Signifying Nothing?: Martin Ritt\u27s The Sound and the Fury (1959) as Deconstructive Adaptation

This essay defends Martin Ritt\u27s film version of The Sound and the Fury (1959), starring Yul Brynner as a Cajun Jason Compson, traditionally positioned as one of the most ill-conceived film adaptations ever made, by highlighting how an academic modernist reading of the works of William Faulkner overwrites the intriguing possibilities of melodrama

Max Ophuls

A short biographical piece on filmmaker Max Ophuls, with particular focus on his melodramas made in Hollywood in the late 1940s and early 1950s

New Englanders, Out of Their Minds

By comparing The Witch (2016) to The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), I argue that Robert Eggers\u27 new film contests Perry Miller\u27s sympathetic reading of the Puritans offered as the formation of American Studies, returning us to the 19th century critique offered by Nathaniel Hawthorne, particularly in his short story, Young Goodman Brown (1835)

Atomic Animals: Toward the Re-invention of Natural History and Science Filmmaking

This essay explores the use of atomic imagery in natural history films as presented in the United States on The Discovery Channel. Using the methods of nuclear criticism, the article builds a case study of the apocalyptic and militarist metaphors employed by an episode of PaleoWorld devoted to the Stegosaurus and then broadens the scope toward more popular animal filmmaking, in particular, “blue chip” wildlife films such as Lion Battlefield

Show Me the Shoah!: Generic Experience and Spectatorship in Popular Representations of the Holocaust

This essay explores the relationship between the textual features of popular cultural artifacts pertaining to the Holocaust and their reception circumstances. Comparative cultural studies methods are deployed in analyzing a film, Life is Beautiful (Roberto Begnini, 1997); a children’s book, Dr. Seuss’ The Sneetches (1961); and the Jewish Museum Berlin, designed by Daniel Libeskind

From Jean-Paul Belmondo to Stan Brakhage: Romanticism and Intextuality in Irma Vep and Les Mierables

This essay compares Romantic literary theory as the road not taken to modernist film criticism, particularly as it pertains to contemporary French cinema

Adapting Genesis

This essay explores two 1990s African films--The Emigrant (Egypt, dir. Youssef Chahine, 1994) and Genesis (Mali, dir. Cheick Oumar Sissoko, 1999)--as radical adaptations of the Holy Bible, expressing an Afro-centric view of the foundation myth of the Judeo-Christian world

Narrative Delay and the Nature of Love in the Short Film, Come

By showing teenagers falling in love, and then cutting to the loving couple, now elderly, the short film, Come brilliantly uses the excision of the narrative tradition of delay in order to revolutionize the cinema\u27s presentation of love in theoretical synchronicity with Irving Singer\u27s philosophical study, The Nature of Love

Unfriending Hawthorne

This essay examines the use of 1980s romantic comedies, particularly the films of John Hughes, by the film, Easy A (Will Gluck, 2010). I use an intertextual approach to adaptation studies to link one of the film\u27s source texts, Can\u27t Buy Me Love (Steve Rush, 1987) to Nathaniel Hawthorne\u27s The Scarlet Letter (1850)

There\u27s Something Rotten in Film Criticism, and His Name is, Regrettably, Not Johnny

I argue for the development of a middle-ground film criticism, less jargon-filled than academic writing, yet one that uses historical and theoretical methods beyond those found in journalistic, mass media popular criticism. I develop a case study of Steven Spielberg\u27s Lincoln (2012), using Jean-Louis Comolli\u27s essay, A Body Too Much to reveal the limitations of popular reviewers\u27 reliance on a simplistic formulation of good acting