Film Matters Magazine

Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.

Ciara Whelan: My article is analyzing and evaluating the ethnic whiteness represented in Rocky IV (1985). This film is selected as an apt example of a cinematic representation of Italian Americans in late-twentieth-century cinema, during a period in which discourse around whiteness in America was shifting to include hybridized ethnic and racial identity forms. The essay considers the significant juncture between hegemonic masculinity and whiteness in this film that is characteristic of Reagan-era somatic aesthetics.

Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.

Vanessa Anzola Castellanos: My article is about the Colombian documentarist Marta Rodríguez; she is one of the first documentary filmmakers in Colombia and her work focuses on advocating for human rights. In my article, I described how she uses ethnography to portray reality and the effect her documentaries have in the communities that she films.

Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.

Ann Zhang: My article is about the idea of character “doubles” and how they are represented in film. Developments in visual effects technology have diversified the selection of strategies by which filmmakers can create human doubles. I compared modernist and postmodernist film philosophies through a close analysis of the human subject in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010), two films in which doubling functions similarly in the narrative but manifests in different ways onscreen.

Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.

Charlie Mc Evoy: My article discusses the 1955 film, The Man with the Golden Arm by Austrian director Otto Preminger. The Golden Arm is a typical noir is many ways – dark, gritty, set on the back alleys of Chicago and boasting a fantastic jazz score. What is surprising is that the protagonist, played by Frank Sinatra (Frankie) is addicted to heroin. This plot point has, however, in my opinion, served to overshadow the most interesting element of the film, which is that Frankie’s wife (Zosh), is a ‘’fake’’ wheelchair user and that this characteristic serves to almost singularly doom Frankie to a life of addiction and booze. I argue that the film constructs Zosh as a kind of crip fatale, with all of the destructive impulses and deceitful wiles of the femme fatale, but none of the allure.

Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.

Aidan O’Malley: My article explores the rise of “cringe culture” on the internet and applies the ironic viewing practices of movies considered “so bad, they’re good” to an emerging twenty-first-century canon, which I’ve taken to calling “cringe cinema.”