The success of his film Calcutta 71 (1972), remarked director Mrinal Sen, was not due to “cinematic excellence,” but “more because of the time in which it was made and released.” [1] Sen was right. Calcutta 71 did not reap profits in the box office. In this it was much like the two other films that were part of Sen’s Calcutta trilogy, Interview (1971) and Padatik [The guerilla fighter] (1973). Calcutta 71 became a phenomenon in its time for the slew of serious discussions and controversies it...

Coming of age in the 1960s in newly independent Senegal, documentarist Samba Félix Ndiaye participated in a ciné-club at the French Cultural Center in Dakar with a group of friends that included fellow future filmmakers Ben Diogaye Beye, Mahama Traoré, and Djibril Diop Mambety. Movie marathons were followed by passionate debates, Ndiaye recounted later, during which “the provocateurs who supported Intolerance were angry at the Battleship Potemkin fanatics, and the devotees of German...

Early in Samuel Shimon’s first-person autobiographical novel An Iraqi in Paris ( ‘Irāqī fī Bāris), the young author-narrator has left his hometown of Habbaniya, Iraq on the eve of Saddam Hussein’s military takeover of the country. A child pushcart vendor now in his early twenties, Shmuel harbors a rags-to-riches dream of traveling to the US and making it big as a Hollywood director. While he hails from a poor Assyrian Christian family, he is detained and tortured in Damascus, due in part to his...

Cinephilia is generally known as the feverish love of cinema. [1] In Hong Kong during the 1960s, such affection towards cinema was entangled with the complex sensation and sentiments revolving around Chinese nationalism (“Cultural China”), the British colonial rule and locality during the contesting ideologies in the Cultural Cold War and demonstrated in wide ranging practices. As Thomas Elsaesser proposed, cinephilia began with “topographically site-specific” and “a detour of place and space, a...

Hong Kong has enjoyed a long film history, which dates back to as early as the invention of film. Recent scholarship has begun to pay attention to the early screen culture of Hong Kong cinema. These findings paved the way for exploring the cinephilic culture in Hong Kong that has taken shape since the mid-1920s, when local critics and movie lovers began to group themselves to form cine clubs and unions and published film magazines. Yinguang ( 銀光 ) was

In the late 1940s, two highly significant cineclubs were founded in the city of Montevideo, Uruguay, building on the work of Cine Arte del SODRE, an initiative of the state-run broadcaster and cultural agency Servicio Oficial de Radiodifusión Eléctrica, which sought to create a public space for the diffusion of alternative cinema beginning in 1944. Cine Club del Uruguay and Cine Universitario were preeminent institutions in Latin America, both for their large membership and for the consistency...

Arriving in Havana in 1948, eighteen-year-old Néstor Almendros (1930–1992), who would go on to become one of the most renowned cinematographers of the twentieth century, found that “Cuba was a privileged place to see films.” [1] Not only did he find a large range of moviegoing options with hundreds of movie theaters showing films from different nationalities in their original language, but he also encountered a burgeoning cinephile community. Significantly, that summer he also registered for a...

It is a little-known fact that two women, Victoria Ocampo and Lola Álvarez Bravo, brought the celebrated avant-garde film Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, 1929) to Argentina and Mexico for the first time. Acting as cultural mediators, they successfully organized the film’s premieres in 1929 and 1938, respectively, at the Cine Club de Buenos Aires, where Ocampo was a key player, and the 16mm Cinema film society, which Álvarez Bravo ran. Álvarez Bravo and Ocampo’s intervention...