“Kino Kino Kino Kino Kino: el cine de artificio de Guy Maddin”

Las películas de Maddin absorben al espectador inmediatamente al mismo tiempo que su complejidad resulta agotadora. Dejan una impresión perdurable de un mundo efímero y distanciado, extrañamente cercano al nuestro —como una sombra profunda de él—. Nuestro propósito es reflexionar sobre esta impresión, dando cuenta de cómo la obra del cineasta canadiense logra este efecto. Su arte puede entenderse como anti-naturalista y anti-mimético, ya que no representa nuestra vida cotidiana por simple imitación. Sin embargo, este es un cine en el que la representación del mundo (y sus criaturas) y la construcción a partir de imágenes del pasado (y su artificio) no son opuestos. Ambos rasgos se vuelven significativos porque se basan en la imaginación y la sedimentación de la memoria con el fin de activar el reconocimiento. Recientemente, Guy Maddin ha desarrollado un compromiso más personal con sus propios recuerdos en lo que él llama la Me Trilogy, un aspecto que vale la pena analizar

“The Past Tense of Our Selves: ‘Um adeus português’ in 1980s Portugal”

The central topic of João Botelho’s “Um adeus português” (1986), is memory in 1980s Portuguese society. The film alternates scenes from 1973, during the colonial war in Africa, with scenes set in 1985, in rural and urban areas of Portugal. In the present essay, I argue that the film enacts the need for a conversation among the Portuguese by opting for a structure that puts its own elements in dialogue. I analyze the film’s stylistic features while also contextualizing it within 1980s Portugal. This study is anchored in five themes: war, race, class, labor, and religion

Religion and Film: Representation, Experience, Meaning

This is a book review of Stefanie Knauss, Religion and Film: Representation, Experience, Meaning (Brill, 2020)

Laughing in Friendship: The Intimate Ensemble Comedy of “Friends”

This paper analyses the sitcom “Friends” (1994-2004) and its performance motifs

Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies, no. 1

For the inaugural issue of “Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies”, we solicited papers discussing Stanley’s autobiographical writings. To mirror types of conversations, we asked for both short and long (though we received mostly the latter)

Editorial

publishersversionpublishe

Editorial

publishersversionpublishe

Labyrinths of the Self: Different Characters, Identical Bodies in “Battlestar Galactica”

Paper on performance and personal identity in the television series “Battlestar Galactica”

“The Law of Capital: ‘The Measure of a Man’”

In this short essay on “La Loi du marché” (“The Measure of a Man”, 2015), I argue that the film builds an accurate representation of the economic and social relations in capitalism, aggravated by the neoliberal offensive

Building Cars and Destroying Men: Working Class Representation as Christian Allegory in "Blue Collar" (1978)

"The company builds cars and destroys men" was the promotional tagline of one of the posters for "Blue Collar" (1978). Shot in Detroit and Kalamazoo, Michigan, the film stars Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto playing three Detroit auto workers in financial despair who break into and rob the offices of their own union. "Blue Collar" critically examines union practices in the automotive industry and the daily life of the working class in the Rust Belt. It marked the directorial debut of Paul Schrader after he had written screenplays for Sydney Pollack, Brian De Palma, John Flynn, and most notably Martin Scorsese in "Taxi Driver" (1976). The collaboration with Scorsese continued in other films with religious references and themes such as "Raging Bull" (1980). The spiritual cinema that Schrader studied in his book "Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer," originally published in 1972 and reissued in a new edition in 2018, has often been the analytical focus of his film work. Yet, despite its acclamation, "Blue Collar", co-written with his brother Leonard Schrader, has been seen as an outlier, a social-realist drama supposedly more difficult to articulate with the Christian perspective present in the director and screenwriter’s other output. This paper argues that the film’s political narrative fleshes out the Catholic iconography seen in the Polish-American family home of Jerry Bartowski (Keitel) and can be read as a Christian allegory about class disparities (Jas. 5:1-4) and division (Matt. 12:25)