Andrew Grossman is the editor of the anthology Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade (Harrington Park Press), a regular contributor to and editor of Bright Lights Film Journal, and a columnist for Popmatters. He has contributed book chapters to numerous anthologies, including New Korean Cinema (University of Edinburgh Press); Film and Literary Modernism (Cambridge Scholars); Chinese Connections: Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora (Temple University Press); Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (Routledge); Moving Image: Documents of Contemporary Art (MIT Press); Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire, and the Ethics of Failure (Bridge 21); The Pink Book: The Japanese Eroduction (Yale University: Kinema Club); Movies in the Age of Obama (Rowman-Littlefield); Clint Eastwood's Cinema of Trauma (McFarland); The Encyclopedia of LGBTQIA+ Portrayals in American Film (Rowman-Littlefield); The Routledge Handbook of Male Sex Work, Culture, and Society; Hong Kong Horror Cinema (Edinburgh University Press); Grief and Contemporary Horror Cinema (Lexington); Bloodstained Narratives: Critical Essays on the Giallo (University of Mississippi Press); A Critical Companion to Terry Gilliam (Lexington); East Asian Film Remakes (University of Edinburgh Press); and A Critical Companion to Julie Taymor (Lexington). 
Absurdism · Activist & Political · Counterculture · Crime · Experimental & Underground · Fairy Tale · Politics · Writers & Critics
Abstract Interposing characters, dialogue, and symbols from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland into a contemporary political scenario – the Chicago 7 trial – Kerry Feltham’s experimental film Chicago 70 provides[…]
Colonialism · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals · Myth and Archetype · Native Americans · Westerns
The handful of “frontier operas” we’ll consider therefore propose an unusual dialectic of both aesthetics and ideology. What might occur when male Western heroes – traditionally stoic and pragmatic –[…]
From these socio-erotic negotiations sprung cinema’s first expressly lesbian-themed feature, Mädchen in Uniform (1931), not simply a tale of forbidden love but a historically particular challenge to Weimar Germany’s separation[…]
Essays · Thrillers & Action · Urban Conflict · Women in Film
This essay is a revised version of a book chapter that originally appeared in the anthology Clint Eastwood’s Cinema of Trauma: Essays on PTSD in the Director’s Films, eds., Charles[…]
African · Experimental & Underground · New Media · Video Artists
We might presume the temporal slips at stake in an African video exhibit are squarely political or anticolonial, but the videos’ slow, reverse, and repeated motions also link politico-economic disorder[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Essays
The existence of films such as Black Samson and The Spook Who Sat by the Door reminds us that there was an era, however fleeting, in which commercial films discarded[…]
The happy ending that sees the clown coupled with the girl never satisfies precisely because we know the clown’s appropriate place is one of “in-between-ness,” a position that stands in[…]
Essays · Experimental & Underground · Silents · Sound & Language
“Though standard critical appraisals would deem Tomatoes a deliberately crude affront to modern technical sophistication, it is itself the sophisticated artifact, its small rebellion resonating more strongly in a media[…]
“Why should you love him who the world hates so?”
“We’ve long since lost faith in endings; the postmodern project of ‘decentering’ everything has made it irrelevant whether our endings end with conjugal bliss, a predicted death, nothingness, a tree, an empty gaze, or any assorted marginalia.”
“Bottled and packaged products were sold mainly according to static imagery and rhetorical claims. With the advancing sophistication of the cinematic age, however, we gradually developed a taste for kinesthesia, ending the false dignity of stasis. The famous Heinz commercial, featuring ketchup slowly trickling downward onto a nude meat patty, was our watershed moment, our epiphany.”
Activist & Political · Essays · TV & Streaming
“There was a time when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, ‘formed as an educational, non-commercial, and public interest alternative to the vast wasteland of commercial networks,’ meant something other than drearily underproduced Anglophone mysteries, self-help seminars for pensioners and forced retirees, staged cooking lessons, cheapjack puppet shows, and various and unspeakable retrenchments of the petit bourgeoisie.”
Asian · Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · Genres
A New Solution to Herbert Marcuse’s Old Riddle
“Soon enough, America’s purported indie filmmakers will regale us with a ‘Remonstrating Cody,’ a ‘Defibrillating Schnitzler,’ a ‘Rehumidifying Allison,’ or a ‘Macerating Tennyson.’ Long live the present participle!”
Composers · Essays · Uncategorized
“Palmer’s meticulously composed images hide the fact that this film is, in a sense, underdetermined, open to endless speculation; it is uncontrolled, savage, and thus, indeed, sometimes given to uncensored crudity.”
Directors · Experimental & Underground
“EXPORT’s antagonistic body undergoes a bloody rebirth, her mutilation inhibiting the screen’s attempt to dominate the body and recentering a commodified humanity whose “eros” struggles to leave its sanguine imprint.”
“Leontev’s rhetoric, though overblown, might strike a chord in those who lament the replacement of honest, inspired amateurism with the interchangeable bodies of the trousered professional class. But wait . . . the polka tremblante?”
A Final Statement of the Obvious
“I like this exhibit . . . it’s very familiar.”
“But we can imagine infinite other, less stodgy flavors: a Saragossa Manuscript of Neapolitan layers within layers within layers; a Cannibal Holocaust of pure cherry surrounding a chunky mystery surprise; a Seventh Seal of precious white vanilla lost in an ominous ocean of midnight chocolate.”
