FILM CRITICISMPub Date : 2021-12-24DOI: 10.13110/criticism.63.4.0319
Harrison Adams
{"title":"Peter Hujar: Shamelessness Without Shame","authors":"Harrison Adams","doi":"10.13110/criticism.63.4.0319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13110/criticism.63.4.0319","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:We can be ashamed and we can feel shame for someone who lacks shame. The essay argues that Peter Hujar's photography explores what it means to feel a truly shameless shamelessness. Each of Hujar's three major bodies of work—his portraits, nudes, and animal pictures—seeks in different ways to overcome what might be otherwise embarrassing about their respective genres: a portrait that is too candid, a nude that verges on naked, and, more subtly, animals that resist anthropomorphism, either as pets or as human doppelgängers. I contend that Hujar's unflinching and candid portrayals make the viewer acutely aware of his or her impulse to be or not to be embarrassed for themselves and/or for the artist's sitters. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's and Silvan Tomkins's idea that shame is something through which identity is constituted provides the essay's theoretical foundation.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":"54 1","pages":"319 - 353"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90756167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FILM CRITICISMPub Date : 2021-12-24DOI: 10.13110/criticism.63.4.0409
Greg Forter
{"title":"Nature, Capitalism, and The Temporalities of Sleep: On Karen Thompson Walker's The Dreamers","authors":"Greg Forter","doi":"10.13110/criticism.63.4.0409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13110/criticism.63.4.0409","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay contributes to recent materialist efforts at rehabilitating the category of \"nature\" from critical disparagement (and misapprehension). It does so by linking nature both to sleep and to the temporal heterogeneities that contemporary capital's construal of time seeks but fails to eradicate. To explore these matters, I bring together Jonathan Crary's 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013), Andreas Malm's The Progress of This Storm (2018), and Karen Thompson Walker's The Dreamers (2019). These are works that trace how capital's assault on nature is also an assault on temporal modalities that cannot be subsumed within homogeneous, empty time. They suggest that any reckoning with contemporary capitalism must include a retrieval of temporalities that are \"natural\" in the sense of belonging to biophysical processes predating and shaping human practice, yet historical inasmuch as they introduce the possibility of punctures into capital's smooth functioning: pausing, interrupting, refusing to be swallowed by, or otherwise disturbing the temporal homogeneity required and enforced by the commodity form. Crary's text and Walker's novel are especially compelling for the way they tether these intimations to a collective experience of sleep.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":"34 1","pages":"409 - 434"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83839808","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FILM CRITICISMPub Date : 2021-12-24DOI: 10.13110/criticism.63.4.0381
Leah Allen
{"title":"From New Criticism to Postcritique: Kate Millett's Method in The History of The Present","authors":"Leah Allen","doi":"10.13110/criticism.63.4.0381","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13110/criticism.63.4.0381","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Kate Millett has not been adequately located in the history of literary criticism. Although her 1970 text Sexual Politics was part of the breakdown of New Criticism's hegemony in US English departments, Millett's early readers primarily understood it as a work of social criticism linked to the emerging second-wave feminist movement. When critics did attend to Millett's use of literature, many found it scarcely literary criticism at all because it defied every tenet of then-dominant New Criticism. Others judged Millett's de-aestheticizing method as \"bad\" literary criticism for its attention to politics over artistic construction, especially as New Criticism's influence waned and her resistance to New Criticism became less obvious at the text's central struggle. As such, we have not fully appreciated Millett's anticipation of cultural studies, nor her influence on contemporary modes of reading. Feminist literary criticism appears as a political intervention into an ongoing enterprise rather than as a foundational driver of changes in modes of interpretation. Here, I contextualize Millett's method in the transitional moment when New Criticism lost its grip on US literary studies and reassess feminist literary criticism's influence on how we read in the present. This reconsideration matters now more than ever as we witness the resurgence of de-aestheticizing methods within yet another transitional moment in the history of criticism.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":"19 1","pages":"381 - 407"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88058955","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"MTV Video Stardom as Media Power: Madonna’s (Moving) Image Control","authors":"Landon Palmer","doi":"10.3998/fc.1786","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3998/fc.1786","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43145375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Blinded by the Light\" and Rock Tradition","authors":"Doyle Greene","doi":"10.3998/fc.1057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3998/fc.1057","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46706054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Vigilantism and the Law in \"Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri\"","authors":"J. McEntee","doi":"10.3998/fc.977","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3998/fc.977","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45862137","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Smile in \"Son of Saul\": A Test of Différence","authors":"Ayesha Ahmed","doi":"10.3998/fc.1036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3998/fc.1036","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the smile that features in the climax of László Nemes’ Hungarian Holocaust film, Son of Saul (2015). The smile, a happy response in the face of death, is argued as emblematic of the film’s problematising of choice. The facial gesture re-presents the dilemma of choice in ways that expose the limits of Jacques Derrida’s notion of différance. In Holocaust discourse, Primo Levi and Lawrence L. Langer have spoken of death camps as sites of extreme coercion where choice was rendered inoperable. 1 This inoperability has been reflected on by Levi as a hindrance to accounting for acts of complicity committed by prisoners under duress. 2 This dilemma in Holocaust discourse is reworked in the Hungarian Holocaust film, Son of Saul ( Saul Fia , Nemes, 2015), which problematises choice in an affirmative context.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45867230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}