Film Matters - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2021

Experimental filmmakers are often celebrated for their radical engagement with both form and content. This article highlights how artists’ film and video have evolved in the past century when it comes to the representation of non-Western communities and their cultures. Employing close textual analysis, it compares Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), Len Lye’s Tusalava (1929) and Free Radicals (1958), and Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s Letters from Panduranga (2015), through a postcolonial lens. Foregrounding how Nguyễn is engaged in the nuances of postcolonial identity in a manner that is not replicated by Reiniger and Lye, it concludes that depictions of non-Western cultures in artists’ film and video have developed in the past century from spaces of exoticization to sites of inclusion and respect.

Using the premise of the 2018 Bollywood film, October, this article aims to contrast the poetry of Keats and Shelley with the film’s plot. It focuses upon the theme of the transience of human existence, inevitability of change, and ephemerality of life. In doing so, the article argues that the expression of urban ennui in October and Hindi cinema has tendencies of the Romanticist rendering, resembling the aesthetic of the given poets. The lack of human connectivity and self-centeredness in the contemporary times is similar to the ideas of the Enlightenment, which the Romantics contested.

This article examines the intersectionality of modernist literature and the advent of cinema, particularly in the context of the incomparable tragedies of the First World War in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. Avant-garde writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot utilized cinema-inspired techniques in some of their most famous literary works, including Ulysses and “The Waste Land.” These techniques are especially salient in light of how much both the First World War and cinema altered societal notions of time, space, and motion.

Chris Marker’s Vive la baleine (1972) is widely hailed as a quintessential essay film. This article examines how the film adheres to essayistic characteristics using film scholar Timothy Corrigan’s definition of the essay film mode. In particular, the article highlights the film’s following traits: the three-pronged and gendered approach to narration, the intentional aesthetic and stylistic inconsistency, the underlying critique of the whaling industry, the explicit adoration expressed toward the whale, and the film’s self-reflexivity.

The image of Chinese women portrayed in American films is essentially the West’s imagination of China, conveyed by the female body and constructed in the Orientalist discourse. Over the past one hundred years, Chinese women have been primarily depicted as docile, weak, submissive, voiceless, and in need of being rescued and guided by Occidentals. With the evolution of the global order and the rise of China’s international status, the silent Orient has taken the initiative to resist and reshape this voiceless, “other-ed” image. This article aims to focus on the female characters in Saving Face, an American film directed by Chinese American director Alice Wu in 2004, and analyzes how the director reverses the stereotyped Chinese female image based on the theoretical framework of Orientalism and postcolonial studies, not only “the other” with regards to men, but also “the other” as to the Occident, thus dismantling long-held misreadings of China.

A phone interview from September 16, 2019, with actor Michael Paré, discussing his role as the adult Trip Fontaine in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999).

Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) may feature entertaining performances and his trademark wit, but it differs so much from its real-life story that it becomes more liberal fantasy than historical narrative.

This article analyzes how cinematography reinforces the themes of feminism and patriarchy in Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern (1991).

Review of: Writing for the Screen: Creative and Critical Approaches, 2nd ed., Craig Batty and Zara Waldeback (2019)

London: Red Globe Press, 310pp.,

ISBN: 9781352006087 (pbk), $27.99,

ISBN: 9781352006025 (hbk), $84.99

Review of: Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club, Anna Kornbluh (2019)

New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 187pp.,

ISBN: 9781501347306 (pbk), $19.95

Review of: American Eccentric Cinema, Kim Wilkins (2019)

New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 224pp.,

ISBN: 9781501336928 (ebk), $35.95,

ISBN: 9781501336935 (epdf), $35.95,

ISBN: 9781501368110 (pbk), $39.95,

ISBN: 9781501336911 (hbk), $120.00

Loving Vincent (2017)

Poland | UK | USA | Switzerland | Netherlands

Directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman

Runtime 94 minutes

Salesman (1969)

USA

Directors Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin

Runtime 91 minutes

Blu-ray

USA, 2020

Distributed by The Criterion Collection (region A)

Man Push Cart (2005)

USA

Director Ramin Bahrani

Runtime 87 minutes

Blu-ray

USA, 2021

Distributed by The Criterion Collection (region A)