Please note; this essay was written for a history department and, with that in mind, there was an assumption of complete unfamiliarity with cinematic analysis. As a result it covers some ground which is probably familiar to you. However, rather than interrupt the flow of the essay by removing such material, I have decided to leave it in. It never hurts to have a refresher.

One may even speak of a culture, in which senseless killing and violence now belong to the Serbs’ sense of themselves: as a wounded people that keep on wounding themselves, and even their best friends and neighbours. We can apply Mark Seltzer’s notion of America’s “wound culture” to modern Serbia. The wound stands paradigmatically as a metaphor for a culture that is traumatized by endless war and everyday violence, and morbidly obsessed with it.

-Igor Krstic, Serbia’s Wound Culture: Teenage Killers in Milosevic’s Serbia. p. 101

The social and psychological impact of genocide on a people is undeniable. In the wake of such a catastrophic event, the mind must attempt to process the hows and whys of what has happened and find a way to live in the aftermath of those events. The pain and suffering of the genocide become a part of the cultural identity of both victims and perpetrators and the evidence of this newfound component of their cultural identity trickles down through all levels of society. An excellent example is the media which a culture produces in the wake of genocide. The artists who create these creative works are not any more or less affected by the genocide than any other members of society and, deliberately or subconsciously, their works of art will reflect the changes that have occurred in the wake of genocide or other devastating cultural event. In this paper we use Srdan Dragojevic’s Rane(which translates as “The Wounds”) as a case study to explore the role of film and media in understanding the advent and consequences of genocide to a people. Due to the restriction of space, we will assume that the reader has a general familiarity with the Bosnian genocide, though all information pertinent to the examples given from the film will be included. While, optimally, we would spend a thousand words on both the Bosnian genocide and critical film theory, this would prevent us from achieving the level of analysis required to answer the question. We will also assume that readers have seen Rane and a copy has been included with this submission. Let us begin with a short summary of the interpretive methods we will use to analyse Rane. Read the rest of this entry »

Here at pleasantfluff.com, we’re all massive fans of Fight Club and today marks the 10th anniversary of its general release in cinemas. In order to celebrate, we’re going to publishing Mr. Bailey Smith’s article on it and (one of) its Japanese counterparts, Battle Royale. We had hoped to get it out by today, but we’re all bogged down in the end of semester quagmire.

Enough bleating! Happy Birthday Fight Club, may you inspire many more young men to adopt an iconoclastic stance in our increasingly alienating world.

A new piece from now-serial contributor, Aiyesha McInerney:

Part I

Introduction

Mulvey’s psychoanalytic feminist film theory had many implications for the study of cinema, and this essay aims to first delineate the way in which these implications have influenced and challenged feminist film theory. Mulvey’s article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” raised several issues which have been taken up by feminist film theorists since; as primary examples in relation to horror cinema I use Barbara Creed and Carol Clover, whose works on the monstrous-feminine and the slasher film (respectively) are both seminal and deeply indebted to Mulvey’s theory. The examination of those sources in relation to Mulvey’s theory concludes Part I of this essay.

Part II will analyse two modern horror films which, I argue, take as their subject woman and the feminine in ways which challenge and oppose what Mulvey calls “the language of the dominant patriarchal order” (Mulvey 485). This essay will argue that it is now possible to attempt an analysis of some – by no means all – modern horror cinema, which occupies a position outside of traditional or mainstream patriarchal codification, a position referred to (and henceforth described) as primal sisterhood. ¹ Read the rest of this entry »

This essay arose when Bailey and I (both long time Cronenberg fans) had an opportunity to write an essay about him in the same class. Naturally, a competition ensued. Here was my entrant:

For Cronenberg sex represents intimacy, betrayal, sublimation, absorption and the merging of identities all at once. Cronenberg has stated that the body is the “first fact of human existence” (Günberg 95). For Cronenberg our physicality and sensual experience of the world is all that we can know for sure (Günberg 95) and, because it is perhaps the ultimate physical act, sex is the intersection of thought, identity and biology. Any pretence of a higher, non-physical person is subsumed in this act of raw physicality and passion. Videodrome, Naked Lunch and Crash are excellent case studies in Cronenberg’s obsessive pre-occupation with human sexuality because each features a central character whose latent sexuality blossoms over the course of the film, for better or worse. This essay will examine the methods Cronenberg uses to expose and explore the expansive and polymorphous entity that is human sexuality in his films. Read the rest of this entry »

Depictions of Native Americans in film have existed since the beginning of the film industry and similar depictions existed before film in the form of wild-west shows. Historically these depictions have been created by and for Euro-Americans and, as a result, present a skewed and stereotyped image of Native American people. While Native people have been involved in the film industry for over a century, it took until 1998 for a completely Native American production to arise with a Native writer, director and crew. Smoke Signals premiered at a time when, regrettably, many people thought that Native Americans no longer existed as a distinct culture or people. This essay will explore how Smoke Signals challenged contemporary and historical views of Native Americans in American film. However, before we can understand the significance of Native American depictions in Smoke Signals we must first gain and understanding of how Native Americans have been historically depicted in American films and entertainment and why such depictions are significant. Read the rest of this entry »

The submissions from guest authors keep coming, with this fine article by Anna Gardner. Anna is a colleague of mine from La Trobe University who’s currently completing her honours, specifically focusing on the rise and fall of Buster Keaton.

-Morgan

The spirited bush girl was a feature of early Australian film. As part of the patriotic nation building drive of the 1920s and 1930s, the bush girl was a wholesome and admirable ideal of womanhood, independent and healthy, representing the prosperity and fertility of the nation. The bush heroine was a prominent figure in films such as A Girl of the Bush (Barrett, 1921) and The Squatter’s Daughter (Hall, 1933). However, somewhat in opposition to the emancipated bush girl, are bush heroines who suffer in their relationships with men. Films such as The Woman Suffers (Longford, 1918) and The Far Paradise (McDonagh, 1928) feature girls trapped by circumstances beyond their control. The young female protagonist is portrayed as the innocent victim of unprincipled men and the inevitable marriage that resolves the film rescues the heroine from her situation, rather than consolidating her power. Read the rest of this entry »

Greetings, faithful readers! We’re very excited to announce a pre-release look at the exciting new Australian film, Cedar Boys, due for release on July 30.

The trailer presents us with a vision of a classic crime film, complete with an 8 Mile-esque soundtrack and premise, but when we dig deeper we see it offers us much more than another tale about youth embroiled in crime. Tarek, played by Les Chantery, is a young Lebanese-Australian man who is stuck in a rut and a dead-end job as a panel beater. When presented with an opportunity to steal a vast quantity of pills from a drug-dealer’s apartment, he seizes it as an obvious chance to make a vast quantity of money and set himself up for life. Despite the trailer’s marketing itself to a younger generation with needlessly flashy editing and an overtly gritty sensibility, the film itself presents an interesting synthesis of the gangster film and that most steadfast of Australian cinematic traditions, the Australian ethnic drama. Read the rest of this entry »

The work of Woody Allen reveals perhaps some of the most instinctively recognized preoccupations and consistent attitudes of contemporary screenwriting. In all of his most celebrated and well-known films (Annie Hall {1977}, Manhattan {1979}, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask {1972}, Match Point {2005}) there exists innate cursors of the screenwriter’s opinions and attitude towards his craft that will, in this essay, be evidenced not just by the films themselves but by Allen’s own remarks, as made in Eric Lax’s Conversations with Woody Allen: His films, the movies, and moviemaking. Not only this, but through discussion of the three of the four films mentioned, as well as Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), common story patterns, character types and treatment of themes will be explored, as they pertain to Allen’s writing and the aforementioned opinions he holds. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re pleased to present the work of guest writer Aiyesha McInerney: her submission on the life and times of Jean Renoir, Orson Welles and Renoir’s arguable master-stroke, 1939’s The Rules of the Game.

It would be genuinely remiss, at this late stage, to discount outright any of the films considered momentous by the foremost critical minds of the Western World, as subsequently critically or cinematically unimportant, in opposition to their accrued reputations. The re-evaluatory anti-establishment instincts that reside within most contentious critics have wrought their best and their worst on our modern understanding of the world that the cinema gifts us with, and yet, these films still stand tall.

That having been said, it would be equally negligent not to consider the possibility that many of the films elevated to the status of pantheon members are as celebrated on account of their oft-torturous histories as their content, which is not to their detriment, but ought be taken into consideration nonetheless. Read the rest of this entry »

If there is one truth to the art of theatre in the age of Shakespeare and the period directly following it (the Jacobean era, during which Ben Jonson ascended to the literary throne left empty by the Bard’s death), it is that boundaries, borders and segregating lines of distinction are not what they seem. They are, in fact, in a constant state of flux despite their apparent and implicit immutability, and this is never truer then when it comes to the depiction of what might perhaps be referred to as tertiary characteristics of gender and sexuality (that is, those characteristics of behaviour, dress and appearance that are entirely socially constructed rather than reliant on biological imperatives). However, this truth, much like the borders it describes, is itself subject to change and exceptions, and only through comparison with other forms of Shakespearean drama can these be truly appreciated or defined.

Read the rest of this entry »