As the heir to an ancient civilization that has lasted for over fifty centuries, the Chinese-speaking world continues to show an instinctive concern for its own culture, especially in the realm of art, even in its current stage of significant development. As such, the art from Chinese-speaking cultures conveys a strong sense of locality. Even though local filmmakers create avant-garde works that we would generally consider a dynamic contradiction to tradition, the continuity, reality relevance, and power of Chinese culture is always prominently present in such works. In other words, through the abstract, exaggerated, and even divorced avant-garde elements of Chinese-language avant-garde cinema, audiences can observe the traditional, widely humanistic side of Chinese civilization. To a certain extent, this has differentiated the avant-garde films created in the East from those created in the West (also known as the land and sea civilizations, respectively), making the former unique in avant-garde cinema. Simultaneously, through the integration and innovation of Western avant-garde filmmaking paradigms, Chinese-language avant-garde filmmakers have contributed to a reinterpretation of conventional ideas about Chinese culture, which is in line with the esthetics and values of the modern era. Furthermore, these filmmakers have resolved the obscurity and incomprehensibility of Chinese elements in the impressions of foreigners, enabling the latter to understand Chinese culture more intuitively through the works of local people through avant-garde forms, one of the most common forms of art across the globe.This project notes the unique cultural locality reflected in this seemingly antinomic phenomenon. On the basis of the historical context and the motifs in the selected films, the project presents this locality in two respective threads: classical and modernistic. The “classical” chapter draws on conventionally endemic aspects such as ecological spacing and neoclassic interpretations of history. It demonstrates how Chinese-language avant-garde filmmakers reconstruct intimate yet isolated Chinese collective memories and develop them into a dynamic self-reflection on Chinese culture in the contemporary era and describes the unexpected feasibility of using foreign avant-garde strategies to adapt and rejuvenate local content (images, narrative, philosophy, etc.). On the other hand, the “modernistic” chapter draws on social and psychoanalytical aspects such as homeland complexity, urban anxiety, and socialist nostalgia. It summarizes these syndromes as the performance of a shared trauma facing continuous upheaval, globalization, and modernization in the Chinese-speaking world over the past century. In a slightly different way than audiences see in most Western avant-garde cinema, Chinese-speaking filmmakers show a very realistic humanization of those suffering from the contemporary dilemma of China using avant-garde esthetics. The project then connects the two threads to conclude that Chinese-language avant-garde cinema is considered a subtle yet honest display of Chinese culture and social status quo. With a global audience, it uncovers the cultural landscape, historical vicissitude, and the dilemma of modernity in Chinese civilizations from an avant-garde perspective. The locality of Chinese-language avant-garde cinema is conveyed through three significant aspects. In terms of content, locality is evident in the genres of Chinese-language films (e.g., classical romance, martial arts, Republic adventure, homeland). From classical values to those of modern society, Chinese-language avant-garde cinema has touched upon the Chinese-speaking world’s collective memories. Struggles between kings and nobles, the sacrificing of the small for the greater good, arranged marriages, agricultural production, life on the margins of urban areas, and many other local topics are all depicted in avant-garde cinematic storytelling. In terms of essence, Chinese-language avant-garde cinema is closely related to traditional Chinese culture and the social status quo; indeed, the two interact dynamically. By deconstructing, abstracting, and reinterpreting local culture, Chinese-language avant-garde cinema attempts to artistically present the ups and downs of Chinese civilization and the dilemma of modernity in today’s world. Similar to the avant-garde literature popularized after the reform and opening-up (改革开放, gaige kaifang), Chinese-language avant-garde films are often ironic, critical, and realistic at their core, as shown by the filmmakers’ depictions. In terms of form, while Western avant-garde cinema uses unique filmmaking methodologies and techniques (e.g., surrealism, expressionism, stream of consciousness, high-speed montages) to present physical or psychological heterization, Chinese avant-garde cinema uses similar strategies to focus on Chinese elements (e.g., shots of Chinese landscapes, elements of “red”, depictions of folk customs) in images, scenarios and characters. Thus, the intense attention given to the individual mentality in Western avant-garde cinema is naturally shifted to a focus on locality in Chinese-language avant-garde cinema. This project on locality in Chinese-language avant-garde films has dual value. Research specifically on locality in Chinese-language avant-garde films is still in the beginning stages, but the subject undoubtedly has twofold significance. First, for local creators, this representation of locality reflects a new understanding of Chinese culture and self-identification. Avant-garde cinematography is an art not only of the West but also of modernity. As one of the filmmaking strategies most recently imported into the Chinese-speaking world Chinese avant-garde cinema is coincidentally taking shape at a critical moment when the Chinese-speaking world is going global. In looking at Chinese film history, as the most important avant-garde art medium after literature and fine arts, the locality in Chinese-language avant-garde film reveals how the Chinese-speaking world has been examining and reinterpreting local culture at the turn of the century by absorbing Western avant-garde esthetics since the 1980s. Additionally, the market positioning of and audience feedback on such films are worth noting, as they reflect the acceptance of this new local cultural industry. Second, from the perspective of global avant-garde cinema, Chinese-language avant-garde cinema offers an opportunity to observe the paradigm of Chinese cultural expression. Compared to Western avant-garde cinema, which has been developing for a century and focuses on constructing sensory alienation, fragmentation, and mystification, Chinese avant-garde cinema has intense and concrete localism that appears unique. In the era of globalization, the abstraction and dramatization of the concept of reality in avant-garde films occasionally make the differences between civilizations more obvious. This comparative study helps us see the differences between modern Eastern and Western civilizations in terms of individual, collective, social, emotional, logical, and moral propositions. Overall, this project aims to bring more Chinese cultural concepts and their manifestations in society to the attention of the world through this dual effect.

The success of films like the Oscar-winning La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino), the family-friendly comedy Sole a catinelle (Buckets of Sunshine, Gennaro Nunziante) and the poetic documentary Sacro GRA (Sacred GRA, Gianfranco Rosi), all released in 2013, confirms the continued and perhaps surprising vitality and variety of Italian cinema. This variety tended to be ignored in what might be called the Standard Model of Italian cinema history, which emphasized the realist and auteurist traditions in Italian cinema. In this article I range across contemporary, classic and lesser-known Italian cinema by analyzing the means and priorities that have been employed when studying it in the Anglophone academy. My title, “What is Italian cinema?,” intentionally recalls Bazin (and I refer also to Deleuze and “world cinephilia”), but an additional clause might read, “and how do we think we know?”. The second half of the article considers the contents of three edited companions to Italian cinema (one recently published and two forthcoming) in order to grasp the current concerns of Italian cinema studies and so to signpost the state of knowledge about Italian cinema, at least as it exists in English. I suggest throughout some methods and approaches for better grasping the variety of Italian cinema over its history, but I finish by noting that the Pantheon of World Cinema has also distilled Italian cinema to neorealism and the “golden age” auteurs and so has obscured both the range and the particularity of Italian cinema.

This is a work of cultural history, mainly because it had to be, because I realized that such a history would most enable my writing a dissertation length work about a cultural industry scarcely documented in primary sources and restrictively written about since. As for my conceiving the early cinema on the Nile as a cultural industry, that was because I found the conception of Egyptian cinema presumptive. Egypt gained its status as a (nominally) independent modern nation-state in 1922, so that for much of the cinema’s early existence in Egypt it and the people who interacted with it were governed according to systems in good part delineated centuries earlier. Moreover, at no time during this study was the most dominant governmental power in Egypt headed by “native” Egyptians.

Egyptian cinema foreclosed people and institutions qualified as non-Egyptian. As it turned out, the most influential, most capitalized practitioners in Egypt’s cinema into the mid-1930s were not of Egyptian origin, though some may have “naturalized.” I also learned that of the totality of activity we may qualify as cinema, most was not in production of films, but in their exhibition, an industrial subsector that directly engaged far more people than did filmmaking in Egypt’s urban and rural locals. As I learned, exhibition was industrially linked to distribution by the most powerful institutions of what I came to describe as the early cinema industry, 1896-1934. Egyptian cinema had methodologically restricted studies past, produced within Egypt and without, in delimiting the seemingly non-Egyptian, whether people or institutions. The term had also relatively promoted the study of textual production within the cinema, often as a facet of cultural creation and commodification overseen if not undertaken by the state. A study of the early Egyptian cinema would be limited materially and restrictive conceptually. I would study the cinema in Egypt as a collective activity that organized overtime and was propelled by exchange among people and institutions, Egyptian or not, regardless of points of origination or conclusion to instances or patterns of exchange.

By examining complex power relations of the political economy of Egypt’s early cinema industry I move to justify the noted methodological shift declared in the title of the first chapter. “How the Cinema in Egypt Egyptianized” is framed as a reflexive investigative journey into such modern history of relevant power relations centered in Egypt and affecting its cinema. I interrogate the concept of national cinema in the second chapter and bespeak Egyptianizing (tamassur), two addresses on which I elaborate theoretically and historically. I follow this discussion with two illustrative case studies of Egyptianizing of cineastes and their institutions in tow, from the operative era. The third chapter attends to the intersecting histories of film pioneer Mohammed Bayoumi and the Misr Company for Acting and Cinema, later Studio Misr, the first bona fide film studio in the Middle East, as led by Tal`at Harb. Both men avowed nationalism and both contributed to the development of the cinema in Egypt in the name of the nation. Chapter three integrates analysis of Bayoumi’s nonfiction films, among those survived silent productions noted, an examination that situates their texts within their cultural and historical contexts. The final chapter makes the case for the significance of the interaction between the theater and cinema industries in Egypt in the studied era. It does so by charting the generic interlinks between stage and screen, specific as they had been to Egypt: (melo)drama, comedy, and singing. In keeping with previous chapters that have instrumentally elaborated on domains of cinematic activity other than production—distribution, exhibition, and press—productions and practitioners are linked to audiences, playhouses, and movie houses. This final chapter also complements or augments discussions from the earlier chapters in each of its three genre-bound segments. In the end, this work is intended to critically assess nationalism as it relates to the cinema, while drawing attention to a cinema underserved by media histories.

This dissertation examines the politics of Chinese cinema distribution and exhibition in the US between 2002 and 2020, a transformative period marked by the robust growth of China’s domestic film industry, tightening state censorship, escalating U.S.-China geopolitical tensions, and the proliferation of online video platforms. It argues that the overseas dissemination of Chinese cinema has been achieved through a “shadow network” of grassroots, bottom-up activities. This network encompasses a wide range of stakeholders—filmmakers, distributors, critics, academics, and audience communities—who collectively shape how Chinese films circulate internationally. This focus reveals how the specialized, subordinate, and informal initiatives have shaped Chinese cinema’s transnational presence beyond state-directed efforts of global expansion.Previous scholarship has addressed China as a lucrative box-office market for Hollywood and assessed the Chinese film industry as more self-sufficient than export-oriented. This dissertation challenges this political economy perspective by employing a site-specific approach to examine an array of distinct yet interconnected distribution and exhibition outlets. It approaches the transnational circulation of Chinese cinema not merely as a space for artistic rebellion and dissent, nor as indicators of failed cultural exportation, but as a productive network with its own promises, logics, and strategies. The project begins by analyzing the theatrical distribution of Chinese cinema in the US, revealing imbalanced power dynamics between Hollywood executives and Chinese directors and distributors. The next chapter examines the rise of diasporic film festivals following the post-2012 Chinese government crackdown on independent film festivals. The final chapter turns to illicit streaming sites that circumvent geoblocking to operate within opaque transnational digital spaces. Through a cultural-industrial analysis that integrates archival materials and ethnographic fieldwork, the dissertation unsettles the boundaries between arthouse and commercial markets, as well as between industrial distribution infrastructures and grassroots exhibition activities, presenting a comprehensive understanding of Chinese cinema’s global circulation.

This project began with a desire to define and articulate what I have termed cinematic performance, which itself emerged from an examination of how liveness, as a privileged performance studies concept, functions in the 21st century. Given the relative youth of the discipline, performance studies has remained steadfast in delimiting its objects as those that are live--shared air performance--and not bound by textuality; only recently has the discipline considered the mediated, but still solely within the circumscription of shared air performance. The cinema, as cultural object, permeates our lives--it is pervasive and ubiquitous--it sets the bar for quality acting, and shapes our expectations and ideologies. The cinema, and the cinematic text, is a complex performance whose individual components combine to produce a sum greater than the total of its parts. The cinema itself is a performance--not just the acting--participating in a cultural dialogue, continually reshaping and challenging notions of liveness, made more urgent with the ever-increasing use of digital technologies that seem to further segregate what is generally considered real performance from the final, constructed cinematic text.

Liveness and presence have remained defining forces within the field. In her now-canonical Unmarked (1993), Peggy Phelan assertively concludes, "Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance" (146). At the end of the same decade, however, Philip Auslander begins to play devil's advocate in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999) by troubling what he sees as a "reductive binary opposition of the live and the mediatized" (3). Through a genealogical consideration of live and mediated forms of performance, Auslander concludes that the live cannot be considered outside of or as separate from the mediated (7).

With the rise of digital products, and the ever-increasing incorporation of the digital into our daily lives, Auslander's initial troubling of the traditional concept of liveness expands and becomes more complex. The cinema, as an art and as an analytical object, continually foregrounds its absent presence, its present absence. By the turn of the 21st century, cinema studies had firmly established claims of indexicality in the relationship of the cinematic text to reality: the celluloid captures the light, is imprinted by the profilmic event. Yet, the rise of new media and digital technologies at the end of the 21st century have allowed for the creation of photorealistic scenes created wholly outside the images captured with the camera, requiring no relationship to the profilmic event.

At the same time that cinema seemed to be losing its indexical relationship to reality, and as digital technologies increasingly permeated the fabric of daily existence, zombie cinematic production witnessed a renaissance in popularity and surge in quantity. It is no small coincidence that zombie cinema also rose in popularity during film's transition to sound (1930s-1940s), again during the proliferation of televisions into every American home (1960s), and then again most recently with the explosion of digital technologies. In each of these moments zombie cinema thematizes presence, absence, and liveness. Combining performance theory, film theory, new media studies, and zombie popular culture, this project seeks to account for the most recent surge in zombie cinema and zombie culture, arguing that 21st century zombie cinema performs new media.

The introduction provides a theoretical background, outlining the beginnings of this project and providing some initial grounding in the theoretical terminology that structures the project. In Chapter One, I provide the historical and genealogical grounding, surveying the history of zombie cinema. Chapter Two, "Inaugurating the 21st Century Zombie: Embodying Biomedia and Liminality in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002)," begins my analysis of new media--in this case, Eugene Thacker's concept of biomedia--and how it emerges within and is represented by zombie cinema, leading to an assertion of zombie liminality. I continue to expand upon new media and zombie cinema in "Liveness and Living Dead: Remediation and Intermediality in George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead (2007)," introducing the concept of remediation and demonstrating some of the potentialities of liminality. Chapter Four, "Networked Dispersal: Performance Process, Multiplicity, and Connectivity in 21st Century Zombie Cinema," expands from the single film examination to a larger consideration of 21st century zombie cinema and how it performs network connections. In the last chapter, Visceral Viewing: Zombies "In Real Life" (IRL), I step away from screened representations of zombies to a consideration of zombies embodied in real life: zombie walks, zombie theater, and community formations. I conclude by returning to the beginning: cinematic performance. And here I offer a continuation of the project, a new branch, taking-up another aspect of cinematic performance and considering how digital post production creates performance and is its own performance.

Inspired and informed by the work of Rey Chow and Shu-mei Shih, among others, this dissertation explores crossovers between East Asian cinema on the one hand and French and Italian cinema on the other. Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang's 2001 film What Time is it There?, for instance, cites and builds upon François Truffaut's Les 400 coups throughout. Cross-cultural films such as these have subsequently been referred to as "Sinofrench." Korean director Park Chan Wook's film Thirst, which is discussed as an example of "Franco-Korean" cinema, critiques traditional Korean familial structure through its citation of Émile Zola's 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin. Each chapter of the dissertation therefore focuses on a different incarnation of hybrid cinema. I argue that Chinese, Japanese Korean, and Hong Kong filmmakers create new subgenres of hybrid film by interacting with, adapting, and "textually reincarnating" French literature and film. On the other hand, I explore the reasons why cinematic interactions between Italy and China are less prevalent and, finally, how these other types of hybrid cinema may inspire Italian filmmakers to proceed in the future.

Defining what makes cinema a unique artistic medium has been a central theoretical tendency dating back to its earliest years. Already an unsettled question throughout film’s century-plus existence as an analog format, the introduction of digital carriers has only complicated the debate. Cinema—a medium so connected to its traditional physical carrier that it is often referred to as “film”—exemplifies the difficulties of essentializing any medium in the age of digital convergence.

Refusing to accept that all digital media are homogeneous or that cinema is “dead,” I approach the question of medium specificity by tracing an ecology of cinema. One that considers cinema’s joint cultural and technical constitution. From preservation to protocols, marketing to moire, fears of cinema’s death to hopes for greater immediacy through raw data, cinema, as I argue, can only be defined through its larger shifting web of relations. As such, I examine the current state of computational film broadly, paying equal attention to marketing tactics, technological shifts, legal battles, distribution strategies, and preservation best practices alike.

Central to this ecological understanding is the reality that changes in one node of this meshwork resonate through each other often with dramatic results. While working towards unveiling a broader picture of cinema in its current state, each chapter of this dissertation also meditates on conflicting determinations of quality at varying nodes in this ecology and examines how such determinations come to influence film’s circulation and preservation. Quality, in relation to cinema, functions simultaneously as (among other things) a marketing tool, a means of controlling access, a production goal, a fuzzy technological standard, and a staple of archival practice. Quality is a term deployed in wholly different ways to drastically different ends, each influencing the overall “essence” of cinema and each carrying its own increasingly concerning ramifications for the future of the seventh art.

Abstract

Apparatuses, Globalities, Assemblages:

Third Cinema, Now

by

Dalida Maria Benfield

Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies

and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Trinh T. Minh-ha, Chair

Colonial wounds endure but are refigured in 21st century cinematic landscapes. These are spaces of memory and mourning, as well as sites of creativity and transformation. New assemblages of power emerge along with equally complex amalgams of resistance, producing multiple and competing cinematic regimes. Third Cinema, the cinematic movement that emerged alongside "Third World" struggles for decolonization in the late 1960s, laid claim to a global space of cinematic production outside existing geo-political relations of power, hierarchies of communication flows, and towards the liberation of the "Third World" and its cinemas. But while Third Cinema has ample genealogies and global sites of production, its critical tools have not been sufficiently engaged in an analysis of contemporary cinematic production, including digital video, interactive video installations, Internet art, and film, in the contemporary context of globalization, the transnationalization of capital with information technology at its core. Third Cinema offers the opportunity for understanding and developing generative intersections between the cinematic decolonization movements of the "Third World" and the present context of cinematic praxis of the "Global South."

This dissertation engages the cinematic texts of Cao Fei, the Raqs Media Collective, Michelle Dizon, Cecilia Cornejo, and Fanta Régina Nacro in a conversation with Third Cinema. The texts selected for study include video, video installation, Internet art, and film. This selection highlights the diversity of contemporary cinematic practices and expands the definition of the cinematic. The process and conditions of production are analyzed, and key examples of each artists' cinematic texts are given a close reading. This conversation is anchored by three critical terms: apparatus, globality, and assemblage. Each of these draws upon genealogies that both productively resonate with historical notions of Third Cinema while also transposing it across theoretical scales. The notion of the cinematic apparatus has been key to previous theorizations of relations of power and knowledge production in cinema. It is used here as a technic for mapping the re-arrangements of power and the attendant epistemic interventions evidenced in the cinematic praxis of these artists. The inquiry is centered on the question of how each artist produces a novel assemblage of the cinematic apparatus, understood as a relationship of author, cinematic text, and spectator, and how, in turn, this produces forms of globality, epistemes that are contentious responses to particular geo-political spaces of knowledge production. The inquiry proceeds through a series of close engagements with the artists' cinematic texts, discussing the transformation of the artist/author from individual to multiple, the redefinition of the "cinema" as a series of assemblages of screen and non-screen based practices, the constitution of the spectator as a site of spectral ephemerality, and the relationship of these transformations to the epistemic and geo-political sites of cinematic praxis. The study combines this textual analysis of the artists' work with a socio-historical analysis of information communication technologies on global and local scales. An interdisciplinary set of theoretical frameworks are mobilized, including post- and decolonial theory, philosophy, media studies, transnational feminism, and Third Cinema.

In the cinematic praxis of these artists, I find productive resonances and dissonances with the critical tools of Third Cinema. Along the variegated routes of "information society," these artists create new forms of cinematic praxis and knowledge production. They significantly destabilize global constructions of race and gender, which they encounter in the contexts of factory workers in China, discourses of information technology and development in India, and global warfare as experienced in the U.S., France, Chile, and Burkina Faso. When thought together as a field, these artists constitute related sites of aesthetic, political, and economic arrangements of cinematic forms. These cinemas reconstruct relations of power and refigure global discourses that produce temporary workers, the "Global South," and permanent war. The tracing of the remnants, refusals and re-compositions of the cinematic apparatus, and, in tandem, Third Cinema, reveals the consequences of colonial conditions for global cinemascapes, and creates a platform for present and future emancipatory cinematic praxis.