Thelma and Louise: Visual Intentions and Cinematic Approaches in the Female Road Film
The radical act of challenging the politics of the female body and fighting for their agency positions Thelma and Louise as a new road film, stepping away from the void left by the male road film and creating a new cinematic language of empowerment.
The Visual Aesthetic of Teenage Social Hierarchy
External markers of expression become more than aesthetic–they become symbolic of societal barriers being broken. [...] Whether it is pink on Wednesdays, sharing sunglasses during a Saturday detention, or splitting a plastic crown into many pieces, the clothing characters wear and the objects they carry matter.
The Monstrous Human: A Comparison Between the Pale Man and Xenomorph
The design elements of both [the Pale Man and the Xenomorph], as well as their narrative functions, leave the viewer to question who the true monster is in each respective film, imparting ideas of monstrous human tendencies including greed, fascism, sexual predation, and corporate materialism.
Home, Sweet Home: Evolution of Home through Shared Memory in A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and Happy Together
The shared sentiment of any person who has been exiled, has had to flee, or has simply left a place, is the need to return home. But for those who have never seen it, what is home?
Queer Melodrama: Analyzing the Aesthetics of 1987’s Law of Desire
The [final] scene’s juxtaposition of exterior forces, symbolized by law and order, with the interior spaces, realms of sexual freedom, underscores essential dichotomies inherent in queer cinema. These dichotomies are no longer a subtext since the queer experience does not hide between ideas of representability but lies in representation.
Finding Fielder: Reality Television as Self-Examination and Expression
The absurdity of Nathan's actions add upon themselves as his serious, no-nonsense demeanor remains consistent, despite the profoundly immature actions he takes to help a genuine friend. The extended runtime of the finale allows him to explore the moments beyond quick, anxiety-filled interactions (...) Fielder wants the audience to reflect on the reasons they find Nathan For You funny and ensure that they do not take away the wrong message that Nathan's character is one to embody. Instead, he aims to shift the audience's perspective of the self-absorbed and often clueless character by exhibiting a new level of empathy towards Bill in the finale, suggesting that Fielder's character, Nathan, may also be one to empathize with.
Film’s Silent Erasure of the Gay Black Man
The absence of audio is positioned suitably for dramatic moments, triggered by dark questions in which a black gay man considers his own erasure from society: “What future lies in our silence?” (Essex Hemphill, Tongues Untied). Along with making the screen cut to black in these sustained periods of time, Marlon Riggs gives the audience time to pause and think about the content he is presenting. This attributes an interpretative property to his documentary, experimenting with the self-referential aspects of the genre for the viewer, producing a cut-off from an almost inhumane reality.
Dead Air, Dead Space: Culpability and Collapse in Landscape Suicide (1986), Grey Gardens (1975), and Pictures of Ghosts (2023)
Dead air hangs over once-occupied scenes, landscapes that have caused their own death. A unique kind of rot is represented here: one that is not structural but spiritual, a para-natural abandonment that may one day lead to a collapse that has yet to occur. Perhaps refracted off of the condition of the film’s subjects—prison does not allow for itself nor its subjects to decay—Landscape Suicide sees collapse as a perpetually imminent consequence of the ruin we cause each other.
Visibly Invisible: The Digital Ghosts of Personal Shopper (2016)
Moreover, just as Maureen seeks to commune with spirits as a medium, Chun sees code “As a medium, [that] channels the ghost that we imagine runs the machine”. (Chun 310) The collective mystification with code and how it functions is what fuels its fetishization and causes us to perceive the digital as spectral, even if we hold the implicit faith that there is a real person on the other end. What Assayas’ film posits is what if this faith was broken and what if the digital truly became a portal to the unknown, where our understanding of a solid reality was fully suspended and all you were left with was uncertainty.