Film, Media and Music
Filmmaker Jennifer Lyon Bell (Blue Artichoke Films) has made empathy the centre of her practice as an alternative porn filmmaker. This blend of artist manifesto and academic essay illuminates the three ways in which empathy is a driving force at every level of her artistic efforts. 1) Structure: Using a foundation of cognitive film theory and specifically the work of Murray Smith, she builds empathy into the structure and content of her films themselves. 2) Production: She prioritises empathy in her production process on the set with cast and crew 3) Society: By creating and spreading empathetic pornography, she aims to introduce more empathy into society at large.
In 1974 the British Board of Film Censors refused to grant a certificate to the Swedish documentary More About the Language of Love (Mera ur Kärlekens språk, 1970, Torgny Wickman, Sweden: Swedish Film Production), due to its explicit sexual content. Nevertheless, the Greater London Council granted the film an ‘X’ certificate so that it could be shown legally in cinemas throughout the capital. This article details the trial against the cinema manager and owners, after the film was seized by police under the charge of obscenity, and explores the impact on British arguments around film censorship, revealing a range of attitudes towards sex and pornography. Drawing on archival records of the trial, the widespread press coverage as well as participants’ subsequent reflections, the article builds upon Elisabet Björklund’s work on Swedish sex education films and Eric Schaefer’s scholarship on Sweden’s ‘sexy nation’ reputation to argue that the Swedish films’ transnational distribution complicated tensions between educational and exploitative intentions in a particularly British culture war over censorship.
The purpose of this article is to analyse the ambivalent politics of looking and discourses of gender, class and sexuality in a variety of 1960s–70s Japanese studio-made exploitation films, known as sukeban films. It first contextualises their production within a transnational and domestic shift emphasising sex and violence in film and popular culture. The article then highlights instances where the visual, narrative and discursive articulation of non-conforming femininities flips the gendered power balance, as in the sketches that satirise men’s sexual fetishes for girls. In conclusion, it suggests to understand the filmic construction of young women’s agency, and their bodily and sexual performance, in terms of a recurring modus operandi of Japanese media that ambivalently panders to and co-constitutes youth phenomena.
Brian Hill’s musical documentaries embody the essence of Judith Butler’s notion of ‘performativity’ as the discourse used in identity formation. By asking his characters to sing their stories in addition to traditional interviews, Hill creates multiple screen identities, which elicits an embodied intimacy that is as much about freeing marginalised people to enact themselves in front of the camera as it is about revealing the director’s own performance. This article uses a cognitive framework to explore how Hill’s documentary, Pornography: The Musical (2003), leads the spectator to challenge existing social stereotypes of sex workers, as well as schematic ideas about traditional documentary form and function.
This introduction to the Film Studies special issue on Sex and the Cinema considers the special place of sex as an object of inquiry in film studies. Providing an overview of three major topic approaches and methodologies – (1) representation, spectatorship and identity politics; (2) the increasing scrutiny of pornography; and (3) new cinema history/media industries studies – this piece argues that the parameters of and changes to the research of sex, broadly defined, in film studies reflect the development of the field and discipline since the 1970s, including the increased focus on putatively ‘low’ cultural forms, on areas of film culture beyond representation and on methods beyond textual/formal analysis.
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.
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.
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.
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.