New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film - New Cinemas Volume 18 is the 2020 volume, Jul 2020

Typical discourses around the puzzle film – a genre that typically eschews classic storytelling for more complex narrative techniques, such as entangled secondary/tertiary plotlines, and characters with mental or psychological instability – often privilege the manipulation of the film’s temporality and narratology. However, in this article, I perform a close textual analysis of the mise en scène of Inception by Christopher Nolan (2010) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) by Michel Gondry to demonstrate how these puzzle films privilege spatiality over time and plot to depict cognitive processes associated with mental and psychological instability, thereby bringing attention to an underrepresented attribute of the genre. I focus on the influence of surrealism on mise en scène, as surrealist art and cinema manipulate space to explore the psyche. I also draw on these films’ production history to show how the filmmakers, production crew and actors understood approaches to space as a cognitive process.

This article explores representations of witchcraft in relation to Julia Kristeva’s 1980 essay Powers of Horror. It begins by investigating the genesis of Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi’s depiction of witchcraft in their 1977 horror film Suspiria, drawing on historical studies of witchcraft by Ronald Hutton and Marion Gibson. In particular, it examines the characterization of the witches’ coven as an all-female, all-powerful death cult – before proposing that Kristeva’s essay on the abject can be seen to explain this specific conceptualization, in line with Barbara Creed’s analysis of how horror film has inherited the role of ‘purifying’ the abject from religious ritual. The second half of this article then focuses on David Kajganich and Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake of Suspiria, reflecting on how the later film can be seen to attempt to redeem the association between witchcraft and abjectness. In doing so, this article reflects on how the attempt to rescue the witch while maintaining an association with the abject is contiguous with other contemporary depictions of witchcraft. It is proposed that such efforts amount to a Foucauldian attempt at a ‘reverse discourse’ celebrating the subversive potential of an initially derogatory identity formation – but that Kristeva’s writing points to the limitations of appropriating the abject in this way.

Annie Baker’s 2013 play The Flick prompted divisive reactions from its audience from the time of its original run, ones largely based on the play’s feeling extremely slow. Setting out from the intersection of the play’s temporal affect and the play’s setting – a movie theatre – this article builds on recent work on slow-cinema scholarship, particularly as it relates to theatrical exhibition, to explore contemporary discourse on both slowness and cinema. Going further, it sets this work against the backdrop of broader, multi-disciplinary conversations about the cultures of speed and slowness, before considering the particular slowness in The Flick as well as its evocation of the theatrical experience. Finally, the article concludes by asking what it means today to attend the cinema.