Theoretical And Practical Challenges Of Foreign Filmmaking

Reviewed by:

Monica Rector

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Hamid Naficy. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U P, 2001. 374 pages. $27.95 (paper); $70.00 (cloth).

            Hamid Naficy’s An Accented Cinema  is a monumental work about post-colonial, exilic and diasporic cinema, analyzed from a contemporary aesthetic and theoretical perspective. His research is extensive and detailed in every aspect, allowing the reader to have a profound overview of this kind of film production. Naficy takes into account the problems and challenges of placement, displacement and replacement from a professional and personal point-of-view which involves the different aspects and participants of the process of filmmaking. Each topic is illustrated by several examples that he calls “close-ups” of film directors and/or producers such as Kusturica, Guney, and Egoyan, among others, and includes a specific film related to the subject being discussed. For example, in a close-up of Chantal Akerman, Naficy starts with a brief biography, emphasizing her birthplace and emigration. He mentions her films and awards, then expounds on the film Je Tu Il Elle. As this example is within the chapter on “Epistolarity and Epistolary Narratives,” Naficy narrates the parts of the film dealing with this theme and interprets the function of the epistle and its “ability to break through the inhibitions and prohibitions against writing and speaking” (113), among other features. Epistles are related to orality in this film, as well as in others dealing with epistolarity. Incapable to concluding the letter, the character Julie eats sugar compulsively in a continuous cycle of eating and writing.

            An Accented Cinema borrows the word accented from Linguistics. An accent refers to a different pronunciation that qualifies the user as being a foreigner or from a different social or educational background. The accent becomes a mark of personality and identity. In Naficy’s case the accent is related to geographical displacement or “deterritorialized locations.” As he says, “all exilic and diasporic films are accented” (23). This accent penetrates the structure of the film from narrative, visual style, characters, to plot, etc. These films are also dialects, because they also present a different “grammar” and level of understanding. The markers are visible all over the film, interfering in the comprehension and interpretation of the film. Language is a main component of the exile. Depriving oneself of the original language is loosing the tool “to shape not only individual identity but also regional and national identities prior to displacement” (24).

            I want to call  special attention to the first chapter of the book “Situating Accented Cinema” (3-40), a synthesis of terminology, concepts and theories of exilic and diasporic texts. It is really an introduction to the understanding of postcolonial and Third World issues. As the author states, “In this book, I direct attention to a new and critical imagination in the global media: an accented cinema of exile and diaspora and its embedded theory of criticism. This is both a cinema of exile and a cinema in exile” (8).

The several components of the accented style, together with their constituting elements, are listed and exemplified in the appendix. For example, visual style is a component with several constituting elements (general characteristics). Naficy lists that the visual style “simultaneously exhibits spontaneity and anxious formality; [it is] less driven by action than by words and emotions; [it has an ] uneven pacing, incompleteness, etc.” (Appendix A). Under visual style, these other components also have to be taken into consideration: mis-en-scène, setting, motivated props, lighting scheme, filming style and framing. This form of illustrating each theoretical point allows the reader, even if s/he is not so familiarized with exilic and diasporic films, to follow didactically the progression of Naficy’s outline of the book. It also becomes a useful tool for Cultural Studies, and other multidisciplinary studies.

            Deterritorialization and displacement are a continuous topic in Naficy’s writing. There is also what the author calls a “third optique.” One can be situated within a country, in another country, but there is the border issue, a real physical border, that has to be crossed. Besides being dangerous, it is a space of ambiguity, ambivalence, and chaos (31). The films that portray this aspect are “hybridized and experimental” (32). Their characters are “shifters.” Once more, Naficy uses a linguistic term. The pronoun “I” becomes a “you” according to the context of the utterance. Therefore, a character can become a pollo, border-crossing brother or sister, a coyote, a person who charges a fee to bring the pollo across the Mexican border, depending on the character’s place and function. These characters are “split, double, crossed, and hybridized” in their identity.

            The accent can also be noticed in the behavior, but it emerges deeply in the structure of feeling of the filmmakers. Identity if questioned, as is the feeling for the new and different place. Homeland is really utopian, and the new country is dystopian and claustrophobic. Sadness, loneliness and alienation become the favorite themes. But a return to homeland becomes impossible, and sometimes undesirable (2-27). Therefore, Naficy demonstrates that there are three types of journeys for these filmmakers to try to make sense of their lives and of those of his fellowmen, “outward journeys of escape, home seeking, and home founding; journeys of quest, homelessness, and lostness; and inward, homecoming journeys” (33). Each filmmaker values one direction. Because each accented film is personal and unique, it is like a fingerprint (34). The filmmaker is the author but the film is also autobiographical. As Naficy says “accented cinema theory is an extension of the authorship theory” (34). However, and he quotes Roland Barthes’ article “The Death of the Author,” the author needs to remove himself from the text. A text, in this case a film, is a fabric of quotations. It consists of multiple “writings” entering into dialogue. In exilic and diasporic writing, these texts enter mainly into contestations. The birth of the reader (viewer) must be requited by the death of the author.

            All accented films deal with the notion of self and nation, which ultimately leads to the ethics and politics of identity. In performed identity, fear and freedom permeates the text. Minorities are ever growing groups and their representation shows defensive and resistive strategies. They rely on “differences” of dominant paradigms in their societies. Filmmakers use ironic devices to subvert such as doppelgänger figures, as in Oscar Wilder’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). These are performative strategies. The filmmaker tries to represent what lies in between (Derrida’s deconstructivist ‘différrance’), which contains both the idea of difference and the process of deferral of meaning. In Derrida’s words, “the signified concept is never present in and of itself in a sufficient presence that would refer only to itself. Essentially and lawfully, every concept is inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to the other, to other concepts (Derrida [1982] 1996: 30).

            An accented filmmaker lives in the otherness and his work reveals this kind of transnational identity in different forms “of fragmented narratives, consisting of ellipses, ruptures, and generic juxtapositions” (271). Biographical elements and feelings of this otherness are interwoven in thefilm.

            An Accented Cinema is a book of utmost interest for scholars and cultural analysts. Naficy treats filmic texts as social practice, allowing the reader to relate to different societies and their ways of dealing with their identity and placement in an everchanging world.

References

Barthes, Roland. “The death of the Author.’ The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989. 49-55.

Derrida, Jacques.  “From Différance,” in Kiernan Ryan (ed.) New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader, London: Arnold, New York: Oxford UP [1982].

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