Film Matters Magazine

This is the second “videographic” edition of Film Matters (the first can be accessed at https://www.filmmattersmagazine.com/2017/03/17/introduction-videographic-essays-issue-1-2017-by-allison-de-fren-adam-charles-hart/). It features four undergraduate audiovisual essays that are each global in scope and varied in their interests. As in the previous edition, we attempted to choose videos that not only demonstrated critical rigor and insight, but also took full advantage of the form. These videos all engage strikingly with the visual: they are stylish and compelling, but they are also all concerned with teaching their viewers how to watch movies. They use video to explore images for meaning, and they show us how to do so as well

In “Framing Time: Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There?,” Catrina Sun-Tan (Wellesley College) shows how the Taiwanese master’s transcendental conception of time is expressed not only through long-durational sequence shots, but also within the mise-en-scène. In “Gendered Resistance and Composition in the Film Timbuktu,” Alyne Figueiredo Gonçalves (Middlebury College) examines in impressive detail the positioning of female characters in moments of resistance, as well as how director Abderrahmane Sissako inscribes notions of polital resistance into his filmic compositions. Both scholars not only show us how space and time are used within the films they examine, but they also draw out the subtle meanings within larger stylistic choices.

Spencer Slovic (Stanford University) is also concerned with “slow cinema,” arguing that auteurs like Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Jia Zhang-ke are the creative heirs of the Italian neorealists, and that they offer a resistant alternative to the maximalist style of mainstream film. Slovic moreover focuses on the ethics of slow cinema, presenting events without imposing judgment or interpretation.

Finally, “Perpetuating the Witch-Hunt: Animals and Female Power in Film,” by Hillia Aho (Occidental College), examines representations of female power through a history of witches in the movies. Aho focuses on employment of animal imagery to dissect a variety of films’ sexist assumptions about their powerful female characters, before analyzing in greater detail the box office hit Maleficent (2014) and the critically respected art house horror film The Witch (2015).

The call for submissions for future issues of Film Matters’ videographic edition will be posted to the website soon!

Contents

Framing Time: Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There? (Catrina Sun-Tan, Wellesley College)

• https://www.filmmattersmagazine.com/2018/05/07/framing-time-tsai-ming-liangs-what-time-is-it-there-by-catrina-sun-tan/

Gendered Resistance and Composition in the Film Timbuktu (Alyne Figueiredo Gonçalves, Middlebury College)

• https://www.filmmattersmagazine.com/2018/05/07/gendered-resistance-and-composition-in-the-film-timbuktu-by-alyne-figueiredo-goncalves/

Slowness and Slow Cinema (Spencer Slovic, Stanford University)

• https://www.filmmattersmagazine.com/2018/05/07/slowness-and-slow-cinema-by-spencer-slovic/

Perpetuating the Witch-Hunt: Animals and Female Power in Film (Hillia Aho, Occidental College)

• https://www.filmmattersmagazine.com/2018/05/07/perpetuating-the-witch-hunt-animals-and-female-power-in-film-by-hillia-aho/

Framing Time: Tsai Ming Liang’s What Time Is It There? (2001) from Catrina Sun-Tan on Vimeo.

Framing Time: Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There?
Catrina Sun-Tan, Wellesley College

Tsai Ming-liang’s style is not for everyone — the first time I watched What Time Is It There? (2001), I realized that this is one of the slowest films I have ever seen. With only 103 shots in a span of 116 minutes, Tsai’s film can feel like pure torture. But, even though What Time is void of fast-paced, fast-cut action, I found myself so emotionally drawn to this picture from the first shot (which is four minutes long) to the last. The camera would linger on just one action — the mother making dinner, the son selling watches, the woman sitting in a Parisian cafe — and yet, I felt inevitable despair and heartbreak over the ordinary lives of three characters. These emotions made me question why the lingering, the “slowness,” and the title of the film are so significant. This essay’s introduction, which oscillates between silence and noise, slowly transitions from voiceover to onscreen text as it progresses to the main body of work. Continue reading →

Gendered Resistance and Composition in the Film Timbuktu
Alyne Figueiredo Gonçalves, Middlebury College

Timbuktu is a gorgeous movie, and when I was investigating the use of composition in it, I naively, almost naturally, started focusing on the shots that were the most visually poignant, the most aesthetically pleasing. Something that Roger Deakins said (quoted in “Cinematography in Storytelling,” the video essay that I am “responding” to, or rather, contributing to) came to my mind and completely rerouted my investigation: “there is good cinematography, bad cinematography and cinematography that is right for the movie.” Often, “when reviewers don’t mention [a cinematographer’s] work it is probably better than if they do.” I understood by his words that good or meaningful cinematography is or can be seamless; it does not need to feel like an entity in itself and can blend with the story, with the tone of the scene. So I started looking for poignant scenes, instead of poignantly beautiful moments. Those were scenes that had something to add to the larger message that the director was trying to convey with his movie. It jumped to my attention that women played an important role in Timbuktu and that most of those poignant scenes had women in them, even though they were barely in any positions of power. In spite of that, I felt that they were powerful and they were the characters that I admire the most, and, dare I extrapolate, the audience is invited to admire or connect with the most. It is the merging of these two trains of thought that allowed me to make the connections that I explore in this video essay, where I seek to argue and show that through composition Sissako tells a story of resistance, that is, a reclaiming of power, by the female characters specifically. Continue reading →

Slowness and Slow Cinema from Spencer Slovic on Vimeo.

Slowness and Slow Cinema
Spencer Slovic, Stanford University

Writing on “slow cinema” often focuses on two poles of pacing in film: the fast-cutting, intensified continuity of twenty-first-century Hollywood, and the glacial, almost static pace of films like Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1980). Renowned slow Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang “retired” from filmmaking after his 2013 film Stray Dogs because he had reached the supposed culmination of his slow-paced aesthetic. Stray Dogs ends in a fourteen-minute shot where neither the camera nor the two main characters move for the first eleven minutes. While the director’s previous works were also very slow, none was quite like this. Continue reading →

Perpetuating the Witch-Hunt: Animals and Female Power in Film from Hillia Aho on Vimeo.

Perpetuating the Witch-Hunt: Animals and Female Power in Film
Hillia Aho, Occidental College

I created this video essay as an honors project, to accompany my senior comprehensives film at Occidental College. My film featured a gentle old spinster as the only onscreen character, a sort of subtle witch. It was important to me to write her as a witch, so my film would be a departure from the evil or at least grumpy film spinster archetype. I’ve been interested in witch history since taking a feminism class during my junior year of college. We read Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, about the trials in Europe and how the transition to capitalism in England fed into the misogyny of the time period. The oppression of women’s autonomy, sexuality, and power is still very much a part of society and can be seen reflected in media, hidden in plain sight in the commonly occurring evil witch character. So, I was drawn to looking at witches in film, and examining how historical folklore and persecution of witchcraft are filtered through contemporary film witches. Continue reading →