...Dana Polan © 1984 by Camera Obscura 1984 ‘ ‘Desire Shifts the DZferance’’ : Figural Poetics and Figural Politics in the Film Theory of Marie-Claire Ropars Dana Polan Polymorphous and perverse the cinema explodes the sign in...

...Lynne Kirby Linda Williams (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981) © 1984 by Camera Obscura 1984 L'Age d'Or (Luis Bunuel, 1930) Book Reviews Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film by Linda WiUzams (Urbana: University of Iiiinois Press, 1981) Lynne...

...D.N. Rodowick Copyright © 1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 1990 Reading the Figural D .N.Rodowick A day will come when, by means of similitude relayed indefinitely along the length of a series, the image...

... is a figure for recasting the problematic of racial alterity as a materialist concern. Relying on Walter Benjamin's formulations on allegory as a privileged mode of representation under conditions of modernity, the author argues that alterity straddles the boundary between the corporeal and the...

... the infamous photos of Abu Ghraib, investigates the frame that creates the figure of the “cluster fuck”—a hopeless entanglement of sexualized yet inept forces—that proves the most eloquent figure of the American entanglement in Iraq. Morris's film can help us discover the difference between a frame...

...Kevin L. Ferguson Connecting the two unlikely figures of Marilyn Monroe and Darth Vader, this article argues that air might offer a previously ignored alternative to the chthonic narratives of sexual reproduction that are especially popular in the psychoanalytic imagination. Borrowing from Luce...

... policy governing cinematic nudity. Long thought to be lost (and the only one of her four films currently extant), the film features Munson in a dual role as the allegorical figure of “Virtue” and as a young woman who becomes an artists' model. She poses nude in scenes throughout the film. Accordingly...

... overlooked, the controversial 1991 film María Antonia (Cuba), by Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sergio Giral. In this article, I first follow the transatlantic figure of Carmen from Spain to Spanish America, sharing unexpected Creole connections between Cuba and the original works of Carmen that emerged in the course...

... Wen], Hong Kong, 1957), which introduced to Chinese-language cinema the figure of the carefree singing and dancing teenager. The figure she cuts in the film, and in many other of her vehicles, is sunny to the point of relentlessness and wholesome and upright to the point of unbelievability. But if...

... brings it closer to the subject, who experiences its closeness as enigmatic or distressing. By bringing things closer, however, it also brings them closer together, compacting them into strange and novel figures. Magnification has its cinematic analogue in the close-up, while compaction can be visually...

...Michael DeAngelis With Russell Crowe character attributes that might code the star as a narcissistic diva are recontextualized, constructing an authentic figure whose occasional acting out enhances his masculinity rather than feminizing him. This article contrasts the notion of the performer as an...

... judgment enter into film theory. Within the pretty, then, we might find unexpected potential to think aesthetics otherwise. Pretty is an invented term; that which it names is figured differently and often implicitly across film theories that have few similarities except for this strange commonality in what...

.... The female protagonists in these films are, accordingly, associated with Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection (in particular, the construction of the maternal figure as abject through the imagery of parturition and the primal scene) and depicted in various guises as the monstrous-feminine, a potent...

...,” viewers and critics are unaware of the extent to which the film draws on Bollywood's affective economy, generic idioms, and performance traditions. Few would recognize that the heroine Satine's transformation from conniving showgirl to tragic heroine recalls the tawaif (courtesan) figure in popular Hindi...

.... The article concludes by arguing that Born into Brothels puts to work the immaterial or affective labor of children in the production of cultural commodities as a humane and “empowering” alternative to coerced sex work. This move to mobilize the child as a new figure of economic promise indicates the...

... figure of Antigone, Oedipus's daughter, the marginalized and yet inerasable point of departure for another psychoanalysis— perhaps for another theory of the archive. In light of what Judith Butler calls Antigone's “scandalously impure” claim, a claim that appropriates the very language of the power she...

...Irene Gedalof Where do spaces of the home figure in contemporary studies of transnational, migrant, and diasporic cinema? According to Hamid Naficy, “accented,” exilic, and diasporic cinema primarily evokes a state of “permanent deterritorialization,” producing cinematic languages of discontinuity...

... sexy and sexually unavailable. In this light, teenage girls, Twilight moms, and gay men could fabricate their own individual ideas of what it means to fall in love with the idea of love for the first time, with a figure that is both abundantly available as a sexual imagination but physically...

... and render the child inert. The essay seeks to denaturalize the iconic figure of the imperiled child that dominates political discourse today by tracing the emergence of this discourse of pedophilia in relation to changing notions of gender and sexuality and by identifying a counter-paradigm that saw...

...Raya Morag This essay proposes a new paradigm for cinema trauma studies: the trauma of the perpetrator. Recognizing a current shift in interest from trauma suffered by victims to that suffered by perpetrators, it seeks to break the repression of the abhorrent figure of the perpetrator in cinema and...