Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Gabrielle Lamb: “Camp Cinema and the Queer Experience” talks about just that: the art form of camp and how it relates to the queer community. I think it’s more important than ever, as the social media age brings a wash of aestheticism, to chronicle the origins of different arts/styles and pay homage to the creators. This is particularly significant in the case of marginalized creators.
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Sophia Fuller: Tell us a little about yourself; what got you into writing?
Stephen Lee Naish: I studied film and media way back in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the city of Leicester, UK, where I grew up. My ambition was to become a filmmaker or film editor. For a few years, I would film local bands and musicians, and also bands that passed through town. I would make music videos, live performance videos, art projections, and music documentaries. At the same time I was also writing short stories, and screenplays for potential narrative films that I wanted to make down the line. I remember in my late twenties sitting in some musty music venue at 11pm waiting for a band I was meant to film to come on stage and thinking “I’m getting too old for this.” I put down the cameras, enrolled back in school to study politics, creative writing, and nonfiction writing and bridged my interests in film, and my knowledge of production, with my interests in politics and pop culture.
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Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Tillie Quattrone: My article investigates overlapping manifestations of power and masculinity in one of the pioneering Blaxploitation films, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971).
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Leave Her to Heaven (1945) is a film classified by IMDb as a drama/thriller and it does not fall short of displaying the qualities of this genre beautifully. The film stands as a great example of cinematic storytelling, where every frame is crafted to evoke a blend of beauty and tension. Through its stunning cinematography, the film paints a portrait of 1940s America, juxtaposing the serene landscapes with the ominous undercurrents of jealousy and obsession. Performances are delivered with a subtle intensity, each actor bringing depth to their characters, particularly Gene Tierney’s mesmerizing portrayal of Ellen Berent. Amidst it all, the mise-en-scène meticulously constructs a world where every detail contributes to the unfolding drama, ensuring Leave Her to Heaven is not just a film, but an immersive experience in visual storytelling.
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Lone Star (1996) is a western mystery that takes place in a Texas town where secrets have been kept for many years until, one day, a body is uncovered, and the truth begins to unravel. The movie focuses on a variety of people of different races all living uneasily together in a small community; the past and present collide through varying perspectives of memories from the past. At the center of it all is Sheriff Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson); he caused the town anguish with his looming presence and sadistic behavior. Throughout the film, we learn about Wade by means of other people’s recollections of him: he shot innocent people, demanded that everyone follow his rules, and was a racist.
Continue readingFilm Matters announces Chapman University’s CFP 16.2 for their fifth special issue on the theme of “The Body.” Submissions from undergraduates and recent graduates are encouraged for consideration in issue 16.2 (2025).
The deadline for submissions is February 1, 2025.
As a reminder, Film Matters is now using MLA 9th edition style, although we will still accept MLA 8th edition formatting — so please prepare your submissions accordingly. Purdue OWL’s MLA Formatting and Style Guide is an excellent resource to consult for help with this.
For more information about this call for papers, please download the official document (PDF):
In addition to your essay text file, submissions should now include our mandatory contributor intake form, which collects author and essay metadata, as a separate attachment; all other identifying information should be removed from the body of the essay text file, as well as the headers/footers, in order to aid the blind peer review process.
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! Chapman University looks forward to receiving your papers!
Figure 1, from the start of the 1964 horror film, Onibaba, depicts an unnamed murdered samurai as he is thrown into his grave in a low-angle view. He is stripped of his clothing by the older woman and younger woman, portrayed by Nobuko Otowa and Jitsuko Yoshimura, respectively. The young woman and the old woman are widows of war who profit from murdering and robbing samurai refugees returning from the Genko War in fourteenth-century Japan. This scene links a loud drum-based timbre to its soundtrack to heighten suspense and create a sense of dread for the audience. The shot has strong expressionistic horror aesthetics in its cinematography and fast-paced editing, despite the quaint rural farm scenery. The opening rough-textured soundtrack and this frame also create an eerie, anxiety-based mood for the viewer.
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Film Matters is happy to highlight the TOC of FM 14.1, our first issue of 2023, which includes the following peer-reviewed features:
A robust book review section!:
Two film reviews:
And the following DVD/Blu-ray reviews:
For more information about this issue, please visit:
https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/fm/14/1
Are you an undergraduate author who wants to be published in Film Matters? Then we want to work with you! Please check out all the different ways you can publish with us.
Happy May Day!
Film Matters is thrilled to reveal the winner of the ninth annual Masoud Yazdani Award: Cole Clark for his FM 13.2 (2022) article, “Afraid to Live, Afraid to Die: Sources of Anxiety in She Dies Tomorrow.” Cole is a graduate student at Chapman University pursuing a master’s degree in Film and Media Studies. He completed his BA in Film Studies at Chapman University, with a minor in English. He has presented on masculinity studies at the 2023 National Conference on Undergraduate Research, and film phenomenology at the USC First Forum 2023 conference. His research interests lie in the fields of masculinity studies, phenomenology, gender studies, and sound studies.
Our judges also wished to recognize Aatika Fareed with an honorable mention for her FM 13.1 (2022) article “Western Modernism and the Fetishization of the Hijab: Deconstructing the Movie Hala.” Aatika is a senior at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi, majoring in History and English Literature. She hopes to combine both of these disciplines in order to explore the impact of literature and media in defining historical events, current political scenarios, and collective mentality. In addition to this, she is an avid writer and has recently contributed as a short story writer for two anthologies published by Swadhya Publishing House, Select Short Stories: An Anthology (2020) and Swadhya Micro Stories (2021).
We are grateful, as ever, for the work of our volunteer judges, who identified our two honorees after a rigorous judging period last fall:
Lexi Collinsworth, a master’s student in Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, treads the delicate intersection of dance and cinema. In addition to her academic pursuits, she founded “Dance on Film” at UNCW, offering guidance to undergraduates while fostering an appreciation for interdisciplinary art. Beyond the academic sphere, Lexi runs a photography business known as “The Reel Shot,” specializing in portrait photography. This November, a collaborative effort materialized in the form of her codirected short dance film, Reflections in Motion, premiering at the Cucalorus Film Festival. Lexi remains dedicated to pushing boundaries, aspiring to weave genuine, unassuming stories within the tapestry of contemporary cinema.
Hannah Davenport is an aspiring film scholar currently located in Wilmington, North Carolina, where she attends the University of North Carolina Wilmington as a Film Studies graduate student. Her academic interests include regional American cinema and ideological film criticism, as well as aesthetics and phenomenology. Outside of class she spends her time reading and watching “bad” movies.
Dason Fuller is a graduate student pursuing his MA in Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He received his BA in Film Studies in the summer of 2023, and has two upcoming published pieces appearing in Film Matters in the spring of 2024. After achieving his MA, Dason is interested in pursuing academic writing and teaching.
Clayton Sapp is a master’s in Film Studies student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His research primarily focuses on masculinity and romance in popular Hindi cinema. When he is not engaged with his research, he can be found volunteering at local nonprofit film organizations, or at a coffee shop grading papers for the class he assists in teaching.
Each year Film Matters – in fond remembrance of Masoud Yazdani, founding chairman of Intellect and a key person in the establishment of our journal – revisits the peer-reviewed feature articles from the prior volume year with the help of graduate student judges. We approach this with enthusiasm, an opportunity to celebrate the innovative and passionate texts we publish, products resulting from the unique collaborative work of emerging undergraduate film scholars, their mentors, and the Film Matters publication process. The honorees receive book awards from the field of film studies, in recognition of their achievement. For more information, please visit: https://www.filmmattersmagazine.com/masoud-yazdani-award/
Sophia Stolkey: In the beginning of the book, you set out to shed light on the underrated film musical that is Summer Stock and “elevate” it to a higher standard of renown. Could you tell readers a little bit about why this film tends to be overlooked in the canon of Hollywood’s Golden Age from your perspectives, and why it deserves greater attention overall?
David Fantle: As for why it doesn’t get as much attention, and why it’s not in the same conversation as Singin’ in the Rain, or Easter Parade, or those great musicals, I think one reason is that the plot is a bit trite. You know: “Let’s put a show on in a barn…” It’s a little bit of a throwback to films that Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney were doing ten years earlier. But we thought the film was worth closer examination because after writing about it and screening it many, many times, what we’ve realized in audiences we have watched it with is that in the 109-minute runtime, there’s arguably more outstanding musical numbers in those 109 minutes than any of these aforementioned “classic” musicals that are always talked about. We have Gene Kelly’s all-time favorite dance number with the squeaky board, Judy Garland’s iconic swan song to MGM, “Get Happy.” We have “Dig-Dig-Dig Dig for your Dinner,” a terrific tap number. We have arguably the best dance duet that Gene and Judy did out of the three films they worked on together. So, minute per minute, number by number, we think this film has so many showstoppers.
Tom Johnson: What drew us to this, too, was the backstory. There was so much drama in getting this made; it was Judy’s last film at MGM. After fifteen years of work at MGM, the only studio she ever knew, she parted with them right after this movie. And as Dave said, it was sort of a trite plot — no one wanted to do it. Gene, Judy, director Chuck Walters, they were all trying to get out of it. But they all came together as sort of a security blanket for Judy Garland, because she was really up against it with her drug dependencies, raising her daughter Liza pretty much as a single parent, and all these things she had problems with at the time. So they surrounded her, the professionalism was there, and they got the thing done, which was just amazing. And what you see in the numbers, and especially in some of the dramatic scenes, is the real feeling that Judy and Gene had for each other. There’s a real love there. It wasn’t even really acting — you could just tell. And I don’t think that exists in any other Judy film, where you see that real regard for each other, and love for each other.
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