Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Jack Zornado: This article is focused on Alfred Hitchcock’s use of sound and how he evolved as an experimental filmmaker, unafraid to experiment with new techniques, into an auteur that was renowned internationally for his films–and how his use of sound (informed by Soviet theories) changed through that evolution.
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Film Matters is pleased to announce officially the release of the first 2022 issue, FM 13.1, edited by the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) and featuring dossiers guest edited by Mina Radovic (Goldsmiths University of London, UK) and Tom Ue (Dalhousie University, Canada).
FM 13.1 includes the following peer-reviewed feature articles:
These “Depicting Spiritual Life Through Literature and Film: Silence by Endo, Shinoda, and Scorsese” dossier featurettes:
These featurettes:
These “Reading Literature and Science” dossier featurettes:
For more information about this issue, please visit:
https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/fm/13/1
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 June!
Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Hannah Vliet: “White Saviors Get Gold Trophies: Colorblind Racism and Film Award Culture” analyzes the cultural “text” of Green Book’s Best Picture acceptance speech at the 2019 Academy Awards to expose the neoliberal, colorblind mode of racism that infects the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as well as the American film industry at large.
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The St Andrews Film Festival (SAFF), which took place 22-28 November 2021, celebrated its third year with a wide array of international films. Born in 2018 through the University’s Filmmakers’ Society, SAFF has become a charity committed to raising the profile of St Andrews and Scotland within the international film scene. Boris Bosilkov, Mina Radović, and Walid Salhab curated a fine week-long experience full of excellent films – from around the world and Scotland itself – accompanied by fascinating talks with the directors. But while the festival moving to a purely online format – due to the pandemic – allowed for an unprecedented degree of flexibility, it also limited the connection between filmmaker and audience that film festivals usually bring. Therefore, it was such a brilliant initiative by Boris to host talks on Zoom with some of the filmmakers, which allowed for lively Q&A conversations. With sixty films to choose from, this helped to draw attention to the more notable entrants. Rounding off the week with a Zoom-based ceremony with around twenty awards also helped unite the filmmakers and audience after the week’s uncharacteristic isolation, giving additional promotion for some remarkable films that would otherwise have been overlooked. The SAFF team did an excellent job crafting a platform for St Andrews, pushing the town as a hub for global cinema.
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Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Georgina Beeby: This article is about pretrauma cinema in relation to the film WALL-E. It explores E. Ann Kaplan’s proposal of pretrauma as a subgenre by explaining how pretrauma films are defined and examining what their function may be. WALL-E is closely analyzed as an example of a pretrauma film as it fulfills the definitions but showcases how the function of the subgenre is difficult to pinpoint. The article aims to show how pretrauma cinema functions to both encourage audiences to face the climate anxieties of our society, but also how these films sometimes simply act as catharsis to the audience whilst no real change is enacted.
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Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Reid Anderson: In this article, I aim to provide context to and shed light on not only the career and star image of Sharon Tate throughout the late 1960s, but also how the events of her death have worked to overshadow and transform the public’s perception of her as a cult victim/cult star. Specifically, I argue that the reinstated images of Tate across Mansonsploitation media has functioned in categorizing the late star as (1) strictly a cult victim and, thus, (2) allowing the hyperreal representations of Tate to be unconsciously accepted as accurate depictions of the late star.
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Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Leo Nelki Göpfert: This is an article analyzing the film WR: Mysteries of the Organism by Dusan Makavejev through the lens of a totally different filmmaker’s theory. The theory is Matsumoto Toshio’s “neo-documentary,” which outlines the potential of synthesizing surrealism and documentary techniques. I argue that Makavejev has stumbled across the same technique, probably by accident, and that his film helps demonstrate the power of this filmmaking style to depict social movements.
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Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Emily Nighman: This article compares Disney’s original 1998 animated film, Mulan, and the 2020 live-action remake to examine the negative and positive treatment of Chinese/American representation in each film. The article also places the films into broader discourses surrounding race and gender studies, as well as the sociopolitical contexts surrounding the films’ production and release.
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In early 2022, I am aware of everyone else who seems to be online just the same amount as I am, so I recognize there is a trend in the content I am consuming. There is an online scene managed by college students in downtown New York. They all appear to be actors, creators, personalities, influencers, or all of the above. They are preparing for the next big scene to appear in New York City. This scene never leaves the online stratosphere of think pieces acknowledging the scene as a physical space, rooting from a triangular epicenter in the Lower East Side: Dimes Square. Dimes Square is a microneighborhood that could be more fiction than fact. In many ways, Dimes Square seems reminiscent of earlier microcultures within New York City that rose to prominence, thanks to aspiring artists from outside the city. Think of The Factory without an Andy Warhol ringleader. Like the countless trend articles about Dimes Square, ambitious artists from outside the city create what they believe to be the New York scene due to their own dreams of a setting beyond the reality of an actual “art scene” that exists in New York. This scene is created through online performances for consumption through various tweets, Instagram memes, and podcasts, curated for eclectic teenagers outside the city. These teens beg for a glimpse into the world of a post-millennial generation, zoomers and Gen Z, living in the city, maintaining a lifestyle unaffordable to the vast majority.
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Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Amanda Coates: My article explores Gregg Araki’s cult trilogy (dubbed the Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy), featuring the films Totally Fucked Up, The Doom Generation, and Nowhere. These films are known best as independent queer films, which focus on troubled young adults as they navigate their lives under unconventional circumstances — including the AIDS epidemic and the apocalypse. My paper approaches these films with a different approach, studying how Gregg Araki’s Asian identity influences these films, as well as how these films represent Asian Americans; many scholars have critiqued that Araki’s work does not represent Asian American identity, but I argue that his representation of Asian American men is empowering. Within the trilogy, Araki gives Asian men the space to explore their queerness without their race becoming a factor that prevents them from doing so, thus empowering Asian men in a unique way.
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