“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” –Neil Armstrong
History has been defined by the scope of our scientific achievements–and the advances we have made in space exploration are no exception. First Man (2018) maintains our enduring interest in the space film.
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On a cool spring night on May 16, 2003, five minutes before 10pm, the people of Casablanca — the bustling cultural port city of Morocco located in northwestern Africa — experienced one of their most memorable moments: moments of pain, terror and blood (Horses of God). In just five minutes, five explosions echoed throughout the city’s center; in five minutes, around twelve young Salafi Jihadist men, with links to Al-Qaeda, committed suicide, taking thirty-three innocent people — including Jews, Westerners and others — with them (Horses of God; Kramatschek). Millions of people in the city were devastated, and many more would have died since there were supposed to be sixteen — not just twelve — men in their twenties from the Salafia Jihadia organization carrying out the attack (Kramatschek). Surprisingly, all of those involved had one thing in common: they all grew up in Sidi Moumen, the impoverished shantytown east of Casablanca, only thirteen minutes apart from each other — a short drive that would surely contrast a life of poverty in Sidi Moumen with a life of luxury in Casablanca (Kramatschek).
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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.
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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.
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Big Universe Adventures Productions will offer a limited streaming release of Eric Rosen’s short film Netuser. Tony Award winner and Emmy Award nominee Denis O’Hare plays Peter Sardovski, an activist whose life unravels when a nightmare about political violence turns true. Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Award nominee Claybourne Elder plays his husband who struggles to prevent Peter’s compulsion from endangering their young son. Two-time Tony Award nominee Johanna Day plays his sister-in-law, a NYPD detective who fights to shield her brother’s family from danger. The film also features Tatiana Wechsler as Peter’s editor Jenny.
Continue readingFilm Matters is officially announcing our open call for papers from undergraduates and recent graduates for consideration in issue 12.1 (2021).
The deadline is September 1, 2020.
Film Matters has officially adopted MLA 8th edition style (and is moving away from 7th edition guidelines) — so please prepare your submissions accordingly. Purdue OWL’s MLA Formatting and Style Guide (https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/) is an excellent resource to consult, in this regard.
For more information about this call for papers, please download the official document (PDF):
Submissions should include a cover sheet, which includes the author’s name, title of essay, institutional affiliation, and contact information; all other identifying information should be removed from the body of the text, in order to aid the blind peer-review process.
And submissions and questions should be directed to:
Please note that Film Matters does not accept submissions that are currently under review by other journals or magazines.
Undergraduates and recent graduates, please submit your film-related research papers today! We look forward to receiving your papers!
Cosmo, originally from South Sudan seeks help from a childhood friend “Moon,” a poet. Having lived over a decade in Maine, USA, after having to flee his home country, he attempts to tell his story for the first time through the medium of poetry, after eighteen years of silence.
Director’s Statement: Migration is a multilayered term that has broadened and complicated itself in my mind, the longer I have lived in a land that is not my own. It is often deemed as a negative by some, as if searching for a better future in an unfamiliar place is a threat and something to be feared. To me, it shows bravery and resilience, surviving and battling systems that strategically repress any form of “otherness,” and the journeys it took to get there.
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Gemide (On Board) is a Turkish film made by Serdar Akar in 1998. Following four rather repulsive men who, on their break from transporting goods on a large freighter ship, take a night off in Istanbul and, after a brawl, kidnap a beautiful woman, taking her on board the ship. The woman, although, in fact, a prostitute and dressed wantonly, is most beautiful. Bearing virginal white skin and refined features, a blue dress, and an elegant figure, she screams innocence and — most of all — purity. She is shown as a jewel in a bed of nails.
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Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Gabrielle Despaigne: My article is about how French New Wave science fiction films have a unique portrayal of women within their stories, all of which contain characteristics that should make up their own subgenre of science fiction archetypes. My main goal is to describe what the archetype consists of and to argue that we should examine science fiction French New Wave films more closely. I feel that there is not enough scholarly research put into the specific subgenre, which is unfortunate.
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When I saw the Spanish science fiction satire The Platform (El Hoyo, Gaztelu-Urrutia, 2019) at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, my expectations were joyfully subverted. I had expected it to be a preachy film with shallow social commentary. Instead, the film was thoroughly entertaining, original, and profound. Although the 9am press and industry screening was not even half full, the audience (myself included) laughed, screamed, and swore loudly at the film’s many darkly funny and disturbing moments.
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