Aatika Fareed, Author of FM 13.1 (2022) Article “Western Modernism and the Fetishization of the Hijab: Deconstructing the Movie Hala

Long shot from Hala of the main character wearing a hijab, striped shirt, black pants, and sneakers, while skateboarding toward the camera and down a suburban street filled with cars parked on the sides.
Hala loved skateboarding and would use her skateboard to get to school. Hala (Apple TV+, 2019)

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

Aatika Fareed: Minhal Baig’s Hala is a coming-of-age film revolving around the life of the protagonist Hala who is grappling with a lot of emotions and events in the quest of re-discovering herself. My article critically analyzes this notion of re-discovering in association with the her “unveiling the veil” as a means of glorifying the white male gaze and hegemony. Aside this, it also deconstructs various stereotypical elements associated with Islam as a means of understanding the origin of Muslim hijabi women being oppressed and how it further perpetuates a homogenous identity against a rising Islamophobic environment.

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Introducing Assistant Editor Brittany Utley

Film Matters is pleased to introduce Brittany Utley as an assistant editor; she supports the editorial side of operations, copyediting texts for publication — especially double-checking citations — as well as prepping communications for authors and publishers.

Contributing to Film Matters with previous writing, publication, and interview experience, Brittany strives to further diversify the national, cultural, and social types of cinemas covered in publication. Brittany is a current Film Studies graduate student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and received her undergraduate degree in English from Bridgewater College in 2017. 

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Abhiraj Goswami and Oishika Basak, Authors of FM 13.1 (2022) Article “Chicken Soup for the Postmodern Soul: Philosophizing Spike Jonze’s Her Through the Lens of Evolving Modernity”

A medium shot from Her of Joaquin Phoenix, right of frame, seated next to a window, which he looks out of to the left, of what appears to be a futuristic landscape of shipping containers and cranes.
Her (Warner Bros., 2013). Atlas of Places.

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

Abhiraj Goswami + Oishika Basak: The article that is being published is called “Chicken Soup for the Postmodern Soul: Philosophizing Spike Jonze’s Her Through the Lens of Evolving Modernity” and it is a philosophical treatise on Her, a film that both my co-author and I have been absolutely mesmerized by. In our article, we try to demystify the fiction that the film is and underscore the political reality, which allows for the existence of such art, either as commentary or as a severe revolt. We try doing this in three parts, which involve an understanding of capitalism, its alienating effects, and the production work involved in vividly producing the related imagery. All in all, our piece aims to decipher Her for what it really is: a warning of the bleak times that are coming, packaged in the form of a traditional romantic saga.

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Introducing Assistant Editor Sohrab Mirab

Film Matters is pleased to introduce Sohrab Mirab as an assistant editor; he works closely with our authors on preparing their texts for publication, as well as leading the OER textbook project.

Sohrab holds an MFA in cinema from San Francisco State University (class of 2016). His past working experience includes International Affairs Liaison at DEFC (Documentary and Experimental Film Center), in Tehran, Iran. He has also served as a juror for the Oscar qualifying section of Mini-Docs at the seventeenth edition of Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. While he explores various modes of production, he is particularly interested in the interrelationship of allegory with history, postcolonialism, performing arts, and religion in Iran. Also, revisionist historiography of Iranian cinema is one of his major areas of research. He is currently pursuing his MA in film studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.    

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Giulia Tronconi, Author of FM 13.1 (2022) Article “Ethical Criticism and There Will Be Blood: Autonomism, Moralism, and Immoralist Perspectives”

A screenshot from There Will Be Blood; a long shot of a man, seated on a stool with his back to the camera, in the outdoors during the day, as he observes an oil derrick on fire
There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007, Ghoulardi Film Company and Paramount Vantage).

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

Giulia Tronconi: Originally, I wrote the essay as coursework for an undergraduate module named Film Aesthetics: in fact, the article deals with issues of aesthetic evaluation and moral judgments. I am extremely interested in questions concerning whether art should be considered a cultural product, defined and informed by the social codes we live by, or whether we should approach it in a more “sensual,” primal, way.

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Interview with Paula Broussard and Lisa Royère. By Holland Elana

Cover of Eleanor Powell: Born to Dance published by University Press of Kentucky

Holland Elana: How did your initial analysis of Eleanor’s filmography in 1974 and your subsequent friendship with her in 1975 intersect and influence each other? Could you describe how the personal connection you developed through your friendship contributed to your decision to transition from analyzing her work to undertaking a comprehensive biography of her life?

Lisa Royère: When we “discovered” Eleanor Powell in 1974 through That’s Entertainment, there were very few of her films available to the public. After we had met Eleanor and we slowly got to see more of her films, we had the idea of compiling a “films of” book. These types of books, with a relatively short overview of her life and career and big on images, were popular at the time, and about as far as our skill set at the ages of eighteen and nineteen would allow. The maturity acquired in the years between our initial project and the present gave us an understanding of certain events in her life that we couldn’t have fully grasped back then. We saw a bigger picture. An in-depth biography now seemed not only doable, but essential to honor her legacy.

Paula Broussard: As Lisa stated, our initial idea was a very modest one that entailed a book of still photos from her films and a light treatment of each film. But, bit by bit, Eleanor did share some special tidbits in her further conversations with Lisa that acknowledged an acceptance that someday something larger in scope might be written. Truly, the entire idea never fully resurfaced until August 2020. While unpacking, I found the old packet of research, called Lisa, and after an hour or two of conversation, the decision was made to revive the project as a full biography.

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Interview with Joshua Heter and Richard Greene. By Holland Elana

Cover of The Godfather and Philosophy book

Holland Elana: What was the nature of the initial conversation that sparked the idea to embark on writing a book about The Godfather? Could you provide insights into the early discussions that laid the foundation for this project?

Joshua Heter + Richard Greene: We have both published a number of books on popular culture and philosophy. All told, there are dozens of these volumes (which have been published since around the year 2000), and we’ve been fortunate to work on a number of them in various capacities. Sometime about a year and a half ago, we began to wonder if there were any “big” pieces of intellectual property (i.e., television shows or movie franchises) that were overlooked; that never got the philosophy and pop culture treatment. And, as it turns out, inarguably, one of the most important pieces of popular storytelling in the twentieth century had been overlooked: The Godfather. With the anniversary of the first two films coming up, and with the release of The Offer (which recounts the making of The Godfather) on Paramount+, it seemed like now was a great time to correct that oversight. Thankfully, the good folks at Carus Books agreed, and we got to work.

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Citation Ethics Project Update. By M. Sellers Johnson

Film Matters is excited to present an update on our ongoing Citation Ethics project. This project endeavors to compile demographic data on the authors referenced in Film Matters’ published articles, featurettes, and special issue dossier features. Our aim is to analyze these data, using them to note potential gaps in inclusive authorship across our back catalog with a view to identifying areas of (and methods for) improvement, moving forward. We hope to address these gaps, and discern patterns that may account for the inequity in scholarly referencing.

To start, we have established parameters to create a distinction between “diverse” and nondiverse scholarship. Presumably, nondiverse authors compose the majority of scholarship in film and media studies. Our working definition of “diverse” has, thus far, been constructed as: author(s) outside of the paradigm of Western, Caucasian, cisgender, English-language, and heteronormative scholarship. For our purposes here, female, cisgender, heterosexual Caucasian scholars writing in English are not considered “diverse” — we assume that they are fairly well represented in film and media scholarship. However, we are tracking presumed male, female, and non-binary author counts; it is still useful to know how many women — regardless of race or ethnicity — are being consulted in FM articles, big picture. Thus, any Queer-identifying person, regardless of ethnicity, is at this time considered a “diverse” source.

This is, obviously, not a perfect system — we are relying upon publicly available author information to make our determinations about identities. In the event that identities cannot be readily confirmed, nondiverse is our default assumption. We would also like to acknowledge that this project, from its inception, is designed to be adaptable to changes in ethics and awareness regarding these types of data collection. In our growing transnational world, there will likely be new nuances, demographic categories, and qualities of diversity that will inevitably arise as these considerations evolve.

Film Matters is committed to bringing more diverse authors into the scholarly conversation and is open to remediating past practice to achieve this goal. We welcome readers and scholars alike to share in this Citation Ethics project as a small step toward engaging with appropriate and inclusive scholarship. The challenges and aspirations of this project aim to reflect our academic ethos: seeking to learn more from one another, while amplifying underrepresented voices, in our mutual affinity for film and media studies.

To view our current data, from FM 1.1 (2010) onward, please see:

Author Biography

 M. Sellers Johnson is Citation Ethics Editor for Film Matters.

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Sophie Barbour, Author of FM 13.1 (2022) Article “Divines and the Constructed Self”

A screenshot from Divines (2016) -- a medium shot of, left to right, a young white woman and a young black woman raising their arms in joy outside of a car roof as the car travels in Paris during the evening -- Arc de Triomphe glimpsed in the background.
Dounia and Maimouna celebrate in female-female drag. Divines (Diaphana Films, 2016), 1:00:41.

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

Sophie Barbour: My article looks at a character named Dounia from the film Divines and attempts to further other academic discussions of her gender identity—or rather, her gender performance. It is immediately obvious upon watching the film that it is interested in gender. It follows a female protagonist, her female best friend, and the female drug dealer against the backdrop of a violent male culture within the banlieue. Additionally, Dounia is North African and lives outside of the banlieue itself in a Roma camp. Her identity is, for lack of a better word, unrooted. There is no female-dominated space for her. She doesn’t live with other North Africans within the banlieue, and, of course, she lives in the periphery of the larger Parisian society and economy. With that in mind, she makes a space for herself as a drug dealer by performing certain traits that are attributed to men in order to partake in the banlieue economy. However, she also performs a type of hyper-femininity when it is required of her. These gendered performances then lead us to question her identity more largely. Where do the performances stop and Dounia start? I found that, really, there is no distinction. The performance of identity is the identity itself, and thus Dounia’s particular skill in acting becomes a powerful tool in being able to morph herself to the needs of the different roles she fulfills.

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Drew Meinecke, Author of FM 13.1 (2022) Article “The Paradise Theater (1941–1951): African American Movie Palaces and the 1943 Racial Uprising in Detroit”

A black-and-white image of Detroit Orchestra Hall -- a long shot of the exterior of a multi-story neoclassical building.
Detroit Orchestra Hall, c. 1970. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, MICH,82-DETRO,17-1.

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

Drew Meinecke: My article is about the Paradise Theater in Detroit, which existed between 1941 and 1951. It was opened initially as a mixed, or integrated, theater, which opted to use Black acts and performers to attract a multiracial audience. I point out the significance of this all-Black stage show, in which famous Black bandleaders such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong headlined, to argue that the Black moviegoing experience was not inherently inferior to the white moviegoing experience, as Black Detroiters saw quality performances at the Paradise Theater. That being said, I also make sure to include the fact that Black Detroiters faced discrimination, segregation, violence, and poverty, to ensure that the audience has no doubt that systemic racism permeated throughout the north during this period. My article also touches on the Paradise Theater’s transition from its distinction as a mixed theater to its distinction as a Black theater, a theater that is designated as a primarily Black space. Additionally, my article explores the close relationship between the Paradise Theater, and the nearby Black neighborhood of Paradise Valley. Specifically, I examine the efforts of the Paradise Theater which uplifted this local Black community, and I discuss how residents of this community reacted to these efforts. I also touch on the Paradise’s broader philanthropy which extended across the nation, with the intention of demonstrating that the Paradise did not fit the stereotype of exploitative Black movie theaters. In all, the goal of my article is to help shed light on an important, and often overlooked, part of Detroit’s history.

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