Keyframes - Review

Afterimage, Sept, 2001 by Erin Ward

Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies Edited by Matthew Tinkcom and Amy Villarejo (New York: Routledge, 2001)

Another anthology on popular film and culture, Keyframes presents the reader with 21 essays spanning such topical films as the Alien quartet, 12 Monkeys, Hannibal, Home Alone and popular figures like Judy Garland, Tom Hanks and Jackie Chan, promising yet another catchy collection investigating how we have shaped Hollywood/Hollywood has shaped us. The editors, however, insist that with this collection, "the essays demonstrate the possibilities of rethinking recent cinema . . . the sites of inquiry themselves might be said to cross-pollinate each other and press one another to achieve greater nuance in their approaches to film as formal and social text.' The sites of inquiry these editors, along with the enclosed essays, attend to, are works in feminism, queer studies, race studies, examinations of nationalism, colonialism and post-colonialism, the phenomenon of fan culture, spectator theory and, of course, Marxism. With a student-based audience in mind, the book's introductory synopses of the aforementioned -i sms provides base knowledge about the usual suspects, in order for readers to follow the trajectory of the anthology as it travels through its four sections: "Woman as inter/national sign," "New constellations: Stars," "Moving desires" and "Production notes."

In consideration of the editors' claims, does this anthology offer anything beyond the useful but usual film analysis with its attendant discussions of cultural relevance and contemporary ramifications? It comes as no surprise that Ridley Scott and Sigoumey Weaver saw the alien threat as sexual. But a brief reference in Pamela Church Gibson's essay points to a place of rupture in the production of this publicly and academically popular film series, as the author remarks on H. R. Giger's instantaneous delegation to the world of homeless surrealism and special effects techno-geek culture. Perhaps his stunning designs lost their art world value and became technical due to the very sexual nature that made them attractive to begin with. It also comes as no surprise that Four Weddings and a Funeral, French Kiss and Notting Hill might be saying something about women as a national, sexual commodity, with the films' suspense being co-dependently built upon the romantic-comedy's drive to couple the protagonists, and th e threat of the heroine's defection from the U.S. From whence that sense of foreboding comes, though, is an unexamined magnification of the American collective unconsciousness. Why do we get a patriotic tear in our eyes when we've repeatedly, to the point of redundancy, seen the images, the film, and the political campaign appropriations of the eager, young James Stewart as Mr. Smith, in suit with tie askew? Most of the essays cover their terrain through familiar tracking methods, yet the ruptures--the pathways obscured by fanfare--are the very locales for rethinking our cinematic social texts. The surprise factor in this text is subtle. However, the text does present the point of view (and 21 ways of enacting this view) that interdisciplinary study can lead to imperative cultural discoveries, and it is through this cooperation of the disciplines of media art and cultural studies that, arguably, the future of the humanities lies.

Wangyo, Lee: Natural Powers and Freedom from All ideas and Thought. Photograph Art Co. (No. 505 Daesung Building, 1 Bun-Ji, Naesu-Dong, JongRo-Gu, Seoul, South Korea)/240 pp./price unavailable (sb).

EXHIBITION CATALOGS

Henri Cartler-Bresson: Paris. Ljosmyndasafn Reykjavikur (Reykjavik Museum of Photography)/40 pp./price unavailable (sb).

Kathy Vargas: Photographs, 1971-2000, A Retrospective, edited by Lucy Lippard and MaLin Wilson-Powell. The McNay (The Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum)/110 pp./S29.95 (sb).

Martha Madigan. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery/56 pp./price unavailable (hb).

Phil Sims: Red Spectrum. Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim/60 pp./price unavailable (sb).