Zeitschriftenartikel zum Thema „Jungle – Au cinéma“

La Légion étrangère et l’Indochine ont été des sujets de prédilection du cinéma. Le film Les derniers Hommes , sorti en France en février 2024, rappelle cette épopée dramatique où une poignée de légionnaires affronta les Japonais et la jungle. Derrière le scénario et les images bien tournées, se révèle toute la dimension humaine de la Légion, une « société multiraciale mais “monoculturelle” » au service de la France depuis 1831.

La profession d’architecte, dans le cinéma commercial américain, et ce depuis un bon demi-siècle, semble être une de celles qui garantissent non seulement le respect de l’entourage, mais aussi et surtout, l’attention féminine. Du Gary Cooper du Rebelle de King Vidor au bouillant Wesley Snipes de Spike Lee ( Jungle Fever ), en passant par Paul Newman ( La Tour infernale ) ou Woody Harrelson citant Louis Kahn ( Proposition indécente ), l’architecte – de sexe masculin et strictement hétéro – est une figure de l’intellectuel idéalement « sexy », plus que l’écrivain, le peintre ou le professeur. Il est créatif et passionné, mais sans la triste mine du pauvre poète, et surtout, il est lié au business, à la circulation de l’argent, au marché, bref à la success story à l’américaine. Tropes scénaristiques et indispensables accessoires des décors (table, équerre, plans) semblent rassemblés pour mettre en valeur le glamour viril des stars et décorer une profession qui serait l’une des plus propices au maintien de l’ordre social et sexuel. Il y aurait donc lieu de chercher dans les genres cinématographiques les moins asservis au commerce une plus subtile idée des relations qu’entretiennent le métier et le désir.

Forced to slow down by the COVID-19 pandemic, Film Quarterly columnist Manuel Betancourt found himself drawn to films that embraced stillness. Marking a refreshing change from the urban settings that dominate much Latin American cinema, Los silencios (Beatriz Seigner, 2018), Selva trágica (Tragic Jungle, Yulene Olaizola, 2020), and Ceniza negra (Land of Ashes, Sofía Quirós Úbeda, 2019) are set in jungle and rural landscapes complete with lush, dreamy soundscapes. Privileging mood over plot, these films revel in their sense of being unmoored from familiar locales, becoming portals that open onto a different way of looking at the world.

Fans of Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem could arguably shapeshift into a wolf’s fangs, the sharp tips of China’s Social Darwinism today. Jiang mourns the killing of Mongolian wolves, erecting a literary totem there after wolves are gone. An elegy for the wild comes to justify the growing of fangs amid the jungle of the socialist-capitalist market. Wolf totem becomes a phallic symbol for power. A Sino-Anglo-Euro morphing materializes in global cinema as Annaud transforms the novel into The Last Wolf. Annaud’s romantic film downplays Jiang’s nationalistic tenor, avoiding to bare “red [in] tooth and claw” to the world.Resumen Los fans de Wolf Totem de Jiang Rong podrían discutiblemente transformarse en los colmillos de un lobo, las afiladas puntas del darwinismo social en China hoy en día. Jiang lamenta la muerte de los lobos mongoles, erigiendo un tótem literario allí tras la marcha de los lobos. Una elegía a los salvaje llega a justificar el crecimiento de colmillos en medio de la jungla del mercado socialista-capitalista. El tótem del lobo se convierte en un símbolo fálico de poder. Un Changling sino-anglo-europeo de algún tipo se materializa en el cine global cuando Annaud transforma la novela en El último lobo. La romántica película de Annaud resta importancia al tono nacionalista de Jiang, evitando mostrar "rojo [en] diente y garra" al mundo.

Since the late 1930s, cinematic depictions of schooling have generally affirmed the necessity of school as a social institution and underscored the importance of formalized education for children and youth. Movies ranging fromGoodbye, Mr. Chips(1939) toDead Poets Society(1989) have represented school as a place of tradition and order, and films such asThe Corn Is Green(1945);Blackboard Jungle(1955);Good Morning, Miss Dove(1955);Up the Down Staircase(1967); andStand and Deliver(1988) have portrayed teachers as heroic figures. It could seem that the film industry has always portrayed schooling in idealistic terms. But that is not the case. This essay examines the familiar cultural genre of films about schooling, but it does so by looking backward beforeBlackboard Jungle, even beforeGoodbye, Mr. Chips, to the first four decades of cinema—a period when schooling was rendered not as a necessity, but as a joke.

Abstract The article aims at exploring how the concept of the transmodern fits, comprises and helps to understand transcultural events from a wider perspective. To do so, three metaphors will be addressed, namely Enrique Dussel’s ‘jungle’, Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s ‘rhizome’ and Sarah Dillon’s ‘palimpsestuous palimpsest’. In all three cases, issues like multiplicity, connectedness and a sense of motility are present. And, the article proves, they prove valid to render the aesthetic, ethical and political possibilities of contemporary texts that range from literature, Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room (2010), to music, Hozier’s hit “Take me to Church” (2014), and to cinema, González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006).1

This article proposes to use the concept of “cosmopolitan cinematic margins” to analyse the paradoxical meeting of the cosmopolitan meaning and discourses of Ciro Guerra’s Colombian films and the spatial restrictions and immobility of the rural and remote places in which they are set. Such areas as seen on screen are usually interpreted by urban audiences as exotic locations, independently of their actual distance from cities. The article explores how films that, at first sight, show images of marginal and remote places like the Colombian Amazonian Jungle, when inserted into a global context—such as the hierarchical system of international film festivals—become symbols of cosmopolitan cinematic margins, and represent a country in the global spaces that legitimise the importance of that country’s film production. The cosmopolitan cinematic margins in the films of Guerra are then strategically situated in environments of global mobility and international prestige.

The process of screen adaptation is an act of ventriloquism insofar as it gives voice to contemporary anxieties and desires through its trans-temporal use of a source text. Screen adaptations that propose to negotiate meanings about the past, particularly a conflicted past, are acts of ‘trans-temporal ventriloquism’: they adapt and reinscribe pre-existing source texts to animate contemporary concerns and anxieties. I focus on the acts of trans-temporal ventriloquism in Ian Iqbal Rashid's Surviving Sabu (1998), a postcolonial, turn-of-the-twenty-first century short film that adapts Zoltan and Alexander Korda's film The Jungle Book (1942), itself an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's collection of short stories by the same name. Surviving Sabu is about the survival and appropriation of orientalist films as a means of self-expression in a postcolonial present. Inherent in this is the idea of cinema as a potentially redemptive force that can help to balance global power inequalities. Surviving Sabu's return to The Jungle Book becomes a means both of tracing the genealogy of specific orientalist discourses and for ventriloquising contemporary concerns. This article demonstrates how trans-temporal ventriloquism becomes a strategy of political intervention that enables the film-maker to take ownership over existing media and narratives. My argument examines Surviving Sabu as an exemplar of cultural studies of the 1980s and 1990s: a postcolonial remediation built on fantasy and desire, used as a strategy of writing within rather than back to empire.

The Super-8 films of Derek Jarman (1942–94) are discussed in the light of the artist's involvement with gay politics and his sense of being an outsider. This led him to identify with elements in Jung's psychology, especially his work on alchemy. Jarman's manipulation of Super-8 film images was comparable to an alchemical processing of the material contributing to his personal development – a process that Jung called individuation. The author argues that Jarman's radical approach to filmmaking is not only an active challenge to the assumption of film images as representative of reality but, in the hands of a politically gay filmmaker, also challenges normative assumptions of sexuality.

In this article, I consider the representation of African-Caribbean religions in the early horror adventure film from a postcolonial perspective. I do so by zooming in on Ouanga (1935), Obeah (1935), and Devil’s Daughter (1939), three low-budget horror productions filmed on location in Jamaica during the 1930s (and the only films shot on the island throughout that decade). First, I discuss the emergence of depictions of African-Caribbean religious practices of voodoo and obeah in popular Euro-American literature, and show how the zombie figure entered Euro-American empire cinema in the 1930s as a colonial expression of tropical savagery and jungle terror. Then, combining historical newspaper research with content analyses of these films, I present my exploration into the three low-budget horror films in two parts. The first part contains a discussion of Ouanga, the first sound film ever made in Jamaica and allegedly the first zombie film ever shot on location in the Caribbean. In this early horror adventure, which was made in the final year of the U.S. occupation of Haiti, zombies were portrayed as products of evil supernatural powers to be oppressed by colonial rule. In the second part, I review Obeah and The Devil’s Daughter, two horror adventure movies that merely portrayed African-Caribbean religion as primitive superstition. While Obeah was disturbingly set on a tropical island in the South Seas infested by voodoo practices and native cannibals, The Devil’s Daughter was authorized by the British Board of Censors to show black populations in Jamaica and elsewhere in the colonial world that African-Caribbean religions were both fraudulent and dangerous. Taking into account both the production and content of these movies, I show that these 1930s horror adventure films shot on location in Jamaica were rooted in a long colonial tradition of demonizing and terrorizing African-Caribbean religions—a tradition that lasts until today.

While the common ground of art and popular culture products is human creativity, popular culture products, as the name suggests, are the products of the people. But it is possible that the productions that the public will like, turn into mass culture today, where the economic determinant is dominant. However, regardless of its basic motivation, it is possible to say that every work that contains the core of creativity has a relationship with the unconscious, which is the field of creativity. What can we see by considering movies with an analytical psychology approach? What do these productions, which contain elements from myths, fairy tales and dreams, tell us from the field of the unconscious?The Matrix series has managed to impress the audience since the first movie was released and attracted the attention of many researchers from different fields. In this study, the relationship of cinema with myth, dream, and fairy tale is evaluated from a psychoanalytic perspective, and the Matrix series and especially the last film of the series, The Matrix Resurrections (Lena Wachovski, 2021), is tried to be examined with the guidance of Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytical psychology. The film, which opens up many fields of inquiry with its approach to reality, is this time handled with an approach from the field of inner reality. For this reason, this study tries to look at the elements of the film, which can be associated with popular culture and the culture industry, from the field of the unconscious. For this purpose, Jung's approach based on myths, dreams and ancient beliefs that he examined in order to understand the unconscious of man is used.

A key distinction of Review of International American Studies is its commitment to the notion that the Americas are a hemispheric and transoceanic communicating vessel. This angle provides a unique path to de-center the American Studies discipline, which has become tantamount to studies of the United States. This angle also expands the discipline beyond its traditional literary roots, inviting critical investigations into other forms of communicative media, such as cinema, television, and photography. Informed and inspired by this conceptualization of the discipline, this issue of RIAS is composed of several pieces specifically focused on Latin America, each of which employs a unique interpretive approach of visual media to, collectively and comprehensively, articulate how this multilayered cultural landscape manifests in our contemporary social imaginary. The arbitrary delineation of the globe through the notion of ‘the western world’ has, seemingly, transformed the Latin American continent a no man’s land. In its vast extension, this part of the planet seems condemned to exist between two worlds. Despite being part of the western hemisphere, and despite its deep Catholic tradition, this vast region is surprisingly excluded as a member of ‘the west.’ Yet, it was neither placed in ‘the east,’ nor on the other side of the wall, when the world was politically, culturally, and economically divided by the Iron Curtain. This land’s perpetual homelessness might be due to its consistent political instability, to the weakness of some of its democracies, or even its colonial past, one that bears no relation to the Commonwealth of Britain, a belonging that placed Australia in the topos of the West. These reasons, in addition to others, have fostered an understanding of Latin America as being generally alien to the ‘western world.’ Being a no man’s land, deprived of a hemisphere, and broadly unintelligible by the general imaginary of the western cultural industry, this continent, populated by almost 700-million people, was traditionally subjected to stereotypes formulated during the twentieth century, and that remained unchangeable in this new millennium. Latin America has become, for the global imaginary, a place of military juntas, a vast lowland displaying desertic features, a tropical yet savage jungle, a poverty-stricken favela, and a land fought over by romantic revolutionarios. Certainly, the question remains if the obsolete model ‘western world,’ the also obsolete ‘third world,’ or ‘periphery,’ and even the in vogue ‘global south’ would be able to embrace and reproduce a closer image of this heterogenous and vast continent, and by extension if this generalization is able to denote a set of multiple series of social diversities. We doubt it. This doubt encouraged us to gather diverse scholars from diverse academic disciplines to contribute to this issue of Review of International American Studies. And this doubt, which was at a first glance only intuitive, brough us to avoid the topic of identity and representation as the main theme for this journal’s issue. Our initial plan was to structure the series of contributions on some problematics relating to the photographic medium, a medium that is widely regarded as exerting an objective representation of reality, yet also places the pictorial representation on an undetermined semiotic field. The choice of photography was also a choice of intuition that we quickly abandoned since, in our twenty-first century mediascape, photography represents only one element of a fast and global visual stream that shapes and refashions the collective imaginary of the Latin American continent. Thus, we expanded our scope to include other media such as films, paintings, and any visual-oriented human expression that could provide insights on the complex and chaotic mechanism that formulates and constructs the imaginary on the turbulent entity that we call society.

Les genres insulaires que sont la robinsonnade et l’utopie, que l’on pourrait penser obsolètes au XXIe siècle, conservent une place importante dans la littérature et le cinéma français contemporains. Le roman de Xabi Molia Les Jours sauvages et d’Alain Damasio Les Furtifs et le film d’Arthur Harari Onoda, 10 000 nuits dans la jungle renouvellent ces genres en jouant des stéréotypes des aventures insulaires en les tournant vers des questions contemporaines : l’île utopique de Damasio évoque une « zone à défendre » inspirée des luttes sociales et écologiques des années 2010, la robinsonnade collective de Molia interroge la transmission d’une histoire violente et celle de Harari fait de l’île le lieu d’une fidélité absolue à une promesse, déplaçant sans les oublier les enjeux du Robinson Crusoe de Daniel Defoe. Ainsi, l’île fournit-elle encore aujourd’hui des ressources narratives pour penser le présent.

This article sought to provide teachers with possible action strategies to address some controversial points in the history and narrative productions about the hylaea in South America through the seventh art, presenting itself as a challenge for a more in-depth reading of five films about the Amazon region in the classroom. Based on the principle of ignorance of the archetypal and symbolic forces that move man within the forest, the films studied – The Naked Jungle (1954), Fitzcarraldo (1982), Anaconda (1997), Z – The Lost City (2016) and Into the Wild (2017) – in light of Neumann's (2021) understanding of the Great Mother, in dialogue with Bachelard's phenomenology of imagination (1988 and 2003) and Durand's symbolic hermeneutics (1992 and 2004), promote an approximation of fundamental points that relate man and wild nature in an ambiguous and at the same time extreme relationship, through violence and deprivation, experiencing the possibility of nothingness as a phenomenon of risk and recognition to rediscover meaning in coexistence with the whole, forcing us to respect the limits that the civilizational process itself proposes in the face of the unknown.

Bu çalışma, auteur bir yönetmen olan Christopher Nolan’ın yazıp yönettiği filmlerinin Arketipsel Analizi niteliğindedir. İsviçreli bir psikolog olan ve psikolojinin ayrı bir bilim dalı olmasını sağlayan üç isimden (Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler) birisi olan Carl Gustav Jung’un arketipler kuramına göre, tüm insanların zihinlerinde paylaştıkları ortak bir bilinçdışı vardır ve arketipler de insan zihninde bulunan bu kolektif bilinçdışı alanın yapısını meydana getirirler. Arketiplerin özü, biçimi bilinemez olsa da sahip oldukları özellikler görüntü olarak rüyalarda, mitlerde, öykülerde, efsanelerde, kitaplarda ve filmlerde ortaya çıkarlar. En yaygın görülen arketiplerse kahraman ve gölge arketipleridir. Bu iki arketip hikayelerde kendilerini ana karakter ve kötü karakter olarak gösterirler. Ancak, Aristocu klasik anlatının da temelini oluşturan bu mevcudiyetin Nolan filmleri için geçerli olmadığı düşünülmektedir. Bunun sonucunda da küresel ölçekte farklı kültür ve toplumlarda karşılık ve beğeni bulan Nolan filmlerinin evrensel yönlerinin neler olduğu sorusu meydana çıkmıştır. Söz konusu soru da bu çalışmanın yapılmasını gerekli kılmıştır. Çalışma kapsamında Nolan filmleri Jungcu bir bakış açısı ile arketipler bağlamında incelenecektir. Nolan’ın filmlerindeki ortak olan Zaman, Baba, Adalet, Âşık, Masum, Tanrı ve Yaşlı Bilge arketipleriyle yönetmenin filmlerinin evrensel ana hatlarının yorumlanması hedeflenmektedir.

The study was carried out in order to examine the suitability of the film "Goodbye Christopher Robin" about Christopher Robin Milne's biography, which was determined by the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) in the "Family and Children's Films" category with the recommendations of the critics. In this research, the movie "Goodbye Christopher Robin"; a) the fact that children spend most of their time in front of the screen as a habit that is an achievement of the pandemic period, b) The film, which was screened in cinemas in our country in 2017, is broadcast in the broadcast zone on television channels, c) In the context of social learning theory, children's learning by modelling, d) the content of the film is suitable for children and includes concepts related to the development of children, for these reasons, it was found appropriate to analyze this film from a developmental point of view. In this study, which has a qualitative research design, document analysis technique was used. The film Goodbye Christopher Robin was evaluated with the Content Evaluation Form for Children's Programs, which was used as a measurement tool in the study. The form used has 5 basic sub-dimensions. These; the content of children's programs for the physical development of children (contents for psychomotor development, content for the sexual development of the child), the content of children's programs for the cognitive/perceptual development of children, the content of children's programs for the social and emotional development of children, the dimension of other content for the development of the child in children's programs (violence, modeling, family values, family structure) and is the content dimension of children's programs for language development of children. Findings of the evaluation results were presented with descriptive statistics. It was determined that the content of the analyzed film included more content for social and emotional development area, followed by the content for the development of the child, including violence, modeling, family structure, family values, cognitive/perceptual development area content, language development area content, content for psychomotor and sexual development areas within the physical development area, respectively. It was seen that the least amount of content related to sexual development was included in the film. In addition to elements such as anger/violence, which we can evaluate negatively, elements of love that we can express positively are also frequently included in the film. As a result, it was concluded that Goodbye Christopher Robin is a film that can have a positive impact on children from an intellectual point of view when watched purposefully and under adult control.

Psychoanalysis is a clinical treatment approach for psychopathology. Sigmund Freud used it to treat his patients by interpreting dreams and unconscious desires. It was later applied to film as a psychoanalytic film theory Margolis (2013). Many film theorists and critics support this theory because cinema has an irrational relationship with the spectator's subconscious. Neither view nor Psychoanalytic film theory can describe the film spectator's unconscious Allen (1999). The fiery treatment of heroic booze and smoking moments in the Pan-Indian Film KGF 2 affected many viewers unconscious. These scenes include powerful temptations that are suppressed over the spectator's psyche's shadow archetypes (dark or hidden personality); a suitable symbolic order (Lacan) is required to unveil persona archetypes (mask or reveal character). The film requires psychological investigation. Although many theorists have contributed to psychoanalysis theory, the researcher favours Carl Jung's psychoanalytic cinema theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious. The researcher uses purposive sampling to select KGF-2 as the sample. Smoking and alcoholic scenes were analysed using qualitative and quantitative content analysis (duration of consumption, consuming scene description, the character consuming, and the sense that suppresses the consuming behaviour overshadow archetypes), and five fellow scholars participated in a focus group discussion to interpret those scenes (scene interpretation and capacity of consuming behavior). Finally, the outcome was assessed using shadow archetype variables (desire, violence, heroism, joy, power, and so on) that were suppressed by the film sequences.

Literature and Cinema are interconnected but they are also distinct in their own ways. It has long been one of the most intriguing fields of science with a profound effect on the human psyche. These are the forms of expression that can be accessed by all ages and employed as a medium to depict the social and environmental catastrophe in their works. The research paper focuses on the ecocritical consciousness in the movie 'Kadamban' and the fiction, Sarah Joseph's Gift in Green. The research article is about corporate greed and strong interests going up against a native, local population that would not leave its territory. A tribe of people who were satisfied to live in the jungle were suddenly attacked by shrewd businessmen. A city industrialist was anxious to get his hands on the large limestone dump that was recently discovered. For more money, the corporate world would do anything. It is more similar in the movie 'Kadamban' and the fiction Gift in Green. It is a unique book about the connection between individuals and the environment they live in is Gift in Green. In the novel, Young Kumaran would like to change his own native place. His plans for development, such as the construction of highways and bridges, suffocating aquatic life, driving birds and butterflies from fading mangrove forests, and allowing poisons to seep into rice fields that have provided food for hundreds of years. They were all destroying the forest in the name of capitalism, industrialism, modernism, colonialism. This article highlights how the locals overcame challenges and fought to preserve their own land through the movie, Kadamban and Sarah Joseph's Gift in Green.

Abstract:The importance of New York in Sex and the City (HBO, 1998-2004) is explicitly acknowledged in its very title. The opening credits already announce that “the City” is going to play an essential role in the series, virtually becoming its fifth character. The aim of this article is to discuss Sex and the City’s representation of New York, which is clearly reminiscent of Woody Allen’s cinema: as is often the case in Allen’s lms, the Big Apple is realistically portrayed and highly romanticised at the same time. This article analyses Allen’s in uence on Sex and the City’s depiction of this city, which is alternatively presented as the perfect scenario for romantic integration and as a cruel and chaotic dating “hell”.Keywords: Sex and the City, Woody Allen, representation of New York.Title in Spanish: “Living in Reality Means Living in Pain, Fear, or Brooklyn”: la representación de Nueva York en Sex and the CityResumen:La importancia de la ciudad de Nueva York en Sex and the City (HBO, 1998- 2004) se hace evidente no sólo en su título, sino también en su cabecera, que anuncia el papel primordial que la ciudad va a desempeñar en el texto, hasta el punto de convertirse prácticamente en el quinto personaje de la serie. Este artículo analiza la representación que Sex and the City hace de Nueva York en relación con el cine de Woody Allen: como suele suceder en las películas del director neoyorquino, la serie ofrece un retrato simultáneamente realista e idealizado de la Gran Manzana. Este artículo considera la influencia de Allen en la representación que Sex and the City hace de Nueva York, una ciudad que unas veces se presenta como escenario perfecto para la integración romántica y otras como una caótica “jungla” sentimental.Palabras clave: Sex and the City, Woody Allen, representación de Nueva York.

“What if we were to go into culture tongue-first to see how things taste?” (Jenkins 5) Released in June of 2005, Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has all the ingredients of a blockbuster success; a well known story-line, a target youth demographic, a nostalgic adult audience and a multi-million dollar synergy between media giants AOL Time Warner and transnational food corporation Nestlé. Yet, when it comes to discussing the affect-oriented components of the marketing campaign behind this film, much contemporary academic scholarship falls short of offering a substantial framework for theoretical analysis. Defined broadly as a subjective, felt experience, the notion of affect has traditionally fought an uphill battle for scholarly recognition within media studies. Against a backdrop of objective rationality and quantitative analysis, the touching, smelling and tasting components of media consumption have been systematically disregarded in favour of the audio-visual pleasures of the filmic medium. However, as the recent cross-promotional strategies underpinning Charlie and the Chocolate Factory reveal, the tactile, olfactory and gustatory components of moviegoing are often central to global media consumption practices. The synergised marketing initiatives between AOL/Time-Warner and Nestlé confectionary exemplify the significance of affect within globalised media consumption. Drawing on Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s classic of the same name, the recent revamping of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory explicitly utilises Nestlé confectionary as a nexus between the seemingly incommensurate realms of transnational media distribution/commerce and the consuming, sentient bodies of actual movie-goers. In direct contrast to Stuart’s 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which offered audiences an audio-visual representation of hedonistic indulgence, the Warner/Nestlé agreement effectively ensures an edible cinematic adventure, in which audiences are enticed to consume “actual” (Nestlé) Wonka bars as part of the movie experience. The following enticement from a recent Nestlé press release is explicit in this regard: “You dreamt of them in the book, you will yearn for them in the film and now you can finally taste scrumptiously sumptuous Wonka Bars” (Drew 1). In keeping with this cross-promotion, the majority of Wonka products seen in Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory have identical wrappings to the merchandise currently being promoted in retail outlets across the United States, Canada, Europe and Australasia. In thus establishing distinct syntagmatic relationships between the film’s diegisis and its “real world” marketing campaign Warner and Nestlé have ensured a form of media consumption that moves beyond ocularcentric understandings of “spectatorship” and into the uncharted realms of the emotional and the visceral. Nestlé’s use of the enigmatic character Wonka and his extraordinary confectionary provides another palpable demonstration of this politics of affect: Willy Wonka, the world’s most eminent chocolatier, has created a scrumdiddlyumptious selection of delectable treats to choose from. The enticing Wonka Bars tempt you in three tantalisingly tasty flavours: Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight, Nutty Crunch Surprise (the surprise is that it contains no nuts!) and Triple Dazzle Caramel (Drew 1). In terms of media affect, the implications of this phenomenon are significant. Far from being confined to the audio-visual specificities of the filmic medium, contemporary audiences are being lured into an entertainment experience that can not only be seen and heard, but also smelled, touched and tasted. These sense-oriented marketing strategies are indicative of what John Hannigan has identified as “eatertainment”, an affective synapse of consumer activity “in which the former boundaries between eating and play are collapsed and recast into something new” (93). In offering audiences an edible cinematic experience, the Nestlé -Warner cross-promotion not only ensures a potentially novel trip to the cinemas, but also a repeat purchase scenario, whereby Wonka-themed confectionary is able to be purchased several times after just one viewing of Burton’s film. The notion of eatertainment is certainly paying off for Nestlé. With a product placement deal in excess of nine million U.S. dollars, Nestlé’s Wonka confectionery range is given optimum exposure throughout the film. According to The Atlanta Journal, the preparation for this placement required Nestlé to produce and wrap over 110,000 fake chocolate bars; most of which were used in the scene in Mr Salt’s factory where hundreds of his employees are seen ripping open Wonka bars in the hope of finding a golden ticket for Mr. Salt’s infamous daughter Veruca (Bookman 8). In tandem with this placement, Nestlé UK also launched a £1.5m television advertising campaign replete with a “golden ticket” promotion, which promised several ‘lucky consumers’ the chance to win a golden ticket: Everybody has a chance of finding one of the most sought after tickets underneath their Wonka Bar wrapper, as featured in the film. The lucky golden ticket winners will be treated to a trip of a lifetime to visit a chocolate factory and Warner Bros Studios in America (Drew 1). The Nestlé/Wonka connection was forged in 1999 after Nestlé purchased Rowntree confectionary. Taking its incentive from both the novel and the subsequent 1971 film, Nestlé re-launched Rowntree’s relatively underdeveloped Wonka range and transformed it into a major brand which now has an annual income of over $121 million U.S (Jardine 8). To date, there are over two dozen products in the Wonka range and all of them manage to tie in with Roald Dahl’s earlier discourses of mischief, eccentricity and gustatory bliss. Included amongst the Wonka range are products such as Laffy Taffy, Nerds, Oompahs, and Wonka Bars, with nearly all of the existing products carrying the tag-line; “Wonka, what will he think of next?”. Discussing the evolution of the Wonka brand, Frank Arthofer, CEO of Nestlé chocolate and confections, noted that “the tag-line is intended to capture the innovation and unpredictability of the brand and further the image of Willy Wonka as an inventor” (Thompson 14). In fortifying this agenda, Nestlé also hosts a Wonka Website in which children are encouraged to play interactive Wonka games such as ‘Oompahs Outrageous Rush’ and ‘Gobstopper Gobbler”. Of course, this is not the first time that media giants have aggressively marketed food as an integral component to the cinematic experience. In 1996, Disney and McDonalds collaborated on a $US four billion cross-promotional exercise (Howard 2). Since then, McDonalds and Disney have launched numerous “McDisney” packages, many of which have included film-specific foods such as banana-flavoured sundaes and “jungle burgers” to tie in with Disney’s 1999 animated film Tarzan. However, unlike the McDonalds/Disney agreement, in which the food operates as an indexical signifier of the film (and not vice-versa), the Nestlé /Warner promotion takes the politics of affect one step further and encourages a mutually beneficial process of signification whereby the food signifies the film and the film signifies the food. It’s a scenario that blatantly ensures a form of visceral connectivity between the audience, the film and the tangible product. To this end, an analysis of the synergised marketing campaign behind Charlie and the Chocolate Factory reveals a persistent and efficient politics of affect in which the neo-liberal agendas of both Nestlé and Time-Warner are affectively absorbed into the sensual and desiring bodies of media audiences. Such initiatives signal a significant departure from traditional audio-visual marketing campaigns in as much as audiences are now being expected to literally swallow the saccharine-tinged marketing agendas of not one, but two, multinational corporations. While prevailing theoretical analysis of media consumption struggles against the traditional confines of rational objectivity, transnational media networks are productively utilising the audiences’ desire to be affectively engaged in the cinematic experience. As the cross-promotional tie-in deals behind Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory clearly reveal, the contemporary media-scape is one which deliberately lures audiences on the basis of their sensuous, emotional and subjective capacities. References Bookman, Julie. “News for Kids.” The Atlanta Journal 18 July 2005: B8. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Directed by Tim Burton. 2005. Dahl, Roald. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. London: Penguin, 1964. Drew, Cathy. “The Marvellously Mouth-Watering Wonka Bars.” Nestlé UK Wonka Press Release 26 July 2005. 24 Aug. 2005 http://www.nestle.co.uk/PressOffice/MediaKit/PressReleases/ ConfectioneryNews/Mouth-wateringWonkaBars.htm>. Howard, Thomas. “Disney Alliance Shows Brute Force.” Nations Restaurant News: The Weekly Newspaper of the Food Industry 2 Dec. 1996. Jardine, Alice. “Nestlé Plans Wonka Push in the UK.” Marketing 29 Apr. 1999: 8. Jenkins, Emily. Tongue First: Adventures in Physical Culture. New York: Virago Press, 1998. Tarzan. Directed by C. Buck. 1999. Thompson, Stephanie. “Nestlé Works to Build Wonka Brand.” Advertising Age 15 Nov. 1999: 14. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Directed by M. Stuart. 1971. Wonka Website. http://www.wonka.com>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Downing, Leanne. "Media Synergies and the Politics of Affect in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/11-downing.php>. APA Style Downing, L. (Dec. 2005) "Media Synergies and the Politics of Affect in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/11-downing.php>.

Introduction: Serial Space“It feels …like the edge of the world; far more remote than it actually is, perhaps because it looks at such immensity” (Godden “Black,” 38). This is the priest’s warning to Sister Clodagh in Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel Black Narcissus. The young, inexperienced Clodagh leads a group of British nuns through the Indian Himalayas and onto a remote mountain top above Mopu. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger adapted Godden’s novel into the celebrated feature film, Black Narcissus (1947). Following the novel, the film narrates the nuns’ mission to establish a convent, school, and hospital for the local population. Yet, immensity moves in mysterious ways. Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) loses her managerial grip. Sister Philippa (Flora Robson) cultivates wild flowers instead of vegetables. Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) sheds nun’s attire for red lipstick and a Parisian dress. The young Indian woman Kanchi (Jean Simmons) becomes a force of libidinous disturbance. At the twilight of the British Empire, white, western nuns experience the psychical effects of colonialism at the precipice. Taking such cues from Pressburger and Powell’s film, Michelle Williams Gamaker, an artist, filmmaker, and scholar, responds to Black Narcissus, both film and novel. She does so through a radical interpretation of her own. Gamaker William’s 24-minute film, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten (forthcoming, London 2018) is a longer “short,” which breaks the mould of what scholar Linda Hutcheon would term an “adaptation” (2006). For Hutcheon, there is a double “mode of engagement” between an original work and its adapted form (22). On the one hand, there is a “transcoding” (22). This involves “transporting” characters from a precedent work to its adapted form (11). On the other, there is an act of “creative interpretation” (22). The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten transports yet recreates the Indian “beggar girl” Kanchi, played by a “blacked up” white Hollywood actor Jean Simmons (Black Narcissus), into Williams Gamaker’s contemporary Kanchi, played by Krishna Istha. In this 2018 instalment, Kanchi is an Asian and transgender protagonist of political articulacy. Hence, Williams Gamaker’s film engages a double tactic of both transporting yet transforming Kanchi, as well as Sisters Clodagh and Philippa, from the feature film into The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten. To analyse Williams Gamaker’s film, I will make a theoretical jump off the precipice, stepping from Hutcheon’s malleable concept of adaptation into a space of “trans-serial” narrative.In what follows, I shall read The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten as an “episode” in a serial. The prior episodes, Williams Gamaker’s House of Women (London 2017, Berlin 2018) is a short, fictional, and surreal documentary about casting the role of Kanchi. It can be read as the next episode in Kanchi’s many incarnations. The relationship between Sister Clodagh (Kelly Hunter as voiceover) and Kanchi in House of Women develops from one of confrontation to a transgender kiss in the climatic beat of The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten. Williams Gamaker’s film can be read as one of a series which is itself inflected with the elements of a “trans-serial.” Henry Jenkins argues that “transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels” (emphasis in original, “Transmedia”). I use the word “trans” to define the gap between novelistic texts and film. Throughout Williams Gamaker’s series, she uses many textual citations from Godden’s novel, and dialogue from Pressburger and Powell’s film. In other words, verbal elements as well as filmic images are adapted in Hutcheon’s sense and transmediated in Jenkins’s sense. To build the “serial” concept for my analysis requires re-working concepts from television studies. Jason Mittell introduces “narrative complexity” as the “redefinition of episodic forms under serial narration” (“Narrative,” 32). In serial TV, characters and narratives develop over a sequence of episodes and seasons. In serial TV, missing one episode can thwart the viewer’s reception of later ones. Mittell’s examples reveal the plasticity of the narrative complexity concept. He mentions TV series that play games with the audience’s expectations. As Mittell points out, Seinfeld has reflexive qualities (“Narrative,” 35) and Twin Peaks mixes genres (“Narrative,” 33). I would add that Lynch’s creative liberties offered characters who could appear and disappear while leaving their arcs hanging intriguingly unresolved. The creative possibilities of reflexivity via seriality, of characters who appear and disappear or return in different guises, are strategies that underpin William’s Gamaker’s short film serial. The third in her trilogy, The Eternal Return (in post-production 2018) fictionalises the life of Sabu, the actor who played the General’s son in Black Narcissus. Once again, the protagonist, this time male, is played by Krishna Istha, a non-binary transgender actor who, by taking all the lead roles in William’s Gamaker’s trilogy, grows over the serial as a malleable ethnic and transgender subject. Importantly, The Eternal Return carries residues of the characters from The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten by casting the same team of actors again (Charlotte Gallagher and myself Catherine Lord), and switching their genders. Istha played Kanchi in the previous two episodes. The General’s son, played by Sabu, courted Kanchi in Black Narcissus. In The Eternal Return, Istha crosses the character and gender boundary by playing Sabu. Such casting tactics subvert the gender and colonial hegemonies inherent in Pressburger and Powell’s film.The reflexive and experimental approach of Williams Gamaker’s filmmaking deploys serial narrative tactics for its political goals. Yet, the use of “serial” needs to be nuanced. Glen Creeber sets out three terms: “episodic,” “series” and “serial.” For Creeber, a series provides continuous storylines in which the connection between episodes is strong. In the serial format, the connection between the episodes is less foregrounded. While it is not possible to enjoy stand-alone episodes in a serial, at the same time, serials produce inviting gaps between episodes. Final resolutions are discouraged so that there are greater narrative possibilities for later seasons and the audience’s own game of speculative storytelling (11).The emerging “serial” gaps between Williams Gamaker’s episodes offer opportunities for political interpretation. From House of Women and The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, Kanchi develops an even stronger political voice. Kanchi’s character arc moves from the wordless obedience of Pressburger and Powell’s feature to the transgender voice of post-colonial discourse in House of Women. In the next episode, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, Kanchi becomes Clodagh’s guide both politically, spiritually, and erotically.I will read The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten as both my primary case-study and as the third episode in what I shall theorise to be a four-part serial. The first is the feature film Black Narcissus. After this is Williams Gamaker’s House of Women, which is then followed by The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, my central case study here. There may be immediate objections to my argument that Williams Gamaker’s series can be read by treating Pressburger and Powell’s feature as the first in the series. After all, Godden’s novel could be theorised as the camouflaged pilot. Yet, a series or serial is defined as such when it is in the same medium. Game of Thrones (2011-) is a TV series that adapts George R.R. Martin’s novel cycle, but the novels are not episodes. In this regard, I follow Hutcheon’s emphasis on theorising adapted works as forged between different media, most commonly novels to films. The adaptive “deliveries” scatter through The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten with an ecological precision.Eco SeriesEcological descriptions from Godden’s novel and Pressburger and Powell’s mise-en-scene are performed in The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten through Kelly Hunter’s velvety voiceover as it enjoys a painterly language: butterflies daub the ferns with “spots of ochre, scarlet, and lemon sherbet.” Hutcheon’s term transcoding usefully describes the channelling of particles from the novelist’s text into an intensified, ecological language and cinematic mise-en-scene. The intensification involves an ingestion of Godden’s descriptive prose, which both mimics and adds an adjectival and alliterative density. The opening descriptions of the nuns’ arrival in Mopu is a case in point. In the novel, the grooms joke about the nuns’ habits appearing as “snows, tall and white” (Godden “Black,” 1). One man remarks that they look like “a row of teeth” (Godden “Black,” 2). Williams Gamaker resists shots of nuns as Godden described them, namely on Bhotiya ponies. Rather, projected onto a white screen is an image of white and red flowers slowly coming into focus. Kelly Hunter’s voiceover describes the white habits as a set of “pearly whites” which are “hungry for knowledge” and “eat into the landscape.” White, western nuns in white habits are metaphorically implied to be like a consuming mouth, eating into Indian territories and Indian people.This metaphor of colonial consumption finds its corollary in Godden’s memoirs where she describes the Pressburger, Powell, and Simons representation of Kanchi as “a basket of fruit, piled high and luscious and ready to eat” (“A House,” 24-5; 52). The nun’s quest colonially consumes Mopu’s natural environment. Presumably, nuns who colonially eat consume the colonised Other like fruit. The Kanchi of the feature film Black Narcissus is a supporting character, performed by Simmons as mute, feral and objectified. If Kanchi is to release herself from the “fruity” projections of sexism and racism, it will be through the filmmaker’s aesthetic and feminist tactic of ensuring that planets, trees, fruits and flowers become members of the film cast. If in episode 1 (Black Narcissus), plants and Asian subalterns are colonised, in episode 2, House of Women, these fruits and flowers turn up as smart, young Asian women actors with degrees in law and photography, ready to hold their own in the face of a faceless interviewer. In episode 3, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, it is important that Krishna Istha’s Kanchi, turning up like a magical character from another time and space (transformed from episode 1), commands the film set amidst an excess of flowers, plants and fruits. The visual overflow correlates with Kanchi’s assertiveness. Flowers and Kanchi know how to “answer back.”Like Black Narcissus the feature, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten relies heavily on a mise-en-scene of horticultural and mountain ecology. Just as Michael Powell filmed at Pinewood and Leonardslee Gardens in East Sussex, Williams Gamaker used Rotherhithe’s Brunel Museum roof Gardens and Sands Film Studios. The lusciousness of Leonardslee is film-intertextually echoed in the floral exuberance of the 2018 shots of Rotherhithe. After the crew have set up the classroom, interwoven with Kelly Hunter’s voiceover, there is a hard cut to a full, cinematic shot of the Leonardslee garden (fig. 1).Then cutting back to the classroom, we see Kanchi calmly surveying the set, of which she is the protagonist, with a projection of an encyclopaedic display of the flowers behind her. The soundtrack plays the voices of young women students intoning the names of flowers from delphinium to lupens.These meta-filmic moments are supported by the film’s sharp juxtaposition between classroom and outdoor scenes. In Pressburger and Powell’s school scenes, Sister Ruth attempts to teach the young General how to conjugate the French verb “recevoir.” But the lesson is not successfully received. The young General becomes aphasic, Kanchi is predictably mute and the children remain demure. Will colonialism let the Other speak? One way to answer back in episode 3 is through that transgressive discourse, the language of flowers.In The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, the young women study under Sister Clodagh and Sister Philippa (myself, Catherine Lord). The nuns teach botanical lists and their ecological contexts through rote learning. The young women learn unenthusiastically. What is highlighted is the ludicrous activity of repetition and abstractions. When knowledge becomes so objectified, so do natural environments, territories and people. Clodagh aligns floral species to British locations. The young women are relatively more engaged in the garden with Sister Philippa. They study their environment through sketching and painting a diverse range of flowers that could grow in non-British territory. Philippa is the now the one who becomes feral and silent, stroking stalks and petals, eschewing for the time being, the game of naming (fig. 2).However, lessons with colonial lexicons will be back. The young women look at screen projections of flowers. Sister Philippa takes the class through an alphabet: “D is for Dogbright … L is for Ladies’ Fingers.” Clodagh whirls through a list of long, Latin names for wild flowers in British Woodlands. Kanchi halts Clodagh’s act of associating the flowers with the British location, which colonizes them. Kanchi asks: “How many of us will actually travel, and which immigration border will test our botanical knowledge?” Kanchi then presents a radically different alphabet, including “Anne is African … Ian is Intersex … Lucy loves Lucy.” These are British names attributed to Africans, Arabs, and Asians, many of their identities revealed to be LGBQT-POC, non-binary, transgender, and on the move. Clodagh’s riposte is “How do you know you are not travelling already?” The flowers cannot be pinned down to one location. They cannot be owned by one nation.Like characters who travel between episodes, the travelling flowers represent a collision of spaces that undermine the hegemonies of race, gender and sexuality. In episode 1, Black Narcissus the feature film, the western nuns face the immensities of mountain atmosphere, ecology and an unfamiliar ethnic group. In episode 2, House of Women, the subalterns have transformed their role, achieving educational and career status. Such political and dramatic stakes are raised in episode 3, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten. There is a strong focus on the overlapping oppressions of racial, colonial and ecological exploitation. Just as Kanchi has a character arc and serial development, so do plants, fauna, fruits, flowers and trees. ‘Post’-Space and Its AtmosphereThe British Empire colonised India’s ecological space. “Remember you and your God aren't on British Territory anymore” declares the auditioning Krishna Istha in House of Women. Kanchi’s calm, civil disobedience continues its migration into The Fruit is There to be Eaten between two simultaneously existing spaces, Mopu and Rotherhithe, London. According to literature scholar Brian McHale, postmodern worlds raise ontological questions about the dramatic space into which we are drawn. “Which” worlds are we in? Postmodern worlds can overlap between separate spaces and different temporalities (McHale 34-35). As McHale notes, “If entities can migrate across the semipermeable membrane that divides a fictional world from the real, they can also migrate between two different fictional worlds” (35).In The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, the semipermeable membrane between it and Black Narcissus folds together the temporalities of 1947 and 2018, and the terrains of India and London. Sister Philippa tells a Kanchi seeking Mopu, that “My dear, you are already here.” This would seem odd as Sister Philippa describes the death of a young man close to Saint Mary’s Church, London. The British capital and woodlands and the Himalayas co-exist as intensified, inter-crossing universes that disrupt the membranes between both colonial and ecological space-time, or what I term “post-space.”Williams Gamaker’s post-spaces further develop Pressburger and Powell’s latent critique of post-colonialism. As film scholar Sarah Street has observed, Black Narcissus the film performs a “post-colonial” exploration of the waning British Empire: “Out of the persistence of the colonial past the present is inflected with a haunting resonance, creating gaps and fissures” (31). This occurs in Powell’s film in the initial Calcutta scenes. The designer Alfred Junge made “God shots” of the nuns at dinner, creating from them the iconic shape of a cross. This image produces a sense of over-exactness. Once in the mountains, it is the spirit of exactitude that deteriorates. In contrast, Williams Gamaker prefers to reveal the relative chaos of setting up her world. We watch as the crew dress the school room. Un-ceremoniously, Kanchi arrives in shorts before she picks up a floral dress bearing the label “Kanchi.” There is then a shot in which Kanchi purveys the organised set, as though she is its organiser (fig. 3).Post-spaces are rich in atmosphere. The British agent Dean tells Clodagh in Black Narcissus the film that the mountain “is no place to put a nunnery” due its “atmosphere.” In the climactic scene of The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten, Kanchi and Clodagh face two screens revealing the atmospheric projection of the high mountains, the black cut between them visible, like some shadowy membrane. Such aesthetic strategies continue Powell’s use of technical artifice. Street details the extensive labour of technical and craft work involved in creating the artificial world of Black Narcissus, its mountains, artificial colours, and hence atmosphere, all constructed at Pinewood studios. There was a vast amount of matte painting and painting on glass for special effects (19).William Gamaker’s screens (projection work by Sophie Bramley and Nick Jaffe) reflexively emphasise atmosphere as artifices. The atmosphere intensifies with the soundscape of mountain air and Wayne Urquhart’s original and haunting music. In Powell and Pressburger’s feature, Brian Easdale’s music also invokes a sense of mystery and vastness. Just as TV series and serials maintain musical and mise-scene-scene signatures from one episode to another, so too does Williams Gamaker reframe her precursor’s cinematic aesthetics with that of her own episode. Thus, serial as stylistic consistency is maintained between episodes and their post-spaces.At the edge of such spaces, Kanchi will scare Clodagh by miming a tight-rope walk across the mountain: it is both real and pretend, dramatic, but reflexively so. Kanchi walks a membrane between colliding worlds, between colonialism and its transgression. In this episode of extreme spirituality and eroticism, Kanchi reaches greater heights than in previous episodes, discoursing on the poetics of atmosphere: “… in the midst of such peaks, one can draw near what is truly placeless … the really divine.” Here, the membrane between the political and cultural regions and the mountains that eschew even the human, is about to be breached. Kanchi relates the legend of those who go naked in the snow. These “Abominable Men” are creatures who become phantoms when they merge with the mountain. If the fractures between locations are too spacious, as Kanchi warns, one can go mad. In this episode 3, Kanchi and Clodagh may have completed their journeys. In Powell and Pressburger’s interpretation, Sister Ruth discards nun’s attire for a Parisian, seductive dress and red lipstick. Yet, she does so for a man, Dean. However, the Sister Clodagh of 2018 is filmed in a very long take as she puts on an elegant dress and does her make-up. In a scene of philosophical intimacy with Kanchi, the newly dressed Clodagh confesses her experience of “immensity.” As they break through the erotic membrane separating their identities, both immersed in their full, queer, transgender kiss, all racial hierarchies melt into atmosphere (fig. 4).Conclusion: For a Pitch By making a film as one episode in a series, Williams Gamaker’s accomplishment is to enhance the meeting of narrative and political aims. As an arthouse film serial, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten has enabled definitions of “serial” to migrate from the field of television studies. Between Hutcheon’s “adaptation” and Mittell and Creeber’s articulations of “narrative complexity,” a malleable concept for arthouse seriality has emerged. It has stretched the theoretical limits of what can be meant by a serial in an arthouse context. By allowing the notion of works “adapted” to occur between different media, Henry Jenkins’ broader term of “transmedia storytelling” (Convergence) can describe how particles of Godden’s work transmigrate through episodes 1, 2, and 3, where the citational richness emerges most in episodes 3, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten.Because one novel informs all the episodes while each has entirely different narratives and genres, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten is not a serial adaptation, as is Game of Thrones. It is an experimental serial inflected with trans-serial properties. Kanchi evolves into a postcolonial, transgender, ecological protagonist who can traverse postmodern worlds. Perhaps the witty producer in a pitch meeting might say that in its serial context, The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten is like a cross between two fantasy TV serials, still to be written: Transgender Peaks meets Kanchi Is the New Black. The “new black” is multifaceted and occupies multi-worlds in a post-space environment. ReferencesCreeber, Glen. Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen. London: BFI, 2004.Godden, Rumer. 1939. Black Narcissus: A Virago Modern Classic. London: Hatchette Digital, 2013.———. A House with Four Rooms. New York: William Morrow, 1989. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. New York: New York University Press, 2012.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.———. “Transmedia, 202: Further Reflections.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan 1 Aug. 2011. 1 May 2012 <http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html>.McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987.Powell, Michael. A Life in Movies: An Autobiography. London: Heinemann, 1986.Mittell, Jason. “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television.” The Velvet Light Trap 58 (Fall 2006): 29-40. Street, Sarah. Black Narcissus. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005.FilmographyBlack Narcissus. Dirs. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Pinewood Studios, 1947.House of Women. Dir. Michelle Williams Gamaker. Cinema Suitcase, 2017.The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten. Dir. Michelle Williams Gamaker. Cinema Suitcase, 2018.The Eternal Return. Dir. Michelle Williams Gamaker. Cinema Suitcase, 2018-2019.

In his directorial debut, The Man with the Iron Fists (2012), RZA not only evokes the textual borrowing techniques he has utilised as a hip-hop producer, but also reflects the influence of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, who has built a career upon acknowledging mainstream and cult film histories through mise-en-scene, editing, and deft characterisation. The Man with the Iron Fists was originally to coincide with Tarantino’s rebel slave narrative Django Unchained (2012), which Tarantino has discussed openly as commentary regarding race in contemporary America. In 2011, Variety reported that RZA had joined the cast of Tarantino’s anticipated Django Unchained, playing “Thaddeus, a violent slave working on a Mississippi plantation” (Sneider, “Rza Joins ‘Django Unchained’ Cast”). Django Unchained follows Tarantino’s pattern of generic and trope mixology, combining elements of the Western, blaxploitation, and buddy/road film. He famously stated: “[If] my work has anything it's that I'm taking this from this and that from that and mixing them together… I steal from everything. Great artists steal; they don't do homages” (“The Directors of Our Lifetime: In Their Own Words”). He sutures iconography from multiple films in numerous genres to form new texts that stand alone, albeit as amalgamations of references. In considering meanings attached particularly to exploitation films, this article addresses the significance of combining influences within The Man with the Iron Fists and Tarantino’s Django Unchained, and the ideological threads that emerge in fusing exploitation film aesthetics. Ultimately, these films provide a convergence not only of texts, but also of the collective identities associated with and built upon those texts, feats made possible through the filmmakers’ use of pastiche. Pastiche in Identity Formation as Subversive A reflection of the postmodern tendency towards appropriation and borrowing, pastiche is often considered less meaningful than its counterpart, parody. Fredric Jameson suggests that though pastiche and parody share commonalities (most notably the mimicry of style and mannerisms), they do so to different effects. Jameson asserts that parody mimics in an effort to mock the idiosyncrasies within a text, whereas pastiche is “neutral parody” of “dead styles” (114). In short, as Susan Hayward writes, “In its uninventiveness, pastiche is but a shadow of its former thing” (302). For Jameson, the most ubiquitous form of pastiche is the nostalgia film, which attempts to recapture the essence of the past. As examples, he points to the George Lucas films American Graffiti (1973), which is staged in the United States of the 1950s, and Star Wars (1977), which reflects the serials of the 1930s-1950s (114-115). Though scholars such as Jameson and Hayward are contemptuous of pastiche, a growing number see its potential for the subversion and critique that the aforementioned suggest it lacks. For instance, Sarah Smith reminds us that pastiche films engage in “complicitous critique”: the films maintain the trappings of original texts, yet do so in order to advance critique (209). For Smith and other scholars, such as Judith Butler and Richard Dyer, Jameson’s criticism of pastiche is dismissive, for while these scholars largely agree that pastiche is a form of mimicry in which the distance between original and copy is minimal, they recognise that a space still exists for it to be critical. Smith writes: “[W]hile there may be greater distance between the parody and its target text than there is between the pastiche and the text it imitates, a prescribed degree of distance is not a prerequisite for critical engagement with the ur-text” (210). In this regard, fidelity to the original texts is not only required but to be revered, for these likenesses to the original “act as a guarantee of the critique of those origins and provide an opportunity for the filmmaker to position [himself or herself] in relation to them” (Smith 211). Essentially, pastiche is a useful technique in which to construct hybrid identities. Keri E. Iyall Smith suggests that hybrid identities emerge from “a reflexive relationship between local and global” (3). According to popular music scholar Brett Lashua, hybrid identities “make and re-make culture through appropriating the cultural ‘raw materials’ of life in order to construct meaning in their own specific cultural localities. In a sense, they are ‘sampling’ from broader popular culture and reworking what they can take into their own specific local cultures” (“The Arts of the Remix: Ethnography and Rap”). As will be evidenced here, Tarantino utilises pastiche as an unabashed genre poacher; similarly, as a self-avowed Tarantino student and hip-hop producer known for his sampling acumen, RZA invokes pastiche to reflect mastery of his craft and a hybridised identity his multifaceted persona. Plagiarism, Poaching, and Pastiche: Tarantino Blurs Boundaries As a filmmaker, Tarantino is known for indulging in excess: violence, language, and aesthetics. Edward Gallafent characterised the director’s work as having a preoccupation with settings and journeys, violence (both emotional and physical), complicated chronological structures, and dissatisfying conclusions (3-4). Additionally, pieces of Tarantino’s cinematic fandom are inserted into his own films. Academic and popular critics continually note Tarantino’s rise as an obsessive video store clerk turned respected and eccentric auteur. Tarantino’s authorship lies mostly in his ability to borrow (or in his words, steal) narrative arcs, characterisations, and camera work from other filmmakers, and use them in ways that feel innovative and different from those past works. It is not that he borrows generally from movements, films, and filmmakers, but that he conscientiously lifts segments from works to incorporate into his text. In Postmodern Hollywood: What’s New in Film and Why It Makes Us Feel So Strange, Keith M. Booker contends that Tarantino’s work often straddles lines between simplistic reference for reference’s sake and meditations upon the roles of cinema (90). Booker dismisses claims for the latter, citing Tarantino’s unwillingness to contextualise the references in Pulp Fiction, such that the film is best described not an act of citation so much as a break with the historical. Tarantino’s lack of reverence provides him freedom to intermingle texts and tropes to fit his goals as a filmmaker, rather than working within the confines of generic narratives. Each film feels both apart and distinct from genre categories. Jackie Brown, for example, has many of the traits attached to blaxploitation, from its focus on drug culture, the casting of Pam Grier who gained status playing female leads in blaxploitation films, and extreme violence. Tarantino’s use of humour throughout, particular in his treatment of character types, plot twists, and self-aware musical cues distances the film from easy characterisation. It is, but isn’t. What is gained is a remediated conception of cinematic reality. The fictions created in films of the past are noted in Tarantino’s play with tropes. His mixes produce an extreme form of mediated reality – one that is full of excess, highly exaggerated, and completely composed of stolen frameworks. Tarantino continues his generic play in Django Unchained. While much of it does borrow heavily from 1960s and 1970s Western filmmakers like Leone, Corbucci, and Peckinpah (the significance of desolate landscapes, long takes, extreme violence), it also incorporates strands of buddy cop (partners with different backgrounds working together to correct wrongs), early blaxploitation (Broomhilda’s last name is von Shaft suggesting that she is an ancestor of blaxploitation icon John Shaft, the characterisation of Django as black antihero enacting revenge on white racists in power), and kung fu (revenge narrative, in addition to the extensive training moments between Dr. Schultz and Django). The familiar elements highlight the transgressions of genre adherence. The comfort of the western genre and its tropes eases the audience, only for Tarantino to incorporate those elements from outside the genre to spark interest, to shock, to remind audiences of the mediated reality onscreen. Tarantino has been criticised for his lack of depth and understanding regarding women and people of colour, despite his attempts to provide various leading and supporting roles for both. Django Unchained was particularly criticised for Tarantino’s use of the term nigger - over 100 instances in the film. Tarantino defended his decision by claiming historical accuracy, poetic license, and his desire to confront audiences with various levels of racism. Many, including Spike Lee, disagreed, arguing Tarantino had no claim to making a film about slavery. Lee stated through Twitter: “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them” (“Spike Lee on Django Unchained: Filmmaker Calls Movie ‘Disrespectful’”). Not only does Lee evoke the tragedy of the American slave trade and the significance of race within contemporary filmmaking, but he uses genre to underscore what he perceives is Tarantino’s lack of reverence to the issue of slavery and its aftermath in American culture. Django Unchained is both physically and emotionally brutal. The world created by Tarantino is culturally messy, as Italian composers rub elbows with black hip-hop artists, actors from films’ referenced in Django Unchained interact with new types of heroes. The amounts of references, people, and spectacles in his films have created a brand that is both hyperaware, but often critiqued as ambivalent. This is due in part to the perception of Tarantino as a filmmaker with no filter. His brand as a filmmaker is action ordered, excessive, and injected with his own fandom. He is an ultimate poacher of texts and it is this aesthetic, which has also made him a fan favourite amongst young cinephiles. Not only does he embrace the amount of play film offers, but he takes the familiar and makes it strange. The worlds he creates are hazier, darker, and unstable. Creating such a world in Django Unchained provides a lot of potential for reading race in film and American culture. He and his defenders have discussed this film as an “honest” portrayal of the effects of slavery and racial tension in the United States. This is also the world which acts as context for RZA’s The Man with the Iron Fists. Though a reference abandoned in Django Unchained, the connection between both films and both filmmakers pleasure in pastiche provide further insight to connections between film and race. Doing the Knowledge: RZA Pays Homage As a filmmaker, RZA utilises Tarantino’s filmmaking brand techniques to build his own homage and add to the body of kung-fu films. Doing so furnishes him the opportunity to rehash and reform narratives and tropes in ways that change familiar narrative structures and plot devices. In creating a film which relies on cinematic allusions to kung fu, RZA—as a fan, practitioner, and author—reconfigures kung fu from being an exploitative genre and reshapes its potential for representational empowerment. While Tarantino considers himself an unabashed thief of genre tropes, RZA envisions himself more as a student who pays homage to masters—among whom he includes Tarantino. Indeed, in an interview with MTV, RZA refers to Tarantino as his Sifu (a Chinese term for master or teacher) and credits him not only for teaching RZA about filmmaking, but also for providing him with his blessing to make his first feature length film (Downey, “RZA Recalls Learning from ‘The Master’ Quentin Tarantino”). RZA implies that mastery of one’s craft comes from incorporating influences while creating original work, not theft. For instance, he states that the Pink Blossom brothel—the locus for most of the action in the film—was inspired by the House of Blue Leaves restaurant, which functions in a similar capacity in Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (“RZA Talks Sampling of Kung Fu Films for Movie & The Difference Between Biting vs. Influence”). Hip-hop is an art form in which its practitioners “partake of a discursive universe where skill at appropriating the fragments of a rapidly-changing world with verbal grace and dexterity is constituted as knowledge” (Potter 21). This knowledge draws upon not only the contemporary moment but also the larger body of recorded music and sound, both of which it “re-reads and Signifies upon through a complex set of strategies, including samplin’, cuttin’ (pastiche), and freestylin’ (improvisation)” (Potter 22). As an artist who came of age in hip-hop’s formative years and whose formal recording career began at the latter half of hip-hop’s Golden Age (often considered 1986-1993), RZA is a particularly adept cutter and sampler – indeed, as a sampler, RZA is often considered a master. While RZA’s samples run the gamut of the musical spectrum, he is especially known for sampling obscure, often indeterminable jazz and soul tracks. Imani Perry suggests that this measure of fidelity to the past is borne out of hip-hop’s ideological respect for ancestors and its inherent sense of nostalgia (54). Hallmarks of RZA’s sampling repertoire include dialog and sound effects from equally obscure kung fu films. RZA attributes his sampling of kung fu to an affinity for these films established in his youth after viewing noteworthy examples such as The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978) and Five Deadly Venoms (1978). These films have become a key aspect of his identity and everyday life (Gross, “RZA’s Edge: The RZA’s Guide to Kung Fu Films”). He speaks of his decision to make kung fu dialog an integral part of Wu-Tang Clan’s first album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers): “My fantasy was to make a one-hour movie that people were just going to listen to. They would hear my movie and see it in their minds. I’d read comic books like that, with sonic effects and kung fu voices in my head. That makes it more exciting so I try to create music in the same way” (Gross, ““RZA’s Edge: The RZA’s Guide to Kung Fu Films”). Much like Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and his other musical endeavours, The Man with the Iron Fists serves as further evidence of RZA’s hybrid identity., which sociologist Keri E. Iyall Smith suggests emerges from “a reflexive relationship between local and global” (3). According to popular music scholar Brett Lashua, hybrid identities “make and re-make culture through appropriating the cultural ‘raw materials’ of life in order to construct meaning in their own specific cultural localities. In a sense, they are ‘sampling’ from broader popular culture and reworking what they can take into their own specific local cultures” (“The Arts of the Remix: Ethnography and Rap”). The most overt instance of RZA’s hybridity is in regards to names, many of which are derived from the Gordon Liu film Shaolin and Wu-Tang (1983), in which the competing martial arts schools come together to fight a common foe. The film is the basis not only for the name of RZA’s group (Wu-Tang Clan) but also for the names of individual members (for instance, Master Killer—after the series to which the film belongs) and the group’s home base of Staten Island, New York, which they frequently refer to as “Shaolin.” The Man with the Iron Fists is another extension of this hybrid identity. Kung fu has long had meaning for African Americans particularly because these films frequently “focus narratively on either the triumph of the ‘little guy’ or ‘underdog’ or the nobility of the struggle to recognise humanity and virtue in all people, or some combination of both” (Ongiri 35). As evidence, Amy Obugo Ongiri points to films such as The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, a film about a peasant who learns martial arts at the Shaolin temple in order to avenge his family’s murder by the Manchu rulers (Ongiri 35). RZA reifies this notion in a GQ interview, where he speaks about The 36th Chamber of Shaolin specifically, noting its theme of rebellion against government oppression having relevance to his life as an African American (Pappademus, “This Movie Is Rated Wu”). RZA appropriates the humble origins of the peasant San Te (Gordon Liu), the protagonist of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, in Thaddeus (whom RZA plays in the film), whose journey to saviour of Jungle Village begins with his being a slave in America. Indeed, one might argue that RZA’s construction of and role as Thaddeus is the ultimate realisation of the hybrid identity he has developed since becoming a popular recording artist. Just as Tarantino’s acting in his own films often reflects his identity as genre splicer and convention breaker (particularly since they are often self-referential), RZA’s portrayal of Thaddeus—as an African American, as a martial artist, and as a “conscious” human being—reflects the narrative RZA has constructed about his own life. Conclusion The same amount of play Tarantino has with conventions, particularly in characterisations and notions of heroism, is present in RZA’s Man with the Iron Fists. Both filmmakers poach from their favourite films and genres in order to create interpretations that feel both familiar and new. RZA follows Tarantino’s aesthetic of borrowing scenes directly from other films. Both filmmakers poach from films for their own devices, but in those mash-ups open up avenues for genre critique and identity formation. Tarantino is right to say that they are not solely homages, as homages honour the films in which they borrow. Tarantino and RZA do more through their poaching to stretch the boundaries of genres and films’ abilities to communicate with audiences. References “The Directors of Our Lifetime: In Their Own Words.” Empire Online. N.d. 8 May 2013 ‹http://www.empireonline.com/magazine/250/directors-of-our-lifetime/5.asp›. Booker, Keith M. Postmodern Hollywood: What’s New in Film and Why It Makes Us Feel So Strange. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007. Downey, Ryan J. “RZA Recalls Learning from ‘The Master’ Quentin Tarantino.” MTV. 30 August 2012. 14 July 2013 ‹http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1692872/rza-man-with-the-iron-fists-quentin-tarantino.jhtml›. Gallefent, Edward. Quentin Tarantino. London: Longman. 2005. Gross, Jason. “RZA’s Edge: The RZA’s Guide to Kung Fu Films.” Film Comment. N.d. 5 June 2013 ‹http://www.filmcomment.com/article/rzas-edge-the-rzas-guide-to-kung-fu-films›. Iyall Smith, Keri E. “Hybrid Identities: Theoretical Examinations.” Hybrid Identities: Theoretical and Empirical Examinations. Ed. Keri E. Iyall Smith and Patricia Leavy. Leiden: Brill, 2008. 3-12. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. London: Pluto, 1985. 111-125. Lashua, Brett. “The Arts of the Remix: Ethnography and Rap.” Anthropology Matters 8.2 (2006). 6 June 2013 ‹http://www.anthropologymatters.com›. “The Man with the Iron Fists – Who in the Cast Can F-U Up?” IronFistsMovie 21 Sep. 2012. YouTube. 8 May 2013 ‹http://youtu.be/bhJOQZFJfqA›. Pappademus, Alex. “This Movie Is Rated Wu.” GQ Nov. 2012. 6 June 2013 ‹http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201211/the-rza-man-with-the-iron-fists-wu-tang-clan›. Perry, Imani. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004. Potter, Russell. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 1995. “RZA Talks Sampling of Kung Fu Films for Movie & The Difference between Biting vs. Influence.” The Well Versed. 2 Nov. 2012. 5 June 2013 ‹http://thewellversed.com/2012/11/02/video-rza-talks-sampling-of-kung-fu-films-for-movie-the-difference-between-biting-vs-influence/›. Smith, Sarah. “Lip and Love: Subversive Repetition in the Pastiche Films of Tracey Moffat.” Screen 49.2 (Summer 2008): 209-215. Snedier, Jeff. “Rza Joins 'Django Unchained' Cast.” Variety 2 Nov. 2011. 14 June 2013 ‹http://variety.com/2011/film/news/rza-joins-django-unchained-cast-1118045503/›. “Spike Lee on Django Unchained: Filmmaker Calls Movie ‘Disrespectful.’” Huffington Post 24 Dec. 2012. 14 June 2013 ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/23/spike-lee-django-unchained-movie-disrespectful_n_2356729.html›. Wu-Tang Clan. Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Loud, 1993. Filmography The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. Dir. Chia-Liang Lui. Perf. Chia Hui Lui, Lieh Lo, Chia Yung Lui. Shaw Brothers, 1978. Django Unchained. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz. Miramax, 2012. Five Deadly Venoms. Dir. Cheh Chang. Perf. Sheng Chiang, Philip Kwok, Feng Lu. Shaw Brothers, 1978. Jackie Brown. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster. Miramax, 1997. Kill Bill: Vol. 1. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Darryl Hannah. Miramax, 2003. The Man with the Iron Fists. Dir. RZA. Perf. RZA, Russell Crowe, Lucy Liu. Arcade Pictures, 2012. Pulp Fiction. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson. Miramax, 1994. Shaolin and Wu-Tang. Dir. Chiu Hui Liu. Perf. Chiu Hui Liu, Adam Cheng, Li Ching.