Film Criticism and Cinema

Mar 25, 2018

Since our last roundup on new issues, two more publications have each put out another. The new March 2018 issue of Film Criticism opens with Julia Vassilieva’s essay on Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan (2014; image above). “While earlier discussions of the film have focused on its thematic concerns, often ignoring its style and privileging narrative over image, this article foregrounds the aesthetics of the film drawing on Jaques Rancière’s recent discussion of the regimes of arts.”

Writing about Todd Haynes’s Carol (2015) and employing “Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (an ‘other space’),” Victoria L. Smith “examines how Haynes, through his meticulous attention to framings, textures, color, and spatial relations, creates a queer counter space, time, and look—a rejection of early 1950s social and sexual propriety.”

“Neoliberalism restructured both national and local economies, including rural areas in the Midwest that were simultaneously hard-hit by the 1980s Farm Crisis,” writes Stacy Denton. “The struggle for the people who inhabit these small communities, along with the opportunity to reimagine an alternative, sets the stage for Lasse Hallström's What's Eating Gilbert Grape? [1993].”

Marc Raymond aims to show “how the dominant name auteurs of Korea, particularly Park Chan-wook and Lee Chang-dong, were established through international festivals, beginning in the 1990s but exploding in the 2000s, at the same time as Korean films began to compete with and surpass Hollywood films at the local box office. . . . The rise of the domestic box office helped create an independent cinema within the country, not unlike the emergence of indie cinema in the United States during the blockbuster era, which had the consequence of both increasing opportunities for young directors while often pigeon-holing them into narrow niches.”

Along with reports on recent film festivals and conferences, there are also new book reviews:

Juan Poblete on Paul Schroeder Rodríguez’s Latin American Cinema: A Comparative History
Kevin Hagopian on Eric Rentschler’s The Use and Abuse of Cinema: German Legacies from the Weimar Era to the Present
Michael Petitti on Pamela Robertson Wojcik’s Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction
Matt Yockey on Dan Hassler-Forest, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics: Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism
Michael Anthony Turcios on Suzanne Gauch’s Maghrebs in Motion: North African Cinema in Nine Movements
Ekin Pinar on Elizabeth Ellcessor’s Restricted Access: Media, Disability, and the Politics of Participation
Kyoung-Lae Kang on Hye Seung Chung and David Diffrient’s Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema

Editors Patrícia Silveirinha Castello Branco, Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad, and Sérgio Dias Branco introduce an issue of Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image “dedicated to the topic of Islam and images. In proposing this topic we were particularly interested in discussing the philosophical understandings of Islamic imagery production, their roots in the history of philosophy, the Islamic tradition of aniconism and anti-ocularcentrism, its influences on styles and movements in the history of art (namely abstract imagery), their development in contemporary societies dominated by new technologies of the moving image, the relationships between the classical and the contemporary, the manual and the digital, artefacts and technologies.”

Articles include M. Javad Khajavi’s “Genealogy of Islamic Synchronization of Sight and Sound,” Mani Saravanan on Jafar Panahi, and Taida Kusturica on “the post-cinema production of political and cultural antagonism towards Islamic culture.”

The book reviews: