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Hannah Vliet: “White Saviors Get Gold Trophies: Colorblind Racism and Film Award Culture” analyzes the cultural “text” of Green Book’s Best Picture acceptance speech at the 2019 Academy Awards to expose the neoliberal, colorblind mode of racism that infects the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as well as the American film industry at large.
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The St Andrews Film Festival (SAFF), which took place 22-28 November 2021, celebrated its third year with a wide array of international films. Born in 2018 through the University’s Filmmakers’ Society, SAFF has become a charity committed to raising the profile of St Andrews and Scotland within the international film scene. Boris Bosilkov, Mina Radović, and Walid Salhab curated a fine week-long experience full of excellent films – from around the world and Scotland itself – accompanied by fascinating talks with the directors. But while the festival moving to a purely online format – due to the pandemic – allowed for an unprecedented degree of flexibility, it also limited the connection between filmmaker and audience that film festivals usually bring. Therefore, it was such a brilliant initiative by Boris to host talks on Zoom with some of the filmmakers, which allowed for lively Q&A conversations. With sixty films to choose from, this helped to draw attention to the more notable entrants. Rounding off the week with a Zoom-based ceremony with around twenty awards also helped unite the filmmakers and audience after the week’s uncharacteristic isolation, giving additional promotion for some remarkable films that would otherwise have been overlooked. The SAFF team did an excellent job crafting a platform for St Andrews, pushing the town as a hub for global cinema.
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Georgina Beeby: This article is about pretrauma cinema in relation to the film WALL-E. It explores E. Ann Kaplan’s proposal of pretrauma as a subgenre by explaining how pretrauma films are defined and examining what their function may be. WALL-E is closely analyzed as an example of a pretrauma film as it fulfills the definitions but showcases how the function of the subgenre is difficult to pinpoint. The article aims to show how pretrauma cinema functions to both encourage audiences to face the climate anxieties of our society, but also how these films sometimes simply act as catharsis to the audience whilst no real change is enacted.
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Reid Anderson: In this article, I aim to provide context to and shed light on not only the career and star image of Sharon Tate throughout the late 1960s, but also how the events of her death have worked to overshadow and transform the public’s perception of her as a cult victim/cult star. Specifically, I argue that the reinstated images of Tate across Mansonsploitation media has functioned in categorizing the late star as (1) strictly a cult victim and, thus, (2) allowing the hyperreal representations of Tate to be unconsciously accepted as accurate depictions of the late star.
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Leo Nelki Göpfert: This is an article analyzing the film WR: Mysteries of the Organism by Dusan Makavejev through the lens of a totally different filmmaker’s theory. The theory is Matsumoto Toshio’s “neo-documentary,” which outlines the potential of synthesizing surrealism and documentary techniques. I argue that Makavejev has stumbled across the same technique, probably by accident, and that his film helps demonstrate the power of this filmmaking style to depict social movements.
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Emily Nighman: This article compares Disney’s original 1998 animated film, Mulan, and the 2020 live-action remake to examine the negative and positive treatment of Chinese/American representation in each film. The article also places the films into broader discourses surrounding race and gender studies, as well as the sociopolitical contexts surrounding the films’ production and release.
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In early 2022, I am aware of everyone else who seems to be online just the same amount as I am, so I recognize there is a trend in the content I am consuming. There is an online scene managed by college students in downtown New York. They all appear to be actors, creators, personalities, influencers, or all of the above. They are preparing for the next big scene to appear in New York City. This scene never leaves the online stratosphere of think pieces acknowledging the scene as a physical space, rooting from a triangular epicenter in the Lower East Side: Dimes Square. Dimes Square is a microneighborhood that could be more fiction than fact. In many ways, Dimes Square seems reminiscent of earlier microcultures within New York City that rose to prominence, thanks to aspiring artists from outside the city. Think of The Factory without an Andy Warhol ringleader. Like the countless trend articles about Dimes Square, ambitious artists from outside the city create what they believe to be the New York scene due to their own dreams of a setting beyond the reality of an actual “art scene” that exists in New York. This scene is created through online performances for consumption through various tweets, Instagram memes, and podcasts, curated for eclectic teenagers outside the city. These teens beg for a glimpse into the world of a post-millennial generation, zoomers and Gen Z, living in the city, maintaining a lifestyle unaffordable to the vast majority.
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Amanda Coates: My article explores Gregg Araki’s cult trilogy (dubbed the Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy), featuring the films Totally Fucked Up, The Doom Generation, and Nowhere. These films are known best as independent queer films, which focus on troubled young adults as they navigate their lives under unconventional circumstances — including the AIDS epidemic and the apocalypse. My paper approaches these films with a different approach, studying how Gregg Araki’s Asian identity influences these films, as well as how these films represent Asian Americans; many scholars have critiqued that Araki’s work does not represent Asian American identity, but I argue that his representation of Asian American men is empowering. Within the trilogy, Araki gives Asian men the space to explore their queerness without their race becoming a factor that prevents them from doing so, thus empowering Asian men in a unique way.
Continue readingAfter an intensive judging process last fall, Film Matters is pleased to announce the winner of the eighth annual Masoud Yazdani Award: Maria Mutka for her FM 12.1 (2021) article, “‘To Begin on Again’: A Study of Early Cinema’s Unique Influence on Modernist Literature.” Maria graduated from Smith College with a BA in Anthropology and Russian Studies. She now works as a research assistant, helping to produce equitable health services research. She remains passionate about work that delves into human stories, from the field of cinema to public health.
This year’s judges also wish to recognize two other strong articles in the honorable mention category: Emma Cieslik for her FM 12.2 article “Monster and the Mob: A Critical Analysis of Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936) and James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931),” and Devon Kurtz for his FM 12.2 article “One of the Boys: The Smug, Patriarchal Undertones of Anders als die Andern (1919).” Emma is currently a Master’s candidate in Museum Studies at George Washington University. She is a graduate of Ball State University with a Bachelor of Arts in History and Biology and the recipient of two undergraduate research fellowships focused on American religious culture. She researches historical effects of visual culture, notably depictions of mob violence in twentieth-century film. And Devon is an alumnus of Dartmouth College where he studied Classics. His other writing has appeared in the Boston Herald, City Journal, and the Wall Street Journal.
This award would, of course, not be possible without the hard work of our judging panel. Therefore, we’d like to take a moment to acknowledge our 2022 judges again:
Hugh Feldmann is a filmmaker currently studying at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Before pursuing his MFA and career in film, Hugh received his BS degree in Psychology from Colorado State University in 2019. Outside of film, Hugh enjoys learning about psychology, history, and geography, and listening to music.
Connor Holland graduated with a BA in Film Studies from the UNC Wilmington, where he is now pursuing his MA degree. His scholarly interests include European art cinema, film minimalism, and American film noir.
Matthew Smits is a graduate MA student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He obtained his degree from UNCW, and is committed to studying cinema history and aesthetics.
For more information, please visit: https://www.filmmattersmagazine.com/masoud-yazdani-award/
Film Matters: Please tell us about your article that is being published in Film Matters.
Harriet Crisp: “An attitude means a style. A style means an attitude: The Free Cinema Movement in 1950s Britain” considers the relation of Karel Reisz’s We Are the Lambeth Boys’ style and production to the aims set out in the first Free Cinema manifesto. “Free Cinema” refers to a series of programs of documentaries shown at the National Film Theatre between 1956 and 1959 which influenced the British New Wave. The programs were accompanied by striking and somewhat enigmatic manifestos. I was interested in whether the ideas expressed in the manifestos were borne out by the films.
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