This video essay 'The Hunt for the Wild Bunch: Simultaneous Multiplicity and Alternative Genealogies in World Cinema' was created for the Centenary Symposium of the Bulletin of Spanish Studies held in Queen's University Belfast in September 2023. It theorizes, constructs and illustrates a mode of analysis that exploits the potential of video essays in Film Studies. In addition, by way of considerations of alternative genealogies in World Cinema and the work of Carlos Saura and his influence on Sam Peckinpah, it contends that videographic criticism can be a vital, progressive component of contemporary scholarship.

This chapter offers a comparative analysis of Linklater with Ashby, drawing parallels between their films, philosophy, filmmaking practice and positioning in relation to Hollywood studios and the independent filmmaking sector. Comparative analysis of The Last Detail (1973) and Before Sunrise (1995), which share the exact same premise of characters who have just met making connections as they move towards an inexorable deadline, reveals the filmmakers’ kindred philosophy and working practice. Pushing style and structure to pay attention to the details of human interaction prompts further comparisons, which culminates with the direct link between the filmmakers that is Linklater’s poignant rendition of Last Flag Flying (2017) as “a spiritual sequel” to The Last Detail, analysis of which suggests that connecting their filmographies creates and completes a long, unbroken list of unheeded warnings against authoritarianism and the unconsidered life.

This book shines much-needed light on the history, structures and films of the Amharic film industry in Ethiopia. Focusing on the rise of the industry from 2002, until today, and embedded in archival, ethnographic and textual research methods, this book offers a sustained and detailed appreciation of Amharic-language cinema. Michael Thomas considers ‘fiker’/love as an organising principle in national Ethiopian culture and, by extension, Amharic cinema. Placing ‘fiker’ as central to understanding Amharic film genres also illuminates the continuous negotiations at play between romantic, familial, patriotic and spiritual notions of love in these films. Thomas considers the production and exhibition of films in Ethiopia, charting fluctuations and continuities between the past and the present. Having done so, he offers detailed textual readings of films, identifying important junctures in the industry’s development and the emergence of new genres. The findings of the book detail the affective characteristics that delineate most Amharic genres and the role culturally specific concepts, such as fiker, play in maintaining the relevance of commercial cinemas reliant on domestic audiences.

 Reviews resolve for us. Living Philosophy is not prescriptive, either. Rather, through its repetitions, anecdotes, and lengthy quotations, readers are invited to forge their own suggestive connections, to experience Kierkegaard, Melville, and company individually. Mooney offers an appealing philosophy of hope and wonder, which, he hopes, will stimulate forms of compassionate responsibility. U  B J P Urban Walking: e Flâneur as an Icon of Metropolitan Culture in Literature and Film. Ed. by O B and I V-C. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press. . £. ISBN ––––. A dozen chapters and a light Introduction make for an amiable, enlightening, and sometimes challenging stroll through metropolitan culture in a variety of case studies of flânerie. e Introduction by the editors sets a traditional scene: it is ‘the onset of modernity’ and, unable to arrest the rise of urbanization, we are enthralled by ‘the mediative observer of urban life’ (p. ix)—the flâneur. At first a literary model, enthroned in nineteenth-century Paris by Baudelaire and Benjamin, the flâneur and the flâneuse wander and thrive, becoming figures of and in urban culture as much as they are beyond it and looking on. is volume attempts to observe the observer, spying on flâneurs and flâneuses from the perspective of a conference on the subject that took place in the University of Jena in  (meaning one imagines with envy the post-conference strolls around Jena in the central metropolitan area of uringia). Indeed, that Jena grew in a spurt of industries dedicated to optical care suggests an ideal location for the papers that fed into this volume on seeing the growth of the modern city. Contributions are sorted into five categories, roughly corresponding to theories, emblematic portrayals, postmodernism, global (i.e. postcolonial) flânerie, and, finally, intermediality , which tags onto an essentially literary anthology two chapters concerned with extremely different films (one an avant-garde experimentalist venture and the other a mainstream, star-driven Hollywood product). Carrying the most weight in the volume is Eva Katharina Ries, whose chapter attempts to reconfigure flânerie as an ethical subject, which involves looking away from the fixity of Walter Benjamin towards the fluidity of Judith Butler’s effort at understanding / and the sense, sensation, and sensibility of precariety that resulted. Vividly written, with keen readings of Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Siri Hustvedt’s e Blindfold to mark the way, the chapter is a triumph of re-energizing the relevance of flânerie. Holding that flânerie ‘becomes a gateway for acknowledging the precariousness of oneself and Others’ (p. ), Ries argues that it is an ambivalent practice redeemed almost by empathy, were it not for the fact that empathy ‘is always already prone to serving one’s own performance of sovereignty’ (p. ). Calling for ‘ever new performances of non-sovereign subjectivity’ (p. ), this first chapter sets a challenge for a volume that manages a scattershot response. Lea Herrmann’s chapter rather reaffirms the established critical framework of flânerie in semi-autobiographical texts by Peter Kurzeck, while the series of chapters MLR, .,   on emblematic portrayals offers interesting descriptions of flânerie in Scandinavia and London but also entrenches the motifs in studies of bohemians, detectives, and Virginia Woolf. Postmodern literature promises more: Ina Schabert considers blogging as flânerie, albeit still grounded in Paris, while Daniel Chukwuemeka finds a new purpose for it in considering Afropolitanism within the confines of New York, where it recovers cultural memory. ereaer, examples of the global flâneur at large in Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, and Delhi are as entertaining as they are informative, but also tentative in a way that borrows rather than claims flânerie for locations other than modern Western urban centres. Flânerie is a concept and a creative practice that this volume does well to recognize and explore. Strongest when it is using flânerie to explore new ideas of identity rather than merely as the urban backdrop to such introspection, this book is distinguished by those contributors who posit the Self as far more interesting than the city, finding distance more revealing than togetherness, seeing flânerie as a strategy of (self-)representation. As a kaleidoscope of city life via intermediality it is somewhat lacking in colours, inhibiting transcendence from...

Hypotheses that instigated the possibility of destabilising and de-westernising film theory have inspired a critical framework for analysing World Cinema that demands new and evolving understandings of its construction and fluidity, particularly in relation to its lost pasts and possible futures. Referencing several key works in this field and responding to David Martin-Jones’s Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History (2019) in particular, this article questions what is unknowable and as yet unknown about World Cinema. Following Derrida, it argues that the answers lie in how World Cinema gains meaning(s) through the process of différance (difference and deferral of meaning), particularly through genre. Deploying and dismantling genre theory in case studies of Wind River (Sheridan 2017), Chung Hing sam la/Chungking Express (Wong 1994), Faa yeung nin wa/In The Mood for Love (Wong 2000), Moonlight (Jenkins 2016) and Widows (McQueen 2018), the article targets the logjam of ethical hesitancy in approaching World Cinema and, holding that impurities in western cinema constitute trace evidence of new paradigms happening elsewhere in World Cinema, posits empathy and its deferral as essential to an understanding of the dynamics of the cinemas of the world.

A fourth Before film for the pandemic sees Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) on a video call during lockdown in 2020, separated, and unwittingly recreating the scene in the record booth from Before Sunrise. Incorporating footage from the Q&As that Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy did with Cameron Bailey for TIFF Originals on 30 April and 12 May 2020 respectively, "Before the End" responds to the ethos and fanbase of the series while considering the impact of the pandemic on filmmaking, films, fans and characters too.

This chapter analyses the influence of the cantaor, the singer of cante jondo on films about flamenco, specifically Sevillanas and Flamenco. It examines the influence of the bertsolari, the improvising Basque poet, on a peculiarly Basque tradition of composition that led to the unique collage of the full-length documentaries Ama Lur and La pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra. In addition to analysing the performance systems of the cantaor and the bertsolari, the chapter explores the empathetic relationship between film and music as art forms that, perhaps uniquely, have the ability to express a sense of the variable duration of time. When possessed by the particular Gypsy muse called duende, the cantaor operates as a seer within a complex performance system that sees him draw on a repertory of collective thought in order to invoke mythical resonance in his cante.

This chapter begins by surveying the work of José Luis Guerin and contextualises his career, his films and their reception within arguments relating to the relationship between local, European and world cinema. Thereafter, a revision of his earlier, complementary works leads to an analysis of En la ciudad de Sylvia/In the City of Sylvia and its construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of memory and myth by allusion to Henri Bergson's theory of an intuitive sense of the durée (duration) of time and its relevance to Gilles Deleuze's theory of the time-image, as well as the affined philosophies of the flâneur and the psychogeography of the dérive (drift) as practised by Guy Debord and the Situationist International. The aim is to delineate a textual analysis of a peculiar example of the contemporary Spanish art-house and to reveal a progressive, modernist, even Cubist notion of cinema that is exemplified in this film's elaboration.

During the forty years of the fascist dictatorship film noir was a bête noire, unable to show its face for fear of reprisals on its perpetrators. This chapter argues that, film noir in the Spain of the dictatorship was never more insidious and was never more relevant. Whereas American noir of the 1950s could be said to hold a dark mirror to American society that questioned the fundamental optimism of the American dream, no such pessimism about the Francoist dream was permitted. Imitative policíacas suffered from limited resources and an even more limited understanding, for there was little available film analysis that would define the genre for filmmakers. As Paul Schrader contends, realism was key to the tone and mood for it 'succeeded in breaking film noir away from the domain of high-class melodrama, placing it where it more properly belonged, in the streets with everyday people'.

This chapter investigates the curious absence of erotic content in Basque cinema (Julio Medem’s feature films are the obvious exception), an absence that, the author argues, extends well into the democratic period and therefore cannot be blamed on censorship or catholic repression. This research shows that the explicit content of Basque films often revolves around contexts of torture, revealing a certain fascination with masochist narratives that could be suggestive of nationalist martyrdom. This is explored in his Deleuzian analysis of his two main case studies, Estado de excepción/State of Emergency (dir. Iñaki Núñez, 1977) and Akelarre/Witches’ Sabbath (dir. Pedro Olea, 1984), and of a segment of Medem’s documentary La pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra/The Basque Ball: Skin Against Stone (2003) among many other examples throughout the history of Basque cinema. This noticeable absence of erotic narratives could be part of a revolutionary intent to distance Basque cinema both from the erotic narratives of the Barcelona School and from the destape films associated with Madrid, but also a nationalist commitment to sacrifice individualistic desires and pleasures at the service of more collective aims.