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Postcolonial Film: History, Empire, Resistance. Ed. by Rebecca Weaver-Hightower and Peter Hulme. New York and London: Routledge, 2014. 326 p. ISBN (hb): 9780415716147.
Reviewed by Patricia Caillé
Presenting "a cross-section of cutting edge postcolonial research on international cinema, research focused on more recent chronologies, new spaces and emerging technologies" (2), the book comprises twelve chapters, each analysing a single film plus an afterword. The selection of films spans forty-five years from Gillo Pontecorvo's Italian-Algerian Battle of Algiers (1965) to Dakxin Bajrange Chhara's The Lost Water: A Salt Worker's Life (2010). Including fiction and documentary, the objective of the volume is to put into perspective different sets of questions from different locations, "away from what once would have been seen as the core postcolonial regions" (3). And one may wonder that it should include only one film by a woman filmmaker, Djebar's La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1978), the first Algerian film by a woman. Organized chronologically, the volume is divided into three parts.
The first section revisits a few classics from the 1960s and 1970s. In a well-documented paper on Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966), Nicholas Harrison explores the film's capacity to capture important ambiguities about Islam; yet Harrison remains cautious about critical film analyses: "Even more careful critical readings of this or some other masterpiece, more respectful of the film's richness and complexity, would not really tell you how other people had reacted or would react" (41), something one needs to keep in mind when reading the rest of this volume. Stephen Spence's theoretically powerful reading of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's The Puppetmaster borrows Emma Perez's notion of "decolonial imaginary," both a theory of resistance and a...