...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...

...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...

...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...

..., 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...

... 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...

...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...

...Sangita Gopal; Sujata Moorti In the years since its release, Moulin Rouge! (dir. Baz Luhrmann, 2001) has emerged as the harbinger of Bollywood cinema's growing visibility in the West. We argue here that while the film's visual excesses are immediately recognizable as citing “Bollywood style...

...J. E. Smyth Although The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (dir. Nunnally Johnson, US, 1956) ostensibly focuses on Tom Rath (Gregory Peck), the production of the screenplay and shooting largely revolved around actress Jennifer Jones's characterization of Betsy Rath, a stay-at-home wife and mother with...

...) and other “questionable” black films, such as David Gordon Green's George Washington (US, 2000) and the Hughes Brothers' film From Hell (dir. Albert Hughes and Allen Hughes, US, 2001), the essay advances a conception of the blackness of black cinema that does not secure an unequivocal racial referent...

...Jean Ma In the 1950s and 1960s, film songs were a ubiquitous feature of Hong Kong cinema, and their performance was the exclusive domain of singing actresses. One of the biggest screen stars and recording artists of this era was Grace Chang. Chang made her debut in Mambo Girl (dir. Evan Yang [Yi...

...Iveta Jusová; Dan Reyes Stylized, irreverent, and iconographically ambiguous, the 1969 Czech New Wave film The Fruit of Paradise ( Ovoce stromů rajských jíme , dir. Věra Chytilová) has frequently left even admiring audiences at a loss for words. In our reading, we take this film's intense but...

...Vincent Hausmann This essay focuses on George Cukor's A Woman's Face (US, 1941), a film that complicates a dominant narrative in studies of Joan Crawford's work that locates Mildred Pierce (dir. Michael Curtiz, US, 1945) as inaugurating the star's pronounced, albeit disparaged, iterations of...

... Dixit, the leading dancer-actress of the time. It tracks the kinesthetic history of the Dixit star text from Tezaab ( Acid , dir. N. Chandra, India, 1988) to her most recent films and television shows and examines how her brazenly sensuous dance numbers have transformed the construction of the female...

... Abramović: The Artist Is Present (dir. Matthew Akers and Jeff Dupre, US, 2012), which follows Abramović through the conceptualization and enactment of the performance, this essay demonstrates how The Artist Is Present restages the quotidian practices, bodily movements, and affects fostered by biopower and...