"My conviction and endeavour are dedicated to the hope that film studies in universities do not become a "registration office" administering the corpus imposed by the industry. This means that we have a duty (urgent to the point of becoming an emergency) to seek out and to comment on what I would call "free-films", that is to say, films made outside the industry for ethical, political, economic or purely aesthetic reasons. Nowadays it appears that fewer and fewer films are made by the industry, because more and more films are the same film under different titles--like those in the pornography market. There are fewer and fewer films to watch because there are more and more prints of the same movie on regular screens. ... And nowadays more and more "free films" are appearing because of the moral and political necessity to escape from economic censorship. This is why I will analyse in this paper three modest, unknown, and unique French experimental films."
--Nicole Brenez, Preamble to her paper "The Secrets of Movement: The Influence of Hong Kong Action Cinema upon the Contemporary French Avant-Garde," collected in Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema (eds. Meaghan Morris, Siu Leung Li and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu, Duke/Hong Kong UPs, 2005), which I picked up today and which looks to be a really impressive volume, including contributions from Brenez, Adrian Martin, Paul Willemen, Stephen Teo, and David Desser, among others.
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