Film Matters Magazine

Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.

Sophie Barbour: My article looks at the film Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse and attempts to analyze it as a “realistic” film. The immediate challenge here is that realism and animation are, by many theories, at odds with one another. How can something be realistic if it looks nothing like reality? Moving away from photorealistic definitions of realism and toward theory that defines realism by how accurately one media type can reproduce another type allows us to look at Spider-verse as “realistic” in that it faithfully reproduces the comic book world. Analyzing the film by looking at its fidelity to comic book aesthetics and conventions allows us to see how, exactly, its groundbreaking animation improves the film’s ability to tell its story. The implications for this are that despite the influx of “live-action” (or, more accurately, photorealistic computer-generated) adaptations of comic book stories, often the most truthful, and most impactful, way to adapt these stories is through animated film.

Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.

Matthew Scipione: “Transnational Filmmaking: The Intersubjective Gaze in Desierto” is an analysis of Jonás Cuarón’s Desierto (2015). Set against the backdrop of a vast desert, the film is a suspense story about a group of Latinx migrants who are hunted by a white American gunman as they attempt to enter the United States. In my article, I examine how Cuarón’s transnational filmmaking presents the theme of national displacement by staging intersubjective camera/editing techniques that report xenophobic violence at the border. What is fascinating about the film is that it vacillates across different viewpoints that have been both physically and figuratively pushed to the margins of society. Similar to the migrants, the working-class citizen feels marginalized, alienated, and displaced. Everyone in the film belongs neither here nor there. Both the migrants and the citizen lack a sense of belonging. Through the film’s fluid audience identification, Cuarón crafts an ever-changing orientation that defies xenophobia by treating all of its subjects as equals. Desierto displays how citizen and migrant distinctions are now breaking down in the global era. As a filmmaker, Cuarón artistically uses transnational dislocation, intersubjective perception, and empathic representations to foster an all-inclusive collective consciousness.

Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.

Mason Leaver: My article analyzes the Romanian New Wave, and Romanian attitudes toward the police by examining two films: Police, Adjective, and Pororoca. Specifically, it takes a look at how Romanian directors see their present authority structures as being a remnant of the communist structures that were “destroyed” after the Romanian revolution. I also briefly compare the outlook of Romanian cinema with the outlook of Prisoners, an American film, to show the stark contrast in our nations’ cinemas.

Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.

Samantha Van Zandt: “The Triumph of Trauma: Tarantino Style” illuminates Tarantino’s genius and artistic ability to demonstrate the journey of overcoming debilitating trauma. He provides us with that thirst for vengeance that we have all, at some point, experienced: satisfying a deep desire to avenge our former selves. Through thematical symbolism, Tarantino explains the evolution of one’s identity as they loudly test themselves on the battlefield of overwhelming trauma. In my article on the Kill Bill series, I pick apart the identity of each character by their code name, their behavior, and their connection with deep trauma.

Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.

Jonathan Monovich: Knowing David Lynch’s background as an Eagle Scout, my article, “The ‘Eagle Scout Film’: David Lynch as Auteur and Genre Filmmaker” explores how many of Lynch’s films and their protagonists, particularly Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) in Blue Velvet (1986), embody Eagle Scout-like heroes and serve as genre-like “Eagle Scout films.” After conducting the necessary research, I recognized that Lynch’s films and their protagonists have many similarities with the film noir and western genres and their detective/cowboy heroes through their dealings with ethics, morality, and justice in sadistic worlds. Ultimately, in Lynch’s genre-hybrid films, he acts as an auteur by using recurring thematic preoccupations/stylistic tendencies, while exemplifying hostile environments offset by a central protagonist with an Eagle Scout-like set of morals (i.e., trustworthiness, kindness, bravery). Throughout my essay, I investigate David Lynch’s background as an Eagle Scout, how his experience as an Eagle Scout likely influences his films, and how his films have Eagle Scout-like protagonists that offset the cruel worlds they live in, helping classify a genre for his films that I define as the “Eagle Scout film.” Being a cinephile with an immense appreciation and admiration for French cinema and some of the most accomplished pioneers of film theory including André Bazin and Francois Truffaut, I strove to write my essay in a similar fashion to some of my idols.

Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.

Clare Matthews: My article “Seeing Triple: Identification and Gamic Vision in Film and FPS Games” investigates the subjective shot as used in film and first-person shooter (FPS) video games. It addresses questions of identification, and looks at the theoretical basis for the generally problematic nature of the subjective shot in film and also its successful use in FPS games. It includes in-depth analysis of Being John Malkovich and Peeping Tom, and identifies a novel class of subjective shot as used in these films, involving the merging of three looks, that is non-problematic.

Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.

Michael Stringer: My article looks at the films of Wes Anderson, and it tries to use parts of his very recognizable style to problematize elements of auteurism. Wes Anderson is often seen through the lens of auteurism, but I think there’re parts of his work that challenge this approach. So, I found his films to be an interesting opportunity to trouble auteurism from the inside, so to speak. I look at how Anderson repeats a lot of techniques, and I try to say that this repetition accomplishes more than we usually attribute to acts of repetition.