Film Matters Magazine

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

Emma Fergusson: My article, “’A Ritz Among Laundrettes’: Identities and New Waves in My Beautiful Laundrette,” analyzes the 1985 Stephen Frears-directed film, My Beautiful Laundrette, as a precursor to the New Queer Cinema movement, and as significant for its portrayal of characters with complex, intersectional identities, living in Thatcher’s England. The laundrette at the film’s center serves as a space in which its characters can find success in business and the freedom to live out their sexuality, but which nonetheless remains inextricable from the oppressive society that surrounds. Furthermore, I investigate the stylistic impact of the film’s origins in television.

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

Emily Heiser: My article examines the critical reception of Raoul Peck’s film I Am Not Your Negro (2017) and how the film’s unique ability to evoke empathy and harness the psychological process of projection could have impacted certain responses. Although I Am Not Your Negro is based on an unfinished book by James Baldwin, he still had no active role in the creation of the film, which is why I was intrigued when I found multiple critics saying that they felt they were in the presence of Baldwin or were immersed in his point of view upon watching the film. 

Brittany Utley: What sparked your interest in wanting to investigate Romanticism and its connection to film?                                                                  

Will Kitchen: Pretty much all the work I’ve done since I started my film studies back in 2011 has been driven by a desire to connect existing interests. Romanticism, for me, came about primarily through an existing interest in music. I’ve always loved Romantic music, including Liszt and Beethoven, and I thought: “Is there a way I can connect that to the study of film? Pushing the idea of film as an interdisciplinary subject, can it be the ultimate synthesis of all the arts? And is there a way to connect these preexisting interests into some new contribution.” That initially took the direction of looking at representation – looking at the ways creative labor is represented in films through biopics, films about performing musicians, creativity, and genius – virtuosity, in a broad sense. But it also includes how classical music has a symbolic content. We go to see a film, for example, and the villain always loves classical music – that sort of thing. So I began to think about those very broad connections and how they become repeated and develop meanings that can expand, be communicated, and used. Of course, that leads to the idea of language more broadly, more “hardcore” film theory, and the theory of audiovisual explanation. My interests grew from exploring these various threads that lead off from this central, nebulous idea of Romanticism. It’s an area that’s leading to all kinds of fascinating topics, which I’ve explored across two books now, and there’s still a lot more work to be done.

Alexis Johnson: Please tell us about The Butterfly Queen in your own words.

Liam O’Connor-Genereaux (director): I wanted to tell a love story about friendship. Lots of movies focus on true “romantic” love (it’s one of the most celebrated forms of storytelling), but friendship, especially in cinema, is treated superficially. It’s either taken as a given and difficulties in the friendship are played for laughs—or it’s relegated to a B or C plot. For me, my platonic relationships are central to my life. They have been just as meaningful, difficult, and life-changing as falling in love. So I wanted to make a movie about that. In the woods. With monsters and portals and a dragon.