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The locus amoenus boasts a long history in cultural representation as a motif affiliated with impossible unions. This article seeks to articulate it as an analytic category for contemporary queer cinema. It does so on the basis of a detailed analysis of Stephan Lacant's Freier Fall (Free Fall, 2013). Lacant's film presents two intertwined temporal structures that converge in the film's evocation of the locus amoenus. On the one hand, Free Fall depicts a heteronormative habitus into which its main character, Marc (Hanno Koffler), is socialized. Here, in the domain of chrononormativity (Freeman), the protagonist's past and present align and are intended to shape the future. On the other hand, the locus amoenus generates an alternate, queer temporal order for Marc: on meeting Kay (Max Riemelt), Marc derails. The regular liaison with Kay poses a threat to the hegemonic order and indexes a queer presentism competing with the regimented hetero temporality of his familial life. The analysis of these competing and intertwined temporal orders will show how the regular narrative recurrence of the locus amoenus in the film — next to being a driving force for the film's melodramatic sentimentality — also stimulates "viewerly" pleasure. This pleasure is immediately tethered to the rhythm of the motif's recurrence and the disabling of hegemonic pressures faced by the protagonist. However, the momentary recourse to queer pleasure afforded by the locus amoenus does not anticipate affirmative queer futures. As this article demonstrates, the locus amoenus advances a queer presentism that compromises liberatory potentials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the limits of sentimentalism in historical films, specifically those that center around World War II. The author analyzes the treatment of combat in the films "Saving Private Ryan," directed by Steven Spielberg, and "Inglourious Basterds," directed by Quentin Tarantino, and explores how each film utilizes emotion and moral value.

The article critiques the film "Avatar," directed by James Cameron, which explores the movements of contemporary sentimental cinema. It examines Cameron's arrangement of existing patterns of sensory-emotional movement while also adapting the form to contemporary technological and political conditions. It also explores the function of sentimentalism as a key rhetoric of movement by addressing the nineteenth-century popular culture in the U.S.

The article presents criticism of the film "The King and I," starring Deborah Kerr. The relationship between the film's theme of sentimental orientalism and the historical context of the Cold War is discussed. The article discusses the film's portrayal of American intervention in Asia as that of maternal benevolence.

The article offers the authors' insight on the works of filmmaker Eric Rohmer, characterizing whimsicality from his work. The authors define the property of whimsicality in Rohmer's films as an expression of innocence and love of innocence and discusses how it is expressed in Rohmer's films. It discusses several films that depict whimsicality and the expression of a sentiment from a film which include "LAmi de mon amie" in 1987, "Le Rayon vert" in 1986, and "Pauline à la plage" in 1983.

The article presents a discussion on the representation of Jewish vocalist Joseph Schmidt in two motion pictures, both of which were titled "Ein Lied Geht um die Welt." The author provides plot synopses for the two motion pictures, noting the presence of a clown motif, sentimentality, and the impact of national socialism on Schmidt's career in the films. The article also includes biographical information about Schmidt.

An essay is presented on the analysis on the transitioning of the film "So Close to Paradise" by Wang Xiaoshuai, a film director, due to the impact of art state censorship and commercialization in China. It explores the method of integrating social critiques and sentimentalism in the motion picture of Wang. Moreover, it cites that aesthetics and politics used in the film production of Wang has affected the filmmaking during the postsocialist China.

The article discusses the genre of Bollywood film in Mumbai, India. The author expresses that the production and circulation of the film bring the audience closer to the inner dynamics of the form, and its genre compensate as cultural capital due to a collective mourning from the audience. The author relates that most songs in the film are marked by a sad lyrical intensity though the endings are happy. Furthermore, the author stresses that Bollywood has no real location beyond its technology-realist image and there were no cultural capital that has been required in enacting. Moreover, the author states that Bollywood is marked by a grand narrative of sentimentality and melodrama that distinguishes the Bollywood consumer from the other Bollywood critical spectator.

This paper seeks to analyse the discourses of sentimentality precisely where they are employed for their most pejorative purposes in relation to the films of Steven Spielberg. Spielberg is all too often accused of not earning his endings, allowing implausible characterisation and plot outcome or awe-inspiring scenes of spectacle to yield superficial and insufficient resolutions to the profound social, historical, and psychological problems set out by his films. Analysing scenes from Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, it will be argued that Spielberg's work negotiates an aesthetics of both realism and traditional melodrama in order to both educate and emotionally move the spectator, with the latter purpose employed as a means of underlining the significance of the diegetic events. The critic who cries 'too sentimental' will be analysed in terms of the established and persistent critical discourses that are implicit in such a charge and challenged to seek alternatives to the rigid binaries of high and low art that such a term polices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Francesco Rosi's adaptation of Primo Levi's masterpiece of Holocaust narrative The Truce caused great controversy. Besides being charged with exaggerated sentimentalism and dramatisation, Rosi's film allegedly profaned the unrepresentability of the Shoah. These critiques negate the autonomous value of Rosi's cinematic creation by assuming a subordination of cinema to literature. As a matter of fact, by enacting the relationship between the Holocaust witness and the audience, both diegetically and extra-diegetically, Rosi's film appropriates the notion of testimony and makes it the underpinning theme of his film. Rosi's feature thereby offers a renewed interpretation of the figure of the Holocaust witness which was crucial to Levi throughout his life and work. As such, Rosi's The Truce should be assessed as an autonomous text that updates and re-launches the fundamental role of the historical witness represented by Levi and as a warning against revisionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper pays close attention to the serial and cinematic narratives produced in the British press of the teens in order to display films widening reach as a narrative mode mingling action, sentiment, and gender and to historicize debates about genre in film studies. Many filmmakers, publicists and journalists in the 1910s fully understood that melodrama was a radically hybrid form, yet they did not have the same semantic anxieties about juxtaposing multiple, non-hierarchical definitions of melodrama as later genre historians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the views of the authors regarding the film blanc movies of 1940's, which include "Beyond Tomorrow," "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" and "Between Two Worlds". According to the authors, out of the mentioned film, "Between Two Worlds" is perhaps the most literal about journeying in the twilight region between death and life, a condition of passage or state of mind that can be called transit as in transition or transitory. Both of them say that the so heavily moralized and sentimentalized film is mainly of humanitarian value which help pacify a public grief.