Papers by Valentina Vitali
Capital and popular cinema, 2016
BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2021
Chinese Cinemas, 2016
Chinese Cinemas: International Perspectives examines the impact the rapid expansion of Chinese fi... more Chinese Cinemas: International Perspectives examines the impact the rapid expansion of Chinese filmmaking in mainland China has had on independent and popular Chinese cinemas both in and outside of China. While the large Chinese markets are coveted by Hollywood, the commercial film industry within the People’s Republic of China has undergone rapid expansion since the 1990s. Its own production, distribution and exhibition capacities have increased exponentially in the past 20 years, producing box-office success both domestically and abroad. This volume gathers the work of a range of established scholars and newer voices on Chinese cinemas to address questions that interrogate both Chinese films and the place and space of Chinese cinemas within the contemporary global film industries, including the impact on independent filmmaking both within and outside of China; the place of Chinese cinemas produced outside of China; and the significance of new internal and external distribution and exhibition patterns on recent conceptions of Chinese cinemas. This is an ideal book for students and researchers interested in Chinese and Asian Cinema, as well as for students studying topics such as World Cinema and Asian Studies.
Capital and popular cinema, 2016
About the Book The book examines recent developments in Taiwan cinema, with particular focus on a... more About the Book The book examines recent developments in Taiwan cinema, with particular focus on a leading contemporary Taiwan filmmaker, Wei Te-sheng, who is responsible for such Asian blockbusters as Cape No.7, Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale and Kano. The book discusses key issues, including: why (until about 2008) Taiwan cinema underwent a decline, and how cinema is portraying current social changes in Taiwan, including changing youth culture and how it represents indigenous people in the historical narrative of Taiwan. The book also explores the reasons why current Taiwan cinema is receiving a much less enthusiastic response globally compared to its reception in previous decades.
Capital and popular cinema, 2016
Genre in Asian Film and Television, 2011
Indian cinemas have not produced horror films except for a short period, between the late 1970s a... more Indian cinemas have not produced horror films except for a short period, between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, when the genre saw a brief moment of glory with the horror films made by the Ramsay family of filmmakers. The family consists of the seven sons of F.U. Ramsay (1917–89), a radio manufacturer and producer, of whom Kumar, Shyam, Keshu, Tulsi, Gangu and Kiran are actively associated with film and, from the early 1990s, with television (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1999: 191). Most of the Ramsay films were directed by the Tulsi and Shyam team, with Kiran, the youngest, in charge of sound. Their films never occupied the centre ground of cinema in India. Like much horror cinema elsewhere, they were cheaply produced films that circulated at the margins of the industry. Even so, the Ramsay brothers’ films stand out in the history of Hindi and, indeed, of Indian cinemas as a unique moment: although their success in a niche market for just over a decade led other filmmakers such as Mohan Bhakri and Vinod Talwar to experiment with the genre, in practice, the Ramsay brothers’ productions constitute a single instance of horror cinema in India. Nothing like it had been made before and nothing similar was made afterwards. The question I want to explore here is: what made these films possible, even necessary, during the 1980s in India and only then?
BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2020
Two narratives dominate accounts of women's work in South Asian cinemas. The most parochial is wr... more Two narratives dominate accounts of women's work in South Asian cinemas. The most parochial is wrapped around three directors born between the mid-1940s and the late 1950s: Deepa Mehta, Mira Nair and Aparna Sen. Only one of these filmmakers, Aparna Sen, works within an Indian cinema. That British director Gurinder Chadha is sometimes tagged onto this short list is indicative of the extent to which this narrative fails to say anything meaningful about women working in South Asian cinemas. 1 Yet for cinemas, television and even some festival programmers in the Anglophone world and Europe, these are the women making films in South Asia today. They constitute the canon and the whole. The second narrative can be gleaned from paying streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime and includes directors of a younger generation, born in the 1960s and 1970s:
BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2020
Dechen Roder is a Thimphu-based filmmaker, director of the feature Munmo Tashi Khyidron/Honeygive... more Dechen Roder is a Thimphu-based filmmaker, director of the feature Munmo Tashi Khyidron/Honeygiver Among the Dogs (2016) and of several short films, and the cofounder of Bhutan's first film festival, Beskop Tshechu. Honeygiver Among the Dogs (2016) premiered at the Busan International Film Festival in 2016, had its European premiere in Berlin in 2017 and won three awards at the Fribourg International Film Festival, including the Special Jury Prize. This interview was conducted by Valentina Vitali following a meeting at the Locarno International Film Festival in August 2018. Shaun Alexander transcribed and edited it. Valentina Vitali: You were born and live in Bhutan. Did you grow up and live in a village or a city? Dechen Roder: I grew up in big towns, sometimes in villages. Basically in a lot of different places because my father was working as a scientist, so we travelled a lot, to different areas and countries. Home was mostly where my family was. VV: Your mother is a writer. Do you think that fact influenced your decision to become a filmmaker? Does your mother's work influence yours? DR: She definitely influenced me as a person and a storyteller. Her being a writer influenced me in the sense that I knew I could pursue a non-conventional career; it gave me that kind of freedom. She still influences me now as a storyteller. Even Honeygiver Among the Dogs was first inspired by stories she told me about different ḍākinīs (ḍākinīs are a type of sacred female spirit in Hinduism and Vajrayana Buddhism). She would tell these stories in passing, while talking about other things, but the way she used stories in everyday conversation was a big inspiration. She makes stories relevant to our lives. Growing up with a storyteller, with someone who comes from an oral tradition, enabled me to understand better the importance of stories, their weight and why it is important to search for, record, create, carry and tell stories. I think I'm very lucky that way. VV: What kind of films could you see growing up in Bhutan? DR: I saw almost only Hollywood films because we didn't have access to anything else. The internet and television only came to Bhutan in 1999, so we were watching those movies on VHS. They were poor-quality prints, pirated or canned movies. While watching the screen you could see people walking around and hear comments from Interview BioScope 11(1) 96-100, 2020
BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2020
Lanka Bandaranayake is a Colombo-based filmmaker who began her career as an actress and costume d... more Lanka Bandaranayake is a Colombo-based filmmaker who began her career as an actress and costume designer. Her short film Tradition (2016) tackles traditional ideas of gender, relationships and society's demands on women. While helping a young bride dress for her wedding, an old woman explains the symbolism of traditional bridal jewellery, which gradually reveals itself more and more oppressive. Intercut with the old woman's explanation are moments in the lives of women caught in abusive or otherwise unhappy relationships. Tradition has been screened at over 40 film festivals and received awards at the Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival (best short film) and Euro Kino Czech International Independent Film Festival (best Cinematography). Lanka's new short, Tell Them I Love, still in production, looks at the problems experienced by Sri Lankan women working as labourers in the Gulf. This interview took place at the Locarno International Film Festival in August 2018. It was conducted by Valentina Vitali, and transcribed and edited by Shaun Alexander. Valentina Vitali: Tell me about your background. When did you start making films and theatre? Lanka Bandaranayake: My mother wanted me to become an artist because her parents didn't allow her to be a dancer. In fact, she wanted me to be a dancer. After my studies a theatre director invited me to work in his production. I'm from Anuradhapura. I first worked in Anuradhapura in several theatres. After that I moved to Colombo, where I studied theatre at the university and won some national awards in acting and costume design. I had stories to tell but I didn't know how to tell them. I wrote some short plays but I didn't think they were suitable for the theatre. With Tradition I realised that cinema was my media, the media I can best express myself in. VV: You had your own stories to tell? LB: I was writing my own stories. I didn't know how to make films but a friend encouraged me to do just that. One day I went to a wedding where a speech was given advising the bride how to behave in her marriage. Unfortunately that bride was my younger sister. That speech shocked me. This was the starting point for Tradition. VV: You worked as an actress and a costume designer, but you never studied cinema.
BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2020
Existing accounts of Myanmar’s film industry available to English speakers are more than twenty y... more Existing accounts of Myanmar’s film industry available to English speakers are more than twenty years out of date. Opening with a brief overview of cinema in Myanmar since 2000, this article is based on a recent visit to the Myanmar Motion Picture Development Department and the Yangon Film School, on conversations with staff, students and alumnae of these institutions and of the National University of Arts and Culture, and with local independent filmmakers. The purpose of my visit was to begin the groundwork needed to answer basic questions: Who are the women making films in Myanmar today? Where are they trained? What are the conditions in which they work? What kind of films they make? How do they fund production? How do their films circulate? And finally: Is there a women’s cinema in Myanmar? What follows thus outlines the context in which women in Myanmar make films today and introduces the work of a small number of them. I conclude with reflections on three short films: A Million...
Women's History Review, 2019
ABSTRACT Lack of research on the Women’s Royal Indian Naval Service (W.R.I.N.S.) has led to the m... more ABSTRACT Lack of research on the Women’s Royal Indian Naval Service (W.R.I.N.S.) has led to the misconception that most of the women recruited into the Royal Indian Navy during World War 2 were either British or ‘Anglo-Indian’. In reality, by far the majority of the ‘Wrins’, as they came to be called, were Indian. In this paper I follow two parallel lines of enquiry. The first inspects the material stored in British archives to offer the first comprehensive account of the W.R.I.N.S.’ formation, operation and dismantlement. This provides the context for an examination of the visual material created to promote the service. Comparing the few surviving photographs of Wrins with Lee Miller’s photos of Wrens, I argue that W.R.I.N.S. material mediated a specific and, for the time, new set of discourses about women’s role in a nation-in-making that may still speak to Indian women today.
Kinema: A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media, 2004
NATIONALIST HINDI CINEMA: QUESTIONS OF FILM ANALYSIS AND HISTORIOGRAPHY The forty years or so fro... more NATIONALIST HINDI CINEMA: QUESTIONS OF FILM ANALYSIS AND HISTORIOGRAPHY The forty years or so from the beginning of cinema world-wide at the end of the nineteenth century to the consolidation of a domestic film industry in South Asia in the 1930s coincided with the project of nation-building that envisioned a variety of horizons, and with the sedimentation of some of those prospects into the coalition ready to inherit the rule from the British Raj. Cinema played a crucial role in mediating the terms by which India came into being as a modern nation. As Ernest Gellner saw it, it is the homogenizing effect of an economic system such as industrial capitalism, and, within it, the occupational mobility and the division of labour leading to the breaking down of pre-industrial, hierarchical, self-contained social categories, that lead to the…
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2018
Capital and popular cinema, 2016
Cinema Journal, 2010
a discussion about Japanese Studies, Harry Harootunian and Naoki Sakai observe that a theory cann... more a discussion about Japanese Studies, Harry Harootunian and Naoki Sakai observe that a theory cannot be the property of a national, ethnic, racial, or civilizational identity.1 Unlike empirical knowledge, a theory does not divide people into those who know and those who do not, for it is a form of sociability that allows those who are willing to ask questions to relate to one another. A theory is always mediated by the time and the place of its formulation and uses, but, as a model of social functioning, it cannot be reduced to those markers. The historical specificity of film historiography would not, in itself, be a problem if those who practice it would always take the place and time from which they "do" history as the point of departure of their inquiry. The problem is that they rarely do, because embedded in the question "Where does film history speak from?" are questions of film theory that are still unresolved. To "do" film history is more than to acquire a sense of where, over a period of five hundred years, the apparatus of cinema came from. The point of retracing how specific cinematic forms developed out of the apparatus's encounter with preexisting cultural practices is, in the end, to understand how, exactly, films function as terrains in which the push and pull of history are played out. This question of how a "text" or film may relate to a historical "context" has been asked most directly in relation to notions of national cinema. Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957) and El vampiro (Fernando Mendez, 1957), for example, are different because Pyaasa was made in India and El vampiro in Mexico. By far the majority of national cinemas' historiographies, however, tend to relegate the "context" to a separate chapter, evoking, yes, history, but setting it aside as if it pertained to a sphere other than, or "outside," the films examined. A film is always simultaneously a cluster of forms arranged according to cultural categories and a commodity that is produced and circulates within economic circuits. With cinema, these categories and circuits are always national and global at the same time. So, Pyaasa and Mother India (Mehboob
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Papers by Valentina Vitali