Film and Media Studies Commons^™

What Can A Body Do? Answers From Arab Cinema, Laura U. Marks

Regards

Baruch Spinoza’s statement “We do not know what a body can do” argues that bodies learn their powers not from divinely imposed laws but through experience in the world. Thought must pass through the body, in a way that menaces both existing thoughts and the body as it is at present. Great works of contemporary independent cinema in Arabic-speaking countries express the body’s forces of becoming in numerous ways, some of which this essay tracks: from not yet living to cultivating molecular forces, enfolding powers, expressing volatile passions, coming to life, and attaining adequate ideas. Some of these dynamics are …

Pays Rêvé (2011) De Jihane Chouaib, Joseph Korkmaz

Regards

The scenarist and director Jihane Chouaib returns, after a long absence, to her native country that she left during the war. She visits South Lebanon where she was born and wanders with her sister, who’s a dancer, in the places that marked her childhood. Her peregrinations are nostalgic and her memories are bitter-sweet. Her path crosses the path of the Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Moawad, of the director and journalist-photographer Katia Jarjoura, and of the French-Lebanese director Patric Chiha. To all these immigrants, Lebanon is the dreamed country that Jihane Chouhaib recalls through her view and her poetic comments.

Résumé

La …

Le Pouvoir En Images : Les Affiches Politiques Au Liban Entre 2005 Et 2010, Elie Yazbek

Regards

During the turbulent period following the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Lebanon, political posters were an important medium used by rival political parties to impose specific imagery on the public, contributing to set up a partisan discourse linked to the political position of each one. A war of images and slogans then took place, based on an audacious revaluation of the notion of image, reconsidered as both a symbol and an icon. The classical figurative representation system inherited from the Renaissance was confronted with ideological considerations that created a rupture and proposed original models of images.

Résumé

Durant …

Café Central, Joséphine Van Glabeke

Regards

Écriture blanche imprimée sur une tente en toile rouge vif, avec l’indication « Beirut » en exergue, pour rappeler où l’on se trouve…

Apocalypse And Eschatology In John Ford's The Grapes Of Wrath (1940), Nancy Wright

Journal of Religion & Film

John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940) visualizes conventions of the apocalypse genre to represent not simply a particular historical setting, the Great Depression, but also a vision of history to be interpreted in terms of eschatology. Expressionistic photography transforms the characters’ experiences into enigmatic visions that invite and guide interpretation. A comparison of montage sequences in Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath and Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke The Plains (1936), a Farm Security Administration documentary, clarifies how Ford’s narrative film aligns spectators within and outside the mise-en-scène.

Hail, Caesar! A Jesus Film In Search Of A Christ Figure, Jon Coutts

Journal of Religion & Film

For over a century the moving picture has been a medium ripe for propagation or exploration of the story of Christ. Since the first wave hit screens in the late 1890s and early 1900s, the list of so-called “Jesus films” has come to number in the dozens. Given that Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2016 Hail, Caesar!­ sets itself up as a reprisal of such films, the question is how to interpret it. To explore this, interpretation of the film is framed by consideration of the Coen brothers' attention to religious themes, is set against the backdrop of the second wave …

The Moving Image And The Time Of Prophecy: Trauma And Precognition In L. Von Trier’S Melancholia (2011) And D. Villeneuve’S Arrival (2016), Luca Zanchi

Journal of Religion & Film

Both the deferred recurrence of post-traumatic symptoms and the foresight granted by prophetic vision bring about a disruption of temporality and generate a chronological discontinuity which is often formally rendered as narrative discontinuity. This similarity produces an interpretive ambiguity that is central to the films, Melancholia (2011) by Von Trier and Arrival (2016) by Denis Villeneuve. Both movies begin by hinting at the post-traumatic origin of visions and then gradually shift towards a prophetic explanation. In addressing these two case studies, this article approaches prophecy and its temporality from a narratological perspective, integrating the critical parameters of trauma-theory with the …

The Gaze And A Sufi Ethics Of Vision In Majidi’S The Willow Tree: Form, Meaning, And The Real, Cyrus A. Zargar

Journal of Religion & Film

In his 2005 film The Willow Tree (Bīd-i Majnūn), Majid Majidi offers a complex moral commentary on the faculty of sight. To do so, the filmmaker draws from Sufi theories of gazing, in which desire must be for ultimate meaning (maʿnā), as conveyed through the vehicle of perceivable form (ṣūra), a distinction with both metaphysical and ethical implications. Majidi presents sight, when devoid of contemplation, as a sort of voyeurism, especially in contrast to the privacy and immediacy of speech and especially within the context of the modern city. Moreover, his use of a …

Skyfall: The "Aliens Sequence" In Monty Python's Life Of Brian, Robert Cousland

Journal of Religion & Film

Despite its brevity and science fiction genre, Terry Gilliam's "aliens sequence" in Monty Python's Life of Brian functions in at least three ways: It is a brilliant parody of Star Wars and other space epics. It addresses concerns that were of profound significance for the religion of Jesus' day and, finally, and it significantly challenges the Christian premise of a divinely ordained purpose underlying Jesus' life.

In Memoriam Terry Jones (1942-2020)

The Neighborhood Of Gods: The Sacred And Visible In The Margins Of Mumbai, Darshana Sreedhar Mini

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a book review of The Neighborhood of Gods: The Sacred and Visible in the Margins of Mumbai (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

Transcendental Style In Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (2nd Edition), Michael Gibson

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a book review of Paul Schrader's Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, 2nd edition (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018).

The Muslim World In Post-9/11 American Cinema: A Critical Study, 2001-2011, Ali A. Olomi

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a book review of Kerem Bayraktaroglu's The Muslim World In Post-9/11 American Cinema: A Critical Study, 2001-2011 (North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2018).

God On The Big Screen: A History Of Hollywood Prayer From The Silent Era To Today, Dan Wells

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a book review of Terry Lindvall's God on the Big Screen: A History of Hollywood Prayer from the Silent Era to Today (New York: NYU Press, 2019).

The Many Editions Of The Front Page: How Gender Shapes The Story, Nicole Moore

Conspectus Borealis

No abstract provided.

Gower As Data: Exploring The Application Of Machine Learning To Gower’S Middle English Corpus, Kara L. Mcshane, Alvin Grissom Ii

Accessus

Distant reading, a digital humanities method in wide use, involves processing and analyzing a large amount of text through computer programs. In treating texts as data, these methods can highlight trends in diction, themes, and linguistic patterns that individual readers may miss or critical traditions may obscure. Though several scholars have undertaken projects using topic models and text mining on Middle English texts, the nonstandard orthography of Middle English makes this process more challenging than for our counterparts in later literature.

This collaborative project uses Gower’s Confessio Amantis as a small, fixed corpus for analysis. We employ natural language processing …

Standing In The Dark: Sloth And Stability, Paralysis And Perseverance In Book Iv Of The Confessio Amantis, Andrea Schutz

Accessus

In Book IV of the Confessio, things happen in the dark – the dark of night, of dreams, of despair, of secrecy, of treachery, of death. The medieval sin of accidia sets the pace for this beautifully constructed book, whose tales link and cross, as in a dance. Dido, Phyllis, the bad, the forgetful, and the obsessive lovers swing like slowing pendulums back to their starting points, and stop still. On the whole, their dance with Amans is a slow and stately pavane of the dead and desperate. This is Gower’s darkest book, though not the most bloody: Sloth is …

Narcissus In Queer Time, Lacey M. Wolfer

Accessus

Queer temporality has been studied in relation to the Middle Ages as a means of questioning the prevailing historiography for other modes of connection to the past, such as embodied or affective. Conversely, the other branch of queer temporality has been primarily interested in how queer lifestyles today disrupt the heteronormative plan laid out by society. Joining these modes, Gower’s revision of Narcissus questions our notions of historiography through showing us an example of a queer, transgender character and his struggles with heteronormative expectations—demonstrating that the medieval is not so disconnected from the modern.

One Voice, Ancient And Resigned, Will Rogers

Accessus

While we know, or at least can imagine, what Gower looked like in his old age, it is hard to imagine or hear his voice. And yet, given what we know about his old age and visual impairments, his voice necessarily was important to his old age and continuing revisions of his texts. In this article, I attempt to reconstruct from some of his later poetry what that voice might have sounded like, at least in-text, and piece together how later authors heard that voice of old age.

Dark Money: Gower, Echo, And 'Blinde Avarice', Craig E. Bertolet

Accessus

Gower’s poetic works show a consistent concern with the darkness and deceit associated with Avarice, the sin mostly associated with commercial transactions. In the Confessio, he calls Avarice blind. This blindness seems to work both ways. Avarice blinds humans to their humanity because it causes them to cheat and steal from others. Avarice also blinds the victims of the greedy since the greedy resort to deception in order to gain what they want. In the Confessio, Genius tells the tale of Echo as an example of the practices that he calls usury but who works as an amalgam …

The Friendly Monster And The Complacent Queer: Assimilationist Approaches To Modern Adaptations Of Frankenstein's Creature, Cassandra Karn

Women's and Gender Studies: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

Monsters have been representations of othered communities since before the creation of the novel, so the Creature in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein should be no exception. The Creature defies binaries and rages against social injustice, making him a queer figure of resistance. However, modern adaptations of the Creature attempt to assimilate the Creature into the larger culture, removing both its queerness and its resistance. This unqueering brings into question how othered populations become accepted, and the cost paid for such acceptance.