Papers by Joshua Schulze
American Quarterly, 2024
This essay examines the promotion of Twentieth Century-Fox's production of The Robe (1953)-which ... more This essay examines the promotion of Twentieth Century-Fox's production of The Robe (1953)-which exhibited Dean Cornwell's oil paintings in local department stores in Detroit-in relation to the city's sociocultural context and racial tensions. It argues that ongoing issues in the city such as property ownership, racialized topographical boundaries, and class aspiration can be traced across Detroit's film culture in the postwar period, particularly in the burgeoning middlebrow culture of materialistic consumption. The promotional campaign's use of art exhibitions in department stores represented a significant moment for new ideas about class, culture, and racial identity in the city, contributing to the formation of the white suburban middle class and functioning as an example of racialized tastemaking. Accounts of this postwar cultural shift, particularly as it pertained to film culture, have underemphasized the importance of racial identity and exclusion to such formations. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that integrates film history, material culture studies, and cultural history, this essay uses the Cornwell exhibition as a case study for understanding the impact of racial tensions on class identity in 1950s Detroit.
Imago. Studi di cinema e media, 2022
This article uses the 2020 desktop horror film Host, which was made and released entirely under l... more This article uses the 2020 desktop horror film Host, which was made and released entirely under lockdown conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic, and shot using the computer screen interface of a Zoom call, as a case study through which to examine the film industry’s increasing dependency on digital technologies. It first situates the film within the broader context of sustainable filmmaking initiatives, emphasizing the carbon footprint of digital streaming platforms to complicate the assumption that such technologies are immaterial. It then considers the capacity for the film and its reflexive deployment of the computer interface to provoke an awareness of its own materiality, with a focus on the ways in which it dramatizes the failure of videoconferencing software to meaningfully replace “authentic” communication, rendering it threatening and uncanny in the process. The article ends by considering how the film’s transparent displaying of its labour and construction still keeps invisible the exploitative and racialized labour of digital device construction—without which it would not exist—ultimately arguing that film studies would benefit from a continued occupation with materiality.
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Apr 2020
Critics, in their dealings with Brian De Palma, have paid little attention to the question of how... more Critics, in their dealings with Brian De Palma, have paid little attention to the question of how his films make us feel, or in what ways they are capable of doing so at all. In order to go about answering such a question, this essay will focus its attention on Body Double (1984), a film rich not only in what it reveals about De Palma as a filmmaker, but also in the ways it can inform our understanding of style, meaning, tone, and feeling, and how they might interact or synthesize with each other. In order to keep the analysis as detailed and informative as is achievable, this article will take for consideration a single moment from the film. I will describe the moment in close detail, in an effort to capture the immediate responses the spectator might have, before considering a range of different approaches, and how they may be able (or unable) to not only capture, but explain, and possibly even understand the feelings one experiences when watching it.
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Horror Studies, Apr 1, 2019
In the cinema of Dario Argento, the architecture frequently draws attention to itself and often c... more In the cinema of Dario Argento, the architecture frequently draws attention to itself and often cross-contaminates various eras and influences within a single film. However, in critical discussions of his 1977 film Suspiria, the interior styles deployed and their thematic and political relationship to the characters themselves have not been as arduously explored. This article will seek to argue that the architecture in Suspiria embodies a rhetoric in art criticism and the horror film that posits feminine styles as ornamental and somehow dangerous and deceptive, and the female body as unknowable and treacherous – ultimately perpetuating the idea that a woman’s sexual difference in all its manifestations is an unassailable threat to man and the progress of modernity. The first section will introduce the various theories and existing literature surrounding Argento, while the second engages with how the film uses ornament and the ‘pretty’ in relation to its female characters. The third section seeks to elucidate how the architectural recreation of maternal and anatomical imagery ties in with theories of ornament and modernity, while the fourth and final part will observe the role of waste in a building that is both decorative and antiquated in a modern context, where everything is measured by utility.
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Journal of Popular Film and Television, 2019
Book Chapters by Joshua Schulze
Watership Down: Perspectives On and Beyond Animated Violence, 2023
Autism in Film and Television: On the island, 2022
The Cinema of James Wan: Critical Essays, edited by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and Matthew Edwards (Jefferson: McFarland), 143-154, 2022
The Faces and Stakes of Brand Insertion, edited by Sandrine Villers and Sébastien Lefait (Wilmington: Vernon Press), 143-157, 2022
This chapter starts by reminding the reader that in The Fast and the Furious (2001), protagonist ... more This chapter starts by reminding the reader that in The Fast and the Furious (2001), protagonist Dom Toretto famously explains to Brian, “You can have any brew you want, as long as it’s a Corona.” According to interviews with the filmmakers, there was no financial transaction between themselves and Grupo Modelo to use their product in the film. The author focuses on this peculiar case of brand placement in the Fast and Furious franchise, arguing that their appearance is a conscious decision made by the filmmakers, one grounded in narrative and character. The author’s aim is to delineate how Corona beers are used and implemented in the franchise as a whole — for which he introduces theories of semiotics in order to outline how the Corona can be productively read and understood as a recurring symbol. He argues that the franchise’s thematic concerns with family, home, and culture, are inseparable from the Corona brand placement. The author’s arguments are critically supported by the work of Mary Beltrán on the franchise and its relationship to Latinx culture and identity, as well as drawing more generally from literature on brand placement in films, and how it might affect the franchise’s seriality.
Book Reviews by Joshua Schulze
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2021
Not every actor warrants an entire anthology devoted to their life, career, and enduring stardom,... more Not every actor warrants an entire anthology devoted to their life, career, and enduring stardom, but Tom Cruise is undoubtedly one of them. As one of the most profitable movie stars in the world, even at the age of 58, the actor-producer regularly assumes an unusually high level of authority over his films, which has helped him cultivate one of the more fascinating and distinguished personas in the industry over several decades. Indeed, the sheer longevity and at times chameleonic capacity of his star persona to survive across different periods and shifts-despite the much-speculated nature of his personal life-provides a plethora of material for scholars and critics to study. Accordingly, this new collection edited by Sean Redmond, Starring Tom Cruise, pulls together a number of methodological approaches and critical lenses through which we can better understand Cruise as a key figure in recent film history, while also touching on broader topics pertinent to the field of film and media studies. Alongside the refreshing defence of textual analysis and its centrality to star studies offered by Redmond in his introduction, in which he describes it as "incredibly robust and deeply intimate, revealing and exposing the ideological tissue that sits beneath its skin" (Redmond 2021, 5), in this anthology the 'star text' is used as a starting point from which to ponder wider sociological and industrial questions. The result is a collection of contributions that ably compliment each other in their unified focus and, in sum, offer a comprehensive study of Cruise that should be of interest to any scholar working in star studies, and also film studies at large. The book is organized into three sections: "Desiring Tom Cruise," "Genre Cruise," and "Aging Cruise." The first includes chapters that focus on Cruise as a sex symbol and object of desire, particularly in his early years and emergence as a star in the 1980s. The authors employ a diverse array of theoretical and methodological approaches, from Patrick O'Neill's use of empirical sources on adolescence to interrogate Cruise's performances in teen films, to Defne T€ uz€ un's deployment of psychoanalytic theory to unpick the usage of Cruise's image in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, and to Loraine Haywood's drawing from the postmodernist writing of Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zi zek to offer a reading of Cruise's embodiment of the American consciousness in his films. The second section, "Genre Cruise," compiles essays that situate Cruise's persona within the various generic contexts that it has appeared in across his career, considering both what Cruise offers to the genre and question, and in turn how the genre is enriched or complicated by his presence. In "Cruising the Vampire: Hollywood Gothic, Star Branding, and Interview with the Vampire (1994)," for instance, Sorcha N ı Fhlainn positions the film as symbiotically improving Cruise's career as an "actorly" (N ı Fhlainn 2021, 143) and bold move, while also boosting the popularity and legitimacy of the horror genre by bringing it into mainstream conversation. The authors in this section also negotiate the relationship between Cruise and the science-fiction genre, whether in hiscollaborations with Steven Spielberg in Minority Report (2002) QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO
New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2020
Mediascape - UCLA's Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2017
Review of Owen Weetch's "Expressive Spaces in Digital 3D Cinema" (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 201... more Review of Owen Weetch's "Expressive Spaces in Digital 3D Cinema" (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) in Mediascape: UCLA's Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.
Conference Presentations by Joshua Schulze
Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 2022
ASAP/12: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, 2021
NECS: European Network for Cinema and Media Studies, 2021
Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Mar 2021
Earth(ly) Matters: Roots, Rebellions, & Resolutions, Aug 2020
London: Gateway to Cinema and Media Studies, Jul 2019
In the period following the British New Wave, the industrial shift towards location shooting led ... more In the period following the British New Wave, the industrial shift towards location shooting led to the establishment of several independent production companies, such as George Harrison’s HandMade Films. One aspect of this shift that has not been satisfyingly delineated is the extent to which the inclusion of ‘real’ architectural spaces in cinema possesses a greater capacity to represent cultural spaces at a moment in time, and to enrich a scene with a sense of history and place that exists beyond the realm of the fiction film. Focusing on a single type of cinematic space, this paper hopes to address this critical gap.
The pub is an iconic and socially significant space in British culture, and yet, despite its prevalence in film, its function and significance remains surprisingly under-explored. In particular, Bruce Robinson’s 1960s-set Withnail and I (1987) represents a key example of London location-shooting for its traversal from the urban to the rural, and – consequently – through three very different kinds of pubs. As a text, its countryside-retreat narrative invites the comparison between such disparate spaces, from the filth and neglect of the eponymous pair’s Bayswater flat, to the lifeless breakfast café in Ladbroke Grove, and, most instructively, between the three pubs/bars: ‘The Mother Black Cap’ in Westbourne Green, and ‘The Crow and Crown’ and ‘King Henry’ in Penrith.
Using the film as a case study, this paper will consider the relationship between location shooting and London’s cultural identity on screen, as well as its specific impact on narrative questions of character and mise-en-scène. Combining spatial theory, textual analysis, and architectural histories of the individual locations that feature in the film (for instance, the pub that featured as ‘The Mother Black Cap’ actually continued under its fictional name for several years, signifying the film’s cult status, but has since closed down), my paper addresses the question: what potential does a real architectural space have for either supplementing or ‘intruding’ on a scene, and how does its own history (and capacity to hold memories, in Gaston Bachelard’s terms) enrich or contrast with both the narrative function and a city’s cultural image?
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Papers by Joshua Schulze
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Book Chapters by Joshua Schulze
Book Reviews by Joshua Schulze
Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17400309.2020.1777639
Conference Presentations by Joshua Schulze
The pub is an iconic and socially significant space in British culture, and yet, despite its prevalence in film, its function and significance remains surprisingly under-explored. In particular, Bruce Robinson’s 1960s-set Withnail and I (1987) represents a key example of London location-shooting for its traversal from the urban to the rural, and – consequently – through three very different kinds of pubs. As a text, its countryside-retreat narrative invites the comparison between such disparate spaces, from the filth and neglect of the eponymous pair’s Bayswater flat, to the lifeless breakfast café in Ladbroke Grove, and, most instructively, between the three pubs/bars: ‘The Mother Black Cap’ in Westbourne Green, and ‘The Crow and Crown’ and ‘King Henry’ in Penrith.
Using the film as a case study, this paper will consider the relationship between location shooting and London’s cultural identity on screen, as well as its specific impact on narrative questions of character and mise-en-scène. Combining spatial theory, textual analysis, and architectural histories of the individual locations that feature in the film (for instance, the pub that featured as ‘The Mother Black Cap’ actually continued under its fictional name for several years, signifying the film’s cult status, but has since closed down), my paper addresses the question: what potential does a real architectural space have for either supplementing or ‘intruding’ on a scene, and how does its own history (and capacity to hold memories, in Gaston Bachelard’s terms) enrich or contrast with both the narrative function and a city’s cultural image?
Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10509208.2019.1646555
Available at: https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/host/2019/00000010/00000001/art00006
Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01956051.2019.1563449
Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17400309.2020.1777639
The pub is an iconic and socially significant space in British culture, and yet, despite its prevalence in film, its function and significance remains surprisingly under-explored. In particular, Bruce Robinson’s 1960s-set Withnail and I (1987) represents a key example of London location-shooting for its traversal from the urban to the rural, and – consequently – through three very different kinds of pubs. As a text, its countryside-retreat narrative invites the comparison between such disparate spaces, from the filth and neglect of the eponymous pair’s Bayswater flat, to the lifeless breakfast café in Ladbroke Grove, and, most instructively, between the three pubs/bars: ‘The Mother Black Cap’ in Westbourne Green, and ‘The Crow and Crown’ and ‘King Henry’ in Penrith.
Using the film as a case study, this paper will consider the relationship between location shooting and London’s cultural identity on screen, as well as its specific impact on narrative questions of character and mise-en-scène. Combining spatial theory, textual analysis, and architectural histories of the individual locations that feature in the film (for instance, the pub that featured as ‘The Mother Black Cap’ actually continued under its fictional name for several years, signifying the film’s cult status, but has since closed down), my paper addresses the question: what potential does a real architectural space have for either supplementing or ‘intruding’ on a scene, and how does its own history (and capacity to hold memories, in Gaston Bachelard’s terms) enrich or contrast with both the narrative function and a city’s cultural image?
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However, in the most recent entry, Insidious: The Last Key (2018), we learn the origins of protagonist Elise's ability to successfully navigate The Further, while she herself comes to terms with the only real demon that ever managed to haunt her. In addition to this, the film develops a strange and intriguing stance on the role of technology in these portals between worlds. The conflation of technophobic and glitch-ridden imagery with rusty keys and ancient whistles certainly succeeds in jarring the audience with its affective properties, but its thematic implications are less immediately clear.
Equally, the possibility of The Further as a site for the uncanny becomes the most actualised in The Last Key, and often functions emblematically for one coming to terms with past traumas. All these elements render the film the least coherent in the series, and arguably the most thematically rich and interesting as a result.
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