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Paul Merchant

Pablo Corro‘s 2014 book Retóricas del cine chileno (Rhetorics of Chilean Cinema) is a wide-ranging examination of the style and concerns that have come to characterise Chilean film-making from the 1950s to the present day. Corro demonstrates how ideas of national cinema are always to some extent dependent on transnational currents of cinematic ideas and techniques, as well as on local political contexts. The chapter presented here, Weak Poetics, adapts Gianni Vattimo‘s notion of weak thought to discuss the growing attention paid by Chilean films to the mundane, the everyday and the intimate. Corro‘s dense, allusive writing skilfully mirrors the films he describes, in which meaning is fragmented and dispersed into glimpsed appearances and acousmatic sounds. Corros historicisation of this fracturing of meaning allows the cinema of the everyday to be understood not as a retreat from politics, but as a recasting of the grounds on which it might occur.

Film Studies
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Exploring Film Seriality: An Introduction
Frank Krutnik
and
Kathleen Loock

Film Studies
John Hughes Family Films and Seriality in 1990s Hollywood
Holly Chard

This article explores serial production strategies and textual seriality in Hollywood cinema during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Focusing on John Hughes‘ high concept family comedies, it examines how Hughes exploited the commercial opportunities offered by serial approaches to both production and film narrative. This article first considers why Hughes‘ production set-up enabled him to standardise his movies and respond quickly to audience demand. The analysis then explores how the Home Alone films (1990–97), Dennis the Menace (1993) and Baby‘s Day Out (1994) balanced demands for textual repetition and novelty.

Film Studies
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Seriality, Shortness and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend
Ruth Mayer

This article explores the transmedial seriality of Winsor McCay‘s newspaper comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (1904–24), tracking the narratives evolution from comic to trick film (Edwin S. Porter‘s The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, 1906) and animation (McCays own Bug Vaudeville, 1921). In contrast to large parts of the critical response to McCay‘s work, this article does not fore ground the subversive and disruptive dimension of the Rarebit narratives. Instead, it reads both the graphic and filmic narratives as integral parts of the larger serialised culture of modernity, and as attempts to chart this reality, in order to make it navigable.

Film Studies
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Averageness, Populism and Seriality in Robert Benchley‘s How to Short Subjects
Rob King

Over the course of the 1930s, the comic persona of Algonquin humorist Robert Benchley changed from that of a sophisticated humorist to an average man. This article situates Benchley‘s How to short subjects for MGM (1935–44) within a broader public preoccupation with averageness that characterised the populist political rhetoric of New Deal-era America. In particular, it explores the function of seriality as a discursive trope conjoining the format of Benchley‘s MGM shorts to the broader construction of average identities in the eras political culture.

Film Studies
The Whistler Film Series
Frank Krutnik

This article explores the serial dynamics behind and within the succession of B-films Columbia Pictures developed from the popular CBS radio programme The Whistler. It examines how this anthology series developed within Columbias on going strategy of low-budget production, while responding to specfiic industrial challenges facing 1940s B-films. Besides looking at broader synergies between radio and cinema during this period, the article also qualies the tendency to categorise the Whistler movies as films noir, suggesting it is more productive to view them as products of a broader pulp serialscape that is shaped by alternative cultural and industrial logics.

Film Studies
James Bond‘s Serial Heritage
Scott Higgins

Just six years after the last American sound-era serial, Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman brought James Bond to the screen, launching the longest-lived and most influential film series of the post-studio era. This article considers how the first Bond films adapted the regular imperilments,and operational aesthetics of sound-serials. Early Bond films benefitted from a field of expectations, viewing strategies and conventions planted by the over 200 B-grade chapter-plays produced between 1930 and 1956. Recourse to these serial strategies conferred tactile immediacy and ludic clarity to the films, and facilitated engagement with the Bond beyond the cinema.

Film Studies
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Repetition, Innovation, and Hollywood‘s Hit Film Formula
Kathleen Loock

This article explores the rise of the Hollywood sequel in the 1970s and 1980s, analysing contemporary industrial and popular discourses surrounding the sequel, sequelisation, and film seriality. Drawing on recent sequel scholarship as well as a wide range of film examples and paratexts it examines how industry insiders, trade papers, and film critics tried to make sense of the burgeoning sequel trend. The ensuing discourses and cultural practices, this article argues, not only shaped the contexts of sequel production and reception at the time but also played into the movies‘ serialisation strategies and their increasingly self-referential manoeuvres.

Film Studies
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Matthew Gartner
,
Martin Fradley
,
Alexis Brown
,
Patricia Prieto-Blanco
, and
Antonio Lázaro-Reboll
Film Studies
Daniel Biltereyst

Arguing that limit transgression is a key feature for understanding the cinematic performance of, and the controversy around, sexuality in the public sphere, this contribution focuses on various aspects of limit transgression in relation to sex cinemas. Following a new cinema history approach and concentrating on the case of an emerging sex cinema in postwar Belgium (Cinema Leopold in Ghent, 1945–54), this article looks at various dimensions of limit transgression in terms of concrete physical and spatial relations; programming strategies; audience experiences; and a range of disciplining societal practices and institutional discourses.

Film Studies