Session 3b: Representations of Intimacy in Contemporary Cinema
Chair: Lucy Butler

When it Comes to Love, it's Luck: The Representation of Contemporary Intimate Culture in Woody Allen's Celebrity (1998)
Beatriz Oria
Depto. de Filología Inglesa y Alemana, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain

One of the most remarkable aspects of romantic comedy is its capability to depict social changes and the state of contemporary intimate culture, helping define the changing relationship between the sexes through time. In this respect, Celebrity (1998), one of Woody Allen’s “light comedies” of the 1990s, constitutes an accurate reflection of its historical context in its depiction of the changes undergone by American intimate culture during the last decades of the 20th century, which include greater gender equality, the development of the pure relationship and the devaluation of marriage. Like most Allen’s films throughout his career, Celebrity deals with human relationships, and more specifically with the problems attached to the creation and upkeeping of heterosexual romantic relationships in the contemporary age. In spite of their “light” tone and trivial appearance, Allen’s films present an accurate reflection of the society in which they are inscribed; namely, an American, urban, educated, middle-upper class society; and sometimes have more to say about contemporary issues such as love, romance, commitment or marriage than many sociology books. Taking this into account, this essay proposes an analysis of Celebrity as a representation of contemporary discourses on love and sex.With this purpose, I will make use of Anthony Giddens, David Shumway and Steven Seidman’s theories, among others, in order to analyse Allen’s use of generic conventions in Celebrity in connection with the wider cultural panorama in which the film is inscribed, trying to determine to what extent the depiction of issues traditionally associated to his filmography, such as the search for self-identity and the state of contemporary intimate relationships between the sexes, has changed since these questions were first tackled by Allen in the seventies.

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Love beyond Ethnicity: the Problematic Representation of Intercultural Relationships in British and Indian Cinema
Elena Oliete
University of Zaragoza, Spain

Love and interpersonal relationships constitute a crucial factor in the construction of the individual’s social identity, as power relations imbued with issues of gender, class and ethnicity are always at stake. That is why the private intimacy of an intercultural love relationship becomes a public arena of both cultural intermingling and confrontation. On its part, cinema, as a cultural artefact, can be considered as an apparatus that both reflects and constructs the complex relationships between dominant and marginal groups within a community. In this sense, the analysis of the representation of interethnic love relationships on screen becomes an interesting tool that helps us understand how the hierarchical construction of social relationships works in a given society.
As heterosexual love relationships are always haunted by the feared phantom of miscegenation that may destabilise this hierarchical social order, the representation of them in cinema has been highly problematic. British cinema has tackled this issue in different kind of cinematographic productions, however it is in the films dealing with the imperial past that the clash between intimate and public matters reveals the complexity of the relationships between culture and power. Interestingly enough, the Indian cinematographic industry has also dealt with Anglo-Indian love relationships which mirror similar patterns of representation in their own system of dominant discourses.
Basing my study on the theories of identity and cultural studies by Hall, Bhabha, and Young among others, in this essay I will study the representation of intercultural love relationships in both British and Indian films dealing with the Raj. In so doing, I will try to demonstrate how the cinematographic representation of intercultural relationships problematises the hierarchical construction of dominant social discourses of the community they stand for

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Of Multiple Collisions and Interesting Conflicts. Making Sense of Personal and Interpersonal Relationships in Crash (Paul Haggis, 2004)
Olga Seco
University of Zaragoza, Spain

One of the most relevant and fruitful aspects within the field of film studies is the analysis of the complex relationship established between texts ―in this case, movies― and the cultural, historical and social context that conceives them. It is actually a twofold process in which film texts not only reproduce contemporary ideological discourses but, most importantly, construct and define such discourses in varied ways. Cinema thus helps spectators apprehend particular “realities” in particular ways, always mediated by the apparatus and filter of ideology.
The U.S. production Crash (Paul Haggis, 2004) constitutes one of those instances of fictionalisation of a never-ending reality, as is the spread and consolidation of racial hatred and violence among people. The film’s very title refers back to the actual crash of a dozen of characters in the city of Los Angeles, and its immediate consequences: as the protagonists bump into each other, cultural and ethnic differences come to the surface, leading in most cases to tragic denouements. Through the multiprotagonist technique, the film’s narrative tackles the problematisation of personal and interpersonal relationships in contemporary U.S., taking this time the racial/ethnic conflict as both point of departure and structuring element. The present paper will try to explore the ways in which this film constructs on screen those tensions between individuals and society, while giving account of their implications within the scope of power relations.