Film Matters - Volume 16, Issue 2, 2025

This article examines pleasure and its absence in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and its film adaptations. By approaching the novel and its adaptations from a feminist perspective, it shows that Lolita on film introduces pleasure into a story where its absence is essential. Applying Laura Mulvey’s notion of “the male gaze” to the films exposes Hollywood’s obsession with commodifying women and girls, which can be extended to how Americans, collectively, view and (mis)treat women.

This article explores the impact of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation on Southern identity and racial narratives. The film’s portrayal of the post-Civil War South, promoting the “Lost Cause” ideology and glorifying the Ku Klux Klan, distorted the history of Reconstruction while reinforcing racist stereotypes. The article draws on scholars like Desmond Ang, who compares the film’s influence to modern media, and Jenny Barrett, who highlights the struggle of People of Color against prejudice. It also reflects on Paul McEwan’s examination of the film’s educational value, arguing that its legacy still shapes public discourse and education, particularly in the South.

This analysis traces the trajectory of Jamie Lee Curtis’s star persona, which is investigated alongside feminist film theory, an exploration of aging within film, and scholarly works pertaining to classical and contemporary cinematic star studies. Initially emerging as the first notable Final Girl figure within cinema, Curtis has since evolved into a star whose persona embodies feminist ideals and a truthfulness toward the process of aging within the public eye. By analyzing a selection of roles included within her filmography, I work to unpack the many nuances of her star persona and how the perceptions of the aged and aging female star have changed within the industry and in spaces of cinematic discourse. From a fraught babysitter to a dimension-hopping IRS agent, Curtis’s inherent rejection toward the pressures of aesthetic conformity within contemporary Hollywood has undoubtedly distinguished her as a unique star.

This article focuses on the visual essay as a cinematic form, its roots in the literary essay, and how it stands today. To attempt to define the form, I look to a wide array of scholars and thinkers, from Rascaroli to Shanspeare. I consider how twenty-first-century technology has changed how visual essays are made and distributed, and what they hope to achieve. I ask to what extent mainstream, Hollywood, and independent visual essays blur into one another, and have negative or positive impacts. And I lovingly conclude that the visual essay, above all else, is increasingly a form of faults.

This article analyzes three 2020s horror films—Crimes of the Future, We’re all Going to the World’s Fair, and Titane—to examine how on-screen body modification can influence viewers’ perceptions of real-world transgender experiences. Drawing on queer theorists such as Jay Prosser and Cael Keegan, it establishes a framework for interpreting trans content in film. Then, using Michel Foucault’s “political technology of the body,” the article identifies specific moments of bodily modification in the chosen films as acts of political resistance and examines how they can shift viewers’ understandings of transness in broader political contexts.

In our increasingly urbanized world, wildlife documentaries are a powerful tool to foster emotional connections with nature and influence conservation efforts. Research suggests a correlation between emotional associations with nature and pro-environmental behavior. This article analyzes existing studies on the impact of documentaries, focusing on narration styles, anthropomorphism, and post-viewing resources. Findings indicate that while emotionally engaging documentaries are more likely to foster conservation efforts, balanced approaches are needed to avoid idealized portrayals of nature and incorporating effective calls to action. Documentaries can be powerful tools for fostering conservation, but great attention to their design is crucial to optimize effectiveness.

“Polluted Blood” addresses the thematic and visual struggle that the representation of menstruation faces in the film industry. This article uses multiple case studies to exhibit how the bodily function has been plagued by its negative cultural and societal understanding, most of which curated outside of the film industry. “Polluted Blood” focuses on past representation to inform the construction of a new kind of menstrual representation emerging, using Turning Red (Shi, 2022) as its focal point of comparison.

Replete with images of bodies desecrated by the atomic bombing, Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) testifies to the vulnerability of the human form to wounding and mutilation, and thereby affirms the protection of the body as the most sacrosanct task of human rights. Bringing into dialog the pragmatist view of human rights as a safeguard against politically induced suffering with Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of cinematic form, this article posits Resnais’s film as a cinematic fossil in Deleuze’s sense: an image that, by way of a haptic, indexical visuality, conscripts the viewer’s own body as a sensorial witness to trauma. If, as moral anthropological approaches suggest, our conviction in human rights arises not from reason or doctrine but from the felt experience of pain, then the cinematic fossil merits consideration as an instrument for generating the embodied solidarity that ought to underpin our modern human rights regime.

Review of: Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror, Kartik Nair (2024)

Los Angeles: University of California Press, 304 pp., ISBN: 9780520392281 (pbk), $29.95

Review of: A Film You Don’t Watch, But Feel

All of Us Strangers (2023)

UK/USA

Director Andrew Haigh

Runtime 105 minutes

Blu-ray

USA, 2024

Distributed by The Criterion Collection (region A/1)