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The purpose of this article is to present the connection between work and emotions in Notes on a Scandal directed by Richard Eyre. The author proves that emotions are determined by our work. In the author’s opinion protagonists’ work influence on their private life, forcing them to reproduce negative emotional patterns in contacts with relatives. Based on Arlie Hochschild’s conception of emotional labor, the author explains, how people control their emotions to avoid the need to make changes.
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Discovering America was, to a point, concurrent with both: the development of the modern landscape painting theory and recognising the issue of the Other. The author of the article undertakes an analysis of various films with their story set in pre‐Columbian America or at the times of the first encounters of America’s native peoples with Europeans, from Christopher Columbus, John Smith, and Pocahontas biographies that explore the paradisical topos, through dark tales of Viking expeditions to America, to cinematic attempts at reconstructing perception of landscape by native Americans of the time. What constitutes an essential context for the films in question, aside from encountering the Others, often symbolically represented by the constructed space – is the stereotype of an American Indian thriving in harmony with nature, who does not transform it in any way. Depicting native Americans as “spirits melted into the landscape” is a strategy quite frequently devised not only in historical, but also contemporary cinema.
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The article’s aim is to reflect upon the role and place of natural landscape in Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography. Its pivotal thesis sums up in a view that spatial issues (regarding objects, locations, real places) were of keen interest to the director while film geography constituted to him a kind of creative method. Some of Hitchcock’s works of the Hollywood period are subject to analysis herein, which concentrates upon recognising the essence of those films’ relationships to the city, the ways of seeing natural, urbanistic, and national landscape, as well as deciphering the cultural code of the post‐war America while using both the ideological and quotidian key.
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In the classical period, Hollywood studios were able to use their wizardly to create a marvellous world that would present the vision of fulfilling life, unattainable to the viewers. Not a thing experienced by them in their mundane lives was able to come close to the said silver‐screen, utopian vision of America aligned with the viewers desires. Back then, Hollywood was in fact a factory of mock cities – the ones that were better, more glamorous, and well‐lit, often also mobile, shielded from sun rays by factory walls. The author of the article analyses the way in which spaces reconstructed to be used as settings for Hollywood musicals created the foundation for thinking of America through the “American Dream” prism, that is, as a quasi‐real place that allows for utopia to be realised and any kind of dreams to be fulfilled.
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This article’s aim is to present the characteristics of Patricio Guzman’s documentary films. In his works, the Chilean director goes back to the times of Pinochet dictatorship. While narrating his account of the crimes perpetrated by the said regime, he endeavours to preserve memory of the events and, at the same time, wonders why the contemporary Chileans discard the memories of the terror years. The author of the article analyses such films as Nostalgia for the Light (2010) and The Pearl Button (2015), underscoring both their social message and, what is peculiar to them, interweaving of the nature images with tales about bloody reign of the Junta.
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The landscape of Miami shaped by Michael Mann is dotted by hundreds of metaphorical storefronts. In terms of ideological attitude, both television and feature‐film versions of Miami Vice constitute an American hyper‐consumerist manifesto which praises the purchasing powers and encourages one to seek unusual experiences. In such a Miami, the late‐capitalist dreams prove to be compelling not only to criminals, but also to the officers of the title law enforcement division, as well as to other officials representing social institutions, so to the presumable guardians of the democratic foundations of the United States. Behind the alluring audio‐visual facade Mann smuggles a reflection on the society that answers the call to participate in a consumerist celebration.
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The opulent cinematic oeuvre of John Carpenter – an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, and composer – serves here as a basis for reflection on the role and ways of building the dramatic aspect of space in horror films. Amongst the key themes of the present article are: places that are besieged, the problem of trespassing a forbidden border, and a thread concerning protagonists entering a territory where normal laws do not apply. The author undertakes the analysis of such films as: Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), Escape from New York (1981), The Thing (1982), Prince of Darkness (1987), and In the Mouth of Madness (1995).
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Detroit has been recently dubbed “the new city of American horror.” The landscape of abandoned, derelict industrial buildings and desolate streets was already utilised in such landmark horror‐genre film productions as: Lost River (2014), Don’t Breath (2016), or Only Lovers Left Alive (2013). In David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014) urban spaces of Detroit are set in contrast with the city’s suburban areas. The latter sphere is, according to the words of teenage characters’ parents – friendly, as opposed to the dangerous city centre. However, the borders between both the worlds become blurred as a result of curse placed on the said teenagers. Dread apparitions emerge out of the neat alleys of suburbia. The well‐trimmed lawns and shapely houses induce anxiety even when no one is looming on the horizon. The director, by arranging the sphere of horror that way, takes advantage of American horror tradition of the 1970s and 1980s, in particular referring to the depiction of suburbia in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). Yet, whereas in majority of horror films landscape remains merely a more or less conspicuous backdrop, in It Follows it emphatically comes to the fore. The visual code used by Mitchell refers to the post‐crisis landscape of America, where de‐industrialised setting of “Rust Belt” appears to yield quite literal monsters.
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The aim of the article is to provide the pop‐culture zombie phenomenon with a broader context. Having acknowledged that the zombie‐films’ “patient zero” was recorded in the American continent, and then the epidemic spread out globally, the author describes audio‐visual productions whose plot takes places in the United States and were produced therein. In this day and age, the figure of zombie may be treated as a form of American public’s dissent against the disappointing and unreliable political and economic system. Setting the plot of the said films outside the urbanised areas or at their frontiers, metaphorically depicts an attempt to defend, presently dwindling, traditional values.
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The article aims at characterising the style of one of the American independent cinema’s most prominent representatives, that is, Wes Anderson – the forerunner of New Sincerity in film. While carrying out a systematic overview of Anderson’s hitherto completed works, the author points to both, key leitmotifs (e.g. childhood, family relations) and the formal measures devised by him (e.g. his use of colour). What proves to be especially important in this context is the manner in which cinematic space is utilised by the director, whose use thereof follows the principles of theatrical exposition.
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Landscapes in films directed by Claudia Llosa come to signify strangeness and isolation. In her debut Madeinusa (2006) the Peruvian filmmaker depicts a secluded village in the Andes, whose name Manayaycuna means a place one must not enter, which indeed proves to be quite accurate for an accidental stranger arriving from Lima. The clash of cultures theme returns in The Milk of Sorrow (2009), which in turn is set in unfriendly landscape of the capital’s suburbia, where migrants try to start their lives anew by leaving behind the traumatic memories of armed conflict taking place in their home villages. Other districts of Lima, which are equally strange and unwelcoming, serve as a setting for Lllosa’s short film entitled Loxoro (2011), telling a story of a desperate search for a missing daughter. The claustrophobic confinement of urban mazes and forbidden villages, however, is counterpointed in Llosa’s films by the hope‐inducing open spaces of mountain ranges and ocean waters.
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Kelly Reichardt is an American independent director, who shoots most of her films in the far West. Yet, her kind of west may not be associated with the American dream fulfilled, or the Gold Rush. The landscapes discussed in the present article, which represent crucial symbols of the western United States of America, are depicted in her films in accordance with realistic principles. Not only does she demythologise the Wild West, but also indicates in hindsight the ramifications of the infamous colonisation inflicted upon the American frontier, whereby nature and culture are still axiologically opposed. While criticising the contemporary West, she draws the map of birthplaces of the American civilisation. Her characters, however, not only seize land on which to settle, but more often than not lose it, and so, when they attempt to find river, they often reach highway, railway, landfill, or a shopping mall. According to ecofeminist theory, the planet Earth is also a home, yet contrary to a literal home (or: a household), where the pater reigns, the new home is centred around caring for and tending to the Mother, that is, both the environment and the Nature epitomised. The anti‐western‐ness of Kelly Reichardt’s films is, therefore, concentrated on the criticism of patriarchal system, capitalism, or consumerism, so the interpretations presented in the article are simultaneously social and environmentalist in their character.
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The author proposes a way of interpreting desert landscapes and other desolate places of North America. For years now they have constituted areas considered attractive as film settings (especially for westerns), by meeting the ideas of wild nature unspoilt by human activity. The fundamental role in shaping this wild desert landscape is played by the following cinematographic techniques: tracking/travelling shots, panoramas, long shots, high‐angle shots, as well as silence. Three (feature) films are analysed in the article, whose protagonists journey for hundreds of miles, often on their own, and in silence, struggling with the inconveniences of the journey, thinking their lives through, which is sometimes enabled by the desert surroundings. Due to this specific type of narration and peculiarity in terms of landscape, both the characters and viewers have a chance to experience nothing short of immersion into the images presented. They become autonomous particles making up the landscape, releasing memory and oblivion, and assisting the characters on their path to self‐identification.
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