Film Criticism Journal

23/07/2025

New to FC: Michael Anthony Turcios on the propaganda of US Customs and Border Protection

Abstract
This essay examines the short-length videos of the United States Customs and Border Protection agency that were produced between 2009 to 2022. It examines how the CBP exploits video to fashion an image of itself as a humane and “benevolent” force. Studied as an ensemble, the videos fall under three distinctive categories: the agency’s canine training program; CBP officers and volunteerism; and the agency’s self-described “humanitarianism.” By omitting reference to the agency’s human rights abuses of migrants and refugees, the moving images opt for a representation of laboring officers executing their duties for the protection of the U.S. A contribution to scholarship in nontheatrical and nontraditional media, and border and immigration media, this essay examines the scope of propaganda production specifically in the context of border policing.

https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/fc/article/id/7936/

17/07/2025

New to FC: Emma Hamilton and Alistair Rolls on John Carpenter's ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976)

Abstract
This article contributes to debate about the political meanings of John Carpenter’s 1976 film Assault on Precinct 13. Existing scholarship has considered how meaning is constructed in Assault via its relationship to the horror genre and from this analysis divergent interpretations have arisen that conceptualise Carpenter’s politics as either “unconsciously reactionary” or liberal. This article utilises an intertextual approach to reconsider how meaning in Assault can be constructed through and with the 1939 John Ford film Stagecoach. An intertextual analysis helps us to arrive at a new interpretation of political meaning that centres the viewer as the maker of this meaning and, because of this, explores how space can be made to reconcile seemingly irreconcilable political interpretations and allow films to hold ambiguity, contradiction and ambivalence in their political meanings.

https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/fc/article/id/7935/

14/07/2025

New to FC: Vernon Shetley on the heist film CHARLEY VARRICK (1973)

Abstract
Don Siegel’s Charley Varrick (1973) encodes a troubled perception of transformations in American economic life into a tightly organized heist narrative. The title character uses his crop-dusting business as cover for bank robberies. As a crop duster, Charley bills himself as “The Last of the Independents,” a moniker which suggests the imperiled nature of the mythos of freedom and self-determination that had long defined the American character. As a bank robber, Charley limits himself to small-time jobs in rural backwaters. But after their latest job, Charley and his accomplice discover that they have taken a huge stash of Mafia money. The film implies that the American economic system has become so fully integrated, and so thoroughly corrupt, that no place is outside the malign influence of the incorporation and centralization of both legal and criminal enterprise.

https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/fc/article/id/7934/

10/07/2025

New to FC: Randy Laist on the "planetary imagination" of Méliès’s A TRIP TO THE MOON (1902)

Abstract
In Georges Méliès’s masterpiece, A Trip to the Moon, one of the first spectacles that the astronomer-adventurers encounter is the image of Earth rising above the horizon. The scene in Méliès’s 1902 fantasy film is an uncanny foreshadow of two of the most famous photographs in human history, Earthrise and Blue Marble. The image of Earth from space evokes the critical question of what it means to consider human existence on a planetary scale, a question that began to take a newly urgent form in Méliès’s time and continues to haunt modern audiences. Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak argues that planetarity constitutes “an experience of the impossible.” Méliès, with his unique penchant for staging impossible situations, is uniquely suited to exploring the radical alterity of “the planetary imagination.”

https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/fc/article/id/7933/

07/07/2025

New to FC: James Brunton on sound design and transgender representation in PUNCH LINE (2022)

Abstract
The short film Punch Line (dir. Becky Cheatle, 2022, Ireland)—a rare and powerful example of a transgender-themed narrative authored, directed, and acted by transgender filmmakers—offers an expanded vision of trans-ness and broadens the possibilities for cinematic suture. The film not only defies the stereotypical tropes and images often found in stories depicting transgender characters produced by cisgender filmmakers but also challenges the taken for granted assumption that works of art dealing with marginalized people must also take on an educational role for non-marginalized audiences. In this essay, I demonstrate how Punch Line’s creative technique of suture through internal diegetic sound and its narrative structure allow for a unique aesthetic experience of, rather than simply an education on, transgender embodiment.

https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/fc/article/id/7932/

03/07/2025

The latest issue of FC is here!

Courtney R. Baker (University of California, Riverside), Ellen C. Scott (University of Pittsburgh), Elizabeth Reich (University of Pittsburgh)

23/12/2024

New to FC: a panel on black feminist film criticism

Abstract: In 2022, New Negress Film Society’s Third Annual Conference highlighted the collective’s commitment to Black women and non-binary film cultures and community. The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture served as gathering space for Black feminist film culture, consciousness-raising, and shared purpose and conviviality. During the conference, Melissa Lyde, founder of Alfreda’s Cinema, moderated the conversation, “Love is at the Center: Remedying Cinema Linguistics,” which included scholars and critics Terri Francis, Samantha N. Sheppard, and Salamishah Tillet. Over the course of an hour, the panelists offered a rich and expansive discussion of Black feminist film criticism. This is an edited transcript of that conversation.

https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/fc/article/id/6868/

22/12/2024

New to FC: an interview with experimental filmmaker Aarin Burch

Abstract: Aarin Burch explores her aesthetic praxis, an experimental cinema reaching and transforming viewers in the condensed time of layered looks and identification; and validating her Black le***an existence with presence. Today, she practices film form across the flatness of racial and visual difference, and from her white mother’s paintings, finding connection.

https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/fc/article/id/6867/

21/12/2024

New to FC: an interview with documentary filmmaker Shola Lynch

Abstract: In this interview, professor Ellen Scott interviews professor Shola Lynch, the latter a key figure of contemporary documentary, whose work centers the lives and impact of Black women public figures. Lynch’s nuanced, archivally-saturated approach to her work creates films with the depth of academic history and the accessibility and visual and stylistic interest to bring a much wider audience to the table, no mean feat. Over the course of her career, Lynch has also developed an archivally driven image-based historiographic approach in her work that is singular and worthy of greater note within Media Studies, a discipline increasingly turning to images, rather than text, to explain images. In this discussion, Lynch and Scott focus on Lynch’s pathbreaking documentary Chisholm ‘72 (2004), a project in which she, out of nowhere, announced herself to the world as a filmmaker and storyteller to be reckoned with by treating an all-but ignored history Chisholm’s bid for the presidency. Lynch has consistently used her background in archival history as a launchpad for media production that is at once soulfully intimate and announces the importance of Black women to the foundations of American History.

https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/fc/article/id/6866/

20/12/2024

New to FC: an interview with director Tracey Strain

Abstract: Director Tracy Heather Strain speaks about her development as a filmmaker, and the recent challenge of editing extensive research into a single documentary, Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming A Life (2023). Her responses also reflect the importance of Black women’s film work in (re)covering Black female subjects such as Hurston, where histories out of context have long shaped their stories.

https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/fc/article/id/6865/

19/12/2024

New to FC: a roundtable on the history of black women and film.

Abstract: Juanita Anderson, Tracy Heather Strain, and Zeinabu irene Davis speak together about the history of Black women film and media makers, their own work, and their efforts—and community’s—to build a world for Black women in film. They share names and stories of women who influenced them, as well as hopes that more collections will document what has remained a largely unrecorded history. The conversation also considers the painful contradictions of erasure inherent in finalizing records and archives even while optimistically producing one.

https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/fc/article/id/6864/

18/12/2024

New to FC: Jacqueline Bobo on the feminist work of black women filmmakers.

Abstract: From enslavement to the contemporary moment, Black women cultural artists cast long shadows. Ideas of agency, self-determination, and empowerment are rendered tangible and achievable. Vivid examples of these principles necessary for social and political activism---the essence of Black feminism---are eloquently present in the work of Black women filmmakers.

https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/fc/article/id/6863/