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The Covid-19 pandemic posed fundamental challenges for the cinema industry, encouraging potentially lasting changes in the ways films were delivered to and consumed by audiences. In light of this, this article evaluates the impact of an earlier pandemic, the waves of influenza that affected the United Kingdom in 1918–1919. The flu struck as cinema was establishing itself as a distinct entertainment form, although still subject to criticism for its perceived effects on the moral and physical health of those attending. Consequently, the exhibition of film became a prime focus of ameliorative action, many health professionals and local councillors seeing it as a prime vehicle for the transmission of disease. For all that, the impact of any regulations proved to be uneven: attention centred primarily on the threat to children and servicemen in uniform, and what restrictions were imposed proved highly localised, reflecting systems of health administration inherited from the previous century. Finally, compared to experiences elsewhere, the duration of controls proved brief. An assessment of the flu's impact is offered for both the short term, reflected in the finances of individual businesses and aggregated tax returns, and the longer term, in challenging or reinforcing perceptions of cinema's social worth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Hong Kong filmmakers, co-productions with mainland China are transborder assemblages characterized by increasing territorialization and coding that impart to them a palpable crisis of losing locality. However, this crisis does not necessarily mean the loss of a critical perspective. Johnnie To's three co-produced action films demonstrate his struggles to evade or even take advantage of the disadvantageous status of dislocality and work under restricted creative conditions to carve out a space for critical expressions. Drug War not only brings to the screen the arbitrary nature of state sovereignty by telling the story of a cross-border crime—one in which narrative doubling plays a key role—but also offers reflections on Chinese urbanization in its visual composition, which takes the style of a kind of suburban realism. Three and Chasing Dream represent To's latest efforts to develop an aesthetics of the studio defined by a tendency toward abstraction such that he uses his dislocality as a basis for a critical perspective on Hong Kong society and, especially, contemporary Chinese neoliberalism. Intertextual allusions, whether large-scale plot structures and visual styles or small-scale features of characterization and dialogue, are pervasive in To's co-productions. These allusions can and should, I argue, be drawn into the new context of To's transborder assemblages for a better understanding of his work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores toxic masculinity in Indian cinema through an analysis of Arjun Reddy. It examines how film perpetuates patriarchal norms and reinforces gender inequality. By examining the portrayal of the protagonist and society's reactions, it reveals the impact of film representations on real-life attitudes. The study highlights the need for alternative narratives that challenge traditional gender norms and promote diversity in masculinity. It advocates a critical analysis of film discourse to promote a more inclusive portrayal of gender identities in Indian cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines some of the social contexts underlying the Supreme Court’s decision in the seminal case of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923). Since the Court’s decision in that case established that whiteness in the U.S. was based on ‘common’ sense, this essay examines how this ‘common’ sense was created in the public sphere. This essay presents arguments on how film, and in particular, the 1915 film Birth of a Nation, helped cement popular understandings of whiteness. Through these arguments, this essay provides further context to some of the social and political underpinnings of the Thind case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Steven Spielberg's 1997 film Amistad, which depicts a slave rebellion and mutiny on a Cuban slave ship in 1839, as a lens through which to view the origins of the Black Legend. The Black Legend emerged in 1830s in the U.S. to depict Latin American instability as the result of Spanish oppression, violence, cultural inferiority and Catholicism. The narrative served to benefit the ideology of white supremacy and the myth of American (read U.S.) "exceptionalism" by drawing global attention away from the maintenance of slavery in the U.S. and highlighting Spanish and Cuban involvement in the clandestine slave trade in the nineteenth century. The article analyzes a variety of secondary and primary sources that place blackness at the center of the construction of the Black Legend, from contemporary accounts of the Amistad revolt to subsequent references to blackness in histories of U.S.-Latin American relations in the 1830s and 1840s. The article shows how Spielberg inserts Christianity as a force for racial equality and holds up the judicial branch of the U.S. government as a model for Latin America to follow, echoing the inherent contradictions of the Black Legend in the late twentieth century. Ultimately, the article argues that U.S. history must be examined in relation to the history of Latin America, and narratives of blackness in the Atlantic world shaped national mythos and identities in similar ways. Examining the African Diaspora in the Americas, as well as the subsequent national narratives of race and national identities, helps to deconstruct narratives of exceptionalism and reveal political motivations and contradictions in the Black Legend narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the efforts to promote the serious study of Arab cinema and film scholarship at the Insaniyyat Forum 2022 in Tunisia. The forum included eight panels on various topics related to Arab cinema, such as critiques of orientalism, refugee and migration cinema, and queer Arab film theory. The article also highlights five papers from the forum that challenge prevailing understandings of Arab cinema, including discussions on language, US cultural hegemony, cultural diplomacy, queer theory, and displacement in Tunisian film. The authors hope that these articles will contribute to a more vibrant and inclusive discussion of Arab cinema and its dilemmas. [Extracted from the article]

Commonly associated with the cinema of Béla Tarr and Gus Van Sant, walking on screen has received relatively little attention from researchers despite the ongoing popularity of wayfaring films and videos. Unsurprisingly, even less is known about how walking functions in experimental film and video or responds to avant-garde storytelling. To fill this gap, I take a phenomenological stance on walking to discuss the pedestrian's embodied experience in a few stylistically distinct works: Crowdog (Vanessa Renwick, 1984/1998), A Walk (Jonas Mekas, 1990), Ordinary Matter (Hollis Frampton, 1972), and Death Songs & Car Bombs (Brendan and Jeremy Smyth, 2013). Despite having different formats and narrative foci, which, respectively, explore walking in a structural-diaristic framework and as a trance state or turn it into a social commentary on female liberation and the culture clash, all of these films echo the phenomenological turn in film studies, demonstrating how pedestrians relate to the multisensorial, kinaesthetic practice and space of walking. Compared to the itinerant mode of art cinema, experimental film and video usually challenge the representational nature of walking and present it as a more complex, disorientating, and unconventional experience, linking the sensation of walking to social mobility, personal freedom, feminism, or place and urban memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to redeem the idea that virtual reality (VR) might serve to foster empathy by rethinking both the notion of empathy and the ways contemporary VR films have attempted to generate it. Specifically, this paper considers two forms of embodiment—being and being with—in order to highlight some of the shortcomings of the 'empathy machine' discourse. In doing so, I also offer an alternative analogy: a tool for empathy, rather than a machine. Finally, an analysis of two key VR productions that invite users to be with characters—rather than putting users 'in the shoes' of a character—allows me to demonstrate how a more productive path towards empathy in VR might instead lay in experiences that create space—or 'make room'—for the work of empathy to be undertaken by individuals who know and want to use VR as a tool, rather than as an end in itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metaphor transcends its role as mere embellishment and emerges as a pivotal process within both language and cognition. This article ventures into uncharted territory within film studies by exploring the potential application of Max Black's interactional theory of metaphor and cognitive metaphor theory to analyze metaphor in film language. This perspective, though hitherto unexplored in film studies, proves indispensable for dissecting complex metaphorical structures within film texts and offers a precise framework for understanding associative language in film. Initially, this study delves into the description of the metaphorical process as delineated by interaction and cognitive metaphor theories, applying them to the analysis of film texts. Special emphasis is placed on elucidating how ideology intricately intertwines with the construction and reception of both conventional and non-conventional metaphors. In the article the final segment, meticulous analyses of Roland Emmerich's "2012" is conducted, spotlighting the interplay of structuring, personification, and displacement metaphors in shaping the ideological discourses embedded within the films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a new paradigm, Sino-American film, that is centered on Chinese language in American films. Sino-American films comprise two generations. The First Generation includes Pushing Hands (1993), Take Out (2004), and Saving Face (2004) and is characterized by independent production, limited distribution, and creation during a period when Asian Americans were rarely represented on film. The Second Generation includes The Farewell (2019), Tigertail (2019), Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings (2021), and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) and is characterized by a Hollywood production model, widespread distribution across streaming services, and creation during a period of growing Asian American cultural representation. Sino-American films negotiate both Chinese-language film and Hollywood by focusing on overlooked characters— Chinese-language-speaking Americans. This article contributes to conversations in Chinese film studies and Asian American studies by bringing Asian American film into exchanges with three Chinese film studies paradigms: transnational cinema, Chinese-language film, and Sinophone film. This cross pollination uncovers new areas for further study. Sino-American film demonstrates the importance of Sino-American language, ethnicity, and culture within the subsuming category of Asian American film. Furthermore, pairing Sino-American films with Chinese film studies uncovers a new category of Chinese-language film outside assumed contexts and paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Expressionism is often regarded as the first purely American art movement and the first to gain mass cultural recognition. Prior to the 1940s, the consideration and appreciation of abstract art belonged to a certain intellectual elite, but the intimidating complexity of Abstract Expressionism, the daring allure of its artists, and the particularities of mid-century American culture converged to transform the avant-garde into consumer spectacle. This shift represented, and was symptomatic of, a larger societal rearrangement: information and commodity superseded industrialized labor as the core of American culture. Jackson Pollock, America's first avant-garde superstar, stood at the center of this shift, at once representing both active creative labor and the commodification of the idea of that labor. Hans Namuth's photographs and films of Pollock placed him and his art firmly in the realm of consumable popular spectacle, underlying further connections to Hollywood film and prominent print media. This article examines how Pollock became a paradigmatic figure in the avant-garde's proliferation into mass culture and asserts that mass culture did not simply subsume the avant-garde. Rather, the two realms engaged in a mutual construction that pushed the avant-garde across numerous social boundaries. The artistic, critical, and popular receptions that grew out of this convergence erased distinctions between 'high' and 'low' culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, the notion of "the people behind the scenes" is used to build a bridge between the cognitive framework of film studies and migration research to describe those who are discursively categorized as "illegal" or "irregular" migrants and whose lives are exploited in the workforce and at risk in "Fortress Europe". As a natural southern border of the Schengen area, the Mediterranean region sometimes offers fleeting encounters between "illegal" migrants excluded by this border regime and foreign travellers courted by the tourism industry. These ephemeral juxtapositions of people with contrasting political and economic stakes create what we call "visual clashes", gathering in one frame antithetical human lived experiences of this maritime area. Drawing on Nicholas Mirzoeff's concept of the "right to look", which the visual culture theorist and activist uses as a bulwark against a dominant Western regime of visuality, this essay analyses a series of visual texts that bear witness to unwanted encounters by this dominant regime's visual system of classification and separation. The essay examines two press photographs and television images alongside Elleke Boehmer's short story "Synthetic Orange", and analyses a cartographic experiment and a film; each case opposes the authority of Western visuality and makes a claim for the autonomy of the right to look. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article places Toni Cade Bambara at the center of a history of Black feminist culture and its radical politics of repair through a close reading of Bambara's and Louis Massiah's film treatment Come as You Are. In its depiction of a group of poor, unhoused Philadelphians taking over a luxury apartment building for a live-in, Come as You Are posits taking over and living-in as practices of refusal of the state care offered through social workers, the housing authority, welfare agencies, and the police. Bambara's cinematic work points to Black feminist representations of state violence and contra-state forms of repair that complicate how feminist theory encounters the problem of reparative appeal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the question of the representability of economy and economics in audiovisual media, developments on the financial markets have often been discussed as a depiction problem. The abstractness and complexity of economic interrelations seem to defy classical modes of storytelling and dramatization. Nevertheless, public opinion about economic changes and dependencies crucially relies on audiovisual media. But how can the public communicate in images, sounds, and words about forces that are out of sight and out of reach, and can supposedly only be adequately grasped by experts? In a case study on audiovisual images of the global financial crisis (2007–), this paper tracks and analyzes a recurring motif: the staging of expert knowledge as close‐ups of expressive faces vis‐à‐vis computer screens in television news, documentaries, as well as feature films. It draws on the use of digital tools for corpus exploration (reverse image search) and the visualization of video annotations. By relating and comparing different staging strategies by which these "broker faces" become embodiments of turbulent market dynamics, the paper proposes to not regard them as repeated instantiations of the same metaphor, but as a developing web of cinematic metaphors. Different perspectives (news of market developments or historical accounts of crisis developments) and affective stances toward the global financial crisis are expressed in these variations of the face‐screen constellation. The paper thus presents a selection of different appearances of "broker faces" as a medium for an audiovisual discourse of the global financial crisis. A concluding analysis of a scene from Margin Call focuses on its specific intertwining of expert and screen as an ambivalent movement figuration of staging insight. Between the feeling of discovery (of a potential future threat) and the sense of being haunted (by a menacing force), the film stages the emergence of a "broker face" in an atmospheric tension between suspense and melancholy. We argue that the film thereby reframes the motif and poses questions of agency, temporality, and expert knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this analysis, the author analyzes Jindřich Polák's 1977 sf comedy Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea and its implications regarding time travel, ideology, and repetition. In exploring the paradoxes present in time-travel fiction, the article finds there exists a concurrent trauma for the individuals involved, stemming primarily from the splitting-then-reintegrating of the self in the wake of the expedition. The film – centering around a group of former Nazis, whose plan is practically thwarted through a set of comically tragic circumstances regarding the aircraft's pilot – offers a humorous approach to totalitarian discourse, pointing out the fallibility of said institutions and showing the pitfalls of adherence to Nazi ideology. The author draws on modern instances of fascist ideology and connects them to the comedic situations presented in Polák's film, putting forth a critical approach to the identification of Nazi modernism as comprised solely of loss and lack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a new approach for understanding the sense of place in film, based on the findings of a practice-based case study. With a background in both television production and heritage interpretation, I approached the production of a short film for a heritage site as an opportunity to investigate filmic approaches to interpreting and analysing a sense place by using the location-linked theories of space and place from philosophy and human geography and the understanding of setting and landscape from film studies. The article contributes to the ongoing discussion around the place at a time when digital technologies are increasingly altering definitions of spatiality and one’s sense of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chris Vanderwees provides a brief review of Richard C. Ledes's film, Adieu Lacan, the story of a young woman's struggle to understand and come to terms with her origins through psychoanalysis. Following this review, Vanderwees interviews Ledes about the making of the film, the depiction of Lacan's clinical practice, and some of the decisions regarding representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this editorial, the editors introduce the 12.2 volume of The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture. The dynamic and interdisciplinary nature of the field is discussed with reference to the collection of articles within the volume, highlighting the malleability of popular culture in all its transdisciplinary forms. The editors provide a summary of the seven articles included in the volume, which collectively represent diverse critical discussions of the field across sociopolitical, socioeconomic and sociocultural artistic realms. The articles examine the evolving realms of the monstrous, the mythic, the heroic and the historical through various mediums like television, film, characters and historical moments. The editors then conclude by offering a summary of the three book reviews included in the volume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The examination of still/motion has been a longstanding subject within the realm of art history, but its significance has gained greater prominence in the field of film studies since the 1970s. However, it appears that the focus has predominantly been on the aspect of motion, overshadowing the exploration of stillness. This paper examines Gregory Crewdson's use of stillness to create narrative and emotional effects in his photography, specifically in the series An Eclipse of Moths. Drawing on theories of still/motion and intermediality, and situating his work within the broader context of contemporary photography, the paper demonstrates how Crewdson's work reflects and contributes to debates and trends within the medium. Crewdson's static lens captures moments of emotional and psychological intensity, offering a remarkable exploration of the power and complexities of photography in narrating. First, this paper delves into how Crewdson blurs the boundaries between photography and cinema, and the consequent impact on the narrative power of his photographs. Second, it explores the role of cinematic techniques, such as lighting, composition, and staging, in enhancing the narrative quality of Crewdson's photographic works. Finally, it examines how Gregory Crewdson employs stillness and stasis to convey narrative depth and evoke emotional resonance in his photography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Film Quarterly / Kwartalnik Filmowy is the property of Kwartalnik Filmowy 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.)

Documentaries are a medium for capturing the reality of people by constructing their everyday life. They are narratives told using sound and moving pictures that highlight the world's wonder, complexity, and contradictions. These moving photographs visually express the life of people, the hardships and the events revolving around them. Non-fiction films dramatise factual information to the readers instead of presenting creatively, and are compelling, informative and appreciated as they represent the events without moulding them. Documentaries attempt to enlighten, educate, and raise awareness by utilising interviews, archive material, reenactments, and narration. They also present a non-fictional perspective that frequently challenges and broadens viewers' perception of the world. The documentaries epitomise the social, cultural and economic facets by portraying the lives of people living in different parts of the world. The present paper studies how cities are represented through documentaries and analyses non-fiction films as a platform for encapsulating the authenticity of the select cities. The analysis includes documentaries Calcutta (1969) by Louis Malle, Bombay Our City by Anand Patwardhan and Dilli by Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh. The study attempts to understand the economic disparity, social problems and other struggles in the lives of people living in cities through documentaries made on Indian metropolitan cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The appeal to the Russian film studies heritage is conditioned by the need to find solutions in the construct of actual contemporary problems, which today have the status of open problems. In this correlation, our research interest is aimed at appealing to scientific heritage of one of the famous Soviet and Russian film expert V.E. Baskakov (1921–1999) in configuration of his theoretical publications on the pages of Cinema Art journal. The purpose of our study is to carry out a holistic retrospective analysis of V.E. Baskakov’s film studies views presented in his theoretical works in Cinema Art journal (1975–1999). Research material: texts of V.E. Baskakov’s theoretical film studies publications in Cinema Art journal. Research methods: content analysis, comparative-historical analysis, textual, hermeneutical method of understanding and interpretation of the text, theoretical methods: analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction. The basic conceptual foundation of V.E. Baskakov’s research was a multifaceted analysis of the problems of methodological knowledge in Russian film studies. The theoretical works of the film expert outlined the following topics: the state and development of Western cinematography, the specifics of its study in the context of ideological and political, as well as social dogmas of the Soviet period; the problems of Soviet cinematography, the genre uniqueness of expressive means; the importance of studying the history of world cinematography in the focus of creation of a film work; the analysis of filmmakers’ creativity works; the relationships during the film production with the history and national culture; the development of Soviet and foreign cinematography theories influencing the cinema artists. As a result of the content-analytical discourse of V.E. Baskakov’s film studies positions presented in his theoretical articles in Cinema Art journal, several conclusions can be drawn: - in his theoretical articles, V.E. Baskakov paid special attention to the study of the main approaches and methods of film studies analysis, trying to trace their modification in the context of political, social, and cultural construct; - V.E. Baskakov’s theoretical approaches focused more on analyzing the problems of cinematographic methodology, genre specificity, and expressive means within the study of film phenomena; - the content of some V.E. Baskakov’s articles traces the problems associated with the study of the most important phenomena in the history and theory of foreign film studies; - the works of this film expert have clear tendency to reflect the ideology of the ruling Communist Party and orientation towards the study of the interrelations and influence of political and socio-cultural transformations on the development of cinematography; - V.E. Baskakov’s theoretical works are characterized by the ideological analysis of historical events and trends that shaped the Soviet cinematography in different time periods and reflection of foreign cinematography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"André Bazin on Adaptation: Cinema's Literary Imagination" is a collection of essays by film critic André Bazin, translated into English for the first time. The book explores Bazin's theories and thoughts on film adaptation, with a focus on both general issues and specific case studies. Editor Dudley Andrew argues that Bazin should be considered the father of modern adaptation studies. While the collection lacks engagement with contemporary adaptation scholarship, it provides valuable insights for scholars interested in film adaptation, film theory, and film history. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the ways in which pastiche, the past, and national iden- tity are portrayed and navigated in the concluding film of Edgar Wright’s The Cornetto Trilogy: The World’s End (2013). By focusing on the relationship between the use of the past and pastiche, it will be considered how they are employed to negotiate the notion of national identity. Through its comedic strategies and tropes, the film rebels against a homogenised version of Englishness based on mythical assumptions of the past and striving toward perfection. The dissection of the cinematic structure of pastiche will reveal a temporal framework questioning contemporary narratives of national identity. Moreover, the exploration of nostalgia and the past as places of retreat, as well as pastiche as a device of comedic criticism, enable Wright to offer a portrait of Englishness as struggling to recover its identity amidst a turbulent and apocalyptic time.

A transnational film studies and mixed race studies analysis comparing French and American cinemas, which have had significant international exposure and have constantly strengthened exchanges between their national talents.

Mobilizing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of "becoming-revolutionary," this article aims to address the relative absence of film studies scholarship on Iranian diasporic women's cinema and transnational Iranian poetics of resistance. More specifically, it examines the role of female agency during Iran's 2009 Green Movement in Sepideh Farsi's, arguing that Farsi's portrayal of a young Iranian woman's progressive politics and sexual emancipation foregrounds connections between Iranian national and diasporic politics and poetics of female resistance. Formally, the film interweaves videos of the Green Movement made by anonymous protesters with intimate fictional narrative, allowing the two modes of storytelling to coalesce in their use of politicized bodies resisting the hegemonic ideological discourses of the state. I argue that the film's textual hybridity emphasizes the role of "raw" protesters' footage as an example of "minor" video, in the Deleuzian-Guattarian sense, in an effort to encompass and preserve the fragmented yet assertive voices of the Iranian civil rights movement and struggle for democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Estudios de Teoría Literaria is the property of Estudios de Teoria Literaria 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.)

As the imaginary deadline or vanishing point of the turn of millennium was drawing ever closer, its associated anxieties and apocalyptic woes offered a fertile breeding ground for suspense, horror, and the fantastic to experience a resurgence in Western cinemas. Roman Polanski's fifteenth feature film The Ninth Gate, released in 1999, can be read among the various auteur-helmed evidences of such a trend, but also as a self-conscious exercise in the kind of trans-European filmmaking being promoted at the time within the continent, one in which Polanski himself had, willingly or not, already been cutting his teeth for almost two decades after his spiteful return from the US and Hollywood in the late 1970s. On the back of a border-crossing journey in search for three demonic books, this essay will argue, The Ninth Gate manages to discursively interlace both facets. The result, by way of an intermedial concern with the world of literature, a generic involvement with the supernatural, and a meticulous mobilization of cinematic space, location shooting and architecture, is a cynical, self-deprecating reflection on the precarious state of Europe at the time, caught between the memories of glorious but long-fading splendor and a crippling uncertainty about its future and place in an increasingly globalized world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I explore the pasts and futures of teaching and researching classical Hollywood cinema in feminist media studies. After outlining some of the problems associated with Laura Mulvey’s influential work on the male gaze, I consider subsequent feminist responses to Mulvey’s work. In particular, I focus on the attempts by post-Mulvey feminist film scholars to reject in their critical practice Mulvey’s conclusion that classical Hollywood cinema is anathema to feminist progress vis-à-vis media representations of women while accepting the theoretical premise that classical Hollywood cinema is inherently misogynistic and patriarchally corrupt at its core. On this point, I discuss the controversial clashes between male and female scholars over this disjunction between theory and criticism. With reference to the films of Otto Preminger, I demonstrate the probative value of an inclusive feminist media studies praxis in which, on the one hand, theory informs rather than distorts criticism, and, on the other hand, male and female scholars are able to assess the contributions—past, present, and future—of men to the project of feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Framed by Guillermo del Toro as "a love letter to the cinema," the academy award-winning feature The Shape of Water (2017) speaks to one of the core debates in film studies: film's status as a "universal language." Paradoxically both propagating and critiquing this idea of universality, a vast knowledge of film history, cinematic techniques, and a desire to create what the director calls a "cinematic Esperanto"—or a globally legible film tradition—informs a film that celebrates the multiplicity of "languages" possible in film as a medium. Reading The Shape of Water as a series of films-within-films—fantasy within realism, black-and-white within color, and a silent film within a "talkie"—I reveal the myriad communicative forms accessible within cinema as a visual, temporal, and mobile medium. The foregrounding of "a speaking silence" in the interactions between the mute Elisa and the Amphibian Man, a pre-linguistic, but communicative, sea creature, acts as a set piece—a silent film within the larger film proper—that celebrates the universal language of gesture, while the situation of this nested narrative within a larger film tradition of "talkies" speaks to the ultimate displacement of the fantasy of universality by the adoption of the voice in film. Through a close attention to film stills, the formal composition of scenes, and the sparse, multilingual dialogue, I examine The Shape of Water's critique of a monolingual "universal" filmic language and celebration of the radical multilingualism possible in the cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on methods by which editors shape character in editing. Given that editors' choices of shot, take, and timing augment and vary actors' performances and directors' instructions, and that these choices shape the audience perception of film characters, we ask: what components of editors' expertise are activated in shaping material to create characters that viewers can invest in emotionally? Editors' expertise is generally referred to as 'intuitive', which is a shorthand for knowledge and experience that informs decision making at a pre-conscious level. This article argues that 'intuitive' is not incorrect, however, drawing on the authors' extensive editing practice and building on existing editing theory as well as ideas from science and film studies, we seek more specific identification and articulation of editors' expertise. This article offers an original editing taxonomy in relation to editing character. The taxonomy includes explicit articulations of kinaesthetic empathy and implicit knowledge such as laws of physics, reflex reactions, and cultural conditioning. Awareness of these pervasive but often unrecognised forms of knowledge, we argue, can enhance editors' ability to develop multifaceted characters through editing, clarify discussions between collaborators, and even enhance understanding of the art of editing more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graham Harman, an American contemporary philosopher, is the founder of object-oriented ontology (OOO). In his 2016 book, Immaterialism, he offeres a theoretical framework for studying social phenomena using OOO. According to this theory, the traditional distinction between subject and object is eliminated in favor of a more realistic vision, in which everything from human beings to animals and arti- ficial entities are 'objects' as far as they have similar stages of living: birth, maturity, decadence, and death. We tried to examine this theoretical framework in film studies by taking the film Dance with Me!, (2019, Persian: "Jahan, ba man beraghs!") as a study case. The methodology of this article is a description-analysis based on observations and library resources. In this paper, we try to sketch out how the film's protagonist, Jahan, as an object in his last stage of living, undergoes! actions and reactions to other objects (characters, animals, properties, etc.) to make sense of his life as a symbiosis.Immaterialism provides a framework to analyze things as they are, as well as their effects on other things. Unlike other theoretical frameworks used in film studies, such as Lacanian psychoanalysis, OOO's main goal is that the critic does not need to find events, accidents, or actions in the films to apply prior knowledge to them. In other words, while other methodologies try to confirm their own limits by abstracting them from the narrative, immaterialism lets audiences see what is deliberately conveyed in the narrative, even if it does not contribute to or amount to the level of dialectical progress of the narration. Dance with Me!, unlike "art movies" that are produced for global or western audiences, is a film that targets local cinemagoers in Iran. Its director, Soroush Sehat (1965), has a long experience in scriptwriting, direction, and acting in Iranian TV and cinema. In this paper, we take the characters as objects that interact in order to create momentum in the narration. Jahan (a Persian name meaning 'world', dropped out of the film's English name), is regarded as a thing at its last stage of life that has some important interactions with other things, from his family and friends to his domestic animals and properties. But, as its name suggests, the film is not simply a biographical drama about someone dying but instead it is trying to portray an improvised cinematic dance. Dormant objects, which according to immaterialism are things present before any interaction with other things, are considered in this paper to have great importance. Instead of trying to prove something or confirm some psychoanalytic realities, here we simply try to address dormant things that may have or not have obvious effects on the plot or the protagonist's consciousness but make a difference, provoke curiosity, and provide a spot in which metaphor becomes possible. So, while we care about what happens and how the narration goes on, we also have an eye on what remains dormant and escapes from the normative restrictions of cinematic narration in Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the lone outlier associated with the cannibal boom of European exploitation films in the 1970s and 1980s – with the main point of diversion being that Sisworo Gautama Putra's film is an Indonesian production rather than the typical Italian fare. Being an Asian film that emulates the traditionally European style of cannibal film, Primitives opens a larger discussion about the role of the theoretical savage and the implications thereof, put in place by ghosts of imperialism and cinematic mimicry. The author explores these concepts with psychoanalytic input, opting to unpack the rationality behind an Indonesian film following the same imperialist notions utilized by the preceding Italian directors, which ultimately results in a subdivision of the artificial–natural dichotomy: the meta-natural. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores different approaches to the study of audiovisual metaphor: the semiotic and linguistic perspectives and the transition from the semantic to the pragmatic one, which has seen the convergence between film studies and Cognitive Metaphor Theory (CMT). Starting from this scenario, a specific case study will be proposed: the serial fiction Stranger things (Netflix, 2016). The series works on the encyclopedic stratification of one of the most consolidated metaphorical relationships in the repertoire of the genre, especially since the 1980s: the (reciprocal) substitution between the semantic plane of adolescence and that of otherness and the supernatural verging on horror. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a cultural analysis of Diane Keaton's later career that teases out the age/gender interactions of the roles she has played past her mid-fifties. Drawing on both age and gender theories, our analysis of Keaton's late-life characterizations explains the actor's transformation into an icon of a positive and desirable form of female aging. At the same time, it observes the normative aspects of gendered old age that are also perpetuated through Keaton's late-life representations of aging femininity, and which troublingly reiterate Hollywood's normative white heterosexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fiction film remains the privileged focus of text-oriented film studies despite the growing interest in other film forms. Fiction as a concept also organizes the field's key taxonomy – fiction v. nonfiction – yet little work has been devoted to the notion of fiction itself. The work that does exist is either textualist or spectator centred. The article argues that this leads to significant issues. First, categorization of numerous films diverges significantly from the ordinary understanding of the fiction/nonfiction divide. Second, such categorization may lead to both misunderstanding of audience experience and ethical problems alike. Third, theoretical commitments revolving around indexicality although partially applicable to documentary cannot shed light on fiction contrary to numerous attempts to do so. Fourth, one of discipline's key assumptions – fiction films change real-life beliefs – demands a theory of the relationship between fiction and belief that is currently absent in film studies. Closer scrutiny of the notion of fiction, the article argues, is necessary to dispel these issues. Specifically, the article advocates for 1) non-textualist accounts of fiction and 2) a theory of the relationship of fiction to imagination and belief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank (2009) through Lauren Berlant's conceptualisation of impasse and the affective rhythms of survival, which Berlant develops in their reflections on the cinema of precarity. This framework, I contend, has the potential to open up new avenues of inquiry within the study of Arnold's work, usually discussed in relation to either British (social) realist cinema or the phenomenological representations of female experience. Situating Fish Tank within the broader framework of the cinema of precarity helps articulate a position from which to problematise the overemphasis on movement in critical writings on the film – which, as I will discuss, is also predominant in both affect theory and film phenomenology. I argue that with its simultaneous focus on movement and impasse, realised through framing and composition of the shot, camera movement, and repetition of visual tropes that convey confinement, Fish Tank is able to capture and aesthetically re-enact the impact of neoliberalism, while simultaneously paying attention to class and gendered styles of bodily adjustment to crisis ordinariness. I conclude that Berlant's critical apparatus illuminates the formal and affective complexity of Fish Tank in new ways, and creates space to address larger questions of affect, aesthetics, and the profilmic body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-examines Rod Serling's career as he transitioned from writing live anthology teleplays to his famous series, The Twilight Zone (1959–1964), in service of investigating the changing definitions of authorship as the television industry changed. It does so in order to show that the techniques many critics agree Serling used to subvert corporate sponsors may have been rooted in pragmatic compromise engendered by the need to remain working within the shifting world of TV. These techniques include using science fiction and fantasy on television and becoming a writer-producer and the face of The Twilight Zone. Serling's transition to science fiction and fantasy, this article argues, could also be seen as a retreat from early TV's dominant mode of storytelling: social realism. His becoming the face of The Twilight Zone may have been a way to assuage producers' fears in supporting another anthology series without a consistent cast. This leads to the conflation of Serling the writer with Serling the salesman. Ultimately, these compromises result in the blurring of the line between commercial and series, as well as between writer and salesman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Werner Herzog avers that cinema reveals a truth beyond mere fact, a truth he calls 'ecstatic truth'. The film that offers the clearest view of this conception, the mockumentary Incident at Loch Ness (2004), remains understudied and obscure. In Incident, Herzog plays a fictionalized version of himself who is making a documentary about the Loch Ness monster. This fictional version of Herzog shares the real Herzog's filmmaking philosophy, a philosophy Incident lays bare for study: namely, Incident reveals how the pursuit of ecstatic truth takes us to the limits of human understanding. While Incident helps us explore the concept of ecstatic truth, I argue it also helps us understand much of Herzog's oeuvre, including 2005's Grizzly Man. In this paper, therefore, I analyze ecstatic truth as presented in Incident and apply that understanding to Grizzly Man and its controversial tape scene. Examining said scene through the lens of the ecstatic truth will, I argue, not only garner us fuller insight into Herzog's films, but will also shed light on the effects of Herzog's controversial choice to not play the tape of Timothy Treadwell's death in Grizzly Man. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper establishes the motif of 'child spectators' within the self-reflexive tradition of modern European cinema since the 1940s and within discourses on the affinity of childhood and cinema, dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Through a close reading of The spirit of the beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973) and Jacquot de Nantes (Agnès Varda, 1991) that deals with the impact of the cinema experience on a child's life, I analyze how this motif stages spectatorship, cinephilia, and filmmaking. First, I show how these films reflect on the impact of film experience and the process of film education as based on the existential being described by phenomenology. Second, I argue that this motif implies specific aesthetic strategies that are often linked to childhood and cinema. The child spectator calls for the understanding of childhood as a film aesthetical category and invites us to engage in a distinctive form of spectatorship. If the children in these films represent and address the phenomenological dimension of film experience, they also invite us, third, to reconsider aspects rarely addressed by phenomenology, especially the integration of imagination and materiality in film experience, and the interdependence of film experience and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is the beginning of the new millennium. Globalization is picking up the pace, and Marxist media theorists warn about affective and 'immaterial' modes of extraction, as well as the rise of the attention economy. It is within this web of post-Fordist anxieties and chameleonic, flexible mechanisms of control that Thomas Elsaesser first charts the rise of the mind-game phenomenon, in his 2009 article 'The Mind-Game Film'. Elsaesser and his successors perceptively trace the mind-game film back to a range of global conditions and technological innovations which marked the passage from the twentieth to twenty-first centuries, from interactive VCR and DVD technology to confrontations with post-colonial Others. However, little-to-no mind-game scholarship thus far has centered the rise of Web 2.0 and the concurrent privatization of the Internet; furthermore, with the obvious exception of the Matrix trilogy, the mind-bending hacker films of the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. WarGames, Sneakers, The Net) have been largely overlooked as mind-game and mind-game-adjacent films. Accordingly, this paper examines whether and how the hacker film might be folded into the broader field of mind-game scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oculocentric perspectives are often dominant in descriptions of the city essay film. Whether flâneurial, observational, lyrical or visionary, the gaze is often placed at the centre of the filmic perception of the city, which is itself conceived of as a sight, image, or palimpsest. In this article, I reflect on the centrality of noise to modernity, and of capitalism to urban sound. In doing so, I pursue a dual goal: to foreground a sound-based understanding of the city through the essay film; and to ask how sound can help us understand the city essay film as a critique at once of the metropolis' entanglement with capitalism and of the cinema's historical contribution to the creation of the city as spectacle. A workable definition of the city essay film as an object of theory is attained via an engagement with urban and sound studies, and the discussion of sound design and sound discourse in Many Undulating Things (2019), a geopolitical essay by Bo Wang and Pan Lu about Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the work of the critic V.F. Perkins in the light of the concept of description, and vice versa. It argues that a range of distinct senses of description come together in Perkins's work, and uses that work to assist in the construction of some proposals about the function and value of description in films and film criticism. Perkins had, it is argued, a particular interest in films that explore what might be referred to as 'failures of redescription', including Max Ophüls's Letter from an Unknown Woman and Elia Kazan's America, America. His writings on these films are explored with a view to demonstrating the ways in which the descriptive practices Perkins used in his writing can bring out rich and fascinating connections between criticism as an ethical practice with affinities to moral philosophy (via a concern with appropriate act descriptions) and the descriptions that are traced by films themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nostalgia is everywhere in media today—be it films, television, or advertisements. But what does it mean to say that media is nostalgic? Beyond presenting nostalgic narratives, media texts can also express nostalgia stylistically. So how does this nostalgia look and feel? This article presents an original theory of the aesthetics of nostalgia, arguing that 'pastness' becomes fantastical when nostalgic media use an artificial style: often a hazy and hyper-coloured image. Through a case study of Guy Maddin's Careful (1992), this article demonstrates how nostalgia may function audiovisually in the context of cinematic melodrama theory. These nostalgic aesthetics serve as both an articulation of mediated memory and a reflection of lived nostalgia, which is a longing for the inaccessible, the impossible, the lost—in other words, fantasy itself. Using phenomenologies of nostalgia by Edward Casey, James Hart, and Steven Galt Crowell, this article defines nostalgia philosophically, as the contradictory position between emotional yearning and a self-reflexive distance from the past. Such a radically critical nostalgia locates nostalgics not in a regressive and idealized relic of the past, but in the present moment, in which we may long for the loss of a past so inaccessible that it never was. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While recent scholarship has discussed the gendered subject/object relations within The Blair Witch Project and Heather's victimization by the male gaze of the horror-genre's camera, my work rebuts and clarifies the level through which this victimization is occurring. I argue we must understand how BWP functions on three different metatextual layers--Heather's documentary, the implied documentary of The Blair Witch Project, and the Myrick and Sánchez mockumentary--to see the ways in which Myrick and Sánchez have exploited spectator expectations of the horror genre to underwrite a critique of the genre's reliance on the villainization and objectification of women, both through the cinematic absence of the Blair Witch herself and the use of Heather as 'vanished' female filmmaker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]