Offscreen. Spaces and Places.

"[I]maginary, real, physical, mental, geographical and geopolitical" are the sorts of spaces and places Offscreen editor Donato Totaro sees addressed in the five essays that make up the new issue.

Here's an unexpected pairing: Robert Bresson's Pickpocket and Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. But Totaro has found affinities.

Daniel Garrett reviews Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema, a collection of essays "on the aesthetics, history, politics, and reception of Palestinian film: it is a thoughtful and sometimes provocative book; and its strengths are its clarity, its focus, and its passion, as it argues that Palestinian film is an affirmation of Palestinian identity, an identity that is threatened by exile, by slander, by violence; but, sometimes, with no lack of sympathy for the injustices of history, one reads the book and longs for a little more film criticism and a little less historical context, for a little more objectivity and a little less outrage."

Betty Kaklamanidou examines "the contemporary depiction of the city and its various connotations expressed via a number of films."

In Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee "offers up a pure archetype of the romantic figure which can be found at the core of the Western mythology," argues Irini Stamatopoulos.

Jason Lindop describes the ways in which Eisenstein mapped the differences "between presenting the objects of thought and mounting the very processes of thought itself." Can't help but note that Ezra Pound's interest in the Chinese ideogram ("we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching things work out their own fate") seems to predate Eisenstein's notion of montage as "an idea that derives from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another." Two constructs, beginning in similar places, but heading off in very different ideological directions.

Posted by dwhudson at April 10, 2007 3:41 AM