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The article examines depictions of school shootings in motion pictures. Particular focus is given to how what the author describes as the "school shooting film" had its origins during the Cold War. Various films are discussed in the article including the 2003 film "Elephant," directed by Gus Van Sant, the 2011 film "We Need to Talk About Kevin," directed by Lynne Ramsay and the 2003 film "Home Room," directed by Paul F. Ryan.

The article examines various contemporary Korean films including the 2008 film "Modern Boy," directed by Ji-woo Jeong and the film "Private Eye," directed by Daemin Park. Particular focus is given to how these films examine Korea's Colonial past. Additional topics discussed include the film's exploration of Kyung-Sung (the city of Seoul, Korea, during the Japanese occupation, how Western modernity impacted Korea and the ways that architecture is conveyed in the film.

The article examines the box-office success of bromance films in the early-21st-century. Particular focus is given to how these films explore homosocial relationships and discourses of emerging adulthood that have developed in the fields of sociology and psychology. Additional topics discussed include how the term emerging adulthood refers to adults between the ages of 18 and 30 and insights on films including "Dead Man on Campus," directed by Alan Cohn, "The House Bunny," directed by Fred Wolf and "I Love You, Man," directed by John Hamburg.

The article presents criticism on the 2005 film "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," directed by and starring Tommy Lee Jones. Particular focus is given to how the film compares to other films in the Western genre including "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," directed by John Ford. Additional topics discussed include how the film utilizes a fragmented structure in its storytelling, insights on the film's plot and how the film alternates between English and Spanish.

This article focuses on two Malaysian nonsensical kung fu comedies, Nasi Lemak 2.0 (Namewee, 2011) and Petaling Street Warriors (James Lee, 2011), that might be regarded as quirky, slightly off-kilter Chinese genre films for their multilingual and multi-ethnic casting. But these films are culturally and geographically rooted in the specificities of contemporary Malaysian politics. Using Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia to enable a richer reading of these films that deploy an ostensibly 'Chinese' genre made universal by Stephen Chow Sing-Chi, I demonstrate how the 'imagined community' envisioned in these two films is hybrid, cosmopolitan and subverts racialized Malaysian identities. Such a reading serves to counter certain expectations of a monologic global style of kung fu film. By emphasizing such localized particularities and difference, these Malaysian Chinese films provide instances of 'accented cinema' that constantly problematize the homogenizing tendency of perceiving them as universal products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite achieving significant success at the box office, academic considerations of Peter Ho-sun Chan's 2005 musical, Perhaps Love, have mostly focused on it as an example of pan-Asian film production and marketing. This article, in contrast, offers a close reading that explores Perhaps Love's engagement with musical film genre conventions, principally the tension created between spectacle and integration, and places this in the context of other recent examples of the musical genre, especially Moulin Rouge! The metacinematic features of the film-within-a-film structure that Perhaps Love adopts, likewise, highlight performance and self-promotion/exposure that are also prominent characteristics of the musical genre. Finally, this article considers gender relations in the musical, noting Perhaps Love's modification of generic conventions in its refusal to consummate the romantic relationship as well as the differing fates of the male and female protagonists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article intends to draw attention to the strategic exploitations of cinematic soundscape as a powerful affective tool to reflect personal and social memory, loss and trauma in three exemplary films, Yangguang canlan de rizi/In the Heat of the Sun (Jiang, 1994), Zhantai/Platform (Jia, 2000), and Dongci bianwei/Conjugation (Tang, 2001). Taking a semiotic approach to film sound, I scrutinize how the post-1989 trauma makes its presence as an acoustic and psychologically-penetrating experience. While the June Fourth Crackdown remains a taboo in cultural representations in the PRC, Chinese filmmakers have responded to the psychological, ideological, and socio-economic impacts of the event in various creative ways. Cinematic soundscape, in particular, constitutes powerful acts of remembering, recognizing, and critically reflecting the unspeakable and the invisible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on a conference on film settings and the representation of space and place in film, held in Jena, Germany, from November 22-24, 2012. Topics of discussion included the concept of heterotopia in motion pictures of the 1970s and 2000s, the 1967 world's fair in Montréal, Québec, and the social implications of Internet lifecasting.

This article examines genre trends in the top 50 grossing films at the US box office each year from 1991 to 2010, focusing on the frequency and rank of different genres, the box office gross and release patterns of films in different genres, and the release profile of Hollywood studios. The results show a narrowing of the range of genres at the highest rankings, with fantasy/science fiction movies coming to dominate at the expense of comedy, crime/thriller and drama films. There are also marginal increases in action/adventure and family films. Analysis of the opening and total gross for each film reveals that different genres are characterized by different release patterns, and noted the importance of awards in contributing to the box office gross of drama films. With one notable exception, there is no evidence of genre specialization among film studios in contemporary Hollywood cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The form of San Diego County's cinematic landscape is shaped by processes of inscription, whereby particular representational techniques are brought to bear, but also by processes of incorporation, which can be understood as the off-camera decisions, tasks, and events that allow for filming to take place. One of the primary tasks involves selecting sites with a high level of production value while minimizing costs and fulfilling the needs of the script. The San Diego Film Commission (SDFC), which aids filmmakers in the tasks required to produce films, is a key entity in shaping this region's cinematic landscape. Where geography often focuses on how a film inscribes meaning and identity into its form, I show how the form of a region's cinematic landscape extends beyond a single filmic event to engage a multiplicity of representations, tasks, and practices. I use a mixed method approach, including spatial analysis to examine and map the inscripted form of San Diego's cinematic landscape. In-depth interviews and fieldwork were used to evaluate how a location's production value plays a key role in the formative process of incorporative tasks of an ever-changing landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the function of space-colonial space, space as disputed territory, gendered space, space and regional/cultural identity-as a fundamental aspect of filmic representations of Algeria. The European colonial project informed what Richard Dyer has called 'a sense of white historical mastery over time and space'. After independence, the configuration and policing of space in the Algerian nationalist imaginary in many ways replicated French colonial power, and left little room for the representation of the dispossessed-Berbers, women and youth. Neo-colonial Algerian cinema celebrated heroic Arabic masculinity and left the discontents of the liberation myth at the margins. This article will consider the ways in which dispossessed groups found representation in the spaces of Algerian cinema, both before and after the watershed moment of October 1988. In so doing it will analyse a range of films and make use of the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, Teshome Gabriel and Ranjana Khanna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of MATRIZes is the property of Universidade de Sao Paulo, Programa de Pos Graduacao em Ciencias da Comunicacao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses the 2003 Italian film "Segreti di Stato," and presents an interview with the director of the film, Paolo Benvenuti. Topics discussed include the subject of the film, the raid of the Portella della Ginestra mountain pass in 1947 by bandit Salvatore Giuliano in order to capture Sicilian communist Giacomo Li Causi; the background history on the origins of the making of the film, beginning in 1996; and the preliminary visit of Benvenuti to the Portella della Ginestra mountain pass.

This study of 113 reviews of the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain finds that although U.S. critics applauded it, the discourse underlying their reviews created three complementary but conflicting frames that direct attention away the movie's core theme of destructive rural homophobia. Our interrogation of press reviews revealed that reviewers framed the film as a “universal” love story while simultaneously encouraging audiences to read it as a “gay cowboy movie.” The tension between these competing frames—perhaps an artifact of reviewers' lack of language to articulate the queer issues privileged in the film's narratives beyond a heterosexual-homosexual dichotomy—results in disagreement about the “proper” interpretation of the film. The result, whether we see the film as “universal” or “peculiar,” is a paradoxical invisibility for queer identity, and yields a third frame in which homophobia is represented as a relic of the past. The tension among these contradictory frames illustrates how efforts in the mainstream press to privilege queerness struggle to exist within heteronormative space. Comparing the film's queer protagonists to culturally familiar heterosexual symbols such as Romeo and Juliet, or Western icons John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, ironically elevates queer visibility while simultaneously relegating queers and queer experiences to the margins. Rather than celebrating Brokeback Mountain for its challenges to heteroideology, press reviews ultimately worked to appropriate Annie Proulx's voice, diluting her story's intended condemnation of brutal and destructive homophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Espacio, Tiempo y Forma. Serie VII, Historia del Arte is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)