This essay explores some of the simultaneous limitations and affordances the Covid-19 pandemic has created for emergent perspectives upon a transnational folk cinema. Merging aspects of more ...traditional scholarly enquiry with the research-by-practice embodied within Scotland's Folk Film Gathering film festival, we position two case studies - of Nadir Bouhmouch's Amussu (2020) and the Amber Collective's Like Father (2001) respectively - within some of the broader question underlying attempts to bring the conviviality of community-focussed filmmaking and cinema-going online during the pandemic.
This article presents a case study of the innovative Japanese film education project Children Meet Cinema, through aspects of an interview with its founder Etsuko Dohi, placed within a wider ...discussion of the project’s pedagogical approaches. In particular, the article details the innovative manner in which Children Meet Cinema has invited some of Japan’s leading film-makers – among them, Nobuhiro Suwa, Hirokazu Koreeda and Naomi Kawase – to engage with children making films for the first time.
This essay explores the multimodal translation of Scottish community oral cultures to cinema through a critical reflection upon aspects of the production and post-production of a feature-length ...documentary film, Mysterious Object. Guided by the work of cultural studies authors such as James Clifford and Stuart Hall, alongside reference to oral cinemas elsewhere in the world (such as the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul in Thailand, indigenous filmmakers in North America, and the films of Gaston Kaboré and Ousmane Sembene in West Africa) reflection focuses upon some of the ironies, imbalances and contradictions inherent within the imperfect processes of transition when translating orality to screen. Discussion explores in particular the impact of cinematic translation upon changing experiences of time, the authority of the oral storyteller, and the manner in which an oral cinema may serve to articulate the collective imagination of the community.
This article explores the development of the Our Cinema project in Scotland: a revolving annual curriculum of film education for upper primary and lower secondary age children in state schools that, ...at the time of writing, is approaching a pilot phase. Discussion explores the project’s origins in France’s Cinéma Cent Ans de Jeunesse, and its relationship with the Catalan film education project Cinema en curs, before focusing in particular upon how a school-based programme of film education might seek to explore vernacular conceptions of cinema, through a focus on dialect, place and the lived experiences of participants. The article concludes by offering a detailed, concrete proposal of a film education curriculum, comprising two years (each broken up into 32 weeks) of creative learning activities.
This article seeks to inaugurate the global frame of an oral cinema: a cinema that, to a significant extent, is defined by its relationship to community oral cultures. Whilst the case studies ...featured are largely those arising from Scotland – in particular Simon Miller’s
Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle
(
2007
), Timothy Neat’s
Play Me Something
(
1989
) and the author’s own film
Mysterious Object
(currently in post-production) – discussion deliberately reaches outwards to a global, comparative frame drawing upon the more sophisticated treatments of orality in the West African cinemas of Gaston Kaboré and Ousmane Sembene and the Inuit cinema of Zacharius Kunuk. Whilst alive to the dangers of homogenization and destructive, western-led universalisms, this article ultimately attempts to establish a space for utopian montage (
Chambers and Higbee 2021a
), wherein divergent yet mutually resonant traditions within world cinema may be co-positioned in order to explore aspects of shared practice and solidarity.
Established in Catalonia in 2005, Cinema en curs is now one of the most significant film education projects worldwide. This article places selections from interviews conducted in early 2021 with ...project founders and directors Núria Aidelman and Laia Colell within a critical context drawing upon international considerations of film education, including previous explorations of Cinema en curs. Discussion is separated into two distinct yet interconnecting sections: first upon the institutional and media-ecological contexts in which Cinema en curs takes place (and the complex considerations informing the project’s shape and manner of delivery that arise from these contexts); and, second, upon the different cultural, aesthetic and political priorities that inform the project’s approach to methodology and pedagogy.
The Cinémathèque Française’s long-running Cinéma Cent Ans De Jeunesse (CCAJ) has become one of the most influential film education projects in the world today. This article reflects critically and in ...detail upon five years of the delivery of the project in Scotland, considering the changing pedagogical shapes of the project’s ‘curriculum’ alongside changing ecological factors (such as class size and age and lesson time) in considering how a small nation such as Scotland might best employ CCAJ as a means of addressing foundational film education.
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