Thesis advisor: Kathleen E. Newman. Includes bibliographic references (p. 320-340).

This dissertation documents and analyzes the reception of Japanese films in the French film journals of the 1950s, when postwar Paris was awash with cinephilia. The foremost of those journals, Cahiers du cinéma, began publication in 1951, the same year as Japanese cinema’s breakthrough into international film culture with the surprise victory of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashõmon at the Venice Film Festival. Previous scholarship has amply credited the critics at Cahiers with reinventing the tenets of film criticism and launching the French New Wave, but without focused attention on the Japanese case. Meanwhile, reception studies of Japanese cinema in the postwar West have tended to concentrate on the United States’ hegemonic position vis-à-vis the Japanese film industry. Entwining those two strands, I investigate how Cahiers’ sustained but selective engagement with Japanese cinema fueled intergenerational conflicts within the journal and debates with rival journal Positif, helped crystallize the key tenets of auteur theory and mise-en-scène, and navigated between orientalist notions of authentic national cinema and the vexed ideal of cinema as a universal language. In addition to mining the film journals, I draw on the rich archive of the Cinémathèque Française for unpublished quantitative data and correspondence related to screenings of Japanese films and Japan’s entries in the European film festival circuit, especially Cannes. This factual record underscores my argument that the French critics used Japanese cinema subjectively as a malleable canvas for limning their own partisan aesthetics and passionate advocacy for cinema as the seventh art. After setting the scene of 1950s cinephilia, I trace Cahiers’ encounter with the unknown of Japanese cinema which resulted in reactions from stunned amazement, through enthusiastic viewership and awareness of Japan’s already thriving film industry, to reaction against the exotic seductions of Japanese films suspected of having been made solely for export to the West. In particular, I show how Cahiers’ championing of the “incomparable” Kenji Mizoguchi as the first non-Western director admitted to their pantheon of world-class auteurs emerged from a decade of polarizing head-to-head comparisons with Mizoguchi’s increasingly disparaged countryman Kurosawa. My transregional approach thus taps and commends a fertile vein in historicocritical film studies.

Submitted by Luciana Sebin (lusebin@ufscar.br) on 2016-10-07T12:17:03Z No. of bitstreams: 1 DissFFAS.pdf: 15147709 bytes, checksum: 04e12638b9fc890c487e554cafcd3ea0 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Marina Freitas (marinapf@ufscar.br) on 2016-10-13T20:01:59Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 DissFFAS.pdf: 15147709 bytes, checksum: 04e12638b9fc890c487e554cafcd3ea0 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Marina Freitas (marinapf@ufscar.br) on 2016-10-13T20:02:09Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 DissFFAS.pdf: 15147709 bytes, checksum: 04e12638b9fc890c487e554cafcd3ea0 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-10-13T20:02:21Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 DissFFAS.pdf: 15147709 bytes, checksum: 04e12638b9fc890c487e554cafcd3ea0 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-03-29 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1928, the Chaplin-Club is considered the milestone of ciné-clubs and of film criticism in Brazil. Since the beginning of its activities, the club used to release O Fan, a vehicle dedicated to spread the group’s ideas. The objective of this dissertation is to analyze the activities of Chaplin-Club and its members’ reflections on cinema. Having as main source the nine issues of O Fan, this work aims to establish a dialogue among the different conceptions of cinema expressed by the club members and evaluate the set of concepts applied by them in the construction of their critical parameters, in order to present the particularities of Chaplin-Club’s thoughts and its specificity in the Brazilian context of the time. / Fundado no Rio de Janeiro em 1928, o Chaplin-Club é considerado o marco inicial do cineclubismo e de uma reflexão crítica mais aprofundada sobre o cinema no Brasil. Já no início de suas atividades, o cineclube lançou O Fan, órgão divulgador das ideias do grupo. O objetivo desta dissertação é analisar as atividades do Chaplin-Club e o pensamento crítico de seus integrantes. Tendo como fonte principal as nove edições de O Fan, o trabalho visa estabelecer um diálogo entre as diferentes concepções expressas pelos cineclubistas a respeito do cinema e avaliar o conjunto de noções aplicado por eles na construção de seus parâmetros críticos, a fim de apresentar as particularidades do pensamento do Chaplin-Club e sua especificidade no contexto brasileiro da época.

Film criticism has changed since its inception and will continue to change moving forward. The evolution of film criticism has largely been a story of the shift from an elite field of intellectual exploration by a few knowledgeable experts to a democratic phenomenon where expert analysis is aggregated and averaged, and the lines are blurred between true expertise and the random opinions of the masses. This paper will address the transition from the birth of film criticism to its popularization through the 90s, to what it has become today. By exploring the nature of film criticism historically and reviewing the key elements of its growth from Victorian times through its emergence as an established field in the 1930s, 40s and 50s and its heyday in the 60s and 70s, we can understand the context of its evolution. This will provide a perspective to view today’s approach to film criticism with a clearer eye and a thorough analysis of film criticism in the digital age. It will demonstrate that more is not always a good thing, and the democratization of film criticism has not necessarily been all good.

A dissertação é dividida em duas partes. A primeira consiste em um estudo sobre a noção de mise en scène no cinema, levando em conta suas origens teatrais e algumas de suas aplicações na teoria cinematográfica. O enfoque privilegia as definições essencialistas formuladas por uma parcela da crítica francesa, concentrada nas revistas Cahiers du Cinéma e Présence du Cinéma nos anos 1950-60. A segunda parte da dissertação, mais fincada na análise fílmica, aborda alguns elementos estéticos do cinema contemporâneo, dentre eles o conceito de cinema de fluxo, que designa um conjunto de filmes que ocupam um ponto cego em relação à definição clássica de mise en scène trabalhada na parte I. O Intruso (Claire Denis, 2004), Sombra (Philippe Grandrieux), A Viagem do Balão Vermelho (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2007) e Gerry (Gus Van Sant, 2002) são alguns dos filmes analisados. / My dissertation is divided in two parts. The first one investigates the concept of mise-enscène as applied to film practice, taking as reference its theatrical origins and some of its extensions to film theory and criticism. My approach privileges the essentialist definitions presented by a group of French critics, focusing on two reviews, Cahiers du Cinéma and Présence du Cinéma, covering their issues published in the 1950s and 1960s. The second part, concentrated on film analysis, discusses some aesthetic features of contemporary cinema such as the notion of cinema of flux, which refers to a set of films located at a blind spot when we look at cinema styles from the standpoint of the classical definition of mise-en-scène discussed in Part I. The intruder (Claire Denis, 2004), Shade (Philippe Grandrieux, 1998), The voyage of the red balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2007) and Gerry (Gus Van Sant, 2002) are among the films.

Evaluative stances are common in narrative and realized at all levels of linguistic structure. In film reviews, evaluation has been recognized as one of the most important stages alongside description (Taboada, 2011). Following Martin & White’s Appraisal Theory of Evaluation, the present comparative study focuses on two sub-systems of Appraisal, namely Appreciation and Engagement. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: a) to compare the way in which film critics use evaluative, axiological adjectives to evaluate two different film types and b) to study how professional film critics use of two types of engagement devices, namely epistemic and opinion devices, to position their own claims towards other potential viewpoints. The study is also influenced by two previous claims: Holbrook’s claim that, in contrast to consumers who seem to prefer American-made, commercial films, expert critics usually appreciate complex cinematography and culturally diverse films; and Carretero’s claim that in professional film reviews opinion devices are an almost absent feature, since these tend to be replaced by epistemic devices. To further explore these claims, this comparative, corpus- based study focuses on the frequency of evaluation adjectives and engagement devices used by expert film critics for the positive or negative evaluation of two different films: the 2020 box office hit “Bad Boys for Life” and the 2018 art film “Cold War”. The study used a mixed-method design, first subjecting the realizations of Appreciation and Engagement to a quantitative analysis and following this with a qualitative discussion of results. The results indicate: a) that in the case of both films positive evaluations clearly surpass negative evaluations; however, individual examples seem to express a mildly deprecatory attitude towards commercial cinematography and b) that although the number of epistemic devices in the reviews clearly surpasses that of opinion devices, the frequencies of opinion devices is greater than that observed by Carretero.

No description available.

The hero is a key archetype in Western culture. However, the hero has almost invariably been male, with associated traits deemed “masculine” within the gender binary. Feminists have begun to rigorously interrogate this binary, and the associated biological essentialism that precludes women from heroism. The fruits of this process are evident in recent popular filmic texts, which feature women as heroes. I examine developments in gender theory, propose a behaviour-based definition of masculinity, and argue that the new female action heroes authentically perform this masculinity. I then examine several select recent films and television series, showing that the new female action hero proves that “masculinity” can be authentically performed by female-bodied persons, and moreover is a liberatory model for ordinary women who wish to assert themselves in the public sphere. Finally, I argue that female action heroes model a new heroic archetype which embraces the best traits of both “masculinity” and “femininity.” Keywords “women in popular culture” “women as heroes” “gender studies” “film / English Studies / M.A. (English)

The hero is a key archetype in Western culture. However, the hero has almost invariably been male, with associated traits deemed “masculine” within the gender binary. Feminists have begun to rigorously interrogate this binary, and the associated biological essentialism that precludes women from heroism. The fruits of this process are evident in recent popular filmic texts, which feature women as heroes. I examine developments in gender theory, propose a behaviour-based definition of masculinity, and argue that the new female action heroes authentically perform this masculinity. I then examine several select recent films and television series, showing that the new female action hero proves that “masculinity” can be authentically performed by female-bodied persons, and moreover is a liberatory model for ordinary women who wish to assert themselves in the public sphere. Finally, I argue that female action heroes model a new heroic archetype which embraces the best traits of both “masculinity” and “femininity.” Keywords “women in popular culture” “women as heroes” “gender studies” “film / English Studies / M.A. (English)

This dissertation explores the embodied and sensory dimensions of fantastic film, those elements that are generally held up in contrast to and, often, in excess of, narrative structure. I suggest a departure from the traditional approach to genre study which has been preoccupied with narrative formulas, themes, and iconographies. My goal is not to dispense with those kinds of analyses but to complement them and, importantly, to point to some neglected dimensions of genre pleasure. I propose to transform the presumably excessive pleasures of the fantastic genre into something essential to it. First, I explore the disavowal or avoidance of embodied sensation within popular genre criticism. I then turn to critique existing models of film reception, focusing particularly upon a critique of the ocularcentric or visualist framework. From this critique, I am able to suggest some criteria for an alternative theoretical model based upon embodiment. I propose a theoretical framework based, first, on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who demonstrates that human subjects are constituted materially and culturally through their perceptual relations within the world. Second, I rely upon a further interpretation of this phenomenology by the American philosopher Don Ihde. Ihde’s work, configured as “postphenomenology,” draws variously from technoscience studies, the philosophy of science, feminist, and posthumanist theory, and sketches a system for the application of an experimental phenomenology. With this method, I explore various embodied, sensational aspects of fantastic genre films, i.e., spectacle, gore, musical genre conventions. I describe and relate these aspects of fantastic film to other cultural venues, exploring common themes and structures among them. From this, I draw some conclusions as to the nature of these sensational genre pleasures for embodied human individuals. Simultaneously, I consider the possibilities for embodied difference among individuals. / text