Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2022.2114257
S. Sielke
ABSTRACT Returning to Brokeback Mountain and its mountainous aesthetics, my contribution develops a three-part argument that reengages the cinematic landscape projected in Ang Lee’s ‘love story’ – a landscape that echoes, as I show, a national visual culture mapped and remapped by paradigmatic moments in art, photography, and film. In part one, ‘Brokeback Mountain and “the force-field of melodrama”’, I show how mountains figure and function in the central genre of film history where they foreground, yet also curtail, the political dimension of personal fears and longings. Calling on the tradition of the Western as much as on the work of Edward Hopper, Ansel Adams, Andrew Wyeth, William Eggleston, Richard Avedon, and beyond, Brokeback Mountain – so I delineate in my second part ‘(Im-)mobility, mediation, melancholy’ – superimposes its own version of the West on representations we are more familiar with, producing a visual space and soundscape that is bound to shift our perspective. In its third and final part, ‘Landscaping a desire that has no name – or art’, my contribution shows why, since then, mountains have never been the same in the US-American cultural imaginary, and why we look at Westerns, at Adams, and Avedon even more mournfully now, superimposing on them Brokeback Mountain’s gender melancholy.
{"title":"Revisiting Brokeback Mountain – how mountains matter, or: melodrama, melancholy, (im-)mobility","authors":"S. Sielke","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2114257","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2114257","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Returning to Brokeback Mountain and its mountainous aesthetics, my contribution develops a three-part argument that reengages the cinematic landscape projected in Ang Lee’s ‘love story’ – a landscape that echoes, as I show, a national visual culture mapped and remapped by paradigmatic moments in art, photography, and film. In part one, ‘Brokeback Mountain and “the force-field of melodrama”’, I show how mountains figure and function in the central genre of film history where they foreground, yet also curtail, the political dimension of personal fears and longings. Calling on the tradition of the Western as much as on the work of Edward Hopper, Ansel Adams, Andrew Wyeth, William Eggleston, Richard Avedon, and beyond, Brokeback Mountain – so I delineate in my second part ‘(Im-)mobility, mediation, melancholy’ – superimposes its own version of the West on representations we are more familiar with, producing a visual space and soundscape that is bound to shift our perspective. In its third and final part, ‘Landscaping a desire that has no name – or art’, my contribution shows why, since then, mountains have never been the same in the US-American cultural imaginary, and why we look at Westerns, at Adams, and Avedon even more mournfully now, superimposing on them Brokeback Mountain’s gender melancholy.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"53 - 74"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49404860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2023.2163864
Cornelia Klecker, Christian Quendler
ABSTRACT Studies in mountain cinema often focus on the innovations and legacies of the classical German film of the 1920s and ’30s. This introduction to a special issue on cinematic mountains proposes to rethink the relationship between mountains and cinema along a different path. Drawing on the criticism of Jean Epstein, Béla Balázs, André Bazin, and Luc Moullet, we discuss three film-theoretical figurations of mountains. The first one concerns the politics of cinema; it invokes mountains as sites of creative visions at a remove from accustomed habits, standards, and conventions. The second addresses the environmental relation of cinema as a spatial and geographic artform. The third cinematic figuration of mountains regards filmic techniques and their virtue to reveal new facets of mountains and meaningful environmental connections.
{"title":"Cinematic figurations of mountains","authors":"Cornelia Klecker, Christian Quendler","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2023.2163864","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2023.2163864","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Studies in mountain cinema often focus on the innovations and legacies of the classical German film of the 1920s and ’30s. This introduction to a special issue on cinematic mountains proposes to rethink the relationship between mountains and cinema along a different path. Drawing on the criticism of Jean Epstein, Béla Balázs, André Bazin, and Luc Moullet, we discuss three film-theoretical figurations of mountains. The first one concerns the politics of cinema; it invokes mountains as sites of creative visions at a remove from accustomed habits, standards, and conventions. The second addresses the environmental relation of cinema as a spatial and geographic artform. The third cinematic figuration of mountains regards filmic techniques and their virtue to reveal new facets of mountains and meaningful environmental connections.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"1 - 18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43412286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-18DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2022.2132074
Zoë Anne Laks
ABSTRACT Nostalgia is everywhere in media today—be it films, television, or advertisements. But what does it mean to say that media is nostalgic? Beyond presenting nostalgic narratives, media texts can also express nostalgia stylistically. So how does this nostalgia look and feel? This article presents an original theory of the aesthetics of nostalgia, arguing that ‘pastness’ becomes fantastical when nostalgic media use an artificial style: often a hazy and hyper-coloured image. Through a case study of Guy Maddin’s Careful (1992), this article demonstrates how nostalgia may function audiovisually in the context of cinematic melodrama theory. These nostalgic aesthetics serve as both an articulation of mediated memory and a reflection of lived nostalgia, which is a longing for the inaccessible, the impossible, the lost—in other words, fantasy itself. Using phenomenologies of nostalgia by Edward Casey, James Hart, and Steven Galt Crowell, this article defines nostalgia philosophically, as the contradictory position between emotional yearning and a self-reflexive distance from the past. Such a radically critical nostalgia locates nostalgics not in a regressive and idealized relic of the past, but in the present moment, in which we may long for the loss of a past so inaccessible that it never was.
{"title":"On longing for loss: a theory of cinematic memory and an aesthetics of nostalgia","authors":"Zoë Anne Laks","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2132074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2132074","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Nostalgia is everywhere in media today—be it films, television, or advertisements. But what does it mean to say that media is nostalgic? Beyond presenting nostalgic narratives, media texts can also express nostalgia stylistically. So how does this nostalgia look and feel? This article presents an original theory of the aesthetics of nostalgia, arguing that ‘pastness’ becomes fantastical when nostalgic media use an artificial style: often a hazy and hyper-coloured image. Through a case study of Guy Maddin’s Careful (1992), this article demonstrates how nostalgia may function audiovisually in the context of cinematic melodrama theory. These nostalgic aesthetics serve as both an articulation of mediated memory and a reflection of lived nostalgia, which is a longing for the inaccessible, the impossible, the lost—in other words, fantasy itself. Using phenomenologies of nostalgia by Edward Casey, James Hart, and Steven Galt Crowell, this article defines nostalgia philosophically, as the contradictory position between emotional yearning and a self-reflexive distance from the past. Such a radically critical nostalgia locates nostalgics not in a regressive and idealized relic of the past, but in the present moment, in which we may long for the loss of a past so inaccessible that it never was.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"402 - 426"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46457116","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-20DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2022.2132072
Mario Slugan
ABSTRACT Fiction film remains the privileged focus of text-oriented film studies despite the growing interest in other film forms. Fiction as a concept also organizes the field’s key taxonomy – fiction v. nonfiction – yet little work has been devoted to the notion of fiction itself. The work that does exist is either textualist or spectator centred. The article argues that this leads to significant issues. First, categorization of numerous films diverges significantly from the ordinary understanding of the fiction/nonfiction divide. Second, such categorization may lead to both misunderstanding of audience experience and ethical problems alike. Third, theoretical commitments revolving around indexicality although partially applicable to documentary cannot shed light on fiction contrary to numerous attempts to do so. Fourth, one of discipline’s key assumptions – fiction films change real-life beliefs – demands a theory of the relationship between fiction and belief that is currently absent in film studies. Closer scrutiny of the notion of fiction, the article argues, is necessary to dispel these issues. Specifically, the article advocates for 1) non-textualist accounts of fiction and 2) a theory of the relationship of fiction to imagination and belief.
{"title":"Fiction as a challenge to text-oriented film studies","authors":"Mario Slugan","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2132072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2132072","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Fiction film remains the privileged focus of text-oriented film studies despite the growing interest in other film forms. Fiction as a concept also organizes the field’s key taxonomy – fiction v. nonfiction – yet little work has been devoted to the notion of fiction itself. The work that does exist is either textualist or spectator centred. The article argues that this leads to significant issues. First, categorization of numerous films diverges significantly from the ordinary understanding of the fiction/nonfiction divide. Second, such categorization may lead to both misunderstanding of audience experience and ethical problems alike. Third, theoretical commitments revolving around indexicality although partially applicable to documentary cannot shed light on fiction contrary to numerous attempts to do so. Fourth, one of discipline’s key assumptions – fiction films change real-life beliefs – demands a theory of the relationship between fiction and belief that is currently absent in film studies. Closer scrutiny of the notion of fiction, the article argues, is necessary to dispel these issues. Specifically, the article advocates for 1) non-textualist accounts of fiction and 2) a theory of the relationship of fiction to imagination and belief.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"427 - 450"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48724944","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2022.2138388
R. Watson
{"title":"Documentary’s expanded fields: new media and the twenty-first-century documentary","authors":"R. Watson","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2138388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2138388","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"595 - 598"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45132296","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2022.2135928
Arya Rani
{"title":"The new female antihero: the disruptive women of twenty-first-century US television","authors":"Arya Rani","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2135928","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2135928","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"592 - 595"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46250368","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2022.2138393
C. Rocha
ABSTRACT Financed by a British-Irish-Canadian co-production, Brooklyn (John Crowley 2015) deals with twentieth-century Irish diaspora, particularly the mass emigration of unmarried Irish women in the 1950s. While Irish immigration to the United States has been ongoing since the eighteenth century, until a few decades ago the perspective of Irish women was missing in Irish and Irish-American literature and film. In the 1880–1920 period, the Bridgets, Irish-born maids, were stereotypical characters in film. In recent decades, there has been a renewed interest in filling the gap regarding the experience of Irish female immigrants, often represented as deceased mothers. Drawing upon psychoanalytical film theory and the work of cultural studies scholars who have paid special attention to the representation of Irish immigrants, this essay analyzes Brooklyn’s gendered representation of younger Irish female immigrants to the United States and the tension between nationalism and transnationalism posed by migration. This gendered depiction provides a new perspective on Irish immigration to America.
{"title":"Brooklyn: gendered Irish migration to the United States","authors":"C. Rocha","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2138393","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2138393","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Financed by a British-Irish-Canadian co-production, Brooklyn (John Crowley 2015) deals with twentieth-century Irish diaspora, particularly the mass emigration of unmarried Irish women in the 1950s. While Irish immigration to the United States has been ongoing since the eighteenth century, until a few decades ago the perspective of Irish women was missing in Irish and Irish-American literature and film. In the 1880–1920 period, the Bridgets, Irish-born maids, were stereotypical characters in film. In recent decades, there has been a renewed interest in filling the gap regarding the experience of Irish female immigrants, often represented as deceased mothers. Drawing upon psychoanalytical film theory and the work of cultural studies scholars who have paid special attention to the representation of Irish immigrants, this essay analyzes Brooklyn’s gendered representation of younger Irish female immigrants to the United States and the tension between nationalism and transnationalism posed by migration. This gendered depiction provides a new perspective on Irish immigration to America.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"489 - 505"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47017434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2022.2133920
Olivia Stowell
ABSTRACT This article explores the intersections of racial identity performance, culinary style, and neoliberal logics within reality cooking television. By close reading the performance and evaluation of Top Chef: New York contestant Carla Hall, this article argues that reality cooking competitions depend on a grammar of stereotype in order to transform contestants into characters, and the contestants both acquiesce to and resist these preconceived notions, sometimes simultaneously. Neoliberal logics of personhood both constrain contestants within their ‘characters’/‘brands’ and also allow chefs to agentially and reflexively self-construct particular personas out of their own culinary ethos. Relatedly, food operates as a multivalent racialized signifier of identity, in which the contestants racialize the food and the food racializes the contestants. As Carla Hall’s performance in Top Chef: New York demonstrates, reality cooking competitions place demands on their contestants to ‘appropriately’ perform their identities, and contestants are evaluated by both the judges and the viewers on how they navigate these performances. This article contends that in its reliance on racial stereotype and conflations between labor, identity, and being, Top Chef propagates neoliberal and multicultural/postracial logics, demanding that its contestants of color perform their individualized, racialized identities in ways that the program deems ‘authentic’ and ‘appropriate’.
{"title":"“It’s Top Chef, not a personality contest”: grammars of stereotype, neoliberal logics of personhood, and the performance of the racialized self in Top Chef: New York","authors":"Olivia Stowell","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2133920","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2133920","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores the intersections of racial identity performance, culinary style, and neoliberal logics within reality cooking television. By close reading the performance and evaluation of Top Chef: New York contestant Carla Hall, this article argues that reality cooking competitions depend on a grammar of stereotype in order to transform contestants into characters, and the contestants both acquiesce to and resist these preconceived notions, sometimes simultaneously. Neoliberal logics of personhood both constrain contestants within their ‘characters’/‘brands’ and also allow chefs to agentially and reflexively self-construct particular personas out of their own culinary ethos. Relatedly, food operates as a multivalent racialized signifier of identity, in which the contestants racialize the food and the food racializes the contestants. As Carla Hall’s performance in Top Chef: New York demonstrates, reality cooking competitions place demands on their contestants to ‘appropriately’ perform their identities, and contestants are evaluated by both the judges and the viewers on how they navigate these performances. This article contends that in its reliance on racial stereotype and conflations between labor, identity, and being, Top Chef propagates neoliberal and multicultural/postracial logics, demanding that its contestants of color perform their individualized, racialized identities in ways that the program deems ‘authentic’ and ‘appropriate’.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"569 - 587"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42802400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2022.2138055
Stephanie Brown
{"title":"That’s not funny: how the right makes comedy work for them","authors":"Stephanie Brown","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2138055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2138055","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"588 - 591"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42020074","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-26DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2022.2122652
T. van Hemert, E. Ellison
ABSTRACT In Australia, the most visible film festivals are clustered around urban centres, yet there is a flourishing network of film festivals outside of major cities. In the state of Queensland, the festivals in regional and rural areas provide crucial visibility for the industry, local community and emerging filmmakers. Following the growth in film festival scholarship, and research on global digital distribution, the impetus for this research was to examine why so many film festivals continue to operate in Queensland. Using a broader mapping project as context, this article examines how the specificity of place shapes the identity of two case study festivals, their audience, and connection to community. The research identifies three key concerns: the distinctions between regional and metropolitan festivals; the duality of these festivals as both inward and outward facing events; and the challenges of viability that face the future of Queensland’s festival sector. In 2020, the COVID-19 global pandemic caused further disruption to the national and international screen industries. While this upheaval continues to affect the screen industry, it is important to understand the role that film festivals already play in cultivating and sustaining local audiences and communities, and consider strategies to support their ongoing viability.
{"title":"‘Punching above our weight’: industry visibility and community engagement in rural and regional film festivals","authors":"T. van Hemert, E. Ellison","doi":"10.1080/17400309.2022.2122652","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2122652","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In Australia, the most visible film festivals are clustered around urban centres, yet there is a flourishing network of film festivals outside of major cities. In the state of Queensland, the festivals in regional and rural areas provide crucial visibility for the industry, local community and emerging filmmakers. Following the growth in film festival scholarship, and research on global digital distribution, the impetus for this research was to examine why so many film festivals continue to operate in Queensland. Using a broader mapping project as context, this article examines how the specificity of place shapes the identity of two case study festivals, their audience, and connection to community. The research identifies three key concerns: the distinctions between regional and metropolitan festivals; the duality of these festivals as both inward and outward facing events; and the challenges of viability that face the future of Queensland’s festival sector. In 2020, the COVID-19 global pandemic caused further disruption to the national and international screen industries. While this upheaval continues to affect the screen industry, it is important to understand the role that film festivals already play in cultivating and sustaining local audiences and communities, and consider strategies to support their ongoing viability.","PeriodicalId":43549,"journal":{"name":"New Review of Film and Television Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"522 - 545"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43703258","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：