Protagonists In Films Research Articles

French medical memes: Themes, language, functions

The study concerns the organisation and content of both the visual and verbal elements within the polycode text of French-language memes that pertain to medical discourse. The meme’s connection to medical discourse is established through its subject matter, the incorporation of medical symbols in its visual elements, and the inclusion of medical terminology in its written content. It also involves depicting communication scenarios between doctors, between doctors and patients, and between nursing staff and patients at both the image and text levels. The study’s novelty lies in its dual approach: firstly, it examines French memes as subjects for linguistic analysis, and secondly, it explores them as a genre of polycode text within medical discourse. The research material comprises 100 French memes centred on medical themes, obtained through continuous sampling from the internet. Study results revealed that memes pertaining to medical discourse are dynamic, viral, and eclectic texts that encapsulate the distinctive elements of institutional medical discourse. Thematically, the meme encompasses various medical topics and addresses social issues prevalent in France. Deciphering the author’s intention behind the meme relies on a layer-by-layer examination of how the idea is expressed through the polycode text, as well as an understanding of the sociocultural context that informs the text, which requires presuppositional knowledge on the part of the recipient. Linguo-cultural characteristics observed in the verbal component, as identified through the analysis, include the use of language play at phonetic and lexical levels, inclusion of colloquial and slang vocabulary alongside emotionally charged expressions within doctor-patient communication contexts, and the utilisation of phonetic spelling. The visual component of the polycode text in French medical memes is distinguished by the incorporation of elements from civilisational phenomena, such as political figures from the country, film protagonists, and globally recognised actors. The analysis revealed that the meme serves various functions including comedic, informative, compensatory, and appellative roles. The article constitutes a segment of a broader study examining polycode texts within medical discourse across multiple genres including memes, medical posters, and demotivators in languages such as Russian, French, English, Chinese, and Arabic.

Lighting up the Stars: Myth archetypes Reimagined for the Times

Monkey King and Nezha have long been the most widely used myth archetypes in Chinese film and television, and their rich rewriting was seen in animated and fantasy films in the past. In July 2022, the feature film Lighting up the Stars also completes a period reimagining of the two myth archetypes. The film's protagonists, Mo Sanmei and Wu Xiaowen, correspond to the characters of Monkey King and Nezha respectively. In the interplay of sorrow and joy, they call on the audience to think of he meaning of life and ponder the value of life, conveying a strong sense of human warmth.

The effect of dualism on gender roles portrayed in film production

This paper examines the mechanism by which dualism, gender roles, and films interact with each other across three fields. It draws on Lacan's mirror stage theory to elaborate on how the opposition between males and females is formed and gradually triggers gender roles, where the yin-yang theory of Eastern philosophy is not considered to play a significant role in the interaction. The thesis further stresses the view that problematic gender stereotypes are pervasive in narrative films and genre films. Gender inequality in the casting of film protagonists, gender-stereotypical performances, and the objectification of women by the camera undermine the unity of humanity and indoctrinate people with gender norms. By offering a review of previous research on dualism and gender roles, the study suggests that dualism contributes to gender roles, which are then reinforced in films and entrench spectators' dualistic thinking. Breaking this vicious circle requires a joint effort from filmmakers and spectators.

Playing the Flute in Shanghai: The Musical Life of Dai Shuhong

Playing the Flute in Shanghai: The Musical Life of Dai Shuhong

Razvijanje empatije kod adolescenata uz pomoć filmske umetnosti

Empathy is a very important prosocial behavior, a part of emotional intelligence and it is necessary for the formation of well-functioning relationships, so that we can work together with others. Empathetic children are more successful in their own social environment and make friends more easily. Empathy is not a fixed personality trait, although there are innate differences in people's social sensitivity. Empathy can also be developed, which requires the right environment and siblings and adults and time to develop. The atmosphere of the family and the wider environment, the behavior of the adults, their relationship with each other and with children is the key, which children also see and learn from it (Borba, 2018). In order to develop empathy in adolescents, we went towards the psychology of art, to see the impact, the relationship of film for developing empathy. Therefore, in the first, theoretical chapter of the work, the taxonomy of film reception by viewers is presented from the perspective of psychology of art, film and theoretical works, empirical results of literary aesthetics, psychological interpretation of empathy and mentalization. The goal of our research is to support the theory that empathy and affective influence are greater in viewers who can more intensely identify with the film's protagonists. We had other goals: to analyze the effects of character identification and to study the relationship between identification and empathy. The results of Vische and Tan (2009), support that the emotional experience is significantly determined by the genre of the film. Examining the collected data, we can conclude that there are statistically significant differences between genres in terms of identification with the male protagonist, and the identification with the hero of the film is stronger in individuals who watched the thriller.

Ghosting Us All: How Hollywood Obscures the Same Environmental Issues It Foregrounds

There is no shortage of disaster films in Hollywood. Be they natural, technologically driven, and/or the result of ideological structures that act on exploitative terms, film protagonists and societies at large engage with environmental disasters with regularity. However, if there is any change in the proliferation of such disasters and their causes, it is an increase, not a decrease or even critical discourse. Why do moviegoers experience such undeniable displays of environmental issues, yet generally are not granted access to such critical discourses by those displays? Using two blatantly similar endings to the films San Andreas and Skyscraper as a starting point, this paper examines the phenomenon of haunting to help explain how and why it can be that some of the more overt themes in Hollywood disaster films have such minimal effect upon the collective consciousness. Part theoretical considerations, part filmic narrative analysis that follows from them, the work here will bring together iterations of hauntology, Freud’s death drive, and capitalism to demonstrate shared aspects of all three that reduce the real environmental concerns at the forefront of the films’ plots to eco-ghosts. As ghosts, those concerns are present but also avoid direct discourse or resolution in virtue of haunting. Along with those of Thanos from the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the experiences of the two protagonists played by Dwayne Johnson in the aforementioned films will be shown to be haunted themselves in ways that take them and the viewer close to eco issues at hand, but not in any substantive way – thus reinforcing and safeguarding the very capitalism that repeats such disasters. Article received: April 25, 2021; Article accepted: June 21, 2021; Published online: September 15, 2021; Original scholarly paper

Girls gone bad: An essay on “Existence” in Chytilová's Daisies

AbstractThis essay re‐examines the subversive potential of Vera Chytilová's film Daisies and elaborates on its possibilities for exploring (feminine) existence as difference in relation to work, (re)production, and consumption. Drawing on the work of Luce Irigaray and critical fem(me)ninity studies, it theorizes fem(me)nine existence as multiple and ambiguous, and explores its possible materialization through a poetic “re‐representation” of the film. Through the ambiguous becoming of the film's protagonists, the Maries, the tension between the “undoing” patriarchal of orders of exchange and their tenacity is discussed in relation to the emergence of non‐patriarchal forms of organizing. The essay contributes to organizational research on difference by introducing a critical fem(me)nine lens and by directing attention towards the struggle between existing only for and through an Other – and not existing at all. This allows for an examination of the disruptive potential of difference while further accounting for possible tensions with regards to its materialization. It is argued that fem(me) theorizations of film can be useful for exploring such matters differently as they open up ways to playfully and creative accentuate ambiguity and multiplicity rather than reducing “it” to sameness.

Response of salivary biomarkers to an empathy triggering film sequence\u2014a pilot study

Empathy is a multifaceted phenomenon that is difficult to measure. Self-report questionnaires are the most common and well-validated measures while currently no validated protein biomarkers associated with the empathic reaction have been established. Trigger films have been previously used in psychological research to evoke emotions. Thus, in the present randomized cross-over study we investigated the responses of nine salivary biomarkers that have been related to emotions and stress following an empathy triggering and a control film sequence. Additionally, questionnaires for empathy (Saarbrucken Personality Questionnaire (SPQ)) and current mental stress were applied and participants were asked to assess the film protagonists’ emotions using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule. Data from 46 participants were included in the analysis. α-Amylase, IgA, IL-1β and estradiol showed a significantly different response between the empathy and control intervention. Moreover, normalized levels of these biomarkers significantly correlated with single scales of the SPQ (control film sequence: α-amylase and IgA with personal distress; estradiol with empathic concern; IL-1β with fantasy; empathy triggering film sequence: IgA with empathic concern, fantasy and the total empathy score). These findings indicated that the observed changes in salivary biomarker levels were reflective of a physiological response to the empathy triggering film sequence. Future studies using different triggers and settings will show if the identified biomarkers can be considered as surrogate markers for empathic reactions in general.

Development and validation of film stimuli to assess empathy in the work context

A growing body of research suggests that empathy predicts important work outcomes, yet limitations in existing measures to assess empathy have been noted. Extending past work on the assessment of empathy, this study introduces a newly developed set of emotion-eliciting film clips that can be used to assess both cognitive (emotion perception) and affective (emotional congruence and sympathy) facets of empathy in vivo. Using the relived emotions paradigm, film protagonists were instructed to think aloud about an autobiographical, emotional event from working life and relive their emotions while being videotaped. Subsequently, protagonists were asked to provide self-reports of the intensity of their emotions during retelling their event. In a first study with 128 employees, who watched the film clips and rated their own as well as the protagonists’ emotions, we found that the film clips are effective in eliciting moderate levels of emotions as well as sympathy in the test taker and can be used to calculate reliable convergence scores of emotion perception and emotional congruence. Using a selected subset of six film clips, a second two-wave study with 99 employees revealed that all facet-specific measures of empathy had moderate-to-high internal consistencies and test–retest reliabilities, and correlated in expected ways with other self-report and test-based empathy tests, cognition, and demographic variables. With these films, we expand the choice of testing materials for empathy in organizational research to cover a larger array of research questions.

Asian Children's Literature and Film in a Global Age ed. by Bernard Wilson and Sharmani Patricia Gabriel

Reviewed by: Asian Children's Literature and Film in a Global Age ed. by Bernard Wilson and Sharmani Patricia Gabriel Lucia Obi Translated by Nikola von Merveldt ASIAN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE AND FILM IN A GLOBAL AGE. Local, National, and Transnational Trajectories. Edited by Bernard Wilson and Sharmani Patricia Gabriel. Series: Asia-Pacific and Literature in English. Palgrave Macmillan / Springer Nature Singapore, 2020, 398 pages. ISBN: 978-981-15-2630-5 While postcolonial studies have long addressed the marginalization of non-Western literatures, the book market, which obeys the rules of global capitalism, still causes unequal circulation of children's literatures. There are more children's books on the Western market about Asia that perpetuate notions of "backwardness" and "exoti cism" than there are books from Asia itself that reflect the reality of contemporary Asian societies. Conversely, neocolonial practices, such as cultural appropriation and reinterpretation of "cultur ally authentic" non-Western sources, determine the flow of the commodity of "children's literature" from Asia. Research on Asian children's literature is also dominated by Western discourses and aesthetic concepts. It was high time for this book, whose authors present Asian children's literature and films as expressions of their specific cultures of origin, but also within the complex symbiosis of their local, national, transnational, global, and glocalized networks. The methodologically varied contributions cover diverse children's media from the Asian American diaspora, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan. The concept of "children's literature" rooted in national contexts and transporting collective ideological interests can certainly be observed in Asia. Even though "Asia" is not conceived here as a static, homogeneous entity, but rather as a heterogeneous space with many centers and peripheries, complex local cultures, and constant historical change in the wake of globalization, regional thematic emphases can be identified in the discussion of children's literatures. The book is organized to reflect this. The first chapter deals with East Asian literature from Taiwan, China, South Korea, and Japan, which focuses on changes in family structures and a redefinition of gender roles. Andrea Mei-Ying Wu looks at transnational cultural dynamics and the local appropriation of the term "child heart" (tongxin), which was adapted from romantic Western notions of childhood into Chinese literary theory and was influential in the development of Taiwanese children's literature in the postwar period. Xiangshu Fang and Lijun Bi reflect on the redefinition of the family shaped by Confucianism or nationalist political movements evident in Chinese children's books from 1978 to 2014. Three South Korean films presented by Sung-Ae Lee manifest similar social pressures through family structures. They are considered a metaphor for society as a whole, showing the negative consequences of nonconformity, but also the possibilities for change it can bring. A social transformation—a redefinition of family, away from heteronormative, monocultural, and patriarchal structures and binary gender roles—becomes more evident in contemporary Japanese children's literature presented by Yasuko Doi. Bernard Wilson sees in the Japanese anime version of Andersen's "Mermaid" a challenge to social norms with their social construction of gender. [End Page 97] The literature selections from South and West Asia, India, Sri Lanka, and Iran grouped together in the second chapter are presented by region, yet they focus on the globally significant children's literature theme of inequality and marginalization of young people due to their age, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Sonia Ghalian traces concepts of childhood in Hindi films since the 1950s that reveal fundamental changes in Indian society. Suchismita Banerjee explores the question of representation of queer lifestyles in Indian heteronormative society through the new phenomenon of LGBTQIA+ literature for children and young adults. Neluka Silva addresses the demonization of alterity along ethnic and ideological lines in Sri Lankan society through two popular children's novels by author Prashani Rambukwella. Amir Ali Nojoumian and Amir Hadi Nojoumian analyze the aesthetic approach to the representation of childhood and child protagonists in films by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. The third section of the book, with contributions on Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, focuses on apparently completely different Southeast Asian literatures that draw on local oral traditions or...

Medialny wizerunek osoby z autyzmem kreowany w filmach

Cel badań. Celem badań było opisanie kreowanego we współczesnych filmach wizerunku osób z zaburzeniami ze spektrum autyzmu, a także określenie obszaru filmowej stygmatyzacji bohaterów z autyzmem oraz ich kulturowej i społecznej dyslokacji.
 Metoda badań. Badaniom poddane zostały cztery dzieła: film dokumentalny pt. Komunia (Zamecka, 2008), dramat obyczajowy pt. Czarny balonik (Down, 2008), film biograficzny pt. Temple Grandin (Jackson, 2010) oraz komedia pt. W kosmosie nie ma uczuć (Öhman, 2010). Przy doborze utworów uwzględniono odmienność gatunkową, zróżnicowanie wiekowe bohaterówz autyzmem i poziom ich psychospołecznego funkcjonowania, a także kraj produkcji filmu.W celu realizacji badań zastosowano metodę jakościowej analizy treści.
 Wyniki badań. Analiza treści filmów dowiodła, że kreują one wizerunek osób z autyzmem uwypuklający ich anormatywność – intensyfikują zarówno brak cech rozwojowo normatywnych, jak również nadzwyczajne zdolności i umiejętności tych osób. W zakresie samorealizacji społeczno-kulturowej bohaterzy podejmują różnorodne aktywności, które w konfrontacjiz neurotypowym otoczeniem eksponują deficyty poznawcze i społeczne, jak również szczególny poziom umiejętności matematycznych i konstrukcyjnych. Ekspozycja niedoborów i nadmiarów behawioralnych i społecznych ukazuje pejoratywny obraz bohaterów z zaburzeniami ze spektrum autyzmu.
 Wnioski. Filmy poddane analizie treści kreują wizerunek osób z autyzmem eksponujący ich atypowość, a tym samym stygmatyzujący, przedstawiając je jako osoby poszkodowane, które wymagają stałej opieki lub osoby genialne bądź dziwaczne. Specyfika funkcjonowania filmowych bohaterów stanowi problem dla społeczności, w której żyją – osoby neurotypowe wykazują dezaprobatę i brak zrozumienia wobec zachowania wynikającego z zaburzeń ze spektrum autyzmu.

Aproximaciones a la exclusión social: el otro lado del "milagro" español en Barrio de Fernando León y 7 Vírgenes de Alberto Rodríguez

In this article, I analyze two movies as fictional accounts of social exclusion in Spain during the late 90s and the early 2000s—a period that is widely associated with prosperity and well-being. The two movies are Barrio (1998) by Fernando León and 7 Vírgenes (2005) by Alberto Rodríguez. I argue that these movies problematize and question the so-called "Spanish miracle"—the utopian image of Spain that dominated cultural and political discourses in the pre-crisis era—by exposing a social world inhabited by excluded and marginalized subjects. In order to contextualize these two movies, the article begins with a brief discussion on the social and economic paradoxes hidden behind the discursive façade of Spain's prosperity. Next, I explore the film's protagonists in light of Zygmunt Bauman's notion of disposable lives, and trace their individual experiences within the consumer society that flourished following the expansion of neoliberal policies in Spain. Given this context, I consider the disposability of those (male) characters in relation to other forms of exclusion (bare life), and examine their relation to the affluent middle classes represented in the two movies. Finally, I seek to address the broader implications of these issues by rethinking the dynamics depicted in these two movies in connection with the 80s and the era of economic crisis inaugurated in 2008.

"To exist is to survive unfair choices": "Tribal Ontology" in the Netflix Originals Series The OA

"To exist is to survive unfair choices""Tribal Ontology" in the Netflix Originals Series The OA David Sweeney In 2017, Vox journalist David Roberts used the term "tribal epistemology"—borrowed from the anthropologist Helmut Wautischer (1998)—to describe a tendency for certain groups, in our current "post-truth" environment, to trust information which is "evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe's values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders". In the Netflix Originals series The OA (2016–19), Prairie Johnson—played by the series' co-creator and writer Brit Marling—is such a leader, however the knowledge she gives her tribe, that the universe is in fact a multiverse and that interdimensional travel is possible, widens rather than narrows their understanding of the world. Convinced of Prairie's claims, the tribe becomes focused less on their personal difficulties than on what Brian McHale calls "problems of modes of being" (McHale 10), as does the series; however, Prairie may be an unreliable narrator, and therefore both her status and her claims are called into question. McHale identifies the preoccupation with modes of being as a characteristic of postmodernist fiction which is distinguished from its modernist predecessor by a shift from "an epistemological dominant to an ontological one" (10; original emphasis). Where tribal epistemology of the type Roberts identifies resolves problems of both being and of knowing by uniting them in a subjectivity guaranteed by what Max Weber termed the "charismatic authority" (2012) of a leader, Prairie's tribe, each of whom feels marginalized by normative society, are given agency by the knowledge they acquire. This knowledge empowers them to become more than mere followers, particularly when they start to doubt Prairie. In Nietzsche's terms, they become who they are and as the series is set in a multiverse, this becoming involves engaging with multiple modes of being: a tribal ontology rather than epistemology. In this essay, I will discuss the "tribal ontology" of The OA in the context of current debates pertaining to the social construction of both knowledge and identity. Significantly, a member of Prairie's tribe, Buck, is transgender as is the actor who plays him, Ian Alexander, who also plays himself in the second season finale where the previous events of both seasons are implied to have all been a "series within a series." I argue that this episode's deployment of metafictional techniques and [End Page 115] the series' use of the trope of the multiverse are ultimately utopian in motivation, calling for a corresponding social multiplicity in the actual world which overflows "tribal" boundaries and removes the need for an epistemology guaranteed by charismatic authority. In Marling and Batmanglij's first collaboration, the 2011 film Sound of My Voice, Marling plays Maggie, a cult leader in the Los Angeles of 2014 who claims to have travelled back in time from the year 2054 to warn her followers of the destruction of American society in her time. I have previously compared Maggie to Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History" from Thesis IX of his Theses on the Philosophy of History: both have their backs to the future, "but unlike the angel, [Maggie] has already seen it and so for her the past to which she travels is a moment in the 'single catastrophe' of capitalist 'progress'" (2015). Maggie uses her knowledge of the future to educate her followers about a new, better way of living based on a return to community and the replacement of the 'culture industry' with an authentic folk culture, as valued by Benjamin and the members of the Frankfurt School with which he was associated, most notably Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. However, Maggie's cult has been infiltrated by two undercover documentary film-makers determined to expose her as a con-artist exploiting the credulous and needy. These characters, particularly Peter (Christopher Denham), are the film's protagonists and Maggie is represented as a potentially unreliable narrator to her cult. This is particularly evident in a scene where Peter attends a cult meeting during which, after she has described her...

The Role of the Camera in Wojciech Smarzowski’s Films

In this paper, I reflect on the role and function of the camera ’acting’ (that is, the camera placed in the hands of the protagonists of films by Wojciech Smarzowski) that appears on the screen as often as an axe, which as an item is strongly associated with this director’s cinematography. I also refute the ‘digital’ legends of his debut – The Wedding, which has not been recorded using a digital camera, but an analogue one. A camera ‘cast’ in Smarzowski’s film should not be considered an extra, but a full-fledged protagonist, a witness seeing (and therefore recording) more than can be seen by the characters holding it in their hands. This perfectly corresponds with the last shot – perhaps the most characteristic one for the author of the films discussed – the shot in which the One who reigns over the world, but does not interfere with it (since we have free will) gazes at the universe created by Wojciech Smarzowski.

Greater empathic accuracy and emotional reactivity in old age: The sample case of death and dying.

With increasing age, proximity to one's own death increases and topics related to death and dying may become particularly relevant and familiar. Consequently, older, as compared to young, adults should experience stronger negative emotions in response to these topics and show higher empathy for other individuals dealing with them. To address these predictions, in a first study, we presented two types of death-related stimuli to 41 young and 41 older adults (i.e., participants were asked to write about how they think and feel about their own death and they were presented with three newly developed films of adults talking about various death-related aspects). Although age differences in emotional reactions to the writing task were nonsignificant, in comparison to young adults, older adults reacted to the film stimuli with stronger negative emotions, especially with greater anxiety and sadness. At the same time, older adults reported greater sympathy for the film protagonists and were better able to recognize their emotions accurately. In a second study, we provided further evidence for the idea that the age relevance and familiarity of stimuli determine older adults' emotional reactions by varying the age-relevance of two film stimuli. As predicted, and consistent with Study 1, older adults reacted with greater anxiety and sadness to the death-related film, but not to a film about divorce, that was not particularly relevant to older adults. Taken together, our studies provide evidence for the idea that particularly older adults' emotional reactions are influenced by the context of an emotional situation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

The Aesthetics of Stagnation: Ashley McKenzie's <em>Werewolf</em> and the Separated Society

The Aesthetics of Stagnation:Ashley McKenzie's Werewolf and the Separated Society Sean O'Brien (bio) Separated from his product, man himself produces all the details of his world with ever increasing power, and thus finds himself ever more separated from his world. The more his life is now his product, the more he is separated from his life. —Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle The development of large-scale industry expresses itself, finally, in the extrusion of workers from the factory—deindustrialisation. Beyond the factory gates, workers find themselves wandering in an immense infrastructure, that of modern life, which reflects back to them not their growing power, but rather, their impotence. They see not a world of their making, but rather a runaway world, a world beyond their control, perhaps beyond anyone's control. —Endnotes, "A History of Separation" [End Page 208] Ashley McKenzie's bleak and beautiful film Werewolf (2016) would appear to tell a story about opioid addiction.1 The film's protagonists, Vanessa (Bhreagh MacNeil) and Blaise (Andrew Gillis), are both recovering addicts on a methadone treatment program, frequenting pharmacies for their medicine and conversing with government bureaucrats and clinic doctors about their progress and mental health. And yet McKenzie's feature debut avoids the tragic excess of conventional junkie movies. There are no thrilling scenes of the characters getting high, stealing, or performing sex work, as one might typically expect to find in a film about drug addiction. As McKenzie says in an interview, "I talked to different people in the methadone program, but I'm not trying to make some sort of exposé."2 In fact, Werewolf is hardly a story at all, at least not in the generic sense of a conventionally defined narrative arc. And while the departure from linear narrative has long been an avant-garde mainstay, the film's recursive structure and oblique close-ups suggest a suffocating constriction instead of some sense of freedom from the dictates of a commercial film industry that we might associate with earlier avant-garde cinema such as the French nouvelle vague. This is because Werewolf, as I hope to show, is first and foremost a cinematic meditation on precarity as a social experience of economic stagnation, one that attends to the gendered forms that precarity assumes in an era of deindustrialization. Werewolf dwells in the everyday reality of recovery and its banal routines, but the opioid epidemic—which has spread throughout both rural and deindustrialized regions across North America—appears in the film not as the primary cause of the characters' suffering but instead as a tragic symptom of their precarity. Viewers might be forgiven for not recognizing the film's setting in present-day Cape Breton, an island in the Atlantic Canadian province of Nova Scotia that was once a hub of industrial activity. While Cape Breton Island has come to be known for its natural beauty through the promotional work of its tourism industry in an attempt to fill the considerable gap left by the flight of manufacture and extractive trades, Werewolf captures the hardscrabble existence of life in the postindustrial region in its depiction of two homeless addicts scraping by with a rusty lawn mower in the former mining town of New Waterford. United in their isolation, Blaise and Nessa (as she's known) seem to have little left to do but wander the blasted waste-lands of capitalist ruin, mowing lawns and killing time between methadone doses, until the tensions of the couple form push them apart. Drawing out the consequences of economic stagnation for the aesthetics of cinematic realism, this essay explores the [End Page 209] relationships between precarity and deindustrialization in McKenzie's film through a Marxian account of the figure of separation. In the conclusion to Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson writes that "Marx's fundamental figure for social development and dynamics (a figure that runs through the Grundrisse, connecting the 1844 manuscripts in an unbroken line to Capital itself) . . . is the fundamental notion of separation (as when Marx describes the production of the proletariat in terms of their separation from the means of production—i.e., enclosure, the exclusion of...

La represión del deseo en el cine cubano

<span>En este ensayo se estudia la figura del </span><em>playboy</em><span> como antihéroe sexual en tres de las películas más representativas del cine cubano, </span><em>Memorias del subdesarrollo</em><span> (1968), </span><em>Cecilia</em><span> (1981) y </span><em>Fresa y Chocolate</em><span> (1994). La censura cinematográfica de estos antihéroes refleja la arquitectura moral de un sistema político que, al menos durante los años 60, trató de “reconducir” la vida íntima de sus ciudadanos, más allá de una lucha legítima y necesaria por la igualdad de género. A través de un análisis en detalle de las tres películas se pretende demostrar que esta represión del deseo traspasa la condena del patriarcado visual y entronca, precisamente, con el cine de Hollywood en su sanción del deseo sexual. Con este estudio no se pone en duda la calidad de las películas. Todo lo contrario, se aprovecha su caudal artístico e ideológico para reflexionar sobre la sexualidad en el arte y en la política de Cuba y comprobar que, a pesar de algunas intenciones tan legítimas como la ironía frente al deseo masculino de la cámara o la integración del homosexual en la Cuba revolucionaria, la represión, contención o condena cinematográfica de Sergio, Leonardo y Diego representan una moral más conservadora que liberal y no tan revolucionaria como burguesa.</span>

A Woman Like You? Emma Peel,Xena: Warrior Princess, and the Empowerment of Female Heroes of the Silver Screen

A Woman Like You? Emma Peel,<i>Xena: Warrior Princess</i>, and the Empowerment of Female Heroes of the Silver Screen

The Pleistocene protagonist: An evolutionary framework for the analysis of film protagonists

Abstract Over the last 25 years, evolutionary science has reinvigorated not only the human sciences but also literary criticism and film theory. Drawing on models of human behaviour advanced by evolutionary psychologists Bernard et al., Lövheim and Zuckerman et al., we propose that the application of an evolutionary framework will illuminate our understanding of film protagonists and their associated audience appeal. We report the development of a new instrument to assess differences in film protagonists’ emotions, motivations and character traits across 34 scales: the Assessment of Protagonists’ Traits, Emotions and Motivations Questionnaire (APTEM-Q). The results of a preliminary study comparing protagonists in 100 popular, recent American and Chinese films indicate that the questionnaire is comprehensive and that four protagonist motivations and emotions predict whether a film is preferred at the American or Chinese box office. Using this four-factor model, we found cross-cultural consensus in the way these psychological attributes are perceived. These findings are consistent with evolutionary theories, which would suggest that screen characters’ traits, motivations and emotions are writers’ emulations of universal adaptations to evolutionary selection pressures, reshaped through aesthetic and cultural processes.

Why drive? Psychoanalytic reflections on the film Never Let Me Go

The author presents a psychoanalytic interpretation of Mark Romanek's film Never Let Me Go, which concerns a society in which young adult clones have their internal organs ‘harvested’ for transplantation. Following some general remarks on the method of psychoanalytic film interpretation, strongly emphasising the aesthetics of form and artistic elements specific to film, the author develops the notion that through its cinematic perspectives and shots, Never Let Me Go dramatizes a specific relationship between the sublime and solitude. The film therefore deals with a particular intrinsic difference between expanse and constraint, as well as the limited and the eternal. This leads the viewer to participate directly in a film‐specific way in the inner conflicts at work both in the film's theme and in its protagonists.In terms of aesthetic content, these conflicts are revealed as those of an inescapable thanatological theme that is essentially intertwined with an erotic one. The film shows how love, sexuality, and internal and external images arise from thanatological forces, and it simultaneously provides a way of sublating them (Hegel's Aufhebung) – that is, the film itself represents a benign drive fusion. The film's protagonists, however, struggle with a lack of early parenting and thus with the helplessness of facing individual drive development and the longing for a holding object. Hence, in formal terms, the film deals with the sublime, and, as I will show, it also deals with sublimation at the level of its content.