Session 4: Film Panel – FHT @ the Movies
3rd Global Conference
Saturday 19th September – Monday 21st September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford
Terrorism and Social Panic in British Fantastic Cinema
Raul Alvarez Gomez
University Complutense, Spain
From 2002 onwards, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, 7/7 and 3/11, and after a somewhat listless period both in artistic terms and from the standpoint of international production and renown, the fantastic sub-genres, particularly horror and science fiction films, have gained importance in British cinema as vehicles for reflection on the social panic that these traumatic tragedies have produced.
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Drumming the Horror Away
Silvia Herreros de Tejada
University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
In 1953, Oskar Matzerath decides to remain a child forever and play his tin drum: the best way to escape from the horrors of World War II. Fifty years later, another Oskar —Oskar Schell— plays the tambourine while he walks around New York looking for the soul of his dead father, killed in the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Günter Grass’ 3-year-old Oskar (The Tin Drum, 1959; a film directed by Volker Schlöndorff, 1979) refuses to grow up physically when he catches a glimpse of the world around him and make-believe becomes his life’s principle: he is a performer who analyses the dreads of humanity, the dreariness of a cold-hearted race that has even killed the toy makers. Oskar necessarily turns to imagination in order to reject a world where the Black Witch (his maxim for death) is extending her wings by means of war.
Jonathan Safran Foer’s 9-year-old Oskar (Extremely Loud and Incredible Close, 2005; film in pre-production, 2009) has to put his fears in order every morning so as to be able to continue living after his father’s death in the Twin Towers. When he finds a key in an envelope labeled “Black” he decides that by finding the lock, he will discover something really important about his father… And his imagination is so vivid that he cannot face the fact that it might be a mere trifle. Oskar turns to make-believe to reconcile with a world in which you can die any day, just by chance, just because you happened to be in a particular place.
How do the Oskars manage to escape from the horror and fear of war and terrorism? Can their imaginations save them from the Black Witch’s paws?
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Monsters, Aliens, Threaten Global and the Uncanny in the Cinema of M. Night Shyamalan
M Gabriel Garcia Mingorance
University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
“The link between man and the world is broken [...] Restoring our belief in the world-this is the power of modern cinema.”. In this paper we will analyze the four last works of the American Indian director and writer M. Night Shyamalan -Signs (2002), The Village (2004), Lady in the Water (2006) and The Happening(2008)-, in order to classify the types of monsters and aliens chosen for these stories, and what kind of threat do they represent. Through this classification of creatures and fears we will try to study the dramatic consequences that the structure of each screenplay, and the main characters’ evolution and internal conflicts. Finally, the conclusions will be shown in the social and political context after 9/11 attacks.
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Cinema and Social Trauma after Terrorist Attacks: the Spectatorship Perception. Approaching to the Spanish Case
Araceli Rodriguez Mateos
University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
If we consider the cinema as a communicative process, it is pertinent to examine the meanings that its audiences attribute to films in their sociocultural context. This article presents a qualitative study focused on the Spanish audience, with respect to the treatment given in films to the trauma and social fear arising after the New York, Madrid and London attacks. On one hand, it describes their reading of the Anglo-Saxon films that allude allegorically to those attacks and to their social consequences. On the other hand, it examines their assessment of the role that should be fulfilled by fictional cinema when it deals with the 3/11 tragedy.
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Hollywood under siege. The entrenched as a dramatic role in the wake of 9/11
Antonio Sanchez-Escalonilla
University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
Researchers of American society such as Stearns point out the panic of invasion and the foreign threat as one of the specific indications of the endemic American fear. In the wake of 9/11 terrorist attacks, this fear has become even more intense before the eyes of the population. This atmosphere of threat has turned necessarily to the exterior and showed the risks of xenophobia and entrenchment in certain sectors of the North American society. Between 2001 and 2009, Hollywood has reflected this social fear as a danger of disintegration in a multi-ethnic society, result of a melting pot after centuries of history.
This work tries to analyse the peculiar character of the entrenched in the American fiction cinema after 9/11. The entrenched is a traditional figure in Hollywood landscapes since the times of early western to the most recent trends in science-fiction, and now has been revitalized as an exponent of ordinary citizen under risk of mass destruction or lethal invasion. The study of the entrenched in recent cinema (as a main character or supporting role) provides us an interesting clue to reach the themes managed by a screenwriter or director, in his or her depiction of an American society menaced by trauma. And at a time, this archetype usually offers a pedagogical reflection about the remedies of collective and individual fear.
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