writings about these women, affectively associating the bodies of foreign actresses with the propaganda of the Franco regime. Drawing on the concept of ‘sticky associations’ developed by Sara Ahmed, I argue that these Francoist symbols came to adhere to the representations of American stars in state-controlled discourse, subtly reflecting the regime’s growing alignment with the US over the period in question. In this way, they allowed for the idea of the West as advanced by US postwar cultural imperialism to gain traction in Spain, despite the oft-cited critique of American morality. My project builds on important work in Spanish Cultural Studies, using affect theory to unite film, celebrity, transnational, and gender studies with history and international relations