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International criminal justice is filled with living, dead, and dying bodies. While witnesses detail atrocities in the courtroom, such testimonies are largely considered for their evidentiary value to establish innocence or guilt. In this article, I explore how death, grief, and mourning are represented at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). I focus on the ICTY documentary, Crimes Before the ICTY: Višegrad , to analyse how filmic representations of international criminal justice register dead, dying, and grieving bodies. Drawing on Queer Death Studies and relational ontologies, I explore the more-than-human and non/living worlds through which death, grief, and mourning are represented in the film. A queer relational approach reveals and challenges the construction of the dead as evidence and death worlds as crime scenes. This approach illuminates how the natural world and buildings, bridges, and artifacts are vestiges, witnesses, and sites of death and grief in Višegrad. My analysis explores how these representations in the ICTY documentary reinforce civilizational logics and reductive representations of violence at the same time as they illuminate relational encounters of death and dying in international criminal justice, thus enriching attempts to see, know, and feel loss in the wake of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gendered violence and masculinity gained popularity in Malayalam cinema during the last decade, and this study explores the aspects of masculinity, hegemony, gendered space, and violence by examining two recent films: Kumbalangi Nights (2019) and Uyare (2019). The study discusses the construct of masculinity in Malayalam cinema over the decades concerning these films and investigates the hegemonic maintenance of masculinity based on Connell's Masculinities. Understanding masculinity as a construct relies on the 'complete man' image of Shammi, Govind, and Vishal. The study also identifies the diverse masculinities in the films to examine the concept's inclusive nature. The two varied treatments of masculinity, (1) as madness and (2) as crime, based on Foucault's Madness and Civilization, explore the masculinizing gendered spaces of public, private, and domestic. These movies analyze the two patterns of violence put forth by Connell: (1) one is the physical verbal violence that the privileged group uses to sustain their dominance, and (2) that claims masculinity among men in group struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the gendered representations of female soldiers in war films and reflects on how the role of women in war is imagined. In particular, it questions the media and popular cultural attention that the female Kurdish fighters received, and thereby contributes to the research on women engaged in political violence and their popular representation. A visual, narrative and contextual analysis of two French films (Girls of the Sun (2018), Sisters in Arms (2019)) exposes how female Kurdish combatants are depicted and for what purpose. I argue that the films contribute to the instrumentalisation of the Kurdish Freedom Movement to promote an essentialist understanding of gender and to enact civilisational superiority. I derive several implications from this analysis. First, that it fosters Islamophobic policies at home. Second, that it undermines the revolutionary political project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The examination of power, space, and identity formation within diasporic literature has garnered significant attention due to the escalating global mobility of migrants across the world. This article studies the complex integration of spatial hierarchy, civil violence, and gendered responses to power representations in Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, The Lowland (2013). We utilise Henri Lefebvre's theories to dissect the spatial dynamics of the novel across three dimensions: representations of space and conceived space, spatial practice and perceived space, and representational space and lived space. Lefebvre's framework is instrumental in understanding how physical and conceptual spaces can simultaneously serve as tools for domination and sites for transformative resistance. The novel weaves distinct spatial realms, such as the exclusive Tolly Club and the diminishing lowland, to symbolise postcolonialism and state control. The findings highlight how conceived space is portrayed as a postcolonial realm marked by violence and gendered spatial injustice, reflecting male dominance and societal norms that suppress female subjectivity. However, the study also reveals that this conformity is not static but showcases the agency of female characters like Gauri and Bijoli in resisting and renegotiating spatial constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the potential use of the horror film Saw IV as a teaching tool for exploring ethical decision-making in public administration. The film follows a police officer named Lieutenant Rigg who is tested by the Jigsaw killer. The article suggests that the extreme violence depicted in the film can provide a context for examining ethical dilemmas in a violent system. It also proposes the use of reflection writing activities to prompt students to analyze the ethical frameworks used by the characters in the film. However, the article acknowledges that the violent content of the film may be triggering for some students and suggests using short clips and focusing on the decision-making process instead. Overall, the article argues that horror films can be valuable tools for exploring complex ethical situations in public administration. [Extracted from the article]

The Parisian banlieues have long been depicted through harmful stereotypes in political speeches, the press and mainstream film as places of violence, crime and poverty, and of social, racial and religious divisions. In this article, Ashley Harris demonstrates the impact of different modes of visual culture upon the thousands of communities in the banlieues and, more broadly, to examine the significance of visual representations for their potential to create, reinforce or challenge inequalities and injustices. Using critical cartographical theory and an intermedial approach, this article assesses the impact of representation upon the banlieues, considering mainstream dominant narratives and grassroots visual cultures. It argues that grassroots visual cultures produces a more nuanced and integrated depiction of the banlieues. Through a comparative study of Sandrine Madji's blog 'Ma Petite Banlieue' and Aristide Barraud's creative works on Les Bosquets, this article asserts the possibility of reconsidering the banlieues as creative centres, rather than precarious peripheries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular culture is a product created for many people. The audience's tastes are essential in production. Besides that, popular culture can also describe a culture that exists in society. One popular product that people like is film. Along with the times, the world of cinema also has more exciting story plots and various characters. One is an American film called Venom: Let There Be Carnage. The film shows signs of the violent formula usually used in American cinema. Therefore, this journal discusses Venom, who is an anti-hero who uses much violence to deliver his existence but has a heroic soul, and also Eddie Brock, an ordinary human who acts as a host who has contradictory traits with Venom even though they live in one body--coupled with conflicts with other villains characters such as Carnage and Cletus Kasady. Researchers present signs of violence using dialogues and movie posters as data references. Also, the characteristics of the heroes used using semiotic analysis supported by John Cawelty's Myth of Violence theory. With this method, the researcher also describes the culture of violence in American society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of bullying continues to be reported by the media because it still happens everywhere, especially in schools, and needs to be discussed in research. This qualitative research focuses on studying American films with the theme of bullying, namely Bully (2011), A Girl Like Her (2015), and Wonder (2017) as the main source of data. This study aims to identify how American movies portray bullying and to find out what bullying represents by applying Hall's representation theory. Dialogs collected and sorted from the films were treated as signs that would convey more meanings. The results of data analysis suggest that American films with the themes of bullying frequently show bullying through portraits of physical violence, verbal violence, and trauma. Besides, bullying can also indicate a lack of attention from the family, the condition of the social environment, and the powerlessness of humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the depiction of sexual violence in Indian films and its reflection of wider cultural norms. It highlights the pervasive influence of a male perspective throughout the filmmaking process, from producers to audiences. The portrayal of rape and sexual violence in Indian films often focuses on the pain and humiliation of women, the satisfaction of men, and the sadistic pleasure derived from the brutality. The article argues for the need to handle these depictions with sensitivity, maturity, and respect for survivors, and calls for greater representation of women in the filmmaking industry. It also examines the influence of social class, ethnic identity, context, and tropes in shaping the portrayal of sexual violence. The normalization of abusive acts and the romanticization of problematic male behaviors in films are also discussed. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of minimizing the glorification of sexual violence, promoting respectful behavior towards women, and dismantling the underlying misogyny and sexual abuse that is perpetuated in Indian films. [Extracted from the article]

In the recent decades of post-globalization India, a digital explosion in media platforms and technologies has created a new cartography of the city. This 'informational' vocabulary addresses the city not merely through built urban architecture but also through a mobile infrastructure of screens. MMS clips, surveillance footage, television news, home videos, memes, and so on are all symptomatic of this new digital archive of the city. This essay attempts to reflect on how Delhi's urban imaginary is given a graphic volatile form through the viral circulations of its digital profile. As a new generation of Delhi-born directors emerge in the landscape of Bombay cinema, some of these filmmakers mobilize the recent televisual archive of crime in Delhi to respond to the city. At the same time, it is also interesting how a more generalized relation between the space of the night and urban violence is given a specific concrete iconography in these fictionalized accounts. Located within an intersection of Delhi's urban imaginary, its expanding media infrastructure, and an aesthetic mobilization of the night, this essay examines Dibakar Banerjee's Love Sex Aur Dhokha (2010), Anurag Kashyap's Dev.D (2009), and Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's Delhi-6 (2009) to argue that the violence in these films as much material as it is technological. It is not only the anxiety related to murder itself, but the viral circulation of death and a television aesthetic of replayed and sensationalized crime that haunts the contemporary metropolitan experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postcolonial feminist hermeneutics presents many challenges to the traditional interpretation of Bible passages. Recognizing the ethical issues in Old Testament metaphors about unclean and unfaithful women, readers now contemplate how to understand and accept in modern times these texts that reveal disenfranchised and excluded voices. This study deals with the violence inflicted on women under the guise of reasonable punishment and its unavoidable results as these are narrated in cultural contexts. This study uses a postcolonial feminist perspective to examine how the book of Lamentations and the novel Comfort Woman reveal the violence, oppression, and forced silence imposed on women. In addition, through finding the value in both the witness to and resistance to suffering, as well as through exploring participation in suffering, this study probes how to dismantle the structure of colonialism that reduces women to victims and offers an alternative reading of the biblical script that in the past has justified violence against women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Violent behavior in adolescents is one of the important public health problems; however, studies on this issue in developing countries are limited. Nowadays, adolescents spend a lot of day-night time watching TV. Objectives: The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship between watching violent movies and perpetrating violent behaviors among adolescents. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 2800 adolescents, aged 11 - 18 years, residing in urban and rural areas of Isfahan province were enrolled. This study received a part of a grantNo. 188169 dedicated to a project scrutinizing if watching violent movies by adolescents encouraged violent behaviors in the three domains of physical, verbal, and psychological violence. The data were gathered by a valid and reliable questionnaire, and SPSS software was used for data analysis. Results: Violent behaviors were significantly higher among adolescents who watched more violent movies (adjusted OR = 1.6, CI: 1.3 - 2.1). Physical, verbal, and psychological types of violence achieved the adjusted ORs of 1.6 (CI: 1.3 - 2.05), 1.3 (CI: 1.1 - 1.6), and 1.07 (CI = 0.8 - 1.3), respectively. Conclusions:Watching violent movies can noticeably increase the frequency of violent behaviors among adolescents, especially in boys and rural students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Basque society has been exposed to the terrorist violence of the Spanish state during and after the dictatorship and to that of ETA until its definitive cessation of violence on 21 October 2011. The search for the truth demands revealing the existence of state terrorism, regardless of how some historians attempt to diminish its gravity. In this article, the focus will be on cultural productions that make the writing of the history of terrorism in Spain more nuanced. The cultural texts studied include Pablo Malo's film, Lasa eta Zabala ('Lasa and Zabala') (2014), Ion Arretxe's novel Intxaurrondo: La sombra del nogal ('Intxaurrondo: The shade of the walnut tree') (2015), Miguel Ángel Llamas and Amaia Merino's documentary, Non dago Mikel? ('Where is Mikel?') (2020) and the Centro Memorial de las Víctimas del Terrorismo ('Memorial Center for the Victims of Terrorism'), which opened its doors in 2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the motif of eye-gouging as a gruesome element of the uncanny, spanning genres like horror, literature, and psychoanalysis. It delves into its significance in relation to Freudian psychoanalysis, cultural symbolism, and its resonance with contemporary events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. It further examines how the uncanny returns in times of crisis, impacting perceptions, trust, and control.

This article examines the construction of maternal subjectivity in the context of breastfeeding narratives in Russian literature, from the early 1800s to the 1920s. It draws on historical and contemporary socio‐economic contexts, in Russia and the West, to support its major contention that, in literature, breastfeeding and violence are intrinsically connected at a symbolic level. As a literary trope, breastfeeding tends to be presented either as the antithesis of violence (as in the passages analysed from Shakespeare's Macbeth and Krylov's Fables) or as a continuation of underlying structural violence (with examples from Korolenko, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky). Through three detailed close readings of fictions by Ivan Lazhechnikov (the 1859 novella "My Doctor's Grimace"), Mikhail Voskresenskii (the 1858 novel Natasha Podgorich), and Vsevolod Ivanov (the 1922 short story "The Child"), I argue that realist literary depictions of maternal breastfeeding and wet‐nursing demonstrate both the social vulnerability of mothers and the temporary autonomy or even sanctuary gained through these practices. I apply Bourdieu's definition of "symbolic violence" and Cixous's notions of "white ink" and "écriture féminine" to the context of Russian maternal fictions. I conclude that the characterization of nursing mothers in Russian realist literature is both revelatory and subversive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depictions of conflict, frequently in the form of physical violence, occupy a prominent space within Zainichi Korean film. Even the most violent of films, however, depict other divergent forms of interaction that shape social ties and inform explorations of identity. These divergent forms of interaction, in many cases, revolve around the consumption or production of Korean food and frequently take place within the shared culinary space of the Korean restaurant. Focusing on the films Yakiniku Dragon (2018), GO (2001), and Blood and Bones (2004), this article analyzes the ways in which Korean restaurants function as spaces of congregation and healing in Zainichi Korean film and act as interactive spaces that lend themselves to subtle representations of ethnic identity that coalesce around notions of intersection and hybridity. Though food, as a symbolic marker of ethnic identity, is certainly linked to direct confrontation and violence, it is the shared culinary spaces depicted in these films that allow for conflict resolution, connections across divides within the Zainichi Korean community, and the assertion of varied and complex Zainichi Korean subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yvonne Rainer's third and most explicitly political feature‐length film, Journeys from Berlin/1971 (US/UK/West Germany, 1979) explores the relationship between personal and political trauma through the lens of the instability and violence that ravaged West Germany during the period commonly referred to as the German Autumn (1977). Through a close reading of the film's formal structure, this essay argues that Journeys from Berlin/1971 represents Rainer's attempt to imagine a feminist counterpublic in the form of a queer "archive of feelings." This essay traces the film's narrative junctures, comprised of five distinct and incongruous tracks layered and juxtaposed in a collage‐like form, arguing that Rainer creates points of connection between scenes of domestic intimacy and political violence. In doing so, Journeys bridges the typically privatized and historically negated realm of everyday traumas of women and queer subjects with the public space of political trauma and asserts the primacy of both within national histories. This essay further argues that the female revolutionaries who emerge within these charged touchpoints act as figures of queer possibility. Their explicit and often spectacular refusals and failures — of the liberatory promises of bourgeois motherhood on the one hand, and political activism on the other — deny any possibility of a reparative fantasy within the film. Made during a period of significant aesthetic and personal change in Rainer's life following her attempted suicide, the film's form as an alternative archive of feminist resistance ultimately acts as both catharsis and a means of bringing this alternative community into being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the trends in literary contemporaneity in Brazil, critics have identified the presence of new realisms and the return to subjectivity (SCHØLLHAMMER, 2009, 2020), the reiteration of the fractured narrative and the thematization of violence in big cities (RESENDE, 2008), among others. Considering these findings, we recognize the recurrence of several traits present in the modern novel revisited in the contemporary. The present work proposes the analysis of one of these traits - multiperspectivity (HARTNER, 2019; NIEDERHOFF, 2019) - in Meia-noite e vinte (Twenty After Midnight) (2016) by Daniel Galera, Pontos de fuga (2019) by Milton Hatoum, and Torto arado (2019) by Itamar Vieira Junior. We aim to analyze how multiple perspectives are articulated in authors and works with different aesthetic projects, seeking to understand the different effects achieved, and how each work touches on fundamental issues for Brazilian society today, such as violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides a comparative reading of the female protagonists in two Sri Lankan films, focusing on how the female body becomes a contentious site of gendered violence, subject to state and male surveillance and containment. Through a close analysis of Prasanna Jayakody's 28 (2014) and Asoka Handagama's Asandhimitta (2019), this paper attempts to reveal how Sri Lankan cinema violently reconfigures the female body as a site of negotiation for articulation of victimhood and desire and becomes a potential space for the inscription of feminist issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a complex plot involving closeted gay councilmen, countless emotional conflicts, and a series of violent disputes, the film establishes a disjunctive tone that is significant in that it marked a shift away from the largely realist political critiques offered by an earlier AIDS cinema.[34] "As most AIDS stories have [so far] been serious dramas by and about white gay men", a contemporaneous reviewer noted, "it's refreshing to see a political satire that not only revolves around men of color, but also refuses to label them as victims." While Chocolate Babies was initially deemed a success following its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February 1997, receiving positive reviews and a number of accolades from the queer events and film festivals it was screened at over the next two years, little has been made of the implications and resonances of its radical resistant vision.[5] In a number of taxonomic articles on AIDS-attendant cinema at the turn of the twenty-first century, for instance, the film is only fleetingly cited, mostly forgotten amid extended discussions of more familiar titles. Chocolate Babies, the advertisement goes on to conclude, "packs a super-powered punch."[4] Yet despite such praise, Winter's film remains something of an outlier to the numerous canons of queer cinema formed during the 1990s and thereafter. Acknowledging what Bradley-Perrin has called the "self-serving reciprocity between pharmaceutical companies and mainstream AIDS organizations", cinema here offers a window onto various alternative political horizons.[33] QUEER CONJUNCTURES, OR BLACK FAGGOTS AND THEIR POLITICAL AGENDAS If one film is to emblematize this shifting sphere of cinematic-activist relations, however, it is undoubtedly Winter's Chocolate Babies. [Extracted from the article]

Borderlands film has traced throughlines from (neo)colonial regimes of coerced labor and ecocide to modern day, extractive industries like the US/Mexico maquila industry. This essay analyzes two films from distinct generic traditions, the sci-fi film Sleep Dealer (2008) and the documentary Maquilapolis (2006), to explicate how scale and framing in each depict and construct counter-epistemologies for surviving the Plantationocene and its logic of division, separation, and domination. Sleep Dealer utilizes bird's-eye-views and endoscopic camera scales to link a dammed river system to protagonist Memo's Cruz's body, which is similarly drained of its labor-power in an infomaquila, a futuristic cybernetic maquila factory. Maquilapolis captures haunting, timelapse shots of workers and slow-pan, bird's-eye view shots of toxified landscapes to link the back-breaking and dehumanizing labor of the factory with the chemical pollution that transfers invisibly from the maquila to the river and into people's bodies. Yet, the body, as a site of toxification and racial violence, inspires unique forms of coalition between the laborer and the ecosystem as laborers uncover connections between their oppression and the river system's degradation. As a result, both films capture new alliances between self and landscape, including the milpa, a biodiverse dryland farm; the cartolandia, informal housing structures made up of salvaged organic and inorganic materials recycled from river pollution; "aquaterrorism," acts of postcolonial violence against mega dams; and alternative narrative forms that center the river as being, friend, and subject. The essay concludes that being and feeling with the ecosystem is one way to counteract and survive the permanent damages that the plantation has incurred to the individual, the community, and the world's ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While American zombie films are staples within the horror genre, often dismissed is the zombie's relationship to both racism and religion. Zombiism emerged from 16th century Haitian Vodou and the cultural context of slavery in Haiti. As such, zombiism, at its core, is a spiritual response to power and racial capitalism. This article argues that zombie films showcase resistance to epistemic violence and challenge the political, economic, and theological relationships that sustain white supremacy. This article analyzes four zombie films--White Zombie (1932), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Night of the Living Dead (1968), and Get Out (2017)--through the methodological framework of liberation theology and calls heavily upon the Black liberation theology of James Cone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intense national debate over whether José Padilha's Tropa de elite (2007) was fascist paradoxically propelled the film's success, though this ideological critique has overlooked the project's shifting messaging during the course of its production. This article explores the largely ignored role that anthropologist Luiz Eduardo Soares's co-authored book Elite da tropa (2006) played in the creation and reception of the movie. The film's later release prompted journalists, marketing strategists, and academics to mistakenly presume it to be an adaptation of Soares's literary journalism. While the two works involved collaboration, they are in fact separate projects forming parts of each artist's distinct trilogy of state failure. After tracing the shifting attitudes towards violence and literary adaptation from cinema novo through films of the retomada , I explore both book and film as processes by tracing their respective origins, production, and reception in order to establish a comparative framework for reconceiving the works as thematic adaptations. While both texts aspire to social critique by foregrounding an ethically ambiguous narrator, Soares's work ultimately provides a more nuanced exploration of racial politics and thus signals a roadmap for reassessing the politics of Padilha's misunderstood blockbuster. Um debate intenso no Brasil sobre a natureza fascista do filme Tropa de elite (2007), de José Padilha, paradoxalmente impulsionou seu sucesso, apesar dessa crítica ideológica ter ignorado as mudanças estéticas ao longo do projeto. Este artigo analisa o papel, em grande medida negligenciado, que o livro Elite da tropa (2006), de coautoria do antropólogo Luiz Eduardo Soares, exerceu na criação e recepção do filme. O fato de o longa-metragem ter sido lançado depois do livro provocou em jornalistas, publicitários e acadêmicos a errônea pressuposição de que aquele se tratava de uma adaptação do jornalismo literário de Soares. Embora o livro e o filme tenham envolvido colaboração, os dois são [End Page 6] em realidade projetos independentes, cada um fazendo parte de uma trilogia distinta de Soares e Padilha sobre violência urbana. Após traçar a evolução de atitudes relativas à adaptação literária e à representação da violência desde o cinema novo até os filmes da retomada , analiso tanto o livro quanto o filme como processos, ao destacar suas origens, produção e recepção com o intuito de estabelecer um enquadramento comparativo no qual os trabalhos sejam entendidos como adaptações temáticas. Enquanto ambos os textos aspiram à crítica social ao ressaltar um narrador eticamente ambíguo, o livro de Soares, em última instância, oferece uma análise mais detalhada sobre políticas raciais e, dessa forma, traça um itinerário de reavaliação do incompreendido sucesso de bilheteria de Padilha. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a reflection on the imaginaries and symbolism present in some artistic creations (literature, visual and film) about the recent violence in Colombia, in which the Magdalena River has been a protagonist and in which can be seen the persistence of memories in the beliefs and representations of the riverside populations. Four aesthetic productions are analyzed that emphasize the river and the presence therein of spiritual and mythological beings in the discussed narrative corpus in order to recognise the metaphors and symbolism present in the literary and audiovisual narratives regarding political violence. This makes it possible to make an interpretive account with reference to the conceptual perspective of symbolic imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: This work aims to demonstrate the effectiveness of the film analysis of A Message to America, the first video of beheadings of ISIS, as a media literacy tool to reduce the anxiety, and the emotional and cognitive impact (unconscious and conscious reactions) that these videos of real violence provoke in young people. Methodology: For this, 80 volunteers were recruited from first-year communication students at the UPV/EHU and divided into two homogeneous groups of 40. Group A watched an educational video about the film analysis of A Message to America, group B did not. Later, all the participants watched another video of the ISIS’ decapitations, and their viewing was monitored to record their state of anxiety before and after the experiment (using the STAI/E questionnaire), and their physiological (HRV and EDA) and cognitive responses (using an ad hoc questionnaire). Discussion and results: The results show that exposure to the film analysis of A Message to America does not attenuate the anxiety or emotional impact that these videos of executions produce in students, but it does reduce their cognitive impact and improve their understanding and interpretation, while empirically testing the correspondence between the audiovisual resources of the video and the physiological reactions of the viewer. Conclusions: The experiment confirms the suitability of film analysis to educate the eye in the contemporary audiovisual context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ways in which the cinematic practices of the audiovisual productions Farmacopea (2013) by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (Puerto Rico) and Río Verde (2017) by Diego and Álvaro Sarmiento (Peru) address human-nature assemblages by articulating a post-anthropocentric gaze. Addressing these two movies as neoregional films, this essay discusses how these contemporary audiovisual productions explore the disastrous environmental histories of the tropical plantation in the Caribbean and the extractive exploitation of the Peruvian-Amazon jungle, exhibiting cinematic techniques that disrupt the socially committed tradition of Latin American cinema of the 1960s centred on human communities. Deploying experimental and poetic cinematic techniques, it is argued that these movies feature small matter by foregrounding local poisonous vegetation and corporal takes of humans and animals that register landscapes in disappearance in the face of modern extractive practices. Departing from Santiago Muñoz's and the Sarmiento brothers' filmic productions, we discuss how the embedding of Amazonian rhythms and unruly Caribbean plants in their filmic narratives produces sites of situated hope that both reconceptualise Latin American cinema and contest the necro-political violence of the modern extractive machinery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue for theorizing ambivalent mourning as a queer affect and practice, opening up the possibility of sitting and reckoning with past and ongoing state-sanctioned violence, war, disorder, and mass deaths. To do so, I use a hybrid text—employing auto-ethnography and an analysis of three Lebanese films from three different junctures in Lebanese history. Each film represents a different genre: Hamasat (1980), a documentary by Maroun Baghdadi; Beirut Phantom (1998), a fiction narrative by Ghassan Salhab; and Bailey's Beads (2020), a short film by Georgio Nassif. A close reading of these films reveals that the characters conjure specters of war, violence, the dead, and the disappeared to mourn, yet they respond and dwell with them in ambivalence. Employing women of color feminisms, queer of color critique, and affect theory, I defend and welcome specters as potential companions and figures that allow some people to not mourn alone. Rather than rejecting or suppressing memories and experiences of violence and war, I argue that the invocations of ghosts and ambivalent mournings are queer acts that reshape how we think of normative affective registers in narratives of war, violence, disaster, and personal encounters with death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the work of the screenwriter Taylor Sheridan known for depictions of masculinity and violence in films such as "Hell or High Water" and "Sicario." Topics discussed include acknowledgment of harm caused by toxic masculinity by Sheridan, role of women and people of color in films of Sheridan, and inadequacies of the film "Yellowstone."

This paper focuses on daily violence as the main theme in novel The Smile Owner which was written by Fekriah Shahrah. It depicts the hegemony of Houthi militia in Yemen. It is an analytical study which interprets the novelist’s literary work The Smile Owner. Moreover, as an instrument of data collection an interview with the novelist has been conducted to shed more light on the novel. This study is based on critical analysis of the literary text, which interprets the real context of violence in Yemen. Violence is a global issue between good and evil, and war and love. Shahrah as many of Yemeni novelists depicted the consequences of violence in their literary platform. The novel represents the situation of Yemen in the ongoing war in Yemen. Hence, the war in Yemen, death, abduction, retaliation and social fragmentation are the main themes of written and spoken Yemeni literature. This paper exposes the horrible implications of the coup led by Houthi Militia backed by Iran against the legal government backed by coalition led by Saudi Arabia and Emirates. Therefore, Fekriah Shahrah in the literary platform portrayed violence in Yemeni society using the narrated text as a tool to convey the awful war consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a renewed momentum in twenty-first-century Argentine film to represent the 1970s in productions that, in one way or another, exhume the alliance between auteur and commercial cinemas, developed during the restoration of democracy in 1983, in order to think "differently" about the '70s or to recover the '70s of "the common people". This essay sets out to examine the particular way political violence is expressed in the film Rojo [Red] through mise-en-scène choices associated with the aesthetics of certain popular cinemas of the 1970s and with the central role of romantic ballads during the period depicted. Attention to the use of romantic song allows us to understand the way the work constructs specific affective and cognitive appeals between the figurative diegetic universe and the spectators' cultural memory, and to suggest that it is precisely in the territory of the family that a type of violence is engendered that would later be replicated in other social structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I examine María Rivera's "Los muertos" (2010), a poem about ongoing violence in Mexico that has been included in the activist repertoire within the context of the state-led "War on Drugs". I use an interdisciplinary approach to analyse, on the one hand, how the poem has approached this violence in the country and, on the other hand, how the poem has been taken up anew by other artists and/or activists: by the Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad, by Luis Felipe Fabre in "El poema de mi amiga" (2013), and by Violeta Luna in the political performance "Requiem for a lost land" (2016). In particular, I investigate the melodramatic mode as one of the catalysing elements in relation to the unique impact of "Los muertos". Through a close reading of the poem, in combination with an analysis of its afterlives, I want to cast light on the changing meanings and roles that both the poem and its melodramatic underpinnings have assumed in different contexts: meanings and roles which reveal, in turn, the multiple political potentials of the original text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines what affect studies can contribute to the analysis of violence and audiovisual media in twenty-first-century Mexico, paying particular attention to the temporal nature of violence and of time-based media. Does the photo of a dead child and her father on the Mexico-US border, as seen on the front page of a newspaper, allow viewers to perceive the slow violence of neoliberal economies and contemporary immigration policies? Or does it merely encourage shallow cries of pity? Given today's saturated and vertiginously paced mediascape, do feature films have any role to play in encouraging audiences to viscerally recognise the duration and weight of state repression? In order to adequately analyse the complex sensorial dynamics of audiovisual media, this essay begins by proposing a tripartite conceptual framework that recognises multiple and inter-related forms of violence, overlaid audiovisual economies, and the contemporary scopic regime. The essay then deploys this framework in a comparison of the sensorial engagements of two recent films: Desierto (Jonas Cuarón, 2015) and Ayotzinapa, el paso de la tortuga (Enrique García Meza, 2017). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article criticizes the 2017 horror film "Get Out," directed by Jordan Peele and starring Daniel Kaluuya. Topics discussed include the way the film presented whiteness, fear of white people, and violence against African Americans, the reported response of the African American community to the mislabeling of the film in the U.S., and the way the film documented racism and violence in the U.S.

There is hardly any other art form as immersive as film. Thus, if a movie focuses on the abyss of human behaviour, dealing with crimes, violence or even murder, it is often accused of being immoral and corrupting its audience. On the basis of selected examples from Alfred Hitchcock’s ›Rope‹ to Martin Scorsese’s ›Taxi Driver‹ and Lars von Trier’s ›Dogville‹, this critical essay explores the question of the moral claims movies can make. Considering contemporary films such as ›Promising Young Woman‹ and ›Joker‹ this text asks how modern anti-heroes influence the audience and what changes can be seen over the last decades in the moral reception of movies. Finally, the essay concludes with the latest attempts of censorship and looks at who determines the moral value of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored how Malaysian Indian viewers read and perceived the portrayal of sexual violence in Tamil movies produced in India. Sixty youths were selected, using a purposive sampling method, to participate in focus group discussions. The discussions were transcribed and analysed for common themes related to their reading of sexual violence in Tamil movies. Four main themes were identified in this study: forms of sexual violence; blurring lines between sexual violence and pre-marital sex; stalking; and rape comedy. Participants clearly identified rape as a form of sexual violence but were more cautious when identifying other forms of sexual violence especially when it was portrayed as part of courtship. Participants were divided in their understanding of rape as part of a comedy scene. Generally, participants accepted the way sexual violence was portrayed in the movies without overtly challenging the meaning of these portrayals. The portrayal of sexual violence and the reading of it by viewers followed traditional notions of femininity and rape myths in their society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the legacy and influence of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) in contemporary cinema. Kubrick's film received criticism on its release for the director's supposed excessive attention to form at the expense of content (what some termed the 'aestheticization of violence'). Two recent directors that have frequently been compared to Kubrick, Thomas Clay and Nicholas Winding Refn, have similarly been criticised for their aestheticization of violence in their films. Drawing upon news clippings of film reviews, the article compares Clay's The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (2005) and Refn's Bronson (2009) to Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange to consider how the media discourse surrounding Kubrick's film continues to inform contemporary criticism of violence in film. The article addresses the reception of these films through the prism of the form vs content dichotomy initiated by Kubrick himself. Archival material in the Stanley Kubrick Archive relating to the reception of Kubrick's film is used to support a comparative approach and show that the accusations aimed at the imitators of Kubrick continue a debate that actually started with A Clockwork Orange itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violence can be intimate and revealing. People reveal much about themselves when they give or receive a beating. So it was when Kevin hit his lifelong friend Chiron in a Miami schoolyard in the second act of Moonlight.1 They shared another type of intimacy the night before when they confessed feelings of despair and loneliness to each other on a beach. These vulnerable emotions created a space to risk touching, leading to a kiss that melted into Kevin slowly masturbating Chiron to orgasm. Chiron and Kevin had always created space for each other, finding ways to be alone and talk even in a larger group of neighborhood boys. Thus, every punch that Kevin landed on Chiron's jaw resounded with betrayal and remorse, not just physical pain. Kevin urged Chiron to "stay down," his eyes pleading forgiveness for what bullies had pressured him to do. Instead, Chiron jutted his chin out and held Kevin's gaze, as though he wanted to sear the scene into his mind: his beloved friend's punches and the jeering faces of the bullies urging him on. The beating showed Kevin, who had a confident social ease throughout the movie, to be a creature of social approval, turning on his friend when his peers demanded it. The beating also showed Chiron's mettle; he did not turn away from his friend's betrayal or from the cruelty of the boys who goaded him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the Japanese direct-to-video series "Guinea Pig," produced by Ogura Satoru in the 1980s and its pornographic approach to presenting violent imagery. Topics discussed include an analysis of the video series' form and distribution, an exhibition of cruelty by the series, and the viewer dynamics of video culture articulated by the series.

In this study, we examine whether youth who are exposed to more weapons violence are subsequently more likely to behave violently with weapons. We use data collected with a 3‐cohort, 4‐wave, 10‐year longitudinal study of 426 high‐risk youth from Flint, Michigan, who were second, fourth, or ninth‐graders in 2006–2007. The data were obtained from individual interviews with the youth, their parents, and their teachers, from archival school and criminal justice records, and from geo‐coded criminal offense data. These data show that early exposure to weapons violence significantly correlates at modest levels with weapon carrying, weapon use or threats‐to‐use, arrests for weapons use, and criminally violent acts 10 years later. Multiple regression analyses, controlling for children's initial aggressiveness, intellectual achievement, and parents' income, education, and aggression, reveal statistically significant independent 10‐year effects: (1) more early exposure to weapon use within the family predicts more using or threatening to use a gun; (2) more cumulative early violent video game playing predicts more gun using or threatening to use weapons, and normative beliefs that gun use is acceptable; (3) more cumulative early exposure to neighborhood gun violence predicts more arrests for a weapons crime; and (4) more cumulative early exposure to movie violence predicts more weapon carrying. We argue that youth who observe violence with weapons, whether in the family, among peers, or through the media or video games, are likely to be infected from exposure with a social–cognitive–emotional disease that increases their own risk of behaving violently with weapons later in life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the nexus of violence, power, discipline, and disavowal in Michael Haneke's Das weiße Band—Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Ribbon , 2009). Haneke's film shows how structures of power can produce countermeasures to their own authority while paradoxically disavowing the role they play in the oppositional forms of violence that emerge under their watch. This article illustrates how terrorism can flourish in a punitive society as a retributive mechanism to authoritarian rule and how the law of the punisher and the radical violence of the punished orbit a shared, co-constitutive imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the depiction of symmetry and violence in lesbian colonial intimacies of the 2016 South Korean film "The Handmaiden." Topics discussed include the reenvisioning of transnational relations in the film in light of its setting during the Japanese annexation of Korea, the use of the sexually saturated female body to address a politically saturated history, and its intertextual reference to show the history of distorted visual fields mediating filmic representations of the era.

The article analyzes the film "Kiss Me Deadly" directed by Robert Aldrich. Topics discussed include description on the protagonist, Mike Hammer, observation on the noir film's depictions of violence, and assessment of author J. P. Telotte on the troubled semantics in the film. It also mentions how the film's representation of domestic scenes provides insight into the complex and changing conceptions of the home in 1950s America.

A film criticism of the motion picture "Django Unchained," written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, starring actors including Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Samuel L. Jackson, is presented. It argues that John Ford's 1956 movie "The Searchers," starring John Wayne, influenced the film. Topics include racism, spaghetti Westerns, and violence in motion pictures.

The article analyzes the Cold War allegory in the 1964 film "Kawaita hana (Pale Flower)" by Shinoda Masahiro. Topics discussed include the depiction of illicit gambling dens, rigid code, threat of violence and murder in the yakuza in the film, focus of the film on the character of middle-aged yakuza Muraki who was released from prison after serving years for killing his rival, and significance of the murder committed by Muraki in front of the young woman Saeko.