your-cine-world
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your-cine-world · 4 years ago
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The Female Gothic Heroine
This deals with the role of women in the gothic genre, and especially in 1940s Hollywood gothic films. Helen Hanson explains how the gothic genre has been used to point out gender issues, identity and how they fluctuate. She also refers to the writings of many feminist writers and how they see the gothic heroine figure.
Looking at gothic films, they are generally characterized by stylistic overabundance and violating normal values and behavior limits. It promotes fear and anxiety and suspense. Gothic stories often have scary and evil characters such as monsters, ghosts, and skeletons in them. Their settings are isolated dreary places that evoke great fear, such as graveyards, old castles, dark streets, etc.
The author first looks at Ellen Moers’ book “Literary Women” and how the gothic mode includes women writers who brought “heroinism” to stories in which the heroine is active and moving and has adventures.
In the 1940s gothic horror films were very popular, maybe because cinema goers were tired of war films. And these films reflected the changes in what was expected in marriage and the changes in gender roles after World War II.
One of the writers mentioned, Pam Cook, also brings up the topic of victimhood and how in gothic horror films men can be victims as well. This is different from earlier times.
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your-cine-world · 4 years ago
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Carol Clover
Carol Clover’s take on slasher films is that they are the lowest on the rung of prestige in the horror film genre. These types of films are far far beyond the likes of what your average respectable middle-age, middle class audience would enjoy. It has so much blood, gore, and pornography, as well as low production value. That is why slashers are targeted towards teenagers and young adults. It is particularly meant to be eye candy to males.
Building upon this, the filmmakers essentially try to appeal to male viewers and basically their lower nature. And it is because of this that the film is seen through the lens of male viewership and the patriarchy in general, with tendencies surrounding that time period that women were just not into horror film, much less the slasher genre. A theme is that the killer is sexually repressed and lashes out at women who are sexually active - which according to the traditional patriarchy, is wrong and is not the idyllic way for a woman to act.
Because of these reasons, there generally is a so-called “final girl” involved in the plot who is the actual protagonist/hero. She is able to gain this power, seemingly because she is not distracted with promiscuous activities and harnesses more male power and strength through wielding phallic objects, such as a knife, which she uses to stop the monster/antagonist.
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your-cine-world · 4 years ago
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Barbara Creed
Here we study into the so called monstrous feminine. According to Barbara Creed’s writing, the monstrous feminine and the horror and fear that surrounds it is a creation of the historical male patriarchy that construed this fear. When in reality it is an imaginary abjection.
A way this is often seen is through a mother figure. Certain religious abominations including bodily fluids, wastes and corpses are clear difference from the patriarchal order. This is what the monstrous feminine brings to the table and adds human functions that upset the phallic order.
Furthermore, in this point of view, you look at the mother and child’s relationship and the child depends on the mother growing up, and then goes to stand more with the father so as to conform to the phallocentric order. However, because of this separation, the mother turns into the abject and attempts to reel the child in towards her. She seeks to do this by wielding a phallic object, to compensate for what she lacks, and which supposedly gives her power. This disrupts the phallic order and is a horror to the patriarchy.
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your-cine-world · 4 years ago
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Fatimah Tobing Rony & the film King Kong
Rony’s reading highlights the extensive use of “othering” in the horror film ‘King Kong’. The era in which the film takes place is in the 1930’s and thus it is no surprise that the filmmakers take this view right at the heights of colonialization, non-ashamed and devout racism, and active promoting of systemic racist systems, etc.
There is the stereotypical fear and idea that the “other” must be controlled and or otherwise pacified in order to have order in white or western civilization. And this is what happened in “King Kong”. The way that the white invaders treat the local population of the island when they arrive by boat actively demonstrates this - treating them with disdain, looking down on them, aiming their weapons at them, treating them as lesser, treating them as being “uncivilized” and in need of “civilization” by white men in order to bring meaning and order to their world.
The horror and fear in the film besides King Kong himself is the exoticism, the uncivilizedness of the island and the non-white race and culture of its inhabitants. This is what is scary. In addition to this is King Kong himself, who is the ultimate “other”, who in the eyes of the filmmakers is the epitome of the subhuman other, who is a threat to white mankind. King Kong is the ultimate horror in this film because he disrupts the rational, reasonable and cognitive norm of Western society – he is not understood, therefore he is dangerous.
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your-cine-world · 4 years ago
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Mulvey & Williams
Here we examine two fascinating readings and analyses of Laura Mulvey and Linda Williams in the context of the horror film Nosferatu. Central to the theme is the focus of phallocentrism in these films. That the main female character is defined by her lack of a penis, and it is this that gives meaning and order to the world. To the male character, a woman is a literal embodiment of castration which is the huge fear for the male characters. This is a central theme throughout these ideologies and in these horror films.
According to Mulvey, movies are a way to see representation in society. It is a phallocentric society and these horror films cater to the male gaze. It is all about male visual pleasure. There is the theme of scopophilia - that is engaging in voyeuristic pleasure of seeing and watching the characters and objectifying them - particularly the female characters.
A way that the male viewer unconsciously escapes the castration anxiety is through objectification of the female character by devaluation, objectification - turning the woman into an object of fetishization so as to seek pleasure of viewing her rather than feel threatened by her. This is supposedly a way for the male to gain control and feel like he has the upperhand.
Williams builds upon this by saying to see or to gaze, signifies desire. And also that there is a connection between monster and the female titular character - both are different in regards to this phallocentric world. The monster is mutilated and is different and the “other,” while the woman lacks a phallus - both are victims in the context of this world - and because of this, there is a certain sympathy between them. Sexual difference are a threat to “normal” male power, and thus the monster, who is also sexually dysfunctional, is an outcast along with the woman.
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your-cine-world · 4 years ago
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Brigid Cherry and the movie Jennifer’s Body
Brigid Cherry’s analysis begins that, generally speaking, most horror filmmakers have never considered female audiences when producing horror movies. They never saw them as liking the horror genre, and they just generally overlooked them in favor of catering to the young men demographic of viewers. Cherry states her view that many have, in reality, overlooked female spectators. And that there are plenty of female spectators that enjoy horror film.
In the case of the movie Jennifer’s Body, the marketing of the movie was done wrong. They marketing was essentially catering the film to young men, as if it was another horror film capitalizing on the male exploitation of females. When in reality the film is centered around a female character exploiting men with Megan Fox’s character literally killing and eating male characters. I think a good contrast is with the movie “Carrie” which was marketed clearly as a horror film for female viewers and did extremely financially well, as opposed to Jennifer’s Body.
A study cited within the reading mentions that for female spectators of the horror genre, the interpersonal relationships developed between the characters are extremely important and is what improves the quality of the film. I think this is an important reason why, since Jennifer’s Body was initially marketed to male viewers, there was an initial negative response because these male viewers didn’t care for all the interpersonal relationship drama. They had come for the sexualization of Megan Fox and thinking it would be a typical horror film made for the heterosexual young male spectator and it was not that at all.
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your-cine-world · 4 years ago
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The Babadook
According to Kelly Oliver’s analysis which is based off of Freudianism, a woman wants a baby because it satisfies a woman’s envy of having a penis. That the baby satisfies the organ which she desires but lacks. In addition, some scholars like Julia Kristeva build on this - that it is actually the abnormality, or the being out of place of women within the phallocentric order (i.e. lacking a penis) that causes them to want a male baby as a substitute for that.
We see this methodology being used in the Babadook film where this is the case – the woman has a male child. But not only that however, there is also the addition that the male child actually fulfills what a man might have traditionally done - the male child strove to protect her by all means against all danger.
The whole film is centered around these themes and the psychological horror with losing the father and the phallocentric symbol, and how this completely disrupts the family life and causes psychological trauma. This must be faced and that is what causes the horror.
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your-cine-world · 4 years ago
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Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films - Robin Coleman
This reading is really interesting because it explains the societal backdrop and gets at the underlying issues as to why the film “Get Out” would eventually be made. It describes how urban areas were usually portrayed in film in the 1980s as savage places. Places where the dangerous non-whites lived. There are specific problems related to the “other” there – crime is rampant, and criminals seem to have more control instead of police officers, violence is rampant, it is effectively a lawless terrain.
White flight is seen as a second-coming of segregation whereby many wealthy white people fled the downtown inner-city areas, effectively designating them to the lower-class and people of color because they could not be trusted and because they would have had to share space with them living near to one another. Another theme seen here is that of the “haves” and the “have nots”.
Yet from many of the most popular horror movies from the 1980s omitted black people from their films, sometimes having a token black actor though, used to embody the whole of black culture within one character and for a white context and audience. Blacks were effectively almost invisible or totally isolated within these films.
That is where “Get Out” comes in. In this context, you can see many themes showing why the filmmakers would have wanted to make this film. To get across to white suburbanites the negative effect of those ideas and themes on black people. And that there are some serious issues and problems related to white suburbanites too, especially with how they perceive and treat black people.
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your-cine-world · 4 years ago
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Fear, Entitlement, and Urban Space by Aviva Briefel & Sianne Ngai
These readings were interesting because, in particular the one by Aviva Briefel and Sianne Ngai, it suggested that the “right to be frightened” is actually a sign of empowerment. That generally in the United States, black and brown people and other poor minorities who tend to be poorer, don’t have that right to feel frightened because it is their life.
The ownership of property is another issue that is highlighted. The characters who own the most, i.e. white upper and middle-class people, stand the most to lose and are thus the most afraid. They tend to not be inner-city folks where crime is most of the time actually higher. In addition, “property” is a loaded word, which goes back to the times of slavery, when black people were the “property” of white people and white people were threatened with losing it. Now, white people are similarly afraid of losing their property to black/darker skinned people or the underprivileged. It becomes a struggle between the privileged vs underprivileged.
The antagonist figure who provokes fear, is generally from a working-class or poor background or location and comes to cause anxiety in privileged, richer or property-owning characters’ lives. Thus it can be concluded that many films of this era, such as Candyman, are in effect territorial and power struggles between the privileged and underprivileged and the property owners vs the non-property owners.
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your-cine-world · 4 years ago
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Rocha
Rocha’s take is that in Latin American movies, and in particular Brazilian Cinema Novo ones, that it is the “exoticism” that explains the social problems. That essentially to the “European observer” the exotic actions and nature of the films are, in reality, explanations of the societal problems that are in place there. They are done this way because often times the social problems can’t be directly criticized, for fear of potential crackdowns on the filmmakers from the authoritarian and/or corrupt politicians/government authorities.
Furthermore Rocha argues that Latin America is still colonized due to the corrupt politicians still claiming control and being drunk with power and that Latin America over time has merely been “exchanging colonizers”. The new colonizers/leaders just creating a more elegant or cultured appearance so as to make it appear that it is different but still much of the same injustices and wrongdoings that happened before are still happening.
Rocha goes on to describe further about the genre that the violence in Cinema Novo mirrors those of colonized societies whereby violence serves as the action that forces the colonizer to “understand the culture he exploits”. And that otherwise the colonized population stays as slaves to the colonizer. That the violence is necessary for the “colonizer to become aware of the existence of the colonized”.
We get more of an idea how the films born out of Cinema Novo aren’t just one offs; but rather a continuously evolving story of films that help bring awareness to the public of the societal injustices, in hopes that this can propel members of the population to work towards decolonization and work towards societal equality.
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your-cine-world · 4 years ago
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Spivak & The Mummy
Spivak essay critques how the "other" is depicted in Western society. Artistic productions are based off of the power, desire and interest of the ruling class of society (white men) - and this is clearly the case with the movie "The Mummy". She critques how the third-world subject is represented within Western discourse and art. Furthermore, she brings attention to, and how detrimental it is, the way the ruling class depicts and represents women in general, and lower-class women in particular.
Overall she indicates that we write history through the lens with which we see it, and so it is important to consider that when storytelling.
We see her philosophy play out in "The Mummy". The film is deeply embedded with non-western differences, depicting the "other" - the local Eygptians and Eygpt - as less civilizied, dangerous, savage and in need of taming. This really means that the society needs westernization. Western white saviors to come in and control and bring "civilization" to the society.
We see a clear example of that where the lead female character Helen talks down about Islamic Eygpt, referring to it as "dreadful mud" as she looks down on Cairo showing huge mosques and the islamified city. She indicates that she wished she was in the "real classical Eygpt", because Islamic Eygpt does not fit her narrative. Since there are no current ancient Eygptians around, she can construct "the real classical Eygpt" in her mind. No doubt adding Western biases to that image.
This is perhaps similar to how in the West, Jesus Christ is often made out to be a white man, when clearly he originated from the Middle East, thus he would not have been white.
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your-cine-world · 4 years ago
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Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
According to Mulvey, fascination of film is reinforced by the already existing patterns and trends of society. Cinema, even fictional content, is informed by what normal human beings have been through in their lives and what they themselves have observed in front of them about the world.
Film historically, and Nosferatu is no exception, has been structed based off of the white male patriarchal view. It impacts how everything on screen is portrayed including sexuality in cinema. And anything not seen through that lens is considered different, or “other”, and can be manipulated by being used as a weapon seen as barbarity or incivility – going against civil, traditional white European society.
A rather ironic, funny aspect that Mulvey mentions is how in a male-dominated historically patriarchal world, categorized as “phallocentric”, it still depends on the “castrated women to give order and meaning to the world.” It just shows how illogical that ideology is by the way, and that if we help empower both wings of the bird of humanity to fly, we can soar so much farther as a society.
In traditional narrative film, instead we are left with women characters being the damsels in distress or trophy that male characters are the only ones who can save them and/or win them.
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your-cine-world · 4 years ago
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Event Horizon
After reading the literature "The Philosohy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart" by Noel Carroll and after taking in the horror sci-fi film "Event Horizon" I have taken in the following observations.
The first interesting of note I heard from the reading is the concept of "fusion". This happens whereby different elements of human/non-human, flesh/machine, alive/dead aspects of characters intercede in a horror film. Looking more in depth, there are also two additional concepts. They are "temporal fission" which divides characters in time, and "spatial fission", which multiplies characters in space.
You can see all these aspects in the movie Event horizon where time and space is manipulated. And with regards to the "monster" and threat, you don't know where it is coming from so well because of the fusion - the monster is seemingly part human/non-human, it is part flesh/machine and it is part dead/alive. This is what makes it an excellent movie because the threat comes from so many different places.
Furthermore some more additional aspects touched upon in the book and are clearly seen in the film is the corrupted individualism of many of the characters, particularlly from Dr. Weir who increasingly becomes antagonistic as his corrupted individualism increasinly becomes more and more dangerous and toxic to the other characters.
There is also this pyschological tension with the monster because the monster is able to get in the characters' heads and make them relive such horrible instances.
At the same time there is a certain kinship and understanding of the monster's problems/why Dr. Weir created the ship initially, and this makes for a stronger movie because you can sort of understand, at least to an extent, the thinking behind it. As opposed to it just being purely evil. To have that sort of understanding makes the antagonist and movie stronger.
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