Film Studies

What can a text's modern reception tell us about its ancient construction? Darren Aronofsky's Noah movie was often pilloried in the Evangelical world for some of the same reasons it was embraced in the Jewish one. With no dialogue and a minimal plot in the biblical text, the movie contains large sections that are modern rereadings of ancient Midrash. The movie and its narrative strengths are a remarkable case study in the afterlife of a text's afterlife.

By the end of the 1990s, Chinese media saw the convergence of politics and commerce under the synergistic force of capital and state directive. Commerce has joined forces with the state in regulating the Chinese media industry. The upshot has been the marginalization of media practices that respond neither to market logic nor state imperative. This article discusses media practices that fall into the “marginal”
category. In particular, it focuses on the positioning of Li Yang as a marginal filmmaker due to his films' limited access to the domestic market as a result, at least initially, of state censorship and more recently of market censure. The article further emphasizes the significance of distribution in determining the cultural and economic
statues of media products.

The 1960 film version of *The Subterraneans* offers an independent and outspoken female artist who embodies many of the values of the Beat Generation.  The character of Roxanne, only a minor character in Kerouac's novel, becomes a central figure of the Bohemians portrayed in the film.

Recent studies of peer review underscore that some facets of accepted evaluation methods have serious flaws. Assessments are often burdened by protectionist inclinations against new ideas, unstable editorial demographics, affiliational biases, and occasionally unethical and/or corrupt protocols, or the avoidance of protocols put in place to restrain biases. This article examines a solution to these dilemmas: the open-source peer review. This emerging evaluation system allows the readers of a journal to offer feedback on submissions before they are officially sanctioned by a publication. Thus, the concept allows journal-readers (who are conceivably experts, like the editors) to decide or make recommendations on which articles are appropriate to continue with further revisions and/or to publish. The concept promises to offer a more democratically and demographically stable evaluation system, one that has the potential to avoid some of the problems that are inherent to traditional scholarly reviews.

This article offers a metaphorical and embodied examination of the representation of perception in narrative cinema. Using insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory we argue that the perceptual states of characters can be represented cinematically via audio-visual expressions of metaphors related to the physical functioning of human bodies. More specifically, we show how a predominant pair of conceptual mappings, namely the metonymy perceptual organ stands for perception and the metaphor perception is contact between perceiver and perceived, plays a crucial role in the non-verbal
representation of the characters’ perceptual experience.

My article focuses on the film California Dreamin’ (Endless) in order to examine the way the movie problematizes and brings in dialogue contemporary overlapping and contradictory Romanian ideologies in relation to the US. By taking the movie as a lens for the Romanian context, my paper analyzes how the US is signified and decoded in the aftermath of communism in Romania. I discuss how the movie envisions a continuous questioning and interrogation of the precommunist past and the postcommunist present upon which images, perceptions, fictions, and appropriations of “America” are predicated in the post-1989 Romanian context. My argument is that by mapping the overlapping terrain of the foreign and the domestic past and present, the film critically reconfigures the space between the US and one of its main supporters in the “New Europe.” It explores axes of local, national, and international interests, pointing to the contradictory, ambiguous sociocultural representations that accrue to “America” as it is caught up in itineraries and mis/translations across a “Second World” site. I contend that the dialogic examination Romania–US that the movie successfully achieves can become an ideal model for approaching the US in the Eastern European space.(Online publication January 27 2014)

Since the early 2000s, zombies have increasingly swarmed the landscape of popular culture, with ever more diverse representations of the undead being imagined. A growing number of zombie narratives have introduced sexual themes, endowing the living dead with their own sexual identity. The unpleasant idea of the sexual zombie is itself provocative, triggering questions about the nature of desire, sex, sexuality, and the politics of our sexual behaviors. However, the notion of zombie sex has been largely unaddressed in scholarship.

This collection addresses that unexamined aspect of zombiedom, with essays engaging a variety of media texts, including graphic novels, films, television, pornography, literature, and internet meme culture. The essayists are scholars from a variety of disciplines, including history, theology, film studies, and gender and queer studies. Covering The Walking Dead, Warm Bodies, and Bruce LaBruce’s zombie-porn movies, this work investigates the cultural, political and philosophical issues raised by undead sex and zombie sexuality.