Gary Bettinson

A key performative trait in Sidney Lumet's oeuvre has gone unexplored: namely, a reliance on players’ hands, not only as a major dramatic and expressive resource, but, more specifically, as a locus of dramatic equivocation. My purpose in this analytical essay is to highlight, by reference to a range of examples, the forms and functions of this distinctive authorial tendency. As I aim to demonstrate, Lumet deepens character complexity, sharpens thematic meaning, and enhances narrational effects (such as suspense and surprise) by imbuing hand gestures with ambivalence and ambiguity.

Otto Preminger (1905–1986), whose Hollywood career spanned the 1930s through the 1970s, is popularly remembered for the acclaimed films he directed, among which are the classic film noir "Laura", the social-realist melodrama "The Man with the Golden Arm", the CinemaScope musical "Carmen Jones", and the riveting courtroom drama "Anatomy of a Murder". As a screen actor, he forged an indelible impression as a sadistic Nazi in Billy Wilder’s "Stalag 17" and as the diabolical Mr. Freeze in television’s "Batman".

He is remembered, too, for drastically transforming Hollywood’s industrial practices. With "Exodus", Preminger broke the Hollywood blacklist, controversially granting screen credit to Dalton Trumbo, one of the exiled “Hollywood Ten. ” Preminger, a committed liberal, consistently shattered Hollywood’s conventions. He routinely tackled socially progressive yet risqué subject matter, pressing the Production Code’s limits of permissibility. He mounted Black-cast musicals at a period of intense racial unrest. And he embraced a string of other taboo topics—heroin addiction, rape, incest, homosexuality—that established his reputation as a trailblazer of adult-centered storytelling, an enemy of Hollywood puritanism, and a crusader against censorship.

"Otto Preminger: Interviews" compiles nineteen interviews from across Preminger’s career, providing fascinating insights into the methods and mindset of a wildly polarizing filmmaker. With remarkable candor, Preminger discusses his filmmaking practices, his distinctive film style, his battles against censorship and the Hollywood blacklist, his clashes with film critics, and his turbulent relationships with a host of well-known stars, from Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra to Jane Fonda and John Wayne.

This article provides a stylistic examination of Sidney Lumet's thriller Deathtrap (1982), analyzing how its strategies of staging and performance generate narrational effects of suspense and surprise. It argues that Lumet anchors these performative strategies to a broad authorial program grounded in expressive subtlety; as such, Lumet's film reminds us of a waning tradition of US filmmaking in which stylistic ingenuity resides at the denotative and expressive (rather than the decorative or parametric) levels of stylistic discourse. The article treats Lumet's stylistic choices as creative solutions to a distinctive set of aesthetic problems. It canvasses-and identifies the functions of-the motivic staging schemas patterned throughout Deathtrap; and it illuminates how these schemas, actuated by star players, shape the viewer's cognitive uptake in substantive ways.

Six exemplary works of film theory, published in 2018–19, receive consideration in this chapter: Johannes Riis and Aaron Taylor’s anthology Screening Characters: Theories of Character in Film, Television, and Interactive Media; Murray Pomerance’s Virtuoso: Film Performance and the Actor’s Magic; Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis’s edited collection When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood
Revisited; Jeff Menne’s Post-Fordist Cinema: Hollywood Auteurs and the Corporate Counterculture; Wieland Schwanebeck and Douglas McFarland’s edited volume Patricia Highsmith on Screen; and Clara Bradbury-Rance’s Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory. The chapter is organized into three sections: 1. Character Engagement and Performance; 2. Revisiting the New Hollywood; 3. A Highsmith Hinge.

Since Ackbar Abbas theorized Hong Kong as a space of cultural ‘disappearance’ in the mid-1990s, critics have debated the extent to which local cultural forms have continued to recede, particularly as a corollary of Hong Kong’s increasing subjection to mainlandization. For several critics, the region’s cinema has already vanished from view, only to re-emerge in a brand new, distinctly Sinicized guise – that of ‘post-Hong Kong cinema,’ a mode of predominantly coproduced filmmaking that effaces traditional Hong Kong aesthetics and routines of film practice. So thoroughly has Hong Kong cinema been subsumed to China that its once ‘unique’ and ‘singular’ identity is no longer discernible. The shackles of PRC censorship now stifle free expression; Hong Kong’s classic genres have become obsolete; and the PRC’s vogue for ‘main melody’ films and the dapian (‘big film’) has straitened Hong Kong cinema’s range of storytelling options. Today, critics contend, Hong Kong filmmakers are severely constrained by Mainland bureaucracy and the exigencies of the China market.
This article seeks to challenge these assumptions, contesting a set of apparent truisms concerning Mainland censorship, Hong Kong-China coproductions, and the dissipation or disappearance of Hong Kong’s local cinema and identity. The theory of mainlandization, I submit, denies the durability of Hong Kong’s standardized craft practices, its aesthetic traditions, and the facile ingenuity of its filmmakers.

In this chapter I review six contributions to the field of film theory published in 2018: Carl Plantinga's Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement (Oxford University Press); Miklós Kiss and Steven Willemsen’s Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema (Edinburgh University Press); Nicholas Godfrey’s The Limits of Auteurism: Case Studies in the Critically Constructed New Hollywood (Rutgers University Press); Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis’ The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema’s Most Celebrated Era (Bloomsbury Academic); Dorothy Wai Sim Lau’s Chinese Stardom in Participatory Cyberculture (Edinburgh University Press); and Gina Marchetti’s Citing China: Politics, Postmodernism, and World Cinema (University of Hawaii Press).

During the 1970s, Shaw Brothers and Hammer Films sought to blend kung fu spectacle with traditional genres. The fruits of this endeavor – The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires and Shatter, both 1974 – were castigated by mainstream critics as idiosyncratic and incoherent. The films’ appropriation by cult audiences, however, is predicated precisely on their purported incoherence. This essay argues that incoherence constitutes a tacit and undertheorized criterion for cult movies, and – insofar as it is conceived as a homogenous phenomenon – tends to offer an uninformative barometer of a cult film’s value. In contrast, I propose several levels of coherence, the better to specify the cult film’s unities and disunities across a range of dimensions. Most centrally, I explore the alleged incoherence forged by fusing kung fu with the norms of horror (Legend) and crime thriller (Shatter). Arguing that both films obey canonized principles of storytelling, I go on to examine the effects that their apparent incoherence has upon the viewer’s experience. The essay also points toward the relevance of transnational coproduction for grasping both the viewer’s activity and the critical neglect of coherence in the Shaws-Hammer movies.