Tastes

Since the last thing we talked about in class was how Hollywood interacts with European and world cinema, I thought that it would be appropriate to share an experience I had on an "international" flight to Canada on my way home for Thanksgiving. My flight was on Air Canada where they have those mini TVs in the back of everyone's seat. I was bored and not entirely ready to engage in anything too studious since my flight had left the terminal at 8am, so I went searching through the movie selections.

There were lots and lots of recent Hollywood movies (none of which I really wanted to watch) and the Hollywood "classics" that they offered were all westerns or too obscure and unusual-sounding from their descriptions to pull me in. So, I went to the Canadian movies. Most of them were shorts under 20 minutes, which I found slightly disappointing. I did see one short called "Sohni Sapna" which was very art-film-esque and was based around an Indian fairy-tale in which a man and woman fall in love, but she is of too high a class to marry him and is married off to another man, but every evening she swims to him until her clay pot (flotation device) is replaced by an unfired one, so she drowns. The feature that I saw was called Small Town Murder Songs about a Mennonite community where a formerly violent police officer has to deal with his past after a young woman's body is found.

While not European, I felt like these films could easily fit under the category of "world cinema" since they fit very nicely into Elsaesser's description of world cinema on p. 509, "an essentially ethnographic outlook, even where the narratives are fictional and stories drawn from legends or folktales."

I don't know where you could watch these films other than on the Air Canada flights, but if you do stumble upon either of them, I recommend that you take a look.