Reappraising Always

Steven Spielberg's 1989 film Always represents one of the director's few critical and commercial disappointments. This paper examines the extent to which the film's failures are attributable to its formal, stylistic, and narrative features. The paper offers a defence of Always against specific reproaches. It also pursues more positive aims. Following Warren Buckland, the paper pinpoints organic unity as Spielberg's primary compositional principle; it tracks the development of motifs, tactics of foreshadowing, and other internal norms to demonstrate the formation of a structurally unified text; and it posits contrasts with a pertinent antecedent, A Guy Named Joe (Victor Fleming, 1943), so as to set Spielberg's artistic achievements in relief. The paper goes on to isolate some putatively troublesome manoeuvres at the film's internal level. Certain of these problematic aspects, I argue, force us to recognise that important narrative effects can be yielded by modulated deviations from organic unity. The collective aim of these arguments is to suggest that Always is apt for critical revaluation. Over this hovers a secondary objective. The paper seeks to disclaim two interrelated faults ascribed to Spielberg: a characteristic supplanting of narrative coherence by spectacle; and an indifference to subtlety and sophistication

Effects of the dominant in Secret Window.

This paper seeks to identify and examine 'problematic' aesthetic strategies in David Koepp's Secret Window (2004). Arguing that the film fits into a specific 'puzzle film' category favouring self-deceiving protagonists and surprise twists, the paper seeks to account for the negative critical reaction accrued by the film's denouement. Most centrally, I invoke the Russian Formalist's concept of the 'dominant' in order to suggest how Secret Window subordinates textual elements to the film's narrative revelation. It is this prioritising of the main plot twist that accounts for many of the film's dramaturgically contentious tactics. The paper demonstrates the means by which Secret Window cuts against the grain of Hollywood storytelling norms; it suggests that the film manipulates character engagement in a way that exceeds the puzzle film's traditional reshuffling of sympathies; and it indicates how the film deploys generic convention and allusion to engender a highly self-conscious and repressive narration. These arguments aim to show that the film displays bold and sophisticated aesthetic strategies. More broadly, the paper argues that by analysing problematic examples of a film genre, we can usefully disclose the aesthetic principles that underpin the genre's more successful films

Yesterday Once More:Hong Kong-China Coproductions and the Myth of Mainlandization

Since Ackbar Abbas theorized Hong Kong as a space of cultural ‘disappearance’ in the mid-1990s, critics have debated the extent to which local cultural forms have continued to recede, particularly as a corollary of Hong Kong’s increasing subjection to mainlandization. For several critics, the region’s cinema has already vanished from view, only to re-emerge in a brand new, distinctly Sinicized guise – that of ‘post-Hong Kong cinema,’ a mode of predominantly coproduced filmmaking that effaces traditional Hong Kong aesthetics and routines of film practice. So thoroughly has Hong Kong cinema been subsumed to China that its once ‘unique’ and ‘singular’ identity is no longer discernible. The shackles of PRC censorship now stifle free expression; Hong Kong’s classic genres have become obsolete; and the PRC’s vogue for ‘main melody’ films and the dapian (‘big film’) has straitened Hong Kong cinema’s range of storytelling options. Today, critics contend, Hong Kong filmmakers are severely constrained by Mainland bureaucracy and the exigencies of the China market. This article seeks to challenge these assumptions, contesting a set of apparent truisms concerning Mainland censorship, Hong Kong-China coproductions, and the dissipation or disappearance of Hong Kong’s local cinema and identity. The theory of mainlandization, I submit, denies the durability of Hong Kong’s standardized craft practices; its aesthetic traditions; and the facile ingenuity of its filmmakers