Film Quarterly Spring 2014

Film Quarterly has published substantial, peer-reviewed writing on cinema and media for nearly sixty years, earning a reputation as the most authoritative academic film journal in the United States, as well as an important English-language voice of cinema studies abroad.

Film Quarterly has published substantial, peer-reviewed writing on cinema and media for nearly sixty years, earning a reputation as the most authoritative academic film journal in the United States, as well as an important English-language voice of cinema studies abroad.

Film Quarterly has published substantial, peer-reviewed writing on cinema and media for nearly sixty years, earning a reputation as the most authoritative academic film journal in the United States, as well as an important English-language voice of cinema studies abroad.

The newest volume in the Film Theory in Practice Series, Auteur Theory and My Son John offers a concise introduction to authorship and auteur theory in jargon-free language. The book goes on to show this theory can be deployed to interpret Leo McCarey's notorious but undervalued film My Son John, which critics deemed a clear-cut failure, and the auteurists declared a masterpiece. James Morrison traces the development of auteur theory through its emergence in the pages of the French film journal Cahiers du cinéma and the complex permutations it undergoes subsequently. This history will help students and scholars who are eager to learn more about this important area of film theory. The analysis of My Son John shows how auteur theory enables modes of interpretation and discovers levels of meaning otherwise unavailable.

This examination of dark comedies of the 1970s focuses on films which concealed black humor behind a misleading genre label. All That Jazz (1979) is a musical...about death--hardly Fred and Ginger territory. This masking goes beyond misnomer to a breaking of formula that director Robert Altman called "anti-genre." Altman's MASH (1970) ridiculed the military establishment in general--the Vietnam War in particular--under the guise of a standard military service comedy. The picaresque Western Little Big Man (1970) turned the bluecoats vs. Indians formula upside-down--the audience roots for the Indians instead of the cavalry. The book covers 12 essential films, including Harold and Maude (1971), Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and Being There (1979), with notes on A Clockwork Orange (1971). These films reveal a compounding complexity that reinforces the absurdity at the heart of dark comedy.

As the first book-length study about Dolan, with case studies of key films like Mommy (2014), Tom at the Farm (2013) and It's Only the End of the World (2016), this volume explores the global reach of small national and subnational cinemas.

In 1990, American television experienced a seismic shift when Twin Peaks premiered, eschewing formulaic plots and clear lines between heroes and villains. This game-changing series inspired a generation of show creators to experiment artistically, transforming the small screen in ways that endure to this day. Focusing on six shows (Twin Peaks, with a critical analysis of both the original series and the 2017 return; The Wire; Treme; The Sopranos; Mad Men; and Girls), Television Rewired explores what made these programs so extraordinary. As their writers and producers fought against canned plots and moral simplicity, they participated in the evolution of the exhilarating new auteur television while underscoring the fact that art and entertainment don't have to be mutually exclusive. Nochimson also makes provocative distinctions between true auteur television and shows that were inspired by the freedom of the auteur series but nonetheless remained entrenched within the parameters of formula. Providing opportunities for vigorous discussion, Television Rewired will stimulate debates about which of the new television series since 1990 constitute “art” and which are tweaked “business-driven storytelling.”

In contemporary culture, existing audiovisual recordings are constantly reused and repurposed for various ends, raising questions regarding the ethics of such appropriations, particularly when the recording depicts actual people and events. Every reuse of a preexisting recording is, on some level, a misuse in that it was not intended or at least anticipated by the original maker, but not all misuses are necessarily unethical. In fact, there are many instances of productive misuse that seem justified. At the same time, there are other instances in which the misuse shades into abuse. Documentary scholars have long engaged with the question of the ethical responsibility of documentary makers in relation to their subjects. But what happens when this responsibility is set at a remove, when the recording already exists for the taking and repurposing? Reuse, Misuse and Abuse surveys a range of contemporary films and videos that appropriate preexisting footage and attempts to theorize their ethical implications.