Film Matters - Volume 13, Issue 3, 2022

This article analyzes the 1985 Stephen Frears-directed film, My Beautiful Laundrette, as a precursor to the New Queer Cinema movement, and as significant for its portrayal of characters with complex, intersectional identities, living in Thatcher’s England. The laundrette at the film’s center serves as a space in which its characters can find success in business and the freedom to live out their sexuality, but which nonetheless remains inextricable from the oppressive society that surrounds. Furthermore, I investigate the stylistic impact of the film’s origins in television.

The nineteenth-century poet and philosopher Charles Baudelaire has become synonymous with the concept of the flâneur. The flâneur was typically a male who had the leisurely time to “stroll” and observe metropolitan life in all its delights and displeasures. This article examines Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2013 film, Ida and reconceptualizes the concept of the flâneur and appropriates it to a female protagonist, a flâneuse, along with a new setting and time period: the countryside and 1960s Communist Poland. Engaging in flâneuserie in the city allows Ida to experience new things, but it is in the countryside where Ida will come to terms with an instructive truth.

Early British documentary cinema, pioneered by John Grierson, undeniably had a heavy influence on later wartime-era cinema. One such film is David Lean’s beloved Brief Encounter. Lean’s utilization of a first-person, omnipresent narrative structure mirrors the philosophy behind these earlier documentary films. By first providing an overview of the history of documentary film, Lean’s depiction of the banality of middle England is then re-examined through the lens of Laura and Alec’s affair. Particular focus is placed upon his depiction of class, empire, and female voices, which are compared and contrasted to these aforementioned British documentaries.

This article explores the slowly changing representation of African Americans in horror films. Scream 2 (1997), I Am Legend (2007), and Get Out (2017) are used as case studies to illustrate what little progression has taken place through the decades in relationship to African Americans on-screen in horror cinema. Topics such as stereotypical tropes, narrative conventions, themes of dehumanization, and racial oppression are investigated across each film to highlight representational similarities and differences through time.

This article explores the shame that derives from human mortality and how it is put on display in Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds. Using the concepts of the natural order and the animalistic other, this article analyzes the film’s commentary on humanity’s inability to accept death willingly, going out of their way to repress it and disrespect it. Unfortunately for the characters in the film, the birds embody a force of nature that remind the humans with their animalistic gaze that they are not above the laws of nature, sharing the same fate as every living being.

This paper investigates the competitive nature of masculinity as presented in Robert Egger’s film The Lighthouse. Applying gender theory, I examine three crucial scenes in the film that demonstrate the two protagonists’ pursuit of ascendance, which manifests as their lust to possess the lamp of the lighthouse. Borrowing from the works of sociologists, anthropologists, and historians, I was able to understand the naturally recurring crises of masculinity that circulate around a hegemonic model of the masculine ideal, ultimately leading to competition between men to achieve said hegemony. The Lighthouse proves this enduring phenomenon through Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe’s volatile relationship and their brutal demise. While the film might not propose a direct solution, I argue it serves as a bleak reminder of how misogyny and toxic masculinity harm men and their relationships with one another.

This article analyzes the Spanish horror film The Skin I Live In (TSILI) from a feminist perspective. Different feminist theories such as the male gaze, toxic masculinity, and the Final Girl are used to explore how TSILI criticizes heteronormative masculinity. By comparing Almodóvar’s film to other horror classics such as Psycho and Halloween, I discuss how TSILI offers a unique and modernist depiction of gender within horror.

Witchcraft has long been associated with expressions of femininity and womanhood. Suspiria, both 1977 and 2018 versions, provide vivid pictures of female bodies as sacrificial bodies bound and restrained by notions of monstrous femininity. The focus on the occult creates spaces wherein female characters find strength and healing through both displays of independence and interconnectedness to other women. These films, read through second- and third-wave feminisms, reveal the struggle to assert female empowerment in a male-dominated world.