A traveling salesman, a hitchhiker, a cheating wife, a murder. Did the salesman kill his wife or not? These tropes are ingrained in the film noir genre. Much like Walter Neff giving his confession of insurance claim fraud and murder via Dictaphone in the 1944 film Double Indemnity, the main character in Kyle Dunbar’s short film Mute (2021) gives his to a priest obfuscating possible guilt with the use of a patsy. Or is he telling the truth?
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A young boy is waiting with his mother in a hospital room as muffled noises overshadow the doctor’s examination. The audience is deprived of any sense of sound or space. Only once the two leave the hospital do we hear the first line of dialogue: “You’re an embarrassment.” An opening both visceral as it is obscure, Kalel, 15 (Lana, 2019) instinctively challenges its audience on both a visual and narrative level through its first spoken scene. With Kalel’s mother threatening her son to not tell anyone about his diagnosis, her ensuing use of vulgar, impulsive language (“You better not tell your sister. Her tongue is loose, like her vagina”) instantaneously sets the tone of the film: an uncensored, stark, and unapologetically honest portrayal of the volatile relationship between a single mother and her teenage children. Most importantly, as Lana subsequently cuts to Kalel’s exploration of his sexuality and erotic capital via social media, these successive opening shots solidify the film’s most intriguing thematic elements: youth, sexual desire, rebellion, belonging, and companionship.
Continue reading“People change, feelings change, but that doesn’t mean that the love once shared wasn’t true and real. It simply means that sometimes when people grow, they grow apart” (We Broke Up).
For the past twenty-thirty years, girls all over the world have fallen under the idealization of romantic comedies, commonly referred to as “rom-coms.” These films usually follow a fairly predictable plotline: guy meets girl, guy becomes attracted to girl, an obstacle stands in the way of their love, and finally, all barriers are broken for them to be together forever. In all of these films, the viewer takes away a universal message: love prevails. Love can (and will) defy all odds for the two main characters (usually a heterosexual couple) to live happily ever after no matter the outside circumstances. But I’d like to present a bit of a different storyline that exists right on the line of the rom-com genre, one that recognizes the value in a fleeting love, a love that you cannot realistically hold onto forever—a genre I have labeled the anti-rom-com.
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Stress is a universal thing. Everyone’s been overwhelmed by something at some point in their life, and the anxiety it produces can make it feel like the universe is conspiring against you. This is an unpleasant experience in everyday life, yet there are many stories out there dedicated to inducing this sensation of dread and panic in the viewer. Perhaps audiences crave catharsis in their storytelling, since most of these films feature a climax dedicated to giving viewers quite the cathartic experience.
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Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Maria Mutka: My article is a brief study and overview of an emerging field of cinema-literature cross sectional studies. The article argues that famous modernist writers of the early twentieth century, like James Joyce, were influenced partially both by cinema and the horrors of the First World War. These events affected how they approached their literary masterpieces, principally how they played with new notions of time and space conceptualization through the use of cinematic-like methods in their writing styles.
Continue readingFilm Matters is pleased to announce the release of FM 12.1, the first issue of 2021.
In this issue, you will find the following peer-reviewed feature articles:
These featurettes:
These book reviews:
These film reviews:
And these DVD/Blu-ray reviews:
Contributor copies should be mailed soon! In the meantime, for more about this issue, please visit:
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/fm/2021/00000012/00000001
Are you an undergraduate author who wants to be published in Film Matters? Then we want to work with you! Please check out all the different ways you can publish with us.
Happy holidays!
Judging has begun for the 2021 Masoud Yazdani Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Film Scholarship. Articles under consideration are from the following fine institutions:
This award wouldn’t be possible if not for the service work of our judges:
Eleanor Gratz is a graduate student in the Film Studies Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
Stephen Lambros is a graduate student born and raised in Wilmington, NC. He double majored in creative writing and film studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in the university’s film studies program. Beyond his studies, he enjoys writing books and screenplays.
Saifey Maynor is a graduate student in the Film Studies Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
Rachel Pittman is a graduate student in the Film Studies Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
Kate Wise Kate Wise is an MA student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her current thesis explores the popularity of the K-pop group BTS and the importance of heightened parasocial relationships for fans during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to her research, Kate served as co-editor-in-chief for UBC’s film journal Cinephile and was recently published in the Vancouver-based arts magazine SAD Mag.
We look forward to announcing the results late 2021/early 2022.
In the meantime, happy holidays! And, as always, stay healthy!
Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Sam Lawson: I have consistently found myself drawn to the analysis of LGBTQ+ representation in mainstream media; as such, my article was a result of my frequent consumption of films geared toward heterosexual audiences which feature queer characters and themes. My focus on De Palma was somewhat coincidental; I had compiled several neo-noir films which dealt thematically with LGBTQ+ topics and realized, based on the sheer number of his films which “fit the bill,” it would be in my best interest to focus on De Palma as an auteur.
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One evening after a full day of work, with four tables pushed together at a café in 2013, I first heard of the Stephen King Dollar Babies program during a precursory meeting which would lead to a film festival that friends and I would put together. One of the local filmmakers in the group simply asked if we had heard of Dollar Babies. They would go on to become my favorite programming block for our short-lived festival. At the same time, over a thousand miles away at the Crypticon Horror Con in Minnesota, Anthony Northrup was hosting his First Annual Stephen King Dollar Baby Film Fest (15). For the uninitiated, “Dollar Babies” are short films where King officially grants adaptation rights to student and promising young filmmakers for a single dollar.
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Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
RM: My article examines the controversy between Netflix and the Cannes Film Festival. In 2017, Cannes announced that it would ban films not released in French theaters, such as Netflix films, from competing at the festival. My article situates Cannes’s decision in the context of French politics, the death of cinema, and film festival studies. Ultimately, I try to understand what compelled Cannes to make this decision and what its implications are.
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