Blood-red shoes?

This chapter examines the motif of red shoes in The Red Shoes (Powell and Pressburger, 1948) and The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), in light of the intervening World War. Whereas Dorothy’s ruby slippers are linked to positive transformation, Vicky’s bloody shoes in the later film stand for the rejection of domesticity in the context of post-war gender politics. They take her far from home, to be torn apart by the forces at war in her psyche.

Back to the Land

This chapter focuses on ways that southern depression-era authors contributed or responded to a renewed interest in the “old” South during the period. While the Southern Agrarians, William Alexander Percy, and filmmakers like Victor Fleming and William Wyler created nostalgic depictions of antebellum southern life, Richard Wright and Erskine Caldwell responded with “antipastoral” depictions of sharecropping that expose the exploitive social, economic, and environmental effects of plantation agriculture. The chapter also identifies ways that Zora Neale Hurston creates alternative forms of social and environmental thought through her depictions of African American folklore in Mules and Men (1935).

Cinema’s Short-Term Tenancy

In this mostly theoretical discussion I discuss some examples of American feature filmmaking, including Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), in order to establish the implicit problematic that race and the raced body are fundamentally bound up in the “spectacle of property,” even when no non-white bodies appear onscreen. Finally, as a means of testing some of these ideas through close formal and historical analysis, the second part of the chapter focuses in detail on a single film, D.W. Griffith’s The Lonely Villa (1909) and its representation of the house and its violation in the context of cinema’s emergence as a narrative representational medium and as an industry preoccupied by property rights

Hagiografia fílmica

O objeto deste artigo são os filmes das vidas dos santos cristãos, como: Joana d’Arc (Victor Fleming, 1948); Santa Rita de Cássia (Giorgio Capitani, 2004); Bernadette (Jean Delannoy, 1988); A canção de Bernadette (Henry King, 1943); Antonio, guerreiro de Deus (Antonello Bellucco, 2006); Irmão Sol, Irmã Lua (Zeffirelli, 1972). Inspirados pela obra de Pamela Grace que colocou estes filmes em relação direta com a cinebiografia, faremos com essa autora um diálogo crítico, e verificaremos os elementos estéticos e narrativos característicos dessas produções no cinema e no audiovisual. Neste artigo busca-se demonstrar que uma hagiografia fílmica não é uma biografia ou cinebiografia. Estabelecendo o filme hagiográfico como um dos gêneros que compõe o campo do filme religioso.