In the early 1980s, Helen Slateraged eighteen and fresh out of drama schoolfound herself at the f... more In the early 1980s, Helen Slateraged eighteen and fresh out of drama schoolfound herself at the forefront of a major Hollywood blockbuster, Supergirl (1984), a spin-off entry in the successful Superman franchise (1978-1987) produced by Ilya and Alexander Salkind. The newcomer had won the coveted title role following an extensive audition process; now she would headline a US $35 million mega-picture, starring opposite such screen luminaries as Faye Dunaway, Peter O'Toole, and Mia Farrow. Slater, a native New Yorker born in 1963, refused to be cowed by the burden of expectation, and turned in an indelible dual performanceas Supergirl and her alter-ego Linda Leethat many observers consider definitive. Ultimately, Supergirl opened to a tepid critical response and failed to turn a profit. However, Slater emerged from the fiasco unscathed-Roger Ebert's contention that "Slater is the best thing in the film" reflected the critical consensus 1and her star continued to rise in a string of cult hits and popular blockbusters including The Legend of Billie Jean (1985),
The foregoing analysis of Wong's work has demonstrated his artistic ingenuity and accomplishment.... more The foregoing analysis of Wong's work has demonstrated his artistic ingenuity and accomplishment. In the following section, I examine Wong's most recent feature-length lm, The Grandmaster (2013), from the perspective of the parameters and contexts that have structured this book so far: musical and visual style, story and narration, and popular genre. The Grandmaster has become Wong's biggest commercial success to date, igniting claims that Wong has entirely abandoned his "local" sensibility and the complex storytelling style for which he is renowned. Detractors argue that The Grandmaster testi es to Wong's turn (or regression) to popular genre and an international mode of address. Indeed, several critical reviews describe this lm as an atypical or anomalous entry in Wong's authorial oeuvre. Yet The Grandmaster embodies and extends many of the stylistic, narrative, and thematic features identi ed in the preceding chapters, no matter the lm's "anomalous" global popularity and impressive box of ce success (it grossed $45,270,000 in the PRC market alone). The Grandmaster's aesthetic strategies attest to Wong's continued endurance as an innovative and artistically relevant lmmaker in world cinema. As Bordwell (1981, 1988, 2005) has shown, a director's importance and fecundity can be further highlighted by examining the uses his or her work gives rise to. In what ways has Wong's cinema been appropriated? This study has placed particular stress on the viewing effects engendered by Wong's lms; but what of the lms' wider artistic and social effects, effects that Wong might not have intended or foreseen? In this concluding chapter, I go on to sketch Wong's in uence on contemporary world cinema. In summarizing the book's main concerns, I also discuss how one particular lm-Happy Together-has been appropriated by queer scholarship and thus has yielded broad social effects. I take this opportunity to hypothesize some of the ways that a poetics of cinema can illuminate the kinds of culturalist inquiries pursued by queer theorists. Finally, I brie y sketch potential pathways for Wong's future productions.
I have examined the signi cance of style in Wong's cinema, but what of story? What convinces crit... more I have examined the signi cance of style in Wong's cinema, but what of story? What convinces critics of the negligibility, even the absence, of plot in Wong's lms? Consider this representative but hardly exhaustive sample: Chungking Express is "minimally plotted" (Taubin 2008), displaying a "breezy disregard for plot structure" (Cameron 2007); My Blueberry Nights constructs a narrative "so vaporous it barely exists" (Brooke 2008: 74); Happy Together is "almost plotless" (Elley 1997: 50); Days of Being Wild "uneventful" (Brunette 2005: 21); and As Tears Go By narratively "sparse" (2). In this context, identifying storytelling as a central enterprise in Wong's cinema seems wrongheaded. Yet perhaps some critics miscalculate Wong's engagement with norms of story and narration, however popular or rare ed these norms might be. Part of the problem stems from conceptual imprecision. Just as some critics rely upon a spurious antithesis between story and style, so they presuppose an opposition between story and character. Thus, for instance, "all of Wong's lms. .. [are] more interested in the nature of human relationships than in narrative momentum" (Davis 2005: 26), while Days of Being Wild is a case whereby "character prevails over story" (Teo 2005: 35). Such claims may seem intuitively correct, but they lack the exactness of more conceptually negrained distinctions. For the purposes of this chapter, I adopt the narratological concepts of fabula (the story in its linear abstract form), syuzhet (the plotting of the story events in a particular way), and narration (the ongoing maintenance of story information). As differential tools of analysis, these distinctions enable a more speci c examination of the apparently diffuse, attenuated, or nonexistent narratives in Wong's oeuvre. This chapter regards story patterning as fundamental in shaping audience interest, stimulating cognitive effort, and counterpointing sensuous absorption. The complexity of Wong's lms owes as much to story materials (e.g., opaque and contradictory characters), plot structure (e.g., deforming the story in ways that make narrative chronology ambiguous), and narration (e.g., implying
Visual Style and the Aesthetic of Disturbance Many of Asian cinema's most renowned auteurs have m... more Visual Style and the Aesthetic of Disturbance Many of Asian cinema's most renowned auteurs have m ounted stylistic programs optimizing a narrow range of techniques. Ozu Yasujiro mines the expressive possibilities of frontal staging, xed shot perspective, and low camera height. Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Jia Zhangke test the inexhaustibility of extended takes and distanced framings. Zhang Che and John Woo explore the kinesthetic effects of camera-speed juxtapositions and rapid zoom shots. In Bordwell's terms, these lmmakers are "stubborn stylists," faithful to their stylistic signatures (2007). Unlike these counterparts, Wong Kar-wai holds fast to no stable stylistic repertoire. And yet Wong's lms-even those as stylistically dissimilar as Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love-seem uni ed by a consistent visual sensibility. In this chapter I argue that Wong is a director wedded not so much to a privileged set of visual techniques as to an elevated narrational principle, to which an array of stylistic techniques is subordinated. This governing principle-Wong's stylistic dominant, in neoformalist parlance-involves complicating (or roughening) the viewer's perception and comprehension without sacri cing overall dramatic clarity. Pledged to making the image "dif cult" yet intelligible, Wong revises, recombines, and repurposes standard schemas of visual style. This authorial strategy contributes to an overall aesthetic of perceptual and cognitive disturbance. By promoting a formal principle above favored devices, Wong outstrips aesthetic pigeonholing-hence he is no more a "long-take director" than he is a devotee of MTV-style editing. And yet, while Wong is in a sense properly characterized as a "polystylistic" lmmaker (Bordwell 2011: 176), he stays monogamous to a stylistic (and narrative) norm of roughened form and perceptual dif culty. In other words, Wong embraces stylistic pluralism, but his lms are uni ed by an enduring aesthetic principle. For Wong, the lm experience involves perceptual and cognitive challenge. Since the early 1990s, he has sought to set dramatically legible devices against tactics that disturb the
wai must be considered one of cinema's truly cinematic auteurs. A lmmaker immersed in sound and i... more wai must be considered one of cinema's truly cinematic auteurs. A lmmaker immersed in sound and image, he taps the spectator's bimodal propensities for dramatic and expressive effect. He ascribes music special importance and no consideration of Wong as a cinematic stylist should neglect this aspect of his lms. As an effort to elucidate Wong's musical engagement, this chapter examines the functions and effects of music in Chungking Express (1994). It aims to disclose how Wong marshals highly eclectic musical cues into a narratively coherent unity. Other, more general questions inform this chapter as well. What principles of musical scoring and spotting govern Wong's sound design, and to what extent do his methods typify standard Hong Kong practice? More broadly still, how have Wong's music tracks been theorized by critics? This last question provides my point of departure. My general claim is that the critical reception of Wong's music tracks has been governed by reigning paradigms within academic lm studies. To some extent, Wong's musical evolution has been assimilated, by critics, to the emerging trends in lm theory and criticism. Consequently, these critical perspectives at times overstate (and oversimplify) certain aspects of Wong's music tracks, particularly at the level of cultural and sociological meaning. By contrast, the ways that music operates formally, narratively, and thematically have been qualitatively neglected. So, too, has the extent to which music permeates all stages of a Wong Kar-wai production. In this chapter, I aim to show that the importance of music in Wong's cinema extends far beyond what is heard on the sound track. Critical Reception and Conceptual Frameworks In the mid-1990s, Western critics subsumed Wong's music scores to broad conceptual and formal frameworks. Auteurists sought evidence of individual artistry in the compilation score, which seemed to exemplify directorial choice.
A key performative trait in Sidney Lumet's oeuvre has gone unexplored: namely, a reliance on play... more A key performative trait in Sidney Lumet's oeuvre has gone unexplored: namely, a reliance on players’ hands, not only as a major dramatic and expressive resource, but, more specifically, as a locus of dramatic equivocation. My purpose in this analytical essay is to highlight, by reference to a range of examples, the forms and functions of this distinctive authorial tendency. As I aim to demonstrate, Lumet deepens character complexity, sharpens thematic meaning, and enhances narrational effects (such as suspense and surprise) by imbuing hand gestures with ambivalence and ambiguity.
Otto Preminger (1905–1986), whose Hollywood career spanned the 1930s through the 1970s, is popula... more Otto Preminger (1905–1986), whose Hollywood career spanned the 1930s through the 1970s, is popularly remembered for the acclaimed films he directed, among which are the classic film noir "Laura", the social-realist melodrama "The Man with the Golden Arm", the CinemaScope musical "Carmen Jones", and the riveting courtroom drama "Anatomy of a Murder". As a screen actor, he forged an indelible impression as a sadistic Nazi in Billy Wilder’s "Stalag 17" and as the diabolical Mr. Freeze in television’s "Batman".
He is remembered, too, for drastically transforming Hollywood’s industrial practices. With "Exodus", Preminger broke the Hollywood blacklist, controversially granting screen credit to Dalton Trumbo, one of the exiled “Hollywood Ten. ” Preminger, a committed liberal, consistently shattered Hollywood’s conventions. He routinely tackled socially progressive yet risqué subject matter, pressing the Production Code’s limits of permissibility. He mounted Black-cast musicals at a period of intense racial unrest. And he embraced a string of other taboo topics—heroin addiction, rape, incest, homosexuality—that established his reputation as a trailblazer of adult-centered storytelling, an enemy of Hollywood puritanism, and a crusader against censorship.
"Otto Preminger: Interviews" compiles nineteen interviews from across Preminger’s career, providing fascinating insights into the methods and mindset of a wildly polarizing filmmaker. With remarkable candor, Preminger discusses his filmmaking practices, his distinctive film style, his battles against censorship and the Hollywood blacklist, his clashes with film critics, and his turbulent relationships with a host of well-known stars, from Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra to Jane Fonda and John Wayne.
Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, 2021
This article provides a stylistic examination of Sidney Lumet's thriller Deathtrap (1982), analyz... more This article provides a stylistic examination of Sidney Lumet's thriller Deathtrap (1982), analyzing how its strategies of staging and performance generate narrational effects of suspense and surprise. It argues that Lumet anchors these performative strategies to a broad authorial program grounded in expressive subtlety; as such, Lumet's film reminds us of a waning tradition of US filmmaking in which stylistic ingenuity resides at the denotative and expressive (rather than the decorative or parametric) levels of stylistic discourse. The article treats Lumet's stylistic choices as creative solutions to a distinctive set of aesthetic problems. It canvasses-and identifies the functions of-the motivic staging schemas patterned throughout Deathtrap; and it illuminates how these schemas, actuated by star players, shape the viewer's cognitive uptake in substantive ways.
The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2020
Six exemplary works of film theory, published in 2018–19, receive consideration in this chapter: ... more Six exemplary works of film theory, published in 2018–19, receive consideration in this chapter: Johannes Riis and Aaron Taylor’s anthology Screening Characters: Theories of Character in Film, Television, and Interactive Media; Murray Pomerance’s Virtuoso: Film Performance and the Actor’s Magic; Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis’s edited collection When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited; Jeff Menne’s Post-Fordist Cinema: Hollywood Auteurs and the Corporate Counterculture; Wieland Schwanebeck and Douglas McFarland’s edited volume Patricia Highsmith on Screen; and Clara Bradbury-Rance’s Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory. The chapter is organized into three sections: 1. Character Engagement and Performance; 2. Revisiting the New Hollywood; 3. A Highsmith Hinge.
Since Ackbar Abbas theorized Hong Kong as a space of cultural ‘disappearance’ in the mid-1990s, c... more 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.
The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2019
In this chapter I review six contributions to the field of film theory published in 2018: Carl Pl... more In this chapter I review six contributions to the field of film theory published in 2018: Carl Plantinga's Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement (Oxford University Press); Miklós Kiss and Steven Willemsen’s Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema (Edinburgh University Press); Nicholas Godfrey’s The Limits of Auteurism: Case Studies in the Critically Constructed New Hollywood (Rutgers University Press); Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis’ The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema’s Most Celebrated Era (Bloomsbury Academic); Dorothy Wai Sim Lau’s Chinese Stardom in Participatory Cyberculture (Edinburgh University Press); and Gina Marchetti’s Citing China: Politics, Postmodernism, and World Cinema (University of Hawaii Press).
In the early 1980s, Helen Slateraged eighteen and fresh out of drama schoolfound herself at the f... more In the early 1980s, Helen Slateraged eighteen and fresh out of drama schoolfound herself at the forefront of a major Hollywood blockbuster, Supergirl (1984), a spin-off entry in the successful Superman franchise (1978-1987) produced by Ilya and Alexander Salkind. The newcomer had won the coveted title role following an extensive audition process; now she would headline a US $35 million mega-picture, starring opposite such screen luminaries as Faye Dunaway, Peter O'Toole, and Mia Farrow. Slater, a native New Yorker born in 1963, refused to be cowed by the burden of expectation, and turned in an indelible dual performanceas Supergirl and her alter-ego Linda Leethat many observers consider definitive. Ultimately, Supergirl opened to a tepid critical response and failed to turn a profit. However, Slater emerged from the fiasco unscathed-Roger Ebert's contention that "Slater is the best thing in the film" reflected the critical consensus 1and her star continued to rise in a string of cult hits and popular blockbusters including The Legend of Billie Jean (1985),
The foregoing analysis of Wong's work has demonstrated his artistic ingenuity and accomplishment.... more The foregoing analysis of Wong's work has demonstrated his artistic ingenuity and accomplishment. In the following section, I examine Wong's most recent feature-length lm, The Grandmaster (2013), from the perspective of the parameters and contexts that have structured this book so far: musical and visual style, story and narration, and popular genre. The Grandmaster has become Wong's biggest commercial success to date, igniting claims that Wong has entirely abandoned his "local" sensibility and the complex storytelling style for which he is renowned. Detractors argue that The Grandmaster testi es to Wong's turn (or regression) to popular genre and an international mode of address. Indeed, several critical reviews describe this lm as an atypical or anomalous entry in Wong's authorial oeuvre. Yet The Grandmaster embodies and extends many of the stylistic, narrative, and thematic features identi ed in the preceding chapters, no matter the lm's "anomalous" global popularity and impressive box of ce success (it grossed $45,270,000 in the PRC market alone). The Grandmaster's aesthetic strategies attest to Wong's continued endurance as an innovative and artistically relevant lmmaker in world cinema. As Bordwell (1981, 1988, 2005) has shown, a director's importance and fecundity can be further highlighted by examining the uses his or her work gives rise to. In what ways has Wong's cinema been appropriated? This study has placed particular stress on the viewing effects engendered by Wong's lms; but what of the lms' wider artistic and social effects, effects that Wong might not have intended or foreseen? In this concluding chapter, I go on to sketch Wong's in uence on contemporary world cinema. In summarizing the book's main concerns, I also discuss how one particular lm-Happy Together-has been appropriated by queer scholarship and thus has yielded broad social effects. I take this opportunity to hypothesize some of the ways that a poetics of cinema can illuminate the kinds of culturalist inquiries pursued by queer theorists. Finally, I brie y sketch potential pathways for Wong's future productions.
I have examined the signi cance of style in Wong's cinema, but what of story? What convinces crit... more I have examined the signi cance of style in Wong's cinema, but what of story? What convinces critics of the negligibility, even the absence, of plot in Wong's lms? Consider this representative but hardly exhaustive sample: Chungking Express is "minimally plotted" (Taubin 2008), displaying a "breezy disregard for plot structure" (Cameron 2007); My Blueberry Nights constructs a narrative "so vaporous it barely exists" (Brooke 2008: 74); Happy Together is "almost plotless" (Elley 1997: 50); Days of Being Wild "uneventful" (Brunette 2005: 21); and As Tears Go By narratively "sparse" (2). In this context, identifying storytelling as a central enterprise in Wong's cinema seems wrongheaded. Yet perhaps some critics miscalculate Wong's engagement with norms of story and narration, however popular or rare ed these norms might be. Part of the problem stems from conceptual imprecision. Just as some critics rely upon a spurious antithesis between story and style, so they presuppose an opposition between story and character. Thus, for instance, "all of Wong's lms. .. [are] more interested in the nature of human relationships than in narrative momentum" (Davis 2005: 26), while Days of Being Wild is a case whereby "character prevails over story" (Teo 2005: 35). Such claims may seem intuitively correct, but they lack the exactness of more conceptually negrained distinctions. For the purposes of this chapter, I adopt the narratological concepts of fabula (the story in its linear abstract form), syuzhet (the plotting of the story events in a particular way), and narration (the ongoing maintenance of story information). As differential tools of analysis, these distinctions enable a more speci c examination of the apparently diffuse, attenuated, or nonexistent narratives in Wong's oeuvre. This chapter regards story patterning as fundamental in shaping audience interest, stimulating cognitive effort, and counterpointing sensuous absorption. The complexity of Wong's lms owes as much to story materials (e.g., opaque and contradictory characters), plot structure (e.g., deforming the story in ways that make narrative chronology ambiguous), and narration (e.g., implying
Visual Style and the Aesthetic of Disturbance Many of Asian cinema's most renowned auteurs have m... more Visual Style and the Aesthetic of Disturbance Many of Asian cinema's most renowned auteurs have m ounted stylistic programs optimizing a narrow range of techniques. Ozu Yasujiro mines the expressive possibilities of frontal staging, xed shot perspective, and low camera height. Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Jia Zhangke test the inexhaustibility of extended takes and distanced framings. Zhang Che and John Woo explore the kinesthetic effects of camera-speed juxtapositions and rapid zoom shots. In Bordwell's terms, these lmmakers are "stubborn stylists," faithful to their stylistic signatures (2007). Unlike these counterparts, Wong Kar-wai holds fast to no stable stylistic repertoire. And yet Wong's lms-even those as stylistically dissimilar as Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love-seem uni ed by a consistent visual sensibility. In this chapter I argue that Wong is a director wedded not so much to a privileged set of visual techniques as to an elevated narrational principle, to which an array of stylistic techniques is subordinated. This governing principle-Wong's stylistic dominant, in neoformalist parlance-involves complicating (or roughening) the viewer's perception and comprehension without sacri cing overall dramatic clarity. Pledged to making the image "dif cult" yet intelligible, Wong revises, recombines, and repurposes standard schemas of visual style. This authorial strategy contributes to an overall aesthetic of perceptual and cognitive disturbance. By promoting a formal principle above favored devices, Wong outstrips aesthetic pigeonholing-hence he is no more a "long-take director" than he is a devotee of MTV-style editing. And yet, while Wong is in a sense properly characterized as a "polystylistic" lmmaker (Bordwell 2011: 176), he stays monogamous to a stylistic (and narrative) norm of roughened form and perceptual dif culty. In other words, Wong embraces stylistic pluralism, but his lms are uni ed by an enduring aesthetic principle. For Wong, the lm experience involves perceptual and cognitive challenge. Since the early 1990s, he has sought to set dramatically legible devices against tactics that disturb the
wai must be considered one of cinema's truly cinematic auteurs. A lmmaker immersed in sound and i... more wai must be considered one of cinema's truly cinematic auteurs. A lmmaker immersed in sound and image, he taps the spectator's bimodal propensities for dramatic and expressive effect. He ascribes music special importance and no consideration of Wong as a cinematic stylist should neglect this aspect of his lms. As an effort to elucidate Wong's musical engagement, this chapter examines the functions and effects of music in Chungking Express (1994). It aims to disclose how Wong marshals highly eclectic musical cues into a narratively coherent unity. Other, more general questions inform this chapter as well. What principles of musical scoring and spotting govern Wong's sound design, and to what extent do his methods typify standard Hong Kong practice? More broadly still, how have Wong's music tracks been theorized by critics? This last question provides my point of departure. My general claim is that the critical reception of Wong's music tracks has been governed by reigning paradigms within academic lm studies. To some extent, Wong's musical evolution has been assimilated, by critics, to the emerging trends in lm theory and criticism. Consequently, these critical perspectives at times overstate (and oversimplify) certain aspects of Wong's music tracks, particularly at the level of cultural and sociological meaning. By contrast, the ways that music operates formally, narratively, and thematically have been qualitatively neglected. So, too, has the extent to which music permeates all stages of a Wong Kar-wai production. In this chapter, I aim to show that the importance of music in Wong's cinema extends far beyond what is heard on the sound track. Critical Reception and Conceptual Frameworks In the mid-1990s, Western critics subsumed Wong's music scores to broad conceptual and formal frameworks. Auteurists sought evidence of individual artistry in the compilation score, which seemed to exemplify directorial choice.
A key performative trait in Sidney Lumet's oeuvre has gone unexplored: namely, a reliance on play... more A key performative trait in Sidney Lumet's oeuvre has gone unexplored: namely, a reliance on players’ hands, not only as a major dramatic and expressive resource, but, more specifically, as a locus of dramatic equivocation. My purpose in this analytical essay is to highlight, by reference to a range of examples, the forms and functions of this distinctive authorial tendency. As I aim to demonstrate, Lumet deepens character complexity, sharpens thematic meaning, and enhances narrational effects (such as suspense and surprise) by imbuing hand gestures with ambivalence and ambiguity.
Otto Preminger (1905–1986), whose Hollywood career spanned the 1930s through the 1970s, is popula... more Otto Preminger (1905–1986), whose Hollywood career spanned the 1930s through the 1970s, is popularly remembered for the acclaimed films he directed, among which are the classic film noir "Laura", the social-realist melodrama "The Man with the Golden Arm", the CinemaScope musical "Carmen Jones", and the riveting courtroom drama "Anatomy of a Murder". As a screen actor, he forged an indelible impression as a sadistic Nazi in Billy Wilder’s "Stalag 17" and as the diabolical Mr. Freeze in television’s "Batman".
He is remembered, too, for drastically transforming Hollywood’s industrial practices. With "Exodus", Preminger broke the Hollywood blacklist, controversially granting screen credit to Dalton Trumbo, one of the exiled “Hollywood Ten. ” Preminger, a committed liberal, consistently shattered Hollywood’s conventions. He routinely tackled socially progressive yet risqué subject matter, pressing the Production Code’s limits of permissibility. He mounted Black-cast musicals at a period of intense racial unrest. And he embraced a string of other taboo topics—heroin addiction, rape, incest, homosexuality—that established his reputation as a trailblazer of adult-centered storytelling, an enemy of Hollywood puritanism, and a crusader against censorship.
"Otto Preminger: Interviews" compiles nineteen interviews from across Preminger’s career, providing fascinating insights into the methods and mindset of a wildly polarizing filmmaker. With remarkable candor, Preminger discusses his filmmaking practices, his distinctive film style, his battles against censorship and the Hollywood blacklist, his clashes with film critics, and his turbulent relationships with a host of well-known stars, from Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra to Jane Fonda and John Wayne.
Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, 2021
This article provides a stylistic examination of Sidney Lumet's thriller Deathtrap (1982), analyz... more This article provides a stylistic examination of Sidney Lumet's thriller Deathtrap (1982), analyzing how its strategies of staging and performance generate narrational effects of suspense and surprise. It argues that Lumet anchors these performative strategies to a broad authorial program grounded in expressive subtlety; as such, Lumet's film reminds us of a waning tradition of US filmmaking in which stylistic ingenuity resides at the denotative and expressive (rather than the decorative or parametric) levels of stylistic discourse. The article treats Lumet's stylistic choices as creative solutions to a distinctive set of aesthetic problems. It canvasses-and identifies the functions of-the motivic staging schemas patterned throughout Deathtrap; and it illuminates how these schemas, actuated by star players, shape the viewer's cognitive uptake in substantive ways.
The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2020
Six exemplary works of film theory, published in 2018–19, receive consideration in this chapter: ... more Six exemplary works of film theory, published in 2018–19, receive consideration in this chapter: Johannes Riis and Aaron Taylor’s anthology Screening Characters: Theories of Character in Film, Television, and Interactive Media; Murray Pomerance’s Virtuoso: Film Performance and the Actor’s Magic; Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis’s edited collection When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited; Jeff Menne’s Post-Fordist Cinema: Hollywood Auteurs and the Corporate Counterculture; Wieland Schwanebeck and Douglas McFarland’s edited volume Patricia Highsmith on Screen; and Clara Bradbury-Rance’s Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory. The chapter is organized into three sections: 1. Character Engagement and Performance; 2. Revisiting the New Hollywood; 3. A Highsmith Hinge.
Since Ackbar Abbas theorized Hong Kong as a space of cultural ‘disappearance’ in the mid-1990s, c... more 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.
The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2019
In this chapter I review six contributions to the field of film theory published in 2018: Carl Pl... more In this chapter I review six contributions to the field of film theory published in 2018: Carl Plantinga's Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement (Oxford University Press); Miklós Kiss and Steven Willemsen’s Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema (Edinburgh University Press); Nicholas Godfrey’s The Limits of Auteurism: Case Studies in the Critically Constructed New Hollywood (Rutgers University Press); Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis’ The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema’s Most Celebrated Era (Bloomsbury Academic); Dorothy Wai Sim Lau’s Chinese Stardom in Participatory Cyberculture (Edinburgh University Press); and Gina Marchetti’s Citing China: Politics, Postmodernism, and World Cinema (University of Hawaii Press).
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He is remembered, too, for drastically transforming Hollywood’s industrial practices. With "Exodus", Preminger broke the Hollywood blacklist, controversially granting screen credit to Dalton Trumbo, one of the exiled “Hollywood Ten. ” Preminger, a committed liberal, consistently shattered Hollywood’s conventions. He routinely tackled socially progressive yet risqué subject matter, pressing the Production Code’s limits of permissibility. He mounted Black-cast musicals at a period of intense racial unrest. And he embraced a string of other taboo topics—heroin addiction, rape, incest, homosexuality—that established his reputation as a trailblazer of adult-centered storytelling, an enemy of Hollywood puritanism, and a crusader against censorship.
"Otto Preminger: Interviews" compiles nineteen interviews from across Preminger’s career, providing fascinating insights into the methods and mindset of a wildly polarizing filmmaker. With remarkable candor, Preminger discusses his filmmaking practices, his distinctive film style, his battles against censorship and the Hollywood blacklist, his clashes with film critics, and his turbulent relationships with a host of well-known stars, from Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra to Jane Fonda and John Wayne.
Revisited; Jeff Menne’s Post-Fordist Cinema: Hollywood Auteurs and the Corporate Counterculture; Wieland Schwanebeck and Douglas McFarland’s edited volume Patricia Highsmith on Screen; and Clara Bradbury-Rance’s Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory. The chapter is organized into three sections: 1. Character Engagement and Performance; 2. Revisiting the New Hollywood; 3. A Highsmith Hinge.
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.
He is remembered, too, for drastically transforming Hollywood’s industrial practices. With "Exodus", Preminger broke the Hollywood blacklist, controversially granting screen credit to Dalton Trumbo, one of the exiled “Hollywood Ten. ” Preminger, a committed liberal, consistently shattered Hollywood’s conventions. He routinely tackled socially progressive yet risqué subject matter, pressing the Production Code’s limits of permissibility. He mounted Black-cast musicals at a period of intense racial unrest. And he embraced a string of other taboo topics—heroin addiction, rape, incest, homosexuality—that established his reputation as a trailblazer of adult-centered storytelling, an enemy of Hollywood puritanism, and a crusader against censorship.
"Otto Preminger: Interviews" compiles nineteen interviews from across Preminger’s career, providing fascinating insights into the methods and mindset of a wildly polarizing filmmaker. With remarkable candor, Preminger discusses his filmmaking practices, his distinctive film style, his battles against censorship and the Hollywood blacklist, his clashes with film critics, and his turbulent relationships with a host of well-known stars, from Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra to Jane Fonda and John Wayne.
Revisited; Jeff Menne’s Post-Fordist Cinema: Hollywood Auteurs and the Corporate Counterculture; Wieland Schwanebeck and Douglas McFarland’s edited volume Patricia Highsmith on Screen; and Clara Bradbury-Rance’s Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory. The chapter is organized into three sections: 1. Character Engagement and Performance; 2. Revisiting the New Hollywood; 3. A Highsmith Hinge.
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.