Showing 1 - 2 of 2 Items
Répresentations de la banlieue dans le cinéma français contemporain
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Yaw Owusu Sekyere
Access: Open access
- Inhabitants of the poor French banlieues are rejected and isolated from the larger French society, who refuse to acknowledge their marginalization. As a result, the cycle continues where no political change is made. The French film genre, cinéma de banlieue, seeks to explain the perspectives of the underrepresented and marginalized groups within France. This honors project analyzes the representations of the banlieue through the films of La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz), Wesh wesh qu’est-ce qui se passe ? (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche), Bande de filles (Céline Sciamma), Divines (Houda Benyamina), and Banlieusards (Kery James & Leïla Sy). These films focus on the themes of drugs, policial relations, the confinement of the banlieue, and the discrimination and stigmatisation that inhabitants of the poor banlieues face, all of which revolve around the idea of entrapment. This work intends to see if these representations of the banlieue, specifically on the periphery of Paris, perpetuate stereotypes, or propose a more complex dynamic.
The Scars of War: The Demonic Mother as a Conduit for Expressing Victimization, Collective Guilt, and Forgiveness in Postwar Japanese Film, 1949-1964
Date: 2017-05-01
Creator: Sophia Walker
Access: Open access
- Contemporary American viewers are familiar with the vengeful and terrifying ghost women of recent J-Horror films such as Ringu (Nakata Hideo, 1998) and Ju-On (Shimizu Takashi, 2002). Yet in Japanese theater and literature, the threatening ghost woman has a long history, beginning with the neglected Lady Rokujo in Lady Murasaki’s 11th century novel The Tale of Genji, who possesses and kills her rivals. Throughout history, the Japanese ghost mother is hideous and pitiful, worthy of fear as well as sympathy, traits that authors and filmmakers across the centuries have exploited. This project puts together four films that have never before been discussed together -- Kinoshita Keisuke's Shinsaku Yotsuya Kaidan (1949), Nakagawa Nobuo's Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (1959) Mizoguchi Kenji's Ugetsu (1953), and Shindo Kaneto's Onibaba (1964) -- and discusses them as four different iterations of the demonic mother motif, presented as a projection of the Japanese collective’s postwar uncertainty over both the memory of suffering during World War II and the question of personal culpability.