Close encounters with foreignness

ABSTRACT

This article opens with reflections upon the authors’ formative encounters with world cinema in Poland and the UK, and the importance of television in providing access to a wide variety of ‘foreign’ films. We propose that the process of viewing transnational films exemplifies this encounter with foreignness and that the value of studying transnational films is that their thematic focus upon encounters invites us to reflect upon questions of translation and misrecognition, difference and sameness. Through a close analysis of Cold War (Pawlikowski, 2017), the article discusses the way in which this film explores questions of cultural politics and national identity, migrant experience and exile, and the transnational circulation of texts. We argue that the film, which follows the experiences of a couple who move back and forth across the ‘iron curtain’ in post-WW2 Europe, offers a critique of nationalist ideologies and invites us to recognise ‘foreignness’ as a constitutive component of local and national cultures. Cold War, we suggest, is an exemplary transnational film in so far as it prompts us to recognise how even familiar cultures are repeatedly transected by difference.

KEYWORDS:

• foreignness
• encounters
• exile
• Pawlikowski
• border-crossing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. I (KM) explored this issue in depth in ‘Pedagogy of Anxiety’ (2010) in relation to a spectatorial witnessing of traumas in the context of Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelinčić’s 1996 documentary, Calling the Ghosts.

2. We discussed transnational cinema pedagogy in our introduction to Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy (2016).

3. As one review claims, Last Resort is an ‘un-British’ film (Gibbons 2001).

4. Translations from the Polish are mine (KM) as the DVD released in October 2018 for the Polish market lacks English subtitles.

5. Twockers is a slang term for car thieves, derived from the UK legal acronym: TWOC, ‘taking without the owner’s consent.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bruce Bennett

Bruce Bennett is Senior lecturer in Film Studies at Lancaster University. He is the author of The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom: Borders, Intimacy, Terror (Wallflower, 2014) and Cycling and Cinema(Goldsmiths, 2019). He is co-editor of Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories and Practices(Routledge, 2008), and, with Katarzyna Marciniak, the collection, Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy(Routledge, 2016) and a special issue of the journal Transnational Cinemasin 2018. He has published articles and book chapters on topics

Katarzyna Marciniak

Katarzyna Marciniak is Professor of Transnational Studies in the English Department at Ohio University. She is the author of Alienhood: Citizenship, Exile, and the Logic of Difference(University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and Streets of Crocodiles: Photography, Media, and Postsocialist Landscapes in Poland(Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2010), co-editor of Transnational Feminism in Film and Media(Palgrave, 2007), Protesting Citizenship: Migrant Activisms(Routledge, 2014), and Immigrant Protest: Politics, Aesthetics, and Everyday Dissent(SUNY Press, 2014). With Bruce Bennett, she co-edited Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy(Routledge, 2016) and a special issue of Transnational Cinemas on ‘Aporias of Foreignness.’ She is also Series Editor of Global Cinema(Palgrave).