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No. 53, summer 2011
Hollywood
The tracks of Sully’s tears: disability in James Cameron’s Avatar
by Dana Fore
Examining disability issues in Cameron's futuristic fairy tale reveals more complex and potentially sinister ideas at work.
by Dana Fore
Examining disability issues in Cameron's futuristic fairy tale reveals more complex and potentially sinister ideas at work.
The Social Network: the contemporary pursuit of happiness through social connections
by Robert Alpert
The Social Network reenacts the U.S success myth and places it in the contemporary context of virtual realities in which connections are monetized and each person is emotionally detached from the next.
Baz Luhrmann’s Australia: when excess isn’t parody
by Stephen Papson
Parody, excess and mythology intermix, producing contradictory readings of Luhrmann’s Australia.
by Robert Alpert
The Social Network reenacts the U.S success myth and places it in the contemporary context of virtual realities in which connections are monetized and each person is emotionally detached from the next.
Baz Luhrmann’s Australia: when excess isn’t parody
by Stephen Papson
Parody, excess and mythology intermix, producing contradictory readings of Luhrmann’s Australia.
Fear and loathing on Brokeback Mountain
by Craig Snyder
A gay love story for the ages? Let's hope not. A textual analysis of how homosexual desire is disciplined within Brokeback Mountain.
by Craig Snyder
A gay love story for the ages? Let's hope not. A textual analysis of how homosexual desire is disciplined within Brokeback Mountain.
There's a sucker born every minute. Audiences blog about Sucker Punch.
by Chuck Kleinhans
A search for the film Sucker Punch on the microblog Tumblr provides a rich data collection to study commonplace audience discourse about a commercial entertainment film and New Media as an example of phatic communication.
by Chuck Kleinhans
A search for the film Sucker Punch on the microblog Tumblr provides a rich data collection to study commonplace audience discourse about a commercial entertainment film and New Media as an example of phatic communication.
Reframing
Decay of the aura: modern art in classical cinema
by Susan Felleman
A study of real works of art—including figural sculpture, “Entartete Kunst” (works of modern art deemed “degenerate by the Nazi regime), and abstract painting—as incorporated into three popular fiction films of the classic period (The Song of Songs, 1933; Venus vor Gericht, 1941; and The Trouble with Harry, 1955), reveals that when an art object becomes part of a fiction film, it enters a space of its own symbolic appropriation; aura is replaced by (unstable) signification.
by Susan Felleman
A study of real works of art—including figural sculpture, “Entartete Kunst” (works of modern art deemed “degenerate by the Nazi regime), and abstract painting—as incorporated into three popular fiction films of the classic period (The Song of Songs, 1933; Venus vor Gericht, 1941; and The Trouble with Harry, 1955), reveals that when an art object becomes part of a fiction film, it enters a space of its own symbolic appropriation; aura is replaced by (unstable) signification.
Oil drilling and the search for the “golden shrimp”: the myth of interdependence in oil drilling films
by Robin Murray and Joe Heumann
Louisiana Story (1948), Thunder Bay (1953), Dead Ahead: The Exxon Valdez Disaster (1992), Black Wave: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez (2009), and Crude (2009) draw on a mythology that suggests the oil and fishing industries can work interdependently once appropriate safety precautions are in place.
by Robin Murray and Joe Heumann
Louisiana Story (1948), Thunder Bay (1953), Dead Ahead: The Exxon Valdez Disaster (1992), Black Wave: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez (2009), and Crude (2009) draw on a mythology that suggests the oil and fishing industries can work interdependently once appropriate safety precautions are in place.
American Medusa: Bette Davis, Beyond the Forest, femininity, and Camp
by David Greven
King Vidor’s Beyond the Forest allows us to consider the feminist and queer relevance of the theme of female transformation in Bette Davis films and to revisit and challenge the category of the Camp Classic.
by David Greven
King Vidor’s Beyond the Forest allows us to consider the feminist and queer relevance of the theme of female transformation in Bette Davis films and to revisit and challenge the category of the Camp Classic.
Taken by Muslims: captivity narratives in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer and Prisoner of the Mountains
by Claudia Springer
A 1935 Hollywood film's vilification of Muslims is countered by a nuanced Russian film from 1996, with both revolving around the abduction of non-Muslims by Muslims.
by Claudia Springer
A 1935 Hollywood film's vilification of Muslims is countered by a nuanced Russian film from 1996, with both revolving around the abduction of non-Muslims by Muslims.
A question of audience: revisiting Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come
by Ulrick Casimir
A modern attempt to unpack Henzell's iconic film, analyzing the complex relations between British and U.S. conceptualizations of the Caribbean and the film itself.
by Ulrick Casimir
A modern attempt to unpack Henzell's iconic film, analyzing the complex relations between British and U.S. conceptualizations of the Caribbean and the film itself.
International cinema
At the global market: Ousmane Sembène’s Moolaadé and the economics of women’s rights
by Amy E. Borden
As both a tool used by contemporary activists, such as Tostan, and within its plot, Ousmane Sembène’s final film Moolaadé demonstrates how West African women may gain collective access to juridical and political power by using local cultural customs to resist the practice of female genital cutting.
by Amy E. Borden
As both a tool used by contemporary activists, such as Tostan, and within its plot, Ousmane Sembène’s final film Moolaadé demonstrates how West African women may gain collective access to juridical and political power by using local cultural customs to resist the practice of female genital cutting.
Serbian cutting: assemblage and the archival impulse in the films of Dušan Makavejev
by Greg DeCuir, Jr.
"If Serbs are fond of slaughtering people, there must be a method of film cutting that corresponds."
by Greg DeCuir, Jr.
"If Serbs are fond of slaughtering people, there must be a method of film cutting that corresponds."
Global capital’s false choices in the films of Laurent Cantet
by Jessica Livingston
By looking at the four major films of French filmmaker Laurent Cantet, we receive a valuable window through which to view the false choices offered by the contemporary neoliberal economy.
by Jessica Livingston
By looking at the four major films of French filmmaker Laurent Cantet, we receive a valuable window through which to view the false choices offered by the contemporary neoliberal economy.
Narrating topography: Still Life and the cinema of Jia Zhangke
by Eric Dalle
Jia Zhangke’s environmental fiction film, Still Life, explores the effects of the Three Gorges Dam on the emotional lives of individuals from different social strata.
by Eric Dalle
Jia Zhangke’s environmental fiction film, Still Life, explores the effects of the Three Gorges Dam on the emotional lives of individuals from different social strata.
Redeeming the woman from Maoist China in China Cry: A True Story
by Jing Yang
This 1990 filmic narrative of the Christian redemption of a Chinese woman from Maoist political frenzy exemplifies residual U.S. Cold War thinking that serves to contain the ideological other.
by Jing Yang
This 1990 filmic narrative of the Christian redemption of a Chinese woman from Maoist political frenzy exemplifies residual U.S. Cold War thinking that serves to contain the ideological other.
Let’s get lost: unmapping history and Reformasi in the Indonesian film Tiga Hari Untuk Selamanya
by Dag Yngvesson
Riri Riza's deceptively lazy 2007 Javanese Road Movie attempts to disorient itself from the pervasive sociopolitical apathy of contemporary Indonesian youth by slowly eviscerating the ubiquitous formal, narrative and cultural structures that have imbued the problems of recent history and resulting status quo with a nostalgic, translucent sheen.
by Dag Yngvesson
Riri Riza's deceptively lazy 2007 Javanese Road Movie attempts to disorient itself from the pervasive sociopolitical apathy of contemporary Indonesian youth by slowly eviscerating the ubiquitous formal, narrative and cultural structures that have imbued the problems of recent history and resulting status quo with a nostalgic, translucent sheen.
The Nakba and the construction of identity in Palestinian film
by Inez Hedges
Performative memory serves as the counterweight to dispossession from the land.
by Inez Hedges
Performative memory serves as the counterweight to dispossession from the land.
Economics and cinema
Capital limits on creativity: Neoliberalism and its uses of art
by Jyotsna Kapur:
Why the “creative economy” is a capitalistic invention, hostile to art and ultimately to human creativity.
by Jyotsna Kapur:
Why the “creative economy” is a capitalistic invention, hostile to art and ultimately to human creativity.
“Creative Industries,” neoliberal fantasies, and the cold, hard facts of global recession: some basic lessons
by Chuck Kleinhans
The international financial crisis provides the ultimate stress test for myths about today’s media culture.
by Chuck Kleinhans
The international financial crisis provides the ultimate stress test for myths about today’s media culture.
Politics of media production and distribution
Woman with the movie camera redux: revisiting the position of women in the production classroom
by Jennifer Proctor, River E. Branch, Kyja Kristjansson-Nelson
A call and template for a responsive pedagogy addressing the pervasive violent representations of women in student films and the continuing under-representation of women the culture of production — a critical echo of and expansion upon Michelle Citron’s and Ellen Seiter’s call in 1981.
On cable, tech gods, and the hidden costs of DIY filmmaking: thoughts on ‘The Woman with the Movie Camera”by Jennifer Proctor, River E. Branch, Kyja Kristjansson-Nelson
A call and template for a responsive pedagogy addressing the pervasive violent representations of women in student films and the continuing under-representation of women the culture of production — a critical echo of and expansion upon Michelle Citron’s and Ellen Seiter’s call in 1981.
by Ellen Seiter
More thoughts on what happens to women's dreams of creative media making while in the educational system and beyond.
Digital distribution, participatory culture, and the transmedia documentary
by Chuck Tryon
Explores the role of digital media reshaping the distribution, exhibition, and reception of documentary films.
by Chuck Tryon
Explores the role of digital media reshaping the distribution, exhibition, and reception of documentary films.
Claims to be heard: young self-expressivity, social change, and the Educational Video Center
by Stephen Michael Charbonneau
A historical and critical overview of New York-based Educational Video Center, a leading youth media organization, and its auto-ethnographic work with disadvantaged communities.
by Stephen Michael Charbonneau
A historical and critical overview of New York-based Educational Video Center, a leading youth media organization, and its auto-ethnographic work with disadvantaged communities.
Ethics, politics and representation in Child of Mine, a television documentary on lesbian parenting
by Lizzie Thynne
Re-interviewing her main character from a documentary on lesbian custody she made for UK Channel 4, Lizzie Thynne explores the ethics and politics of filming one's own community for broadcast.
by Lizzie Thynne
Re-interviewing her main character from a documentary on lesbian custody she made for UK Channel 4, Lizzie Thynne explores the ethics and politics of filming one's own community for broadcast.
Porn
Clips, clicks and climax: notes on the relocation and remediation of pornography
by Julian Hanich
Moving-image pornography on the Internet has facilitated and intensified the masturbatory experience due to a double tendency toward privatization and individualization. This becomes particularly obvious when compared to the time when porn films were projected in theaters and consumed with other, mostly anonymous viewers.
by Julian Hanich
Moving-image pornography on the Internet has facilitated and intensified the masturbatory experience due to a double tendency toward privatization and individualization. This becomes particularly obvious when compared to the time when porn films were projected in theaters and consumed with other, mostly anonymous viewers.
The excess of porn: response to Julian Hanich
by Magnus Ullén
Considering the relation between pornography and different media is important, yes; but it will be difficult to historicize pornography without first historicizing the mode of reading that gave rise to the concept of porn in the nineteenth century.
by Magnus Ullén
Considering the relation between pornography and different media is important, yes; but it will be difficult to historicize pornography without first historicizing the mode of reading that gave rise to the concept of porn in the nineteenth century.
Back to the Golden Age
by Thomas Waugh
This brief intervention in the current conversation about porn contextualizes the debate within the history of porn studies and Jump Cut’s contribution since the 1970s to a materialist-feminist understanding of sexual representation.
by Thomas Waugh
This brief intervention in the current conversation about porn contextualizes the debate within the history of porn studies and Jump Cut’s contribution since the 1970s to a materialist-feminist understanding of sexual representation.
Porn: it’s not just about sex anymore
by Nina K. Martin
Porn's shift to online and mobile device mediums has de-stigmatized the term to the point of banality, linking "porn" to non-sexualized notions of excess.
by Nina K. Martin
Porn's shift to online and mobile device mediums has de-stigmatized the term to the point of banality, linking "porn" to non-sexualized notions of excess.
Beyond porno chic
by Jose B. Capino
Internet porn viewing and spectatorship at adult video arcades are more similar than we imagine.
by Jose B. Capino
Internet porn viewing and spectatorship at adult video arcades are more similar than we imagine.
Pornography, technology, and masturbation: response to Julian Hanich
by Peter Lehman
Society hysterically fears the dangers of pornography and masturbation while academia represses it, and that aspect of the historically complex interaction between media, technology and porn is lost in the process.
by Peter Lehman
Society hysterically fears the dangers of pornography and masturbation while academia represses it, and that aspect of the historically complex interaction between media, technology and porn is lost in the process.
Independent/Art/Avant-garde
Loin du Vietnam (1967), Joris Ivens and Left Bank documentary
by Thomas Waugh
Far from Vietnam, the collective French film of 1967, produced in solidarity with the Vietnamese people under U.S. attack, is explored in relation to its historical context on three continents, to its coalitional politics and the solidarity genre in general, and to the forum it provided to one contributor, veteran communist filmmaker Joris Ivens.
by Thomas Waugh
Far from Vietnam, the collective French film of 1967, produced in solidarity with the Vietnamese people under U.S. attack, is explored in relation to its historical context on three continents, to its coalitional politics and the solidarity genre in general, and to the forum it provided to one contributor, veteran communist filmmaker Joris Ivens.
Re-conceiving Misconception: birth as a site of filmic experimentation
by Roxanne Samer
This cultural history of Marjorie Keller's birth film Misconception (1977) seeks to release the film from past dichotomizing interpretative binds with the hope of opening it up to further future interpretations, re-looking and better appreciation.
by Roxanne Samer
This cultural history of Marjorie Keller's birth film Misconception (1977) seeks to release the film from past dichotomizing interpretative binds with the hope of opening it up to further future interpretations, re-looking and better appreciation.
Horror
Archaeology of flesh: history and body-memory in Taxidermia
by Laszlo Strausz
As a grotesque body film with comic corporeal exaggerations, Taxidermia outlines a complex argument about 20th-century Hungarian history and historical memory.
by Laszlo Strausz
As a grotesque body film with comic corporeal exaggerations, Taxidermia outlines a complex argument about 20th-century Hungarian history and historical memory.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: the Beginning:
a cultural critique of the Bush-Cheney Administration
by Rod Buxton
Through a dark poetics of brutality and mayhem, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: the Beginning explores the militarism and economic fallout that resulted from the political policies of the Bush-Cheney Administration.
a cultural critique of the Bush-Cheney Administration
by Rod Buxton
Through a dark poetics of brutality and mayhem, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: the Beginning explores the militarism and economic fallout that resulted from the political policies of the Bush-Cheney Administration.
It takes a child to raze a village: demonizing youth rebellion
by Andrew Scahill
When children attack! The child collective horror film presents a nightmare scenario of childhood in revolt — a revolution against systems of surveillance, control, and heterosexual kinship.
by Andrew Scahill
When children attack! The child collective horror film presents a nightmare scenario of childhood in revolt — a revolution against systems of surveillance, control, and heterosexual kinship.
Books
Books on film sound
review by Michael Chanan
Two books about film sound come at their subject from completely different angles.
• Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo), Cinema in the Digital Sound Age
• Andy Birtwistle, Cinesonica: Sounding Film and Video
review by Michael Chanan
Two books about film sound come at their subject from completely different angles.
• Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo), Cinema in the Digital Sound Age
• Andy Birtwistle, Cinesonica: Sounding Film and Video
Iranian film opposing regimes of voyeurism
review by Jyotika Virdi
Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema by Negar Mottahedeh
Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema is seen as a dynamic alternative to Hollywood's dominant voyeurism codes, while its narratives are displaced allegories that circumvent the state's modesty laws.
review by Jyotika Virdi
Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema by Negar Mottahedeh
Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema is seen as a dynamic alternative to Hollywood's dominant voyeurism codes, while its narratives are displaced allegories that circumvent the state's modesty laws.
Darwin at the movies
by David Andrews and Christine Andrews
This review of Barbara Creed's book Darwin's Screens also examines the use of evolutionary ideas in the field of film studies.
by David Andrews and Christine Andrews
This review of Barbara Creed's book Darwin's Screens also examines the use of evolutionary ideas in the field of film studies.
Star Trek’s allegorical monomyth
review by Elspeth kydd
David Greven in Gender and Sexuality in Star Trek: Allegories of Desire in the Television Series and Films tackles complex issues within this large and elusive monomyth.
review by Elspeth kydd
David Greven in Gender and Sexuality in Star Trek: Allegories of Desire in the Television Series and Films tackles complex issues within this large and elusive monomyth.
Nobody’s baby
review by Kirsten Pike
Babysitter: An American History by Miriam Forman-Brunell
The book examines girls’ domestic labor in the U.S. and also offers significant insight into the contradictory ways that girls are imagined, debated, and targeted by experts, advisors, and creators of popular culture.
review by Kirsten Pike
Babysitter: An American History by Miriam Forman-Brunell
The book examines girls’ domestic labor in the U.S. and also offers significant insight into the contradictory ways that girls are imagined, debated, and targeted by experts, advisors, and creators of popular culture.
Sexual innocence and film: a look at scholarship on virginity
review by Susan Ericsson
Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film, edited by Tamar Jeffers McDonald
How can virginity be depicted in fiction film and television beyond dialogue or narrative moments when the condition of virginity ends?
review by Susan Ericsson
Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film, edited by Tamar Jeffers McDonald
How can virginity be depicted in fiction film and television beyond dialogue or narrative moments when the condition of virginity ends?
Documentary studies: news from the front line
review by Russell Campbell
Sociopolitical documentary comes under intensive scrutiny in a cluster of new books.
• Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation by John Ellis
• Recording Reality, Desiring the Real by Elizabeth Cowie
• The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture by Belinda Smaill
• Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary by Jonathan Kahana
• The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film by Thomas Waugh
review by Russell Campbell
Sociopolitical documentary comes under intensive scrutiny in a cluster of new books.
• Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation by John Ellis
• Recording Reality, Desiring the Real by Elizabeth Cowie
• The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture by Belinda Smaill
• Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary by Jonathan Kahana
• The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film by Thomas Waugh
Documentary: intelligence and/or emotion?
review by Chuck Kleinhans
• The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture by Belinda Smaill
• Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary by Jonathan Kahana
Challenge for Change and participatory documentary filmmakingreview by Chuck Kleinhans
• The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture by Belinda Smaill
• Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary by Jonathan Kahana
review by Lyell Davies
Challenge For Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada. Edited by Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker and Ezra Winton.
The last word
Crisis politicsby the editors
Crises and drastic neoliberal economic makeovers.
No. 52, summer 2010
Experimental documentary
Introductionby Chuck Kleinhans
Documentaries with different forms, different agendas, different means.
“How it was then”: home movies as history in Peter Forgacs’ Meanwhile Somewhere...
by William C. Wees
From home movies shot between 1940 and 1943, Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács creates an extraordinary account of ordinary–and not so ordinary–life in wartime Europe.
The global repositioning of the city symphony: sound, space, and trauma in 11’09”01—September 11
by Maria Pramaggiore
The cultural work of memorializing traumatic events, here examining the film 11’9”01-September 11 (Brigand 2002) and, specifically, its use of experimental film genres and strategies.
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a constructivist: Perry Bard’s The Man With the Movie Camera: The Global Remake
by Seth Feldman
Ninety years ago, Dziga Vertov dreamed about an entire nation collectively making films. Thanks to the Internet, the whole world can do just that — and it's Vertov's film that they are making.
Memoradic narrative in The Shoebox
by Janet Marles
An innovative approach to online documentary creates an interactive architecture mimicking the process of personal memory recall.
Sick shit happens: everyday histories in Martin Creed’s Body Docs
by James P. Hansen
In Sick Film (2006) and Shit Film (2006), contemporary British artist Martin Creed locates a unique sense of commonality and equality within the everyday historical acts of vomiting and shitting.
Conference report:
Reframing Standard Operating Procedure—Errol Morris and the creative treatment of Abu Ghraib
Reframing Standard Operating Procedure—Errol Morris and the creative treatment of Abu Ghraib
Society for Cinema and Media Studies panel. Saturday, March 20, 2010. 2:00-3:45 pm. Chaired by Linda Williams (University of California, Berkeley). Papers by Bill Nichols (San Francisco State University), Jonathan Kahana (New York University), and Williams with a response by Irina Leimbacher (University of California, Berkeley).
Introduction
by David Andrews
This conference report provides an analysis of the debates surrounding Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure and introduces the two conference panels on this documentary at this year's SCMS conference in Los Angeles, with an emphasis on the panel moderated by Linda Williams.
by David Andrews
This conference report provides an analysis of the debates surrounding Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure and introduces the two conference panels on this documentary at this year's SCMS conference in Los Angeles, with an emphasis on the panel moderated by Linda Williams.
Feelings of revulsion and the limits of academic discourse
by Bill Nichols
Standard Operating Procedure was a monumental box office flop. Does that anything to do with
the feelings of revulsion that it produced in one viewer?
by Bill Nichols
Standard Operating Procedure was a monumental box office flop. Does that anything to do with
the feelings of revulsion that it produced in one viewer?
Speech images: Standard Operating Procedure and the staging of interrogation
by Jonathan Kahana
Drawing on the adjacent histories of U.S. war documentary and military psychiatry, Standard Operating Procedure provides its subjects with a powerful historical weapon: the confession that functions as an excuse.
by Jonathan Kahana
Drawing on the adjacent histories of U.S. war documentary and military psychiatry, Standard Operating Procedure provides its subjects with a powerful historical weapon: the confession that functions as an excuse.
“Cluster fuck”: the forcible frame in Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure
by Linda Williams
Williams defends Errol Morris' film through an examination of its framings, metaphorical and literal, arguing that even Lynndie England needs to be seen as an ethical being wrestling with her acquiescence to an unethical situation.
by Linda Williams
Williams defends Errol Morris' film through an examination of its framings, metaphorical and literal, arguing that even Lynndie England needs to be seen as an ethical being wrestling with her acquiescence to an unethical situation.
Corporate Hollywood today
Introduction: scholarship on corporate Hollywood
by Chuck Kleinhans
Merging aesthetic and economic analysis in studying media.
by Chuck Kleinhans
Merging aesthetic and economic analysis in studying media.
Media empires: corporate structures and lines of control
by Eileen R. Meehan
Sometimes it’s hard to see who’s really running the show!
by Eileen R. Meehan
Sometimes it’s hard to see who’s really running the show!
The future of selling the past: studio libraries in the 21st century
by Eric Hoyt
The Hollywood studios have long profited from their film libraries. Two pending deals and a wave of new media ventures invite us to reconsider the libraries’ industrial and political significance.
by Eric Hoyt
The Hollywood studios have long profited from their film libraries. Two pending deals and a wave of new media ventures invite us to reconsider the libraries’ industrial and political significance.
It’s not film, it’s TV: rethinking industrial identity
by Jennifer Holt
A revealing analysis of the revenue breakdowns for the major media conglomerates that explains how television keeps the film business afloat.
by Jennifer Holt
A revealing analysis of the revenue breakdowns for the major media conglomerates that explains how television keeps the film business afloat.
Hollywood handouts: tax credits in the age of economic crisis
by Vicki Mayer and Tanya Goldman
For an object lesson in government bailouts, we turn to Louisiana’s history of film production giveaways.
by Vicki Mayer and Tanya Goldman
For an object lesson in government bailouts, we turn to Louisiana’s history of film production giveaways.
U.S. film
Light Bouncing: digital processes illuminate the cultural past
by Deborah Tudor
As filmmakers define the relationship between analog and digital image capture, some like JJ Abrams with Star Trek use digital tools to create a nostalgic reproduction of film effects while others like Michael Mann in Public Enemies approach digital capture as a way to try to reframe the way audiences view cinema.
by Deborah Tudor
As filmmakers define the relationship between analog and digital image capture, some like JJ Abrams with Star Trek use digital tools to create a nostalgic reproduction of film effects while others like Michael Mann in Public Enemies approach digital capture as a way to try to reframe the way audiences view cinema.
Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker: a jack-in-the-box story
by Robert Alpert
In depicting the daily activities of a U.S. bomb squad in Iraq, Kathryn Bigelow continues to explore the rules of engagement of her culture and the resulting emotional schizophrenia and deathly effect on those who would challenge those rules.
by Robert Alpert
In depicting the daily activities of a U.S. bomb squad in Iraq, Kathryn Bigelow continues to explore the rules of engagement of her culture and the resulting emotional schizophrenia and deathly effect on those who would challenge those rules.
"Come Back to the Humvee Ag’in James Honey," or a few comments about the sexual politics of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker
by Sam Whitsitt
The great American love story between a white male and a dark-skinned male Other gets a twist that puts the White guy on top and the Black man beneath (but lovin’ it, chile!).
by Sam Whitsitt
The great American love story between a white male and a dark-skinned male Other gets a twist that puts the White guy on top and the Black man beneath (but lovin’ it, chile!).
Maternity divided: Avatar and the enjoyment of nature
by Todd McGowan
James Cameron's Avatar politicizes the natural world by depicting it as divided against itself.
by Todd McGowan
James Cameron's Avatar politicizes the natural world by depicting it as divided against itself.
Terminator to Avatar: a postmodern shift
by Kimberly N. Rosenfeld
Two popular narratives are decoded to illustrate U.S. society’s turn from a modern Terminator mindset to a postmodern Avatar era.
by Kimberly N. Rosenfeld
Two popular narratives are decoded to illustrate U.S. society’s turn from a modern Terminator mindset to a postmodern Avatar era.
District 9 and its world
by James Zborowski
Blomkamp’s up-to-the-minute representation of social problems in his thrilling South African sci-fi promises something different from what it ultimately delivers.
by James Zborowski
Blomkamp’s up-to-the-minute representation of social problems in his thrilling South African sci-fi promises something different from what it ultimately delivers.
Demeter and Persephone in space: transformation, femininity, and myth in the Alien films
by David Greven
The Alien films are modern horror versions of the classical Hollywood woman's film that, like this genre, foregrounds the heroine's remarkable ability to transform in myriad ways.
by David Greven
The Alien films are modern horror versions of the classical Hollywood woman's film that, like this genre, foregrounds the heroine's remarkable ability to transform in myriad ways.
Another kind of monster: Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer
by Dahlia Schweitzer"
Office Killer is Cindy Sherman's only film, and it provides essential clues to understanding her entire body of work. So why isn't anyone talking about it?
by Dahlia Schweitzer"
Office Killer is Cindy Sherman's only film, and it provides essential clues to understanding her entire body of work. So why isn't anyone talking about it?
Film and ecology
by Stephen Rust
Review of Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann’s Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge (New York: SUNY Press, 2009)
by Stephen Rust
Review of Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann’s Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge (New York: SUNY Press, 2009)
Passage as journey in Sherman Alexie’s Smoke Signals: a narrative of environmental adaptation
by Robin Murray and Joe Heumann
In a move toward a more sustainable view of prairie and desert ecosystems, Native Americans in Smoke Signals (1998) adapt a seemingly lifeless environment into a place they can call home.
by Robin Murray and Joe Heumann
In a move toward a more sustainable view of prairie and desert ecosystems, Native Americans in Smoke Signals (1998) adapt a seemingly lifeless environment into a place they can call home.
Field of American dreams: individualist ideology in the U.S. baseball movie
by Tom Robson
A look at how Hollywood has used the baseball movie to reinforce and reinscribe individualist capitalist ideology and how this ideology contributed to an explosion of successful baseball films during the Reagan years.
by Tom Robson
A look at how Hollywood has used the baseball movie to reinforce and reinscribe individualist capitalist ideology and how this ideology contributed to an explosion of successful baseball films during the Reagan years.
Who is missing in Bunny Lake?
by Dahlia Schweitzer
Is Ann losing her mind or just her child? An examination of what, exactly, has gone missing in Preminger's classic film.
by Dahlia Schweitzer
Is Ann losing her mind or just her child? An examination of what, exactly, has gone missing in Preminger's classic film.
The Hollywood two: 1945 and 1946 as filmgoing's best years
by Catherine Clepper
Review of Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron’s Best Years: Going to the Movies, 1945-1946 (Rutgers University Press, 2009)
Hollywood historians often note the final wartime years as the most successful period of U.S. exhibition, but do sky-high attendance records suggest that these years were also Hollywood's creative pinnacle?
by Catherine Clepper
Review of Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron’s Best Years: Going to the Movies, 1945-1946 (Rutgers University Press, 2009)
Hollywood historians often note the final wartime years as the most successful period of U.S. exhibition, but do sky-high attendance records suggest that these years were also Hollywood's creative pinnacle?
International film and television
East Asian film and television
The circulation of Hong Kong television: imaginary landscapes, transnational Chinese publics and global Chinatown
by Amy Lee
Hong Kong television is a diasporic medium that connects Hong Kong to Chinatowns throughout the world — a transnational media geography best encapsulated by the notion of “global Chinatown.”
by Amy Lee
Hong Kong television is a diasporic medium that connects Hong Kong to Chinatowns throughout the world — a transnational media geography best encapsulated by the notion of “global Chinatown.”
Japanese cinema, Swallowtail Butterfly, and the classroom
by Colleen A. Laird
An analysis of Iwai Shunji’s popular and “problematic” film Swallowtail Butterfly addresses issues of canon and education in order to challenge some of the established patterns in Japanese cinema classrooms and scholarship.
by Colleen A. Laird
An analysis of Iwai Shunji’s popular and “problematic” film Swallowtail Butterfly addresses issues of canon and education in order to challenge some of the established patterns in Japanese cinema classrooms and scholarship.
“It’s better not to lie, but it’s hard to stimulate the audience otherwise”: realism and melodrama in Lee Chang-Dong’s Secret Sunshine
by Marc Raymond
A detailed formal analysis of the 2007 South Korean melodrama Secret Sunshine explores how melodrama and realism can interact to create and interrogate meaning in popular film form.
by Marc Raymond
A detailed formal analysis of the 2007 South Korean melodrama Secret Sunshine explores how melodrama and realism can interact to create and interrogate meaning in popular film form.
Transnational China and Hollywood-ized Chineseness: interventions and discontents
by Kin-Yan Szeto.
Review of Gina Marchetti, Tan See Kam, and Peter X Feng’s edited volume Chinese Connections: Critical Perspective on Film, Identity, and Diaspora (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009) and Kenneth Chan’s Remade in Hollywood: The Global Chinese Presence in Transnational Chinese Cinemas (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009).
Two recent scholarly volumes deal with the overlapping contact zones between Chinese diasporic cinema and other cinemas (such as Hollywood, etc). Szeto suggests that thinking, writing and teaching film and cultural criticism demands a dialectically critical approach, one that unveils what has been concealed and failed to be articulated in the East/West dichotomy.
by Kin-Yan Szeto.
Review of Gina Marchetti, Tan See Kam, and Peter X Feng’s edited volume Chinese Connections: Critical Perspective on Film, Identity, and Diaspora (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009) and Kenneth Chan’s Remade in Hollywood: The Global Chinese Presence in Transnational Chinese Cinemas (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009).
Two recent scholarly volumes deal with the overlapping contact zones between Chinese diasporic cinema and other cinemas (such as Hollywood, etc). Szeto suggests that thinking, writing and teaching film and cultural criticism demands a dialectically critical approach, one that unveils what has been concealed and failed to be articulated in the East/West dichotomy.
South Asian film
Rage against the state: historicizing the “angry young man” in Tamil cinema
by Kumuthan Maderya
Tamil cinema’s “Angry Young Man” genre enjoyed a popular run in the 1980s, depicting the violent struggle of anti-heroes against failed bureaucracies, corrupt politicians, crooked cops, and a feeble justice system.
by Kumuthan Maderya
Tamil cinema’s “Angry Young Man” genre enjoyed a popular run in the 1980s, depicting the violent struggle of anti-heroes against failed bureaucracies, corrupt politicians, crooked cops, and a feeble justice system.
Indian cinema and Partition
by Jyotika Virdi
Love and loss in India's historical trauma, the Partition
Review of Bhaskar Sarkar's Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009)
by Jyotika Virdi
Love and loss in India's historical trauma, the Partition
Review of Bhaskar Sarkar's Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009)
Latin American film
Genders and feminism in the films of Maricarmen de Lara
by Eli Bartra
Violence and feminist critique: leitmotifs in the films of Mexican documentarist Maricarmen de Lara.
by Eli Bartra
Violence and feminist critique: leitmotifs in the films of Mexican documentarist Maricarmen de Lara.
Secuestro Express and La clase: politics of realism in contemporary Venezuelan filmmaking
by Mercedes Vázquez
What is propaganda filmmaking and what is not? In Venezuela today, everything is polarized, society, politics, and “socially-committed” filmmaking.
by Mercedes Vázquez
What is propaganda filmmaking and what is not? In Venezuela today, everything is polarized, society, politics, and “socially-committed” filmmaking.
Battle of Chile: Struggle of a People Without Arms
by Victor Wallis
Class-struggle classic, a generation later with DVD release.
by Victor Wallis
Class-struggle classic, a generation later with DVD release.
Central Asian television
Franchising culture for Kazakhstan television: producers’ ambivalence and audiences’ indifference
by Amos Owen Thomas
Television programming in Kazakhstan in the post-Soviet age becomes site of cultural-economic contestation by producers and consumer between a globalized Russian and a nationalistic Kazakh one.
by Amos Owen Thomas
Television programming in Kazakhstan in the post-Soviet age becomes site of cultural-economic contestation by producers and consumer between a globalized Russian and a nationalistic Kazakh one.
European film and television
Hidden, or fear of a black planet
by Nicholas Sammond
Race and neoliberal anxiety in Caché (Haneke 2005), Europa 2005—27 octobre (Straub and Huillet 2006) and the election of Barack Obama (2008)
by Nicholas Sammond
Race and neoliberal anxiety in Caché (Haneke 2005), Europa 2005—27 octobre (Straub and Huillet 2006) and the election of Barack Obama (2008)
Michael Haneke: a little colder than reality
by Jason Kelly Roberts
Review of Peter Brunette’s Michael Haneke (University of Illinois Press, 2010)
Peter Brunette tackles one of the art cinema's most emotionally daunting bodies of work in a new monograph in the Contemporary Directors Series, published by the University of Illnois Press.
by Jason Kelly Roberts
Review of Peter Brunette’s Michael Haneke (University of Illinois Press, 2010)
Peter Brunette tackles one of the art cinema's most emotionally daunting bodies of work in a new monograph in the Contemporary Directors Series, published by the University of Illnois Press.
Freaks, geniuses or biological citizens? Discourses of mental distress in British television documentaries
by Stephen Harper
While television documentaries adopt an increasingly sympathetic perspective on psychological distress, some British documentaries nonetheless tend to reproduce hegemonic sexist and class-biased assumptions and reinforce a desocialized view of mental distress.
by Stephen Harper
While television documentaries adopt an increasingly sympathetic perspective on psychological distress, some British documentaries nonetheless tend to reproduce hegemonic sexist and class-biased assumptions and reinforce a desocialized view of mental distress.
Producing resistance: Elías Querejeta’s political landscapes
by Tom Whittaker
An overview of one of Europe's most important and controversial producers.
by Tom Whittaker
An overview of one of Europe's most important and controversial producers.
Goodbye Germany: emigration, reality TV and Schadenfreude
by Mattias Frey
Reality TV series show Germans flocking to exotic lands, "emigration" which often ends in ruin. This article explores the European fantasy of mobility and asks, in general, why does it makes us feel good to see others feel bad?
by Mattias Frey
Reality TV series show Germans flocking to exotic lands, "emigration" which often ends in ruin. This article explores the European fantasy of mobility and asks, in general, why does it makes us feel good to see others feel bad?
Burnt by the Sun: from screen to stage
by Andrea Grunert
A Russian film turned into a play in London: Burnt by the Sun emphasizes how emotions and universal themes of love and humanity convey political reflections.
by Andrea Grunert
A Russian film turned into a play in London: Burnt by the Sun emphasizes how emotions and universal themes of love and humanity convey political reflections.
Middle Eastern film
Man-made martyrs in the age of mechanical reproduction: disturbing manufactured martyrdom in Paradise Now
by Phoebe Bronstein
A discussion of media, martyrdom, and violence (or the lack thereof) in Paradise Now (2005) in the context of Hollywood representations of the Middle East and the "War on Terror."
by Phoebe Bronstein
A discussion of media, martyrdom, and violence (or the lack thereof) in Paradise Now (2005) in the context of Hollywood representations of the Middle East and the "War on Terror."
Sex and its anxieties
AIDS video: to dream and dance with the censor
by Alexandra Juhasz
Censorship demands an AIDS act; it propels AIDS art. It always has; it still does. Annette Kuhn calls this “the circuit of censorship” and here I will perform the circuit not as series of parties where gay men dance, drink, and hook up, but as another sort of dance through time, one inspired by AIDS videos that spoke strategically to the censor in their own time.
by Alexandra Juhasz
Censorship demands an AIDS act; it propels AIDS art. It always has; it still does. Annette Kuhn calls this “the circuit of censorship” and here I will perform the circuit not as series of parties where gay men dance, drink, and hook up, but as another sort of dance through time, one inspired by AIDS videos that spoke strategically to the censor in their own time.
Identity scavengers: queer girl fandom, identity politics, and South of Nowhere
by Whitney Monaghan
Through analysis of the fan culture of South of Nowhere, this essay opens up the complex worlds of reception and fandom, positioning queer girl fans as "identity scavengers."
by Whitney Monaghan
Through analysis of the fan culture of South of Nowhere, this essay opens up the complex worlds of reception and fandom, positioning queer girl fans as "identity scavengers."
Surveillance, space and performance: informing interstitial subjectivities in Head On
by Evangelos Tziallas
Explores intersections between sexuality, ethnicity and nationality, suggesting gay identity is a spatially dependent, surveillant performance.
by Evangelos Tziallas
Explores intersections between sexuality, ethnicity and nationality, suggesting gay identity is a spatially dependent, surveillant performance.
Bend Over Boyfriend to Take it Like a Man: pegging pornography and the queer representation of straight sex
by Curran Nault
The recent phenomenon of pegging pornography (pornography aimed at straight viewers that features acts of female-to-male penetration), puts on display a new heteroerotic in which the anus, not the penis, is situated as the principal site of male pleasure, and categorical distinctions between masculine and feminine, hetero and homo are frustrated.
by Curran Nault
The recent phenomenon of pegging pornography (pornography aimed at straight viewers that features acts of female-to-male penetration), puts on display a new heteroerotic in which the anus, not the penis, is situated as the principal site of male pleasure, and categorical distinctions between masculine and feminine, hetero and homo are frustrated.
Torture and horror film
Torture porn and surveillance culture
by Evangelos Tziallas
A group of "extreme horror" films, known collectively as "torture porn," let us contemplate the social and political ramifications of visibility, exploring the evolution of "the gaze" in the 21st century.
by Evangelos Tziallas
A group of "extreme horror" films, known collectively as "torture porn," let us contemplate the social and political ramifications of visibility, exploring the evolution of "the gaze" in the 21st century.
Tortured logic: entertainment and the spectacle of deliberately inflicted pain in 24 and Battlestar Galactica
by Isabel Pinedo
24 and Battlestar Galactica, two television series about our post-9/11 world, tackle the issue of torture from right wing and progressive perspectives, respectively, arriving at diametrically opposed positions.
Cross-cultural disgust: some problems in the analysis of contemporary horror cinema, part 2: Public Toilet, Visitor Q by Isabel Pinedo
24 and Battlestar Galactica, two television series about our post-9/11 world, tackle the issue of torture from right wing and progressive perspectives, respectively, arriving at diametrically opposed positions.
by Chuck Kleinhans
Film artists can expand cinematic disgust beyond shock and gross out. Fruit Chan rewrites human waste in a humanistic global framework while Takahisi Miike uses it for dark social satire.
Experimental and art worlds
Revisiting “The Two Avant-Gardes”
by David Andrews
Reconsiders a classic essay by Peter Wollen so as to defend a new analysis of U.S. experimental cinema. Andrews presents this field's peculiar subcultural dynamics as effects of its internal dynamics and its conflicted relations to its supporting institutions.
by David Andrews
Reconsiders a classic essay by Peter Wollen so as to defend a new analysis of U.S. experimental cinema. Andrews presents this field's peculiar subcultural dynamics as effects of its internal dynamics and its conflicted relations to its supporting institutions.
Economics of the film avant-garde: networks and strategies in the circulation of films, ideas, and people
by Kathryn Ramey
An ethnographic study of the economics of avant-garde film and filmmakers.
by Kathryn Ramey
An ethnographic study of the economics of avant-garde film and filmmakers.
Persevering despite the impossible: a brief history of media activism in Buffalo, NY
by Marc Moscato
Examining the tradition of media activism in Buffalo, NY, a city that has only recently started to become recognized for its lo-fi, experimental and, above all, uncompromising body of film and video.
by Marc Moscato
Examining the tradition of media activism in Buffalo, NY, a city that has only recently started to become recognized for its lo-fi, experimental and, above all, uncompromising body of film and video.
Placing artists’ cinema
by Kate Mondloch
Review of Maeve Connolly, The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site and Screen (Bristol, UK and Chicago, USA: Intellect, 2009)
by Kate Mondloch
Review of Maeve Connolly, The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site and Screen (Bristol, UK and Chicago, USA: Intellect, 2009)
Hollywood animation
by Alla Gadassik
Review of Esther Leslie’s Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (London and New York: Verso, 2002)
by Alla Gadassik
Review of Esther Leslie’s Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (London and New York: Verso, 2002)
Art treasures of the wasteland
by Susan Felleman
Review of Lynn Spigel’s TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)
by Susan Felleman
Review of Lynn Spigel’s TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)
Resources: Studying the media avant-garde
by Chuck Kleinhans
Books, DVDs, distributors, and online resources.
by Chuck Kleinhans
Books, DVDs, distributors, and online resources.
The last word
No. 51, spring 2009
Documenting tortureImagining torture
by Chuck Kleinhans
Survey of the fundamental political facts of torture in the present moment in U.S. history and a brief introduction to the visual imagination of torture in fiction film and television.
Torture documentaries
by Julia Lesage
With a close analysis of Taxi to the Dark Side, Standard Operating Procedure, and The Road to Guantanamo, Lesage analyzes the torture documentary in terms of genre structures, torture epistephilia, and affect.
A Simple Case for Torture, redux
by Martha Rosler
Rosler reconsiders her 1983 experimental video, A Simple Case for Torture in the context of torture in the George W. Bush presidency.
Television
The Wire and the world: narrative and metanarrative
by Helena Sheehan and Sheamus Sweeney
Does The Wire deserve the critical acclaim it has attracted? The key to this question lies in an examination of how its specific plots open into a systemic critique of the social order encompassing it all.
“Don’t Just Watch It, Live It:” technology, corporate partnerships, and The Hills
by Elizabeth Affuso
This essay examines how MTV’s The Hills uses new media technologies and corporate partnerships to create and expand the show’s aspirational lifestyle brand.
Postmodern marketing, Generation Y and the multiplatform viewing experience of MTV’s The Hills
by Amanda Klein
The Hills offers content in alternate venues, including tabloid magazines, MTV-sponsored virtual worlds, gossip sites, blogs and product tie-ins. This multiplatform marketing strategy engages its target audience, Generation Y, a demographic adept and dependent on social networking tools and comfortable with the concept of surveillance and public disclosure.
The past isn't what it used to be: the troubled homes of Mad Men
by Mark Taylor
How Mad Men's sixties nostalgia recycles and revises our image of the past.
Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica
reviewed by David Greven
A new essay collection praises the current version of Battlestar Galactica for its gritty complexity. But is there something ideologically suspect in this “complexity”?
Global formats, gender and identity: the search for The Perfect Bride on Italian television
by Michela Ardizzoni
Does reality television challenge traditional gender norms and expectations? Or, is the new packaging of television programming a camouflage for conservative views on gender roles? The case of the Italian 'Perfect Bride' reveals the tensions between format novelty and ideological regression.
East Asian film
A nightmare of capitalist Japan: Spirited Away
by Ayumi Suzuki
Hayao Miyazaki uses animation and children as characters to question conditions in post-modern Japan by depicting a late-capitalist society that faces issues such as the loss of spiritual values and identity.
The curious cases of Salma, Siti, and Ming:representations of Indonesia’s polygamous life in Love for Share
by Ekky Imanjaya
A domestic comedy exploring the polygamous lifestyle and depicting the mostly unacknowledged aspects of polygamy in the country with the largest percentage of Muslims.
Gender and class in the Singaporean film 881
by Brenda Chan
This essay examines how Singaporean director, Royston Tan, challenges gender, linguistic and class hierarchies in his 2007 film 881.
Cinenumerology: interview with Royston Tan, one of Singapore’s most versatile filmmakers
by Anne Ciecko
Dynamic Singaporean filmmaker Royston Tan speaks with Anne Ciecko about cultural identity and language, film festivals and box-office success, actors and singers, melodrama and spectacle, and chicken jokes and bullet bras.
Visible “waves”: notes on Koreanness, pan-Asianness, and some recent Southeast Asian art films
by Anne Ciecko and Hunju Lee
The impact of the Korean cultural "wave" and pan-Asian cinematic trends are visible in recent films by Singapore's Royston Tan and Thailand's Pen-ek Ratanaruang.
Asia’s beloved sassy girl: Jun Ji-Hyun’s star image and her transnational stardom
by JaeYoon Park
Jun Ji-Hyun became one of the Korean Wave stars in Asia through her “sassy” girl image that reversed gender expectations. Does her image signify a new subversive female type in Asia?
Porn
Pornography and its critical reception: toward a theory of masturbation
by Magnus Ullén
The cultural centrality of pornography will become evident only if we pay attention not only to the contents of porn, but to the masturbatory mode of reading it habitually involves as well.
Real sex: the aesthetics and economics of art-house porn by Magnus Ullén
The cultural centrality of pornography will become evident only if we pay attention not only to the contents of porn, but to the masturbatory mode of reading it habitually involves as well.
by Jon Lewis
This essay examines art-house porn, a genre defined by a market niche and a set of shared aesthetic principles that introduce a peculiar but nonetheless sincere cinematic realism.
Documentary and the anamnesis of queer space: The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman
by Nicholas de Villiers
Fred Barney Taylor's recent documentary portrait of the writer Samuel R. Delany intervenes in debates about New York City's changing queer sexual landscape, combatting cultural amnesia alongside the activist video Fenced Out and the documentary Gay Sex in the 70s.
Documentary investigations and the female porn star
by Belinda Smaill
Analyzes representations of the female porn star, subjectivity, and the question of desire in documentaries about the pornography industry, and considers these depictions of the women in terms of genre expectations, economy of emotions, and popular narratives of femininity.
The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene
reviewed by Catherine Clepper
The Asian/American female body serves as a site of desire, danger, or virtue — and sometimes all three.
Documenting and denial: discourses of sexual self-exploitation
by Leigh Goldstein
In their analyses of the adolescent social practice of producing and sharing eroticized images, media and legal discourses contribute to a social construction of childhood innocence that puts kids at risk.
Hollywood
Milk and gay political history
by Harry Benshoff
Academy Award winning actor Sean Penn makes political organizing look joyous.
Children of Men and I Am Legend :
the disaster-capitalism complex hits Hollywood
by Kirk Boyle
The formally similar post-apocalyptic films Children of Men and I Am Legend respond in diametrically opposed ways to the neoconservative movement’s mix of imperial foreign policy with religious and market fundamentalism.
The exceptional darkness of The Dark Knight
by Todd McGowan
The Dark Knight explores the danger and the necessity of the state of exception for contemporary politics.
The Dark Knight of American empire
by Randolph Lewis
Along with its teenage fantasy of bulging biceps and smoke-belching cars, does the new Batman invite a second fantasy of rupture and revolution? Using the insights of philosopher Ernst Bloch, this essay argues for a radical interpretation of a Hollywood blockbuster released at the end of the Bush administration.
Post-Iraq cinema: the veteran hero in The Jacket and Harsh Times
by Justin Vicari
John Maybury's The Jacket (2005) and David Ayer's Harsh Times (2007) explore in very different ways the difficulties faced by Iraq war veterans in civilian U.S. society, though both films reach the same conclusion: the problems of veterans are all of our problems.
WALL-E: from environmental adaptation to sentimental nostalgia
by Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann In WALL-E,
A robot built for clean-up named WALL-E helps transform the hell of Earth into a home by following a narrative of environmental adaptation with a clear and cohesive structure that follows an evolutionary pattern focused on place.
Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino: the death of America’s hero
by Robert Alpert
Clint Eastwood, at 78, elegiacally acknowledges the failure of the myth of the invincible loner.
Interpreting revolution: Che: Part I and Part II
by Victor Wallis
The dialectic of victory and defeat in the life of Che Guevara — and what it means today.
Art films, international cinema
The cold world behind the window: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Romanian cinema’s return to real-existing communism
by Constantin Parvulescu
How a generation of filmmakers rethinks the cinematic representation of the past.
Retrieving Emir Kusturica’s Underground as a critique of ethnic nationalism
by Sean Homer
Is it possible to read Kusturica’s Underground “against the grain” today, as a critique of ethnonationalism, or has Kusturica’s more recent and very publicly expressed nationalist leanings now irretrievably marked this text for us?
Dimensions of exile in the videos of Silvia Malagrino
by Ilene S. Goldman
Video artist Malagrino traces her memories of Argentina and of friends murdered there in works that focus on the embodiment of fear, violence, war, and memory.
No parking between signs: on Sadie Benning's Flat is Beautiful and early works
by Burlin Barr
Benning’s videos render the private material and conceptual spaces of an adolescent youth, and offer a compelling depiction of an emergent subject: someone attempting to come to terms with him/herself in a world of racial, class, and sexual prescriptions and prohibitions.
Sex versus the small screen: home video censorship and Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también
by Caetlin Benson-Allott
In order to protect its member studios and satisfy the market demands of conservative video retailers, the MPAA abuses its ratings system, compelling "foreign" films like Y tu mamá también to obfuscate political critique by cutting scenes crucial to the movie.
Torture, maternity, and truth in Jasmila Zbanic’s Grbavica: Land of My Dreams
by Caroline Koebel
Set in Sarajevo a decade after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this understated domestic melodrama dramatizes a mother's memories and a daughter's needs.
Horror
Culture wars: some new trends in art horror
by Joan Hawkins
New trends in art-horror—and the way they’re received by critics, the subgenre of guilt-trauma horror films, and the mainstreaming of trash culture.
Misogyny as radical commentary: Rashomon retold in Takashi Miike’s Masters of Horror: Imprint
by William Leung
Not just a cheap thrill dressed up as a class act, Imprint is a radical Japanese filmmaker’s visceral commentary on Western audiences’ reverence for Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece, Rashomon.
The dangers of biosecurity: The Host and the geopolitics of outbreak
by Hsuan L. Hsu
Analyzes the South Korean blockbuster monster movie as a narrative about disease, hunger, and the IMF.
The return of horror to Chinese cinema: an aesthetic of restraint and space of horror
by Li Zeng
After a four-decade absence, horror returns to the PRC cinema. This essay studies the theme and style of contemporary Chinese horror films in relation to international horrors and Chinese social and cultural context.
Cross cultural disgust: some problems in the analysis of contemporary horror cinema
by Chuck Kleinhans
The increased market in the West for “Asian Extreme” horror cinema dramatizes the problems of cross cultural (mis)understanding and analysis.
Media salad
Media salad
by Chuck Kleinhans
Book reviews
Center Field Shot: A History of Baseball on Television
reviewed by Deborah Tudor
Center Field Shot provides a meticulous survey of the twinned economic fortunes of media and baseball.
Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance
reviewed by Neha Kamdar
Mutation of music and the cultural reinvention of Bollywood across the world.
From “centripetal” to “centrifugal” trauma: history and representation in modern China
by Li Zeng
Review of A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film by Michael Berry (New York: Columbia University Press. 2008)
Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound
reviewed by Mark Kerins
The individual essays in Lowering the Boom are a mixed bag, but several standout pieces and the book's breadth of topics make it a great resource for film scholars whether specifically interested in sound or not.
The last word
Racing into the Obama era
by the editors
Remembrance against manufactured amnesia: on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Incident
by David Leiwei Li
History since the Tiananmen incident makes clear the convergence of state and capital interests for the sake of a forever-profitable economy.
No. 50, spring 2008
Arab independent media and Hollywood representation of Arabs Tora Bora cinema and independent media from Palestine
by Sobhi al-Zobaidi
How can people survive their lost geographies? What are the consequences of perpetual and systematic dispossession of people like the Palestinians? Tora Bora Cinema traces in film and video, the emergence of the paranoid Palestinian, the displaced, de-centered and space-less subject who, in order to survive, must not remember.
Civil society under siege:
terrorism and government response to terrorism in The Siege
by Helena Vanhala
This essay analyzes how methods of counterterrorism can pose a bigger threat to civil society than terrorism itself, as portrayed in the 1998 film, The Siege, and how mainstream action-adventure films and news media’s misrepresentations of international terrorism in pre-9/11 era had left audiences unprepared for the reality of international terrorism.
Reel Bad Arabs:
How Hollywood Vilifies a People by Jack G. Shaheen
(New York: Olive Branch Press, 2001)
reviewed by Christian Blauvelt
This review seeks to chart the origins, development, and continuing influence of degrading Arab stereotypes in U.S. media and their relation to U.S. foreign policy.
Latin America
Lucía: visual style and historical portrayal
by John Mraz
Close visual analysis of a Cuban classic.
Latino and the Chicano warrior in the U.S. national body
by Barbara Korte
In light of the current dicussion about ethnic-minority soldiers and citizenship, this essay takes a second look at Haskell Wexler's 1985 portrayal of a Mexican-American soldier in the U.S. covert war in Nicaragua.
Lucrecia Martel: “A decidedly polyphonic cinema”
by Dominique Russell
An exploration of the way Lucrecia Martel’s films are designed for sound and the results of this aural primacy.
The theory and practice of the Peruvian Grupo Chaski
by Sophia A. McClennen
An analysis of the socio-political context, key films, aesthetic practices, and media activism of Grupo Chaski.
Cinema law in Latin America:
Brazil, Peru and Colombia
by Gabriela Martínez
A study of cinema law in Latin America and its impact in the development of national film industries, with three case studies.
Art house and European film
Babel:
pushing and reaffirming mainstream cinema's boundaries
by Marina Hassapopoulou
Babel provides a useful case study to examine how far artistic innovation can push the boundaries of mainstream cinema without jeopardizing commercial success, and if a script can develop national specificities and maintain "transnational" appeal.
Colonial fictions: Le Petit Soldat (Jean-Luc Godard)
and its revisionist sequel, Beau Travail (Claire Denis)
by Justin Vicari
Nearly forty years after Jean-Luc Godard examined the immorality of torture and terrorism in Le Petit Soldat (1960), Claire Denis in Beau Travail makes an art-house sequel that takes up Godard's hero and places him in a contemporary situation no less fraught with political complexities.
Migrants and lovers in Flowers from Another World
(Flores de otro mundo)
by Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez
Analysis of Spain's most critically acclaimed film on migrants.
Jindabyne: old secrets and a second chance
by Andrea Grunert.
Shattered identities mirror feelings of individual and collective guilt in a country still haunted by the shadows of its violent colonial past.
An East German Indianerfilm:
the bear in sheep’s clothing
by Vera Dika
The Sons of the Great Mother Bear, a Western made in East Germany just after the building of the Berlin Wall, reuses and displaces U.S. Western genre conventions as it casts American Indians as the heroes against frontiersmen and the U.S. Cavalry who threaten their land.
Hollywood (today and reconsidered)
Say hello (and goodbye) to the postclassical:
Tony Scott and Domino
by Larry Knapp
Tony Scott's Domino—an unrelenting panorama of post-9/11 United States —renovates Scott as a key agent, and symptom, of Postclassical Hollywood Cinema.
Brokering Brokeback Mountain:
a local reception study
by Harry M. Benshoff
The reception of Brokeback Mountain in North Texas created an important public space for discourse on the place and meaning of men and masculinity in contemporary United States, even as much of that discourse attempted to reduce complex queer concepts to easily dismissed factoids about “gay cowboys.”
(Not) queering “white vision” in
Far from Heaven and Transamerica
by Rebecca Scherr
In contemporary U.S. queer cinema, race and sexuality are often mapped as contiguous and interlocking discourses; this essay examines the effects of this conflation in Far from Heaven (2002) and Transamerica (2005.)
Yuppie devil:
villainy in Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel
by Kevin L. Ferguson
The yuppie, who went from a success story to a cultural villain during the 1980s, provides an ambivalent, hastily dismissed symbol for imaginings of the relationship between gender, power, and cinema.
China
Leaving the cinema: metacinematic cruising
in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn
by Nicholas de Villiers
A reading of Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn in terms of queer sexuality and the cinema as an alternative public sphere.
Salvaging the rubble of utopia:
Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks
by Jie Li
A close-reading of a recent documentary epic’s treatment of an industrial complex’s monumental decline and of the individuals trying to survive in its crevices.
U.S. television and independent video
Wallowing in Sex:
The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television
(Duke University Press, 2007) by Elana Levine
reviewed by Mary E. Pagano
Gay TV and Straight America
(Rutgers University Press, 2006) by Ron Becker
reviewed by Hollis Griffin.
How and why 90s television made U.S. viewers increasingly familiar with gay people and gay culture.
The twilight of identity: Enterprise,
neoconservatism, and the death of Star Trek
by David Greven
Enterprise's plots, with their xenophobia and sexism, exhibit a nostalgia for a time before liberal values and the belief that exploration and the unification of diverse groups are good things.
Confessions of A Dangerous Mind and
Good Night and Good Luck:
George Clooney on U.S. television, history, and politics
by Brian Faucette
Dealing with both low and high culture television, George Clooney critiques the negative effects of corporate capitalism on U.S. entertainment and news.
Queer Performance, youth and YouTube
by Ron Gregg
YouTube is a site of both pleasure and danger, self-invention and mass-mediation and has become a powerful cultural force for queer youth that deserves our attention.
Webisodic mock vlogs:
HoShows as commercial entertainment new media
by Chuck Kleinhans
The HoShow fake vlogs reveal the problems and (sometimes) possibilities of new media.
Without restraint:
9/11 videos and the pursuit of truth
by Christopher Sharrett
This close critical reading of many of the prominent 9/11 Truth videos analyses 9/11 and the supporters and critics of the official narrative (left and right) within the context of past state-sanctioned crimes.
Horror film
Horror's new terrain
by Chuck Kleinhans
Introduction to horror film section
Representations of the body in pain and
the cinema experience of torture-porn
by Gabrielle Murray
Inquiring into the appeal of films like Hostel II, Murray concludes that we may seek to forget ourselves — our cognitive subjectivity — in the immensity of physical feeling.
Dread of mothering:
plumbing the depths of Dark Water
by Nina K. Martin
The mise-en-scene of Hideo Nakata's film Dark Water (2002) suggests that the home and its environs embody a dread that cannot be escaped, a dread related to the intense cultural pressures placed on Japanese women as idealized mothers.
Art of branding: Tartan "Asia Extreme" films
by Chi-Yun Shin
Taking the Tartan "Asia Extreme" label as a fascinating site to explore how the West consumes East Asian cinema, this essay examines the marketing and promotional practices of the most high-profile label amongst the East Asian film providers in the West.
Sentimentality and the cinema of the extreme by Chi-Yun Shin
Taking the Tartan "Asia Extreme" label as a fascinating site to explore how the West consumes East Asian cinema, this essay examines the marketing and promotional practices of the most high-profile label amongst the East Asian film providers in the West.
by Jinhee Choi
This essay examines the sentimental "mode" that is shared between sentimentality and brutality manifest in the recent trend of melodrama and extreme cinema.
Links
Audio podcasting now
by Julia Lesage
An overview of spoken word podcasting and a guide to some interesting podcasts, mostly free
The last word
Torture and the national imagination
Continuing from the editorial in JC 49 on contemporary political film, we are extending the analysis with a look at new films that deal with the Iraq war, its representation (in film) and misrepresentation (by the Bush administation), and the issue of torture.
No. 49, spring 2007
China and China disapora film — a new stage
Introduction
by Chuck Kleinhans
Trajectories of identification: travel and global culture in the films of Wong Kar-wai
by Allan Cameron
A number of Wong Kar-wai's films reveal complex and entwined preoccupations with travel and cultural translation, and pursue a developing exploration of regional identification.
The politics of historiography in Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle
by Kin-Yan Szeto
If we look at Kung Fu Hustle from a transnational perspective, we can see how the film relates to and is shaped by the history of post-1997 Hong Kong.
Hero: China’s response to Hollywood globalization
by Jenny Kwok Wah Lau
Hero answers the question: How can a film be both a blockbuster and Chinese (not simply having a Chinese story but more importantly based on Chinese aesthetics and values)?
Searching for Taiwanese identity: reading June Yip’s Envisioning Taiwan
by Li Zeng
Review of June Yip, Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary (Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004).
Huangmei opera films, Shaw Brothers and Ling Bo: chaste love-stories, genderless cross-dressers and sexless gender-plays?
by Tan See-Kam
Shaw Brothers Huangmei opera films often starred actress Ling Bo in cross-dressing roles; the films cater to a constellation of gazes, from the heterosexist to the queer.
Modernity, diasporic capital, and 1950s Hong Kong Mandarin cinema
by Poshek Fu
A study of Hong Kong Mandarin cinema of the 1950s in the changing context of modernity, diasporic capital, and Cold War politics.
Romantic comedies of Cathay-MP&GI in the 1950s and 60s: language, locality, and urban character
by Kenny K. K. Ng
The Hong Kong Cathay-MP&G Studio films of the 50s and 60s base their plots on clashes of regional dialects and cultures in a genre inspired by Hollywood romantic comedies that imaginatively figures Chinese modernity and urbanity.
Dialect and modernity in 21st century Sinophone cinema
by Sheldon Lu
Lu explores the politics of language and dialects in the construction of national identity in Chinese cinemas.
Dialogues with critics on Chinese independent cinemas
by Esther M.K. Cheung
These critics discuss the different patterns, functions, and critical roles that independent filmmaking has in the PRC and Hong Kong, and the impact of independents in a rapidly globalized world.
The Hong Kong local on film: re-imagining the global
by Wendy Gan
In two Hong Kong films, Comrades: Almost a Love Story and One Nite in Mongkok, stories of local difference emerge and reshape dominant narratives of globalization.
The class imaginary in Fruit Chan's films
by Wimal Dissanayake
The films of Fruit Chan draw our attention the class predicament of Hong Kong's urban proletariat by using imaginative narratives and a wide range of visually expressive styles.
Serving the people — Dumplings
by Chuck Kleinhans
In Dumplings director Fruit Chan presents a disturbing social satire using creepy taboo topics of cannibalism and abortion to pump up the shock and underline ethical issues of capitalist culture.
Hollywood’s crusade in China prior to China’s WTO accession by Chuck Kleinhans
In Dumplings director Fruit Chan presents a disturbing social satire using creepy taboo topics of cannibalism and abortion to pump up the shock and underline ethical issues of capitalist culture.
by Ting Wang
Hollywood-China interplay before China's WTO accession looked at through the prism of history, bilateral diplomacy, trade relations, and national cultural identity.
Spotlight on horror
Vampire as metaphor: revisiting Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction
by Justin Vicari
Existentialism, radical politics, and vampire lore meet in Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction (1994), an intense, anomalous and highly personal film.
“Before you die, you see The Ring”: notes on the immanent obsolescence of VHS
by Caetlin Benson-Allott
The videocassette and reproduction are examined in a technological sense, a biological sense, and a psychoanalytic sense in the way they shape the plot of The Ring's horror narrative.
Perpetual flight: the terror of biology and biology of terror in the Ginger Snaps trilogy
by Patricia Molloy
The misfortunes of teen sisters Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald in this darkly comic Canadian werewolf film trilogy provoke a critical reflection on bare life and sovereign violence, as theorized by Giorgio Agamben.
"I could kiss you, you bitch": race, gender, and sexuality in Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2: Apocalypse
by Stephen Harper
Harper explores fetishized femininity and racial stereotyping in the first two instalments of the Resident Evil film series.
Everyman and no man: white, heterosexual masculinity in contemporary serial killer movies
by Nicola Rehling
Film serial killers have commonly been represented as sexual deviants or "white trash," and more recently as extraordinarily-ordinary white males. In all instances, this iconic figure conveys more general cultural anxieties about white male subjectivity.
Audio in film and video
The audio first classroom: a sound place for engagement with theory and practice
by Giovanna Chesler
In a “sound–first” media pedagogy, audio serves as the introduction to media methods instruction.
Audible evidence: on listening to places
by Andrea Hammer
Audio documentary has a formidable ability to reshape our awareness of space (and time) through sound, and it can also draw attention to the social and political dimensions of the sites we traverse.
Feature fiction in the U.S. and abroad
Down with Love and up with sex: sex and the post-feminist single girl
by Nina K. Martin
More of an indulgent homage than a critical satire, the film reveals much about contemporary representations of female empowerment, retro-sexist nostalgia, and their persistent link to the construction of heterosexual female desires.
Back to the future, or the vanguard meets the rearguard
by Bert Cardullo
Last Days, Tony Takitani, 3-Iron, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Me and You and Everyone We Know. Five recent, more-or-less mainstream films all attempt to bridge the gap between narrative and non-narrative cinema — between the abstract and the representational, that is, or the avant and the garde.
Discovering America: reflections on Brokeback Mountain
by Justin Vicari
Camouflaged as pastoral melodrama with a twist, Brokeback Mountain (2005) is at heart a tragic investigation of that vast, “undiscovered” U.S. frontier — divided, unsafe, and seemingly untouched by Will & Grace.
A stalker’s odyssey: arrested development, gay desire, and queer comedy in Chuck&Buck
by Carter Soles
Buck's queer relations with the men around him bring out their own repressed homosexual desires within the context of overt heterosexual rejection, but the queerest aspect of this film is its comically sympathetic portrayal of Buck’s voyeurism and stalking.
Celebrity juice, not from concentrate: Perez Hilton, gossip blogs, and the new star production
by Anne Petersen
When Britney Spears shaves her head, who shapes our societal response? Perez Hilton, that's who: Perez and his gossip blog form the newest component of star production, a compelling force in the way stars are constructed and consumed in the age of New Media.
Hoax of the lost ancestor in Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman
by Thelma Wills Foote
Foote explores relations between late twentieth-century identity politics and the subversion of factual discourse in Cheryl Dunye’s mockdocumentary, The Watermelon Woman.
Pasir Berbisik and new women's aesthetics in Indonesian cinema
by Intan Paramaditha
This ground-breaking Indonesian film challenges masculine aesthetics by depicting women who engage in and negotiate with the gaze; Daya, the daughter, engages in a voyeurism more based on desire for knowledge than perverseness, while Berlian, the mother, sees everything, loses control, and gains it back.
The bourgeoisie is also a class: class as character in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura
by Frank P. Tomasulo
As a materialist film, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (1959) documents the decay of Italy's decadent bourgeoisie during the postwar years of "il boom," not only through theme and narrative but also through techniques such as mise-en-scène, recurring motifs, and subtext.
Politics and the media in the U.S. and abroad
Shock and awe: the aesthetics of war and its confrontations with reality
by Jyotsna Kapur
Writing about a film/performance, Mutual Conversations (by Mike Covell) where the filmmaker speaks to his film image from 25 years ago, Jyotsna Kapur considers relations between the cinematic image and reality in this time of war.
The winning and losing of hearts and minds: Vietnam, Iraq, and the claims of the war documentary
by Tony Grajeda
Vietnam and Iraq documentaries are compared to evaluate the consequences of depicting the war from the soldier's perspective, often at the expense of evaluating military policy and government decision making.
Mohamed Soueid’s cinema of immanence
by Laura U. Marks
Absurdist, poetic, and moving, Mohamed Soueid's documentary trilogy on post-civil war Lebanon invites an atomist approach, drawn from Islamic philosophy, which also sheds light on other contemporary cinemas.
Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and its skeptics: a case of environmental nostalgia
by Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann
Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth succeeds not because of its dire predictions but because of the eco-memories it evokes.
Filming the war with Sendero
by Francisca da Gama
The Lion’s Den and You Only Live Once: Two Peruvian feature fictions portray the insurgency of Sendero Luminoso/Shining Path in ways that relate to broader debates on national identity in Peru.
Book reviewsby Francisca da Gama
The Lion’s Den and You Only Live Once: Two Peruvian feature fictions portray the insurgency of Sendero Luminoso/Shining Path in ways that relate to broader debates on national identity in Peru.
Women refocusing
by Angelica Fenner
Review of Women Filmmakers Refocusing. Jacqueline Levitin, Judith Plessis, Valerie Raoul, eds. New York: Routledge, 2003. 496 pp.
History as motivation: Mississippi, memory, and Movement
by Shannon Gore
Review of Stephen Classen, Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles Over Mississippi TV, 1955-1969 (Chapel Hill NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2004, 248 pp.
Unstable boundaries: sex, academic research and conceptions of normalcy
by Susan Ericsson
Review of Williams, Linda, ed. Porn Studies. Durham, NC: Duke UP. 2004; and Church Gibson, Pamela, ed. More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power. London: British Film Institute. 2004.
media salad
media salad
by Chuck Kleinhans
media salad provides short reviews and topical notes by the editors.
Links
The Internet today, or how I got involved in social bookmarking
by Julia Lesage
An overview of many aspects of the Internet, especially useful for media scholars and feminists. Bookmark for future exploration.
The last word
Popular political film
by the editors
No. 48, winter 2006
(Click here for text only version)
Fictions and their viewers
Making women warriors: a transnational reading of Asian female action heroes in
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
by L.S. Kim
Asian women warriors offer an alternative to the stereotype of passive Asian femininity, yet Orientalism remains a framework for their spectatorial reception, since these powerful Asian action heroes are simultaneously exoticized and fetishized.
The Kryptonite closet: silence and queer secrecy in Smallville
by Jes Battis
This article explores the network of queer secrets and closets within the hit tv show Smallville, as well as the relationship between Clark Kent and Lex Luthor.
Twenty-first century Superman: Smallville and New Media mythmaking
by Cary M. Jones
This article explores the new media texts surrounding Smallville, addressing how the myth of Superman has evolved over time to take advantage of new technologies and maintained its cultural relevancy.
DVD marketing in U.S. of Working Title's British romantic comedies: framing reception and strategies of cultural appropriation
by Pavel Skopal
Moral fictions
Marco Bechis’ Garage Olimpo: Cinema of witness
by Amy Kaminsky
Bechis uses a popular feature fiction form to try to engage Argentine audiences with the realities of the Dirty War, which had occured over a ten year span thirty years before but was never emotionally absorbed into the national consciousness.
What would Buffy do? Feminist ethics and epistemic violence
by Shannon Craigo-Snell
The show Buffy the Vampire Slayer provides a landscape and language to analyze the complexites of ethics, violence, and sex. It also acknowledges the ways in which feminism, which aims to destroy traditional ways of viewing the world, is violent.
The Woodsman: saying the unsayable
by Jamie Bennett
The Woodsman provides a challenge to popular views on managing sex offenders in the community, providing criticism of current policy, and suggesting more positive alternatives.
The Woodsman: full disclosure
by Julia Lesage and Chuck Kleinhans
The Woodsman is a controversial film in which Kevin Bacon gives a powerful, empathetic performance as a child molester attempting to resettle in the community after being released from prison.The script effectively utilizes narrative tension to evoke or work with the contradictory emotions and perspectives viewers bring to the film.
Collateral Damage: terrorism, melodrama, and the action film on the eve of 9/11
by Russell Meeuf
Showing how popular images and narratives of terrorism support fundamental U.S. myths about violence and morality, this essay traces in Schwarzenegger's Collateral Damage, one of the last action films made in pre-9/11 Hollywood, relations between spectacular violence, rhetoric of terrorism, and logic of melodrama.
Films of Michael Haneke: the utopia of fear
by Justin Vicari
Deeply pessimistic, and preoccupied with the idea of "everyday" apocalypse, the films of Michael Haneke share philosophical ground with the writings of Theodor W. Adorno.
New worlds of documentary
Introduction: new worlds of documentary
by Julia Lesage
Terri Schiavo and the mediaEmergency analysis, Terri Schiavo: introduction
The cutting edge: emergencies in visual culture
by Janet Staiger
In public controversies there is an on-going need to provide possible discourses and stories so that those holding progressive opinions remain unshaken in their opinions and those not yet decided have a reason to adopt progressive interpretations.
Schiavo videos' context and reception: timely triage
by Diane Waldman
An analysis of the legal, medical, and political context of the widely-seen Schiavo video excerpts, the preferred reading offered by the Schindler family and their supporters on their website, and responses on the 'blogosphere' and elsewhere.
Emergency analysis: the academic traffic in images
by Catherine L. Preston
Certain still images of Terri Schiavo became cultural icons as they circulated across media and social arenas. Preston does a cultural biography of the Schiavo images taken together as a "media event.
The videographic persistence of Terri Schiavo
by Janet Walker
Walker explores the ways that photography and video are evidence of the simultaneous presence of life and death and how this is particularly poignant in the case of the Schiavo videos.
Television and audio documentaryA walk on the wild side: the changing face of TV wildlife documentary
by Richard Kilborn
"Adapting to survive": reflections on changes occurring in TV wildlife programming as broadcasting becomes ever more competitive.
Strange Justice: sounding out the Right: Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and
constructing spin in the name of justice
by Steve Lipkin
In its cinematic construction, Strange Justice sutures real and recreated materials in a way that models the very processes the film exposes — that is, the way politicians shape public perception and opinion.
Giving voice: performance and authenticity in the documentary musical
by Derek Paget and Jane Roscoe
The term 'documentary musical' ought to be an oxymoron, but British film director Brian Hill has made a specialty of them - Derek Paget and Jane Roscoe explore a new hybrid.
Video Vigilantes and the work of shame
by Gareth Palmer
Shame is seen here in documentary forms as a productive force creating many and varied subject positions.
Audio documentary: a polemical introduction for the visual studies crowd
by Chuck Kleinhans
An overview of what's happening in audio and radio documentary today, including extensive Internet links.
Global reachTV news titles: picturing the planet
by Sean Cubitt
The globe seen in TV news logos is produced by computer graphics technology and implies a globalized, networked subjectivity that is mainly an omnivoyant observer, produced by news gatherers and producers.
Les Archives de la Planète: a cinematographic atlas
by Teresa Castro
An early Frrench photographic inventory of the " known world" uses the model of the atlas, a book of maps, to assemble, organize, and transmit images; it thus constitutes a way of symbolically dominating and grasping the world through vision.
Cinephilia and the travel film: Gambling, Gods and LSD
by Catherine Russell
Peter Mettler’s experimental travel film Gambling, Gods and LSD (2001) is examined as an experiment in transcending the limitations of image culture. This article looks at the film as an epistemological treatise on trans-cultural knowledge that points to the role of cinephilia in global industrial modernity.
Independent documentaristsDark Days: a narrative of environmental adaptation
by Joseph Heumann and Robin L. Murray
In this presentation of homeless people living below ground in Amtrak tunnels, director Marc Singer provides a romantic narrative of adaptation.
Feminist history making and Video Remains
by Alexandra Juhasz
Video scholar and maker, Alex Juhasz, engages in dialogue with women’s historian, Antoinette Burton, about Juhasz’s latest work, Video Remains, a piece that they propose evidences a feminist history making: a practice that helps align the poetry, evidence, passion, and politics of AIDS.
Links
AIDS activism today
by Danica Amstadt
As Video Remains deals with a history of AIDS video activism, the Internet ties together AIDS activists today.
Film history
Revolting women: the role of gender in Sergei Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico! and U.S. Depression-era Left film criticism
by Chris Robé
This essay explores how Que Viva Mexico! might have become one of Eisenstein’s most sophisticated works to investigate gender’s relation to radical political transformation while also elucidating the ways in which 1930s U.S. Left film critics marginalized gender issues within their own columns on Eisenstein’s film.
Updated classic
Kinesthesia in martial arts films: action in motion
by Aaron Anderson
Anderson draws on theories of kinesthetics, fight choregraphy, and bodily memory to develop an aesthetic analysis of the role of movement per se in the martial arts film, with particular attention to films of Stephen Seagal. Reprinted here with color stills and shot analysis of sequences from Seagal's Out for Justice.
Book reviews
"This ain’t no junk." Recuperating black television in the “post civil rights” era
by Devorah Heitner
Review of Christine Acham, Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power.
White gay male identity and Warhol
by Margo Miller
Review of Roy Grundmann, Andy Warhol’s "Blow Job."
The last word
Education under attack
by the editors
No. 47, winter 2005
(Click here for text only version)
Mindful violence: the visibility of power and inner life in Kill Bill
by Aaron Anderson
An analysis of screen action and violence in Tarantino’s Kill Bill reveals the integral relation between screen fights, narrative structure, characterization, and moral themes.
Pale Rider: environmental politics, Eastwood style
by Joseph K. Heumann and Robin L. Murray
Eastwood’s biting comment on hydraulic mining and plea for community control over the environment.
by Aaron Anderson
An analysis of screen action and violence in Tarantino’s Kill Bill reveals the integral relation between screen fights, narrative structure, characterization, and moral themes.
Pale Rider: environmental politics, Eastwood style
by Joseph K. Heumann and Robin L. Murray
Eastwood’s biting comment on hydraulic mining and plea for community control over the environment.
Cape Town Affair: right-wing noir, South African style
by Joseph K. Heumann and Robin L. Murray
Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street remade into a feature fiction about apartheid in South Africa.
“Woman” and “homeland” in Ritwik Ghatak’s films: constructing post-Independence Bengali cultural identity
by Erin O'Donnell
A close look at the works of one of India’s most important filmmakers, analyzing the relation between his aesthetics and lifelong evaluation of India’s 1947 Partition.
The Passion of the Christ: reflections on Mel’s monstrous messiah movie and the culture wars
by Robert Smart
Parallels between the film and the results of brutal childrearing are traced, as well as the film’s relation to both the culture wars, historically, and to the most lowly “body genres,” especially the splatter film.
Bibliography on class in film and media studies
by Terri Ginsberg, Dennis Broe, and Chuck Kleinhans
Useful bibliography of important readings dealing with Marxist theories of class, race, women, and media. Compiled by the Caucus on Class of the Society for Film and Media Studies
China, broadly conceived
by David Leiwei Li
Review of Sheldon H. Lu’s China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
Documentary theory, new documentaries, and “contemporary events” fictions: a special section
by Jean-Luc Lioult
A practicing photographer and film scholar explores the connections between carefully framing and anticipating images and capturing spontaneous occurrences.
Paradise Lost I & II: documentary, gothic, and the monster of justice
by Andy Opel
Social fear of working class “goth” boys and unequal justice for the rich and the poor lead to severe sentences for boys rushed to judgment in a murder case.
by Joseph K. Heumann and Robin L. Murray
Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street remade into a feature fiction about apartheid in South Africa.
“Woman” and “homeland” in Ritwik Ghatak’s films: constructing post-Independence Bengali cultural identity
by Erin O'Donnell
A close look at the works of one of India’s most important filmmakers, analyzing the relation between his aesthetics and lifelong evaluation of India’s 1947 Partition.
The Passion of the Christ: reflections on Mel’s monstrous messiah movie and the culture wars
by Robert Smart
Parallels between the film and the results of brutal childrearing are traced, as well as the film’s relation to both the culture wars, historically, and to the most lowly “body genres,” especially the splatter film.
Bibliography on class in film and media studies
by Terri Ginsberg, Dennis Broe, and Chuck Kleinhans
Useful bibliography of important readings dealing with Marxist theories of class, race, women, and media. Compiled by the Caucus on Class of the Society for Film and Media Studies
China, broadly conceived
by David Leiwei Li
Review of Sheldon H. Lu’s China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
Documentary theory, new documentaries, and “contemporary events” fictions: a special section
Meditation on a freeway suicide: the sacrifice of autobiography
by James Tobias
Pathbreaking theoretical monograph on media and AIDs, AIDS and health care, AIDS activism, and the agency of people with AIDS.
Framing the unexpectedby James Tobias
Pathbreaking theoretical monograph on media and AIDs, AIDS and health care, AIDS activism, and the agency of people with AIDS.
by Jean-Luc Lioult
A practicing photographer and film scholar explores the connections between carefully framing and anticipating images and capturing spontaneous occurrences.
Paradise Lost I & II: documentary, gothic, and the monster of justice
by Andy Opel
Social fear of working class “goth” boys and unequal justice for the rich and the poor lead to severe sentences for boys rushed to judgment in a murder case.
by Laurie Calhoun
A close analysis of Morris' documentaries, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. and The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara by an ethical philosopher explores the effect of human fallibility on social "institutions of killing" and also the belief structure of those involved in such institutions and why it is so hard to hold them accountable.
Gus Van Sant’s Elephant: an ordinary high school movie, except that it’s not
by John P. Garry III
A poetic version of a high school shooting like Columbine which addresses the challenge of how to represent a violent tragedy.
The relatable real: docudrama, ethics, and Saving Jessica Lynch
by Steve Lipkin
Analysis of a “snatched from the headlines” docudrama based on Jessica Lynch’s rescue from Iraq. Overview of docudrama construction in general.
Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11
by Nicole Laskowski
Analysis of Moore’s critical reputation and his editorial essay style in Farhenheit 9/11.
The last word
Mel and Michael
by the Editors
Two directors as symptomatic of the contemporary political situation.
Remembering Bill Van Wert
by Chuck Kleinhans for the Editors
Links
Abu Ghraib and images of abuse and torture
by Julia Lesage
The release of abusive photos taken by U.S. military at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison has occasioned the publication of a broad range of insightful essays and reportage on the Internet. This links page traces responses to the photos themselves, as well as the background of the situation, and broader political, moral, anti-imperialist, psychological, and photographic analyses.
No. 46, Summer 2003
(Click here for text only version)
Free
market, branded imagination—
Harry Potter and the commercialization of children’s culture
by Jyotsna Kapur
The Harry Potter enterprise sets limits on providing children with transformative, imaginative fantasies.
The Goblin’s dilemma in Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan and Spider-Man
by Boyd White and Tim Kreider
Two very different Sam Raimi films, in terms of visual style, have a striking similarity thematically.
Harry Potter and the commercialization of children’s culture
by Jyotsna Kapur
The Harry Potter enterprise sets limits on providing children with transformative, imaginative fantasies.
The Goblin’s dilemma in Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan and Spider-Man
by Boyd White and Tim Kreider
Two very different Sam Raimi films, in terms of visual style, have a striking similarity thematically.
A
beautiful mind(fuck): Hollywood structures of identity
by Jonathan Eig
Who is that staring back at you in the mirror? In today’s Hollywood, the answer is more confusing than ever.
“Pansies don't float”– gay representability, film noir,
and The Man Who Wasn’t There
by Vincent Brook and Allan Campbell
A queer reading of the Coen brothers’ 2001 noir homage examines questions of subtext in a supposed age of “gay visibility.”
Three Kings: neocolonial Arab representation
by Lila Kitaeff
Revisits the film Three Kings, set in the first Gulf War, to examine further mainstream U.S. media’s misrepresentation of Arabs, especially in the last two years.
Contemporary Singapore filmmaking:
history, policies and Eric Khoo
by Tan See Kam, Michael Lee Hong Hwee and Annette Aw
Eric Khoo’s Mee Pok Man and 12 Storeys offer an innovative critique of Singapore society. The development and social-economic context of Singapore feature filmmaking are also examined.
Letter from Cuba
by Michael Chanan
A visit to the Cuban film school at San Antonio de los Baños provides the occasion for a look at contemporary Cuban media education.
Why the personal is still political —
some lessons from contemporary Indian documentary
by Jyotsna Kapur
The lyrical documentary has a new life in alternative media in India.
by Jonathan Eig
Who is that staring back at you in the mirror? In today’s Hollywood, the answer is more confusing than ever.
“Pansies don't float”– gay representability, film noir,
and The Man Who Wasn’t There
by Vincent Brook and Allan Campbell
A queer reading of the Coen brothers’ 2001 noir homage examines questions of subtext in a supposed age of “gay visibility.”
Three Kings: neocolonial Arab representation
by Lila Kitaeff
Revisits the film Three Kings, set in the first Gulf War, to examine further mainstream U.S. media’s misrepresentation of Arabs, especially in the last two years.
Contemporary Singapore filmmaking:
history, policies and Eric Khoo
by Tan See Kam, Michael Lee Hong Hwee and Annette Aw
Eric Khoo’s Mee Pok Man and 12 Storeys offer an innovative critique of Singapore society. The development and social-economic context of Singapore feature filmmaking are also examined.
Letter from Cuba
by Michael Chanan
A visit to the Cuban film school at San Antonio de los Baños provides the occasion for a look at contemporary Cuban media education.
Why the personal is still political —
some lessons from contemporary Indian documentary
by Jyotsna Kapur
The lyrical documentary has a new life in alternative media in India.
by Gina Marchetti
Review of Dai Jinhua, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, eds. Jing Wang and Tani E. Barlow. London: Verso, 2002.
Received wisdom: three reception studies
by Tomas Kemper
Review of Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (New York University Press, 2000); Janet Staiger, Blockbuster TV: Must-See Sitcoms in the Network Era (New York University Press, 2000); Annette Kuhn, Dreaming of Fred and Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory (New York University, 2002).
Selections from “A road-map for America“
by Anandam P. Kavoori
Selections from a Jump Cut contributor’s forthcoming book of poetry. Here he offers an immigrant’s understanding of U.S. news presentations of the Gulf War.
The last word
Unruly consumption
by the Editors
U.S. administrators’ and media treatment of looting in Iraq versus the conspicuous consumption of energy, and thus oil, in the United States that goes uncommented on.
Links
Using the Internet for contingent faculty organizing
by John Hess
Contingent facultyare non-tenure eligible college faculty with term appointments (one semester, two years, etc.) that are contingent on enrollment, funding and program change. This faculty has little or no job security and very low wages compared to their professorial counterpart. Since many of our readers are connected to colleges, this resource guide will be of special interest to them.
Itd.
Go to index for issue: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10-11, 12-13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24-25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
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