film studies – ARTCOM

Landscapes of Dictatorship in Film: Three Aesthetic and Emotional Modes

by Graça P. Corrêa. Drawing on emotion theory and genre studies, this article analyzes and compares three landscapes of dictatorship in ﬁlm, namely Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone (2001), and Luis Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (2005), as expressed by distinct aesthetic and emotional modes. The ﬁlms under examination reﬂect upon three interrelated dictatorial rules in disparate geographical locations: the escalation of Nazi power and attendant criminal frame of mind in Germany of the early 1930s (Fritz Lang’s); the persecution of Leftwing sympathizers, accompanied by the murder of powerless human beings, …

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Social Order and Subconscious Disorder: The Gothic Aesthetic of David Lynch

by Graça P. Corrêa. From its inception the Gothic mode is structurally and thematically associated with the irrational, the ambiguous, the chaotic, the hidden, and the nightmare. Its fiction is populated by monstrous figures, by hybrids (in animal-human and machine-human combinations), and by other imaginary dwellers of the dark side. It is an aesthetic rooted in the intuition of a paranormal and supernatural realm, of a world that transcends human reason and therefore contests anthropocentric reality. It is therefore not surprising to suggest that US director David Lynch’s filmic oeuvre is aesthetically Gothic, as a few critics have already hinted …