Social media and Twitter-happy stars are changing the way Hindi films are promoted in India. (With this caveat: for English speakers only.) Sripana Ray looks at film prefiguration targeting India's urban middle class.
Read more »
Posts Tagged ‘ film ’
Hindi Cinema: Coming Soon To A Tweet Near You
Ongoing 3.11 Disaster and Recovery and Japan’s Mediascape
Rayna Denison and Hiroko Furukawa analyze how Japan’s fiction media producers have responded to the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 with a discourse of trauma, healing, and recovery in media ranging from manga to anime and film.
Read more »
Monty Python’s Life of Brian, British Local Censorship, and the “Pythonesque”
Kate Egan uses the BBFC archive to consider British local censorship history through a case study of Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
Read more »
On Tim Burton’s Dumbo
Last week's announcement that Tim Burton will direct a remake of Disney's Dumbo is a reminder that in Burton's career we witness the convergence of the aesthetic logic of allusionism and the corporate logic of franchising.
Read more »
Interstellar: It’s About Hope, Not Just Science!
Interstellar’s real value is as an exploration of memory, of hope, and of the power of dreaming of a better tomorrow for our kids.
Read more »
Drive-Ins, and the Stubborn Usefulness of Film Nostalgia
Interstellar (2014) made its well-known debut last weekend. In Chicago, the film (yes, we can still call it that) screened in its “intended” format of 70mm at the Navy Pier IMAX. Its appearance there and at other such venues was predictably celebrated by old school cinephiles as yet another defiant declaration of celluloid’s continuing...
Read more »
Popular Culture and Politics: The Hunger Games 3-Finger Salute in Thai Protests
Thai protesters' appropriation of the three-finger salute articulates the relationship between popular culture and politics and places the protests within a history of fan-based civic engagement.
Read more »
I, Reboot (Part II)
This second installment of "I, Reboot" dives into the origins of the reboot-as-narrative-analogy and distinguishes "reboot" from "ret-con."
Read more »
I, Reboot (Part 1)
What is a reboot, then? This is the overarching question of this series of articles and one which I have been wrestling with for six years or so.
Read more »
Exploring True/False
Each winter, as February becomes March, Columbia, Missouri transforms itself into a grand stage for the True/False film fest, a four-day international nonfiction film festival.
Read more »
The Hunger Games and the Female-Led Franchise Part 2
While teaching an undergraduate film module this week, I asked my student cohort to come up with any female-led film franchises. We were discussing gender and I was trying to illustrate how inequality still persists in the twenty-first century both at the level of industry and aesthetics. Masculine film franchises were easy and the...
Read more »
Say My Name: Unnamed Black Objects in This Year’s “Quality” Films
This year has been heralded as a renaissance for films featuring black actors and actresses. Many of these black actors and actresses have performed in “quality” films like 42, The Butler, and 12 Years A Slave. As an arbiter of their “quality” these films have already begun racking up award nominations, and in some...
Read more »
The Aesthetic Turn: In Search of the Pictorial Intelligence
Colin Burnett continues our Aesthetic Turn series with a call to revise our thinking about moving image intelligence beyond just language and verbal systems of thought.
Read more »
Deadline Extended: The Velvet Light Trap CFP: On Sound (New Directions in Sound Studies)
The Editorial Board of The Velvet Light Trap has extended the deadline for its forthcoming "On Sound (New Directions in Sound Studies)" issue to September 1. In particular, VLT seeks sound-related research that addresses issues and topics in radio, television, video games, digital/new media, and other non-film media. Read on for the CFP.
Read more »
Enough Said? Beasts of the Southern Wild, SharkNado, and Extreme Weather
In this short post I’d like to juxtapose an unlikely pair of films in order to push harder at the taken-for-granted mythologies of extreme weather: SharkNado and Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Read more »