Search Results (75)

This article proposes a reading of A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) as the spiritual swan song of Stanley Kubrick, even though it was completed posthumously by Steven Spielberg. Conceived and developed by Kubrick from the 1970s until the late 1990s, the film emerges as a profound meditation on life, death, and the persistence of memory—one that continues to resonate through another author’s hand. It stands as a singular case of authorial transmission, where Spielberg’s intervention operates less as completion than as curatorship: the act of listening to, translating, and preserving a vision projected beyond its creator’s lifetime. Beyond its production history, which includes Kubrick’s long collaboration with writer Ian Watson, the early story treatments, and Spielberg’s eventual reinterpretation of Kubrick’s design materials and narrative architecture, this essay advances a philosophical reflection on A.I. as a mediated testamentary work. Drawing on the thoughts of Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, and Maurice Blanchot, it examines how questions of authorship, memory, and narrative closure intersect with the film’s ontological and affective dimensions. Through these lenses, A.I. reveals itself as both an allegory of survival and a reflection on artistic legacy—suggesting that a swan song may endure beyond its maker, preserved through the curatorship and imagination of another. Full article

John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies has often been interpreted as a lament for the decline of institutional Christianity in twentieth-century America. Instead, in this essay, it is argued that the novel dramatizes the metamorphosis of the sacred across four generations of the Wilmot family. Based on Updike’s conviction that divine presence endures beyond the walls of the church and through literary and cultural analysis grounded in sociological theory, the narrative shows that what appears to be the retreat of institutional religion is in fact a return to its primal ground in private faith. From Clarence’s crisis of belief to Teddy’s communal–private devotion, Essie’s narcissistic yet spiritualized stardom, and Clark’s restless searching, the novel traces diverse expressions of private religion in modern life. Film, above all, emerges as the communicative form that replaces the authority once vested in institutional churches, becoming the most pervasive medium through which transcendence is imagined and experienced. Far from depicting religion’s disappearance, Updike presents its reconfiguration into subtler and more pervasive forms of grace. In doing so, In the Beauty of the Lilies becomes a literary meditation on how religious meaning persists, adapts, and finds new representatives in a modern, media-saturated world. Full article

There is a longstanding connection between “curiosity”, “desire”, and “sexuality”. This connection can be found in texts as diverse as works of scripture like the Hebrew Bible and the Quran as well as in contemporary works of critical theory. Miguel de Cervantes explored such a connection more than four centuries ago in El curioso impertinente, an exemplary novella embedded in the 1605 part one of Don Quixote. Through a comparative reading of Cervantes’s El curioso impertinent, Pedro Almodóvar’s 1997 film Carne trémula (itself a free adaptation of Ruth Rendell’s 1986 novel Live Flesh), and Luis Buñuel’s 1955 film Ensayo de un crimen, this essay analyzes the intersection of curiosity and desire—inflected through the lenses of both Girardian and Lacanian theory—in order to explore the fundamental role not just of curiosity in early modern Spain, but also in the representation of modern (and postmodern) sexuality. Full article

This essay explores the political dynamics of the Godzilla film franchise over the past 70 years, arguing that critical and scholarly characterizations commonly oversimplify the movies’ complicated messages, which reflect the complex, often contradictory responses of Japanese filmmakers and audiences to the experiences of war, the atomic bombings, defeat, occupation, lasting subordination to the United States, and a seemingly endless postwar period. The analysis focuses on Honda Ishirō’s Gojira (1954), in which pacifist sentiments are tempered by depictions of military weaponry and patriotic pride, and Yamazaki Takashi’s Godzilla Minus One (2023), where ahistorical narratives, misty-eyed nostalgia, and ultranationalist tropes co-exist with strong anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment themes. By contextualizing these two films within the contested history of early postwar Japan and the polarized politics of the early twenty-first century, this essay suggests that the Godzilla series has shown remarkable continuities over time and has captured the profound ambivalence with which the Japanese people have negotiated memory, nationalism, and the charged relationship between Japan and the United States since the end of World War II. Full article

This essay proposes to read the classic cycle of Godzilla films (roughly, 1954–1995) using a posthuman perspective that makes its emphasis on animal, vegetal and mineral life. We will use posthuman and materialist philosophy to analyze hybrid monsters as part of new interdisciplinary studies about non-human agencies and their creepy potential. As such, we want to offer the first posthumanist readings of the Godzilla franchise, in time to celebrate its 70 years of existence and, in consequence, highlight how posthumanist the series has always been. Full article

Drawing on the insights of media ecology, this essay explores the potential of media to mobilize representations, feelings, and habits to transform individuals into extensions of media themselves. Specifically, I undertake an analysis of the South Korean film Oldboy, which I argue demonstrates how, in the contemporary moment, media narratively and affectively mobilize individuals to become not only ideological subjects but also media appendages that, consequently, carry out cinema’s central functions. Full article

Contemporary politics is filled with anxiety about the survival of democracy—particularly within a framework pitting liberal representative democracy against authoritarianism. In times of anxiety about authoritarianism, Western artists repeatedly return to a masterpiece of relatively early cinema: Robert Weine’s silent film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. This essay examines three twenty-first century adaptations: David Lee Fisher’s 2005 remake of the film; James Morrow’s 2017 novel, The Asylum of Dr. Caligari; and Georgie Bailey’s 2022 play Caligari. I argue that while the direct politico-cultural anxieties of Weine’s film have often been overstated, the emergence of adaptations during periods of heightened concern about authoritarianism reflects a deep-seated reception of the film as anticipating autocratic governance. However, for all its fears about power, control, and the loss of self-determination, Weine’s movie also contains the seeds of liberation. Cesare ultimately sacrifices his own life rather than murdering Jane. And it is this gesture that the adaptations examined here seek—a gesture of resistance. The sleepwalker can awaken and assert a form of just resistance in the world, even if the penalties are steep. Full article

This essay brings psychoanalytic theory on trauma together with film and television criticism on rape narrative in an analysis of Michael Coel’s 2020 series I May Destroy You. Beyond the limited carceral framework of the police procedural, which dislocates the act of violence from the survivor’s history and context, Coel’s polyvalent, looping narrative metabolizes rape television’s forms and genres in order to stage and restage both trauma and genre again and anew. Contesting common conceptions of vulnerability and susceptibility that prefigure a violent breach of autonomy, Coel’s series and her interviews about it invite an ethics of looking that embraces a curiosity in the unknowable and untreatable kernel of subjective experience and defies and resists a policing of the survivor’s thoughts and emotions. By emphasizing and exploring what psychoanalysis calls the “afterwardness” of trauma, Coel foregrounds her main character’s subjectivity prior to her victimization, widens the sphere of consequence beyond the victim and criminal justice system to the survivor’s larger community, and entreats that community to preserve a space for her to look and look again at everything, without judgment. Full article

The standard image of First World War soldiers is of men in open trenches: waiting to attack or be attacked; walking, sitting, sleeping, dead. Ford’s Parade’s End includes such scenes. But it is a different kind of image which predominates in his war writings and often produces its most memorable passages: images of houses or house-like shelters. The mind seeks protection in such structures; but they offer little security against the destructiveness outside, against the bombardments, gas, shrapnel, bullets. Ford wrote that the experience of war revealed: ‘men’s dwellings were thin shells that could be crushed as walnuts are crushed. … all things that lived and moved and had volition and life might at any moment be resolved into a scarlet viscosity seeping into the earth of torn fields […]’. This realisation works in two ways. The soldier’s sense of vulnerability provokes fantasies of home, solidity, sanctuary, while for the returnee soldier, domestic architecture summons war-visions of its own annihilation: ‘it had been revealed to you’, adds Ford, ‘that beneath Ordered Life itself was stretched, the merest film with, beneath it, the abysses of Chaos’. It is now customary to read war literature through trauma theory. Building on analyses of Ford’s use of repression, but drawing instead on object relations theory, I argue that Ford’s houses of war are not screen memories but images of the failure of repression to screen off devastating experiences. The abysses of Chaos can be seen through the screen or projected upon it. Attending to Ford’s handling of this theme enables a new reading of his war writing and a new case for its coherence. The essay will connect the opening of No More Parades (in a hut, during a bombardment) with the war poem ‘The Old Houses of Flanders’; the postwar poem A House; the memoir It Was the Nightingale (quoted above); and the otherwise puzzling, fictionalised memoir No Enemy, structured in terms of ‘Four Landscapes’ and ‘Certain Interiors’. Full article

My aim in this essay is to isolate and describe the eschatological technophobia that is expressed by many popular films in the genre of science fiction. What I have in mind by this designation is the (irrational) fear of advanced technologies with respect to the conjectured likelihood that autonomous systems and programs will inevitably deliver a negative judgment of humankind. In expressing and/or cultivating this fear, I offer, directors in the genre tend to help themselves to the language and imagery of the Biblical Day of Judgment, especially as it is prophesied and characterized in the Abrahamic religions of the global West. This fear, I maintain, is itself an expression of a deeper anxiety pertaining to the possibility (or likelihood) that the achievements of humankind matter very little, if at all, especially when evaluated on a cosmic scale. Following my critique of several films that rely, uncreatively, on the trope of eschatological technophobia, I turn to a consideration of two relatively recent films in the genre: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016). From these directors, I suggest, we receive subtler and more thoughtful treatments of the judgments of humankind that superior intelligences are likely to pronounce. What emerges in these two films is the exploratory expression of a religiosity or spirituality that I associate with an updated, epoch-appropriate version of humanism. Full article

Noir can be seen as a formula with a set of distinguishable thematic, narrative, and aesthetic elements matured in postwar Hollywood and later recycled, refined, or resisted by filmmakers worldwide. In the past decade, a handful of noirish crime films produced in People’s Republic of China particularly reworked this formula to articulate local concerns, one example being Black Coal, Thin Ice. By attempting a comparative analysis of this movie’s characterization with the noir formula’s conventional portrayal, this essay argues that Black Coal, Thin Ice revises the noir formula by drawing more attention to the noir killer’s plight as a demoralized state worker and deconstructing the formulaic presence of the femme fatale as a deadly and powerful seductress. Moving beyond the Black Coal, Thin Ice case, the essay also posits that the recent Chinese noirish crime films’ fusing of stylized chiaroscuro with color lighting to register various existential and psychological concerns enriches the chiaroscuro aesthetic of the noir formula. Full article

This paper enters into a debate of how new and potentially more accessible technologies might affect freedom of expression for heretofore disenfranchised peoples and postcolonial social and political development. This essay examines short films produced on camera phones by amateur African filmmakers for one of the many existent mobile phone film festivals: Mobile Film Festival Africa held in 2021. Mobile Film Festival, an annual and international festival of short-length movies, was founded in 2005 based on the principle “1 Mobile, 1 Minute, 1 Film”. Because of the highly destructive mining in Africa required to obtain the minerals necessary for mobile phone production, because of the Western narratives of progress mobile phone sales build upon, and because of the fact that mobile phones are instruments of capitalism that largely feed big Western countries, mobile phones are themselves tools of neocolonialism and digital colonialism. Thus, a film festival that markets itself as a means of social progress but that relies upon mobile phones in Africa provides an interesting and quite complicated case study. Two of the award-winning films from this festival recognize in different ways the complicated relationship between mobile phones and postcolonial activism. Full article

The film Sunset Limited is an HBO adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s play of the same name, and it is an in-depth character study of two individuals: Black (played by Samuel L. Jackson) and White (played by Tommy Lee Jones). In the beginning of the film, Black has already saved White from committing suicide and they are sitting together at a small, round kitchen table; viewers learn that Black was going to work when he saw White on the train platform about ready to jump in front of the Sunset Limited. Black is a religious Christian and White is an outright atheist; one believes in Jesus Christ and one believes in nothing; one has faith and one has no faith in anything. These ideological standpoints (the lack of an ideology is still an ideology) are the foundation of this text. The focus of Suset Limited is the push and pull between religious belief (Black) and philosophical thought (White), which ultimately will determine whether White stays and decides to live, or goes and decides to take his life. In essence, Sunset Limited is an exercise in rhetoric, in the art of persuasion, and how this artform can be used in both religious and secular conversation. This study of Sunset Limited will devote time to Cormac McCarthy’s connections to religion and philosophy using research about his work; then, there will be an in-depth textual analysis of the film, which will speak to not only who these characters are but also what they want to relay to one another about what they know (rather than what they believe) about the world. Black and White are polar opposites of each other (black and white); what this essay intends to prove is that there are similarities to their thought processes, even if they may not recognize it. Full article

Haniya Yutaka (1909–1997) was one of the leading figures in postwar Japanese literature and avant-garde art movements, chiefly remembered today for his unfinished metaphysical novel Dead Souls [Shirei, 1946–1997]. This essay, however, examines his hitherto unknown theoretical writings on film. Haniya and other writers gathering around the literary magazine Kindai bungaku [Modern Literature, 1946–1964] shared a keen interest in film’s unparalleled importance in twentieth-century modernity. And their collective efforts to transgress conventional boundaries between literature and film culminated in the 1957 publication of the anthology entitled Literary Film Theory [Bungakuteki eigaron]. Above all, Haniya’s film writing was clearly distinguished for its tendency to explicate film’s paradoxical mode of existence philosophically, an approach that the film critic Matsuda Masao later called an “ontological film theory” [sonzaironteki eigaron]. Looking closely at his essays and interviews collected in Literary Film Theory and two other volumes on this topic—Thoughts in the Darkness [Yami no naka no shisō, 1962] and Dreaming in the Darkness [Yami no naka no musō, 1982]—the present essay reads Haniya’s theorization of cinema in relation to both Martin Heidegger’s existential phenomenology and recent scholarly debates on non-Western film theory. Full article

This essay offers a comparative analysis of Bernard Rose’s 1992 Candyman and its 2021 sequel directed by Nia DaCosta. Through an intertextual approach informed by gothic studies, narratology, and critical race theory, the essay shows how DaCosta’s film establishes a transformative relationship with its predecessor. In the 2021 film, Candyman rewrites the story of the original, disrupts its stereotypical representation of Blackness, and appropriates the horror genre to give voice to the peculiar anxieties of contemporary African American life. In so doing, DaCosta’s film also challenges classic gothic tropes of horrific Blackness while at the same time pushing back against dominant narratives on race to reclaim space for a discussion on racial relations in America filtered through a Black lens. Full article