Film Matters Magazine

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Dylan O’Connell: “Nagisa Ōshima’s Essayistic Exploration of Japan’s ‘Korean Problem’” analyzes four films by Japanese filmmaker Nagisa Ōshima: Forgotten Soldiers (1963), Diary of Yunbogi (1965), Death by Hanging (1968), and Three Resurrected Drunkards (1968). The analysis of these films focuses on their use of essay film techniques to highlight various aspects of the “Korean problem.” The “Korean problem” refers to the animosity between the two countries that stems from Japan’s imperial legacy and contemporary exploitation of their neighbors. A summary of theorists’ descriptions on essay film is provided to serve as a foundation from which Ōshima’s films can be analyzed.

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

Jacqueline Brady: My article is about Olivier Babinet’s 2016 film Swagger and explores how the film challenges reductive cinematic and media representations of the French banlieues, which often shape the banlieues into spaces of exclusion and Otherness and work to legitimize State violence against the population.

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Francesca Iucci: My article explores the symbolic role cigarettes take in Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai. Ever since watching the film, I was struck by the recurrence of cigarettes and smoking in scenes, which were essential to understand character dynamics. With my work, I strived to discover why and how cigarettes become relevant in characters’ interactions and obtain symbolic meaning that goes past their role as an object.

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

Taylor Floyd: My article explores the core aspects of how the unique elements of clay molding impact the genre of claymation. This exploration was conducted using three of Australian filmmaker Adam Elliot’s films, with the focus primarily being on the elements of mise-en-scene in each film.

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

Jack Zornado: This article is focused on Alfred Hitchcock’s use of sound and how he evolved as an experimental filmmaker, unafraid to experiment with new techniques, into an auteur that was renowned internationally for his films–and how his use of sound (informed by Soviet theories) changed through that evolution.

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Hannah Vliet: “White Saviors Get Gold Trophies: Colorblind Racism and Film Award Culture” analyzes the cultural “text” of Green Book’s Best Picture acceptance speech at the 2019 Academy Awards to expose the neoliberal, colorblind mode of racism that infects the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as well as the American film industry at large.

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Georgina Beeby: This article is about pretrauma cinema in relation to the film WALL-E. It explores E. Ann Kaplan’s proposal of pretrauma as a subgenre by explaining how pretrauma films are defined and examining what their function may be. WALL-E is closely analyzed as an example of a pretrauma film as it fulfills the definitions but showcases how the function of the subgenre is difficult to pinpoint. The article aims to show how pretrauma cinema functions to both encourage audiences to face the climate anxieties of our society, but also how these films sometimes simply act as catharsis to the audience whilst no real change is enacted.

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

Reid Anderson: In this article, I aim to provide context to and shed light on not only the career and star image of Sharon Tate throughout the late 1960s, but also how the events of her death have worked to overshadow and transform the public’s perception of her as a cult victim/cult star. Specifically, I argue that the reinstated images of Tate across Mansonsploitation media has functioned in categorizing the late star as (1) strictly a cult victim and, thus, (2) allowing the hyperreal representations of Tate to be unconsciously accepted as accurate depictions of the late star.