Contributors: 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.
My Man Godfrey (1936). Reviewed by Film Matters Fall 2019 Editorial Board
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FM 10.1 (2019) Announcement
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:
- Rediscovering Paris, Rediscovering Identity: An Exploration of Sounds and Voice in Cléo from 5 to 7 by Anne Billingsley
- Film Noir Heroes and the American Dream: Examining Contradictions in American Ideology through Fred Zinnemann’s Act of Violence by Sean Carson
- The Stigmatization of Queer Black Women in Television by Thomas Cruz
- Space Sirens: The Portrayal of Women in French New Wave Sci-Fi by Gabrielle Despaigne
- Off-Script: Toward a Revolutionary Arab Cinema by Safwat Nazzal
- Celebrity Theorists and the Filmic Embodiment of Thought by Edouard Saakashvili
- Manipulating the Masses with Modernism: The Weapon of Abstraction by Chamberlain Staub
- “Movies Are Supposed to Move, Stupid”: Examining Movement in Chris Marker’s La Jetée by Grace Wallace
- Filmic Architect or Architectural Filmmaker?: Examining the Relationship Between Space and Cinema in the Work of Michelangelo Antonioni by Nashuyuan Serenity Wang
- Generational Horror: A Comparison of Tim Curry’s and Bill Skarsgård’s Portrayals of Pennywise in Stephen King’s IT by K. M. Wise
A guest-edited dossier — Fake News — by Amanda Ann Klein (East Carolina University):
- Fishing for Fake News by John Cordova
- Fiction and Reality: The Characters and Characterization of Fox News by Madeline Daniel
- When Covering Too Much Results in Not Covering Enough: An Essay on NBC News by Cara Hairston
- Intentions of the HuffPost by Ida Misghina
- Fake News: CNN’s Digital Trends by Kylee Pearl
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.
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Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Reviewed by Benjamin Bergstrom
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.
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Our 2019 Masoud Yazdani Award Judges
Judging 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!
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Hope at the End of the World. My Film Festival by Tylen Watts
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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The Lost City of Z (2016). Reviewed by Keshav Srinivasan
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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Chamberlain Staub, Author of FM 9.3 (2018) Article “Confronting Rural Hardship in British Cinema: National Identity in The Levelling and God’s Own Country”
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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Emma Hughes, Author of FM 9.3 (2018) Article “The New Global West: Redefining the Borders of Genre in the Post-Revisionist Western”
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.
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Alexandria R. Moore, Author of FM 9.3 (2018) Article “A Feminine Techno-Utopia: Identification/Transformation/Transcendence of Embodiment in Spike Jonze’s Her”
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.
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Adam Herron, Author of FM 9.3 (2018) Article “‘Victim Sells’: The Commercial Context of Snuff Fiction and A Serbian Film”
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.
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