Jordan Peele

The year 2017 was a genuine breakthrough year for horror cinema, with multiple massive box office successes and surprising dominance on both critics lists and award shows. I’d like to look at the three successes that defined the genre in 2017 and seemed to indicate a resurgence in film’s importance to the broader landscape of horror. The horror landscape is far too variegated at this point to be adequately represented by three theatrically released movies, but they are useful objects in that we see in them a representation of the influences of TV, games, screamers, etc. These show how the cinema can serve as a point of convergence for the traditions inaugurated, emphasized, and, even, elevated by other mediums.

INTRO:
As audiences, we are always looking to justify our desires, to cloak those things we enjoy in a mantle of respectability. As such, when Jordan Peele’s Get Out became a surprise critical and box office hit in 2017, the rhetoric surrounding the film from pre-release press to post-release press experienced a notable shift. Upon becoming a critical darling, it was set apart by an attempt at generic distinction, no longer merely a horror film, but instead referred to—along with such films as The Babadook (2014), It Follows (2014), The VVitch (2016), and Split (2016)—as ‘smart horror’ or ‘elevated horror’. When Get Out was later nominated for several Oscars, including Best Picture, it was then categorised even by Peele himself as a ‘social thriller’. This categorical slippage comes as little surprise to avowed horror fans; after all, it is not a new phenomenon, and this trend of critically-acclaimed horror films being rhetorically or generically distanced from the often-denigrated horror genre is well established. Successful films like Silence of the Lambs (1991) and The Sixth Sense (1999) are both inextricably steeped in horror subjects, tropes, and tone, yet—as ‘serious’, critically-acclaimed Oscar nominees—are described instead as ‘psychological thrillers’. Within independent film (itself a frustrated categorisation at best), this discursive distanciation from the generic stain of ‘horror’ is more evident. As Jamie Sexton notes, ‘horror films have been a frequent staple of independent film production within the United States, yet since the 1980s they have been marginalized from discourses relating to American independent cinema’ (Sexton 2012: 67).  However, influenced no doubt by the emergence and increasing acceptance of the category of ‘smart cinema’, the designation of ‘smart’ or ‘elevated horror’ arose as a shorthand to describe this recent spate of horror films exemplified by Get Out—box office high performers that have been lauded by critics for their cerebral narratives and pointed social criticisms.

" Can One Get Out? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism" situates Jordan Peele's 2017 movie Get Out in dialogue with two prominent forms of African American discourse, Afro-Pessimism and Post-Blackness. Peele's movie narrates how slavery remains a central paradigm for understanding the present, a central tenet of Afro-Pessimism. Although, as this article argues, Peele's movie narrates the deep truth of Afro-Pessimism, the movie also gestures toward ways out of this seemingly historical fixity. The way out, the movie suggests, begins with aesthetics—radical Black aesthetics.

The zombie is first and foremost an expression of Haitianness.. .. the zombie exists, by definition, in a state that as closely resembles the movement of life as it does the immobil-ity of death.-Kaiama Glover, Haiti Unbound The plantation thesis uncovers the interlocking workings of modernity and blackness, which culminate in long-standing, uneven racial geographies while also centralizing that the idea of the plantation is migratory.. .. With this, differential modes of survival emerge-creoliza-tion, the blues, maroonage, revolution, and more-revealing that the plantation, in both slave and postslave context, must be understood alongside complex negotiations of time, space, and terror.-Katherine McKittrick, "Plantation Futures" Barbadosed I n the late 1640s Colonel Walrond, a plantation owner in the colony of Barbados, decapitated the body of an enslaved African man who had committed suicide rather than labor for Walrond in the Caribbean. Walrond placed the man's head on a twelve-foot pole and, according to the British writer Richard Ligon, "caused all his Negroes to come forth, and march around this head, and bid them look on it" in order to make the case that the enslaved Africans "were in a main error, in thinking they went into their own Countries, after they were dead; for this mans head was here, as they all were witness of; and how was it possible, the body could go without a head." 1 Killing oneself, Walrond sought to demonstrate, was not a way to escape the living death of Caribbean enslavement-not a way to effect natal repatriation in body or spirit. According to some accounts, the Haitian origins of the zombie relate directly to the display of the decapitated head on a pole-and specifically to the message that Colonel Walrond, as well as plantation owners in colonial St. Domingue, sought to convey with the horrific (and horrifyingly conventional) staging of the tortured black body as the sign of plantation power. Amy Wilentz notes that historically, Haitian slaves who committed suicide were understood to

Das Etikett Mobilisierung verwende ich in zwei Bedeutungen, die different, vielmehr: divergent sind und zunächst nur einen Bereich für beschreibende, interpretierende, polemische, begriffsskizzierende... Operationen abstecken. Zum einen Mobilisierung als Dynamik neoliberalen Regierens, die gängiger unter Flexibilisierung, Entfesselung und Optimierung gefasst ist. Zum anderen Mobilisierung in Form politischer Bewegungen bzw. der politischen Artikulation sozialer Konflikte. Anhand der Mainstream-Filme Little Joe (2019) von Jessica Hausner und Us/Wir (2019) von Jordan Peele schneide ich dreierlei an: 1) Mobilisierung in der Bedeutung neoliberaler, auch neonationalliberaler, disruptivkonservativer Entregelung-inwieweit stößt Kritik an ihr auf das Problem, dass sie "intakte Normalzustände" behauptet und naturalisiert? Seien diese wohltemperierte bürgerliche Demokratie (die mit rassistischen und elitistischen Machtformen einige Übereinstimmungen hat) oder unentfremdetes, "gesundes" Mensch-Sein. Little Joe gibt da Antworten. 2) Kritik an identifizierenden Verhärtungen von Protestbewegungen und am Überhöhungs-und Offenbarungs-Pathos popularer Mobilisierung - inwieweit lässt sich sowas im Horizont einer Bewegung artikulieren, auch mit ihr artikulieren? Also ohne Pathos und Konflikt-Sinn aus der Politik auszuschließen? Us gibt da Antworten. 3) Anhand beider lassen sich Beobachtungen zu politischen Einsätzen von Mainstream-Spielfilm thesenhaft zuspitzen und differenztheoretisch aufbrezeln. Wie positioniert sich Film zur Politik, ohne sich auf Repräsentation zu bescheiden, aber auch abseits der Dogmatik von Versinnlichung oder aber Reflexion? Lösungen, zu denen Little Joe findet, rufen Deleuze´sche Film-Begriffe der Aktions/Situations-Differenz im Licht seiner Logik des Sinns auf den Plan; Lösungen, die Us in den Raum stellt, gewinnen mit Laclau/Mouffes Populismus-Theoremen, mit Ruth Sonderegger und von Denkfiguren politischer Differenz her an Kontur. Beide Male geht es auch um Treue zur ZersTreuung, die sie enthält. Als Lösungen sind beide Kracauer´sche nonsolutions-also erstens keine, aber zweitens unvermeidlich.

This essay contends that Jordan Peele's Us (2019) connects the psychic operation of fetishistic disavowal to the existence of class division. By exploring the role that fetishistic disavowal plays in commodity fetishism, the film makes clear how the psychic disposition of the ruling class perpetuates the suffering of an underclass that lives beneath the surface. Us reveals the connection between two forms of fetishism just as it reveals the inseparability of the psyche from politics. What separates Us from the typical Marxist critique of bourgeois individualism is the connection that it establishes between the psychic disposition of the individual and the social situation in which the individual exists. Without the necessary psychic response to the situation, class inequality would quickly become unsustainable. Through the nature of the revolt the film depicts, Peele attempts to illustrate how the psychic disorders of individuals ensconced within capitalist society make possible the sustained existence of its inegalitarian structure.

Within cinematic horror, trauma as a concept has often been used as an allegorical strategy to work through collective anxieties. This article on It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) and Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) strikes another note. It argues that, by their aesthetic qualities, both films are rendered traumatic in their affective orientation, both toward the cinematic world and toward the spectator. It analyses the two films through trauma as an affective-aesthetic strategy that puts emphasis on the edge of the frame as well as on the offscreen space. This strategy evokes a sinister mood that exists independently of the protagonists, allowing us to meaningfully feel the effects of their trauma as we engage with the film. Especially the use of the offscreen space in both films contributes to the "traumatic mood" of the films, but it also functions to immerse the spectator in the invisible filmic world. In this way, It Follows and Get Out embody trauma as a denial of relief from dread, which we both recognize in the characters' experience, and feel in our own bodies through the effective creation of ever-present threat.

Kolumna u kojoj se posle premijere televizijske drame "Proleće u januaru", a u kojoj su studenti Fakulteta dramskih umetnosti ekranizovali komad Dušana Kovačevića, promišlja povezanost ovog pozorišnog teksta sa aktuelnim filmovima "Us" Jordana Peelea i "Parasite" Bong Joon-hoa. Četvrt veka od izlaska Kusturičinog "Podzemlja" čiji se uticaj može prepoznati u ovim filmovima, kroz novu ekranizaciju te drame, srpska dramska produkcija se uključuje u najaktuelniji kinematografski dijalog.

Il cinema afroamericano contemporaneo è lo strumento ideale per meglio comprendere complesse questioni politiche, sociali e culturali degli Stati Uniti. In particolare la realtà nera, fortemente vessata da vecchi e nuovi razzismi, intolleranze e disunità interna, come ha dimostrato il drammatico caso di George Floyd e il conseguente consenso raggiunto da #BlackLivesMatter.

Antes de iniciar os caminhos desse texto é importante limpar alguns conceitos para que os apontamentos e considerações tenham o mínimo de ruído possível, sobretudo no que se refere às ideias sobre "trauma colonial" e "grande trauma colonial" que surgirão associadas exclusivamente às dimensões de imagem e representação-ou seja: por trauma e grande trauma colonial me refiro à paradigmática ruptura que os sistemas brancos de dominação perpetuam entre as imagens negras antes e depois do processo escravagista. Assim, partir do momento em que não há como olhar para trás em busca de uma terra concreta que permita a íntegra reconstrução-diáspora-, o processo de "voltar a ser" pelas imagens é um paradoxal movimento de mover-se adiante. Caminhemos então.