Genre Filmmaking Research Articles

Minority Views: “Liberator”, American Cinema, and the 1960s African American Film Criticism

The article reconstructs the discourse of film criticism in Liberator – a radical African American magazine published between 1961 and 1971. Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the cultural field, the author situates Liberator within the context of the 1960s, civil rights movement, and Black Arts movement, and analyses the magazine’s role in film culture of the era, as well as the links between the magazine and important black filmmakers and film writers. Four aspects of Liberator’s film criticism are explored: cultural memory of past representations, criticism of genre filmmaking, the need for cinematic realism, and the possibility of creating a distinct black cinema. The case study of the critic Clayton Riley’s career presents an author who wanted to continue his radical criticism in the mainstream press (The New York Times). Liberator’s legacy is framed as essential in understanding the tradition of African American film criticism.

Then, Now, Forever: Television Wrestling, Seriality, and the Rise of the Cinematic Match during COVID-19

In April 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the state of Florida classified professional wrestling (pro wrestling) alongside hospitals, law enforcement, and grocery stores as an essential service. The state’s decision made global headlines and was generally met with a mix of confusion and surprise. This article investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on contemporary television wrestling. After tracing the influence that the television medium and media convergence have had on pro wrestling, the article argues that the pandemic circumstances, coupled with the demands of television wrestling’s serialized storytelling, led to an evolution of a specific wrestling-match type: the cinematic match. Through a close textual analysis of wrestling programs that were produced without a live crowd during the COVID-19 crisis (e.g., WWE Friday Night Smackdown, Wrestlemania 36), this article examines how television wrestling—in an effort to appeal to its audience—produced a number of cinematic matches that combine distinct elements (e.g., editing, cinematography, sound) of genre filmmaking (e.g., horror, action) with the spectacular athleticism of pro wrestling.

White Skin and the Black Mask™

White Skin and the Black Mask™

Toei’s Truck Guys series (1975–79): masculine identity and fantasies of utopia

The Toei Studio-produced Truck Guys/Torakku yarō (1975–79) is a popular domestic genre film series. Consisting of ten films, it is an action-comedy, loosely structured around a buddy-road film genre framework. While rarely canonised within critical or academic discourses, the series’ lasting popularity is still evidenced by its commercial ‘long-tail’. The aim of this article is primarily to shed light on this critically overlooked series, locating it within specific national and cultural contexts, in particular toward the end of the Japanese studio system. Specifically, this article examines how Toei attempted to revitalise the popular cycles of their genre films facing a decline in both mainstream commercial film production and cinema audiences, highlighting a fiercely pragmatic mode of filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s where serialisation played an important role. By exploring the films from both textual and contextual perspectives, the article will also attempt to highlight and confirm the significance of intra-serial intertextuality, with particular reference to the first and the final instalments of the series: No One Can Stop Me (1975) and Hometown Express Service (1979). Addressing a practice of popular genre filmmaking in Japan also begins to fill a critical gap in Japanese film studies

«КОГДА РОЖОК ОТТАЯЛ, ПОЛИЛИСЬ ЗВУКИ МУЗЫКИ…»: ПАВЕЛ ЛУНГИН О СОЗДАНИИ ФИЛЬМА «ТАКСИ-БЛЮЗ»

Russian film director Pavel Lungin explores the topic of independent cinema during perestroika, using the example of his debut film Taxi Blues, which received one of the first international awards in post-Soviet Russia—the Best Director Prize and the Special Mention of the Ecumenical Jury at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. In the interview, the interlocutors discuss the directorial and dramaturgical tools: how symbolism is interpreted in a historical context, how the audiovisual image is constructed, what are the signs of a chronotope — and explore the image of a man at the crash of an era. For instance, in Taxi Blues, Pavel Lungin intentionally contraposes the two male characters—that of Pyort Mamonov (the image of the 90s), and of Pyotr Zaichenko (the image of a Soviet man)—clashing them against each other not only plotwise (through a dramatic conflict), but also aesthetically (through fundamentally different physiognomy and acting plastics). The director analyzes the specifics of auteur and genre filmmaking, dividing his artistic biography into a “script-writing” period, when his films were highly successful in Soviet distribution, and a “directing” period, when he, being in the new historical conditions, began to make independent auteur films. Another question raised is why a full-fledged “New Wave” has not emerged in Russia, similar to those that had formed in French and English cinema. Lungin recalls and evaluates the forgotten figure of Marin Karmitz, who not only produced the New Wave directors, but also had an auteur cinema distribution network—an interesting experience of distribution in Europe, which can be actualized in scientific research to answer a very timely question: can auteur films be successful at the box office? Thus, the interview covers not only the early period of Pavel Lungin’s work (given that at the time of Taxi Blues there was no Internet yet, and many reviews and analytical articles about the film are still not digitized). Most importantly, the film Taxi Blues fits into the historical context; and this fact creates a cultural field both for modern interpretations and for understanding the art of perestroika—information about which is still insufficient, resulting in the absence of full-fledged analytical comprehension. In the interview, we also trace parallels with the processes that were taking place in world cinema—the New Wave in French cinema, the British “angry young men”, and the “Youth Rebellion” in Hollywood.

The Shining by K.J. Donnelly (review)

Reviewed by: The Shining by K.J. Donnelly Michael D. Gibson K.J. Donnelly, The Shining. Cultographies. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2018. Paper, vii+128pp, $15.00 ISBN 9780231851251 Stanley Kubrick is one of the most revered and enigmatic filmmakers in American cinematic history. His oeuvre as a writer-producer-director consists of no less than ten heralded masterpieces and many of his films consistently rank as among the highest in industry- and critic-based polls. Current filmmakers continue to cite his work as a paramount influence on their own artistic endeavors. No less celebrated a filmmaker than Martin Scorsese has noted that one Kubrick film was equal to the entire output of almost any other filmmaker. Within Kubrick’s body of work, The Shining (1980) is perhaps his most enigmatic but also most popular film; it is by far the most scrutinized and theorized of his films, even being the subject of a fascinating recent documentary film, Room 237 (2012), that dedicates nearly two hours to dissecting the numerous interpretations of Kubrick’s film, from the academic to the conspiratorial. As with many of Kubrick’s films, its critical reception has undergone a significant reorientation, perhaps more extreme than any other: upon its initial release in 1980, The Shining received some of the most negative critical reviews of Kubrick’s career up to that time; in the intervening decades, however, its reception has been revised to the point where it is now widely regarded as one of the most technically astute horror films ever made and an exemplary piece of genre filmmaking. Into this space of critical reassessment and lionization enters K.J. Donnelly’s recent volume on Kubrick’s film. Donnelly’s title is an installation in the Cultographies series published by the Wallflower Press imprint of Columbia University Press. Each title in the series focuses on an individual classic or recent cult film and aims to offer a brief and accessible overview of its history, reception, and critical interpretations. While aimed at popular audiences, the volumes are not bereft of scholarly sophistication and provide an important orientation to cinematic genealogy and theory; the format — 4x7, nearly pocketsized — makes these technical matters less of an obstacle to leisurely reading. Taking up Kubrick’s heralded film, Donnelly’s volume achieves the objectives of the series quite handily. It is at once an insightful, informative, engrossing, and even at times humorous investigation of a landmark piece of cinema. While crisp and compact — one can reasonably manage a cover-to-cover reading of the work within the 146-minute running time of the film itself — the volume posits a cogent and compelling thesis about this masterwork from a master director: Donnelly argues that with The Shining Kubrick achieved the rare feat of creating a crowd-pleasing mainstream genre film that is also an intricate, elliptical, and technically sophisticated art-house cult film (3–6). The Shining was a certified box-office success for Kubrick despite its initial negative critical reviews, and, as with many of his films, it is replete with ambiguities and complexities such that it rewards repeated viewing (97–99). Donnelly demonstrates his thesis with aplomb over the course of the book, tracing these elements from the origins of the production to the most recent critical reappraisals. The structure of the book falls largely into two main sections: the first deals with the development and production history of the film, and the second takes up critical reception and interpretation; although more space is given to the latter (about two-thirds of the book), the first third of the book is pivotal to locating The Shining in Kubrick’s filmography and as a piece of horror genre filmmaking (15–33). Donnelly’s account of Kubrick’s preproduction collaboration with Diane Johnson on the adaptation of Stephen King’s novel to script and the subsequent production process of designing, shooting, and editing the film is fascinating, if breezily presented. While this section does not break significantly new ground through access to the materials available at the Stanley Kubrick archive (which could yield valuable new detail and insight), it [End Page 86] does provide a serviceable and engaging overview of...

Thelma: Empathic engagement and the Norwegian horror cinema

Genre filmmaking has become very important in Norwegian cinema in the years since 2000, even to the point of certain art cinema directors like Joachim Trier creating types of horror movies. I argue that Trier’s intimate, subtle approach to the main character in his psychological horror film Thelma deepens and expands the experience of Norwegian horror.

Between film and photography: the bubble of blood in The Family of Disorder

Founded within the context of the Brazilian military dictatorship, the film company Belair was one of the most radical attempts to cultivate a cinema in the spirit of Tropicalism: its works are distinguished by parodies of genre filmmaking, a carnivalesque celebration of the body, and a profound investment in subversive politics. Led by filmmakers Rogerio Sganzerla and Julio Bressane and actress Helena Ignez, Belair produced 6 films between January and March 1970, when the team was forced into exile. 'A Familia do Barulho' ('The Family of Disorder'), directed by Bressane, contains one of the most striking sequences in all of Belair’s productions. Its portrait of a nuclear family in constant tension ends up with the three main characters looking straight into the camera and suffering in front of an unknown, invisible danger: a young man has a wound on his face; another covers his face with his hands in a liminal state; and a woman, played by Ignez, vomits a bloody slobber. Following Brigitte Peucker’s exploration of the relationship between cinema’s impurity, stillness and the cinematic body, as well as Raymond Bellour’s analysis of some dispositifs that anticipated the movement of cinema from the immobility of death, I will argue that these images exist in a territory between different media, and between life and death: they are intersections of the liberating dynamism of cinema and the enforced stillness of photography, which evokes police mugshots, the menace of firing squads, and the ghostly quality of wax figures. I will focus particularly on the case of Helena Ignez and her bloody mouth, which chime with the tropicalist exploration of the grotesque and the intermedial quality of the cinematic body.

Salvaging The Counselor: Watching Cormac McCarthy and Ridley Scott's Really Trashy Movie

Abstract I argue that Cormac McCarthy's The Counselor, set amid the U.S.–Mexican drug wars, critiques late capitalism through self-reflexive genre filmmaking. Centered on the metaphor of trash, this essay connects the film's low-art spectacle with the drug trade's entrenchment in globalization and multinational capitalism. The Counselor, in effect, resists cinema's central role in the culture industry by tying its “trashy” plot to the historically pressing narcotics crisis and the twenty-first century's accumulating trash heaps.

Wind Blast, a Chinese Western in a nomadic plateau

This analysis of Wind Blast (2010) presents a type of genre filmmaking in Chinese cinema heavily indebted to Hollywood. Wind Blast is a Chinese Western; in fact it falls into a category of Asian Westerns, including Tears of the Black Tiger (Thailand, 2000), Sukiyaki Western Django (Japan, 2007), The Good, The Bad, The Weird (South Korea, 2008), A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop (China, 2009), and Let the Bullets Fly (China, 2010). All these Westerns may be described as ‘Nomadic’ films, to use a Deleuzian principle, unfolding along rhizomatic ‘lines of segmentarity’ (from A Thousand Plateaus, p. 21). The paper will set out to delineate the Western space of Wind Blast and to examine its signs of spatiality that connects it to the Hollywood Western, while also exploring how it is also disconnected from its source. The Chinese Western possesses its own Western space that is located in the Western topographical regions of China. The paper will examine how this space is infused and affected by the Deleuzian concept of difference.

The AFKN nexus: US military broadcasting and New Korean Cinema

ABSTRACTThis article explores the unintended cinematic consequences of America's military presence in South Korea. It traces the history and programming of Armed Forces Korea Network-TV (AFKN-TV), the US military television network, and shows how the network functioned as a major channel for the flow of Hollywood and other commercial genre films into Korea during the 1970s and 1980s. AFKN had a large ‘shadow audience’ of young Koreans during these years for whom it offered an alternative media culture to that of the repressive Park and Chun regimes. This article argues that AFKN may have helped shape the development decades later of the genre-centred New Korean Cinema by providing its viewers—among them future directors Bong Joon-ho and Kim Jee-woon—with lessons in the language and logic of genre film-making.

Capturing “Authenticity”: Digital Aesthetics in the Post-Studio Japanese Cinema

En diminuant les coûts de production et en ouvrant de nouvelles possibilités de tournage en lieux réels, les technologies numériques ont favorisé l’émergence d’un nouveau genre dans le cinéma japonais contemporain : le long métrage de fiction s’appropriant la technique et les ressources expressives du documentaire. Comme ce fut également le cas dans plusieurs autres cinémas nationaux évoluant dans des contextes industriels semblables, cette irruption du quotidien à l’écran entraîna une remise en question des frontières séparant film et vidéo, fiction et documentaire. Cet essai se penche sur une certaine esthétique de « l’authenticité » s’étant développée dans le cinéma de fiction et le documentaire japonais, et plus particulièrement dans le documentaire personnel. Trois films se retrouvent au centre de cette discussion : Dare mo shiranai/Personne ne sait (Kore’eda Hirokazu, 2004); Tarachime (Kawase Naomi, 2006), et Atarashii kamisama/Nouveau dieu (Tsuchiya Yutaka, 1999). Alliant tradition documentaire et fiction, ces œuvres communiquent l’instabilité du réel par le biais de l’esthétique numérique et du concept « d’authenticité ».