Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Safwat Nazzal: My article examines Maysoloun Hamoud’s Bar Bahar, as a contemporary Palestinian film that delivers profound meditations on the stagnation of cultural identity through an auto-critique of the intersectional oppression faced by Palestinian women.
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Warning: Spoilers Ahead
Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel (George Orwell, 1949) has remained in the public consciousness for decades. Given the age in which we live, its prominence in current culture has grown larger, with many of the social and political woes of today often compared to the work by Orwell. This is where the film adaptation, 1984 (Michael Radford, 1984), returns to the spotlight. Even upon its release, the film’s depiction of the book’s dystopian reality drew criticism for not diving enough into the original’s thought-provoking messages. As someone who has not yet read the novel, I hoped my fresh eyes could see positive and redeeming qualities that many past viewers had overlooked. However, after having viewed the film, I did not see a world that served as a dark warning about a party’s control over the populace, but rather a world populated by whittled-down concepts and missed opportunities. As a result, the film’s adaptation of the award-winning cautionary tale presents, from a qualitative perspective, only half of the book’s sharp writings, while the rest feels generally underwhelming.
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We are close to the end of Uncut Gems. Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) has convinced basketball player Kevin Garnett to purchase a sacred black opal that Howard himself acquired from Ethiopia. This gem will not only settle Howard’s never-ending debts, but–more importantly–allow Howard to make a profit due to his inflated price. Garnett is offering just enough money for Howard to simply pay his debts, and walk away with a clean slate. After everything we have seen Howard go through thus far, this should be exactly what he has been looking for–but it isn’t. Howard Ratner isn’t interested in breaking even–Howard Ratner wants to win.
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Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Sean Carson: My article is an analysis of the spectrum of film noir heroes as depicted in Fred Zinnemann’s Act of Violence. I argue the film mirrors the ideological contentions facing returning Second World War veterans. These individuals attempt to attain the American dream while maintaining a moral integrity that clashes with the socially Darwinist actions required to attain the ideal American lifestyle.
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“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” –Neil Armstrong
History has been defined by the scope of our scientific achievements–and the advances we have made in space exploration are no exception. First Man (2018) maintains our enduring interest in the space film.
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On a cool spring night on May 16, 2003, five minutes before 10pm, the people of Casablanca — the bustling cultural port city of Morocco located in northwestern Africa — experienced one of their most memorable moments: moments of pain, terror and blood (Horses of God). In just five minutes, five explosions echoed throughout the city’s center; in five minutes, around twelve young Salafi Jihadist men, with links to Al-Qaeda, committed suicide, taking thirty-three innocent people — including Jews, Westerners and others — with them (Horses of God; Kramatschek). Millions of people in the city were devastated, and many more would have died since there were supposed to be sixteen — not just twelve — men in their twenties from the Salafia Jihadia organization carrying out the attack (Kramatschek). Surprisingly, all of those involved had one thing in common: they all grew up in Sidi Moumen, the impoverished shantytown east of Casablanca, only thirteen minutes apart from each other — a short drive that would surely contrast a life of poverty in Sidi Moumen with a life of luxury in Casablanca (Kramatschek).
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Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Grace Wallace: When we screened La Jetée in our senior seminar, I was struck by its simplicity and, despite this, its capacity to so accurately mirror human emotion within a science fiction setting. The film is so quietly powerful. Yet, given its narrative, Marker could have easily served up a space-and-time-faring epic. In writing this piece, I wanted to understand from where the power of the film derives, how a movie with so little movement fits in among the motion-centric world of cinema.
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Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Nashuyuan Serenity Wang: Michelangelo Antonioni is a director who is known for his distinctive visual style and his articulation of landscape, architecture, and cinematic space to express the themes of ennui, urban alienation, uncertainty, solitude, tediousness, crisis of modernity, mismatch of values, struggle and pain of feelings. The article examines the relationship between space and cinema in the work of Antonioni and how he holds space and “architecture as the fundamental site of film practice,”[1] especially through urban landscape, in relation to La notte (Antonioni, 1961), L’eclisse (Antonioni, 1962), and Red Desert (Antonioni, 1964). It not only focuses on the representations of cinematic space, architecture, and their functions, but also the geo-emotive mapping in space-human relation and the ways in which spaces act as the catalyst for connection between journeying bodies and their physical and mental movements. It aims at discussing the unique position of space in cinema as it forms a sphere between the past and the present, the physical and the mental; therefore, looking at people who choose to go back, belong to, move around, or accept these spaces is to understand how humans can rediscover or situate themselves in the seemingly decayed but actually valuable realms, in which their roots, memories and spiritual belongings can be reclaimed.
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Big Universe Adventures Productions will offer a limited streaming release of Eric Rosen’s short film Netuser. Tony Award winner and Emmy Award nominee Denis O’Hare plays Peter Sardovski, an activist whose life unravels when a nightmare about political violence turns true. Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Award nominee Claybourne Elder plays his husband who struggles to prevent Peter’s compulsion from endangering their young son. Two-time Tony Award nominee Johanna Day plays his sister-in-law, a NYPD detective who fights to shield her brother’s family from danger. The film also features Tatiana Wechsler as Peter’s editor Jenny.
Continue readingFilm Matters is officially announcing our open call for papers from undergraduates and recent graduates for consideration in issue 12.1 (2021).
The deadline is September 1, 2020.
Film Matters has officially adopted MLA 8th edition style (and is moving away from 7th edition guidelines) — so please prepare your submissions accordingly. Purdue OWL’s MLA Formatting and Style Guide (https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/) is an excellent resource to consult, in this regard.
For more information about this call for papers, please download the official document (PDF):
Submissions should include a cover sheet, which includes the author’s name, title of essay, institutional affiliation, and contact information; all other identifying information should be removed from the body of the text, in order to aid the blind peer-review process.
And submissions and questions should be directed to:
Please note that Film Matters does not accept submissions that are currently under review by other journals or magazines.
Undergraduates and recent graduates, please submit your film-related research papers today! We look forward to receiving your papers!
