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AbstractCatalan director Lluís Quílez’s 2021 Netflix film, Bajocero ostensibly tells the story of men against nature. This article views the film as a rape-revenge thriller that narrativizes a ‘traditional’ masculine identity in crisis and attempts to rehabilitate via an ideal Spanish masculine based in the rural. Released in the aftermath of La manada rape trial, the film burdens the male body with both the believing of women and enacting justice. As one of the first fictional narratives to take on rape in post-manada Spain, the film provides an opportunity to address masculinity in relation to violence against women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agnieszka Holland's animal rights horror-thriller Spoor (2017) can be read as a revenge tale wherein women, non-hegemonic men and animals join forces against the hunters and, implicitly, against what they represent: the conservative worldview of the current nationalist government in Poland. Spoor offers a feminist, queer and ecological response to these values and, in the process, expands our comprehension of how ecocinema might look or feel. While narratively human-centred, the film uses several strategies to foster an aesthetic attunement to non-human beings and non-anthropocentric politics. However, Spoor also transcends ecocinema by putting itself in quotation marks. In its self-reflexive use of extreme genericity, Spoor exemplifies Nicole Seymour's observation that politically engaged cinema can sometimes fail to follow the available scripts for 'appropriate' environmental feeling. This paper argues that, by merging tenderness and despair with more distanced modes, including irony, humour and metageneric playfulness, Spoor departs from serious approaches prevalent in environmental filmmaking, questioning the authenticity and proximity central to the very concept of ecology. Spoor's aesthetic and affective complexity rests on blending fakery and feeling, which problematises existing ways of understanding how eco-films engage us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically examines how Gemini Man (2019) incorporates director Ang Lee's cinematic aesthetics and Will Smith's star persona to present a nuanced representation of empowered crossover Blackness. In this film, Smith's commanding status as a Black lead exceeds the typical constraints of social and spatial mobility (a relative rarity in Hollywood production). However, Gemini Man's adoption of sf generic conventions and prevalent ideological narratives ironically neutralizes this momentum and, instead, reveals the precariousness that Asian and Black American filmmakers experience navigating the entertainment industry's unequal decision-making, especially as it seeks maximized crossover appeal to attract wider audiences worldwide. This article explores how the film's artistic expression not only illustrates ongoing ideological and identity negotiations within the racialized sf genre, especially concerning the representation of Black experiences, but also illuminates filmmakers' challenges when collaborating with major studios in Hollywood's profit-driven, racially-determined global marketplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The production of suspense thriller films has recently surged in Taiwan. These films adopt narrative techniques and visual aesthetics reminiscent of classic and neo-noir Hollywood cinema but also address social issues in Taiwan and represent transcultural aesthetic appropriation of film noir. This article employs a case study approach to examine the narrative and visual style of the Taiwanese suspense thriller Who Killed Cock Robin (2017), using film narratology as a textual analytical framework. This study considers themes, characters, visual style, and narrative structures, focusing on fundamental characteristics of classic film noir and neo-noir. This study reveals that the selected film both appropriates and deviates from the aesthetics of Hollywood film noir. It effectively incorporates aesthetic elements from classic Hollywood film noir and neo-noir, enriching the intricacies of storytelling and character depiction, while also localizing them through complex narrative strategies and nuanced Taiwanese cultural and social elements. The film brings attention to several prevalent issues in Taiwan's media landscape, including truth manipulation, sensationalism, tabloidization, and conglomerate and political control. The film portrays Yi-Chi as a morally compromised character embodying the detective archetype with classic noir traits, while also reflecting the "Eastern mentality" in Taiwan journalism. Despite his moral compromises, Yi-Chi partly retains traditional virtues, presenting a nuanced view of human nature that blends pessimism and optimism in Taiwan. This approach creates a distinct cross-cultural narrative that resonates emotionally with Taiwanese audiences, while also contributing to the broader global cinematic discourse on film noir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the evaluation of directing styles and decoupage parameters in Alfred Hitchcock's movie "Psycho" to understand their impact on suspense and brain activity, particularly using Electroencephalography (EEG) measurements. Topics include the examination of decoupage parameters in a murder scene, the correlation between suspense points and decoupage parameters, and the identification of suspense points by experts in cinematic or performing arts.

The article, titled "Concerto for Piano and Desire," follows the journey of a woman attending a piano concert. Initially reluctant, she becomes enthralled by the pianist's performance and develops a strong emotional connection to the music. She yearns to meet the pianist and even writes him a letter expressing her admiration. However, she is left disappointed when she receives no response. Despite continuing to daydream about him, she eventually realizes that her fantasies are unfulfilling and decides to move on. At a party, she unexpectedly encounters the musician in person, but remains uncertain if he ever received her letter. [Extracted from the article]

Miguel Ángel Blanca's eccentric docufiction film, Magaluf Ghost Town, follows three residents of the Mallorcan resort area during the 2019 tourist season. By offering locals' perspectives on lives tied to the excesses of low-cost tourism, the film traces their respective desires to withstand, break and transform the Faustian pact through which this part of Calvià municipality has made its living. Tourism infrastructure visually organizes the picture, with one space in particular - the hotel balcony - playing an important aesthetic and thematic role. Yet, while the overt references to balconing - the often-fatal tourist practice of jumping into a pool from one's room - seem to parrot mediadriven coverage, I argue that Blanca's picture instead offers a counternarrative that challenges stereotypes by destabilizing the traditional tourist gaze through the mise-en-scène. By further cloaking his critique in the supernatural, the director plays with documentary tropes in a way that spurs the viewer to think about tourism beyond the news. In giving space to individual local voices and experiences, he lets us explore the deep affect that the tourist landscapes evoke in a constituency that is all too often left outside the frame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The centrepiece of this essay is a close reading of Henry Mancini's score for the 1967 suspense film Wait Until Dark, starring Audrey Hepburn. Drawing on poststructuralist narrative theory, I explore the implications of a blind protagonist for received thinking about focalisation and propose a music-informed narrative reading of the film. Informed by feminist disability studies and the work of film critics including Steven Shaviro, Stan Link, Vivian Sobchack, Michel Chion, and others, I propose that, unlike other films with visually impaired protagonists, which affirm the stability of visual experience by presenting blindness as an epistemological prop for theorising sight, Wait Until Dark effects a decentring of vision in cinematic experience that challenges traditional associations between sight and selfhood. Based on musical and narrative analysis, I argue that Mancini's score is significant to this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research targets the movie "The Pale Blue Eye" for the purpose of application of Lacan's Psychoanalysis to all possible characters. Various states of mind have been analyzed in each character on the basis of their actions and behaviors. The effect of the protagonist's behaviors on the states of other characters' minds is also under observation. Lacanian Psychoanalysis along with its all components is explained in this study. The research is completely based on the qualitative approach of analysis and the data has been collected from the original copy wright of the movie. The findings of the research suggest that the character of the protagonist overshadows the behaviors of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the bodily and psychological dimensions of Tony Leung Chiu-wai's performance in Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's urban noir thriller, Infernal Affairs (2002), as a way of trying to comprehend the actor's flexible, transnational stardom. Through a textual analysis of a pivotal scene from the film, the article argues that Leung's facial acting facilitates an embodied and empathetic connection between the actor and the spectator, effectuated through cinematic techniques such as close-ups, editing and music. An embodied understanding of Leung's facial work in the close-up thus challenges the existing scholarship that limits Leung's transnational appeal to a restrained or minimalist acting style. A greater appreciation of Leung's modulating, flexible and multi-layered performance is also illustrated through the scene's juxtaposition of narrative and spectacle. The rupturing of the spectator's empathetic and bodily engagement with Leung's character during the spectacle sequence encourages the actor to shift his emotional response and bodily expressivity towards a performance delivery dictated by a flexible identity, thus bringing into relief the film's preoccupation with a postcolonial identity crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La Peste series (Movistar Plus+) represented a pre-pandemic benchmark in transmedia and hybrid (online and offline) fictional storytelling. This research delves into the keys for the construction of suspense through the development of interactive actions that place the public in a leading position in the story through the dialogue between geographical, fictional and expanded space. Therefore, we will examine the resignification of the city through the image built up by the participation of the viewer -in the series- and the user -in the transmedia actions-. We address both the study of the fictional and augmented space, taking into account the territory occupied by the different strata that made up the city in the sixteenth century, and the processes of expansion of the contents through interactive cartographies, movie maps, and Alternative Reality Games (ARG). As a result, we observe an expansion of the series through the metaphor of the map in an expedition that flits between past and present; fiction and reality; geographical space and cyberspace; the traditional medium -television series- and multiplatform formats, which produces at the same time a novel approach to the urban space of Seville from an experiential perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suspense as an aesthetic effect is a key narrative strategy of thriller movies, serving the function of entertainment for wide audiences. As the plot unfolds, arcs of suspense rely on triggering an appealing sense of anticipation that calls for a resolution. The present study examines the creation of suspense throughout fictional dialogue in Quentin Tarantino's popular feature films Pulp Fiction (1994), Inglourious Basterds (2009), and Django Unchained (2012). In these movies, dialogic interaction is often dominated by eloquent villains who skilfully flout the conversational maxims of Grice's cooperative principle, thereby exercising verbal power over other interlocutors. As is demonstrated in a qualitative pragma-stylistic framework, the villains' discursive strategies amount to stylistic deviation resulting in suspenseful implicatures. In particular, suspense is commonly caused by digressing from current topics, by giving too little information or too many details, by being insincere or ironic, and by making equivocal or redundant statements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study explores the role of narrative content and non-diegetic music, as well as their interplay in the creation of film suspense. In a between-subjects design, three audience groups watched either the full version (audio–video) of a suspenseful short movie (Love Field) or a video-only version or listened to the audio track only. Audience responses were assessed with a combination of continuous response measurement (CRM) and psychophysiological measures, comprising heart rate (i.e., inter-beat interval, IBI), pulse volume amplitude (PVA), and skin conductance level (SCL). Frame-by-frame content coding was performed to identify distinct plot segments and musical moods (tense vs. relaxing) and mark the critical visual and auditory events that directed the audience's inferences about the nature of the plot and elicited specific outcome expectations. Results showed that continuous self-report data and objective physiological measures were largely dissociated, suggesting different processing modalities. Tense music alone induced feelings of suspense (CRM) even in the absence of any clues about the story content. Overall, the audio-only version led to the highest arousal levels, as indicated by SCL and PVA, while the video-only version led to the lowest arousal levels. IBI data revealed short-term heart rate deceleration responses to salient narrative clues that could be interpreted in terms of heightened attention and cognitive resource allocation. Results are discussed in light of a multidimensional framework of tension and suspense and a terminological differentiation of both concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The study aims at investigating the phenomenon of crisis in the intersection of three areas: simulation, singularity and temporality. The argument develops a theory of the singular crisis whose instances are demonstrated and proved by the American thriller, Take Shelter (2011, Jeff Nichols). The applied concept of crisis is based on the argument that any critical period is treated by models derived from earlier crises. The theoretical background to the simulated operating mechanisms of the crisis is Jean Baudrillard's and Gilles Deleuze's appropriations of simulation and simulacra. In case the simulated problem-solving patterns fail in a critical period, the singular characteristics of the crisis can be observed. Based on examples taken from the film, the article argues that reaction to any given crisis is essentially built up by both hyperreal patterns governed by simulation and singular elements that simulation cannot account for. The description of the temporal nature of crises is heavily dependent on interpretation, thus their temporal span is observed from the vantage point of their singular characteristics. The study argues that crises are characteristically open-ended but their endpoint is predominantly designated in hindsight to render the crisis as a finished time period for the sake of manageability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Completing his trilogy of adaptations of Shakespearean tragedies, Indian director Vishal Bhardwaj's film Haider (2014) tackles Hamlet. A generic fusion of realist drama, Bollywood movie, and espionage thriller, the film intersects the Elizabethan source text's revenge plot with intertextual references to journalist Basharat Peer's contemporary war memoir Curfewed Nights (2011), detailing the realities in insurgency-torn Kashmir in the 1990s. Taking its cue from the film's controversial reception, which runs the gamut from censorship, appraisals, and criticism that Indian film does not need the 'crutch' of Hamlet to claim attention, this article explores questions about border-crossing, violence, and reconciliation raised on the level of form and content. Haider presents an adaptation of not one but two source texts: one 'global' and one 'local'. The result, this article argues, is astonishingly harmonious and the contested metaphors of adaptation theory and global Shakespeare studies, such as 'appropriation' or 'indigenization', apply less to it than that of a transcultural 'contact zone' (Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation , 2nd. ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2008) and of a 'crossmapping' (Bronfen, Elisabeth. Crossmappings. On Visual Culture. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2018). By placing greater emphasis on communality and having the ending turn from revenge to forgiveness, Haider interrogates the transcultural appeal of Hamlet , drawing attention to histories of violent conflict. It also reveals a revisionist agenda that captures both hidden political realities and a haunting refiguration of Shakespeare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American psychological thriller Joker made a lot of noise in the cultural world and became a blockbuster. The impact of the film was so huge that the images of the main hero Joker appeared in the most unexpected context. Joker could be the name of a café, teenager clothes shop, youth club, graffiti on the city building. It looked like the film produced multiple meanings for the audience and turned out to be one of those art objects that would stay as a part of the world culture. In this paper, we aim at analysing the meaning-constructing images that comprise the content matrix of the film Joker. For this, we firstly consider the contemporary cinematic theory and point out the ideas of the acknowledged experts and thinkers that are significant for film analysis. Then we approach the studies of prominent researchers of culture and philosophy that are critical for the film understanding. We also engage in hermeneutic analysis to follow the events and characters of the film plot. The final purpose of the research is to draw a resume that would define the philosophical value of the American blockbuster and explain its multi-layered sense for the world audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document provides brief biographical information about several contributors to the journal "Derrida Today." Abigail Culpepper is a doctoral student at Brown University, focusing on ecocritical reading and the relationship between humans and nonhumans in texts. Joanna Hodge is a professor at Manchester Metropolitan University, with research interests in phenomenology, critical theory, and transcendental aesthetics. Amir Jaima is an assistant professor at Texas A&M University, specializing in Black Aesthetics and the convergence of aesthetics and Africana Philosophy. Christopher Morris is an emeritus professor at Norwich University, with expertise in literature and film studies. Kristian Olesen Toft is a PhD fellow at the University of Copenhagen, researching translation in Jacques Derrida's seminars. Eftichis Pirovolakis is an assistant professor at the University of the Peloponnese, focusing on the relationship between deconstruction, hermeneutics, and phenomenology. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on the humor and horror within the film "Get Out," by Joran Peele. Topics include the concept of black satire and African American humor, the film's critique of real-world racism, and Peele's characterization of the film being a "social thriller." His curated film series for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, "Jordan Peele: The Art of the Social Thriller," is also mentioned.

Surveillance, as a phenomenon, is connected to the power and control of the surveyor towards the surveyed subjects who suffer from isolation. According to this perspective, this paper strengthens the essence of surveillance in thriller films and explores the different panoptical forms. It represents each form according to its effect on the viewer's engagement and embodiment by relating it to the logic of existence discussed by Merleau-Ponty. It also explores the form(s) that represent(s) the 'docile-body-viewer'. The researchers find out that the 'docile-body-viewer' can be created by 'sensorial transparency' first, then by the 'Labyrinth-like spaces' depending on the way it is shot. The other panoptical forms discussed in this study show that the viewer suffers from anxiety, attention, shock and surprise while empathising and sympathising with the protagonist. In general, all these forms increase the embodiment of the viewer, her/his corporeality and consciousness. Finally, the paper shows how Foucault's idea of the Heterotopia is very helpful to define surveillance as a situation that has the ability to increase the embodiment and body corporeality of the viewer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an encyclopedic overview of epidemics in the movies since the 1950s. After a phase in which epidemics were depicted as being caused by a dramatic antagonist (often by invaders from outer space), real-life epidemics (such as AIDS, Ebola, SARS, etc.) caused the movies to turn to social consequences of epidemics. Many of the films can be categorized as eco thrillers: They examine the relations between humans and their environment. Most of them show the breakdown of society, medical-political measures such as quarantine, ghettoization or even the annihilation of collectives. Furthermore, the films address the human ability for bonding and solidarity, but also the ethical implications of responsibility that authorities and the military, in particular, bear toward all others. Scientists and doctors are often represented as heroic figures because they are able to combat the general threat. The epidemic film belongs to a set of ethical simulation games in which normality, the safety of everyday life and the security of the individual in social institutions are at stake. Many of the films suggest an allegorical approach to what is at hand – as an individual and social encounter with the nearness of death and with the inevitability of an end before God. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]