Covid - Day One
I made it several years into the Covid-19 pandemic without catching the virus. Unfortunately, my time has come.
Posts
What is Genre?
A concept that is has been popping up in recent posts is genre. It's not surprising, as genre is central not only to film--increasingly, the focus of this blog--but to rhetoric and writing studies, my academic home. But what *is* genre?
Superheroes: Ritual or Ideology?
I read something fascinating in Rick Altman's book that I discussed in [another recent post](/film/men/). He talked about two ways that critics tend to look at film's social dimension. These are as ritual or as ideology.
Masculinity in Shane and Yojimbo
I've been going through some of my notes from a film genre class I took in graduate school. One week, we watched *Shane* and *Yojimbo* as cross-cultural examples of the western, which historically commingled with the samurai film in Japan.
Men (2022)
A few weeks ago, I went to see Alex Garland's film Men. I really enjoyed, especially in the context of my growing interest in both film genre studies and the specific genre of horror.
Two Films on Catastrophe
Last night I watched Nicholas Ashe Bateman's The Wanting Mare and Adam McKay's Don't Look Up. Each suggests a similar conclusion-in a senseless world, codependence is the only way to find meaning.
Memory, Document, Archive
By collecting and categorizing historical artifacts, archives deeply influence the historical record. But they exist in complicated institutional settings, and archivists can't always have full control over how their archives present history. Researchers have to consider the archive less as a neutral place and more as a motivated and rhetorical construction.
What is New About New Media?
New media are better defined as media that challenge our existing conceptions of technology... even if the new media in question might be old.
Satoyama, Modernity, and Tradition in Japanese Anime
I've been reading scholarship about anime, its history, and how it deviates from animation in the United States. It's frequently observed that tensions between tradition and modernity are often central to anime.