Drama in the Dull: Journalistic Process and Moral Ambiguity in All the President’s Men Ryan Wilcox Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Woodward (Robert Redford) tirelessly hover over the typewriter, a weapon that brings down the highest office in the land … Read more
Excerpted from the author’s 2021 honors thesis Funneling Out: The Ever-Present Constriction on Black Filmmakers in Hollywood Veronica Chandler Returning the gaze and rewriting Black representation in HBO’s series Lovecraft Country Finding Power and Agency You need executive producers … Read more
Excerpted from the author’s 2021 honors thesis From Hurdanos to Hakua Cults: On Ethnographic Surrealism in Buñuel and Rouch Films Macy Meyer Why doesn’t the documentary crew intervene to help suffering subjects in Las Hurdes? Surrealism has never been … Read more
Excerpted from the author’s 2020 honors thesis Hanging Out at the Movies: Nostalgia, Spectatorship, and Slowness in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn Josh Martin An (in)attentive audience from a bygone era watches King Hu’s film in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, … Read more
Infectious Atmospheres: The Horror of Japanese New Media in Ring Ben Van Welzen Viewing scenes of viewing: an estranged couple studies a mysterious and apparently lethal videotape When Sadako (Rie Inō) emerges from the television screen in Nakata Hideo’s … Read more
Winner, Best Undergraduate Essay in Film Studies, 2020-21 The Portrait Looks Back: Revising Hitchcockian Tradition in Portrait of a Lady on Fire Halynna Snyder Hëloise (Adèle Haenel) eyes the rolling waves in one of Sciamma’s painterly compositions Upon first … Read more
The Inhuman Violence of Capitalism in Alien Josh Martin “You’ll get whatever’s coming to you.” Hidden in shadows, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the only eventual survivor of the Nostromo’s crew, predicts the fate of her colleagues. From the moment the … Read more
Winner, Best Undergraduate Essay in Film Studies, 2019-20 Surreal Exposures: Found-Footage Experiments in Avant-Garde Cinema Lexi Baird Barbara Hershey in Peter Tscherkassky’s Outer Space (1999). As we watch a film, the continuous act of recognition in which we are involved is … Read more
Earn ‘n’ Cash: Surrealist Comedy, Code-Switching, and Capitalism in Atlanta and Sorry to Bother You Dylan O’Connor LaKeith Stanfield (left) of Atlanta and Sorry to Bother You, and Donald Glover (right) of Atlanta A recent surge in popular Black art that … Read more
Is this Some Kind of Joke? Surrealist Tragicomedy in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman and the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man Felix Murithi As if belonging to another film, a meteor falls through the sky in the curious opening seconds … Read more
