Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World on Film

Columpar, Corinn

ISBN 10: 080932962X / ISBN 13: 9780809329625

Published by Southern Illinois University Press, 2010

About this Item

Examines the politics of representing aboriginality. This title discusses the cinematic construction and transnational circulation of aboriginality. It analyzes how indigeneity is represented in cinema. It also explores contextual issues in filmmaking such as funding, personnel, modes of production, and means of distribution. Num Pages: 272 pages, 9 illustrations. BIC Classification: APFA. Category: (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly. Dimension: 228 x 152 x 18. Weight in Grams: 340. . 2010. 1st Edition. Paperback. . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9780809329625

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World on Film
• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080932962X
• ISBN 13: 9780809329625
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World on Film examines the politics of representing Aboriginality, in the process bringing frequently marginalized voices and visions, issues and debates into the limelight. Corinn Columpar uses film theory, postcolonial theory, and Indigenous theory to frame her discussion of the cinematic construction and transnational circulation of Aboriginality. The result is a broad interdisciplinary analysis of how Indigeneity is represented in cinema, supported by more than twenty rigorous and theoretically informed case studies of contemporary feature films by both First- and Fourth-World filmmakers in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Columpar relies heavily on textual analysis of the films but also explores contextual issues in filmmaking such as funding, personnel, modes of production, and means of distribution.

Part one of Unsettling Sights focuses on contact narratives in which the Aboriginal subject is constructed in reactive response to a colonizing or invading presence. Films such as The Piano and The Proposition, wherein a white man “goes native,” and The New World and Map of the Human Heart, which approach contact from the perspective of an Aboriginal character, serve as occasions to examine the ways in which Aboriginal identities are negotiated within dominant cinema. Part two shifts the focus from contact narratives to films that seek to define Aboriginality on its own terms, with reference to a (lost) homeland and/or Indigenous practices of (hi)story-telling: while texts such as Once Were Warriors and Smoke Signals foster an engagement with issues of deterritorialization, relocation, and urbanization, discussion of beDevil, Atanarjuat, and The Business of Fancydancing, among others,bring questions of voice, translation, and the relationship between cinema and oral tradition to the forefront.

Unsettling Sights is the first significant, scholarly examination of Aboriginality and cinema in an international context and will be invaluable to scholars and students in many fields including cinema studies, anthropology, critical race studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies.

About the Author

Corinn Columpar is an associate professor of English and cinema studies at the University of Toronto and a coeditor of There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond.