Cineaste 

Abstract: Most Twin through of us Peaks: a know day Fire someone without Walk quoting who With can't from Me, get through a day without quoting from Twi Peaks: Fire Walk ith M , Casablanca, Dracula or some other compulsively worshipped movie. Other people tire of hearing them intone, "Eeelectricity!,n "Round up the usual suspects , " or "I never drink. . . wine, " but they perseverate and we screen them out. At what point , however , does this knd of behavior cease to seem quaintly quasipathological and begin to call to us as a significant spectacle ? Is it a matter of the ferodty of their ardori Or their numbers? Would 1,000 people attending a Star Trek convention wearing Mr. Spock ears in San Diego make us sit up and take more notice than if two showed up at a Starbucks in Paramus speaking Vulcan? We finally decided that the only way to seriously examine these and other pressing questions was to publish a special section on Cult Film. What initially drew our attention was that not only did cult film turn up in our conversations with great frequency, it also arrived in numerous guises. Cult as shock and schlock ; cult as nostalgia ; cult as marginality; cult as intensity and passion; cult as marketing hype; cult as fad and fashion ; cult as subversion ; cult as historical era marker. Too many things to too many people, cult film seemed to us to be stretching so thinly before our eyes as to potentially lose its meaning in a dizzying vortex. It seemed an untenable situation ripe for critical investigation. Cult film has actually been a subject of intermittent, serious study for almost thirty years, and the object of "gee-whiz," hyperemotional expostulations for longer than that. But Cineaste is also aware that the past ten years has seen a surge of scrutiny of the cult film phenomenon by wellinformed scholars, journalists, and critics armed with something more than the pleasure, curiosity, and wonder of the initial wave of critics. This "New Wave " of cult criticism, so to speak, carries with it the intention of winnowing the wheat of rigorous understanding from the chaff of spurious and digressive chatter. We approached a number of leading scholars, journalists, and critics authors of classics in the field, editors of journals devoted to cult film, and new scholars of the subject and invited them to contribute to our Critical Symposium. In the following pages, and continuing on our web site, we offer a wide range of critical interpretations and strategies emanating from the United States, England, and Australia that we believe will contribute to a new clarity about cult film, but leave abundant breathing room for the stimulating clash of differing considered opinions. Our contributors differ in emphasis, which has created a trio of interrogational repertoires. Their three major focus points can be itemized as: the cult fan; the cult object; and the relationship between the cult film and the marketplace. Viewing the phenomenon of cult film through the lens of the fan elicits questions about what distinguishes cult interest from the more general category of cinephilia ; differences between the opportunities for cult fans now and cult fans bade in thedayofprehome-viewing technologies ; and the motives and cultural roles of the cult fan. Viewing the cult film in terms of its definition as an object, our contributors have confronted questions about cult esthetics: whether they are distinctly different from the esthetics of mainstream film; the independence of cult creators; whether there is a distinctive cult esthetic; whether the cult film (or only some cult films) is marked by a defamiliarized attitude toward the body, gender, society, the family, and human identity. Finally, where our contributors set their sights on the commodification of cult film, they ran up against the overwhelming question of whether cult film is possible any longer, given a marketplace that omnivorously coopts whatever it catches in the cross hairs of its profit motive in order to produce a standardized product. Under this heading, we find consideration of whether and how there can still be the kind of search for the unknown, obscure object of filmgoing desire that marked the cult adventure in the long-ago days of the midnight movie, screened in the kind of independently owned movie theater that barely exists today. We posed the following questions to our respondents, both for the print and online editions, suggesting that they could choose either to answer the individual questions, or to use them as departure points for their own essay. The Editors

Abstract: In April 1989, the Los Angeles International Film Festival canceled at the last minute the premiere of Veiled Threat (U.S., 1989), directed by IranianAmerican filmmaker Cyrus Nowrasteh, because of a bomb threat-a controversial action that highlighted the festival's dual responsibility for public safety and for First Amendment rights protection. The controversy continued for several days, but it was difficult to sort out definitively the real reasons behind either the bomb threat or the cancellation of the screening. The festival director claimed that the producers brought the threat on themselves as a publicity stunt by publicly linking their film and its anti-Islamist content to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's/atoe against the author of The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie. The producers responded that the threat was real enough for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to have taken it seriously. This low-budget, low-velocity, lowbrow thriller finally opened in Los Angeles theaters to dismal reviews and attendance. Trying to recoup their losses by downplaying its Islamic connotations, the producers dropped the 'veil' from the title. Apparently, neither the initial attempt to associate the film with political Islam as a threat nor the subsequent attempt at dissociating it from political Islam helped the film's box office. Straddling more than one society, emigre filmmakers are sometimes in a position to play the funding agencies and public tastes of different countries against each other to increase their financial backing and revenues. Sometimes, they attempt to cash in on the newsworthiness and popular stereotypes of their country of origin. Such efforts pay off more when newsworthiness is based on positive attributes, but they can backfire badly, as in the case of Veiled Threat, if negative connotations are involved, as was the case with Iran and Iranians because of the 1979 anti-Shah and antiimperialist revolution and the 1979-80 disastrous hostage-taking episode in which 52 Americans were held illegally captive in the American embassy in Tehran for 444 days. Defining Key Terms This essay examines the politics and aesthetics of the films made by Iranian filmmakers living in exile and diaspora in Europe and North America. These films are part of an emerging global cinema of displacement-what I have called 'accented cinema'-created by differently situated filmmakers from varied origins who live in diverse host countries (Naficy 2001a). However, this is by no means an established or cohesive cinema, for it has been in a state of preformation and emergence since the 1960s in disparate and dispersed pockets across the globe. It is, nevertheless, an increasingly significant cinematic formation in terms of its output, which reaches into the thousands, its variety of forms and diversity of cultures, which are staggering, and its social impact, which extends far beyond the emigre communities to include the general public as well. If the dominant cinema is considered universal and without accent, the films that exilic and diasporic subjects make are accented. However, this accent emanates not so much from the accented speech of the diegetic characters as from the displacement of the filmmakers, their artisanal production mode, and their aesthetic, politics and demography. In this study, the term 'exile' refers principally to external exiles: Iranians who voluntarily or involuntarily have left their country of origin, and who maintain an ambivalent but highly cathected relationship with their previous and current places and cultures. Although they do not return to Iran, they maintain an intense desire to do so-a desire that is projected in potent return narratives that form a veritable genre of 'return' films. As exiles their relationship is with their country and cultures of origin, and the sight, sounds, taste, and feel of an originary experience, of an elsewhere at other times. Those filmmakers who have been forcibly driven away, tend to want to define, at least during the liminal period of displacement, all things in their lives not only in relationship to the homeland but also in strictly political terms. …

Abstract: A s Robert Kapsis ha.s noted in Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation, Alfred Hitchcock alway.s courted the press. From the early yeans in England working for Michael Balcon at Ciainsborough to his final years in Hollywood working for Lew Wasserman at Universal, Hitchcock attempted to produce and direct critical response to himself and to his work. One of Hitchcock's favorite screenwriters, Charles Bennett, told stories of Hitchct)ck spending his entire weekly salary on elaborate (self-) promotional parties for London's film critics back in the early iy3()s. Hitchcock remained actively engaged in the publicity for and promoliun of his films throughout his career, personally conducting national press tours. It is possible, in other words, to trace the 'Hitchcock Indtistry,' the proHfciation of essays, articles, trade press, a)id academic press books on Hitchcock, back to Hitchcock himself and his attempt to control his construction as a celebrity-entertainer-artist in the media. But Hitchcock has been dead for twenty-three years now. At ihe time of his death, according to Jane Sloan's Alfred Hitcheock: A Guide to References and Sources (1995), there were already over 540 articles and books on Hitchcock, including a handful of essays by Hitchcock himself, numerous interviews with him, and other pieces \\spawncd' by ihe director's efforts al generating publicity. We can, perhaps, 'blame' Hitchcock for some of this material. lUu he is nol to be held entirely responsible for whal happened after iiis death. Lroiii then (April 28, 1980) to his centennial in 1999, more than sixty-four new books and 371 new critical essays were published. C'livcn that the 'Hitchcock Industry' really took off during the lODth anniversary of his birth (1999), one could guess that another tweniy-or-so books had been published since then, nol to mention scores of iK•̂ •̂ articles. At any rate, a quick count of books on Hitchcock currently available for sale on Amazon.com indicates eighty-seven new and old book titles. Hooks on Hitchcock sell. For the past twenty-Hve years, since the heyday of high auleuihm, university and trade presses have taken a beating on studies of film directors. But Hitchcock, partly because of his status as a cultural icon and partly because college film courses are regularly devoted to his work, has endured as a sitbiect for popular biographies and scholarly monographs. Robin Wood's hook, Hitchcock's l-ilins, subsequently retilled Hitchcock's Tihns Revisited, is perhaps the best exatnple of Hitchcock's enduring popularity. Originally published (in a green cover edition) by Zwemmcr in 1965, it was reissued in 1969 (in a yellow cover edition that included a chapter on Torn Curtain). A thirii edition came out in 1977 with a \"Retiospective\" on the earlier editions. In 1989, Columbia University Press reprinted it along with about 200 pages of new material. That edition was revised yet again in 2002 with a new forty-page preface and a new essay on Mamie. Wood's book holds a very special place in llnglish-language scholarship on Hitchcock, being nol only {me of the first such books but also one of the best. At the same time, its various revisions document crucial shifts in films studies as a discipline and provide an important portrait of Hitchcock's role, as a figure of study, in the development of critical paradigms from early (i/i/fHcism, to psychoanalysis, feminism, semiotics (of a sort), and queer studies. There are various ways of accounting for the proliferation of books and essays on Hitchcock. The most obvious explanation would seem to be that Hitchcock's oeuvre merits such attention, Sidney Ciottlieb, coeditor of a journal devoted exclusively to Hitchcock (The Hitchcock Annual) and of a recent anthology of essays from that journal, is one of the few scholars to address the phenomenon of \"Hitchcock Studies.\" He observes that Hitchcock has been \"valorized,\" \"institutionalized,\" \"commodified,\" and \"proliferated\" as a topic of study. Although he considers the Hitchcock Industry to be a \"mixed blessing,\" the fact is that Hitchcock, like Shakespeare, is a major artist in an art form—the cinema—that has becotne the major artistic medium of the last century. To ensure the continued viability of Hitchcock Studies, Cottlieb then makes a series of recommendations designed to prevent the field from becoming yet anolher instance of cultural commoditlcation, instrunientali^ation, and reiflcation. One of his recommendations could be .said to describe the best of recent work on Hitchcock; it involves \"de-centering\" Hitchcock—that is, exploring the various \"contexts of his work,\" \"...his collaborators, his historical milieu...\" A more cynical commentary on llitch-

Abstract: An overview of the state of Irish film in 1999, with a discussion of the themes and concerns of irish cinema as it slowly emerged over the previous two decades. The article was part of the special 'Cineaste' supplement on 'Contemporary Irish Cinema'