 |
 |
Angelica and others, Firstly, Michael Winterbottom's 'In this World', which recently won the Golden Bear in Berlin and as it happens opens in London today, about migration from Asia to England. Second, '11/09/01 - September 11' - the compilation film with episodes by Makhmalbaf, Chanine, Tanovic, Loach, Imamura et.al., now out on video. Third, there is a problem I detect in your original request and hence in responses on this topic so far, and that is the constraint of your being 'particularly tasked to give attention to European cinemas, especially German/French/Italian'. The problem is that this in part defeats the purpose of the exercise, because it reproduces a Eurocentric picture of the world. Please note, I don't oppose this for doctrinal reasons of any sort, I'm very partial to European cinema, but because it's part of the problem - which is the assumption that a global view is capable of being a purview of the whole as if from outside and above (this being a construct of the whole tradition of occidental philosophy at least since the Enlightenment). To me, in order to deliver the course you're describing, you have to have points of comparison with films from other parts of the globe, films which put this dominant occidental perspective into another perspective, as '11/09/01' at least attempts to do. You have to search high and low for European or North American films which even so much as mention any other part of the world, except for the likes of adventure genres. (Try comparing Crocodile Dundee with Shadi Abdel Salam's The Night of the Counting of the Years, which recounts the European archeological exploration of Egypt from the Egyptian point of view.) In Latin American cinema, on the other hand, it is almost unusual for a film not to reference the first world in some way. I particularly recommend, however, a number of Argentinian films, including Adolfo Aristarain's A Place in the World (Un lugar en el mundo) and Eliseo Subiela's Man Looking South East (Hombre mirando al sureste). (The latter, by the way, is the original of the recent American movie K-Pax, which appears to be a rip-off of Subiela's film.) These are just a few suggestions - there are lots more, especially if you can include documentaries, of which there are hundreds. Michael Chanan