Editorial

Point of view. Can a perspective be claimed? Or nationalized? Or politicized? These are some of today’s hottest questions as the backgrounds of migration, colonialism and even adoption are radically foregrounding “how a story is told.” The world’s future morphs around the younger generations’ solidarity and their new concept of what “heritage” means.

This issue scopes out some of these ideas. Each writer looks at definitions of “political” cinema and “global” cinema. Andreea Marinescu, in her “The Dream of Memory in Raúl Ruiz’s Memories of Appearances: Life Is a Dream,” discusses the prolific and brilliantly inventive work of the Chilean director, whose films are not widely known, in part, Marinescu argues, because Ruiz was so politically driven. Ewa Mazierska’s guest-edited dossier, Marking Political Cinema, raises valuable questions about the nature of film and politics, something still loosely defined, and studies the staunch term “political cinema.” Her dossier undoes some of the expectations that have clustered around films as diverse as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will/ Triumph des Willens (DE, 1935) and Jerzy Skolimowski’s Essential Killing (PL/NO/IE/HU/FR, 2010). Adriana Margareta Dancus’s “Ghosts Haunting the Norwegian House: Racialization in Norway and The Kautokeino Rebellion” examines how racism, immigration, and nationalism in Norway manifests on screen. In “Sojourner Cinema: Seeking and Researching a New Cinematic Category,” Jane Mills argues the need to create a new vocabulary in approaches to “global cinema,” especially in the work of filmmakers whose origins and lives begin in one nation and continue in another. Are these hybrids easily categorized? Mills argues that they aren’t.