Film Scholars Research Articles

Documenting the air

The air sustains, connects and conditions our lives and has been of growing relevance to social scientists adopting an atmospheric approach to social life. Nonetheless, in screen studies, air’s critical uptake has so far been limited to narrative cinema, leaving it undertheorized in non-fiction filmmaking. In this paper, I introduce theories of the air that flow from the broader rise of atmospheric socio-aesthetic theories and suggest that it is possible to understand the air as an agent in the relationship between a filmmaker and their practice, and the film and its viewers. To make this argument, I first present a theoretical orientation to air as it is implicated in the non-fiction filmmaking process, before considering how the air has been understood in film scholarship, and how it has been taken as a subject of filmmakers working in experimental traditions. I then consider two bodies of non-fiction filmmaking through this aethereal lens. The first is Margaret Tait and her concept of ‘breathing’ with the camera, and the second is Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah’s And Still, It Remains (2023). In these analyses, I argue that thinking aethereally allows us to consider the co-construction of documentarian, document and viewer.

The movie-struck girl in British Malaya, 1919–1937

ABSTRACT This article outlines some of the key cultural shifts that influenced moviegoing for girls and women in British Malaya. To reconstruct the patterns of film exhibition during the silent and early sound era, it draws on archival resources, including American trade press, local popular press, and oral interviews with elderly Singaporeans; these were conducted in the 1980s, by the Singapore National Archives, when spectators who experienced silent moviegoing were still alive. Methodologically, this work draws on feminist film scholarship that focuses on the socio-cultural role of cinematic consumption at a defined, historical moment. The article contextualises cinemagoing within a wider framework of spatial geographies under colonial rule. It also interrogates the popularity of Hollywood on the national screens, and the related, gendered anxieties on moviegoing expressed across the Malayan public sphere.

SATYAJIT RAY AS A DOCUMENTARIAN: A STUDY ON RABINDRANATH TAGORE AND SUKUMAR RAY

Satyajit Ray, renowned globally for his cinematic brilliance, also left an indelible mark as a documentary filmmaker. It is to be mentioned here that the literatures and writings on Ray’s documentary are very less in number. Ray's documentaries on Rabindranath Tagore encapsulate the multifaceted persona of the Nobel laureate, exploring his literary contributions, artistic vision, and philosophical ideologies. Through meticulous research and visual finesse, Ray elucidates Tagore's timeless relevance, weaving together archival footage and dramatic reenactments to present a holistic portrayal of the poet's life and legacy. In his exploration of Sukumar Ray, Satyajit Ray ventures into the whimsical world of children's literature and satire to commemorate the centenary birth anniversary.This paper tries to discuss on documentaries made by Ray with special emphasis on Rabindranath Tagore and Sukumar Ray. Besides reviewing relevant literatures, the researchers have tried to describe two documentaries vividly. In addition to this, they also have taken insightful interviews of three literary and film scholars to understand Ray as documentarian. The interviews were analysed and conclusion have been drawn on the basis of that. The paper shows, beyond mere biographical documentation, Satyajit Ray's documentaries serve as nuanced reflections on the socio-cultural milieu of their respective times, offering profound insights into the artistic legacies of Rabindranath Tagore and Sukumar Ray. The paper serves to highlight the intricate nature of Ray's documentary legacy and its ongoing significance in influencing conversations within Indian cinema.

Revisiting Weimar Film Reviewers’ Sentiments: Integrating Lexicon-Based Sentiment Analysis with Large Language Models

Film reviews are an obvious area for the application of sentiment analysis, but while this is common in the field of computer science, it has been mostly absent in film studies. Film scholars have quite rightly been skeptical of such techniques due to their inability to grasp nuanced critical texts. Recent technological developments have, however, given us cause to re-evaluate the usefulness of automated sentiment analysis for historical film reviews. The release of ever more sophisticated Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown that their capacity to handle nuanced language could overcome some of the shortcomings of lexicon-based sentiment analysis. Applying it to historical film reviews seemed logical and promising to us. Some of our early optimism was misplaced: while LLMs, and in particular ChatGPT, proved indeed to be much more adept at dealing with nuanced language, they are also difficult to control and implement in a consistent and reproducible way – two things that lexicon-based sentiment analysis excels at. Given these contrasting sets of strengths and weaknesses, we propose an innovative solution which combines the two, and has more accurate results. In a two-step process, we first harness ChatGPT’s more nuanced grasp of language to undertake a verbose sentiment analysis, in which the model is prompted to explain its judgment of the film reviews at length. We then apply a lexicon-based sentiment analysis (with Python’s NLTK library and its VADER lexicon) to the result of ChatGPT’s analysis, thus achieving systematic results. When applied to a corpus of 80 reviews of three canonical Weimar films (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Metropolis and Nosferatu), this approach successfully recognized the sentiments of 88.75% of reviews, a considerable improvement when compared to the accuracy rate of the direct application of VADER to the reviews (66.25%). These results are particularly impressive given that this corpus is especially challenging for automated sentiment analysis, with a prevalence of macabre themes, which can easily trigger falsely negative results, and a high number of mixed reviews. We believe this hybrid approach could prove useful for application in large corpora, for which close reading of all reviews would be humanly impossible.

Mourning the Italian boys: ‘Gen Z’, masculinity, teen stardom

This article aims to help fill a quasi-void in Italian film scholarship regarding media representations of Italian teen gender identities. It explores the role of Italian performers belonging to the so-called ‘Generation Z’, in terms of their emerging professional trajectories – with a focus on the post-pandemic context – and representations of gender, finding that the ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ played by Italian teen actors in movies and media outlets negotiate emerging cultural and social trends in representing gendered identities. Through a close analysis of filmic and media texts, as well as a trove of data acquired via ten in-person interviews conducted with carefully selected Italian actors, the article also examines how their characters and media personas negotiate traditional gender stereotypes and the cultural status of their profession.

When the Wind Is Gently Rustling: Film and the Aesthetics of Natural Beauty

While experiencing natural beauty is a key appeal of the cinema and other moving-image media, academic film scholarship has rarely paid attention to it. In this article I will use the widespread motif of the gently rustling wind as a pars pro toto to make some general remarks about the experience of natural beauty in film. I will first note the firm place of the motif of the rustling wind in film theoretical debates from the late 19th century until today. Then, I will propose three modes of how viewers can experience this beautiful motif in film. In the following section I will discuss how film's mediation modifies the experience of natural beauty. And in a final step I will explore the reciprocal relation between nature and film, and how one can enhance the appreciation of the other. Ultimately, I follow two – mutually imbricated – goals. On the one hand, I aim to (re)connect the film theoretical discourse about the wind in the trees to natural beauty. On the other hand, I use the motif of the gently rustling wind to say something more general about the aesthetic experience of natural beauty in film.

Neoliberalism and the Mutations of Social Realism in Contemporary European Cinema

Over the last couple of decades film scholars have begun building a critical vocabulary to theorize the new kinds of social relations depicted in the new European cinema of precarity, from “flexible solidarity” and “precarious intimacies” to “the gift economy” and “cruel optimism”. Although the European cinema of precarity continues the legacy of older film traditions like French poetic realism, Italian neorealism and British kitchen sink realism, thus inscribing itself within a well-established European tradition of social realism, the realism of precarity films is often refracted through specific genre tropes or filmic devices—e.g., allegory, experimental cinema techniques, black comedy, cinema verité cinematography etc.—as though social realism is no longer able to render visual the hidden pathologies of neoliberalism or to capture the complexity of Europe’s current political, economic, and moral crisis.

Feminist World-Making with Cinema’s First Nasty Women

Cinema’s First Nasty Women is a ninety-nine-film DVD/Blu-ray set that highlights silent-era comediennes and cross-dressed women. Cocurators Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak organized two live Zoom roundtables with members of the team who had created, taught, or contributed to the project, moderated by FMH editor Jennifer Bean. One included cocurator and film historian Laura Horak, Kino producer Bret Wood, cocurator and silent film archivist Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, composers Renée C. Baker and Gonca Feride Varol, Indigenous film historian and booklet contributor Liza Black, and film scholar Kaveh Askari. The other included cocurator and film historian Maggie Hennefeld, silent film festival organizer Enrique Moreno Ceballos, film scholars and commentary contributors Yiman Wang, Aurore Spiers, and Kate Saccone, and film scholar Neta Alexander. Rachel Loewen transcribed the roundtables and Hennefeld and Horak condensed and cut together the conversations to highlight the key themes that emerged.

“You're in the Middle of the World”

Abstract Despite Barry Jenkins's pronounced and intentional allusions to the work of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai, film scholars have generally made little of the pervasive Asian elements in Moonlight (2016). This essay, however, offers a sustained study of the film's aesthetic and political engagement with Wong's cinema. It highlights how the distinct Asian femininity, or ornamentalism, of Days of Being Wild (1990) and In the Mood for Love (2001) are translated into Moonlight and reinforce the film's key themes on Black queerness, especially its ontological implications for Black (non)being and its material implications for Black embodiment. Furthermore, this essay claims that by borrowing from films in which Wong visually explores postcolonial loss—especially Happy Together (1997), about a pair of queer male Hong Kong migrants who work and live in Buenos Aires—Jenkins emphasizes the historic and global magnitude of queer Black diasporic dislocation and humanlessness. Ultimately, this essay outlines how the convergence of Black and Asian forms in Moonlight disrupts white, liberal, humanist scripts on racial, gendered, and sexual formation.

The Rules of the Game in Carlos Reygadas’s “Serenghetti”


 
 
 At first glance, Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas’ Serenghetti (2009) appears to be a documentary, capturing nothing more than an amateur women’s soccer match filmed in Santo Domingo Ocotitlán (Morelos, Mexico). Commentary on the film has focused on social issues such as urban development, anthropocentrism, and sport as spectacle. This essay, however, argues that Serenghetti is much more interested in examining the aesthetic dimension of cinema, or what Reygadas calls the film’s “fiction.” In some respects, Serenghetti recalls Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006), as both movies record complete soccer matches. But where Gordon and Parreno’s film engages, as Michael Fried contends, with the issue of absorption in contemporary art, this essay suggests that Reygadas’s film is concerned with contesting an anti-representational account of cinema, particularly the question of time, which has been central to how slow cinema scholarship has understood his work. Indeed, since his Cannes award-winning film Japón (2001), Reygadas’ films have been labeled as slow cinema—films that are understood less as a representation of time than as what Thiago de Luca calls “duration itself.” This essay proposes that through the concept of the soccer game, Serenghetti not only asserts itself as fiction but also, in doing so, provides a reading of cinematic time that challenges many political and aesthetic fantasies endorsed by contemporary cultural criticism.
 
 

On the Margin of Male Gaze: An Analysis of a Typical Category of Female Supporting Characters in Hitchcock's Works

Gender concepts within Alfred Hitchcock's films have long been a focal point of interest for feminist film scholars. This analysis delves into a recurring archetype of young, rejected women in Hitchcock's cinematic works, exemplified by characters like Miriam in Strangers on a Train, Midge in Vertigo, and Danielle in To Catch a Thief. The essay seeks to unravel the underlying gender ideologies associated with these characters. Through this examination, it becomes evident that Hitchcock situates these subversive female figures at the margin of the male gaze, using their misfortunes as a form of retribution for transgressing patriarchal norms. In doing so, male viewers can reaffirm their own gender identity by witnessing the punishment inflicted upon these women. On the one hand, these portrayals serve to reinforce gender stereotypes, perpetuating a well-established pattern that aligns with the collective subconscious of the mainstream male demographic, which fears the prospect of women gaining autonomy or challenging the existed power dynamics. On the other hand, the stark contrast between these marginalized characters and the heroines in Hitchcock's films can inspire alternative perspectives and independent interpretations among different audience segments.

De-westernizing the gaze in Hulu’s Ramy (2019)

ABSTRACT The marginalization of the Orient in U.S. cinema has reduced the Oriental space and its inhabitants to a series of clichés and stereotypes. Based on Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), several film scholars like Jack Shaheen, Ella Shohat, and Lina Khatib, among others, have demonstrated that the exclusion and the distortion of the Orient in U.S. cinema were achieved through the manipulation of Oriental music, culture, religion, and the objectification of the female figure. These cinematic representations contribute to the marginalization of the Orient while creating a Eurocentric narrative. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam in their Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (2013) and Saër Maty Bâ and Will Higbee in their De-Westernizing Film Studies (2012) challenge this long-lasting tradition that marginalizes the Other. The Hulu TV series Ramy (2019-) by the Egyptian comedian, actor, and director Ramy Youssef attempts to de-westernize the gaze on the marginalized Muslim and Middle Eastern communities in the U.S. This article highlights how the series goes beyond the stereotypical iconography used to approach the Middle East while depicting the life of a first-generation American Muslim. It will use a comparative method and discourse analysis to examine how the show can deconstruct these clichés and offer a fresh perspective.

When Silence Becomes Overstretched: Exploring the Loud Silence in Women's Struggle for Liberation in Contemporary Nollywood

Lots of debates, contestations and criticisms have continued to trail the subjugation of women in Nollywood narratives. Film scholars and critics, especially those who tow the feminist line, keep bemoaning the manner in which patriarchy and male hegemony take centre stage in many Nollywood movies to the detriment of women. Employing the mixed research methodology (qualitative content analysis and key informant interview), this study explores the loud silence in women’s struggle for liberation in contemporary Nollywood narratives. Three widely acclaimed and contemporary movies – Muna (2019), Omo Ghetto: The Saga (2020) and Fine Wine (2021) – were content analysed to foreground and highlight male chauvinism and hegemony as well as women’s struggle for their liberation. Though women’s silence in the movies is as prolonged as it is loud, the fierce fight they later put up against male oppression comes as a great solace. Therefore, it is concluded that Nollywood film-makers should continue to give preeminence to such issues in subsequent narratives.

Sensing and self: a haptic ‘look’ at the aesthetics of women’s labour in contemporary Maghrebi and Maghrebi-French diasporic cinema

ABSTRACT This article expands on an ongoing dialogue about representations of female protagonists’ sensual and embodied experiences in Francophone North African cinema scholarship. It examines the dynamic cinematographic styles of contemporary Maghrebi French filmmakers Abdellatif Kechiche, Nadia El Fani, Leila Kilani and Houda Benyamina, asserting that they create a multisensory connection with the viewer that disrupts the underlying unequal power dynamic between film viewer and the Maghrebi woman’s body. This article places labour practices as the loci of analysis, as these examples of quotidian life represent a microcosm of protagonists’ participation in larger social and economic frameworks. First, it looks at the role of embodied labour in strengthening a protagonist’s connection to her community in Kechiche’s La Graine et le mulet/The Secret of the Grain (2007) and El Fani’s Bedwin Hacker (2003). Then, it turns to labour practices in Kilani’s Sur la planche/On the Edge (2011) and Benyamina’s Divines (2016) that isolate and disconnect the protagonist from her community and her body. This article concludes that it is the distinctly multisensory style used by all four directors that centres their protagonists’ physical, lived experiences while challenging the viewer not to merely watch them passively, but to engage in a dynamic, empathetic relationship with the body onscreen.

Director, Sportsman, Auteur: Henri Decoin and the Art of Self-Reflexivity in Filmmaking

Abstract: This article revisits the multifaceted contribution of Henri Decoin to French cinema's rich history through the lens of sport and auteurism. Decoin, who began his career as a professional swimmer in the 1910s, turned to sports journalism during the 1920s before switching his focus to filmmaking until the mid-1960s. Despite an extensive cinematic oeuvre, film scholars are yet to conduct a systematic examination of his influence as a director. By taking a closer look at the recurring sporting motifs and symbolism present in his work, we argue that Decoin not only ought to be seen as a genuine auteur, but also as one of French cinema's most versatile players.

Re-identifying Characters across Films and Fiction

Abstract The current article outlines a theory for character re-identification across films and fictional works: that is, by which interpretive operations does a viewer, spotting a character in film-y, understands that it is the same character identified on the occasion of a prior film-x? While this seems to be a mundane activity, consideration of multiple examples discloses that such acts mobilize sophisticated and abstract concepts and inferences, requiring theoretical insight. Such insight comes by way of Julius Moravcsik's application of Aristotelian concepts to lexical theory. The alignment of the latter—lexical theory—to film interpretation raises deeper questions as to the link of cognition to language, whose implications for future film scholarship are acknowledged in the conclusion.

Contesting feminism: pedagogical problems in classical Hollywood cinema, feminist theory, and media studies

ABSTRACT In this essay, I explore the pasts and futures of teaching and researching classical Hollywood cinema in feminist media studies. After outlining some of the problems associated with Laura Mulvey’s influential work on the male gaze, I consider subsequent feminist responses to Mulvey’s work. In particular, I focus on the attempts by post-Mulvey feminist film scholars to reject in their critical practice Mulvey’s conclusion that classical Hollywood cinema is anathema to feminist progress vis-à-vis media representations of women while accepting the theoretical premise that classical Hollywood cinema is inherently misogynistic and patriarchally corrupt at its core. On this point, I discuss the controversial clashes between male and female scholars over this disjunction between theory and criticism. With reference to the films of Otto Preminger, I demonstrate the probative value of an inclusive feminist media studies praxis in which, on the one hand, theory informs rather than distorts criticism, and, on the other hand, male and female scholars are able to assess the contributions—past, present, and future—of men to the project of feminism.

Onomatopoeia, Sound Effects and Humour in Japanese Anime and US Animation Films and Television

Onomatopoeia are words signifying sounds by phonetically imitating or suggesting them. Research into the use of onomatopoeia in literature, language and comics has been rich and varied while the study of the use of onomatopoeia in film, television and their functions has so far been limited. This article focuses on two aspects: (a) the relationship between onomatopoeia and sound effects in US animation and Japanese anime; and (b) audiovisual humour caused by the use of onomatopoeia and sound effects in US animation and Japanese anime. The author introduces classifications and usage patterns of onomatopoeia in English and Japanese, and analyses the different types of onomatopoeia and sound effects in recent popular US animation films and TV, and in Japanese anime and their contributions to creating humour by applying humour theory (incongruity theory in particular). This study combines film analysis, soundtrack analysis, linguistic analysis and theories of humour, and will be of interest to students and scholars of film, sound, linguistics, psychology and other subjects interested in the study of onomatopoeia and audiovisual humour.

Writing sound in the screenplay: Traditions and innovations

Despite the rich literature on both film sound and screenwriting, there is a paucity of practical advice in current Hollywood screenwriting guides on how to write sound into scripts. This essay encourages the work of screenwriters, screenwriting teachers, students and cinema scholars in two ways. It both reviews the traditions for integrating sound into screenplays and introduces innovations in the classical script format for writing sound. A sequence of off-screen sounds can convey a whole series of actions, while sounds in an outline or synopsis can structure an entire film narrative. As in past screenplays, sounds can again be written side by side in tandem with yet independently from images. Finally, the article makes original emendations to the classical master scene format for writing dominant sounds that fill a scene as well as indications for movie music. At a time when both film production and the screenplay itself are being transformed, this essay rejuvenates both film scholarship and practice by bridging historical traditions with practical innovations for screenwriting sound.

Navigating Nollywood Filmmaking in Covid-19 Pandemic through New Technology

Despite the challenges posed to film production by the lockdown during the pandemic and post-pandemic period, some filmmakers still explored new technological media to express their creative ideas about the situation in which the nation and world were enmeshed. With the need for continuity editing in the construction of visual narratives, it appears that the psychological effect of a narrative is dependent on the mode in which it is constructed to represent the ideologies to be construed. This paper examines the communicative potentials of shots in Obi Emelonye's Heart 2 Heart (2020) shot within the Pandemic era with the use of phones, coordinated and collated with the zoom communication application before editing. It highlights the aggressive psychological and emotional impact of the pandemic as x-rayed in the narrative anchoring on Kipendoff's and Urajav, Begum & Pavadai’s cognitive semiotic theories to explain the communicative impact of the film narrative and technical possibilities in this 21st century brought together through film. It is hoped that the paper would provoke film scholars and filmmakers to explore new ideas in film and the need for more study on cognitive semiotics.