Invasion of the Child Snatchers: Pedophilic Seduction in New Queer Cinema

Beginning in the mid-1990s and continuing through the first decade of the twenty-first century, American independent cinema began to engage the taboo of intergenerational intimacy as its animating provocation and ready-made narrative solution. This chapter analyzes two films associated with the New Queer Cinema that appear to challenge the conservative paradigms of erotic endangerment embodied by these films. By offering portraits of precocious adolescents whose shattering encounters with sexuality defy the norms of pedophilic representation, both L.I.E. (Michael Cuesta, 2001), and Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, 2004) mine the potential of queer sexuality to transform dominant narratives of violation into ambiguous dramas of sexual awakening and kinship. Yet, in spite of New Queer Cinema’s promise to offer an alternative to the standard depiction of the monstrous pedophile, these texts fail to embody a genuinely counter-cinema practice, relying instead on a paradigm of “pedo-normativity” developed in the midst of the AIDS crisis and the War on Terror.

Hiding in Plain Sight

Hiding in Plain Sight is an illustrated history of the former and present cinemas in the city of Leeds and an interactive website that engages Leeds residents in a participatory reminiscence project about cinemas and cinema-going. Launched in the summer of 2020, it is the most recent output of an ongoing cinema history research project at the Hyde Park Picture House, a much-loved 106 year-old Grade 2 listed independent cinema. The Hiding in Plain Sight project was one of a series of activities hosted by the organisation in line with their objective to engage as many people as possible with the cinema’s valuable heritage. The author of this paper, Dr Laura Ager, was employed by the Hyde Park Picture House as their Creative Engagement Officer between 2019 and 2020 and in this role she developed project’s framework and its research strategy. In this article she outlines the project’s origins and stages of development and considers how the methods used in the research phase have interacted with the design and production of the Hiding in Plain Sight website to give unexpected insights. She also reflects on some essential stages of project re-negotiation during the extraordinary and turbulent summer of 2020.

On Women of Rido: A Film Analysis of “Women of The Weeping River” by Sheron Dayoc (2016) Through the Lens of Hamm-Ehsani, Wang, Feldman, and Hsu

Several films today include the narratives of Muslim communities. Due to the vast array of movies on the subject, Muslim communities’ representation has opened many representations and interpretations, whether positive or negative. The independent film “Women of the Weeping River” (WOTWR), by Sheron Dayoc, is one of the many indie films in the Philippines that includes the Muslim community. Using the lenses of Stuart Hall (1997) “Theory of Representation,” the researchers focused on how producers utilize elements of the film in crafting their representations towards cultural groups. This study focuses on this film to elaborate the potential of independent cinema in terms of minorities and highlight social issues. In the case of WOTWR, the study also emphasizes how the Muslim community throughout the film also portrays Islamic women and the film’s influence regarding the formation of viewers’ perspectives towards the selected cultural group. Through an analysis of WOTWR, this study also aims to discuss how indie films can break away and are capable of breaking away and alluding to mainstream cinema milestones. Several frameworks like Yihan Wang’s “Ethnic Boundary and Literature/Image Representation,” Mark B. Feldman and Hsuan L. Hsu’s “Introduction: Race, Environment, and Representation,” and Karin Hamm-Ehsani’s “Intersections: Issues of National, Ethnic, and Sexual Identity in Kutlug Ataman’s Berlin Film Lola und Bilidikid,” were utilized in close reading, providing the reader with several perspectives. The study proved that independent film such as WOTWR is a powerful tool when it comes to representation because of having the privilege of autonomy.

Independent dreams, American nightmares: Industrial transgression and critical organization in the work of George A. Romero

Film critic Robin Wood categorized George A. Romero as a transgressive genre filmmaker, a director who with films such as Dawn of the Dead offered a consistent, and consistently bloody, attack on the normative social constructs that dominate US culture. Within such advocacy, Wood helped define Romero as a specific cultural type – as a horror film auteur. This article considers Wood’s framing within a wider critical, commercial and industrial context, asking how this ideological analysis became, paradoxically, part of a more conservative organization of Romero. By drawing upon business theory and a media industries methodology, I shed new light on Romero’s efforts to cultivate a boundaryless independent cinema unbeholden to institutional norms, demonstrating challenges to leadership roles, market orientation, financing and genre. While Romero’s typecasting as a horror auteur was ultimately delimiting, I also consider the filmmaker’s complicity in this codification, scrutinizing his knowing attempts to parlay brand-name recognition into a lasting platform for non-Hollywood production. This article offers a unique insight into the industrial and business contexts of horror cinema, revealing a rare intersection between critical reception and industrial navigation while complicating our understanding of both Wood’s seminal writings and one of the genre’s totemic ‘masters’.