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 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 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

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 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 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 paper establishes the motif of ‘child spectators’ within the self-reflexive tradition of modern European cinema since the 1940s and within discourses on the affinity of childhood and cinema, dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Through a close reading of The spirit of the beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973) and Jacquot de Nantes (Agnès Varda, 1991) that deals with the impact

ABSTRACT Studies in mountain cinema often focus on the innovations and legacies of the classical German film of the 1920s and ’30s. This introduction to a special issue on cinematic mountains proposes to rethink the relationship between mountains and cinema along a different path. Drawing on the criticism of Jean Epstein, Béla Balázs, André Bazin, and Luc Moullet, we discuss three film-theoretical

ABSTRACT In the 1920s and ‘30s, the U.S. federal government produced many educational films about national parks and national forests. These films were widely shown in nontheatrical venues such as schools, as well as in commercial movie theaters as shorts before the main feature film. Neglected for decades, these films are of interest now, in the age of global warming, for the way they represent ideas

ABSTRACT Returning to Brokeback Mountain and its mountainous aesthetics, my contribution develops a three-part argument that reengages the cinematic landscape projected in Ang Lee’s ‘love story’ – a landscape that echoes, as I show, a national visual culture mapped and remapped by paradigmatic moments in art, photography, and film. In part one, ‘Brokeback Mountain and “the force-field of melodrama”’

ABSTRACT This essay introduces the descent as a critical vantage point that broadens the mountain film genre and reconsiders modernist debates with an eye towards cinema’s socio-ecological substance. I analyze three films—Philipp Stölzl’s Nordwand (2008), Nils Gaup’s Ofelaš (1987), and Jeff Orlowski’s Chasing Ice (2012)—for how they highlight social connectivity and environmental sustainability in

ABSTRACT This article explores the work of the critic V.F. Perkins in the light of the concept of description, and vice versa. It argues that a range of distinct senses of description come together in Perkins’s work, and uses that work to assist in the construction of some proposals about the function and value of description in films and film criticism. Perkins had, it is argued, a particular interest

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 21, No. 1, 2023)

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 21, No. 1, 2023)

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 21, No. 1, 2023)

ABSTRACT Nostalgia is everywhere in media today—be it films, television, or advertisements. But what does it mean to say that media is nostalgic? Beyond presenting nostalgic narratives, media texts can also express nostalgia stylistically. So how does this nostalgia look and feel? This article presents an original theory of the aesthetics of nostalgia, arguing that ‘pastness’ becomes fantastical when

ABSTRACT Financed by a British-Irish-Canadian co-production, Brooklyn (John Crowley 2015) deals with twentieth-century Irish diaspora, particularly the mass emigration of unmarried Irish women in the 1950s. While Irish immigration to the United States has been ongoing since the eighteenth century, until a few decades ago the perspective of Irish women was missing in Irish and Irish-American literature

ABSTRACT This article explores the intersections of racial identity performance, culinary style, and neoliberal logics within reality cooking television. By close reading the performance and evaluation of Top Chef: New York contestant Carla Hall, this article argues that reality cooking competitions depend on a grammar of stereotype in order to transform contestants into characters, and the contestants

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 20, No. 4, 2022)

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 20, No. 4, 2022)

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 20, No. 4, 2022)

ABSTRACT Fiction film remains the privileged focus of text-oriented film studies despite the growing interest in other film forms. Fiction as a concept also organizes the field’s key taxonomy – fiction v. nonfiction – yet little work has been devoted to the notion of fiction itself. The work that does exist is either textualist or spectator centred. The article argues that this leads to significant

ABSTRACT In Australia, the most visible film festivals are clustered around urban centres, yet there is a flourishing network of film festivals outside of major cities. In the state of Queensland, the festivals in regional and rural areas provide crucial visibility for the industry, local community and emerging filmmakers. Following the growth in film festival scholarship, and research on global digital

ABSTRACT This paper examines the political effects of the representation of historical paintings in film. It contends that the inclusion of this ‘older’ form, painting, and of the world associated with its popularity brings a mythological past to bear on contemporary philosophical and political issues in a novel and complex manner. Using the formal qualities of film, like montage and close-up, film

ABSTRACT Disney’s Moana (2016) portrays a village leader’s daughter who leaves her home island and sails across the open ocean to undo a curse spreading across Polynesia in response to a Promethean blunder by the demigod Maui. The film’s popular reception focuses on its representation of Polynesian culture, often placing an emphasis on the corporate history and practices of the Walt Disney Company

ABSTRACT This essay argues that by deploying the mind-game tropes of body swap and time travel, the Japanese animated film Your Name poses questions of time, memory, and mediation that must be considered in light of the 2011 national disaster. To take up these questions, I juxtapose three lines of interrogation that situate the film at varying timescales. The first analyzes the film’s use of myth to

ABSTRACT Over the past two decades, film scholarship has experienced a renewed interest in the theory of André Bazin. This French film critic is most commonly quoted regarding the ontological basis of realism, prompting some highly varied – and sometimes unexpected – readings of his most renowned essay, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’. Of course, it is no mere accident that he chose this ontological

ABSTRACT This article explores the ontological subversiveness of psychedelic sequences in Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980). Exposing the viewer to a mode of experiencing the world that radically deviates from his/her standard mode of experiencing, these sequences call into question the foundations of the viewer’s ‘folk ontology’. Distinguishing between two levels of subversion, the article’s first

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 20, No. 3, 2022)

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 20, No. 3, 2022)

Published in New Review of Film and Television Studies (Vol. 20, No. 3, 2022)

ABSTRACT Through three archival case studies, this article explores problematic aspects of Stanley Kubrick’s relations of production and the power underlying his role as a film producer by the 1960s and 1970s. The case studies explore Kubrick’s practices in the casting of women, his attitude toward trade union regulation and labor relations, and his interactions with politicians in the UK in the 1970s

ABSTRACT The encounter between the cinema image, originally created to be seen on a large screen, and the mobile phone used as screening device, stands as one of the most striking instances of what Erkki Huhtamo calls the ‘Gulliverisation’ of our contemporary environments: “a two-directional optical-cultural ‘mechanism’” that works “against the idea of a common anthropomorphic scale”. In what follows

ABSTRACT The mirror scene that produces an eerily mismatched reflection is a staple of both trans and speculative films. Jay Prosser and Jack Halberstam have examined this trope, the latter asserting trans mirror scenes allow a disruptive ‘trans look’ for a non-trans audience. This essay takes up the trans gaze, but the process reverses. Rather, non-trans characters can become readably trans by way

ABSTRACT Contemporary LGBTQ film festivals are often held to a standard of nostalgic radicalism based in U.S. independent film cultures of the early nineties, and found diluted and assimilationist as a result. In an effort to track the complex circulation of affect still present within LGBTQ film festivals, this article troubles this critique of commodification and investigates the networking of LGBTQ

(2022). Wonder, horror, mystery: letters on cinema and religion in Malick, Von Trier, and Kieślowski. New Review of Film and Television Studies: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 298-302.

(2022). ‘Bad’ women of Bombay films: studies in desire and anxiety. New Review of Film and Television Studies: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 292-294.

(2022). ReFocus: the films of John Hughes. New Review of Film and Television Studies: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 294-298.

ABSTRACT This article examines the transformation of the femme fatale figure from classic noir to neo-noir film and to contemporary television. Exploring the reasons for this transformation and its implications yields fresh revelations about the new femme fatale. Using Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) as the focal point, we examine the intertextual allusions to this classic in two postmodern

ABSTRACT Against the background of a widespread language skepticism among film theorists and practitioners, this article aims to highlight the evocative potential of spoken words in cinema. Focusing on an aesthetic device dubbed ‘suggestive verbalization’, it demonstrates how character speech can powerfully appeal to the spectator’s sensory imagination: language allows film viewers to imagine – in

(2022). Towards a catalogue of cine-genres. New Review of Film and Television Studies: Vol. 20, Renewing the Cine-genre: Pasts and Futures, pp. 1-3.

ABSTRACT The concept of cine-genres, first introduced by Adrian Piotrovsky in a 1927 anthology of essays by Russian Formalist critics on cinema, has been used by a number of recent critics to describe genres that rely as much on their cinematic form as their narrative structure or iconic images. This essay argues for cine-genre as a way to acknowledge the unique cinematic aspect of groups of film.

ABSTRACT Although ‘Towards a Theory of Cine-Genres’ announces his interest in connecting film genre to the formal properties of the medium, Adrian Piotrovsky’s thinking as a whole is marked by a fundamental ambivalence to genre. Placing this better-known essay within the overall development of his thinking on cinema reveals how Piotrovsky grappled with taxonomizing cinema and refined a vision for a