Books by Shohini Chaudhuri
In recent years, the Arab world and Iran have been afflicted by cataclysmic events, among them br... more In recent years, the Arab world and Iran have been afflicted by cataclysmic events, among them brutal state crackdowns of revolutions. Yet, filmmakers have persisted in their desire to tell their stories, against the odds, in creative acts that attest to their imagination, courage and resilience.
In this book, Shohini Chaudhuri examines a broad range of films made during the tumultuous 2009–2020 period, ranging from internationally award-winning festival favourites, such as For Sama (2019), Capernaum (2018) and Taxi Tehran (2015) to lesser-known films from the region. While freedom of expression is often understood through the lens of state censorship, she reveals the different types of obstacles that filmmakers face and their strategies for overcoming them so that those constraints are transformed into creative opportunities. Using her original interviews with filmmakers such as Waad al-Kateab, Yasmin Fedda, Larissa Sansour, Mani Haghighi and Ossama Mohammed, she identifies nine creative strategies – witnessing, child protagonists, animation, psychogeography, road movies, humour, stories within stories, archives and sci-fi dystopia – for producing work under conditions of crisis.
Chaudhuri develops the argument that creativity is indelibly shaped by constraints, whether these are externally imposed by existing materials, funding and socio-political conditions, or self-imposed constraints, through choices of genre or acceptance of rules and responsibilities. Moving beyond prevalent allegorical interpretations, she shows that the range of creative strategies emanating from the region is much wider than allegory and becoming ever more direct. She thus opens up new lines of inquiry into cinematic creativity in sites of conflict and crisis in the Middle East and beyond.
Read the Introduction here: https://tinyurl.com/CrisisCinema
A few days after 9/11, US Vice-President Dick Cheney invoked the need for the USA to work ‘the da... more A few days after 9/11, US Vice-President Dick Cheney invoked the need for the USA to work ‘the dark side’ in its global ‘War on Terror’. Cinema of the Dark Side explores how contemporary cinema treats state-sponsored atrocity, evoking multiple landscapes of state terror. Investigating the ethical potential of cinematic atrocity images, it argues that while films help to create and confirm normative perceptions about atrocities, they can also disrupt those perceptions and build different ones. Asserting a crucial distinction between morality and ethics, a new conceptualisation of human rights cinema is proposed, one that repositions human rights morality within an ethical framework that reflects upon the causes and contexts of violence. It builds upon theories of embodied spectatorship to offer a new perspective on the ethics of spectatorship, providing readers with fresh insights into how we respond to atrocity images and the ethical issues at stake.
Reviews:
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/cinema-of-the-dark-side-atrocity-and-the-ethics-of-film-spectatorship-by-shohini-chaudhuri/2017388.article
https://www.cinemahumain.com/cinema-of-the-dark-side/
Since it began in the 1970s, feminist film theory has revolutionized the way that films and their... more Since it began in the 1970s, feminist film theory has revolutionized the way that films and their spectators can be understood. This book focuses on the groundbreaking work of Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, and Barbara Creed. Each of these thinkers has opened up a new and distinctive approach to the study of film and this book provides the most detailed account so far of their ideas. It illuminates
the following six key concepts and demonstrates their value
as tools for film analysis:
• the male gaze
• the female voice
• technologies of gender
• queering desire
• the monstrous-feminine
• masculinity in crisis.
Shohini Chaudhuri shows how these four thinkers construct their theories through their reading of films as well as testing their ideas with a number of other examples from contemporary cinema and television. She concludes that the concepts have not remained static over the past thirty years but have continually evolved with the influence of new
critical debates and developments in film production, signalling their continuing impact and relevance in an era that is often unthinkingly branded as ‘post-feminist’.
Since the start of the 1990s, despite tougher competition than ever before from Hollywood, a rebi... more Since the start of the 1990s, despite tougher competition than ever before from Hollywood, a rebirth and flourishing of cinema has been taking place in parts of Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia. This book provides an overview of the cinemas of these regions, interpreting some of the recent developments as strategic responses to globalisation. Highlighting transnational and cross-cultural structures, influences and themes, it offers: a broad critical context for the study of contemporary world cinema, introducing key concepts and issues including modes of production and distribution; cultural and historical background for the cinemas of each region, with analyses of regional aesthetic styles and comparisons with Hollywood models; case studies of Scandinavian, Iranian, Hong Kong and Indian cinema; and close analysis of twelve landmark films, including Thomas Vinterberg's Festen, Samira Makhmalbaf's The Apple, Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood For Love, and Ashutosh Gowariker's Lagaan.
Journal Articles by Shohini Chaudhuri
Transnational Cinemas, 2018
Images of the Syrian crisis, circulating on the international film festival circuit as well as in... more Images of the Syrian crisis, circulating on the international film festival circuit as well as in mainstream and social media, help to construct narratives about those events, people and places. This article explores how three Syrian documentaries – Silvered Water: Syria Self-Portrait, The War Show and Little Gandhi – appeal to their distant spectators and how the international film festival circuit shapes their aesthetic form. While the use of citizen videos in news reporting has generated a sense of familiarity with the audiovisual style and iconography of Syrian conflict imagery, these films invite us to look at their footage in a different way, foregrounding an experience of cultural distance through an emphasis on the formal qualities of the image. By focusing on the aesthetic rather than merely evidentiary qualities of these documentaries, I draw out a particular kind of transnational cinematic encounter in which, to borrow John Berger's words, 'meaning is a response not only to the known, but to the unknown'. Drawing upon the work of Berger and Laura Marks, the article offers a new conceptualization of distant spectatorship in terms of the alterity of the image.
This article, originally published in Screen in 2003, argues that the appeal of recent Iranian fi... more This article, originally published in Screen in 2003, argues that the appeal of recent Iranian films to international audiences is due at least in part to their use of 'open', ambiguous, epiphanic images. In answer to concerns about the apolitical trajectory of these films, it suggests that the repressed political dimension returns within the aesthetic form of the open image.
The high media profile and ‘crossover’ success of South Asian migrant
filmmakers such as Deepa Me... more The high media profile and ‘crossover’ success of South Asian migrant
filmmakers such as Deepa Mehta has often bred accusations that they
deliberately package themes and aesthetics in order to stir up controversy and
produce an ‘exotic’ India for global audiences. This claim has recently been
played out in relation to the Oscar-nominated film Water (2005), which provoked
protests from Hindu fundamentalists and death threats to Mehta and her crew.
My article argues that exoticist representation is a significant tendency within
contemporary world cinema and needs to be addressed without the customary
moral condemnation implied in both popular reactions and academic studies that
favour more experimental works. It attempts to shift the terms of the debate by
deconstructing the notion of the touristic, Western gaze to which these films
ostensibly pander and mobilise a more fluid set of perspectives – the invocation of
different regimes of sensuous knowledge and the cross-cultural adaptation of
melodrama – to illuminate Water’s aesthetic choices, export success, and
interpretation of gender power dynamics.
Journal of Screenwriting, 2012
Abstract: Screenwriter and director Sue Clayton and academic Shohini Chaudhuri consider storytell... more Abstract: Screenwriter and director Sue Clayton and academic Shohini Chaudhuri consider storytelling structures in Bhutan, a country that has, until recently, been relatively culturally isolated but is now moving towards entering the global stage. As in the rest of South Asia, ...
This article attempts to make sense of the mixed audience responses to Cronenberg's film Crash wh... more This article attempts to make sense of the mixed audience responses to Cronenberg's film Crash when it premièred at Cannes in 1996 and during the film's controversial release in Britain in 1997, the same year as the death of Princess Diana in a fatal car-crash. In a psychoanalytic interpretation that takes its lead from the film's melancholy mood, it suggests that Crash engages us, and its characters, in a kind of identification that closely resembles mourning - namely, melancholia.
Chapters by Shohini Chaudhuri
New Punk Cinema, 2005
Viewed in terms of a punk aesthetic, the apparent contradictions between Dogma's rule-making and ... more Viewed in terms of a punk aesthetic, the apparent contradictions between Dogma's rule-making and rule-breaking begin to make sense, especially in the work of the movement's two main founders, von Trier and Vinterberg. Punk logic is what best encapsulates their ethos, if not the movement as a whole. This essay therefore presents case studies of their work following a general discussion of Dogma's punk idiom.
Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, 2005
Global Humanitarianism and Media Culture, 2019
What happens when humanitarian images of Palestinian casualties take centre stage, as they did du... more What happens when humanitarian images of Palestinian casualties take centre stage, as they did during the 2014 Israeli bombardment of Gaza? In this chapter, I argue that a media outcome that appears to be favourable to the Palestinians, in that it focuses on their suffering, can actually have the opposite effect. I refer to a range of media texts related to the Gaza conflicts: UK, US and Israeli news coverage, including UK journalist Jon Snow’s video blog upon his return from Gaza in 2014; Waltz with Bashir, which was released around the time of the 2008–9 conflict; and the Palestinian film Where Should the Birds Fly (Fida Qishta, 2013), which focuses on the 2008–9 conflict and its aftermath.
Taking its title from Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's statement during the 2014 conflict - accusing Hamas of using ‘telegenically dead Palestinians’ for their cause - the chapter focuses on the concept of 'perception management'. This can serve to divorce the public from realities of state violence through a kind of cinematic derealisation that enables states to reduce perceptions of blame for their atrocities and act with impunity.
A Companion to Wong Kar-wai, 2016
Wong Kar-wai is undoubtedly one of cinema’s great colorists. His films are renowned for their dis... more Wong Kar-wai is undoubtedly one of cinema’s great colorists. His films are renowned for their distinctive ‘smudge-motion’ style, in which colors segue and blur into each other. As color in cinema is a product of collaboration between the director, production designer and cinematographer, this chapter emphasizes Wong’s creative partnership with his collaborators – most of all, William Chang, Wong’s long-term art director, costume designer and editor, who has worked with him on all of his films. Treating color as a form of montage, it explores Wong’s color strategies in the context of Western and Chinese color aesthetics, showing how his films both conform to and depart from classical conventions whilst engaging in color-experimentation similar to modernist artists. In its close analysis, the chapter considers the distinctive ways in which color is used in Wong’s cinema: color lends his work an authorial signature; it synergizes with music; it captures the vitality of his landscapes; it reveals the play of memory; and implants narrative enigmas. In this way, it shows how color carries much of his films’ affective charge and is intrinsic to the expression of his social and philosophical themes.
Cinema of the Dark Side: Atrocity and the Ethics of Film Spectatorship, 2014
Science fiction films that have dramatised issues of immigration detention and deportation form t... more Science fiction films that have dramatised issues of immigration detention and deportation form the focus of this chapter, which argues that, far from being about the future, science fiction is a historiographic mode which can situate current oppressive realities in a longer history of violence. In their mise en scène, Children of Men (2006), District 9 (2009), and Monsters (2010) make links between wealthy states’ present-day treatment of immigrants and historical atrocities of the ‘War on Terror’, Nazi concentration camps, and South African apartheid. Combining location shooting with CGI, these films create a recognisable world, a slightly altered version of our own reality, which provokes us to scrutinise an oppressive geopolitical order. A coda on SF blockbuster Elysium (2013), which shares similar features, both reinforces and qualifies the chapter’s argument about the genre’s critical potential.
Postcolonial Cinema Studies, 2012
Storytelling in World Cinemas, Vol. 2. , 2013
In this article, film scholar Shohini Chaudhuri and screenwriter/director Sue Clayton consider st... more In this article, film scholar Shohini Chaudhuri and screenwriter/director Sue Clayton consider storytelling structures in Bhutan, a country that has, until recently, been relatively culturally isolated but is now moving towards entering the global stage. As in the rest of South Asia, the dominant cinematic model in Bhutan is that of Bollywood, yet Buddhism, the oral tradition and supernatural beliefs form a rich repertoire of stories that screenwriters of the emerging film industry are increasingly attempting to mine. In this article, we show how cinematic storytelling in Bhutan functions as a kind of ‘secondary orality’ through our analyses of an earlier international co-production Travellers and Magicians (2003), local digital video films, and the film project that Clayton is developing in dialogue with Bhutanese writers, Jumolhari. We argue that Bhutan’s Buddhist, animist and oral traditions challenge and transform classically established cinema conventions of story structure, decentring individual human subjectivity as the controlling force and producing an altogether different kind of hero’s journey.
Disappearing War: Cinema and the Politics of Erasure in the War on Terror , 2017
This chapter explores the heightened visibility of certain people, images and experiences and red... more This chapter explores the heightened visibility of certain people, images and experiences and reduced visibility of others in the 'War on Terror', illustrating this with American Sniper (2014) and Good Kill (2014) together with other filmic examples and news reports. It then turns to Göran Hugo Olsson’s documentary Concerning Violence (2014), which explores the reverse perspective of those on the receiving end of the West’s actions. Although this film deals with decolonisation struggles in Africa in the 60s, 70s and 80s, using archive footage from Swedish state television, it encourages viewers to see beyond the period and connect it to current issues, evoking the ‘colonial present’ in which violence inflicted on marginalised people continues in new forms.
Shorter Articles, Blogs and Filmmaker Interviews by Shohini Chaudhuri
Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait is a documentary mostly composed of YouTube posts by anonymou... more Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait is a documentary mostly composed of YouTube posts by anonymous activists. In this interview, the director Ossama Mohammed and documentarist and researcher Zaher Omareen lend their personal insights into its structure and significance.
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Books by Shohini Chaudhuri
In this book, Shohini Chaudhuri examines a broad range of films made during the tumultuous 2009–2020 period, ranging from internationally award-winning festival favourites, such as For Sama (2019), Capernaum (2018) and Taxi Tehran (2015) to lesser-known films from the region. While freedom of expression is often understood through the lens of state censorship, she reveals the different types of obstacles that filmmakers face and their strategies for overcoming them so that those constraints are transformed into creative opportunities. Using her original interviews with filmmakers such as Waad al-Kateab, Yasmin Fedda, Larissa Sansour, Mani Haghighi and Ossama Mohammed, she identifies nine creative strategies – witnessing, child protagonists, animation, psychogeography, road movies, humour, stories within stories, archives and sci-fi dystopia – for producing work under conditions of crisis.
Chaudhuri develops the argument that creativity is indelibly shaped by constraints, whether these are externally imposed by existing materials, funding and socio-political conditions, or self-imposed constraints, through choices of genre or acceptance of rules and responsibilities. Moving beyond prevalent allegorical interpretations, she shows that the range of creative strategies emanating from the region is much wider than allegory and becoming ever more direct. She thus opens up new lines of inquiry into cinematic creativity in sites of conflict and crisis in the Middle East and beyond.
Read the Introduction here: https://tinyurl.com/CrisisCinema
Reviews:
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/cinema-of-the-dark-side-atrocity-and-the-ethics-of-film-spectatorship-by-shohini-chaudhuri/2017388.article
https://www.cinemahumain.com/cinema-of-the-dark-side/
the following six key concepts and demonstrates their value
as tools for film analysis:
• the male gaze
• the female voice
• technologies of gender
• queering desire
• the monstrous-feminine
• masculinity in crisis.
Shohini Chaudhuri shows how these four thinkers construct their theories through their reading of films as well as testing their ideas with a number of other examples from contemporary cinema and television. She concludes that the concepts have not remained static over the past thirty years but have continually evolved with the influence of new
critical debates and developments in film production, signalling their continuing impact and relevance in an era that is often unthinkingly branded as ‘post-feminist’.
Journal Articles by Shohini Chaudhuri
filmmakers such as Deepa Mehta has often bred accusations that they
deliberately package themes and aesthetics in order to stir up controversy and
produce an ‘exotic’ India for global audiences. This claim has recently been
played out in relation to the Oscar-nominated film Water (2005), which provoked
protests from Hindu fundamentalists and death threats to Mehta and her crew.
My article argues that exoticist representation is a significant tendency within
contemporary world cinema and needs to be addressed without the customary
moral condemnation implied in both popular reactions and academic studies that
favour more experimental works. It attempts to shift the terms of the debate by
deconstructing the notion of the touristic, Western gaze to which these films
ostensibly pander and mobilise a more fluid set of perspectives – the invocation of
different regimes of sensuous knowledge and the cross-cultural adaptation of
melodrama – to illuminate Water’s aesthetic choices, export success, and
interpretation of gender power dynamics.
Chapters by Shohini Chaudhuri
Taking its title from Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's statement during the 2014 conflict - accusing Hamas of using ‘telegenically dead Palestinians’ for their cause - the chapter focuses on the concept of 'perception management'. This can serve to divorce the public from realities of state violence through a kind of cinematic derealisation that enables states to reduce perceptions of blame for their atrocities and act with impunity.
Shorter Articles, Blogs and Filmmaker Interviews by Shohini Chaudhuri
In this book, Shohini Chaudhuri examines a broad range of films made during the tumultuous 2009–2020 period, ranging from internationally award-winning festival favourites, such as For Sama (2019), Capernaum (2018) and Taxi Tehran (2015) to lesser-known films from the region. While freedom of expression is often understood through the lens of state censorship, she reveals the different types of obstacles that filmmakers face and their strategies for overcoming them so that those constraints are transformed into creative opportunities. Using her original interviews with filmmakers such as Waad al-Kateab, Yasmin Fedda, Larissa Sansour, Mani Haghighi and Ossama Mohammed, she identifies nine creative strategies – witnessing, child protagonists, animation, psychogeography, road movies, humour, stories within stories, archives and sci-fi dystopia – for producing work under conditions of crisis.
Chaudhuri develops the argument that creativity is indelibly shaped by constraints, whether these are externally imposed by existing materials, funding and socio-political conditions, or self-imposed constraints, through choices of genre or acceptance of rules and responsibilities. Moving beyond prevalent allegorical interpretations, she shows that the range of creative strategies emanating from the region is much wider than allegory and becoming ever more direct. She thus opens up new lines of inquiry into cinematic creativity in sites of conflict and crisis in the Middle East and beyond.
Read the Introduction here: https://tinyurl.com/CrisisCinema
Reviews:
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/cinema-of-the-dark-side-atrocity-and-the-ethics-of-film-spectatorship-by-shohini-chaudhuri/2017388.article
https://www.cinemahumain.com/cinema-of-the-dark-side/
the following six key concepts and demonstrates their value
as tools for film analysis:
• the male gaze
• the female voice
• technologies of gender
• queering desire
• the monstrous-feminine
• masculinity in crisis.
Shohini Chaudhuri shows how these four thinkers construct their theories through their reading of films as well as testing their ideas with a number of other examples from contemporary cinema and television. She concludes that the concepts have not remained static over the past thirty years but have continually evolved with the influence of new
critical debates and developments in film production, signalling their continuing impact and relevance in an era that is often unthinkingly branded as ‘post-feminist’.
filmmakers such as Deepa Mehta has often bred accusations that they
deliberately package themes and aesthetics in order to stir up controversy and
produce an ‘exotic’ India for global audiences. This claim has recently been
played out in relation to the Oscar-nominated film Water (2005), which provoked
protests from Hindu fundamentalists and death threats to Mehta and her crew.
My article argues that exoticist representation is a significant tendency within
contemporary world cinema and needs to be addressed without the customary
moral condemnation implied in both popular reactions and academic studies that
favour more experimental works. It attempts to shift the terms of the debate by
deconstructing the notion of the touristic, Western gaze to which these films
ostensibly pander and mobilise a more fluid set of perspectives – the invocation of
different regimes of sensuous knowledge and the cross-cultural adaptation of
melodrama – to illuminate Water’s aesthetic choices, export success, and
interpretation of gender power dynamics.
Taking its title from Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's statement during the 2014 conflict - accusing Hamas of using ‘telegenically dead Palestinians’ for their cause - the chapter focuses on the concept of 'perception management'. This can serve to divorce the public from realities of state violence through a kind of cinematic derealisation that enables states to reduce perceptions of blame for their atrocities and act with impunity.
Published on the website Palestine Docs.
previously invisible in people’s everyday struggles.
SESSION 1: Art of the Unfree: Supporters and Campaigners. Introduced by Dr Ros Green (Director, Essex Book Festival) and Dr Shohini Chaudhuri (Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex). Speakers: Jo Glanville, (Director, English PEN), Obinna Nwosu (Fundraising and Communications Director, Safe Ground), Sheila Hayman (Co-ordinator, Write to Life, Freedom from Torture).
SESSION 2: Art of the Unfree: Artists’ Presentations and Perspectives. Introduced by Professor Sanja Bahun (Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex). Speakers: Winston ‘Gus’ Augustine (Safe Ground project participant), Hamid Ismailov (Novelist, poet and the BBC World Service’s first writer-in-residence), Write to Life (Freedom from Torture).
SESSION 3: Panel Discussion chaired by Lucy Popescu (Writer and critic on literature, theatre and human rights). Speakers: Conteh (Write to Life member, Freedom from Torture), Jo Glanville (Director, English PEN), Sheila Hayman (Co-ordinator, Write to Life, Freedom from Torture), Dr Ahmed Shaheed (UN Special Rapporteur on Iran and Lecturer in the School of Law and Human Rights Centre, University of Essex) and Charlotte Weinberg (Executive Director, Safe Ground).
The symposium was organized by Dr Shohini Chaudhuri and Professor Sanja Bahun with Director of the Essex Book Festival Ros Green. An audio recording of the event is available on the Essex University SoundCloud channel.
This event was the first in a series re-examining the life and works of influential historical figures from across the humanities and social sciences, exploring the important and continuing influences they have on society and debating their place as key thinkers for our time.
Chaired by Professor Laura Marcus FBA, University of Oxford.
Speakers:
Professor Stephen Frosh (Birkbeck, University of London),
Professor Ankhi Mukherjee (University of Oxford),
Dr Shohini Chaudhuri (University of Essex),
Dr Jana Funke (University of Exeter).
A video recording of the event is available on the British Academy website.
The paper draws on what Paul Virilio calls the ‘logistics of perception’ – that a ‘war of pictures and sounds’ accompanies conflicts and shapes our attitudes towards them as just or unjust – and Mark Curtis’s notion of ‘perception management’, which describes the media’s role in projecting powerful groups as moral forces for good, keeping their agendas hidden to make their policies more acceptable. In no way unique to the Gaza conflicts, perception management can serve to divorce the public from realities of state violence through a kind of cinematic derealisation that enables states to act with impunity and alter public perceptions of atrocities to reduce allocation of blame to those who perpetrate them. In this instance it includes the appeal to and manipulation of international humanitarian law in which compassion for Palestinian suffering expressed by Israeli spokespeople on the news became a mask for violence, permitting Israel to carry on its policies with international support.
To support and illustrate its argument about the framing of humanitarian images, the paper refers to a range of media texts. Among them will be: Waltz with Bashir (2008), an Israeli coproduction about the 1982 Lebanon War whose release coincided with the 2008-9 Gaza conflict; British news presenter Jon Snow’s video blog upon from his return from Gaza in July 2014; The Honourable Woman, a BBC drama screened at the time of the 2014 conflict; and Where Should the Birds Fly (2013), a documentary about the 2008-9 war made by a Gazan citizen journalist. The paper demonstrates that, without broader context, humanitarian images can actually limit our understanding of these conflicts, and that it is not sufficient merely to elicit compassion for suffering; rather, what is necessary is reflection on what makes such oppression possible, acceptable and ‘normal’.