Search

The Assamese film Kothanodi (2015) radically demonstrates how film adapts to folklore, rather than the other way around. It actively contributes to the folkloric tradition, notably through its commitment to establishing a thoroughly material sense of premodern Assamese life. This grounds the representation of its folkloric narratives in a tangible ecology, bringing the grain of lived experience to material that might otherwise appear to be fantastical, If things horrify in Kothanodi, they do so out of recognition rather than shock, If the film features tricksterish phenomena, as in its account of a woman giving birth to an outenga, known in English as elephant apple, it also incorporates such tricksterism into its own methods, querying its own representation of reality and productively disturbing its audience. Similarly, violence takes many forms in the film. It can be customary and ancestral, superstitious or avaricious, intergenerationally transgressive or simply malicious. The audience is left uncertain how to decode all of it, other than to acknowledge that such material contains more truths and problems than might initially be realized. Such an adept appropriation of folkloric uncertainty into cinema not only captured an international audience for Kothanodi but also engendered the emergence of further interpretive routes, especially within online fan communities. Rather than reading Kothanodi as the auteurist product of its director Bhaskar Hazarika, it can instead be seen as part of an ongoing folkloric enterprise, an expression of the practical magic of a folkloric aesthetic. Keywords: folklore--tricksters--horror--infanticide--adaptation--retelling--violence, In Ram Venkat Srikar's online review of the Assamese film Kothanodi (2015), he cited how the great Italian director Dario Argento paid tribute to the capacity of the horror genre [...]

Las películas Signs, The Village y The Lady in the Water, de M. Night Shyamalan, tienen como tema central la búsqueda de refugio ante situaciones de violencia y pueden entenderse como actualizaciones del topos de la guarnición según lo definió Northrop Frye. La protección que ofrecen estos refugios no es sin embargo absoluta y los personajes de Shyamalan deben enfrentarse a la amenaza de criaturas monstruosas que pueden entenderse como proyecciones de experiencias traumáticas, provocadas en parte por los ataques terroristas de septiembre de 2001 e, incluso en mayor medida, por la percepción del propio Shyamalan de una violencia social incontrolada en la sociedad de los Estados Unidos. Palabras clave: M. Night Shyamalan; trauma cultural; terapia del trauma; violencia; mentalidad de la guarnición; monstruos en el cine This paper argues that M. Night Shyamalan's Signs, The Village and The Lady in the Water turn around the need to find refuge from violence, in an updated version of Northrop Frye's garrison motif. The protection that these refuges offer is nevertheless put to the test by the presence of threatening, monstrous creatures. These creatures can be defined as projections of two traumatic experiences: on the one hand, the terrorist attacks of September 2001; on the other, and more significantly, the violence that, according to Shyamalan, is rampant in North American society. Keywords: M. Night Shyamalan; cultural trauma; trauma therapy; violence; garrison mentality; monsters in film, Traumatic Seclusion in M. Night Shyamalan's Garrison Trilogy: Signs (2002), The Village (2004) and The Lady in the Water (2006) M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999) was a phenomenal [...]

IN ONE OF THE MOST DRAMATIC SCENES in Jeff Nichols's Take Shelter (2011), a film about a construction worker who begins to have nightmares involving an impending storm, the protagonist [...]

This article positions Christian Petzold's feature Undine (2020) in relation to German Romanticism. It considers the film as a turning point in Petzold's oeuvre, offering a way out of alienation: love engenders a comportment that is radically different from the rules of existence dictated by capitalism, the schedules and demands that mold life into a rigid form. The fluidity of water, I argue, is an analogy for a different mode of life--a floating that mirrors his own desired mode of creativity and contemplation, described by him as 'a state of hovering' and by others as 'abeyance.' But who can float above the neoliberal city, and who must go on kicking to keep from drowning? Through this question, a different kind of romanticism can be glimpsed, one that is less resolved than Undine might suggest., A FAIRY TALE FOR CAPITALISM At the Spree a stronghold of glass and steel towers, where the historicist facade of Lehrter Bahnhof once impressed Berlin's travelers with its palatial splendor. [...]

The familial romantic comedy extends the trajectory of the traditional rom-com into the wider family, further affirming the rom-com's reliance on heteronormative ideology, positing blood ties and a unified, cordial family unit as the ideal outcome for any coupling. But the comedic moments in familial rom-coms occur when the future-oriented trajectories of heteronormative couplings are ruptured and become incompatible with romance's warm fuzzy feelings and its optimistic look toward the future. Instead, comedy tears at the seams of heteronormative polite civility as a momentary rupture of its eventuality., MEET THE PARENTS (JAY ROACH. 2000) BEGINS WHERE MOST ROMANTIC COMEDIES END: with a proposal, albeit one that is soon abandoned once Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) learns that his prospective [...]

This article examines the disruptions seen between the London romantic comedy's depictions of pre- and post-digital urban space. Focusing on Richard Curtis's About Time (2013) as a pivotal case study, I analyze how the London rom-com has navigated the rapid integration of digital technologies within urban life since the genre's boom in the 1990s. I argue that the kinds of aesthetic and formal challenges to rom-com conventions seen in About Time in fact preserve the genre's central ideological underpinnings (and expectations of city space) in the face of the potentially unsettling or destructive impacts of digitization., THE BRITISH ROMANTIC-COMEDY GENRE SAW ASTONISHING SUCCESS IN THE LATTER HALF OF the 1990s. Emerging at a time of economic and cultural transformation in London, these films helped to reshape [...]

This essay reconstructs and analyzes the context of production for D. W. Griffith's The Idol Dancer (1920) and The Love Flower (1920), both filmed in South Florida shortly after Griffith Studios relocated from Hollywood to Mamaroneck, New York. By reconstructing production processes, this essay demonstrates that Griffith's ambitions exceeded his abilities. He was often indecisive when choosing filming locations, as exemplified by his capricious relationship with South Florida. The essay further argues that Griffith's overzealous ambition and geographical ambivalence correlates with his attempt to function independently when the industry shifted to a more producer-centered model post-World War I. KEYWORDS: D. W. Griffith, production culture, Florida, Bahamas, Most histories of D. W. Griffith focus on his output prior to 1916. The importance of formulaic developments like parallel action and close-ups, which are generally attributed to Griffith's single-reel [...]

Introduction What if a group of slaves murdered their overlords and returned home to find themselves targeted by a bounty hunter? What if the slaves were really bioengineered beings seeking [...]

IN THE EXTENSIVE BODY OF SCHOLARSHIP devoted to George Romero's groundbreaking film Night of the Living Dead (1968), rarely has anyone asked an obvious question: who is Duane Jones? (1) [...]

This article explores connections between C.S. Lewis and filmmaker Terence Fisher, notably how their works explore themes like the charm of evil, white magic's dubious nature, and myth hinting at divine truths. By viewing these themes, Fisher and Lewis's common views on fairy tales, and how feedback informed their work, scholars discover nuance in the perceived 'Inklings versus secular British culture' dichotomy. Additional Keywords hammer horror; russell kirk; christopher lee; peter cushing; gothic horror; dennis wheatley; dark fantasy; roald dahl; david cronenberg; space trilogy; narnia; frankenstein; dracula; gorgon; the devil rides out; aleister crowley; order of the golden dawn, Mentioning C.S. Lewis and horror in the same sentence will shock some readers. Yes, Roman Catholic culture critic and ghost story writer Russell Kirk argues in 'A Cautionary Note on [...]

In Celia (1989), writer/director Ann Turner engages with the intersection between the public realm and the experience of everyday life. Presented from the perspective of child protagonist Celia Carmichael (Rebecca [...]

ONE OF ONLY A VERY FEW FEATURES MADE IN AUSTRALIA IN THE 1960S, LUDWIK DUTKIEWICZ AND IAN DAVIDSON'S LITTLESEEN AVANT-GARDE CREATION HAS LONG BEEN ABSENT FROM THE NATIONAL FILM CANON. [...]

Ingmar Bergman's 1960 Jungfrukallan (The Virgin Spring) is unusual among his films in that it does not derive from the auteur director's own, original screenplay but rather from a medieval [...]

The work of David Lynch represents an essential engagement with the Anthropocene and its aesthetic forms. This is especially evident in the case of Twin Peaks, which integrates influences from multiple genres and the avant-garde into a complex mythopoeic treatment of planetary ecological crisis. Episode eight of Twin Peaks: The Return, with its Promethean title 'Gotta Light?', grounds Lynch's mythopoesis in an origin story that builds upon foundational concepts regarding the Anthropocene, including its connections to the atomic age, its grounding suppositions in androcentrism, its complicity in cosmological violence, and the value of post-nature perspectives for understanding the (perhaps inescapably) precarious present., ATOMIC ART HAS MUCH TO TELL US about our precarious existence in the Anthropocene. As a designation, Atomic Art accounts for creative work responding to the events and potentially devastating [...]

Depicting a single father's navigation of complex relationships within the boundaries offered by masculinity, Aaron Wilson's film represents a 1970s rural Australia on the precipice of social change. As Annika [...]

A tale of a Maori woman's forcible childhood separation from her mother and her culture, Cousins narrativises the pain suffered by members of New Zealand's sfolen generations. By immersing the [...]

Prelude: Mickey Mouse and the Fight for Pop-Cultural Agency (1) IN 1971, DAN O'NEILL, an out-of-work cartoonist formerly in the employ of the San Francisco Chronicie, gathered an assortment of [...]

JOHN CAWELTI'S INFLUENTIAL ESSAY 'Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films,' published in 1979, ignited considerable scholarly attention and debate on the issue of genre blending in cinema. Significantly, [...]

Introduction: Reverse Motion and Temporal Plasticity (1) ONSCREEN, WORKERS JERKED THEIR PICKS unnaturally away from bits of stone that slid upward, miraculously fusing onto a flattened edifice. Meanwhile, a thickening [...]

The United States is among the developed world's most income-unequal countries, American health care and education are uniquely expensive, and youth depression is on a sharp rise (1) (Twenge et [...]

El secreto de sus ojos (2009) directed by Juan Jose Campanella and Zulu Love Letter (2004) by Ramadan Suleman are films made five years and 5000 miles apart. Though the [...]

Bernard Rose's Candyman has generated polarized reactions since its release in 1992. Illustrating the intersections between race, class and gender, the film exposes white fears of miscegenation and Black reprisal that are deeply rooted in America's past. It also evokes and counters by way of example racist stereotypes (gangsters, welfare mothers, crackheads, wilding packs) that echo these fears and were exploited in the media and the political discourse of the 1980s and early 1990s. The controversy surrounding the film stems from several sources. Its narrative revolves around interracial sexual relations, which some consider a taboo in American society. The fact that the eponymous monster is a Black man who pursues a white woman uncomfortably resonates with the myth of the sexual predator represented in films such as The Birth of a Nation but also in the War on Drugs campaign, the Willie Horton political attack ad, or the coverage of the Central Park Five trials during the Reagan and Bush era. In his representations, the director walks a fine line between exposing stereotypes, on the one hand, and perpetuating them by the very fact of evoking them, on the other. It is the ambiguous nature of the monster that holds the narrative together. It does so, however, without fully resolving these conflicting discourses., The announcement that a new Candyman would be released in 2021 provides an opportune moment to reevaluate the original 1992 film, which was written and directed by Bernard Rose. The [...]

No they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it--this suspicion of their not being inhuman. --Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (36) An enemy had to [...]

KEYWORDS: Tejano, Mexican American, Robert Rodriguez, Spy Kids, kinship, imagination Robert Rodriguez is an iconic Latino filmmaker who presents captivating Latinx characters and storyworlds in genres dominated by whiteness. His Tejano upbringing and sensibility also play an important role in shaping his films. Bringing Tejano history and culture as well as biographical and critical commentary from Rodriguez to bear on the Spy Kids series, I suggest the storyworld is informed by a Tejano sense of place/belonging and identity that delights in independence and ingenuity while upsetting conservative Tejano ideals through representations of nontraditional family and gender hierarchies. In Spy Kids, viewers apprehend less about the dominant US nation-state--often understood as the oppositional motivation of Latinx film--and more about the restorative power of imaginative Latinx kinships., SINCE ROBERT RODRIGUEZ FIRST crashed the entertainment scene in the 1990s, the number of successful Latinx artists working across different visual media has steadily grown. (1) That number, however, is [...]

KEYWORDS: Hollywood, Latinx, speculative, cinema, audience, storytelling, narrative Robert Rodriguez is an innovator of cinema that exalts the speculative over the constraints of realism, a fact made all the more conspicuous by the sheer dearth of Latinx-identified directors in this filmic tradition. The historical importance of Rodriguez's concerted efforts to claim this expansive mode of storytelling is crucial to assessing his contributions, which recalibrate audience's expectations of Latinx culture in speculative cinema specifically and visual narratives more broadly., THERE IS A RICH BUT AT TIMES STI-fling tradition of realism in Latinx storytelling in the United States. It's rich because it gives a semblance of lived lives and experiences [...]

KEYWORDS: science fiction, film, Latinx studies, gender, borderlands This article examines Robert Rodriguez's construction of a transborder, hemispheric Americas space sci-fi storyworld in his film Alita: Battle Angel (2019). After considering a tradition of mainstream sci-fi narratives that erase or reconstruct ethnoracial peoples as exotic ornament, the article provides a critical overview of how Latinx sci-fi creators such as Alex Rivera, Carla Cavina, and Rodriguez use a 'Brown-optic' to strike back at this tradition. It continues with an analysis of Rodriguez's building of transborder storyworld spaces and Alita's becoming a cyber-Latina warrior., AFTER ESTABLISHING THE YEAR 2563 and some context--Earth 'three hundred years after The Fall.. .'--Robert Rodriguez's Alita: Battle Angel (2019) opens with a simultaneously ominous and majestic orchestral soundscape along [...]

EDGAR WRIGHT'S BABY DRIVER (2017) is a film filled with heightened visual splendor. In it, the titular character progresses through a three-act structure that utilizes familiar narrative tropes from various [...]

This article sets out to look back at and 'rehear' a film, Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, and a biblical text, the story of David and Bathsheba in II Samuel 11-12, in the aftermath of the Trump presidency and in light of the #MeToo movement. Employing the interpretive method used in my book, Movies and Midrash, as well as the feminist epistemological insights of Evelyn Fox Keller and Miranda Fricker, the article concentrates on and critiques the would-be throwaway, comic, #Metoo-relevant moments of the Woody Allen film, those not typically addressed in critical and Jewish interpretations of the film, including my own book. It then offers a contemporary, #MeToo, feminist, midrashic close reading of the David and Bathsheba story. Throughout the David and Bathsheba narrative, men and a masculine God are depicted as seeing, often broadly and from a distance, but only Bathsheba actually hears. The aim of the article is to engage in an exercise in self-observation, re-listening and constructive re-interpretation that also speaks to the kind of broader historical, epistemological and hermeneutical shifts that allow us as a culture to read differently., Why did is take me so long to shake off the weight of nongendered biblical literary interpretations? First was the necessity of developing new sight lines, borrowing from feminist theory, [...]

William Wyler's The Children's Hour and The Children's Hour papers in Wyler's archive suggest that lesbianism should be understood as the material conditions that allow women to build lives together without men, whether or not they have sex. The scandal of the film is more literally the two schoolteachers' economic independence than the sexuality of which they are falsely accused. This article examines hate mail preserved in the archive against its grain to suggest that viewers who seem to have misunderstood the film were actually its best readers, insofar as it condones lesbianism as a way of life, not an identity based in sexual practices. KEYWORDS: lesbianism, feminism, economics, The Children's Hour, archive, AN ANECDOTE APPEARING IN A 1961 review of William Wyler's The Children's Hour juxtaposed illicit same-sex sexuality with economic transgression in a manner that fortuitously illuminates both the film and [...]

In the beginning of Surrealism was the word. The movement began with the invention of automatic writing in the early 1920s, a technique that would free the writer from the [...]

This article takes a close look at the Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976) and his 1962 film Subarnarekha (The Golden Line). The film responds to the partition of Bengal/India in 1947, avoiding a simple representation of events in favor of figuring traces of history. It tries to raise the experience of homelessness to the level of a universal predicament. This required an approach where representation is 'not in place' since its object is not really present. Here the article author explores how the film's form contemplates the processes of dislocation, death, and madness by working out spaces of connection. Thriving on these connections, Subarnarekha often ends up mirroring consciousness, which is understood here as a space of unconstrained connection/recombination. The director made this space partially independent of characters. The article author sees in this a philosophical potential, which is different from films presenting philosophical thought., I In his memorable 'Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye,' John Berger wrote that cinema was the twentieth century's own narrative art because it was a century of displacement. He saw [...]

This essay reflects on questions of visibility and invisibility in the representation of Fascism through a study of the visual memory of Fascism in Amarcord and the photo-essay 'Il Fascismo involontario,' which Renzo Renzi, Bolognese critic and longtime friend of Fellini, wrote in 1975 in direct response to the film. After retracing the roots of Amarcord to Fellini's collaboration with Renzi, the essay maps their contrasting stances toward memory: for Fellini, a delivery from the past; for Renzi, a practice of working-through. The essay explores the optics of Fascism in Amarcord through an analysis of the influence of photography and television on the filmic image and a reflection on the relation between visibility and invisibility in Fellini's cinematic spectacle. These visualities of Amarcord are then discussed in dialogue with the photographs accompanying Renzi's text, thus bringing to the fore the differing status of the trace in the two authors. While in Fellini's film the trace is an embodiment of cinematic pathos, in Renzi's critical reflection with photography, the trace becomes the site of what Roland Barthes defined as the 'mad' encounter with the past, the site where Fascism is confronted as the 'intractable,' a stubborn point of (in)visibility in Italy's past. Keywords: Federico Fellini, Renzo Renzi, memory, Fascism, Amarcord, photography, intermediality., Memory looms large in Fellini. Critical studies have pointed out how memory for Fellini is more a revelation than a process, a posture toward time rather than a willful and [...]

In American Psycho, Patrick Bateman's narcological function is as a pastiche of cognitive and cultural dissonance resulting from deregulated commodity fetishism. Mary Harron's film adaptation sharpens his schizoid parody of 1980s Wall Street with film noir elements such as low-key lighting, subjective A/V techniques, and nunimalist mise-en-scene, which enables opportunities for critiquing the relationship between commodification in the yuppie cultural mythos and visual consumption of the body. KEYWORDS: postmodernism, cultural studies, yuppism, film noir, pastiche, commodification, fetishism, BRET EASTON ELLIS'S POSTMODERN cannibal recognizes only the objects, icons, and bodies that pop culture fetishizes to a profitable degree, in that they have become commodities. Patrick Bateman, the anti-hero [...]

Following a group of young singers from audition to performance at a prestigious Brisbane opera school, Liselle Mei's documentary is an intimate representation of female friendship and artistic development that [...]

Elle-Maija Tailfeathers' 2012 short film A Red Girl's Reasoning dismantles the narrative of colonial sexualized violence in its representation of the protagonist, Delia, enacting retributive violence against white men. Tailfeathers' tense eleven-minute film depicts a First Nations woman seeking violent vengeance against white men who have sexually assaulted Indigenous women. This essay explores the political and transformative potential of such stories of revenge, examining A Red Girl's Reasoning's fictional representation of violence against the colonial oppressor alongside J. Halberstam's discussion of imagined violence. I argue that this story of violent revenge is productive in its utopic depiction of a counterreality and futurity that destabilizes the relationship between imagination and reality, while simultaneously representing the ongoing community-based resistance of Indigenous women. A Red Girl's Reasoning illustrates both an alternative present and vision for a decolonized future that are politically productive, depicting a space of violence that challenges both the white male rapist and the colonial white heteropatriarchal state that protects him. This argument is complicated by narratives of non-violence and forgiveness, but ultimately, I propose that imagined violence is a decolonial intervention, effective in its moral complexity and in its refusal to provide tidy ethical answers about the violence that it represents. Keywords: Imagined violence, Indigenous futurity, decolonization, colonial sexualized violence, decolonial intervention, counterreality, ethic of non-violence, Introduction 'I used to think you were just a story,' Nelly tells Delia in Elle-Maija Tailfeathers' short film A Red Girl's Reasoning. Tailfeathers is a member of the Kainai First [...]