Film Matters Magazine

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Harriet Crisp: “An attitude means a style. A style means an attitude: The Free Cinema Movement in 1950s Britain” considers the relation of Karel Reisz’s We Are the Lambeth Boys’ style and production to the aims set out in the first Free Cinema manifesto. “Free Cinema” refers to a series of programs of documentaries shown at the National Film Theatre between 1956 and 1959 which influenced the British New Wave. The programs were accompanied by striking and somewhat enigmatic manifestos. I was interested in whether the ideas expressed in the manifestos were borne out by the films.

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

Randall Rodriguez: This article aims at bringing to light some of the underlying themes in Ruxandra Ghițescu’s 2020 film Otto the Barbarian. One way to interpret the film is as an examination of adolescence, anger, and the old ways of life clashing with new ones. I believe that there is another (less obvious) way of interpreting the film: as a criticism of phallocentric cultural norms. Ghițescu does this by turning phallocentric storytelling tropes in on themselves and executes this in a way that keeps the first interpretation of her work intact.   

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

Leif Tystad: My article, “Cracks in the Ornament,” uses Siegfried Kracauer’s text “The Mass Ornament” as a groundwork for defining a predominant visual structure of the twentieth century, in concert with the cinematic musicals of Busby Berkeley. Berkeley’s film Gold Diggers of 1933 is a particularly rewarding case study for this, as each of its musical numbers demonstrates the mass ornament’s distinct theoretical potential in terms of industrialization, voyeurism, and nationalism.

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

Sophie Barbour: My article looks at the film Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse and attempts to analyze it as a “realistic” film. The immediate challenge here is that realism and animation are, by many theories, at odds with one another. How can something be realistic if it looks nothing like reality? Moving away from photorealistic definitions of realism and toward theory that defines realism by how accurately one media type can reproduce another type allows us to look at Spider-verse as “realistic” in that it faithfully reproduces the comic book world. Analyzing the film by looking at its fidelity to comic book aesthetics and conventions allows us to see how, exactly, its groundbreaking animation improves the film’s ability to tell its story. The implications for this are that despite the influx of “live-action” (or, more accurately, photorealistic computer-generated) adaptations of comic book stories, often the most truthful, and most impactful, way to adapt these stories is through animated film.

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

Matthew Scipione: “Transnational Filmmaking: The Intersubjective Gaze in Desierto” is an analysis of Jonás Cuarón’s Desierto (2015). Set against the backdrop of a vast desert, the film is a suspense story about a group of Latinx migrants who are hunted by a white American gunman as they attempt to enter the United States. In my article, I examine how Cuarón’s transnational filmmaking presents the theme of national displacement by staging intersubjective camera/editing techniques that report xenophobic violence at the border. What is fascinating about the film is that it vacillates across different viewpoints that have been both physically and figuratively pushed to the margins of society. Similar to the migrants, the working-class citizen feels marginalized, alienated, and displaced. Everyone in the film belongs neither here nor there. Both the migrants and the citizen lack a sense of belonging. Through the film’s fluid audience identification, Cuarón crafts an ever-changing orientation that defies xenophobia by treating all of its subjects as equals. Desierto displays how citizen and migrant distinctions are now breaking down in the global era. As a filmmaker, Cuarón artistically uses transnational dislocation, intersubjective perception, and empathic representations to foster an all-inclusive collective consciousness.