Cinema in an Age of Terror looks at how cinematic representations of colonial-era victimization inform our understanding of the contemporary age of terror. By examining works representing colonial history and the dynamics of spectatorship emerging from them, Michael F. O’Riley reveals how the centrality of victimization in certain cinematic representations of colonial history can help us understand how the desire to occupy the victim’s position is a dangerous and blinding drive that frequently plays into the vision of terrorism. Films such as The Battle of Algiers, Days of Glory, Caché, and recent works by Maghrebien filmmakers all exemplify, in different ways, how this focus on victimization can become a problematic perspective—one in fact seeking to occupy ideological territory. Their return of colonial history to our contemporary context, although frequently problematic, enables us to see how victimization is very much about territory—cultural, spatial, and ideological—and how resistance to new forms of imperialist warfare and terror today must be located outside these haunting images from colonial history. Although such images of victimization ultimately only return as spectacular acts that draw our attention away from the cyclical contest over territory that they embody, those images nonetheless have the last word. Michael F. O’Riley is an associate professor of French and Italian at Colorado College. He is the author of Francophone Culture and the Postcolonial Fascination with Ethnic Crimes and Colonial Aura and Postcolonial Haunting and Victimization: Assia Djebar’s New Novels.

Cinema Journal is sponsored by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and represents recent scholarship by SCMS members. The Society for Cinema and Media Studies, founded in 1959, is the largest professional organization of moving image media scholars. Its members include university faculty, graduate students, archivists, filmmakers, and others devoted to the study of the moving image from the U.S. and 39 other countries. The college and university faculty and students who comprise this scholarly organization are involved in various fields of study, including (but not limited to): Film Studies, Cinema Studies, Television Studies, Media Studies, Visual Arts, Cultural Studies, Film and Media History, and Moving Image Studies. The goals of SCMS are to promote all areas of media studies within universities and two-and four-year colleges; to encourage and reward excellence in scholarship and writing; to facilitate and improve the teaching of media studies as disciplines and to advance multi-cultural awareness and interaction. SCMS is dedicated to serving its members' professional needs and concerns; strengthening the ties between the academic community and those who interact with it, from the media industry to the government to the public at large; and to promoting the preservation of our film, television, video, and other media heritage.

A Los Angeles Times Bestseller

The most important development in American culture of the last two decades is the emergence of independent cinema as a viable alternative to Hollywood. Indeed, while Hollywood's studios devote much of their time and energy to churning out big-budget, star-studded event movies, a renegade independent cinema that challenges mainstream fare continues to flourish with strong critical support and loyal audiences.

Cinema of Outsiders is the first and only comprehensive chronicle of contemporary independent movies from the late 1970s up to the present. From the hip, audacious early works of maverick David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, and Spike Lee, to the contemporary Oscar-winning success of indie dynamos, such as the Coen brothers (Fargo), Quentin Tarentino (Pulp Fiction), and Billy Bob Thornton (Sling Blade), Levy describes in a lucid and accessible manner the innovation and diversity of American indies in theme, sensibility, and style.

Documenting the socio-economic, political and artistic forces that led to the rise of American independent film, Cinema of Outsiders depicts the pivotal role of indie guru Robert Redford and his Sundance Film Festival in creating a showcase for indies, the function of film schools in supplying talent, and the continuous tension between indies and Hollywood as two distinct industries with their own structure, finance, talent and audience.

Levy describes the major cycles in the indie film movement: regional cinema, the New York school of film, African-American, Asian American, gay and lesbian, and movies made by women. Based on exhaustive research of over 1,000 movies made between 1977 and 1999, Levy evaluates some 200 quintessential indies, including Choose Me, Stranger Than Paradise, Blood Simple, Blue Velvet, Desperately Seeking Susan, Slacker, Poison, Reservoir Dogs, Gas Food Lodging, Menace II Society, Clerks, In the Company of Men, Chasing Amy, The Apostle, The Opposite of Sex, and Happiness.

Cinema of Outsiders reveals the artistic and political impact of bold and provocative independent movies in displaying the cinema of "outsiders"-the cinema of the "other America."

In Cinema Today, Elena Oumano has ingeniously crafted a conversation from her personal and individual interviews with a distinguished group of international cinema legends. She follows a lively symposium-in-print format, with the filmmakers' words and thoughts grouped together under various key cinema topics. Collectively these artists reflect on and explore issues and concerns of modern filmmaking, from the practical to the aesthetic, including the process, cinematic rhythm and structure, and the many aspects of the media: business, the viewer, and cinema's place in society.

The first in-depth analysis of how Mexican cinema has both supported and subverted the construction of a gendered and sexualized national identity.

The conversion to sound cinema is routinely portrayed as a homogenizing process that significantly reduced the cinema's diversity of film styles and practices. Cinema's Conversion to Sound offers an alternative assessment of synchronous sound's impact on world cinema through a shift in critical focus: in contrast to film studies' traditional exclusive concern with the film image, the book investigates national differences in sound-image practice in a revised account of the global changeover from silent to sound cinema. Extending beyond recent Hollywood cinema, Charles O'Brien undertakes a geo-historical inquiry into sound technology's diffusion across national borders. Through an analysis that juxtaposes French and American filmmaking, he reveals the aesthetic consequences of fundamental national differences in how sound technologies were understood. Whereas the emphasis in 1930s Hollywood was on sound's intelligibility within a film's story-world, the stress in French filmmaking was on sound's fidelity as reproduction of the event staged for recording.

Cinematic Flashes challenges popular notions of a uniform Hollywood style by disclosing uncanny networks of incongruities, coincidences, and contingencies at the margins of the cinematic frame. In an agile demonstration of "cinephiliac" historiography, Rashna Wadia Richards extracts intriguing film fragments from their seemingly ordinary narratives in order to explore what these unexpected moments reveal about the studio era. Inspired by Walter Benjamin's preference for studying cultural fragments rather than composing grand narratives, this unorthodox history of the films of the studio system reveals how classical Hollywood emerges as a disjointed network of accidents, excesses, and coincidences.

This wide-ranging collection investigates the father/son dynamic in post-Stalinist Soviet cinema and its Russian successor. Contributors analyze complex patterns of identification, disavowal, and displacement in films by such diverse directors as Khutsiev, Motyl', Tarkovsky, Balabanov, Sokurov, Todorovskii, Mashkov, and Bekmambetov. Several chapters focus on the difficulties of fulfilling the paternal function, while others show how vertical and horizontal male bonds are repeatedly strained by the pressure of redefining an embattled masculinity in a shifting political landscape.

Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees is in part a history of cinephilia, in part an attempt to recapture the spirit of cinephilia for the discipline of film studies, and in part an experiment in cinephilic writing.

Cinephiles have regularly fetishized contingent, marginal details in the motion picture image: the gesture of a hand, the wind in the trees. Christian Keathley demonstrates that the spectatorial tendency that produces such cinematic encounters -- a viewing practice marked by a drift in visual attention away from the primary visual elements on display -- in fact has clear links to the origins of film as defined by André Bazin, Roland Barthes, and others. Keathley explores the implications of this ontology and proposes the "cinephiliac anecdote" as a new type of criticism, a method of historical writing that both imitates and extends the experience of these fugitive moments.