In 1999, The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007) was the first-ever nominee from premium or basic cable in the Primetime Emmys’ Outstanding Drama Series category, a slate annually dominated by broadcast dram...

ABSTRACT This article analyses how Belgian identity is articulated in contemporary Belgian cinema. Since the introduction of sound, Belgian cinema has been characterised by a divide between Flemish and Belgian francophone cinema. However, the twenty-first century has seen an increase in co-productions between the two communities. By analysing how these intranational co-productions relate to Belgium

ABSTRACT In recent years, television has undergone an artistic and critical reevaluation. This essay aims to add to the study of television aesthetics by examining a form particular to American television: the bottle episode. The bottle episode first arose as a solution to the budgeting ‘bottlenecks’ experienced by U.S. television series in the 1950s and 60s. I find that this form presents a logic

ABSTRACT This article seeks to renegotiate the relationship between reenactment, truth, history, and the archive in documentaries on genocide. It moves away from the common binaries surrounding the supposed creativity and fictionality of reenactments as opposed to the evidentiary and static archive, and instead reads reenactments as facilitating access to truth. Through four case studies of Claude

ABSTRACT French screenwriters’ precarity has been highlighted in a number of different ways in recent years, not least by their efforts to organise and publicise professional abuses. This article will consider the situation of writers and how these are often framed in relation to a cinematic culture rooted in what Jonathan Buchsbaum calls ‘a certain idea of film [as] the art form of the twentieth century’

ABSTRACT Australia’s George Miller, director of the Mad Max films and others, has an international reputation as a singular creative force. But this reputation overlooks key facts about Miller’s career and working methods, including his co-founding and stewardship of the production company Kennedy Miller (now Kennedy Miller Mitchell), which organized production along collaborative and collective lines

ABSTRACT In recent years, Stanley Cavell has become one of the canonical reference points for film scholars. In particular, his work on ‘comedies of remarriage’ has become one of the most fertile arenas of contemporary scholarship in film studies. However, Cavell’s work on remarriage comedy has rarely been subjected to criticism. For the most part, scholars interested in Cavell’s work on remarriage

ABSTRACT Agnès Varda’s science fiction tale, Les Créatures, is her only film with an extravagant plot, and it is also the film considered (by others and by herself) to be her great failure. This article argues that these two aspects of the film are related. Les Créatures can be read as a condemnation of a certain kind of unrestrained storytelling, in which an artist’s desire for invention displaces

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 21, No. 3, 2023)

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 21, No. 3, 2023)

ABSTRACT This article analyses the Franco-British series The Tunnel (Canal+, 2013–2017), co-produced by Sky Atlantic and StudioCanal, as an iteration of the Swedish-Danish series Bron/Broen/The Bridge (Danmarks Radio, 2011–2018). The author situates Bron within the global television format trade and argues that The Tunnel is best understood as a localised version rather than a remake or an adaptation

Abstract Netflix’s reboot series Cobra Kai (2018–present) depicts an intergenerational negotiation of masculinities as the men from the original Karate Kid mentor Gen Z students. Reagan-era masculine norms and measures of manhood are tested by the teens as they face twenty-first-century challenges. Static performances of masculinity fail to meet the demands of new situations; thus, the mentors and

ABSTRACT There is very little academic work on music in television series, and none on music in French television series. This article focuses on one of the most successful French television series, the eight-season-long Engrenages/Spiral (Canal+, 2005–2020). It identifies the similarities and differences between music for films and music for television series before focusing on the music composed

Abstract Bernarr Cooper (1912–1999) led the Bureau of Mass Communications of the New York State Education Department from 1962 to 1982. During its heyday—roughly between 1970 and 1980—the Bureau produced or coproduced more than 1,500 educational programs, distributed widely to public schools and libraries across the state of New York. This article draws the story of Cooper and the Bureau out of the

ABSTRACT Except for a brief representation of her as a child in The King’s Speech (2010), Queen Elizabeth II’s life has been adapted to the screen through The Queen (2006) and A Royal Night Out (2015). Moreover, the release of the TV series The Crown has added a new perspective to the ways in which the queen’s life has been revised, rewritten, and adapted, although the dynamics of film and of television

Abstract The post-hardware heroine is argued to be the latest revision of action heroines since the 1990s, emerging into a parodic postmodern paradigm that recalls compensatory reactions exhibited by the “beefcake” cinema of the 1980s that is inextricably caught up in nostalgia and desire. For Yvonne Tasker, muscular, built male bodies the likes of Schwarzenegger and Stallone are reactions to a then-new

Published in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Vol. 51, No. 2, 2023)

Published in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Vol. 51, No. 2, 2023)

Published in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Vol. 51, No. 2, 2023)

ABSTRACT This article uses textual and discourse analysis to examine the interpersonal dynamic between Rob and Cherise in High Fidelity (Hulu 2020), two Black female characters at the center of a gender- and race-flipped TV remake of Nick Hornby’s (1995) novel and Stephen Frears’s (2000) film. It centers Cherise in the frame by examining how she opposes her secondary status as a supporting character

ABSTRACT This article reads Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009) through Lauren Berlant’s conceptualisation of impasse and the affective rhythms of survival, which Berlant develops in their reflections on the cinema of precarity. This framework, I contend, has the potential to open up new avenues of inquiry within the study of Arnold’s work, usually discussed in relation to either British (social) realist

ABSTRACT This article re-examines Rod Serling’s career as he transitioned from writing live anthology teleplays to his famous series, The Twilight Zone (1959–1964), in service of investigating the changing definitions of authorship as the television industry changed. It does so in order to show that the techniques many critics agree Serling used to subvert corporate sponsors may have been rooted in

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 21, No. 2, 2023)

ABSTRACT This special issue highlights a range of scholarship on LGBTQ+ film and media, encompassing a variety of subjects from across numerous decades and explored through a diverse range of methodologies. If these articles collectively define ‘queer/trans media now’, it is due to their capaciousness, dexterity, and generative provocation – qualities essential to articulating the value of queer/trans

ABSTRACT This article discusses the ‘Netflix imaginary’ and how it shapes our understanding of queer taste and legibility in contemporary visual culture. While Netflix has promoted itself as a bastion of LGBTQ inclusivity and other forms of ‘diversity’, this article considers the platform not on the basis of celebrated LGBTQ ‘Netflix Originals’ such as Sex Education or Queer Eye but rather on how our

ABSTRACT Several critics have described Xavier Dolan as a gifted yet self-indulgent filmmaker. From the stylish costume design to the carefully composed arrangement of colors and objects within the mise en scène, Dolan’s films would seem to be guilty of an over-investment in the image. This essay interrogates the aesthetic and affective possibilities that the ostensibly intolerable textuality of Dolan’s

ABSTRACT Engaging with ideas of hegemonic masculinity, femininity, homosexuality, and heteronormativity, this article examines the film and television work of Joey Soloway as a means of studying the popularization of feminist and queer theory within contemporary American independent media. By focusing on representations of non-normative genders and sexualities (including sex work, transgender identity

ABSTRACT A complex cinematic history of trans characters precedes contemporary representations of trans people — one of normalizing trans identity through class, gender, and race. In the context of contemporary American cinema, Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015) demonstrates alternative strategies for representing trans characters and marks a turning point in trans cinema. Tangerine presents a grittier

ABSTRACT This article examines representations of cats across various media in Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942) and its remake (Paul Schrader, 1982). I reorient the scholarship of these films towards issues raised by animal studies: asking what the films’ investigations into animal representations might offer for understanding depictions of women, monsters, and interspecies intimacy across different

ABSTRACT This article presents a study of the creative process of Silverlake Life: The View from Here (Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, 1993), from the perspective of its authorial multiplicity. Silverlake Life is regarded as one of the main representatives of autobiographical documentary in the 1990s. The specificity of the film is found in the circumstances of the death of the filmmaker-autobiographer

ABSTRACT This article assesses the significance of the Gay Cable Network (GCN), a production company that aired a dozen shows on public access cable television made by and for LGBTQ New Yorkers. Drawing upon archival research and interviews with producers, hosts, and assistants at GCN, I argue that LGBTQ producers experience both transformational opportunities for political engagement as well as precarity

ABSTRACT Streaming television is often seen as a progressive space for queer representation, due to the wealth of queer people and stories found across its programmes. Yet for queer people to be seen on streaming television, they must first be made visible at the level of the interface, which determines which programmes are presented to users and in what ways. Through the organisation of the interface

ABSTRACT The time is out of joint in Moonlight (2016). While Barry Jenkins’ film appears to divide Chiron’s life into three chronological periods, each stage both repeats and anticipates something of the others, on the levels of both form and content – from the recurrence of heteronormative, antiBlack violence throughout Chiron’s life to the reprisal of the police-like flashes of light that cinematographically

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 21, No. 2, 2023)

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 21, No. 2, 2023)

ABSTRACT This article historicizes and theorizes the feminist documentary practice of Julie Gustafson, focusing on The Politics of Intimacy: Ten Women Talk About Orgasm and Sexuality (US, 1973) and Desire (US, 2005). Employing archival research and original interviews with Gustafson, it argues that both works interrogate intimacy’s use value for navigating new modes of documentary witnessing afforded

ABSTRACT Werner Herzog avers that cinema reveals a truth beyond mere fact, a truth he calls ‘ecstatic truth’. The film that offers the clearest view of this conception, the mockumentary Incident at Loch Ness (2004), remains understudied and obscure. In Incident, Herzog plays a fictionalized version of himself who is making a documentary about the Loch Ness monster. This fictional version of Herzog

ABSTRACT This article proposes an examination of the white woman’s positionings within the French postcolonial structures of race and gender in two of Claire Denis’s films: Chocolat (1988) and White Material (2009). Using an intersectional frame of reference which combines postcolonial theory, Third World feminism and geography/spatiality, this article demonstrates that these two films unearth structures

Published in French Screen Studies (Vol. 23, No. 2-3, 2023)

ABSTRACT The author examines the mise en scène of performance in Barbara (Mathieu Amalric, 2017) in the context of the problematic yet pervasive cultural re-inscription of the musical biopic in French cinema, and its remediation of the traditions of chanson française and variété through the body of the female performer. Featuring Jeanne Balibar as ‘Brigitte’, an actress playing the eponymous singer-composer

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This is a case study of 40 years of policy approaches in Australian children’s television during which the children’s television production ecology was profoundly altered by new distribution techno...

Published in Journal of Popular Film and Television (Vol. 51, No. 1, 2023)

Abstract The Netflix time-travel series Dark exhibits many motifs found in ancient Athenian tragedy, from themes to modes of presentation. These include the use of myth, emphasis on houses and family trauma, mirror scenes, and other techniques for showing parallel events across generations, acts of murder and incest, preoccupation with fate, and divine intervention in the form of deus-ex-machina appearances

Abstract In recent decades, scholars have recognized close connections between Western film and Greek and Roman antiquity, a relationship HBO’s Westworld brings into sharp relief through classical themes, characterizations, and allusions. Two episodes from season 2 in particular have a heavy classical bent. Episode 4 (“Riddle of the Sphinx”) casts park owner James Delos as an Oedipus figure who, in

Abstract This article focuses on Black representations of Greco-Roman goddesses in film and on television, exploring the historical and ideological conditions which have allowed audiences to react neutrally or favorably toward such representations. Adopting the transmedial perspective, the intersecting forces that have gradually disjointed conceptions of the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology in

Abstract The TV show Supernatural (2005–2020) features itinerant brothers Sam and Dean Winchester battling pagan gods from ancient Greco-Roman mythology who pose a threat to the present-day American way of life. The show utilizes two key concepts to define perils to American culture and values: the frontier myth and the myth of American exceptionalism. In a remote town in Alaska (i.e., the frontier)

Published in French Screen Studies (Vol. 23, No. 2-3, 2023)

Despite critical and popular acclaim, the travel/food television series of Anthony Bourdain have not received much academic attention. This paper examines the negotiations required of the series’ p...