Gentlemen Prefer Bland Homogeneity: Unless They Have to Pitch in with the Others
Then goodness knows what will happen
Category: Essays
Sex on the Beach: The Yin Yang of Female Sex Tourism in Two Films
“I didn’t come all the way down to Jamaica to become a slut.”— How Stella Got Her Groove Back
May I Touch Your Meat? Jan Svankmajer, Birth Trauma, and the Gesture Toward Touch
“Life is a continuity which does not begin at birth; it is split up by birth.” — Nandor Fodor
Documentaries · Essays · Reviews
Fourth Moments in the Atacama Desert: On Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light
“To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past — which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l’ordre du jour — and that day is Judgment Day.” – from “On the Concept of History” by Walter Benjamin
Essays · Genres · LGBT & Queer · Memoir
Last to Leave the Theater: Sissy Spectatorship of Stalker Movies and the “Final Girls” Who Survive Them
“Just by going to the movies I became, like the Final Girl, a target. A target, in my case, for bullies loitering outside the theater after the movie’s over. Having been beaten up under the marquee in sixth grade, I’d become reluctant to attend horror movies. But I had to go, despite the risk. I had to see — to see as the Final Girl sees.”
Asian · Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · Genres
Random Acts of Sensible Violence: Genre, Hong Kong Censorship, and the Brief Ascent of “Category III”
A New Solution to Herbert Marcuse’s Old Riddle
Indeterminate Position: Kechiche, Tragicomedy, and La Graine et le Mulet
“If Kechiche treats political tragedy, then, it is first by creating abundantly detailed, richly convincing comédie humaine, and nowhere is this more apparent than in what is justly considered his major achievement, La Graine et le Mulet.”
The Visual “Finding,” the Linguistic “How,” and the Interrogative “Talk”: Three Examples of Early 21st-Century Rhetoric
“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!”
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Essays
Love of Sophia: Lost in Translation, Transcendence, Transfiguration
“Translation is at best an echo.” – George Borrow
Meet the Macbeths: Again and Again and Again
Almost as though we’re addicted or something
New Fathers, Old Conflicts? Patriarchal Politics in 3:10 to Yuma, Don’t Come Knocking, and Atmen
“Is emotional capacity, as figured by film, an entity of fixed dimension, so that if men are represented as more caring, women must be represented as caring less?”
(Re)Staging the Story: The Pre-History of Cinema
“Though most people in earlier times could not even have imagined the present role of science and technology, nor, even more implausibly, the apparently alternate life offered by the cinema and its recent offshoots, the human imagination refused to be tied down.”
Death of a President: The Last Temptation of Anti-Bush Critics
“Where many people watch a film for a true or faithful rendition of an historical event, I needed confirmation that the thing I was viewing was . . . made up!”
“Every Man and Woman Is an Island”: Modern Discontent in the Films of Wong Kar-wai
“Wong shows that certain modernized countries have been able to flourish economically because they have embraced globalization, but with powerful emotional consequences for their people.”
Actors & Personalities · Essays · War
Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair: Marlene Dietrich’s Star Persona and American Interventionist Strategies in Postwar Berlin
“I read so much about immigrants, how they must adjust to customs and the words of foreign lands. Maybe because I was never treated like an immigrant! Nobody made excuses for me. Not then – not now. Nobody cares about my roots.”1 – Marlene Dietrich, April 15, 1985
Two Cinematic Visions of the Inca Conquest: The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Aguirre: Wrath of God
“Both films suggest Europe has run aground spiritually, as they both depict the Catholic Church and its representatives to be as bloodthirsty as the conquistadors.”
La Bete Humaine: Runaway Train
“The train is a symbol for whatever you want it to be,” the film’s director, Andrei Konchalovsky, explains. “It can be viewed as a prison because they can’t get out of it, or considered as freedom because they escaped from prison on it, or considered as our civilization running out of control because no-one can stop it.”
Activist & Political · Essays · SF & Fantasy
The Numinous Automaton at the Center of Scorsese’s Hugo
“With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous.” — C.S. Lewis”Becoming a cyborg is the ultimate goal.” — Kevin Warwick on Singularity Hub
African American · Essays · LGBT & Queer
Postlude to a Kiss: Will Smith’s Performances of Race and Sexuality in Fred Schepisi’s Six Degrees of Separation
“Beneath its self-presentation as a satiric comedy of manners lie cogent interrogations of notions about race and class, the history of blacks in America, the limits of assimilation, the representations of black gay men, the nature of African American and Hollywood homophobia, and the fluidity of racial identity. Smith performs, resists, and usurps this character in order to effect certain cultural interventions and to further the cause of his public star identity.”
Lovers and Killers? Only on This Island
Which is why you and I must escape
Links + BSA
