Film Matters Magazine

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

Jake Martin Graves: The paper, “‘We’re Just Cinema Thugs,’” explores how the controversial documentary The Act of Killing portrayed the Indonesian Massacre of 1965-6, where millions were killed in response to an alleged failed coup. In order to explore this, the thesis explores the history and politics surrounding that era, as well as analyzing the production process and the editing of the film itself. 

In Indonesia, many of the perpetrators from the 1960s remain in positions of authority and are celebrated as heroes. In the documentary, director Joshua Oppenheimer asks perpetrators to reenact their killings in the form of their favorite Hollywood genres. This paper explores the killer’s infantilization with cinema and how it can be viewed as their coping mechanism for their atrocities. For me, exploring this thesis combined my interests in documentary, editing, and political history.

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

Kyle Stanley:  The article is titled “What Makes HAL 9000 a Character in 2001: A Space Odyssey” and was written for Dr. Todd Berliner’s Aesthetic Pleasure in Hollywood Cinema class. The paper explores how audiences recognize characters in movies. The paper uses an “artificially intelligent” character to analyze how audiences can emotionally engage with characters that are not depicted as human.

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

Linnea Warburton: My article looks at the new Ghostbusters (2016) movie and examines the positive ways in which the movie represents women. The action movie genre can be very misogynistic, and it’s rare to see a movie like Ghostbusters with four female leads. In my article, I look at the many different ways that Ghostbusters rejects the traditional characterizations of the female action hero. For example, it’s really unusual to see female action heroes that are not hypersexualized, or to see female characters that hold jobs in STEM. In many ways, the Ghostbusters movie presents new possibilities for women in action movies, which is very exciting.

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

Grant Brighter: This project examines an underdeveloped area of inquiry pertaining to the American avant-garde during the 1940s: the dynamic between the avant-garde and the commercial film industry as it relates to the mechanics of the human mind. Through formal analysis, I argue that Maya Deren’s Ritual in Transfigured Time exploits expectations instilled by commercial cinema to create anomalies in the audience’s perception of filmic time and space. This argument is derived from the schema theories of psychologists such as Frederic Bartlett, as well as Béla Balázs’s writings on“visual culture,” André Bazin’s notion of an evolving cinematic language, and Deren’s own writings on manipulating reality through the formal properties of film.

Close formal analysis of Ritual in Transfigured Time reveals the relationship between commercial cinema and individual perception. Through moments that seem to distort the spatial and temporal fabric of the film, Ritual suggests a viewer’s reliance on Hollywood-inspired schemata, in which motion indices are used to construct a cohesive fictional world from juxtaposed shots. For example, a sequence in the film cuts from a shot depicting a colonnade to a shot depicting an ocean shore.Due to the rightward movement of a woman in both shots, the viewer interprets this edit as one narrative moment despite the change in location (and the woman in the frame). Ritual highlights the ability of early American avant-garde cinema to reveal the social and psychological forces that influence how a film is understood, while also demonstrating how an individual’s perceptual reality is a subjective phenomenon produced by past experiences and cultural milieu.