Editor's Introduction
2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 75; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19346018.75.4.01
ISSN1934-6018
Autores Resumothis issue of the journal of film and video features four articles that explore entirely different subjects, but together they illuminate ways that social and aesthetic practices reflect their material circumstances. The articles’ accounts of production practices, ecological realities, and technological developments also offer insights for both scholars and practitioners. Sowjanya Kudva's compelling historical analysis in “Neoliberalism and Disclosure's New Trans Activism: The Politics of Discrimination in Hollywood and How to Fight It” received the University of Film and Video Association Award of Merit at the 2023 annual conference. Kudva's article identifies industrial strategies that have fostered inequality in Hollywood since the 1970s; it then describes the equitable approach that shapes the practices of some contemporary documentary filmmakers. Phillip D. Duncan's well-illustrated article, “‘A Truer Test of Woodcraft’: Bell & Howell Camera Advertising, Nature Magazine, and the Creation of the Modern ‘Camera Hunter,’” provides an engaging account of technological developments, specifically a history of Bell & Howell cameras, along with useful ecocinema insights into the gendered and objectifying perspectives that have influenced nature filmmaking since the early twentieth century. Continuing the thread of ecocritical analysis, Robinson Murphy's innovative work in “Queer Child, Decolonial Child: Beasts of the Southern Wild Revisited through an Ecocritical Lens” considers Benh Zeitlin's polarizing 2012 film in a new light; it suggests that the film's conclusion frames the characters’ multiracial, nonnormative kinship unit as an ecofeminist model for thriving in a climate-changed world. Dario Lanza Vidal's discussion of visual effects in “A Study of Mordor and Coruscant as Paradigms of Neo-Baroque Digital Landscapes” should interest scholars, filmmakers, and general readers, as its case studies are the matte paintings that create the views of the Barad-dûr tower and Mount Doom in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003) and Coruscant's governmental district in Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith (George Lucas, 2005).
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