Hamid Naficy. An accented cinema: exilic and diasporic filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.

ISBN 0 691 043924 374 pp US$24.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Princeton University Press)

Uploaded 25 July 2002 1727 words

Hamid Naficy's imposing new work, An accented cinema, sets itself two related and equally ambitious tasks. First and most straightforwardly, the book presents a critical overview of the style and conditions of production of films by a wide range of post-1960s filmmakers who grew up in the Third World and have since worked in the West (including, among many others, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Ghasem Ebrahimiam, Mira Nair, and Ann Hui), as well as some filmmakers who grew up largely in the West, but have undergone experiences of displacement (including Chantal Akerman, Atom Egoyan, Nina Menkes and Chris Marker). Through a mix of general discussions of the style, themes, and modes of production of these films and concise "close-up" sections focusing on particular films and filmmakers, Naficy's book pieces together a detailed taxonomy of the "accented cinema." The book engages with the intricate cultural politics of diasporic, exilic and postcolonial filmmaking while maintaining a concern throughout for how experiences of mobility -

some voluntary, some forced - impact upon film aesthetics to produce what Naficy calls the "accented style." Noting that existing scholarship on postcolonial cinema has tended to approach exile and diaspora as themes within films rather than as factors shaping film style (20), Naficy argues that "the accented style helps us to discover commonalities among exilic filmmakers that cut across gender, race, nationality and ethnicity, as well as across boundaries of national cinemas, genres and authorship" (39). Elsewhere, Naficy compares the accented style to Raymond Williams' notion of a structure of feeling, insofar as it encodes responses to a particular, material social experience (26). In effect, Naficy's accented style represents a wholly new framework for conceptualising cinema and classifying films. This leads us to the second task that Naficy's book addresses. With its close attention to how cultural location and geocultural mobility affect film style, An accented cinema reinflects the conceptual basis of film analysis, and enables a fundamental re-visioning of the meaning and function of cinema itself in the contemporary world. Naficy defines his use of the term "accented": If the dominant cinema is considered universal and without accent, the films that diasporic and exilic subjects make are accented. [...] [T]he accent emanates not so much from the accented speech of the diegetic characters as from the displacement of the filmmakers and their artisanal production modes." (4) But as this excerpt suggests, by drawing attention to the stylistic "accent" perceptible in films by this group of

filmmakers, Naficy - in this regard like the films themselves - effects a critique of the putatively "accentless" dominant cinema, so sure of its own ground that it routinely elides the questions of place and displacement that haunt and define the accented cinema. In its political engagement and implicit and explicit social critique, Naficy's conceptualisation of accented cinema enters into a timely dialogue with the notion of Third Cinema, written about by Teshome H. Gabriel and others analyzing the political Latin-American film movement of the 1960s. As he notes at the outset, Naficy's approach to the accented style departs from current trends in film scholarship and cultural criticism in at least two ways. First, in insisting on taking into account the structuring presence of the filmmakers' embodied histories within their film work, Naficy counters the postmodernist turn of recent decades toward presuming the "death of the author" (4). Secondly, taking his cue from the films themselves, with the marked emphasis of many of them upon the irreducibility of place, geography, and home, Naficy makes an implicit and well-directed critique of what he calls the recent "overcelebration" of tropes of travel, global interconnectivity, and deterritorialization (5). A major aim of this book is to detail the formal commonalities that identify films as examples of the accented style. Stylistic tendencies that Naficy finds occurring commonly across the extremely wide range of films he surveys (these tendencies are summarized usefully in a 4-page appendix) include "accented" uses of voice, sound and language (from the use of voiceovers with literally accented pronunciation and the prevalence of non-synchronous sound, to the appearance of written text in the film's frame and the preponderance of epistolary narratives); the textual presence of the lost

homeland as master referent; the visual representation of a traumatically split relationship to the body (recalling, perhaps, Frantz Fanon's theorisation of the traumatic "epidermalization" of racism) leading to a what Naficy calls a "tactile optics" (28-30); emphasis on border subjectivities and hybrid identities; and the autobiographical inscription of the filmmaker within the film's text. As well as paying detailed attention to the distinguishing style of accented cinema, Naficy argues that these films' distinctive conditions of production, distribution and consumption have defining consequences for the films that result. The book includes two chapters dedicated to elaborating the "interstitial and artisanal mode of production" (including close-up sections on Atom Egoyan, Michel Khleifi, and Women Make Movies), and the "collective mode of production" (including analysis of several Asian Pacific film collectives in the USA, collective production in Iranian film, and British postcolonial collectives including Sankofa and others). Naficy argues that whilst it would be wrong to assume that accented cinema is free of the taint of capital and capitalism, nevertheless its distinctive modes of production can be interpreted, broadly, as oppositional in relation to postindustrial Hollywood's dominant mode of production. In its insistence on thinking in the same breath, as it were, questions about the accented cinema's aesthetics, history, and modes of production, An accented cinema is an extremely welcome development in the study of cinema, postcoloniality, and globalization. However, the very ambitiousness of Naficy's book's conceptual sweep and its wide range of objects of analysis lead to a tension that both structures and fractures the logic of its central

argument. Theoretically, Naficy is committed to taking seriously the particularity and historical specificity of the situations of the filmmakers whose work he analyses: as he rightly notes on the first page of the book, "there is nothing common about exile and diaspora" (3). At the same time, though, Naficy's method compels him to search out, at the level of film style, the very universalizing commonalities whose possibility his theoretical approach would appear to preclude. Thus, Naficy ends up with a slightly uneasy statement of aim that tries to reconcile his generalizing methodology with his particularizing conceptual framework: My task here is to theorize this cinema's existence as an accented style that encompasses characteristics common to the works of differently situated filmmakers involved in varied decentered social formations and cinematic practices across the globe - all of whom are presumed to share the fact of displacement and deterritorialization. (21) On the one hand, Naficy concedes that the filmmakers are all differently situated, and are located in varying social formations at different points on the globe - which in the light of his generally historical-materialist framework would imply differences that should matter for the films they produce. While on the other hand, Naficy seeks a style that will encompass common characteristics, cut through differences, and be explicable in terms of what now appears as a generalized fact of "shared" displacement and deterritorialization.

Linked to this tension between the particularity of historical experiences of displacement and the generalizing tendency of taxonomy as method is the question of Naficy's choice of films. Naficy discusses both experimental films and commerically-directed feature films, but the majority of films addressed (with some borderline exceptions, including some of the films by Isaac Julien, Hanif Kureishi, and Fernando Solanas) work within non-popular forms and genres. This is really a minor quibble, since empirically the accented filmmakers that are his subject have produced far more of these kinds of films than they have popular ones. Nevertheless, without necessarily implying a criticism of Naficy's choices, it's nonetheless interesting to think about what would happen to this taxonomy, with its strong emphasis on experimental technique and oppositional style, were one also to consider in detail the work of transnationally mobile directors working within more popular genres, like Taiwan's Ang Lee, Japan's Takeshi Kitano, or Hong Kong's John Woo. This amounts to an observation of the inevitable limitations of this kind of project: the messiness of the taxonomy's parameters means that it threatens to break down around its edges. Naficy's approach begs the questions, for example, of what constitutes the "Third World" (would Kitano, Woo, and Lee even qualify for discussion, growing up as they did in Japan and in two of the Asia Pacific's Newly Industralizing Economies?); what constitutes exile (can one defensibly consider the films of French-born Chris Marker, voluntary global flaneur, alongside those made by involuntary exiles from postcolonial nations?); and how to justify the definition of accented cinema as straightforwardly in opposition topostindustrial Hollywood (thus excluding from consideration directors who have

travelled from outside of Europe and the US to work in Hollywood, most notably, in recent times, from East Asia). These are some of the questions Naficy's book provokes. Far from representing a weakness, though, its capacity to make the reader consider questions about just how geocultural and political location affects the business of film production and the aesthetics of cinema is this book's central strength. Undoubtedly, An Accented Cinema will re-define the language in which film is talked about in a world increasingly defined by transnational flows of all kinds. Fran Martin

Works Cited
Frantz Fanon. Black skin, white masks. Trans. Charles Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967. Teshome H. Gabriel. Third cinema in the third world: the aesthetics of liberation. Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1982.

In An Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy offers an engaging overview of an important trend--the filmmaking of postcolonial, Third World, and other displaced individuals living in the West. How their personal experiences of exile or diaspora translate into cinema is a key focus of Naficy's work. Although the experience of expatriation varies greatly from one person to the next, the films themselves exhibit stylistic similarities, from their open- and closed-form aesthetics to their nostalgic and memory-driven multilingual narratives, and from their emphasis on political agency to their concern with identity and transgression of identity. The author explores such features while considering the specific histories of individuals and groups that engender

divergent experiences, institutions, and modes of cultural production and consumption. Treating creativity as a social practice, he demonstrates that the films are in dialogue not only with the home and host societies but also with audiences, many of whom are also situated astride cultures and whose desires and fears the filmmakers wish to express. Comparing these films to Hollywood films, Naficy calls them "accented." Their accent results from the displacement of the filmmakers, their alternative production modes, and their style. Accented cinema is an emerging genre, one that requires new sets of viewing skills on the part of audiences. Its significance continues to grow in terms of output, stylistic variety, cultural diversity, and social impact. This book offers the first comprehensive and global coverage of this genre while presenting a framework in which to understand its intricacies. Review: "[Naficy] does a wonderful job of describing and bringing to life works as yet unseen and, equally admirable, prompts a desire to return to more familiar cinematic texts. [His] prose is engaging, and often eloquent."--Joel Gordon, Arab Studies Journal Endorsements: "An Accented Cinema is in numerous respects a monumental work. It is an attempt to rewrite the history of contemporary cinema by reinventing the categories we use to think about production, consumption, and spectatorship. The energy behind this effort and the continual use of excellent examples to back up the argument make the book a unique and original work of scholarship. It is likely to produce a great deal of debate and interest among film scholars and cultural analysts."--Ron Burnett, President and Professor, Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design "Hamid Naficy's Accented Cinema offers a groundbreaking overview of theoretical and aesthetic debates concerning postcolonial, exilic, and diasporic forms of cinema. His analysis moves elegantly between high theory and sensitive 'close-up' readings of emblematic tropes in the work of key filmmakers in this field such as Kusturica, Guney, and Egoyan. The book is a major contribution to the study of transnational cultures and the cinematic production of cultural identities."--David Morley, Goldsmiths College, University of London "Hamid Naficy's magisterial account of an accented cinema proposes a timely reassessment of the ethics and aesthetics of the occidental center. In the details of language, perspective, and technique, the many significant films considered by Naficy invite us to a re-vision of our very understanding of cinema in the modern world."--Iain Chambers, Istituto Universitario Orientale

"Drawing on highly literary and media theory, Naficy places accented films in an evolving, multilayered dialogue with home and host countries."--Robert Avila, San Francisco