Film/TV

Which Side Are You On?

Annabel Daou’s art work ‘Which Side are You On?’ (2012) features an old television, a still image, a tape recording of the artist asking the titular question ‘which side are you on?’, and a recording of people’s answers to that question. That’s it. It seems simple enough. But this work represents the doubts and desires …

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Tideland

A.R. Warwick just published an analysis of Terry Gilliam’s Tideland as metamodern film in Art Writ. Terry Gilliam’s 2005 film Tideland centers on an abandoned child, Jeliza-Rose, and her solitary adventures during one summer in rural Texas. With both veiled and obvious allusions to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the story focuses on the increasingly dark, imaginative fantasy life …

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Metamodernism, Quirky and Feminism*

As metamodernism as an idiom, philosophy, sensibility and cultural force are being developed, conceptualized and analyzed, I think it is time to address an important and central aspect so far overlooked, namely that of feminism. What kind of feminist implications does metamodernism entail? What kinds of femininity does metamodernist art and popular culture depict? How …

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Wes Anderson, tone, and the quirky sensibility

Frequent Notes on Metamodernism contributor James MacDowell recently published his second academic essay on the quirky sensibility. His article in The New Review of Film and Television Studies situates Wes Anderson within the ‘quirky’ sensibility of recent American indie cinema, a category encompassing a range of films and filmmakers that emerged in Indiewood during the 1990s …

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Seeking Substance in Historical Costume Films

A common strategy used by many critics of contemporary historical films and costume dramas is to locate such films within the critical mode of a postmodern nostalgia. Such a postmodern nostalgia is defined by what Cora Kaplan calls the “much debated view that the passage from modernity to postmodernity has been marked by the profound …

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Notes on Quirky

Regular Notes on metamodernism contributor James MacDowell recently published an essay on Quirky and metamodernism in the newly revamped academic film journal Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism. You can read his article in full here.