Eavesdropping at the Movies: 447 – Superman (2025)

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DC, which for the best part of two decades has failed to put together a cinematic universe of comic book adaptations to rival Marvel’s MCU, regroups and goes again with director James Gunn in charge of what will be known as the DCU – and what better superhero to introduce the new brand than the original: Superman.

David Corenswet’s performance and physique are extremely appealing, recalling an era before steroids and dehydration were considered compulsory in order for a man to be thought of as sexy. We appreciate the film’s lightness of tone and sense of humour, although one of us argues that the whole experience is so audiovisually hyperactive and loud that the tone doesn’t support all the jokes, and it’s simply exhausting to endure. We also discuss wokeness, the right wing’s determination to have a culture war, and obvious parallels between Lex Luthor’s villainy and that of Donald Trump; destruction of cities and the concomitant human cost; what made the previous Lex Luthor interesting; and why putting on glasses is an effective method of disguise.

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

José Arroyo In Conversation with Sam Shahid, director of HIDDEN MASTERS: THE LEGACY OF GEORGE PLATT LYNES

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George Platt Lynes is arguably the most significant artist in a long and distinguished line of great 20th Century queer photographers of the male nude which includes George Hoyningen-Huene, Horst P. Horst, Clifford Coffin, Robert Mapplethorpe and Bruce Weber. All in some sense worked in the interstices of fashion, portraiture, art photography and the nude. Yet, though Platt Lynes is at least their equal, he is arguably the least well known, a situation Sam Shahid aims to rectify in his gorgeous new film, HIDDEN MASTERS: THE LEGACY OF GEORGE PLATT LYNES.

Sam Shahid is Creator Director, Principal and president of Shaid/Kraus & Company, a full branding, advertising and design agency founded inn 1993. Before that he was Creative Director of in-house advertising for Calvin Klein in the 1980s, did work for Abercrombie and Fitch in the 90s that still inspires today (some of the catalogues have become much sought-after collectors’ items). In the aughts he worked as Creative Director of INTERVIEW magazine and he’s since edited dozens of books of photographs by the likes of Bruce Weber and Herb Ritts. He knows about images, and he puts that knowledge to use in his first film,  the beautiful HIDDEN MASTERS: THE LEGACY OF GEORGE PLATT LYNES.

In the accompanying podcast, we talk about how Platt Lynes was at the centre of practically every current of modernism in America and how Sam found the only existent film footage of the photographer. We ask why Platt Lynes is relatively so little-known today.  Is it because his greatest work is of the male nude? Is there homophobia involved? Sam talks about how difficult it was to get a hold of the photographs, tensions between controllers of major holdings and the family; the reticence of institutions and individuals to make public such an incredible body of work that feels so contemporary. Isn’t it time that a major museum undertake a retrospective of George Platt Lynes’ work?

What Sam doesn’t say is what a ravishing film he’s made, full of some of the most beautiful black and white images of men ever made. A film to see. It’s currently on release from Picadillo Pics and available on demand from Amazon and other major digital outlets.

 

The podcast may be listened to here:

 

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

Those of you who are interested in knowing more on George Platt Lynes might be interested in the following links:

On the biography by Alan Ellenzweig’s biography. Ellenzweig is featured in the film:

On Platt Lynes’ famous thrupple with Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Westcott as well as their circle (Paul Cadmus, Pavel Tchelitchev, Jared French, George Tooker ): David Leddick’s INTIMATE COMPANIONS: A TRIOGRAPHY OF GEORGE PLATT LYNES, PAUL CADMUS, LINCOLN KIRSTEIN AND THEIR CIRCLE

On his connection to American Modernism: The Young and the Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930-1955, edited by Jarrett Earnest, David Zwirner Books, 2020

 

 

The film may be seen through Peccadillo films at: https://peccadillo.film/pages/films/hidden-master-the-legacy-of-george-platt-lynes

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 446 – F1

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Hollywood collaborates with the FIA, the motorsport governing body, to try to convince us that Formula One is not, in fact, televised Microsoft Excel, but actually very exciting indeed. To this end, it brings in accomplished genre action director Joseph Kosinski, star Brad Pitt, and every cliché under the sun. And it’s great fun.

There’s hardly anything realistic about this story of a sixtysomething has-been given an unexpected shot at glory in racing’s most prestigious competition, despite the extraordinary effort that’s been made to evoke the world of F1, including shooting during real races and race events, with real drivers filling the scenes and even the real commentary team of Crofty and Brundle talking us through the action. The ironic curse of such detail is that the audience most attuned to recognising it is precisely that which will take issue with the film’s inaccuracies; José, on the other hand, doesn’t know F1 from a hole in the ground, and has no such problem.

We discuss the incredibly intense action and praise the cinematography that captures it; Pitt’s perfect fit for the role of a veteran driver who once had promise, made a series of mistakes, but nonetheless carries himself with a casual, appealing ease; whether the film is a corporate biopic, a term Mike is pretty sure he invented and is desperate to catch on; how you can’t call yourself an artist when you’re just selling a product; and whether Kosinski can make a film that depicts complex human interactions.

F1 is far from a great film, but it pretends to be nothing other than what it is: a deeply derivative, expensively made, fabulously shot and entertaining advert for Formula One. It’s easy to recommend. See it!

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

José Arroyo in Conversation with Daniel Bird on THE FALL OF OTRAR (Ardak Amirkulov, 1991)

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My choice for must-see film of this year’s Cinema Rediscovered is Ardak Amirkulov’s THE FALL OF OTRAR (USSR, 1991), which will have its UK Premiere in Bristol’s old IMAX cinema, now called the Bristol Megascreen, on Sat 26th of July. As Daniel Bird says in the podcast, ‘it’s a once in a lifetime occasion’. I wanted to talk to Daniel about the film because he knows more about it than anyone I know, because he speaks so articulately and with such an expansive frame of reference, and because he’s the one who proposed the restoration to Cecilia Cenciarelli, one of the four artistic directors of Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato and part of The World Cinema Project, whose goal is to restore great film from around the world. Such as this one.

 

 

THE FALL OF OTRAR is an epic set in the 13th Century where an obedient servant of the state Undzhu (Dokhdurbek Kydyraliyev) is persecuted for telling Kaiyrkahn (Tungyshpai Zhamankulov), his ruler, what he doesn’t want to hear, which is that Otrar is soon to be invaded by Genghis Khan. The film is an extraordinary aesthetic experience, a film of great style, structured in two halves, with the last part depicting the siege of Otrar and battles sequences that clearly use Kurosawa’s KAGEMUSHA (1980) as a reference point whilst transforming before our eyes into something else altogether. The film has crane shots that rival Leone’s, poetic compositions that recall John Ford’s, and a selective use of sepia and colour that recall some of the masters of the late Soviet era. A beautiful film that feels epic and yet very intimate as well.

 

In the accompanying podcast Daniel tells me of THE FALL OF OTRAR’s fascinating production history (it was part of a national search for ‘new blood’ from the ‘regions’; it began filming just as the Soviet Union was unravelling, it started off as Amirkulov’s graduation project, it is now one of the key works of Kazahkstan cinema); his own involvement with the project; how the film can be seen as the result of a Russian influence in the dramaturgy and an East Asian, particularly Japanese, influence in the visual aesthetic. We talk too of the film’s initial distribution at home and in New York, Martin Scorsese’s involvement, and how this new release is demonstrating how the film is also one that speaks to our times, and the various ways it does so. There are digressions (Russian Formalism, Deleuze and Guattari’s A THOUSAND PLATEAUS: CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA, showing vs telling in cinema….and much more. It can be listened to below:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

The trailer for the film may be seen here:

José Arroyo

Incompresso (Luigi Comencini, 1966).

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A beautiful film about childhood, quite restrained in its telling but very successful as a tearjerker. The film begins with the British Consul in Florence (Anthony Quayle) at his wife’s deathbed deciding how he’s going to tell the news to his children. He decides on telling the oldest, Andrew, who he feels can handle it, but not the youngest, Miles, who is not yet in school and, in his view, more sensitive, like his mother. This decision results in structural miscommunication in this otherwise loving family to the point that Andrew, who dearly loves his father, gets so little attention that he begins to feel unwanted. According to Michel Ciment in one of the extras, the film was damned at Cannes for being too popular. Ciment offers an interesting critique of film critics arguing that they devote too much time to theme and too little to mise-en-scene. He argues that opera is melodrama and critics of opera would never think of restricting their critique to the libretto, yet how film critics often damn melodrama without dealing seriously with the direction, which Ciment finds to be perfect in INCOMPRESSO, as do I. Milo, the younger son is depicted with all the freedom from restraint that Tootie is in MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, just as sharp and equally capable of wickedness. The absent mother is figured regularly through the house the family inhabit, absent, but with constant reminders through décor, paintings, forgotten messages, and a much-valued recording of her reading Eliot’s THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK. The first scene had me welling, and in spite of all the humour in the film, I remained that way until the end, when the floodgates opened. David Cairns has an excellent video essay on the depiction of Childhood in Comencini films, A CHILD’S HEART. The film is based on a Victorian novel by Florence Montgomery published in 1869. It was remade in Hollywood as MISUNDERSTOOD (Jerry Schatzberg, 1983) with Gene Hackman in the Quayle part.

José Arroyo

THE SUNDAY WOMAN/ La donna della Domenica (Luigi Comencini, 1975)

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A mystery with a comical bent set in Turin’s high society based on a best-selling novel by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini. A man is killed with a giant dildo. Inspector Santamaria (Marcello Mastrioanni), polite, middle-aged, Roman, with a structured life which includes having sex on Sundays with women he doesn’t care to have stay until Monday, is the detective. Jacqueline Bisset, at the peak of her beauty here and very glamorous plays Anna Carla Dosio, so uppity she’s turned in by her servants, and is the first suspect. Her best friend is super-rich closet-case Massimo Campi (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Richard Dyer does a wonderful intro where he remarks that whilst there’s nothing to mark Campi out as gay, that’s not quite the case with his lower-class lover Lello (Aldo Regianni), and had he seen the film when it came out he would have found that depiction homophobic, whereas now, in the context of greater representation, he finds the characteristics attributed to Lello – a homebody who likes exotic vacations, a dress sense that is on the too-much spectrum of elegance, his relative ‘effeminacy’, loving, loyal, rather hysterical,  living his follie d’amour in a frenzy that sometimes embodies his boyfriend – endearing. In the end, the case is not about art or sex but, even in Turin’s high society, crude cash. There’s an interesting twist too in that Mastrioanni becomes Bisset’s Sunday Man whilst she continues to reap all the benefits of being married to her rich industrialist husband. Lovely film, that adds to my appreciation of  Comencini’s work with actors and control of tone . Radiance has produced a lovely disc of it which I see many friends have worked on.

Jose Arroyo

THE IRON PREFECT/ IL PREFETTO DI FERRO (PASQUALE SQUITIERI, 1977)i

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A popular and political film based on a real person, Claudio Mori, who was sent by Mussolini to Palermo in 1925 to eradicate the Mafia. Mori, humourless, systematic, efficient and ruthless begins to smoke them out; first the peasants, then the landowners followed by the churchmen, bourgeois and aristocrats. But it’s no use, at the end all his troubles have been for nothing because all the money leads to the Fascist Party and the State. His goal had been to make people respect the law by making citizens fear the state as much as they fear the Mafia. In the end, they do but only because the State is already the Mafia.

A gripping film with no particular visual razzmatazz but with an eye for both scale and intimacy and a superb Ennio Morricone score. Giuliano Gemma is good in a role meant for his idol, Burt Lancaster. The presence of Claudia Cardinale, second-billed in a tiny role that would seem worthless of her if she didn’t represent ‘the people’ (and have ‘the people’ ever been more beautifully represented?), was a complete mystery to me — why would such a big star take this small and far from challenging role?  — until I learned she was Squitieri’s partner at this time. The extras on the Radiance disc are excellent and I learned from Alex Cox’s intro that Giuliano Gemma was so popular in Japan he had a range of motorcycles and scooters named after him by Suzuki.

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: Cinema Rediscovered 2025 Preview

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Richard and I are once more excited about the prospect of Cinema Rediscovered, which begins next week on the 23rd and runs right to the 27th at the Watershed in Bristol. This year’s is a beautifully balanced programme with directors (Carlos Saura, Maria Luisa Bemberg, Stephanie Rothman, Yasuzō Masumura) and stars (Anna Me Wong) ripe for rediscovery; but also featuring key exemplars of queer cinema (MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDERETTE, DESERT HEARTS, THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION; ostensibly the first film to feature queer representation in India, BADNAM BASTI (NEIGHBOURHOOD OF ILL REPUTE); black cinema (HANDSWORTH SONGS, THE KILLER OF SHEEP), feminist exploitation cinema (THE WORKING GIRLS, THE VELVET VAMPIRE); key works from classic directors (Sam Fuller’s THE HOUSE OF BAMBOO, John Ford’s YOUNG MR. LINCOLN; a whole strand of 1980s British Cinema (from ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS to A ZED AND TWO NOUGHTS),  newly restored masterpieces (THE FALL OF OTRAR, YEELEN); and a smattering of films from practically every hemisphere. A great program, which includes not only films but workshops, talks, introductions; for Cinema Rediscovered is not only about seeing films in the best possible conditions but also about learning about cinema from filmmakers, curators, programmers, critics, academics and other practitioners.

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

One of the lunchtime talks will be A BRIEF HISTORY OF FILM ON CHANNEL 4 with Sheldon Hall. I interviewed Sheldon Hall on his book on films on his book ARMCHAIR CINEMA: FEATURE FILMS ON BRITISH TELEVISION, 1929-1981 here:

In the accompanying podcast Richard and I go through the programme day by day and highlight those  films we have already seen at Ritrovatto or elsewhere and can recommend. These include:

Jose Arroyo

 

A MAN ON HIS KNEES / UN UOMO IN GINOCCHIO (Damiano Damiani, 1979).

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Like a Warners 30s Gangster Film. Giuliano Gemma is former car thief now gone straight. He’s out of jail, running a street stall and doing well for his family, when a place he delivers coffee to becomes the site of a mafia hit. A coffee cup carelessly left there implicates him and puts him on a mafia hit list. The film is all about how society dictates what a man should be and the impossibility of living up to it. The hero loses everything, is forced on his knees to kiss the mafia don’s ring in public, all so he could get back what had been robbed from him but with the addition of now being at the Mafia’s beck and call. But the hitman hired to off him (Michele Placido) is in no better position: the sole breadwinner of a rural family taking lives because he has no other way of maintaining his own.  How to get out of this one? Will he get out this one? An exciting male melodrama, visually inventive with long takes, hand-held camera, and film noir lighting, shot on the streets of Palermo, where a man constantly tries to do right by his family even as the society that requires that from him prevents him from doing so. Interesting too in that the mafia is here seeing exploiting poor people, pitting them against each other, extracting everything possible from the already poor and desperate. A film to see.

 

Jose Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: DELITTO D’AMORE (Luigi Comencini, 1974).

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DELITTO D’AMORE (Luigi Comencini, 1974), also known as CRIME OF LOVE or SOMEWHERE BEYOND LOVE in English, is along with VOLTATI EUGENIO (1980), my favourite of the Comencini films shown at this year’s Ritrovato in Bologna.

Two factory workers fall in love. He’s from a family of Anarchists from the North. She’s an immigrant from South. They both live with their families but she’s a woman so all her movements are monitored. They split up because she needs to be married in a Church whilst he can only consider City Hall. Factories spewing smoke is a constant background to the development of their romance.

In the accompanying podcast Richard and I discuss: how it is a MARXIST romance in which two factory workers fall in love even as the factory spews poison all over them (one of the titles considered for the film was LOVE AND POISON); how rare it is for a political film to deploy such a delicate tone, a mixture of humour/romance/enchantment; the relative rarity of having working class workers depicted so lovingly and glamorously (by Guliano Gemma and Stefania Sandrelli).

The film’s been compared to LOVE STORY (Arthur Hiller, 1970) and also ALI, FEAR EATS THE SOUL (Fassbinder, 1974). We bring up Visconti’s ROCCO E I SUOI FRATELLI (1960). None of the comparisons convey the humour, the romance, the enchantment that this very political film evokes. We hope we do in the podcast that follows:

The podcast may also be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

Many thanks to David Cairns for his help with this. He’s done a wonderful video essay on children in Comencini films called A CHILD’S HEART, that  may be found in the Radiance’s disc of Comencini’s INCOMPRESSO.  The article from SENSES OF CINEMA on the film that Richard refers to, The Aesthetics and Politics of Melodrama, Reconsidered: Delitto d’amore/ Crime of Love by Thomas Austin, may be found here.

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: Ritrovato Round-Up 2025 with Pamela Hutchinson

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For this year’s Ritrovato Round-Up we are joined by the witty, incisive and all-around fabulous Pamela Hutchinson, editor of the Silent London website, author of two marvellous BFI Classic monographs (The Red Shoes, Pandora’s Box), producer of the Weekly Film Bulletin for Sight and Sound and one of the jurors for Ritrovato’s DVD Awards since 2018.

In the discussion that follows we touch on all the strands of the festival, praise Cecilia Cenciarelli for her programming, Mariann Lewinsky for her illuminating introductions and Ehsan Khoshbakht for his superb programme notes on Lewis Milestone. We touch on the Willi Forst and Nordic Noir programmes, so popular José couldn’t get into any of them. We have a lively debate on Molly Haskell’s Hepburn programme, agree on our love of Naruse, discuss how Comencini’s Delitto de amore  highlights issues of class and made us want to see more Comencini films and delight in the early cinema and silent cinema strands. Sumitra Peries’ Gehenu Lamai (The Girls) is a film we all adored. We touch on memorable experiences, such as watching Coline Serrau introduce Trois hommes et un couffin at the Piazza Maggiore, or the incredible response to Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, the impact of Silvana Mangano in Bitter Rice, the intensity of the colour in Duel in the Sun, or the spontaneous applause for Shirley MacLaine in Artists and Models.

All this and much more can be listened to in the podcast below:

The podcast may also be listened to here (above):

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

If you can’t get enough of Pam discussing Hepburn, she goes into much greater depth here for the BBC 4’s History’s Heroes series: Katharine Hepburn: Queen of the Screen

The Laczic sisters have also done a wonderful podcast on the festival here:

 

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: Arrebato (Iván Zulueta, 1979)

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Iván Zulueta’s only feature as sole director. A cult film; a queer film; a vampire film; a film maudit; a film about film; a film about drugs; a film about film as a drug;  a film that deserves to be better known. Audiences will recognise many of Almodóvar’s collaborators from his earliest works (Cecilia Roth, Eusebio Poncela, Luis Ciges, Will More; Ángel Luis Fernádez is the dop) and the voice of Almódovar himself. A genre film that transforms into an auteur film. A film of the Movida and a film of the transition. A film that embodies and evokes one era but that gained traction in another. A cinephile’s film about addiction where one delights in being bitten by drugs and cinema even as that bite becomes transformative and potentially deadly. An avant-garde experiment encased in a genre film. A trawl through the underground that aimed at the mainstream.  Aside from this film, Zulueta is probably best known today for his fantastic designs for the posters of Almodóvar’s early films. A film to see and discuss.

 

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

SOME OF THE SCENES DISCUSSED IN THE PODCAST:

Beginning: Editing Vampires

Gran Via as Repertory Cinema:

Discussing Mae West:

King Solomon’s Mines and Cinephilia:

Cecilia Roth as Betty Boop:

End:

Drugs. Male Nudity, Cinema:

 

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 445 – Riefenstahl

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n the 1930s, Leni Riefenstahl infamously directed two propaganda films, Triumph of the Will and Olympia, for the Nazi Party. For the rest of her life, which ended in 2003, she denied knowledge of the regime’s crimes, including the Holocaust. In 2016, her heirs gave her estate, which included a vast collection of personal documents, correspondence, and film and tape recordings, to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which itself gave permission to Sandra Maischberger and Andres Veiel, a journalist and filmmaker respectively, to use the material as the basis of a documentary. Riefenstahl, comprising countless elements of the archive, along with documents from other sources, builds a biography of a person who never came clean about what she knew about Nazi Germany, and never took responsibility for her part in it.

It’s a complex and layered examination of a life led between pride and denial, and has resonances today: take Riefenstahl’s television appearance in 1976 alongside Elfriede Kretschmer, an anti-Nazi activist and contemporary who refuses to believe her claims of ignorance during wartime, which is followed by recordings of phone calls to Riefenstahl in support of her stance and contempt for Kretschmer. The line between those calls and the metastasising popularity of extreme right-wing, “anti-woke” and similar ideologies today is self-evident, as is the difference between ideas expressed publicly and privately. Riefenstahl is more outspoken off the record than on it, demanding interviewers’ cameras be turned off to prevent them from capturing candid revelations. In this sense and others, her life provides a window into fascism – what drives it – her initial response to seeing and hearing Adolf Hitler speak is almost sexual – what it represents and offers to its adherents, and how it shrinks and cowers when it doesn’t get everything it wants.

It’s a problem for Mike that the film doesn’t seem to think that the artistic and cultural impact of Riefenstahl’s work is worth exploring, where to him it’s the most interesting thing about her. Not only were her films technically and artictically innovative – something claimed by subjects in the film but not explained or examined – but her work arguably gives the Nazis their key, and enduring, victory. As thuggish and vile as the regime was, and despite its collapse, through Triumph of the Will and Olympia it created an image of itself as glorious and powerful with which we continue to associate it, and to which neo-Nazis today aspire to emulate. Few filmmakers have left a cultural legacy of such significance and duration, but the documentary isn’t interested in the work – only the person.

Quibbles apart, Riefenstahl is an excellent example of how to tell a complex tale with intention, clarity, and concision, while allowing for interpretation of the material presented, and it’ll be the basis of endless conversations. Highly recommended.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

Jose Arroyo in Conversation with James Taylor on ….THE SUPERHERO BLOCKBUSTER: ADAPTATION, STYLE AND MEANING

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Just as the Superhero film loses centrality in the culture there comes a book that is not only a brilliant accounting of the various strategies of adaptations the mode engages with but also offers a methodology that will be of interest and use to anyone engaged with the analysis of visual media:  not only a brilliant book, but an important one. In this podcast we talk about what it is that is being adapted when discussing comic book characters that have so many iterations across different media. We talk about modes of seriality; the translation of the illusion of movement across media; the significance of bodies in spaces and movement in the mode; intertextuality, kaleidoscopic irruptions; how the move to digital affected issues of realism and reflexivity; restorative and reflective nostalgia; how the works compress, hierarchize and create continuities; the dramatization of alternate timelines….and we return over and over again to the hierarchization of gendered, racialised and sexualised bodies in dialogue with past iterations, current politics, contemporary formal strategies and more. I can’t imagine future explorations of audiovisual work engaged with adapting any form of Intellectual Property, characters or worlds uninformed by THE SUPERHERO BLOCKBUSTER: ADAPTATION, STYLE AND MEANING.

 

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: Le Jour se lève (Marcel Carné, 1939)

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We begin this podcast by congratulation the beautiful Garden Cinema on their superb programming. Le Jour se lève is the first in a series of great films exploring International Film Noir.

In the podcast we discuss the film as an example of ‘Poetic Realism’; as one of the first films to be described as a ‘film noir’; as an expression of the Popular Front sentiment and how the film’s reception aligned with reviewers’ political views. In relation to the film, we discuss the significance of its structure, the precision of the decor and mise-se-en-scène where it seems every object in François room subsequently comes into play to describe loss, longing, love, innocence since tarnished.  I have made a compilation of all the times Gabin looks out the bullet-riddled window and outside. As the day rises and the night ends so does François’ life. We discuss Gabin, Arletty, Jules Berry…all at their best. Gabin is the representative everyman with nothing to live for but more sand in his lungs. It’s not only that as Georges Altman writes, ‘the whole of the working class is etched in Gabin’s face’ it’s that Gabin’s IS the face of the whole of the French working classes. He is François,. She is Françoise. Together they represent the oppression of the French working class. They are everyman and everywoman, orphaned by capitalism. This is a film not only about doomed love but a protest against class-as-destiny, one of the film’s most worked-through themes. The podcast may be listened to below:

 

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

Readers wanting to continue with their interest in the film might start here with  Ben McCann’s excellent guide.

An example of right-wing reception of the film from Ben McCann’s book:

 

A short compilation of all the times Gabin looks out the window culminating in François speech to his neighbours:

Arletty

 

Glorious iconic imagery:

The train seen only through its smoke, part of Traubner’s design, so beautifully rendered meaningful by Carné.

 

Those of you who want to pursue the Gabin connection might be interested in this two-part podcast with the great Ginette Vincendeau:

 

 

https://notesonfilm1.com/2019/12/10/in-conversation-with-ginette-vincendeau-part-1/

 

https://notesonfilm1.com/2019/12/13/in-conversation-with-ginette-vincendeay-part-ii/

José Arroyo

One Second (Zhang Yimou, 2020)

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Zhang Yimou’s very beautiful film has things to say about the cultural revolution and Chinese History and other things we’re not best placed to discuss. However, it is also about cinema: it’s lure, it’s power, its enchantments and  its fragility; and Zhang Yimou’s magisterial mise-en-scène embodies its themes through its medium as if in the process of unfurling from an editing suite, to a projector and onto a screen.

The podcast may be listened to here:

We’re very grateful this week for Theme Music by Cody  https://codyoxford.bandcamp.com/

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

 

Images from the Film:

 

 

Jack Hulbert on ‘How The Knight Became Dark: How Media and Societal Changes Can Affect a Long Running Franchise’

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“How The Knight Became Dark: How Media and Societal Changes Can Affect a Long Running Franchise” traverses the history of the Batman franchise from the first television serial in the 1940’s, all the way to the most recent filmic entry in the Batman franchise: Matt Reeves’ The Batman[1]. In the subsequent 80 years, a plethora of Batman media and films have been released, all with their own styles, aesthetics and tones.

 

Posters for (from left to right) Batman[2], Batman[3], Batman Forever[4], The Dark Knight[5], The Batman[6].

 

This video essay demonstrates this history of Batman films, the history of changes in the cinematic medium, and the historical eras of comic books, to understand how nearly 100 years of constant change can be seen and felt in The Batman.

 

The Batman franchise is perfectly suited to exploring the nature of how 80 years can affect a franchise: be this through societal changes or through cinematic changes. Reflection theory suggests “that cinema, being a “popular art,” tends to embody some state of mind common to the millions of people living in a society”[7]. Using this idea as an approach, seismic shifts in the zeitgeist can feasibly be observed through tonal or story changes within a franchise. For this purpose, the Batman franchise is a unique example, being a franchise that had been going strong for almost a century. It has crossed ears of cinema, the Hays code era and the post 9/11 response for example, and it has also developed and crossed multiple eras of comic books, the overly safe silver and transgressive modern age for example. These changes will be explored by exposing and analysing where their influences can be found in 2022’s The Batman.

 

Before analysing The Batman however, it is logical to first explain the history of the Batman franchise and how, historically, it has interacted with seismic shifts and changes to the zeitgeist. To explain this history, every major film and shift must be explored chronologically, to concisely and simply explain 80 years of history in under 11 minutes. (“Major film” here refers to lie action. While the video essay will feature clips from animated films, this is both to show comic books in a more visually engaging way, using their film counterparts, and because pretending that they don’t exist would be disingenuous to the history of Batman films). The eras of Batman films will be explored by their director, splitting the eras neatly, almost by decade. This aligns with the shifts that have affected the franchise, mainly the Hays code limiting the 1960’s film (and its removal between Batman and Batman); the negative reaction to the darker Burton films ( which used the post Hays code freedom to explore “deconstructive and dystopian re-envisionings of iconic characters and the worlds that they live in”[8]); the shift towards dark realism post 9/11 (which was felt across all of cinema as “the omnipresent post traumatic response”[9] at the time was that it all “looked like a movie”).

 

Only after unveiling this history of change can The Batman be analysed. With an understanding of 80 years of cinematic and societal oscillations, sequences from and the overall tone of The Batman are rendered meaningful through their relationship to these changes. After working chronologically through the history of change, going back through each influential event can elucidate the notions of reflection theory: can the various zeitguiseds be felt in The Batman, or is it truly a standalone work?

 

When it was originally released The Batman was positioned as a standalone work. Obviously with the advent of The Penguin[10] series on HBO this is no longer accurate, but it is interesting to consider how standalone it truly was. The word standalone indicates that it is not influenced by other films or properties and is a singular work. However, this video essay attempts to disprove that notion, challenging the nature of how anything can really be singular or standalone. It posits that in reality, Reeves’ The Batman has been shaped by 80 years of changes and that each of these can be observed within itself. It is not a product of isolation but a product of constant change.

The Video Essay may be seen on Vimeo here:

 

Bibliography:

Bordwell, David, “Observations on Film Art: Zip, Zero, Zeitgeist”, DavidBordwell.net (2014), https://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/08/24/zip-zero-zeitgeist/ accessed 3rd February 2025

 

Briefel, Aviva; Miller, Sam. Introduction, in “Horror After 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror” (University of Texas Press, Austin, 2011)

 

Filmography:

 

Batman (Leslie H. Martinson, USA, Greenlawn Productions, 1966)

 

Batman (Tim Burton, USA, Warner Bros, 1989)

 

Batman Forever (Joel Schumacher, USA, PolyGram Pictures, 1995)

 

The Batman (Matt Reeves, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2022)

 

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, USA, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2008)

 

The Penguin (USA, HBO, tx.30.09.2024 – 11.11.2024)

 

 

 

[1] The Batman (Matt Reeves, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2022)

[2] Batman (Leslie H. Martinson, USA, Greenlawn Productions, 1966)

[3] Batman (Tim Burton, USA, Warner Bros, 1989)

[4] Batman Forever (Joel Schumacher, USA, PolyGram Pictures, 1995)

[5] The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, USA, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2008)

[6] The Batman (Matt Reeves, USA, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2022)

[7] Bordwell, 2014

[8] Quoted in Shadows of the Bat (USA, Warner Bros. DVD, 2005)

[9] Briefel, Aviva; Miller, Sam. Introduction, in “Horror After 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror” (University of Texas Press, Austin, 2011)

[10] The Penguin (USA, HBO, tx.30.09.2024 – 11.11.2024)

Fiola Odusote on the Mise-en-Scène of the Multiverse

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Creator’s Statement

Within my video essay I will be answering the question of: how the mise-en-scene in scenes depicting the multiverse help to enrich a film’s story? I plan to answer this question using three films to support my argument. Everything Everywhere All at Once (Kwan & Scheinert, 2022), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse (Dos Santos, Powers & Thompson, 2023) and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Raimi, 2022) are the films I will be using to support my video essay as all three feature the multiverse in a significant way that impacts the narrative of their respective films. The Research question of my video essay interests me as I was fascinated by the rise in popularity of films that feature the multiverse. Upon further thought about why multiverse films have become so popular I realised that their rise in popularity has a lot to do with the rise in popularity of comic book adaptations. Comic books, more specifically science fiction / superhero comic books, often feature storylines concerned with the multiverse and so it is unsurprising that with the increasing output of movie studios like Marvel, there have been a greater amount of multiverse stories told. The multiverse, however, is not a concept limited to comic book adaptations, as a film like Everything Everywhere All at Once shows that interesting original stories can be told using it. As I was aware about why so many multiverse films were being produced, I began to become fascinated about how the concept could be featured in audio-visual storytelling. Several critiques about films that feature the multiverse tend to be reductive and make claims about the films being mainly spectacle and a monetary vehicle for cameos that aim to draw in crowds chasing nostalgia (Burt, 2022). And that’s why it felt important for me to discuss the different ways the multiverse can be used to enhance a film’s story.

In Cinema As a Worldbuilding Machine in the Digital Era : Essay on Multiverse Films and TV Series, Alain Boillat explored the idea that Hollywood, after 9/11, put a larger focus on world building that had to do with parallel worlds (Boillat, 2022, p. 26-29). Boillat mentioned that CGI in the early 2000s had become popular and also mentioned that many 2000s and 2010s Hollywood films could be looked at as a reflection of the shared trauma the US had experienced. Many films featured city settings that were thrown into chaos by freak events, and it could be possible that history repeated itself when it came to films produced after the Covid-19 Pandemic. Stephanie Burt asked the question in her article ‘Why do we live in a multiversal moment?’ and proceeded to answer herself by stating that ‘One theory holds that the ascent of the multiverse matches our need to keep up many identities. We may feel like different people as we slide from Instagram to Slack to the family group chat’ (Burt, 2022). In a post pandemic world where we use social media more than ever before, Burt’s theory about the multiversal moment we’re in may ring true (Dixon, 2023). Multiverse stories due to being fantastical could allow audiences to explore their traumas through an escapist lens. Themes of trauma relating to the Covid-19 pandemic may be worth paying attention to when it comes to multiverse films after Covid-19, as explorations surrounding topics like loss would be very relevant to general audiences.

When looking at how loss could be explored in a multiverse film, I focused on how the filmmakers of both Everything Everywhere All at Once and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness both employed genre in relation to alternate universes. The Daniels, the directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once, used the Hong Kong romance genre to explore the loss of the romance in Evelyn and Waymond’s marriage. They took inspiration from Wong Kar-Wai’s  In the Mood For Love (Kar-Wai, 2000) and within my video essay I included clips from Kar-Wai’s film to support my point. Sam Raimi within his take of a Doctor Strange film, employed the horror genre to show how Wanda’s loss had driven her to commit immoral acts. Raimi referenced his own prior works when using horror techniques and I also included clips from The Evil Dead (Raimi, 1983) to help support this point as well. Son Lux, the band who are responsible for creating Everything Everywhere All at Once’s score and soundtrack, discussed their creative process with Rolling Stone in an interview (Rolling Stone, 2022). In that interview they mentioned how the film utilised established genre a lot and that required them to compose the score in different ways depending on the genre that was taking place on screen. In the parts of the film that delved into Romance, Son Lux often utilised the faint sounds of strings alongside the more prominent sound of a piano softly playing. The romantic scoring accompanied the Wong Kar-Wai inspired visuals and this successfully helped the film to emulate the romantic genre in an effective way.

Identity was a theme that explored in both Everything Everywhere All at Once and Spider-man Across the Spider-verse. Both films employ the multiverse to help explore this theme and the animated Spider-man film used different styles of animation in order to both communicate what universe we’re occupying and also express what characters are feeling and the ideas they are fighting against. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, identity is explored through the motif of the googly eye, which Evelyn places on her forehead at the climax of the film. An eye on the forehead is known as a third eye and is a symbol within Buddhism for enlightenment. The third eye’s connection to enlightenment is important to Evelyn’s journey of reshaping her identity to become a better version of herself. The placement of the third eye marks a change in her approach to life as she adopts more of her husband’s characteristics in order to save her daughter.

Additionally, the importance of family, community and loving oneself are explored within The Daniels film as well as Raimi’s. Embracing your loved ones and yourself is the key to solving the central problems within Everything Everywhere All at Once and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. And the depictions of the multiverse within both of these films helped to drive home this message as montage and having Elizabeth Olsen act against herself, allowed for the story of both of these films to be told in an interesting and unique way. A films’ score as well as visual techniques’ such as slow motion can help to punctuate important moments where the themes of family, community and self-acceptance are explored. And I believe The Daniels and Raimi’s films employ these elements of mise-en-scene quite well.

My video essay whilst briefly discussing the critiques of the multiverse film does not go into much depth on the weaknesses of that kind of film. This is in large part due to the nature of my research question which is more focused on how the multiverse film can aid a films story. All the multiverse films I’ll be discussing in my video essay are not perfect as both marvel films that I’m using to support my points do use unnecessary cameos as a way to draw in audiences and Everything Everywhere All at Once due to its chaotic and absurdist nature could be seen as being forced to sacrifice its potential for more intriguing cinematography so it does not overwhelm its audience. In spite of the weaknesses the multiverse film can have, I do believe the merits of the films I’m discussing within my video essay do show that the multiverse film can be used in a successful way to explore grounded themes. Science fiction films that do choose to use the concept should not be reduced to being seen as pure spectacle but should instead be given the opportunity to show that they have the capacity to tell as interesting of a story as a traditional drama. Within my filmography and bibliography, I will be including all the resources that have been referenced within this Creator’s statement as well as my video essay.

The video essay may also be seen on Vimeo here:

 

 

Filmography

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) Directed by Sam Raimi, USA, Marvel Studios

In the Mood for Love (2000) Directed by Wong Kar-Wai, Hong Kong, Jet Tone Production, Block 2 Pictures & Paradis Films

Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) Directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers & Justin K. Thompson, USA, Columbia Pictures

Spiderman: into the Spider-Verse (2018) Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman, Canada, Columbia Pictures

The Evil Dead (1983) Directed by Sam Raimi, USA, Renaissance Pictures

Bibliography

Boillat, A. (2022) Cinema As a Worldbuilding Machine in the Digital Era : Essay on Multiverse Films and TV Series, Indiana University Press: Indiana. p. 26-29

Burt, S. (2022) ‘Is the Multiverse Where Originality Goes to Die?’, The New Yorker, 31 October. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/07/is-the-multiverse-where-originality-goes-to-die  (Accessed 2 January 2025).

Cavendish, R. & Burland C. (1995) Man, Myth and Magic: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Mythology, Religion, and the Unknown . Vol. 19. New York: Marshall Cavendish Corporation p. 2606

Coe, J. (2023) Everything Everywhere All at Once and the Intimate Public of Asian American Cinema. Film Quarterly, 76(4), p. 35

Desta, Y. (2022) ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once: All the Wild Movie References, Explained (as Best as We Can)’ Vanity Fair. 8 April. Available at: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/04/everything-everywhere-all-at-once-explained-as-best-we-can?srsltid=AfmBOooeQHL3nrXJF798TRQ6UR35L2bzdb52cZYd-jM4p7qcOgexW_-l (Accessed: 11 December 2024)

Dixon S. (2023). Social media use during COVID-19 worldwide – statistics & facts. Statistita. Available at: https://www.statista.com/topics/7863/social-media-use-during-coronavirus-covid-19-worldwide/#topicHeader__wrapper (Accessed 10 January 2025).

Drake, N. (2023) ‘What is the multiverse—and is there any evidence it really exists?’, History, 13 March. Available at: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/what-is-the-multiverse (Accessed: 27 October 2024)

Latour, J. (w) & Rodriguez, R. (a) (2015). Most Wanted?. Spider-Gwen. Vol. 0, 17 November. USA: ‎Marvel – US.

Mead, S. (no date), Futuristic city, Auto Design Magazine, Sandow Meida: USA, Available at: https://autodesignmagazine.com/en/2019/12/syd-mead-has-passed-away/. (Accessed: 11 January 2025)

Mead, S. (no date), Zhora dancing in Taffey’s Snake Pit bar, The Movie Art of Syd Mead: Visual Futurist, Titan Books: UK, Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-50955699. (Accessed: 11 January 2025)

Morrison, H. (2000) Detail showing head of Buddha statue with third eye in Da cheng ge at Da Fo si. Available at: https://hpcbristol.net/visual/Hv03-034 (Accessed: 10 January 2025)

Rolling Stone. (2022) How Son Lux Crafted a Maximalist Soundtrack for ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r64JPGRT_OQ  (Accessed: 10 January 2025).

Travis, B. (2022). ‘Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse Will Have Six Dominant Art Styles: ‘The Ambition Is To Wow You’ – Exclusive Image’, Empire, 22 November. Available At: https://www.empireonline.com/movies/news/spider-man-across-the-spider-verse-six-art-styles-exclusive/ (Accessed: 9 January 2025).

I Am Legend: A Prime Depiction of Isolation Horror by Jake Diamond

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The video essay may be seen below:

I Am Legend: A Prime Depiction of Isolation Horror Creator’s Statement 

 

In I Am Legend: A Prime Depiction of Isolation Horror I demonstrate how, through a cinematic character study of Doctor Robert Neville, complete psychological existentialism, created through isolation, can be visually depicted in conjunction with a narrative in I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, U.S., 2007). This presents I Am Legend as an excellent example of Isolation portrayed on-screen, in conjunction with the sub-genre of Isolation horror. I first outline the cinematic scape the director, Francis Lawrence creates, through daunting expansive establishing shots of the conventionally populated Manhattan; now presented as a desolate, looming skeleton of social contact. Visually, we are thrust into this empty cityscape which Robert occupies completely alone prior to an exploration of the narrative. I examine the sub-genre as a whole, portraying how it can be broken down into three separate sections with their own conventions; conventions all used by I Am Legend, with a primary focus on the existential downfall that is inevitable from a lack of human contact. I make visual reference to examples of each of these subsections of the genre: Cast Away (Robert Zemeckis, U.S., 2000) and Moon (Duncan Jones, U.K., U.S., 2009) in reference to the Geographical subsection; 127 Hours (Danny Boyle, U.K., U.S., 2010) and Buried (Rodrigo Cortes, Spain, 2010) in reference to the Social subsection; and The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, U.K., U.S., 2019) and The Lodge (Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, U.K., U.S., 2019) in reference to the existential subsection. I also outline that the film is a prime example due to its timeless essence surrounding the depiction of a cinematic star being cast against type to demonstrate psychological deterioration; referencing Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth (Sidney Salkow and Ubaldo B. Ragona, U.S., Italy, 1964) and Charlton Heston in The Omega Man (Boris Sagal, U.S., 1971).

 

I outline how the film uses these earlier adaptations to portray a modern take on the text, focusing directly on demonstrating isolation. I detail that the film can be broken down into five distinct narrative sections that each have their own audio-visual constructions, in conjunction with narrative events to present a mental decline within Robert Neville. The formation of my essay surrounds presenting a short clip from the movie before dissecting it, visually and through narration, presenting the deeper meanings present. This is done through visual overlays, graphic colour matting and waveform displays to detail how cinematography/lighting, mise-en-scene, editing, performance and sound are constructed – in-tandem – to illuminate Neville’s perception of safety contrasted with the reality of his impending doom. I additionally use multiple musical scores from the soundtrack of the film, within different sections as a subtextual presentation of the contrasting tones and ambience of perceived safety versus actual danger and isolated existentialism. The construction of multiple sections which I transition between are used to compartmentalise the narrative significance of specific moments and the effect they have upon Neville. I start with the mundane existence he has crafted for himself for stability before transitioning through the narrative to eventually link different portions that build up to his needless sacrifice. He accepts that his life of isolation has been a slow purgatory more than a complete existence.

 

Outside of the visual elements of the video essay, I explored scholarship that assisted in my research and formalisation of the video essay, examining written as-well as visual texts. First, I examined the theoretical underpinnings of the fascinating undertones of the sub-genre. Francis McAndrew outlines that ‘under some circumstances creepiness and horror can be seductive and […] this allure comes from questioning what we ourselves would do if we found ourselves alone, forming mental strategies to deal with it.’[1] This element of self-projection into the narrative sphere is the bedrock of isolation horror and is prominent within I Am Legend, with a diverse introspective look at a singular individual in an inescapable situation. I also examined Carl Royer and B.L. Cooper’s statements on introspective effects stating that ‘much of the finest horror […] deals with psychological horror.’[2] The horrific visual construction of the film is built upon this innate fear that underpins the genre, where inescapable introspective torture is more emotionally provoking than external stimuli, such as the situational dark seekers in I Am Legend. I also made use of Justin Robert’s statement that ‘the hero […] is a total product of his or her environment’ within the actual visual fabric of the video essay to highlight it’s importance.[3] As my essay presents this idea of perception versus reality within the realm of Robert Neville, this idea that – within such narratives – the hero forms environmental schemas was key for my understanding of how to display the environmental contrasts Francis Lawrence conveys in his directorial construction. I researched conventions of films featuring vampiric creatures to look into the external effect the dark seekers have upon Neville. Abbott states that “Rather than embodying humanity’s Legend, Neville’s legend is rescuing the remaining humanity.”[4] Rather than following the conventions of the genre – outlined within the original novel I Am Legend (Richard Matheson, 1999) which shaped the genre shown in other works such as The Stand (Stephen King, 2008) and The Passage (Justin Cronin, 2010) – and submitting to the dark seekers, acting as a martyr of humanity, Neville protects the cure he gives to Anna, accepting a lack of hope within himself, accepting that he cannot connect with the future humanity due to his deterioration. Finally, I also explored video essays about I Am Legend specifically for inspiration and intriguing elements examining deeper meanings. Ryan Hollinger states that ‘Robert tries to survive the dangers of both the outside world and the loneliness and isolation that plagues his mind.’[5] This focus on the two dangers: the dark seekers and Neville himself frames how I presented the ending of the video essay with a focus on match cuts with two perspectives of interior and exterior danger. The channel Macabre Storytelling also outlines in their video essay that I Am Legend engages in ‘flipping the script [and] removing the hopeful aspect of the narrative.’[6] This notion was pivotal within my video essay as I explored how Neville is connected with Sam, his pet who is the only safe form of social contact available to him. How, without Sam, he realises his existentialism and even with the inclusion of human contact and a hope for a future he lacks any essence of hope. This exploration of other texts and an in depth-viewing of films within the sub-genre aided the construction of my video essay.

 

Word Count: 1086

 

Video may also be seen on Vimeo here below:

Link to Video-Essay: I Am Legend – A Prime Depiction of Isolation Horror Video-Essay.mp4

 

 

Bibliography:

Abbot, S. (2016) ‘Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21st Century’, Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh.

 

Cronin, Justin. (2010) The Passage. Ballantine Books.

 

King, Stephen. (2008) The Stand. Hodder and Stoughton.

 

Macabre Storytelling (2020) ‘I Am Legend – One Fatal Flaw’, Uploaded On: Youtube. 17th November. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmvgea1vP7o (Accessed: 28th October 2024).

 

Matheson, Richard. (1999) I Am Legend. Gollancz.

 

McAndrew, T. Francis. (2020) ‘The Psychology, Geography and Architecture of Horror: How Places Creep Us Out’, Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, Vol. 4(2), pp. 47-62.

 

Roberts, J. Justin. (2016) ‘Transforming the Hero of I Am Legend’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 44(1), pp. 42-50.

 

Royer, Carl and Cooper, B. L. (2013). “Chapter 2: “And I brought you nightmares”: The Play of Horror in Hitchcock’s Films”, The spectacle of isolation in horror films: dark Parades, Routledge, p. 25.

Ryan Hollinger (2019) ‘The Haunting Meaning of I Am Legend’, Uploaded On: Youtube. 25th August. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VEDxyQnA6U (Accessed: 25th August 2019).

 

Filmography

Buried. (2010). Directed by Rodrigo Cortes. Spain: Versus Entertainment; The Safran Company; Dark Trick Films; Kinology; Studio 37. Main Cast: Ryan Reynolds (Paul Conroy).

 

Cast Away. (2000). Directed by Robert Zemeckis. United States: 20th Century Fox; DreamWorks Pictures; ImageMovers; Playtone. Main Cast: Tom Hanks (Chuck Noland), Helen Hunt (Kelly Frears), Nick Searcy (Stan).

 

I Am Legend. (2007). Directed by Francis Lawrence. United States: Village Roadshow Pictures; Weed Road Pictures; Overbrook Entertainment; Heyday Films; Original Film; Rose City Pictures. Main Cast: Will Smith (Doctor Robert Neville), Alice Braga (Anna), Charlie Tahan (Ethan).

 

Moon. (2009). Directed by Duncan Jones. United States and United Kingdom: Stage 6 Films; Liberty Films; Xingu Films; Limelight. Main Cast: Sam Rockwell (Sam Bell), Kevin Spacey (GERTY).

 

The Last Man on Earth. (1964). Directed by Sidney Salkow and Ubaldo B. Ragona. United States and Italy: Associated Producers Inc.; Produzioni La Regina. Main Cast: Vincent Price (Doctor Robert Morgan), Franca Bettoia (Ruth Collins), Giacomo Rossi Stuart (Ben Cortman).

 

The Lodge. (2019). Directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. United States and United Kingdom: FilmNation Entertainment; Hammer Film Productions. Main Cast: Riley Keough (Grace), Jaeden Martell (Aidan Hall), Lia McHugh (Mia Hall), Richard Armitage (Richard Hall), Alicia Silverstone (Laura Hall).

 

The Lighthouse. (2019). Directed by Robert Eggers. United States and Canada: A24, Regency Enterprises, RT Features, Parts and Labor. Main Cast: Robert Pattinson (Thomas Howard), Willem Dafoe (Thomas Wake).

 

The Omega Man. (1971). Directed by Boris Sagal. United States: Walter Seltzer Productions. Main Cast: Charlton Heston (Neville), Anthony Zerbe (Matthias), Rosalind Cash (Lisa), Paul Koslo (Dutch).

 

127 Hours. (2010). Directed by Danny Boyle. United States and United Kingdom: Pathe; Everest Entertainment; Film4 Productions; HandMade Films, Cloud Eight Films. Main Cast: James Franco (Aron Ralston), Amber Tamblyn (Megan), Kate Mara (Kristi).

 

 

[1] Francis T. McAndrew. (2020) ‘The Psychology, Geography and Architecture of Horror: How Places Creep us out’, Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, Vol. 4(2), pp. 49-50.

[2] Carl Royer and B. L. Cooper. (2013) ‘The Spectacle of Isolation in Horror Films – Dark Parades, Routledge, p. 25.

[3] Justin J. Roberts. (2016) ‘Transforming the Hero of I Am Legend’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Vol. 44(1), p. 42.

[4] S, Abbott. (2016) Undead apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21st Century, Edinburgh University press, Edinburgh, p. 36.

[5] Ryan Hollinger. (2019) ‘The Haunting Meaning of I Am Legend, Uploaded On: Youtube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VEDxyQnA6U, 00:02:28-00:02:40.

[6] Macabre Storytelling. (2020) ‘I Am Legend – One Fatal Flaw’, Uploaded On: Youtube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmvgea1vP7o, 00:12:40.

 

Awkward opening sentence I had to read it several times to understand it.

 

Think through punctuation

 

Excellent

Animal Affect – EO (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022) by Rowan Abbott

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Animal Affect – EO (2022)

Creator’s Statement

Across cinema canon, animals have rarely been considered worthy subjects for a serious film narrative. Films with animal protagonists will tend to be aimed at children; these characters are anthropomorphised beyond recognition, sharing only a surface resemblance with their real world animal counterparts, functioning more-so as puppets for telling human stories. Where cinema could be a valuable tool to make children – and adults – understand and empathise with real animal perspectives, the reliance on anthropomorphism to align audiences with these characters instead means that the real animal is being missed all together. Eco philosopher Val Plumwood, in her essay Babe: The Tale of the Speaking Meat, questions the role of anthropomorphism in cinema, noting that the very concept itself is often ‘used to support the claim that the attribution of characteristics such as subjectivity to animals must be anthropomorphic’.[1] This claim is based on the false assumption that animals do not possess such subjectivity. The attribution of human speech to animals has been a necessary tool to allow audiences to understand the emotions of fictional animal characters, undoubtedly generating a degree of empathy for real animals, but it is nevertheless achieves this via partially reconstituting the animal into a human, distancing the real animal perspective. Through my visual essay, I aim to explore how a film can connect viewers to an animal’s true subjectivity, without the use of anthropomorphism, spotlighting the film EO (2022)[2] as a rare example of a fiction film that refuses to anthropomorphise its animal protagonist.

My suggestion is that Affect Theory explains how animal subjectivity can be captured on screen. The two concepts I highlight in my essay are Laura U. Marks’ Haptic Visuality, and Vivian Sobchack’s Cinesthetic Subject. The former explains how our bodies relate to the texture of the screen image. Marks states that haptic vision ‘enables an embodied perception, the viewer responding to the video as to another body and to the screen as another skin’,[3] the film texture is something that can be felt by the viewer, their sense of touch mediated through their eyes and ears. I posit that EO uses techniques of Haptic Cinema; where traditional filmmaking ‘appeal[s] more to narrative identification than to body identification’,[4] haptic cinema instead aims to relate the viewer’s body to the film surface. EO frequently emphasises the texture of it’s titular donkey’s body, as well as the environment he lives in. This emphasis facilitates a viewer’s haptic vision, allowing for a physiological connection between the viewer, EO, and the environment he inhabits. The concept of the cinesthetic subject more broadly explains how it is that a viewer relates their sense perception to images onscreen. The term ‘cinesthetic’ is derived from the psychoneurological condition synaesthesia, and the sensory state coenaesthesia; ‘both of these structures and conditions foreground the complexity and richness of the more general bodily experience that grounds our particular experience of cinema.’[5] The cinesthetic subject is the viewer themselves, using ‘embodied vision informed by the knowledge of the other senses’[6] to respond physiologically to the sensory experiences depicted on screen. Sobchack state that this sensory engagement with cinema is owed ‘not to our secondary engagement with and recognition of either “subject positions” or characters, but rather our primary engagement (and the film’s) with the sense and sensibility of materiality itself.’[7] This is to say that it is not our cognitive/narrative connection with the characters that make us relate to their sense experience, but rather it is our instinctual bodily reaction to them, in part facilitated by our haptic vision.

My visual essay sets out to ask whether the physiological empathy created by an embodied engagement with cinema, can apply to animal subjects, and not just humans. If we do not share language or cognitive reasoning with animals, then I suggest that our shared experience of bodily senses is our greatest means for empathising with animal subjectivity. EO’s choice to use a donkey as its animal protagonist makes this especially pertinent, as the nervous systems of animals in the Equidae family (e.g. donkeys, horses, zebras) share many similarities with humans, especially the Sympathetic Nervous System responsible for our fight-or-flight reactions to harmful stimuli,[8] thus it is not a stretch to say EO’s sense perception can be aligned with our own. Setting out to prove this theory, I draw direct comparisons between my own sensory experience, and the onscreen sensory experience of EO and the other animals featured in the film. I begin by trying to create a sensory dialogue between myself, and you – the viewer, using visually and aurally textural images of myself experiencing recognisable sensory experiences – prompting the use of haptic vision, and embodied sensory engagement with the images. To avoid drawing attention away from the affective experience, I chose to keep my narration to on-screen text, rather than voiceover. If successful, then these images demonstrate the ability of film to affect a viewer physiologically, when focusing on a human subject. I then transition to EO, emphasising how the film uses the very same techniques to evoke the animals’ sensory experience. By doing this I ask: if you can empathise with me and my sensory experience, then what is stopping you from doing the same with animals?

The goal of this visual essay is to spotlight the strides being taken in animal representation on screen. EO is not the only film to attempt this form of affective alignment with an animal subject, a recent wave of animal rights activist documentaries; including Kedi (Ceyda Torun, 2016), Gunda (Viktor Kossakovsky, 2020), Stray (Elizabeth Lo, 2020), and Cow (Andrea Arnold, 2021); use similar formal techniques to EO. These are important strides to make, in a time where the view of animals as biological machines underscores much of our agricultural practices, and animal subjectivity is all but entirely neglected in modern farming legislation. Once the autonomy and subjective experience of animals is acknowledged, it poses many difficult challenges to the modern world which relies so heavily on the disregard of their suffering, but these are necessary challenges to face, and I believe that cinema can push us further towards confronting them.

 

The video may also be seen on Vimeo here:

BIBLIOGRAPHY

HorseHeadInfo. “The Autonomic Nervous System: You and Your Horse.” horsehead.info, 2019. https://horsehead.info/the-autonomic-nervous-system/#:~:text=Despite%20mammoth%20differences%20between%20horses,muscles%2C%20glands%2C%20etc…

Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Plumwood, Val. The Eye of the Crocodile. Anu Press, 2012.

Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley, California: Univeristy Of California Press, 2004.

 

FILMOGRAPHY

Cow. United Kingdom: Mubi, 2021.

  1. Poland: Skopia Film, 2022.

Gunda. Norway: Neon, 2020.

Kedi. Turkey: Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2016.

Stray. Turkey: Magnolia Pictures, 2020.

 

[1] Val Plumwood, The Eye of the Crocodile (Anu Press, 2012), 66.

[2] EO (Poland: Skopia Film, 2022).

[3] Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 4.

[4] Ibid. 7.

[5] Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley, California: Univeristy Of California Press, 2004), 67.

[6] Ibid. 70-71.

[7] Ibid. 65.

[8] HorseHeadInfo, “The Autonomic Nervous System: You and Your Horse,” horsehead.info, 2019, https://horsehead.info/the-autonomic-nervous-system/#:~:text=Despite%20mammoth%20differences%20between%20horses,muscles%2C%20glands%2C%20etc...