Film Matters Magazine

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

Sean Carson: My article is an analysis of the spectrum of film noir heroes as depicted in Fred Zinnemann’s Act of Violence. I argue the film mirrors the ideological contentions facing returning Second World War veterans. These individuals attempt to attain the American dream while maintaining a moral integrity that clashes with the socially Darwinist actions required to attain the ideal American lifestyle.

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

Grace Wallace: When we screened La Jetée in our senior seminar, I was struck by its simplicity and, despite this, its capacity to so accurately mirror human emotion within a science fiction setting. The film is so quietly powerful. Yet, given its narrative, Marker could have easily served up a space-and-time-faring epic. In writing this piece, I wanted to understand from where the power of the film derives, how a movie with so little movement fits in among the motion-centric world of cinema.

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

Nashuyuan Serenity Wang: Michelangelo Antonioni is a director who is known for his distinctive visual style and his articulation of landscape, architecture, and cinematic space to express the themes of ennui, urban alienation, uncertainty, solitude, tediousness, crisis of modernity, mismatch of values, struggle and pain of feelings. The article examines the relationship between space and cinema in the work of Antonioni and how he holds space and “architecture as the fundamental site of film practice,”[1] especially through urban landscape, in relation to La notte (Antonioni, 1961), L’eclisse (Antonioni, 1962), and Red Desert (Antonioni, 1964). It not only focuses on the representations of cinematic space, architecture, and their functions, but also the geo-emotive mapping in space-human relation and the ways in which spaces act as the catalyst for connection between journeying bodies and their physical and mental movements. It aims at discussing the unique position of space in cinema as it forms a sphere between the past and the present, the physical and the mental; therefore, looking at people who choose to go back, belong to, move around, or accept these spaces is to understand how humans can rediscover or situate themselves in the seemingly decayed but actually valuable realms, in which their roots, memories and spiritual belongings can be reclaimed.