Filmmaking-in-Place: Peripheral Production and Ecofeminist Aesthetics in Eden and
Meek’s Cutoff
Citation:
Holtmeier, Matthew and Chelsea Wessels. “Filmmaking-in-Place: Peripheral Production and Ecofeminist Aesthetics in Eden and Meek’s Cutoff.” Afterimage (2021) 48 (1), 54–72.
Abstract:
In Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and Eden (2012), filmmakers Kelly Reichardt and Megan Griffiths (respectively) negotiate the interconnection between women, nature, and patriarchal capitalism through their emphasis on place, or one’s separation from it. Ecofeminist aesthetics resonate with regional production when directors emphasize relationships with environments and people over typical neoliberal concerns of production such as cost and infrastructure. A particular political aesthetics emerges when the approach emphasizes building community and the politics of place, rather than the bottom line. Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff shifts from the panoramic landscape shots of the classical Western to allow gendered engagement. This framing redirects the viewer away from the supposedly “male” action and instead focuses on the constant work of the women, which is the real action of survival. In Eden, Griffiths similarly frames human trafficking victim Hyun Jae in closed spaces where she is forced into sex work. Such cinematography is drastically juxtaposed with the open framing that signals potential emancipation. In each film, feminist politics intertwine with aesthetics of space to resist patriarchal capitalism co-opting women’s labor, an approach relevant to both environmentalism and feminism.
Ableism in Avatar: The Transhuman, Postcolonial Rapprochement to Bioregionalism
Citation:
Holtmeier, Matthew and Sueyoung Park-Primiano. “Ableism in Avatar: The Transhuman, Postcolonial Rapprochement to Bioregionalism.” Studies in the Humanities, 46, 1-2 (2020), 136-154.
Abstract:
Shrouded in larger discourses surrounding colonialism, environmental collapse, and utopia, Avatar makes a complicated argument, when considered through the lenses of ecocritism and disability studies together, about the potential to inhabit environments being predicated upon able-bodiedness. Seemingly in line with Cameron’s politics, Avatar argues for an environmental approach, or more specifically a bioregional approach, to inhabiting Pandora. Buried within this argument, however, is a privileging of able-bodied individuals and the erasure of disability. Perhaps due mostly to its generic conventions, the ultimate paradox of Avatar is that while it seems to signal a concern for disability, its conclusion suggests only the erasure of disability. It answers the question of what it means to live-in-bodies by arguing only the able-bodied can adopt the practices and philosophies that allow one to live-in-place. Even prosthesis is not enough. One must, like Jake, transcend disability entirely. This is antithetical to the bioregional attention to the particulars of people and places that might have been productively extended.
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“Entertainment-wise, a motherfucker”: Critical Race Politics and the Transnational
Movement of Melvin van Peebles
Citation:
Holtmeier, Matthew. “Entertainment-wise, a motherfucker: Critical Race Politics and the Transnational
Movement of Melvin van Peebles.” Jump Cut, No. 59 Winter 2019, digital.
Abstract:
This article argues that the transnational movement of Melvin van Peebles was crucial to ending the dearth in African American feature film production in the United States after Oscar Micheaux’s The Betrayal (1948). By establishing himself as a global auteur, van Peebles uniquely navigates the film industry with his first three films and develops a critical race politics that questions the role of American exceptionalism in Hollywood. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) is often a focal point for considering van Peebles’ political aesthetics, but I argue that this third feature-length film is the culmination of a larger project that focuses on the director’s playing industry aesthetics and practices in a minor key.
Communicating Cascadia: Reichardt’s three ecologies as bioregional medium
Citation:
Holtmeier, Matthew. “Communicating Cascadia: Reichardt’s three ecologies as bioregional medium.” Screen 58.4 (2017): 477–496.
Abstract:
From Everglades to evergreens, the work of Kelly Reichardt foregrounds the inhabiting of particular environments and their role in producing subjectivity, marking her out as an important bioregional filmmaker. In working with the short stories and screenplays of Jon Raymond, Reichardt turned to the environment of the Pacific Northwest, beginning with her film Old Joy (2006). Rather than simply using this setting for the sake of fidelity to the books, Reichardt emphasizes the environment of the Pacific Northwest as the medium through which the stories are told.
The Modern Political Cinema: From Third Cinema to Contemporary Networked Biopolitics
Citation:
Holtmeier, Matthew. “The Modern Political Cinema: From Third Cinema to Contemporary Networked Biopolitics.” Film-Philosophy 20 (2016): 303–323.
Abstract:
This article looks at a qualitative shift in global political cinemas within the new era of globalization. Outside the Law reworks the earlier Battle of Algiers in order to situate the Algerian Revolution in an increasingly globalizing world. This acknowledgement has important ramifications for the production of political subjectivity, which is both fragmented and networked by global flows of information, economies, and people. The cinematic production of subjectivity offers an important critique of Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of the Civilizations, illustrating the unique potential of film to enter into contemporary debates surrounding international relations.
The Wanderings of Jia Zhangke: Pre-Hodological Space and Aimless Youths in Xiao Wu and Unknown Pleasures
Citation:
Holtmeier, Matthew. “The Wanderings of Jia Zhangke: Pre-Hodological Space and Aimless Youths in Xiao Wu and Unknown Pleasures.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 8.2 (2014): 148-59.
Abstract:
This article examines the pre-hodological space Jia Zhangke creates in his films, such as Xiao Wu (1997) and Unknown Pleasures (2002), illustrating the connection between the formal construction of filmic space and economic reform in China. Gilles Deleuze defines pre-hodological space as the space before action, drawing from Kurt Lewin’s Principles of Topological Psychology (1936) and Gilbert Simondon on the concept of individuation. Exploring Jia’s films through these originary texts, the author elaborates a psychopolitics based on the connection between the production of subjects and the growth of globalized capitalist economies in China.
An Exiled Filmmaker under House Arrest: Bahman Farmanar’s Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine
Citation:
Holtmeier, Matthew. “An Exiled Filmmaker under House Arrest: Bahman Farmanara’s Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine.” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 5.2 (2012): 135-48.
Abstract:
Bahman Farmanara’s career as a filmmaker in Iran provides a unique example of the effects of the revolution on filmmaking, because he was an established filmmaker before the revolution, continued making films until his exile during the revolution, and returned to Iran years later and began making films again. As a result, Farmanara has experienced a variety of different stages in the evolution of Iran’s filmmaking environment. Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine, Farmanara’s first film made after the revolution, attests to Farmanara’s experiences with his exile and return home. In doing so it establishes rhizomatic group affiliations, the potential for the construction of an extra-national community.
Ethereal Impressions In Chambers: The Crystal Image as Semiotic Key
Citation:
Holtmeier, Matthew. “Ethereal Impressions In Chambers: The Crystal Image as Semiotic Key.” Short Film Studies 2.2 (2012): 245-48.
Abstract:
In Chambers imagines a science-fictional experience for comatose patients. Working as a puzzle, this film does not reveal the reality of the comatose patients until its conclusion. By unlocking the coma experience through a circuit of images, In Chambers revises the potential of the what Gilles Deleuze refers to as the crystal image not only to collate past and present, but to articulate a concept as well.
The Sunday Religious Revival, and a Horse Named Desire
Citation:
Holtmeier, Matthew. “The Sunday Religious Revival and a Horse Named Desire.” Short Film Studies 1.2 (2011): 303-06.
Abstract:
Sunday juxtaposes curiosity, religion and desire amidst the clash of acute sounds vying for attention. These sounds – the banality of knives and forks scraping plates, the instruction of a sermon being delivered via the radio, and a horse’s breath and steps – set and break boundaries, revealing the rupture desire presents in social and cultural norms.
Post Pandoran Depression or Na’vi Sympathy: Avatar, Affect, and Audience reception
Citation:
Holtmeier, Matthew Alan. “Post-Pandoran Depression or Na’vi Sympathy: Avatar, Affect, and Audience Reception.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 4.4 (2011).
Abstract:
Purporting to send an environmentally and spiritually healthy message, Avatar seems like an ideal candidate to positively impact audience members’ positions towards the environment on a large scale. Indeed, director James Cameron said that “Avatar asks us all to be warriors for the Earth.” Since Avatar was released in theaters, however, there have been two overwhelming trends in response to the film: either, a seemingly immediate change in the spectators’ worldview and relationship with the environment; or, the creation of an unachievable desire for the hyper-real techno-spiritual world of Pandora. These responses – environmentally proactive Na’vi sympathy and a debilitating post-Pandoran depression – offer examples of two, very different, relationships with the world. At the base of these relationships is the film’s ability to provoke emotional response in audiences, which engenders positive or negative relationships with the environment.
Scars, Cars, and Bodies without Organs: Techno-Colonialism in J.G. Ballard’s Crash
Citation:
Matthew, Holtmeier. “Scars, Cars, and Bodies without Organs: Techno-colonialism in J.G. Ballard’s Crash.” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 16.4-5 (2009): 1-9.
Abstract:
The proliferation of technology combined with a synthesis between the artificial and the organic in J.G. Ballard’s novel, Crash, creates an environment where technology acts as a surreptitious colonial force. As new subjectivities emerge from the interplay of technology and bodily organization, Crash explores the ethical dangers of psycho-social experimentation.