What tensions characterized the relationships between cinema, European Leftists, and emerging postcolonial ideologies after World War II? In Traveling Auteurs, author Luca Caminati analyzes the work of influential Italian filmmakers Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Michelangelo Antonioni as they engaged politically and aesthetically with the global landscapes and politics of the Cold War period. As documentaries, the films considered in this book record specific manifestations of political sensibilities of the twentieth century. As bodies of work, they reveal that the traveling auteurs who made them were symptomatic actors in complex geopolitical networks. As cultural objects reflecting and shaping contemporaneous debates, they provoke a complex afterlife at home and abroad. In the three chapters dedicated to Rossellini in India, Pasolini in Africa and the Middle East, and Antonioni in China, Caminati pays particular attention both to the reception that these films had in the countries where they were shot and to their legacies in Italian film history. As it follows the entanglements of filmmakers, artists, and activists involved as allies or direct witnesses to momentous political change, this book sheds new light on anticolonial struggles, the reaffirmation of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the consolidation of the Chinese Communist Party.

Mosaic Space and Mosaic Auteurs constructs a model of mosaic, which extends our focus beyond narrative strategy, to approach the trend of diverse multi-strand films across genres, nations and filmmaking contexts since the late 1980s. Different from investigation of this recurring global phenomenon from perspectives of spectator engagement, narratology, cognitive understanding and socio-political messages, proposed by film scholars, the model of mosaic helps establish the intertwining relationship between narrative, aesthetics, transnational production, and distribution modes – and in the framework of contextualised geopolitical spaces. As the transnational auteurs in question draw talents, resources, and subject matters from a wide range of geopolitical spaces along their border-crossing journeys, their films juxtapose diverse spatial configurations. In fact, "mosaic" is a spatial metaphor which puts emphasis on the visual image of spaces and links space, narrative, and authorship into a multidimensional model of spatial compilation. It is a mosaic which gathers, groups, juxtaposes, and re-arranges spaces, offering a reading of mosaic beyond an exclusive focus on narrative – its nuances are examined in detail in different mosaics of Alejandro González Iñárritu, Atom Egoyan, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Michael Haneke.

The Authorship of Place is the first monograph dedicated to the study of the politics, history, aesthetics, and practices of location shooting for Taiwanese, Mainland Chinese, and coproduced art cinemas shot in rural communities since the late 1970s. Dennis Lo argues that rural location shooting, beyond serving aesthetic and technical needs, constitutes practices of cultural survival in a region beset with disruptive and disorienting social changes, including rapid urbanization, geopolitical shifts, and ecological crises. In response to these social changes, auteurs like Hou Xiaoxian, Jia Zhangke, Chen Kaige, and Li Xing engaged in location shooting to transform sites of film production into symbolically meaningful places of collective memories and aspirations. These production practices ultimately enabled auteurs to experiment with imagining Taiwanese, Mainland Chinese, and cross-strait communities in novel and contentious ways. Deftly guiding readers on a cross-strait tour of prominent shooting locations for the New Chinese Cinemas, this book shows how auteurs sought out their disappearing cultural heritage by reenacting lived experiences of nation building, homecoming, and cultural salvage while shooting on-location. This was an especially daunting task when auteurs encountered the shooting locations as spaces of unresolved historical, social, and geopolitical contestations, tensions which were only intensified by the impact of filmmaking on rural communities. This book demonstrates how these complex circumstances surrounding location shooting were pivotal in shaping both representations of the rural on-screen, as well as the production communities, institutions, and industries off-screen. Informed by cutting-edge perspectives in cultural geography and media anthropology, The Authorship of Place both revises Chinese-language film history and theorizes groundbreaking approaches for investigating the cultural politics of film authorship and production. “This extraordinary book discusses the uses of location shooting in films by contemporary Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese directors ranging from Li Xing to Jia Zhangke. It highlights the ways in which place, memory, and identity stances respond to social changes and geopolitical disparities. In a world full of uncertainty, the argument about the imaginary homeland as an experienced cinematic reality only renders it more urgent and universally relatable.” —Ping-hui Liao, University of California, San Diego “The Authorship of Place is certainly a welcome intervention into the study of Chinese cinemas and their auteurs that further contributes to the wider study of location shooting as well as cultural geographies and place-based imaginaries of film. It is rare to find a book dealing with space/place in and around cinema that is this inventive and nuanced in its methodologies.” —Stephanie DeBoer, Indiana University

Ana M. López is one of the foremost film and media scholars in the world. Her work has addressed Latin American filmmaking in every historical period, across countries and genres—from early cinema to the present; from Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico to diasporic and Latinx cinemas in the United States; from documentary to melodrama to politically militant film. López's groundbreaking essays have transformed Latin American film studies, opening up new approaches, theoretical frameworks, and lines of investigation while also extending beyond cinema to analyze its connections with television, radio, and broader cultural phenomena. Bringing together twenty-five essays from throughout her career, including three that have been translated into English for this volume, Ana M. López is divided into three sections: the transnational turn in Latin American film studies; analysis of genre and modes; and debates surrounding race, ethnicity, and gender. Expertly curated and edited by Laura Podalsky and Dolores Tierney, the volume includes introductory material throughout to map and situate López's key interventions and to aid students and scholars less familiar with her work.

What tensions characterized the relationships between cinema, European Leftists, and emerging postcolonial ideologies after World War II? In Traveling Auteurs, author Luca Caminati analyzes the work of influential Italian filmmakers Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Michelangelo Antonioni as they engaged politically and aesthetically with the global landscapes and politics of the Cold War period. As documentaries, the films considered in this book record specific manifestations of political sensibilities of the twentieth century. As bodies of work, they reveal that the traveling auteurs who made them were symptomatic actors in complex geopolitical networks. As cultural objects reflecting and shaping contemporaneous debates, they provoke a complex afterlife at home and abroad. In the three chapters dedicated to Rossellini in India, Pasolini in Africa and the Middle East, and Antonioni in China, Caminati pays particular attention both to the reception that these films had in the countries where they were shot and to their legacies in Italian film history. As it follows the entanglements of filmmakers, artists, and activists involved as allies or direct witnesses to momentous political change, this book sheds new light on anticolonial struggles, the reaffirmation of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the consolidation of the Chinese Communist Party.

Once heralded and defined by the likes of François Truffaut and Andrew Sarris as a romantic figure of aesthetic individualism, the auteur is reinvestigated here through a novel approach. Bringing established as well as emergent figures of world art cinema to the fore, The Global Auteur shows how politics and philosophy are present in the works of these important filmmakers. They can be still seen leading a fight that their glorious predecessors seemed to have abandoned in the face of global capitalism and the market economy. Yet, as the contributors show, a new world calls for a new cinema, and thus for new auteurs. Covering a range of global auteurs such as Lars von Trier, Lav Diaz, Lee Chang-dong and Abderrahmane Sissako, The Global Auteur provides a much-needed reassessment of the film auteur for the global age.

Written in the irreverent style that made How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read a critical and commercial success, Pierre Bayard takes readers on a trip around the world, giving us essential guidance on how to talk about all those fantastic places we've never been. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Places You've Never Been will delight and inform armchair globetrotters and jet-setters, all while never having to leave the comfort of the living room. Bayard examines the art of the “non-journey,” a tradition that a succession of writers and thinkers, unconcerned with moving away from their home turf, have employed in order to encounter the foreign cultures they wish to know and talk about. He describes concrete situations in which the reader might find himself having to speak about places he's never been, and he chronicles some of his own experiences and offers practical advice. How to Talk About Places You Haven't Been is a compelling and delightful book that will expand any travel enthusiast's horizon well beyond the places it's even possible to visit in a single lifetime.