“I Saw a Different Life. I Can't Stop Seeing It”: Perfectionist Visions in Revolutionary Road

In this article, I claim that Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road (2008) is a recent version of the film genre that Stanley Cavell calls the “melodrama of the unknown woman”. Accordingly, my discussion focuses on two key elements of that identification: the film's overriding dramatic and thematic emphasis on conversation, and the central characters’ relation to the wider social and political concerns of America.

Elsewhere

FQ columnist Bilal Qureshi reflects upon the significance of Bong Joon-ho's Parasite's Oscar victory over the presumed favorite, Sam Mendes' World War I drama 1917 for both the film industry and the culture at large. In keeping with the premise of his column “Elsewhere,” which explores the ways in which cinematic works are activated and reframed by the national, cultural, and aesthetic geography of where they are experienced, Qureshi offers a fresh perspective on these two films based upon his experience of watching 1917 in Dubai, with Arabic subtitles and an ethnically diverse audience. Viewed in this Middle Eastern context, a film dismissed as passé and traditional by U.S. critics revealed itself as urgent and resonant, transcending differences of language and geography to offer a potent reminder of why the pain and loss of war still matters.

Immersion Through Culture: Representations of the “Day of the Dead” in Film

The Mexican celebration of the “Day of the Dead” (Día de Muertos or Día de los Muertos) has been recurrently used in film, with three of the most notable examples ranging from the recent Coco (Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina, 2017) and Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015), all the way back to the surviving footage of ¡Que Viva Mexico! (Sergei Eisenstein, 1931, unfinished). Though vastly different from one another in almost every respect, all three cases explore the topic of “in-between” both thematically and technically: the celebration that merges life and death becomes a visual metaphor and a tool for filmmakers to explore the ways in which film technique creates overlapping areas between cinema and reality. In each film, a visually powerful cultural asset such as the “Day of the Dead,” is combined with different aspects of film technique, explicitly, but differently, appealing to a kind of sensory immersion in order to attract viewers inside its world. By doing so, the “Day of the Dead” exemplifies the ways in which a common cultural element can help translate the personal visions of different filmmakers into distinct filmic events.

Lazos victorianos para la resurrección del Servicio Secreto de su Majestad

El fenómeno James Bond ha sido abordado para discutir nociones de identidad británica, ética imperialista, revisiones de la masculinidad y comodificación de la clase media. Con todo, el canon crítico que ha tratado el fenómeno no ha explorado los orígenes ideológicos del mito, a saber, la teoría del Héroe de Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), patrón principal de la ideología victoriana de la norma. El presente artículo explora la película Skyfall (2012) de Sam Mendes como análisis profundo del mito Bond como constructo carlyleano (vale decir también, Victoriano), a través de la idea de “resurrección” (uno de los motivos más significativos del film). El artículo concluye que la película abraza y celebra la ideología Victoriana (con sus ideas de estabilidad y dependencia) integradas en el fenómeno James Bond como mito.

Jonson and Performance

For Una Ellis-Fermor, there is a ‘deeply inherent non-dramatic principle’ in the drama of Ben Jonson, a fundamental dislike of theatricality, and a pursuit instead of ‘psychological truth’. Conversely, theatre directors such as Sam Mendes see Jonson’s plays as beautifully engineered blueprints for performance, and locate the psychological truth of Jonson precisely in performance on the stage. This chapter considers current approaches to the whole question of Jonson in performance. It examines the idea of an antitheatrical Jonson, rooted in Jonson’s own critical writings and developed by Ellis-Fermor, Herford and Simpson, and Jonas A. Barish, among others. It contrasts that with the more theatre-friendly version of Jonson which informs much recent performance criticism. The chapter builds up to a reading of the metatheatrical and performance aspects of the most often staged Jonson play of all: Volpone.

Is a rose is a rose is a rose? Appropriating polysemy in film: The case of rose imagery in American Beauty

The issue of cultural appropriation is at the crux of adaptation studies with emphasis on what constitute cultural junctures in cinematic renditions of textual sources, rather than how formal processes facilitate contextual and intertextual overlap. This paper explores processes for the appropriation of textual polysemy in visual terms in film. Drawing on classical semiotics and film semiotics, I propose a theoretical model for reconstructing the effect of contextual complexity and overlap manifest in textual polysemy in terms of visual signification in film. The proposed model is applied in an analysis the recurrent rose imagery in American Beauty (Sam Mendes 1999).