...Tania Modleski This article looks at theories of melancholia to analyze “bromantic” comedies of the kind often associated with film producer, director, and writer Judd Apatow. Taking its title from the references to the film An Affair to Remember (dir. Leo McCarey, US, 1957) that run through the...

...Marc Francis This article examines a series of recent films that seeks to represent the often conflated categories of asexuality and singlehood. The films (A)sexual (dir. Angela Tucker, US, 2011), Year of the Dog (dir. Mike White, US, 2007), and Bill Cunningham New York (dir. Richard Press, US...

...Shilyh Warren This article analyzes Performing the Border (dir. Ursula Biemann, Switzerland and Mexico, 1999), Señorita extraviada ( Missing Young Woman , dir. Lourdes Portillo, Mexico, 2001), and The Price of Sex (dir. Mimi Chakarova, US, 2011), three documentaries that focus on the ways that poor...

...Chris Dumas The problem of the “it was all a dream” structure is considered, particularly in reference to its appearance in the year 1953. This article compares three films featuring the dream structure — Robot Monster (dir. Phil Tucker, US), The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T (dir. Roy Rowland, US), and...

... family life across time through the prism of feminist and queer cultural production and critique. Daldry's film is treated as a dense and fascinating work in itself, but it is also read against a small but influential cycle of recent queer-authored melodramas: Far from Heaven (dir. Todd Haynes, US, 2002...

... produced as part of this project, Self-Portrait with Three Women (dir. Zhang Mengqi, China, 2010) and Children's Village (dir. Zou Xueping, China, 2012), the article argues that the project produces a counterhistory through collective film production in a digital format. These films foreground the...

... the film sound theorist Michel Chion calls the acousmêtre , or the acousmatic voice. By bringing together Chion, Lacan, and feminist film theory, the article analyzes the acousmatization of the male voice in Gabbeh (dir. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Iran/France, 1996) and Banoo-ye ordibehesht ( The May Lady...

..., serves silent films as a medium that links the films of the past with the present moment. Using Orochi (dir. Buntaro Futagawa, Japan, 1925) as an example, Sawato reveals that she personally disagrees with the male-centered values expressed in the film and finds the binary oppositions of good and evil too...

... slapstick comedienne performers — most of whom have now dropped out of historical visibility entirely. I frame this comparative analysis through close readings of two key texts: a Vitagraph trick film, Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy (dir. J. Stuart Blackton, 1909), which depicts the surrealistic...

... African American music. To unpack these connections, BREAKAWAY is analyzed in the context of two contemporary films in which Basil played significant roles: The T.A.M.I. Show (dir. Steve Binder, US, 1964), a groundbreaking concert film that signaled a new era of on-screen racial integration, and the...

...Kyoung-Lae Kang This essay examines two films, Modern Boy (dir. Ji-woo Jeong, South Korea, 2008) and Private Eye (dir. Dae-min Park, South Korea, 2009), both of which depict Seoul in the 1930s—the period during which Korean colonial modernity was fully shaped—and in so doing draw contemporary...

... 1979 film The Rose (dir. Mark Rydell, US), and in particular, through its spectacular reimagining of Janis Joplin's death, Bradshaw explores our cultural attachment to narratives of the diva's abjection and shame. By framing Joplin, that quintessential symbol of both 1960s rock-and-roll culture and...

...Richard C. Cante This essay discusses How to Survive a Plague (dir. David France, US, 2012) as a deep rumination on the natures of action and agency from the individual to the collective, especially gay male action and agency when they are approached intersectionally. It takes the film as an...

...Melissa Phruksachart This article studies Breakfast at Tiffany’s (dir. Blake Edwards, US, 1961) to examine the constitutive role Mickey Rooney’s yellowface performance of Mr. Yunioshi plays in shoring up the infamous brand of white femininity embodied by Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly. In...

...Katharina Lindner This article is situated within a critical context in which phenomenological approaches to film intersect with debates around queer cinema, and lesbian film in particular. With a specific focus on Apflickorna ( She Monkeys , dir. Lisa Aschan, Sweden, 2011), it proposes ways of...

...Ana Stevenson The women’s suffrage subplot in Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins (dir. Robert Stevenson, US, 1964) has come to dominate the popular memory of the history of the turn-of- the- century women’s movement. This essay examines how the film’s imaginative portrayal of women’s suffrage, especially...

...Will Scheibel Famously touted as “the most beautiful woman in movie history” by Darryl F. Zanuck, the chief executive of Twentieth Century Fox, actress Gene Tierney achieved major stardom with Fox’s classic Laura (dir. Otto Preminger, US, 1944) following years of being typecast as an Orientalist...

...Niels Niessen Rosetta (dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, France/Belgium, 1999) teases the viewer into a spiritual mind game. At first viewing, the film appears to be about a young woman’s quest for a job. On very close analysis, though, Rosetta turns out to be encrypted with the holy spirit...

... misogynistic narratives, eventually worked to legitimize women’s sexual desires. As sex-segregated screenings of Emmanuelle (dir. Just Jaeckin, France, 1974) tell us, feminist impulses are embedded in perhaps unexpected places. Copyright © 2018 Camera Obscura 2018 exploitation Turkish cinema sex...

...Raz Yosef This article explores the relationship between trauma, gender, and ethnicity in the Israeli film Or, My Treasure (dir. Keren Yedaya, Israel/France, 2004). The film presents a few routine days in the life of Ruthie, a Mizrahi (Jews from Arab countries) prostitute, and her daughter, Or. I...