Scope. Nov 04.

"[R]ecording people's hitherto undocumented memories to 'recreate going to the pictures when film was the great social habit'" - that's one of the recent turns film studies has taken, writes Helen Richards in the new issue of Scope, leaning on a phrase from Enter the Dream House by Margaret O'Brian and Allen Eyles. Contacting a few dozen folks getting on in years in the South Wales town of Bridgend, Richards contributes a study to the pool.

Taking science fiction films made over the past three decades or so, Lincoln Geraghty and Rebecca Janicker "track the progress of the alien - how it was portrayed and what it represents - in relation to the shifting signs of the times."

Juliana de Nooy and Bronwyn Statham examine "recent horror films featuring male conjoined twins" in part to show that "existing work on the representation of the body in contemporary horror only partially explains the emergence of this phenomenon, and that the pattern needs to be understood as a highly specific configuration of genre (horror), gender (male) and topos (conjoined twins) that lends itself to the rehearsal of a cultural anxiety regarding gender (male maternity)."

Coral Houtman: "What I hope to show is that the narration in The Sixth Sense serves a consistent aesthetic, and its very unreliability at the level of plot demonstrates a deeper coherence functioning at the level of character psychology, motivated by the film's self-conscious understanding and use of psychoanalysis."

And then, the fun parts. Thirteen book reviews and ten film reviews, plus four conference reports.

Posted by dwhudson at December 4, 2004 12:24 PM