Cinephile: The University of British Columbia's Film Journal

VIFF Film Reviews

2023-05-13T21:53:15-07:00

Film reviews of Charlotte Wells' Aftersun, Marie Kreutzer's Corsage, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, Charlotte Le Bon's Falcon Lake, Hong Sang-soo's The Novelist's Film, Sophie Jarvis' Until Branches Bend, and Connie Cocchia's When Time Got Louder.

Brando's Engaging Contradictions

2023-06-04T13:50:42-07:00

This article belongs to the continuing work on the labor and craft of screen performance, feminist scholarship that recognizes women’s overlooked contributions, and cultural-materialist research that examines film practice in relation to its historical context. It deconstructs the Cold War and Hollywood-friendly idea that Marlon Brando was a Method actor by untangling the term’s multiple meanings, contextualizing the factors that gave rise to Brando’s association with Method acting, and highlighting the ignored evidence that he studied with Modern acting teacher Stella Adler. The article details contrasts between the Method’s Freudian focus on actors’ inhibitions and the holistic, research-intensive Modern acting principles Brando employed. It clarifies that Strasberg’s Method was designed to make actors’ more responsive to (male) directors, whereas Modern acting strategies foster actors’ agency and collaborative abilities. The article explores connections between Modern actors’ in-depth exploration of characters’ social realities, Brando’s interest in films with diverse casts and progressive politics, and his offscreen work to support social justice initiatives. It highlights his involvement in One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Burn! (1966), and other films that align audience identification with the autonomous nonwhite characters. The discussion also outlines Brando’s participation in political actions integral to the rise of the American Indian Movement in the 1960s, the work of Martin Luther King Jr., and the Black Panthers. It proposes that contradictions between well-publicized aspects of Brando’s star career and the mundane dimensions of his work as an actor and citizen reveal new insights into American acting, Hollywood cinema, and mid-twentieth century America.

"Blonde"

2023-05-13T22:03:57-07:00

Andrew Dominik’s biopic of Marilyn Monroe, Blonde (2022), uses new digital technologies, including lenses, to redefine the star image of Marilyn Monroe. As Dominik mentions, the narrative of the film is drawn from the ‘shards’ of the biographical fiction novel which was written by Joyce Carol Oates in 2000. This article begins by considering the ‘spectral’ influence of Monroe that the filmmakers cited as a presence during the production of Blonde. It then contextualizes Monroe’s screen persona with reference to research on stars that emerged during Hollywood’s Golden Age. Much of this writing was contemporaneous with the height of Monroe’s acting career. The article focuses on how Blonde revises Monroe’s star’s image, analyzing how a new digital screen persona is illuminated by flashes of light, lenses and framing that distorts and disembodies her image. It highlights how Blonde constructs Monroe primarily through the perspectives of other characters as a spectral image, one who is rarely afforded her own point of view.

A "Misfit" Revision

2023-06-04T13:56:36-07:00

Director John Huston’s The Misfits (1961) was one of the most volatile productions of his career, with its ensemble cast headlined by a trio of screen icons: Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift. Drawing on new archival research, I argue that The Misfits illuminates the transition from old to New Hollywood in terms of its behind-the-scenes star negotiations of Gable and Monroe, who had varying levels of creative control to appear in the film. My analysis of their respective deals underscores how The Misfits anticipates the shift from the female driven star system of Classical Hollywood to the male lead talent of the New Hollywood era, in which men dominated creatively and financially in Hollywood productions . Nevertheless, even within this male centric production context, Monroe exerted her own creative influence in the film by using her star power to help secure United Artists and the A-list talent in the film and by utilizing her Method acting technique. In this way, The Misfits is a transitional film that points to the emerging gender gap that continues to impact Hollywood filmmaking to the present day.

The First Years of #OscarsSoWhite

2023-06-04T18:10:39-07:00

The #OscarsSoWhite twitter campaign started a major conversation in the 2010s about diversity at the Academy Awards, and Hollywood more broadly. However, the moment was just the latest in a long history of media discourse responding to the event. This paper examines the news coverage around the first two Black performers to receive awards “buzz”: Louise Beavers in Imitation of Life (1934); and Hattie McDaniel, who became the first person of color to win an Academy Award for her performance in Gone With the Wind (1939). Beavers, who ultimately did not receive a nomination, had been the first potential Black contender at the event; nonetheless, her snub facilitated a dialogue about the systemic exclusion of minority groups at the Oscars that continues today. As the first Black winner, McDaniel fueled a wider exchange about what the moment would ultimately mean for progress on screen. McDaniel had broken barriers, but did that actually accomplish anything? This paper focuses on the symbolic meaning of the Academy Awards trophy and how its allure as Hollywood’s most coveted achievement has often been used as a symbolic gesture without any long-term substance. At the same time, the modes of discourse around the event has motivated conversations and pushback exposing the wider systemic realities of the American film industry. This paper looks at the origins of Black media discourse around the event, and how they persist into the contemporary context of the Academy Awards.

Poison

2023-06-04T18:20:37-07:00

The American novelist and short story writer Flannery O’Connor felt divinely chosen in her vocation from an early age. However, like more than sixty percent of the American population in the 1940s, she had a moviegoing habit that lured her away from practicing her art. With the recent release of archival materials, we are able to see how frequently O’Connor wrestles with addiction to film, as well as how little effect her performative dislike of cinema had. In the end, cinema—Gone With the Wind, Mighty Joe Young, Till the End of Time—informs her fiction, no matter how strong her protests that movies are low and anti-art.

The Many Faces of Judy Barton

2023-06-04T18:25:33-07:00

This analysis of Wendy Powers & Robin McLeod's 2011 novel The Testament of Judith Barton, a retelling of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) from the point of view of its female lead, argues that the shift in perspective makes space for the inner life and personhood of a character who has been objectified by the film’s male gaze and flattened by its cultural legacy. As a work of adaptation, The Testament of Judith Barton demystifies Vertigo’s mysteries by closely following Judy from early childhood through to her performance of Madeleine within the film’s plot, removing the distance imposed by the male protagonist’s point of view on-screen. It is a contemporary retelling of a classic film that uses the conventions of the novelization genre to interrogate Judy’s place in film history from a feminist angle. By flipping the script and approaching this well-known narrative from Judy’s first-person perspective, the novel alternatingly explores and reinvents her complex motivations in ways that cannot be addressed by the film itself, thereby creating a more fully rounded character and breathing new life into the Hollywood classic.

Rider of the Purple S(t)age

2023-05-23T20:23:05-07:00

This essay explores how the contemporary drag king deconstructs and appropriates the iconography of the classical Hollywood western to reimagine the cowboy figure through subcultural drag performance. Through a combination of interviews and textual, ideological, and genre analyses, this case study illustrates how one drag king in the Washington, DC drag scene, King Molasses, responds to the western’s prescriptive and normative constructions of gender and race by naming them and transforming them into new sites of resistance. Dragging the cinematic cowboy troubles the western’s thematic binary oppositions between the individual and society, the masculine and feminine, as well as the cowboy archetype’s rigid racial construction. The drag king’s embodiment of the Hollywood cowboy renders visible the erasures inherent in the American frontier mythology of this figure, and simultaneously infuses these symbols with new meanings in the context of drag performance to create new subcultural voices and subjectivities.

A Short Interview with Dr. James Naremore

2023-05-13T21:55:16-07:00

An interview with Dr. James Naremore about his scholarship on Old Hollywood.

The Wayward Pleasures of "His Kind of Woman"

2023-05-13T22:01:00-07:00

Nobody would pick His Kind of Woman (1951) as one of the ten best films of all time, but for me it has long been a kind of comfort food. An unusual mixture of noir, comedy, music, and romance, it benefits from the chemistry of Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, from the comic/heroic turn of Vincent Price as an aging movie actor, and above all from John Farrow’s direction and screenwriter Frank Fenton’s wit. It was marred in some ways by producer Howard Hughes, who kept recasting the villain and called in the uncredited Richard Fleischer to direct new climactic scenes aboard a new set—a full-scale ocean-going yacht on a water tank at the back lot of RKO. Hughes rewrote some of the dialog and pressured the reluctant Fleischer to pump up the violence, sadism, and comic heroics of Price. All this didn’t spoil the picture, but it did alter the overall tone, departing from the charming, almost leisurely melding of Farrow’s tracking camera with shifts between the glamourous, the tuneful, the witty, and the sinister.

Letter from the Editor

2023-06-04T18:30:42-07:00

What initially inspired me to theme issue 17.1 of Cinephile around the Classical era was my own personal affinity for it. When I first began falling in love with movies, I would watch the Turner Classic Movies channel religiously, trying to keep up with every Star of the Month spotlight and record every showing of a rare film. While my love for this era inevitably bleeds into my choice of theme, I believe that the reach of this issue extends far past the niche of Classical Hollywood addicts; indeed, many people voicing their opinions on Kardashian's dress choice have never seen an original Marilyn Monroe film. Monroe's cultural legacy extends far past her literal filmography, allowing for a multiciplicity of different relationships with her image--all of which clearly incite strong opinions and emotions in the people involved. All of the articles in this issue interrogate these feelings that live on for the most iconic images from Classical Hollywood.