Avant-garde encounters with the Anthropocene

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) departs from the series’s origins as a detective thriller/primetime soap pastiche to reveal the sf creature feature lurking in its DNA. In The Return’s most celebrated hour, Lynch ventures deeper into experimental filmmaking by soaring into a recreation of the first atomic test at Alamogordo, now commonly cited as the Anthropocene’s origin date. Following the blast, Lynch introduces a creature feature backstory for the entire series via three indelible creatures: the blackened human-hybrid Woodsmen; the winged frogs that enter the mouths of their sleeping prey; and BOB, the series’s original villain. My essay examines how Twin Peaks has transitioned from being, in part, a show about a forest that needs protecting to an art film about a universe reeling in the aftermath of human-made ecological imbalance - a permanent rift that even the most determined authority figures (local law enforcement, the military, the FBI and other government agencies) can’t hope to remedy or comprehend. I also analyse how Lynch’s disruptive avant-garde filmmaking in The Return resists didacticism in favour of providing visceral and ambiguous ways to engage environmental crises.

Contemplating Law, Film and Mennonites

In this article, I put Carlos Reygadas’ prize-winning art film, Stellet Licht, to use for Law and Film purposes. Stellet Licht (or Silent Light) is the first film made in the medieval German/Prussian dialect, Plautdietsch (or Low German), and filmed in an Old Order (very conservative) Mennonite colony in Mexico. Viewers of Stellet Licht must be prepared to be contemplative because the film often eschews dialogue or action in favour of contemplation. This fictitious film invites us to contemplate a heterosexual love triangle and provides a novel site for thinking about how law and patriarchy can unconsciously work in our lives. When we do the contemplative work invited by the film, we not only see law differently, but we can also imagine miraculous reconciliation between people.

Art films foster theory of mind

Research shows that reading literary but not popular fiction enhances the Theory of Mind (ToM). This article builds on the symmetry between literary theory and film theory and investigates whether exposure to art films, but not Hollywood films, enhances ToM. Participants (N = 232) were randomly assigned to view either art or Hollywood films and then answered questions about the film and its characters before completing two separate measures of ToM (the Read the Mind in the Eyes Test and the Moral Judgement Task). Results showed that art film viewers scored higher on both ToM measures and that the effect was sequentially mediated by perception of complexity and predictability of the characters. The findings are discussed in the context of the emerging literature on the impact of fiction on social cognition.

Art, film and political action. Brief historiographic review of the ideas of Bolshevik filmmakers: Dziga Vertov and D’Alexandre Medvedkine.

This article is an approach to the experiences of two Bolshevik filmmakers: Dziga Vertov and D’Alexandre Medvedkine. It is a first, historiographic study that is woven, in the first place, with the primary sources of the films and the published testimonies of both filmmakers, to read them from some of the most important references that I located. They are germinal experiences that were forged at the time of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, sometimes it is necessary to bring them back to account and review them again, to understand some keys about trends and expressions that are observed in contemporary audiovisual proposals.

Brogdon, Blackness and the BSI: Archiving race in Sherlock Holmes fandom

Philip R. Brogdon is an avid Sherlock Holmes aficionado and the first Black American ever inducted into the exclusive – and predominantly White – Sherlock Holmes society, the Baker Street Irregulars. His small monograph, Sherlock in Black (1995), brings a wealth of archival information and insight into the Black history of Sherlock Holmes fandom, ranging from famous fans of colour to Black fan creators and a history of both professional and amateur fan art, film and music. This article argues that Brogdon’s Sherlock in Black archive provides an important counter-history to White establishment fan narratives popularized by the Baker Street Irregulars and raises important questions about the roles race and identity play in collecting, fandom and identity. How does Brogdon define Black Sherlockian fandom? What did it mean to him, and to other fans, to see this long history of Black Sherlockians in American film and media? What kinds of activities and creations are included? Brogdon’s Black Sherlock Holmes archive illuminates how fans of colour construct their own fan identities and how they see themselves in relation to large, often primarily White, cultural constructs.

‘Art-horror’ and ‘hardcore art-horror’ at the margins: Experimentation and extremity in contemporary independent horror

The changing forms of contemporary horror have been the subject of much discussion, both in popular journalism and scholarship. Amid an on-going discussion on the arrival and characteristics of what has been contentiously termed ‘post-horror’, this article seeks to situate recent independent American horror within the context of the recent art film, in keeping with the work of Geoff King, as well as the traditions of ‘art-horror’ as it has been referred to by Joan Hawkins. Using a series of examples taken from recent independent horror – including A Ghost Story (David Lowery 2017) and The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers 2019), as well as the micro-budget independent films of Phil Stevens – Falvey makes use of King’s work to explore the textual characteristics of recent ‘art-horror’. Falvey argues that films iterative of this mode employ experimentation and extremity (in various forms) to discursively position the films away from more generically recognizable studio horror films in a bid for critical distinction.

Fellini the founder? The Fellini brand in film production

Linking the word ‘entrepreneur’ to Fellini’s name may seem a contradiction. Yet, according to the literature, Fellini was founder, member or manager of no less than three film production companies. Research based on archival material, however, reveals that Fellini never played the role of producer, nor founded a film production company. Thus, the albeit frail aura of Fellini as entrepreneur falls apart. His name seems to have been used by producers as a brand to foster commercial operations. This process starts with La Dolce Vita (1960), which granted Fellini the status of ‘archetypical art film director’ and freed him from producer-imposed obligations. Delving into a mass of various, new archival sources and cross-referencing data, this article analyses how the Fellini brand – as auteur versus the film producer’s traditional capitalist logic – was constructed and later exploited by Fellini and his producers.