Youth Cinema

Since the 1970s, Lebanese cinema has developed alongside the country’s changing political and social landscape, with crime narratives reflecting these shifts. During the Civil War (1975-1990), filmmakers like Maroun Baghdadi used crime to highlight the chaos and moral complexity of the time, as seen in Little Wars (1982). Several years later, crime stories reappeared in Lebanese cinema, combining genre conventions with themes of social struggle. By the 2010s, films like Very Big Shot (2015) by Mir-Jean Bou Chaaya redefined crime cinema through dark humor and social critique, reflecting Lebanon’s ongoing instability. This article examines the development of crime narratives in Lebanese cinema, using both films as a case study to analyze how crime functions both as a narrative device and as a reflection of historical and political changes. Through a comparative study of Little Wars and Very Big Shot, this paper explores the thematic and stylistic shifts that suggest the emergence of a distinct Lebanese crime cinema, blending genre elements with social commentary on Lebanon’s complex realities.

Since the Western “discovery” of Japanese cinema in the 1950s, there has been a tendency among both Film Studies and Japanese Studies scholars to draw on essentialist visions of Japanese Cinema, understating its uniqueness as a consequence of its isolation from the rest of the world [...]

Film history surveys have traditionally revolved around North American and European developments. However, the digital era allows an increasing access to film cultures from other regions, which is forcing the redefinition of film history surveys and their learning methodologies. Educators in the twenty-first century now have a responsibility to update their approaches to the discipline by challenging its traditional Euro-American focus. Nevertheless, that is not an easy task, as film studies has evolved from Western canons, paradigms, and models which are unsuitable for the study of ‘other’ cinemas.

Film history surveys have traditionally revolved around North American and European developments. However, the digital era allows an increasing access to film cultures from other regions, which is forcing the redefinition of film history surveys and their learning methodologies. Educators in the twenty-first century now have a responsibility to update their approaches to the discipline by challenging its traditional Euro-American focus. Nevertheless, that is not an easy task, as film studies has evolved from Western canons, paradigms, and models which are unsuitable for the study of ‘other’ cinemas.

The Western ‘discovery’ of Japanese cinema in the 1950s prompted scholars to articulate essentialist visions understanding its singularities as a result of its isolation from the rest of the world and its close links to local aesthetic and philosophical traditions. Recent approaches however, have evidenced the limitations of this paradigm of ‘national cinema’. Higson (1989) opened a critical discussion on the existing consumption, text and production-based approaches to this concept. This article draws on Higson ́s contribution and calls into question traditional theorising of Japanese film as a national cinema. Contradictions are illustrated by assessing the other side of the ‘discovery’ of Japanese cinema: certain gendaigeki works that succeeded at the domestic box office while jidaigeki burst into European film festivals. The Taiyōzoku and subsequent Mukokuseki Action films created a new postwar iconography by adapting codes of representation from Hollywood youth and western film...

The general concepts in theorising the aesthetics of film are still rooted in occidental traditions. Thus, thinking about film is dominated by Western terms and aesthetic paradigms—such as “pieces of work”, the representation of reality or regarding the arts as an act of communication. From such an angle, it is difficult to describe different characteristics of the cinematic image, for example, its ephemeral character. In contrast to occidental thinking, the cultural traditions of East Asia are based on the concept of the way (dō or dao), which allow for the description of aesthetics of transitions and transformations. Inspired by the concept of kire-tsuzuki, as developed by the Japanese–German philosopher Ryōsuke Ōhashi, I shall, in this paper, describe some alternative ways of understanding appearance and occurrence in relation to the cinematic picture.

Cinema has a long-standing engagement with the disenchantments of adolescence and early adulthood, but rarely are films that deal with terrorism and the process of radicalisation treated as films about the dissatisfactions of youth. Terrorism is read as an identitarian, religious or a civilisational clash, rather than as a manifestation of generational discontent. However, recent cinema from the Maghreb and the Middle East, a region with chronic unemployment and where over half the population are under thirty years of age, stresses the connections between radicalisation and the disenfranchisement of young people under global capitalism. This article, then, proposes an examination of the links between terrorism and youthful disaffection, focusing on the figure of the male protagonist drawn into fundamentalist violence in Nouri Bouzid's Making Of (2006). Unlike Western depictions of the terrorist, which have tended to present a univocal image of the terrorist as malignant and external force and a fully formed and utterly unscrupulous agent of violence, this film invites the spectator to encounter the terrorist as a humanised and vulnerable young man, screening the pivotal transition from broader political discontent to the channelling of that dissatisfaction into terrorist violence. The film also questions authoritarianism, indoctrination and intergenerational conflict through its use of documentary-style sequences, which pit the director's vision against the beliefs of the principal actor. My intervention seeks to interrogate the figure of the terrorist through the prism of youth, reading youth as an affective and biological category that encompasses and often magnifies many of the issues that are frequently cited as catalysts in the radicalisation process: idealism, rebellion, antiauthoritarianism, economic and social insecurity and disenfranchisement, and powerless ness. Making Of is veteran Tunisian filmmaker Nouri Bouzid's sixth film, and it stages the themes of social, personal and political alienation and disenchantment that mark the entirety of his oeuvre. Born in Sfax in 1945, Bouzid

The general concepts in theorising the aesthetics of film are still rooted in occidental traditions. Thus, thinking about film is dominated by Western terms and aesthetic paradigms-such as "pieces of work", the representation of reality or regarding the arts as an act of communication. From such an angle, it is difficult to describe different characteristics of the cinematic image, for example, its ephemeral character. In contrast to occidental thinking, the cultural traditions of East Asia are based on the concept of the way (dō or dao), which allow for the description of aesthetics of transitions and transformations. Inspired by the concept of kire-tsuzuki, as developed by the Japanese-German philosopher RyōsukeŌhashi, I shall, in this paper, describe some alternative ways of understanding appearance and occurrence in relation to the cinematic picture.

The Western ‘discovery’ of Japanese cinema in the 1950s prompted scholars to articulate essentialist visions understanding its singularities as a result of its isolation from the rest of the world and its close links to local aesthetic and philosophical traditions. Recent approaches however, have evidenced the limitations of this paradigm of ‘national cinema’. Higson (1989) opened a critical discussion on the existing consumption, text and production-based approaches to this concept. This article draws on Higson´s contribution and calls into question traditional theorising of Japanese film as a national cinema. Contradictions are illustrated by assessing the other side of the ‘discovery’ of Japanese cinema: certain gendaigeki works that succeeded at the domestic box office while jidaigeki burst into European film festivals. The Taiyōzoku and subsequent Mukokuseki Action films created a new postwar iconography by adapting codes of representation from Hollywood youth and western films. This article does not attempt to deny the uniqueness of this film culture, but rather seeks to highlight the need to reformulate the paradigm of national cinema in the Japanese case, and illustrate the sense in which it was created from outside, failing to recognise its reach transnational intertextuality.

Intermedial practices are a common trademark of the Japanese art world in the sixties and seventies. This article focuses on a case study of such practices, namely the relationship between artwork and audience in Terayama Shūji's cinema. Moving from the author's theatrical theories on spectatorship (kankyakuron), the paper applies those theories to Terayama's experimental movies, analysing how they are adapted to the cinematic medium. This study conceives a three-phased system, where the spectator is progressively brought towards the screen and his role changes from passive viewer to active agent. The study adopts an approach based on performance studies and avant-garde film theory to reveal how Terayama moulds the movie-going practice into a performative and collective event, using the movie theatre as a theatrical stage.

Hakuchi, Kurosawa Akira’s 1951 film adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, finds its proper historical context in post-World War II cultural criticism. In this period an interest in Dostoevsky was shared by many artists and intellectuals who sought the larger cultural causes of the catastrophe that had involved all industrial nations. Kurosawa’s turn to Dostoevsky contributes a Japanese variant to the series of ethical revisions of modernism attempted in Europe by such artists and thinkers as Thomas Mann, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Mikhail Bakhtin. For them Dostoevsky represented an alternative model for an ethically differentiated collective consciousness, in opposition to the now discredited father of modernism, Friedrich Nietzsche. Through a reading of the film’s crucial scenes and motifs, Kurosawa’s cinematic mediation between the West and the East is shown to have started from the shared premises of the ethically revised modernism that emerged from the wartime trauma.

The purpose of this course is to explore contemporary (and future) Japan through film from the late 1980s to nowadays. The foundations of the course lie in Film Studies in its broader sense. It is not intended to simply summarize the sociopolitical issues of contemporary Japan as depicted in films. Rather, it is designed to analyze the films themselves in order to understand, through their aesthetics and formal aspects, what new forms of production, distribution and consumption, the intersection of screens (in theatres, at home, in our pockets), pop culture and the media mix, etc., tell us about Japan and how its society is evolving.

In Japan in 1955, 23-year-old writer Ishihara Shintaro created a sensation with the publication of Taiyo no kisetsu [Season of the Sun], a novel which seemed to both reflect and define the idleness, casual sexuality and aimless violence of the first generation to grow up in the aftermath of World War II. By 1956, Nikkatsu Studios had made the novel into a successful movie, and the generation of teenagers depicted in the novel and the movie became known as the “taiyozoku,” or sun tribe. The summer of 1956 became known as the heyday of the “taiyozoku boom” (Harada 38). In the same year, Shintaro wrote another novel about the taiyozoku, Kurutta kajitsu [Crazy Fruit], which was also made into a film, this time starring his younger brother, Yujiro. Although it was controversial for its depictions of sex and violence, the film was a huge hit. Even more than his older brother, Yujiro became a new ideal of young male identity. In this article, I will examine these two novels and the accompanying films as a series of related cultural events that addressed a specific audience, namely, teenage boys in post-Occupation Japan.