Film Matters Magazine

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.

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

Emma Hughes: “The New Global West: Redefining the Borders of Genre in the Post-Revisionist Western” is a revised version of a longer paper that I wrote for my senior comprehensive exercise at Carleton College in 2016. I fell in love with genre studies and the western genre at the same time, during my first year of college, and I wanted to write an analytical paper that would best represent my specific love for film studies, as well as my skills learned as a Cinema and Media Studies major. This article analyzes recent western genre films, with focus on Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015) and The Revenant (Alejandro Iñárritu, 2015), and explores the ways in which this genre–which is a staple of American cinema and American national identity–has changed and been reborn in the past several years. I propose that a new era of the “post-revisionist western” works to shift both classical and revisionist definitions of the genre in its boundaries of time, space, and identity to signal a new, more global and universal identity of both the genre and of society itself.

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

Alexandria R. Moore: This piece was really the culmination of my undergraduate intellectual development. It was, to me, a way of dovetailing my humanities education in a way that felt intersectional, representative, probing, and honoring of great female scholars.

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

Adam Herron: My article discusses how A Serbian Film demonstrates the commercial context of snuff fiction through its marketing and distribution, as well as its textual content. Whereas the film was largely condemned by critics, I aim to contextualize the film within prior developments in horror. Examining how sensationalism and excess have already been deployed in the promotional campaigns and narrative themes of other films, I contend that the marketing and distribution of A Serbian Film actually aimed to mitigate its shocking content, while its textual content mounts a critique of economic inequalities perpetuated by global capitalism and occidental consumerism.

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

Florian Zitzelsberger: The article focuses on aspects of domesticity and gender in the film Julie & Julia by director Nora Ephron. I have loved this film ever since its release in 2009, mainly because I am a huge fan of Julia Child’s work and was very happy to see her come to life again on the big screen. Her enthusiasm for cooking became a huge inspiration for people all around the globe, women in particular. I therefore ask in my article: how does the film engage with women? One of the most intriguing aspects, for me, lies in the ways in which the film plays with “traditional” views on gender because Julia Child surely was a woman who knew how to cook—which, however, didn’t reduce her to the status of an exclusively domestic women.

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

Zachary Goldstein: This article utilizes Stephen Gaghin’s film Syriana as a lens through which to analyze larger trends of Islamophobia and Orientalism in Hollywood film.