Badlands and the Music of Temporal Immanence

As an eccentric outlaw crime film, Terrence Malick’s Badlands employs expressive sensory immersion, eccentric humor, and a concern for the relationship between history and human experience. The past, in Badlands, is a complex ontological ground for the characters’ (and audiences’) senses of being in the world, a temporalized film world akin to a field of pure immanence within the uncanny strangeness of material reality. A film set in the fifties, but far more concerned with transhistorical philosophical questions, Badlands uses the musical soundtrack to explore these existential concerns. Within this musically heterogeneous film, the two most important sources of compiled non-diegetic classical music (the pedagogical music of Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman and the early compositions of Erik Satie) function as active philosophical agents, cultivating embodied states of play and melancholy that strive, albeit ambiguously and inconclusively, to create meaning from the raw immediacy of experience.

Samuel Khachikian and the Crime Thriller in Iran

Samuel Khachikian was the most successful director of crime films in Iran during the genre’s heyday in the late 1950s and early 60s. Debates among critics about his films highlight how the crime film was able to thrive as a prestige form in the years before boundaries had solidified between commercial films and intellectual films made in Iran. Film noir, from its earliest transatlantic imaginings to its recent global circuits, has consistently engaged with an imagined elsewhere through its modernist style. In many parts of the world, it allowed a kind of performance of exuberant cinephilia while also attracting attention about its originality. In Tehran, as elsewhere, the genre accompanies the global circulation of modern design with strong, but mixed, feelings.

Unpiecing the Jigsaw: Compulsive Heterosexuality, Sex Crime, Class and Masculinity in Early 1960s British Cinema

This article explores the discursive intersections of masculinity, class and heterosexual desire in the still undervalued British police procedural film, Jigsaw. It considers the film both as an example of a new style of cinematic crime narrative and as a significant conjectural text in which ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and marriage, especially in their post-war and mid-century forms, are re-articulated, here as compulsive heterosexuality: a masculine drive that can ultimately lead to sexual murder. The film's low-key naturalistic style owes much to the newly realist television drama of the period, while its identification of middle-class masculinity as the locus of transgression carries cultural resonances well beyond the ostensible project of the film's narrative. Released in 1962, Jigsaw was in effect squeezed between, on the one hand, the British New Wave and, on the other, the pop musicals and London-focused films that dominated cinema in the UK in the mid-1960s. However, the casting of dependable Jack Warner as the investigating detective and its Brighton setting mark it out as an important text situated on the cusp between older versions of the crime film and the new permissiveness. Jigsaw's interrogation of the problematic sexual behaviour of two ostensibly middle-class, middle-aged men is therefore particularly interesting, especially when placed within the context of the cultural anxieties about marriage, the increasingly fluid class system of the early 1960s and an emergent youth culture.

A Study on Viewers' Viewing from the Angle of Desire—An Interpretation of Xiaofeng Li 's "Calm sea"

As a visual feast, the sound and light images created by film viewing have different interpretation meanings for different levels of viewers.As the latest work directed by Li Xiaofeng, "calm sea" not only continues the framework of the previous crime film with the nature of the author's film, but also contains the spiritual core that the obsessive can only leave the scene, which is of far-reaching significance.In this film, the protagonist and the outsider are in the unity of opposites, leading their own viewing behavior and self-examination under the peep of desire, and stripping the cocoon of visual images to reveal the source of pleasure obtained by the viewers from the perspective of desire.

I Died a Million Times

The Age of Affluence. Ike and Mamie. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. In the United States, the 1950s have been memorialized as the Pax Americana. A similar stereotypical view has characterized the 1950s crime film. While the big-shot gangster dominated the headlines in the 1930s and the private eye graced the 1940s, both the gangster picture and film noir were declared DOA in the 1950s. There is, of course, another, less than perfect picture of the ’50s in which the tropes associated with the decade are rather darker. Commies. Aliens from outer space. The bomb. I Died a Million Times argues that the crime film is alive and well in the 1950s in the generic guise of gangster noir. The corpus delicti is a trio of subgenres that crystallized in the period and that correlates with the above symptomatic events: the syndicate picture, the rogue cop film, and the heist movie. These subgenres and the issues associated with them--the “combo” as capitalism incarnate, the letter of the law versus the lure of vigilantism, and the heist as a “left-handed form of human endeavor”--may appear black and white in the rearview mirror of history, but from another perspective, one that’s attentive to issues such as race (The Phenix City Story), class (The Prowler), gender (The Big Heat), sexuality (The Big Combo), the nation (The Asphalt Jungle), and the border (Touch of Evil), these signal, not-so-generic films are as vibrant and colorful as the decade itself.

Exploiting Ambiguity: Murder! and the Meanings of Cross-Dressing in Interwar British Cinema

The crime film Murder! (1930), directed by Alfred Hitchcock for British International Pictures and based on the novel Enter Sir John (1929) by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson, has long been cited in debates about the treatment of queer sexuality in Hitchcock's films. Central to these debates is the character of Handel Fane and the depiction of his cross-dressed appearances as a theatre and circus performer, which many critics have understood as a coded reference to homosexuality. This article explores such critical interpretations by situating Murder! more firmly in its historical context. In particular, it examines Fane's cross-dressed performances in relation to other cultural representations of men's cross-dressing in interwar Britain. These include examples from other British and American films, stories in the popular press and the publicity surrounding the aerial performer and female impersonator Barbette (Vander Clyde). The article argues that Murder! reflects and exploits a broader fascination with gender ambiguity in British popular culture, and that it anticipates the more insistent vilification of queer men in the decades after the Second World War.