The year 2024 marks a period of consolidation and transformation for the Chinese film industry. Throughout the year, film authorities at all levels have implemented various measures to promote the prosperity of Chinese cinema and stimulate film consumption. Ongoing efforts have been made to explore regionalized, tiered, and multi-round distribution models, while “differentiated screenings” have enabled more films to precisely reach their target audiences. At the same time, the industry faces challenges such as an insufficient supply of high-quality films, uneven market performance, and a declining number of moviegoers. In the future, we must place greater emphasis on respecting the artistic, industrial, and managerial principles of filmmaking, accelerate the restructuring of the film industry chain, and solidly promote high-quality development. We will strive to convert all positive advantages into tangible outcomes.
This article explores the recording by documentary film of the imperceptible longue-durée of tectonic processes alongside the radical eventhood of volcanic eruption. Through an analysis of Romanian filmmaker Diana Vidrașcu’s Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream? (2019), I re-animate Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of islands to explore the temporal, philosophical, and mediatic implications of volcanic eruption, island formation, and the volcanic archive. I argue that in the film’s effort to reassert human memories of the tectonic alongside those of the landscape, it performs an incomplete reconciliation of the coeval processes and materialities of human and nonhuman, refusing to silence the human histories and archival excesses that are subsumed by narratives that emphasise the longue-durée of geological time.
Anthropology Now, 13:123–128, 2021 • Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ISSN: 1942-8200 print / 1949-2901 online • https://doi.org/10.1080/19428200.2021.1973858 Tunisian Cinema after the Arab Spring: Portrait of a Nation in Transition
The ocean, for Jean Epstein, figures the disruption that the cinematograph offers for human perception, presenting a nonhuman view on the world. This article will critically engage with Epstein’s writings on water to reflect on Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019) and its particular conception of the oceanic. Atlantics positions the ocean within the perspectives of its filmic subjects but also in excess of them. This perspectival nature of the oceanic speaks to a liminal space between male and female, living and dead, human and nonhuman, which mirrors contemporary debates within Black studies around the exclusion of Blackness from the normative category of the human: the contingency of the definition of humanity based on racial exclusion. As a result, it is not only the nonhuman perspective that the ocean provides in Atlantics , but a spectral haunting of those deemed other than human by global capitalism, which disrupts, as a queer prophecy, the veneer of necessity that the neocolonial order requires to sustain itself.
While water as setting and as mirror have driven animation technologies in mainstream American animated features (requiring, in Disney’s 1937 Snow White , the enormous resources of the multiplane camera), contemporary Indigenous productions activate another relationship of viewer to screen and viewer to water, converging to form a new Indigenous screen imaginary that connects instruction with care. This article traces the integration of North American Indigenous animation aesthetics with interrelated relationships and obligations around water and water protection. Drawing on examples from an expanding corpus of short animated productions, I argue that Indigenous ways of envisioning water present viewers with instruction towards action: water conveys a teaching. Following Lenape critic Joanne Barker’s turn to water as an analytic – “a water that (in)forms, a water that instructs” – I explore Indigenous animation of water as both pedagogy and technology, a conjunction that foregrounds human creative authorship even as it decenters the human in favor of water as a teacher.
