Screening Europe in Australasia

This book challenges the historical myopia that treats Hollywood films as always having dominated global film culture through a detailed study of the circulation of European silent film in Australasia in the early twentieth century. Before World War I, European silent feature films were ubiquitous in Australia and New Zealand, teaching Antipodean audiences about Continental cultures and familiarizing them with glamorous European stars, from Asta Nielsen to Emil Jannings. After the rise of Hollywood and then the shift to sound film, this history—and its implications for cross-cultural exchange—was lost. Julie K. Allen recovers that history, with its flamboyant participants, transnational currents, innovative genres, and geopolitical complications, and brings it vividly to life. She reveals the complexity and competitiveness of the early cinema market, in a region with high consumer demand and low domestic production, and frames the dramatic shift to almost exclusively American cinema programming during World War I, contextualizing the rise of the art film in the 1920s in competition with mainstream Hollywood productions.

Widma dawnych wartości. Kryzysy ekonomiczne w filmach o nawiedzonych domach

British and American cinema used a haunted house motif to tell a story about a family in a time of economic crisis. Most of the movies mentioned in the article are found on a similar pattern: not wealthy family is buying or renting a big house; they believe that this is their future dream place, so they spend their last money on house repairs. Though they are broke, they continue to live on their „American dream”. Neoliberal myths instruct them that in American or British society there’s no place for economic losers. By this time house is reviling the symptoms of being haunted by the demons and along with the paranormal phenomena wife, husband and their children are starting to show their demons (they are extremely violent and stressed). Economic problems are linked with interpersonal family drama and the decay of social relations. Haunted house horrors are showing that the only remedy for their problems they can find in the past. Film characters from movies such as Burnt Offerings and The Amityville Horror believe that conservatism and old values are going to help their situation. In the end, it turns out that, this symbolic return to the past is just another form of ideological oppression.

Existential Definition at the End of the American Road

This article discusses three films that helped landmark American cinema in the 1970s. Although differing in inception and reception, all three belong loosely to the genre of the road movie and are linked by protagonists whose stances of rebellion and alienation were characteristic of the counterculture of the 1970s and by the broader theme of existential self-definition that still influences moviemaking today. A critical and commercial failure on its release in 1970, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point has been revalorized as an ambitious attempt to represent the political and cultural conflicts that seemed to be fracturing American society at the time. In contrast, Richard Sarafian’s Vanishing Point soon overcame the disadvantage of studio disinterest and established itself as a cult favorite. Arguably the definitive anti-hero of 1970s cinema, the amphetamine-fueled renegade driver played by Barry Newman achieves iconic stature through an act of defiant self-destruction that still leaves viewers of the film stunned. Finally, Clint Eastwood’s The Gauntlet, in which the actor-director breaks with his ‘Dirty Harry’ persona to depict a burned-out cop who redeems a ruined career, and enables himself a new start, not by making his own law but by enforcing the law on the books, and against all odds. In all three films, the still unspoiled landscape of the American Southwest, crisscrossed by its skein of highways, provides the tableau for escapist fantasies that may in fact be real, for high-speed chases and automotive acrobatics that defy the laws of physics, and for vignettes of an ‘outsider’ way of life that was already beginning to perish.

Queer Capital: Transgender Representation in Contemporary American Cinema

<p>From The Crying Game’s shocking gender reveal in 1993, to the resounding success of Pose in 2018, trans characters and narratives have become increasingly visible across media platforms. Most significantly, trans characters have become a key part of American Indiewood cinema. Films like Dallas Buyers Club, The Danish Girl, Stonewall, and 3 Generations demonstrate the growing visibility of these roles within the American independent tradition. Moreover, these films’ critical and financial successes, in particular those of Dallas Buyers Club, signal the potential value these characters offer studios as a marker of cultural progressiveness. However, while trans characters in Indiewood films inspire more mainstream conversations about queer identity and community, interrogating these representations reveals how these depictions may reinforce harmful myths about trans identities and experiences. Analysing these representational practices through textual, generic, and industrial analyses, I will demonstrate how trans performances benefit the wider film industry, and question the impact of cis-gender casting on these films’ representational strategies. The purpose of this project is thus to examine performances of transgender identity in contemporary indie and Indiewood films, spotlighting industrial influences on transgender representations. By using Dallas Buyers Club as a case study to explore how queer Indiewood films appeal to mainstream audiences; and using Tangerine to illustrate alternative representational strategies, this thesis demonstrates how contemporary Indiewood cinema excludes most trans writers, directors, and actors, how this process benefits cis-gender industry elites, and how paratexts mitigate the potential threat that trans identities pose to gender categories. More specifically, I pose the questions: how are filmic performances of transgender identity informed by industrial power relations; and, what are the cultural implications of the dynamic between the two.</p>

Queer Capital: Transgender Representation in Contemporary American Cinema

<p>From The Crying Game’s shocking gender reveal in 1993, to the resounding success of Pose in 2018, trans characters and narratives have become increasingly visible across media platforms. Most significantly, trans characters have become a key part of American Indiewood cinema. Films like Dallas Buyers Club, The Danish Girl, Stonewall, and 3 Generations demonstrate the growing visibility of these roles within the American independent tradition. Moreover, these films’ critical and financial successes, in particular those of Dallas Buyers Club, signal the potential value these characters offer studios as a marker of cultural progressiveness. However, while trans characters in Indiewood films inspire more mainstream conversations about queer identity and community, interrogating these representations reveals how these depictions may reinforce harmful myths about trans identities and experiences. Analysing these representational practices through textual, generic, and industrial analyses, I will demonstrate how trans performances benefit the wider film industry, and question the impact of cis-gender casting on these films’ representational strategies. The purpose of this project is thus to examine performances of transgender identity in contemporary indie and Indiewood films, spotlighting industrial influences on transgender representations. By using Dallas Buyers Club as a case study to explore how queer Indiewood films appeal to mainstream audiences; and using Tangerine to illustrate alternative representational strategies, this thesis demonstrates how contemporary Indiewood cinema excludes most trans writers, directors, and actors, how this process benefits cis-gender industry elites, and how paratexts mitigate the potential threat that trans identities pose to gender categories. More specifically, I pose the questions: how are filmic performances of transgender identity informed by industrial power relations; and, what are the cultural implications of the dynamic between the two.</p>

From Impulse to Action—Noah (2014) and Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014) as Secular Bible Epics

Several large-scale Bible epics have been produced in the decade after the revival of epic cinema at the turn of the millennium. Yet, while many biblical films of this period were primarily aimed at religious audiences, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (2014) and Ridley Scott’s Exodus:Gods and Kings (2014) stand out due to their broader epic appeal and religious skepticism. Using Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of the impulse-image and the action-image as framework, this article analyses some of the nuances and complexities of both films. It argues that although both films offer scale and spectacle consistent with older biblical epics, the portrayal of their lead characters as a man determined on destruction (Noah) and religious skeptic and warrior (Exodus) differentiates them from traditional biblical cinema. Additionally, comparing both films helps articulate nuances within Deleuze’s movement-image that are often overlooked. Having proclaimed that modern cinema brings with it a crisis of truth that challenges the certainties of classic American cinema and its clear ideas on morality and belief, Deleuze ultimately calls for a leap of faith to reinstate the possibility of action. The article concludes that Noah and Exodus offer us a bit of both—spiritual uncertainty and a return of classic epic cinema.

Tracing Lesbian Cinema in Latin America

This chapter discusses the representation of lesbian bodies, desires, and identities in Latin American cinema. It contextualizes the production of LGBTQ cinema in Latin America, and its accompanying body of criticism. In doing so, the chapter identifies a critical lacuna that it then proceeds to address by first providing a historical tracing of several important films dealing with lesbian and gynosexual desires—including movies by such directors as Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Abel Salazar, Diego Lerman, Lucía Puenzo, María Luisa Bemberg, Julia Solomonoff, and Raúl Fuentes. The chapter then proceeds to explore why these films are understudied within the field. The chapter broadens the scope of the current studies on queer Latin American cinema by adapting their theoretical and taxonomical structures to lesbian-themed films, to thus provide a point of reference for future filmic production and critique.

‘The Blackest Disney Movie of All Time!’: A Goofy Movie and the Production of ‘Film Blackness’

Disney films have a distinct way of always feeling in-time, a sensation the company understands and monetizes. A Goofy Movie (AGM) was released in 1995, and since its theatrical release, the film has continued to capture the hearts and minds of a cult audience of passionate fans. Among this array of fans is a core of Black millenials who hold the film in high regard due to its R&B soundtrack and relatable narrative. However, the moments of Black representation within the film are less interesting than how a Black reading becomes possible. What are the component parts of the film’s making when arranged in such a way that invokes an essential Black lifeworld? AGM affixes Blackness to its form not through any profound representation of race. Rather, considering its animators as technical performers, the dark history behind the American cartoon, and how Black music is used to not just make Blackness known but believable instantiate what Michael Gillespie terms, ‘film Blackness’ in Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (2016).