Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Anne Billingsley: My article explores the internal perspective of Cléo in Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) as shown through camera and sound devices. I focused on the use of camera and sound combined because there are not many articles regarding sound and this film, which made finding resources difficult, but which ultimately brought a hopefully fresh perspective to the film’s techniques.
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What would it be like if your child disappeared one day?
What would it be like to have everyone call your grief a lie?
What would it be like to pick up the shattered pieces, and begin to move on?
Throughout the 1970s and 80s, North Korean spies purportedly kidnapped Japanese citizens for reasons never made clear. And while this is now a thing of the past, something that happened generations ago, an important question about humanity still lingers: why is it that we treat these headlines as just words until they significantly affect us?
Stolen is about just such a headline. But it’s told from the perspective of the family that loses a boy to such a kidnapping. A modern re-imagining of these true accounts, director Taka Tsubota’s indie film explores how the incendiary nature of media exacerbates the lives of an already grieving family, and how they are reduced to tools or mere talking points among pundits, politicians, and laypeople. The sad truth of the matter is that we love thy neighbor only if it bodes well us.
Stolen, then, is about shedding a light on what is otherwise just a headline, on the family that may otherwise just be a talking point, on the humanity that lies beneath a trove of inhumanity or, at best, negligence. It is about each of the family members dealing with this loss in their own way, despite the political and diplomatic debate that their son’s disappearance sparks on the international level.
This is a film that will be released worldwide through Amazon Prime, and for those residing in Los Angeles, an L.A. premiere will be held at the Japanese American National Museum on February 7, 2020. Join the director and everyone who worked tirelessly on this indie Japanese film to engage in a story about a tragedy most may not have heard of. Something real, intimate, and human. Something that may otherwise just be a headline.
Stolen trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JU1w5oUdkc
Get your tickets here: https://stolen2020.eventbrite.com
Follow @fortune8official on Instagram for the latest information.
Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Chamberlain Staub: “Manipulating the Masses with Modernism: The Weapon of Abstraction” analyzes the different reactions to avant-garde throughout history. The article focuses on how Hitler, Stalin, and Castro created guidelines for censorship and implemented cultural watchdogs to enforce the regimes’ ideologies through the arts while monitoring the content being created. It also outlines how certain avant-garde filmmakers found creative ways to avoid censorship.
Continue readingContributors: Nic Connole, Julia Desmond, Andrew Doss, Candyce Edwards, Trey Gurley, Sherita Jackson, Jessica Kernan, Joshua Puckett, Anna Standridge, Tylen Watts, Anya Ekaterina, and Andrew Steven Williford.
Film Matters is pleased to announce, officially, the release of issue 10.1, our first issue of 2019!
In this issue, you will find these peer-reviewed feature articles:
A guest-edited dossier — Fake News — by Amanda Ann Klein (East Carolina University):
As well as book, film, and DVD/Blu-ray reviews by: Evan Amaral, Catherine Traci Colson, Alexis Dickerson, Lily C. Frame, Matt Johnson, Alexandria Rose Moore, Andrew P. Nielsen, Ashley R. Pickett, Cheyenne Puga, Ashley R. Spillane, Karl Watkins, Andrew Ryan Wentz, Adam Wiener, and Emmett Williams.
For more details about this issue, please visit: https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/fm/2019/00000010/00000001
We’re always looking for new undergraduate authors! So if you are interested in publishing, get in touch with us today.
Blade Runner (1982) serves as one of the pillars of a dystopian future and science fiction cinema that was popular in the 1980s. Now in the 2010s, the 80s have made a resurgent comeback in the form of remakes like the Terminator and Transformers franchises and reimaginings like Netflix’s Stranger Things. Blade Runner joins these other 80s classics in this cultural trend with its sequel Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Unfortunately, 2049 both surpasses and falls short of its own expectations. In this review, I will not be mentioning the original film when possible. I personally don’t believe that a film should be constantly compared to its sequels or predecessors as I feel this blinds myself to biases. Additionally, the original film has several different edits and it is difficult to pick the “right” cut. And, finally, while the original Blade Runner contains plot points that do tie into the sequel, you can still watch Blade Runner 2049 without watching the original and understand the plot.
Continue readingJudging for the 2019 Masoud Yazdani Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Film Scholarship has officially begun, thanks to the hard work of our volunteer judges:
Charlie Michael received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and currently teaches at Emory University in Atlanta. In general, his work focuses on popular film and media industries with a particular focus on French and Francophone cinema. His first monograph, French Blockbusters: Cultural Politics of a Transnational Cinema, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2019; he co-edited a book with Tim Palmer, Directory of World Cinema: France (Intellect, 2013).
Alison Taylor teaches film studies and ethics at Bond University in Queensland, Australia. Her film course, “Sex, Love and the Movies,” focuses on gender representation, sexuality, and censorship across significant moments in film history. Research-wise, she’s interested in European art cinema, particularly the intersection between representations of extreme violence within otherwise ordinary, everyday settings and narratives. Her first monograph, Troubled Everyday: The Aesthetics of Violence and the Everyday in European Art Cinema, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2017. Currently, she is writing about the performance style and career of French legend, Isabelle Huppert.
Tom Ue researches and teaches courses on nineteenth-century British literature, intellectual history, and cultural studies at Dalhousie University. He is the author of Gissing, Shakespeare, and the Life of Writing (Edinburgh University Press) and George Gissing (Liverpool University Press) and the editor of George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Edinburgh University Press). Ue has held the prestigious Frederick Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship and he is an Honorary Research Associate at University College London.
This is Tom Ue’s second term of judging for Film Matters, incidentally, not to mention his various guest-edited dossier contributions to our print issues!And we are particularly thankful to Masoud Yazdani Award regular, Michael Benton (Humanities Professor at Bluegrass Community & Technical College), for his help in judging the essay mentored by Alison Taylor this year. We couldn’t do this without you, Michael and Tom!
Film Matters is incredibly grateful to the 2019 judges for the service they are providing! And we look forward to announcing the results late 2019/early 2020.
So please watch this space!
With the looming threats of nuclear war and global climate change hanging over us, it’s easy to look at the state of the world right now with despair. According to scientists, humanity is as close to extinction as it’s ever been. The famous “Doomsday Clock,” created by scientists and experts as a symbolic warning for how close we are to our own self-made destruction, currently sits two minutes before midnight, the hypothetical doomsday scenario. The last time the clock was moved this close to midnight was in 1953, during the nuclear arms build-up of the Cold War. While the future of humanity looks bleak, not all hope is lost. Just as the clock can be moved forward, it can also be moved back. However, if humanity chooses to continue down this dangerous path, catastrophe will be all but certain.
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Western cinema, and by extension much of Western culture, has had a complicated relationship with colonialism. From the pro-British propaganda of Gunga Din to the “cowboys vs. Indians” subgenre that Stagecoach (1939) occupies, European and American representation of the very races that they oppress has been predictably wanting. This is why James Gray’s revisionist epic, The Lost City of Z (2016), begins with a deliberate juxtaposition, following a shot of Native Amazonian tribesmen with a shot of the British Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) on horseback. This is not a display of dominance or conflict, but rather one of harmony, representative of the film’s protagonist being one of the few progressives of the time willing to give Aboriginal tribes humanity. The Lost City of Z is partly a thrilling exploration adventure and partly a thoughtful examination of obsession, but the real reason it succeeds is because of its politics.
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Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Chamberlain Staub: “Confronting Rural Hardship in British Cinema” argues that The Levelling and God’s Own Country are British heritage films; it is a topic that has been understudied and this article outlines how these films emphasize not only rural landscapes, but the people who maintain them. The writing praises the work of Hope Dickson Leach and Francis Lee as they weave farming traditions and folklore into authentic onscreen portrayals of modern-day farming, hardships, and the complex familial relationships present within this lifestyle.
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