This article examines how repetition produces déjà vu-like recognition in non-deterministic narrative cinema. Focusing on David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), it argues that the film’s repetitions do not lead to conventional repetition–resolution, but instead organise an entangled binary narrative structure: two discontinuous diegetic modules remain distinct while becoming mutually implicated through recurring elements. Drawing on theories of repetition, modular narrative, impossible puzzle films, Nochimson’s account of entanglement, and psychological models of implicit memory, the article develops déjà vu-like recognition as a formal and phenomenological mechanism rather than as a literal empirical claim about spectators’ cognitive experience. Through episodic experience, single-element familiarity, and Gestalt familiarity, recurring phrases, figures, objects, spaces, and situations encourage viewers to perceive non-causal linkages between narrative fragments that resist stable resolution. The article’s contribution lies in reconceptualizing repetition, doubling, and ambiguity in Lost Highway not merely as textual motifs, but as mechanisms that sustain interpretive oscillation between recognition and uncertainty. A brief discussion of Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues (2015) serves as a limited comparative case, suggesting that this framework may also clarify other non-deterministic narrative structures in which repetition connects narrative modules without producing causal closure.
As cornerstones of human culture, stories embody shared experiences and themes. Through adaptations, these stories are enriched, gaining in value and relevance as they transcend historical and cultural boundaries. The present research offers a comparative reading of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) in light of theories of cognitive poetics. As an interdisciplinary approach, cognitive poetics explores the interplay between textual structures and cognitive processes. Exploring the role of foregrounding, defamiliarization, and figure-ground dynamics in shaping these stories, this study explores how Ran is, essentially, a reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s tragedy and how, in the hands of Kurosawa, adaptation functions as an act of preservation and reinvention, providing profound insights into human nature. It is argued that Kurosawa does not merely transpose Shakespeare’s narrative into a new context; he reimagines it to mirror the artistic and cultural exigencies of his medium and time, thus enriching the source material, creating an ongoing dialogue between the two works. This study offers a new reading of these works in order to maintain how the concepts in the field of cognitive poetics might facilitate the study of adaptations, their reiterations of a work and their deviations from it, and provide novel means of meaning construction.
This paper examines the presence of queer ecologies in two recent works by Camille Vidal-Naquet and Luca Guadagnino, reading their distinct visualisations as sites where non-normative desire and human-nature relationships are brought into productive dialogue. While both works engage with queer subjectivity, they do so through substantively different representational and political registers, and it is precisely this divergence that the paper sets out to illuminate. Through close textual analysis, the study interrogates how each work constructs an environmental aesthetic that is inseparable from the articulation of queerness. Vidal-Naquet presents a raw, embodied refusal of heteronormative and capitalist structures, raising pointed questions about whether figures such as sex work can sustain genuine anti-systemic critique. Guadagnino, by contrast, deploys a romanticised Mediterranean landscape as both a mirror and a medium of queer longing, while the adaptation of key scenes from the source novel reveals a deliberate softening of the more unsettling, abject dimensions of desire. The paper argues that, despite their shared investment in non-normative sexuality, these works diverge significantly in their aesthetic and political strategies. Through which they render queerness ecological — ultimately contributing to emerging scholarly conversations on nature and queer representation.
In this study, the dramatization of paternal absence as a structural silence that governs the life of the protagonist and her daughter, Aria, is examined. The absence of Aria’s father is not a mere narrative omission but a defining one that shapes the emotional, economical and psychological conditions throughout the film. Black feminist criticism, trauma theory and reader-response criticism are employed as lenses to qualitatively analyze Straw as a cultural product. The argument is built on close reading of dialogue (as text) for meaning-making rather than through cinematic means. It pays attention to patterns of omission, connotation and implied meaning, while interpreting silence and language as markers of suppressed grief and prolonged isolation. Janiyah is depicted as a single mother who is navigating unrelieved motherhood, financial precarity and private grief with an air of obvious paternal omission. The father of her daughter is neither named nor remembered, yet the effects his absence saturate the narrative and drives the mother’s quiet descent. Findings show that meaning in Straw is not only constructed through direct dialogue but through what is implied and deliberately left unsaid. It concludes that Tyler Perry’s film interrogates paternal abandonment without spectacle, instead allowing domestic labor, suppressed longing and psychological fatigue to surface gradually. It asks the viewer to read silence, implied statements and omission as evidence, thereby making popular African American cinema a medium of literary and cultural meaning-making.
The challenge of transferring the three-dimensional world onto two-dimensional surfaces has been debated by artists and scientists for centuries. This discussion, gaining prominence during the Renaissance, led to the development of linear perspective techniques such as one-point perspective. This study examines the effect of one-point perspective—which lies at the intersection of art and science—on viewers using eye-tracking data (N = 180). For data collection, the study used scenes from three films: 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining, which include Kubrick’s consistent application of one-point perspective. Scenes were divided into nine Areas of Interest (AOIs), and gaze-and fixation-based metrics were used to assess viewers’ attention. The results revealed that AOI 5, centrally located on the screen, had the shortest time to first gaze, the highest number of gazes, and the longest total gaze duration compared to other AOIs. The findings show that participants fixated on the center earlier, more frequently, and for longer durations—even in scenes featuring intense peripheral stimuli. These findings provide empirical evidence that one-point perspective influences gaze direction in moving images by guiding visual attention toward the central region of the frame. This study offers a clear and empirically grounded contribution to understanding the effects of one-point perspective in moving images from the standpoint of vision science.
This article argues that contemporary border regimes operate not merely do not solely engage power through juridical exclusion or economic exploitation but through the engagement of unconscious desire and collective affect as well. Through a comparative reading of three feature-length films directed by Maghrebi women directors—Yamina Benguigui’s Sunday God Willing (Inch’Allah Dimanche 2001), Reem Kherici’s Paris or Perish (Paris à tout prix 2013), and Narjiss Nejjar’s Apatride (2018)—the study employs a dual methodological approach combining Lacanian psychoanalytic approach with the Spinozian affect theory to examine how cinema contributes to shaping political subjectification. This analysis prioritizes feminine experiences and positions gender at the center to disclose diasporic subjectification. It examines how gender fundamentally shapes the way border-crossing characters experience displacement, belonging, and jouissance. Using affect theory as developed in film phenomenology, we analytically trace the affective intensities generated by these films as they exceed narrative resolution to inviting spectators, particularly those occupying positions of gendered and racialized marginalization, to experience the contradictions of diasporic life. The analysis develops three interconnected theoretical concepts: “border jouissance” describes the psychoanalytic mechanism through which borders bind subjects to structures of domination, “diasporic transference” names how this jouissance gets mobilized and managed through cultural forms, and the “cruel optimism of integration” reveals how border jouissance sustains itself through spectatorial investment, keeping the subjects attached to integration fantasies despite their structural impossibility. Methodologically, the article undertakes a textual analysis of the narrative structure, mise-en-scène, temporal organization, and sonicness across the three films, attending to how the motion pictures shape affective reception and spectatorial identification, situating each within its specific historical and political-economic context. Through this approach, the study traces the shift from assimilationist transference (promising integration through cultural performance) through entrepreneurial transference (transforming cultural difference into market value) to border transference (confronting spectators with state violence). It also engages with the way each mode organizes the unconscious political desire differently, either sustaining or potentially disrupting contemporary border regimes. In lieu of addressing gender as an isolated category, we address how the affect operates at the intersection of gender, colonialism, state power, race, and class—shaping both diegetic characters and the viewer's experience. The narratives under study underscore how feminine desire becomes a site where psychoanalytic repression, nationalist ideology, and affective intensity converge, contesting liberal feminist frameworks that isolate gender from colonial legacies and contemporary border regimes. This framework contributes to critical border studies, psychoanalytic film theory, and diaspora studies as it unravels biopolitical governance operating through unconscious mechanisms. It reveals new possibilities to deconstruct and subvert contemporary forms of racialized exclusion.
The present article aims to explore the concepts of privacy and freedom in the French TV show Nu [Nude] (OCS Max. Capa Drama, 2018) in order to examine how the show becomes a manifestation of John Stuart Mill’s idea of the “tyranny of the majority”. The central questions of the study, therefore, are: What is the relationship between the disappearance of privacy and the loss of individuality and freedom in Nu? How does Nu embody John Stuart Mill’s concept of “tyranny of the majority”? To answer these questions, the TV show Nu is analyzed episode by episode in the context of Mill’s theory, in an attempt to understand how a democratic government gradually transforms into a totalitarian state, where people are under constant surveillance and have no privacy. As portrayed in the show, citizens’ freedom and sense of identity are often suppressed through majority vote. The majority does not always realize the consequences of their decisions, and individuals living under democratic governments can be easily manipulated. In such a world, minorities are marginalized, and those who oppose the majority rule are either forced to conform or face imprisonment and silencing.
The paper analyses Squid Game (Seasons 1–2) released in year 2021 and 2024 respectively in light of Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD), a psychological syndrome associated with long-standing exposure to structural violence, emotional abuse and systemic marginalisation. The study analyses how Squid Game visualizes trauma as a condition of social and psychological entrapment sustained rather than isolated through the analysis of the series’ narrative structure, character arcs, and recurring motifs. C-PTSD is paralleled by this depiction of debt, exploitation, betrayal, and coerced competition in the series. Seong Gi-hun, Kang Sae-byeok and Cho Sang-woo are not just players in a lethal game; they are offspring of emotional neglect, abandonment, and economic disenfranchisement. These are repeated behaviors, which go from emotional numbness to moral decay, and are identical to the main characteristics of C-PTSD, including multiple personality, hypervigilance and compulsive coping techniques. It also interprets the aesthetics of the series: surreal game arenas, disembodied authority, and childlike symbols as metaphors for dissociation, emotional regression, and the inner landscapes of unresolved trauma. Trauma is no longer merely depicted in Squid Game; it is made into the sensory: viewers are urged to be smeared by the tension, the cost, and the betrayal of being alive. This article also situates Squid Game within contemporary trauma and media studies, expanding the framework through theoretical concepts derived from the work of Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, and Cathy Caruth. It contributes to trauma-informed media criticism by linking psychological theory with audiovisual form.
Tomboy figures have become increasingly visible in contemporary queer cinema, yet their cultural and political meanings remain deeply ambivalent. Positioned at the intersection of subversion and containment, the tomboy simultaneously embodies gender nonconformity and remains vulnerable to visual discipline and narrative normalization. Drawing on feminist and queer revisions of gaze theory (Mulvey in Screen 16:6-18, 1975; Kaplan in Women and Film, Methuen, London, 1983; Doane in Screen 23:74-88, 1982; Straayer in Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-Orientations in Film and Video, Columbia University Press, New York, 1996), alongside film semiotics and performativity (Barthes in Myth Today, Routledge, London, 2014; Metz in The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1981; Butler in Gender as Performance, Routledge, London, 2013), this article examines how tomboy subjectivity is constructed, regulated, and occasionally reclaimed through cinematic form. Adopting a comparative qualitative methodology that integrates semiotic analysis and close textual reading, the study analyzes four films from distinct cultural contexts: Blue Is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019), Yes or No (Saratsawadee Wongsompetch, 2010), and The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, 2016). Focusing on visual signifying practices, such as costume, bodily gesture, spatial occupation, camera framing, and symbolic objects, the analysis investigates how tomboy masculinity is alternately eroticized, desexualized, domesticated, or framed as autonomous agency under different regimes of looking. The findings reveal a clear cultural divergence. In Western queer films shaped by female or queer authorship, tomboy figures are more likely to be situated within structures of reciprocal gaze and embodied subjectivity. By contrast, in East and Southeast Asian commercial contexts, tomboy masculinity is frequently softened into a politically neutral, marketable image shaped by censorship and commercial logic. Auteur cinema, however, occupies a liminal zone in which tomboy performativity is caught between patriarchal fetishization and queer reclamation. Rather than constituting a stable identity category, the tomboy emerges as a culturally regulated cinematic sign whose meaning is continually produced through visual power relations. By synthesizing gaze theory, semiotics, and performativity within a cross-cultural framework, this study demonstrates how tomboy representation functions not merely as a marker of gender difference, but as a critical site where visibility, discipline, and queer agency are negotiated in contemporary screen culture.
Michael Haneke’s Amour criticizes and humanizes current biopolitical practices concerning old age, disability, care, gender, and death by telling a disturbing love story. Amour (2012) depicts an elderly French couple’s struggles after the wife, Anne suffers a debilitating stroke, and thus her retired pianist husband, Georges has to transform into a caretaker and eventually smothers his wife to end her—and his own—agony. By relying on various approaches to care within the medical humanities as well as disability- and gender-related insights of critical gerontology and film studies, the essay argues that Anne and Georges are primarily destroyed physically and mentally not by the illness experience itself but the debilitating and often transparent ideologies of care they are culturally submerged in. My reading of the film examines its cinematic depiction of the spatial and gender-related construction of (end-of-life) care in the face of the painful vulnerability of chronic illness.
Metin Erksan’s 1968 film Kuyu (The Well) is a radical cinematic interrogation of bodily autonomy, gendered violence, the illusion of property, set against the stark backdrop of rural Anatolia. Through the harrowing ordeal of Fatma—a woman subjected to abduction, rape, systemic coercion—the film dismantles the conflation of possession with ownership, asserting the body’s inalienability as property. Drawing on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s critique of property, Marxist labor theory, Frantz Fanon’s dialectics of violence, this article argues that The Well exposes the ideological sleight-of-hand by which patriarchal, colonial regimes mistake domination for rightful claim. Fatma’s suicide, framed as an act of abusus (the right to destroy what one owns), becomes the ultimate assertion of agency, challenging the gendered, theological foundations of ownership. The film’s subversive use of Quranic misquotation, metaphors further critiques religious complicity in women’s commodification. While the conclusion’s fatalism risks reinforcing cycles of oppression, The Well transcends its historical moment to offer a universal commentary on resistance, positioning the body as the ultimate site of political struggle. Through interdisciplinary analysis, this article situates Erksan’s work within anti-colonial, feminist discourses, revealing its enduring relevance to debates on sovereignty, violence, freedom.
This article reimagines cinematic experience through Henri Bergson’s concept of durée—lived time as qualitative flow—and Gilles Deleuze’s cinematic philosophy, challenging traditional narrative and representational paradigms in film studies. By integrating phenomenological analysis with close readings of The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), The Stanley Parable (Galactic Cafe, 2013), Parasite (Gisaengchung, Bong Joon-ho, 2019), and Memories of Murder (Salinui Chueok, Bong Joon-ho, 2003), we propose "cinematic durée" as a dynamic fusion of filmic constructs and viewer perception, positioning spectators as active co-creators. Qualitative cinematic elements like lighting, interactivity, and pacing, understood as Bergson's (1889) qualitative multiplicities that evoke distinct experiential textures (Deleuze 1966) shape subjective durée, evoking diverse emotional responses, from dread to empowerment, as evidenced by audience reactions spanning decades and media. Extending Vivian Sobchack’s embodied phenomenology and Laura U. Marks’s intercultural senses, this study transcends linear models (e.g., David Bordwell’s narratology), embracing analog, digital, and non-Western contexts. Virtual reality, Carne y Arena (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2017), further tests participatory durée, blending bodily engagement with temporal synthesis. Methodologically, we employ philosophical inquiry, supplemented by audience insights, and propose future empirical tools—such as eye-tracking and interviews—to explore affective resonance, offering a novel framework for cinema’s temporal and emotional architecture. This interdisciplinary approach—bridging film theory, cognitive psychology, and cultural studies—reveals cinema as a continuous process of becoming, reshaping perceptions of time, space, and identity across global landscapes.
This paper explores the affective qualities of cinema and builds on the growing body of research on the intersections of film studies, diasporic identities, and affect. It examines the narratives and experiences of second-generation immigrant Pakistani women: 18-year-old Zahira in Stephan Streker’s film A Wedding (2016) and 16-year-old Nisha in Iram Haq’s What Will People Say (2017). While the former is inspired by the honour killing of Sadia Sheikh in Belgium in 2007, the latter is inspired by Haq’s own life in Norway and Pakistan. Through an approach informed by intermedial processes, the purpose of the study is to understand if and how an inquiry into the lives of girls like Zahira and Nisha contributes to a broader social and cultural understanding of ethnic identities in multicultural European societies. The paper argues that diasporic subjectivities are built through processes that are intercultural and dynamic in nature. Moreover, it further explores how the films create sites of mutuality through the affective and traveling qualities of shame. The study finds that while the material aspect of intermediality contributes to perpetuation of stereotypes (often against an ethnic group), culture as media in its intermedial rendering confronts and challenges such reductive practices.
Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) – a psychological thriller – in terms of its narrative is a drama of loss, grief and acceptance, but it is also a highly reflexive film because it takes perception and interpretation as its central themes. The article discusses the curious relationship between the film’s diegetic reality and the cinematic apparatus that represents this reality. At the heart of the matter lies the issue of expressing and extending subjectivity through an (audio) visual medium, the representation of thought processes as mental and technological reconstructions of personal experiences, perceptions and feelings. The initial and central trope in question is the cinematic form and formation of memory, or more precisely a temporally expanded sense of memory: visions of the past, the future, and the present. I argue that the protagonist’s ability to unwittingly see beyond the here and now is not only a reflection of trauma processing, but also analogous to the mental processes of the spectator, his or her successful or failed understanding of the film’s complex stream of images. I try to show that cinema – by exploiting the potential of the conventions of continuity editing – is capable of employing traits of subjectivity without creating a unified fictional narrator character or making perceptual focalization as an explanation for the ambiguous meanings of representation.
Wes Anderson's Asteroid City (2023) unfolds a multilayered narrative that interrogates the boundaries of mourning, loss, and representation within a meticulously stylized formal world. This article offers a Lacanian psychoanalytic reading of the film, with particular focus on the concept of the Real, examining how elements that resist symbolization are repressed and reemerge through aesthetic and narrative rupture. Engaging with Lacan's registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, the analysis aligns these with the film's visual language, narrative structure, and affective positioning of its characters. Expanding this framework, the study explores how melancholia, as a limit condition of representation, reveals the tensions between aesthetic form and the unrepresentable, thereby linking affective experience to the structural logic of cinematic signification. In bringing psychoanalytic theory into dialogue with formal and ethical concerns, the article argues that Asteroid City does not express grief through naturalistic means but renders it perceptible through formal breakdowns and compositional discontinuities, creating a space in which the Real emerges at the edge of representation.
This article examines Albert Serra’s Liberté (Serra in Liberté. France, Spain, Portugal. Idéale Audience / Andergraun Films / Lupa Film / Rosa Filmes.1.85:1, 132 min, 2019)—both the film and the video art installation, first exhibited the same year at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, under the title Personalien—alongside Roland Barthes’s reading of texts by the Marquis de Sade, proposing a conceptual juxtaposition between Barthes’s approach and the aesthetic and rhetorical dimensions of Serra’s work. Barthes advocates for a purely formal interpretation of Sade, privileging structure over narrative or moral positioning, and engaging with such elements as the perpetual construction of libertine language, the defence of impossibilia, and humour, among others. The composition and fragmented discourse of Liberté resonate with this framework, revealing a cinematic logic that resists conventional storytelling and undermines superficial understandings of artistic and sexual freedom. At the same time, the article highlights how Serra’s work, operating on the threshold between cinema and video art, incorporates performative elements that intensify the viewer’s hyper-awareness of their position in relation to the screen. By intertwining formal optics with a visual and rhetorical analysis of the film, this study unpacks a conceptually unstable and ambiguous artwork—at once serious and playful, abstract and corporeal, present and vanishing.
The Affective Turn highlights the limitations of the structuralist discourse when applied to visual hermeneutics, and instead foregrounds affect as a critical tool emphasizing the emotional and sensory atmosphere that film can convey. This framework will guide the analysis of Arraianos (2012), a film by Galician director Eloy Enciso Cachafeiro. Inspired by O Bosque (1977), a dramatic work by Jenaro Marinhas del Valle, Arraianos immerses us in the culture of the inhabitants of A Raia Seca, a border region between Ourense in Galicia, Spain, and the Couto Mixto in Portugal. The film does more than document a geographically, historically, politically, and economically situated community; it also captures the inner life of its people-their dreams, emotional worlds, and collective psyche. In this article, I argue that by immersing the viewer in a world shaped by affect and thus aligning with the tradition of exploratory ethnographic cinema, Arraianos succeeds in evoking the ethos of a culture beyond the limits of objective and representational documentary filmmaking.
Ruben Östlund’s socially critical stories cannot be analysed only from a moral point of view. His films also address the theory of deconstructive performativity, questioning the possibility of authenticity and intentional action. Unexpected turns in everyday rituals or spontaneity that exposes and overrides artistic intentions can be treated as allegories of “structural parasitism” (Jacques Derrida, Signature, event, context. Tr. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, Northwestern University Press, Evanston IL, 1988). The derailments of the character’s performative acts reveal the constant possibility of speech act “failure” (John L. Austin, How to do things with words, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1975), exposing the illusory nature of the autonomous subject (Judith Butler Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal 1988 40: 19–531. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3207893 . Accessed 23 Feb 2025.). The Square (2017) connects the failure of contemporary art to have a direct socio-political impact with the emptiness of the aesthetics of l’art pour l’art, on the one hand, and the problems of appropriating art as a commodity, on the other. As the artistic intention to impose eventfulness and the intention to rigidify presence into an ideological message fails, deconstructive performativity is revealed anamorphically. This presence, which subverts artistic action through its trace-like appearance, manifests itself as an embarrassing and uncanny experience for both the characters and the viewer.
Past centuries’ optical apparatuses for the documentation and quantification of land and the human body are central motifs of the first two feature films of Gábor Bódy and Peter Greenaway. Both directors explored various methods of incorporating the culture and optical technology of the era depicted in the narrative into the language of film. The ties between American Torso (Amerikai Anzix, Gábor Bódy, 1975) and The Draughtman’s Contract (Peter Greenaway, 1982) lie in their focus on the use of optical appliances. Their second feature films, Narcissus and Psyche (Nárcisz és Psyché, Gábor Bódy, 1980) and A Zed and Two Noughts (Peter Greenaway, 1985), both draw strongly from the chronophotography of the 19th-century photographer, Eadweard Muybridge. However, the ways in which the homages are woven into the narrative differ significantly: in Bódy’s film, the reference appears as part of a dreamlike montage, while in Greenaway’s, it is integrated diegetically into the plot. Ultimately, the synchronicity between the directors came to an end. Bódy died in 1985, while Greenaway continued making films before later expanding his practice into the field of video art.
The present article explores the ambiguous treatment of female bodies in the film The Substance (Coralie Fargeat 2024) in order to outline some of the political dilemmas and representational paradoxes that characterize contemporary film culture, in which a postfeminist cultural framework redefines previously held norms of what counts as ethically sound, feminist, progressive, or politically responsible. It argues that the categorization of The Substance as feminist social satire or feminist body horror symptomatically reveal a set of contemporary political and theoretical issues that arise in a cultural milieu where the borderlines between art and exploitation may become increasingly blurred, and where the term feminist is often used as a marketing tool to legitimize extreme and exploitative content. The article thus does not simply analyse the political implications of the film's formal qualities and representational choices, but uses The Substance as a sort of litmus paper that indicates shifts in the politics of representation in early twenty-first century film culture. In order to highlight these changes, the paper contrasts contemporary reviews of the film with such concepts of feminist film theory as bodily affect, masquerade and satire, and spells out the ways the film is informed by such trends as postfeminism, the postmodern horror film, and French extreme cinema. The article indicates the way the critical reflection of these concepts and contexts may contribute to a more complex understanding of the representational strategies of The Substance, and may also serve as important reference points for film scholarship in the age of postfeminism.
