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FILM STUDIES NEWSLETTER QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
2014 •
A personal filmic exploration of contemporary Irish-Australian identity This thesis consists of two parts: a documentary film and a written exegesis. The film, Secret Family Recipes, explores a personal experience of migration and documents issues of personal identity within broader family, community and intercultural contexts. The documentary uses the device of cake baking to provide a narrative spine for the journey of exploration. The filmmaker, Enda Murray, journeys from Sydney back to his birthplace in Ireland in 2007 and helps his elderly mother bake her annual Christmas cake. In the course of this journey, he talks to his mother and peers about their memories of growing up and ponders on his own early family life in Ireland. He then returns to Australia and bakes a cake with his two daughters (ages six and four), using this occasion to reflect on his current family situation. The exegesis provides a background context in Irish-Australian history and culture. It examines the major influences on the author’s work as an artist and draws on a range of literature to critique the production of Secret family recipes against the context of Irish documentary, Irish migrant documentary, and Irish-Australian accented cinema. The exegesis argues that Secret family recipes uses elements of performative documentary, defined by Bill Nichols as documentary that includes the author as a performing character in the film. It also argues that the documentary uses elements of domestic ethnography, a term coined by Michael Renov to describe filmmaking that explores the complexity of communal or blood ties between the subject and his or her family. This is a form of supplementary autobiographical practice where the subject constructs self knowledge through the familial other. This research project proposes a new framework of domestic performativity within documentary that combines elements of performative documentary and domestic ethnography. This thesis argues that domestic performativity allows a stylised representation of the subject’s voice and combines elements of documentary and ethnography to produce an enhanced autobiographical product.
Studies in Documentary Film
Home Movies as Personal Archives in Autobiographical Documentaries“The name is Bond, James Bond.” Everyone knows the good-looking, suited up British fighting machine that never misses its target – be it a long-legged blonde or a long-faced villain. A pop-culture icon of masculinity, with a notorious track record when it comes to fighting crime abroad in places that are traditionally, and in many ways, hostile to the West. These places, often exotic, are carefully selected to reflect the very real and existing contemporary geopolitical turmoil. Whereas nowadays international cyber terrorist syndicates are designated ‘Bond villains’, Communist Russia ruled the screen at the very start of the film series. Russia, (other) parts of Asia, the Middle-East: these places and regions are convincing villainous areas to the Western audience. They are the obvious choice, representing dangers in the real world. These representations however might not always be accurate and when attaching a well-known cultural theory such as Orientalism to the matter, adding to it another dimension, they may even be contested. Scholars that chose James Bond as an object have studied it in more or less obvious areas such as gender (more), or post-colonial studies (less). Interested in the ever-existing East-West dichotomy and the representations of ‘the Other,’ and hoping to add only a minor piece to the corpus of imagology, I have chosen to ask myself to what extent James Bond movies exoticize the Western image of the ‘European Orient’? This thesis is based upon four movies of the James Bond franchise. In From Russia with Love (1963), Istanbul is an archetypical ‘in between’ city dealing with both the West and the Soviets during the Cold War. It is also the starting point of a journey (by train) through the Balkans, passing Sofia, Belgrade, Zagreb, to Paris, which will reveal prejudices reflecting both stereotypes born out of the Balkans historical past and the geopolitical variables. The World is Not Enough pays attention to international terrorists and global oil disputes. In Casino Royale (2006), the location of the casino is set in Montenegro but the film was never shot there. Instead, the set was in the Czech Republic, which in itself is generalizing. Skyfall seems to address cyber terrorism and the ancient conflict of tradition versus modernity. We will have to look into the ‘how and why’ of the multifaceted evolution Bond has gone through in its 53 years of life on the big screen. Following Said, through Bakic-Hayden and Todorova, I suspect a shift from classic Orientalizing scenes like the Gypsy scene from From Russia with Love, to less exoticizing and refined Balkanizing images. Although the latter Bond movies are toned down in exoticizing portrayal, they still silently do – albeit in a fashion the Western viewer might not even notice, as they may have grown accustomed to it. Negative stereotypes of the Balkans in Western culture came into existence due to biased Western media and fiction. Seemingly, the main reason for existence of the Balkan spaces –including the portable ones - in the Bond movies, is to pose challenge to the Western hero. The spaces are equipped and furnished to contrast Western ones, even through music, in order to serve a hostile purpose. Problems occurring in those parts have to be solved by a Western hero and only he accomplishes all decisive and positive acts. The romantic fairy-tale ending in ambiguous Venice, away from the place where the villain space is, is truly exoticizing. Although exotization has reduced since 1963, Bond movies still are examples of how Western imagination constructs the Balkan space as the ‘other’. The construction reinforces the existing stereotypes and conceptions of the shadow of the Orient.
2010 •
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