Last Friday, Staff Writer Samantha Seiff and Editor Solomia Dzhaman attended “Zoom-In,” a showcase of MFA Film and Media Studies theses. 

This two-day showcase was organized into five themed sections: New Media, Internet, Gender, National + Post-National, and finally, Aesthetics. We attended the final panel, “Aesthetics”, but the entire event will likely be posted to the event website. 

“Aesthetics” consisted of four speakers, each with a unique thesis and focus area. Although the films discussed were not shown, speakers used clips when needed, and the audience was given links for where to watch the different works, which were also posted to the event website. 

The first speaker was Mark Ebbay, presenting a thesis titled “Still-Birth and Philippine Cinema: On Colonialism, Subjectivity and Abjecthoods.” His focus was not on a particular film, but rather Filipino cinema as a whole. He began by presenting two film theory ideas: Giorgio Agamben’s bare life theory and Julia Kristeva’s ideas on abjection. Bare life is the idea that if a person is condemned by the state, they can be killed without the killer committing homicide, so their life is reduced down to a bare state, where they are simply a physical body rather than a complex entity with the full rights of a person. Abjection is, literally, the state of being cast off. The abject is a being or object rejected by the majority and is seen as detestable by the authority. In other words, abjection is what separated the “normal” from the “abnormal”. 

Ebbay then continued to describe the colonial subject, and how abjecthood is in some ways inherent to colonialism. Colonized people and land are presented as abject in films, and post-colonial film attempts to turn that presentation around. 

Ebbay finished by presenting the core of his thesis: still birth. A combination of bare life and abjecthood, still birth produces a body that is not seen as a human, but that body is also abject. The metaphor of the womb as a place of nurturing that fails to nurture and produces a stillbirth can be applied to post-colonial countries and thus reflected in their cinema. 

The second speaker was Simone Dill, with a thesis titled “I Can’t Watch This Anymore: Meditations on Black Aesthetics”, with a focus on the film Queen & Slim. Dill began by explaining the concept of re-traumatization, and Hollywood’s patterns in their portrayal of Black people. 

Throughout cinematic history, portrayals of Black people have been unilaterally negative and painful to watch, so that a Black viewer has two choices: they can either reject their Blackness, and so themselves, or they must forsake the pleasure of viewing the film. There are some traumatic images that have simply become a part of our cultural lexicon: one such example is the disfigured face of Emmett Till, shown in history textbooks and on screens without any content warnings. 

Although the goal is usually to “educate” the showing of such graphic images results in trauma for a Black viewer. A Black spectator always ends up identifying with the Black character, and so when the Black character is mutilated or tortured, the trauma more easily carries over to the viewer that has already identified themselves with the character. This re-traumatization brings past trauma back into the modern-day and does not allow Black people to escape the trauma of the past. Dill adds that the fascination with Black bodies and violence towards them is a voyeuristic result of white supremacy. 

Dill then explored the specific example of Queen & Slim, a modern-day Bonnie-and-Clyde story as a couple runs from the law. The twist though is that the couple is Black, and so as they confront police and the law, the interpretation of their actions is inherently different than if they were white. Although Queen & Slim is widely considered a feat of Black cinema, Dill argues that it too cannot escape feeding into re-traumatization. A worst-nightmare scenario is played out on the large screen, and any Black couple in the room is forced to imagine themselves in the situation: what if I were pulled over by police while on a date?

The third speaker was Po Chen, with a thesis titled “Application of Rhythm Theories in Cinemetrics: Visualizing Antonioni’s Trilogy of Modernity and Discontent.” His thesis takes a new approach to analyzing cinema, one that is rarely seen because of how difficult it is to pull off: quantification. Chen began by describing the concept of rhythm in a film – the subliminal beat and style of a film that is hard to describe. What makes say, a Wes Anderson film different from a Quentin Tarantino? Other than vastly different subject matters, there is still some fundamental distinction in the style of the shots. 

To try and quantify this difference, Chen split a film up by shot, and manually annotated each shot. He used a numerical scale to rate the shot on different metrics: closeness, primary movement, secondary movement, microrhythm, etc. For example, a car driving across a screen would score high for primary movement, while a person at a desk animatedly waving their hands would score high for secondary movement. A close-up of a face would score higher for closeness than a landscape shot. Chen also quantified things like color, light, and shot length. 

After analyzing this data, Chen was able to come up with graphical visualizations for various films, and compare them. How did closeness change over time in Film 1 vs. Film 2? How much primary movement was there in Film 2 vs. Film 3? He could even look at one director’s filmography to decipher trends as to the techniques used to quantitatively describe the director’s rhythm. 

Chen admitted that because he is the one rating shots, the model is highly subjective, and thus imperfect, but this cutting-edge method can, over time, be refined and hopefully implemented into broader film analysis.

The final presenter was Jialin Zhang with his provocative thesis presentation, “Blurring the Line Between Art and Pornography: A Reimagination of Japanese Pink Cinema.” Zhang’s thesis examines “Roman Porno” (an abbreviated term referring to the Romantic Pornography genre) both as it manifested in early 1970’s Japan and as it has reemerged within the last decade. Zhang also qualifies Roman Porno as “a type of Pink Cinema produced by Nikkatsu from 1971 to 1988,” (Zhang). 

Zhang asserted that this genre of pornographic film deserves attention because it targets a mixed-gender audience, promotes advanced “narrative content,” and allows its creators a great deal of “artistic freedom.” In order to demonstrate the salience of Roman Porno, Zhang masterly deconstructed general criticisms of pornography. 

Zhang first examined the perceived purpose in creating pornography, which he claimed most believe is “to entertain its viewers and create sexual arousal.” He then evaluated the “artistic qualities” of pornography, concluding that “pornography is formulaic in both style and theme.” He eventually deemed the presupposed “moral status” of porn to be “obscene, anti-female, [and] misogynist.”

Zhang then uses examples of classic films within the Roman Porno genre to defy each of these three prescribed limitations.

The creational purpose of a film like Violated Angels (Wakamatsu, 1967) was certainly not solely “to [generate] sexual arousal,” as the film portrays the gruesome murder of an entire rooming house of nurses. Thus, nudity in this film seems not exclusively intended to titillate.

In order to demonstrate the caliber of “artistic qualities” demonstrated in Roman Porno films, Zhang called on Oshima’s 1976 film In the Realm of the Senses. This film thwarts any climactic “formula,” with Sada, a hotel maid, strangling her lover Ishida mid-coitus and severing his penis. 

Zhang mentioned that Nagisa Oshida, this film’s creator, stood trial for obscenity for this film. The filmmaker declared that “when one feels that everything one had wanted to see has been revealed, ‘obscenity’ disappears, the taboo disappears as well, and there is a certain liberation.” 

This statement feels poignant as Zhang considered the “moral status” of Roman Porno, especially as the genre has begun to reemerge in Japan in the last decade. 

In 2016, the “Roman Porno Reboot Project” was launched as a gender-progressive tribute to Roman Porno and Pink Cinema. While pornography is typically criticized for its misogynist tendencies, Akihiko Shiota’s 2016 film Wet Women in the Wild instead takes on a categorically feminist perspective–engaging with “failed male expectations, subverted male dominance, and [a] reversed gender relationship.” Thus, when Zhang artfully navigated the demolition of preconceived criticisms of films that fall under the umbrella of ponronography. 

I had never heard of Roman Porno, or even Pink Cinema, before viewing Jialin Zhang’s thesis presentation. So at the presentation’s close, when Professor Jane Gaines asserted that we must “switch historical sides […] in order to understand the world,” I couldn’t help but reflect that Roman Porno was perhaps the perfect vehicle for beginning this process of reconsidering film history.

Zhang engaged with themes of reversal, historical prescience, and moral ambiguity within his thesis–he asked us to step back from our own prejudgements of pornography to evaluate the specific experience of Roman Porno. And I, for one, was inclined to follow the Master’s candidate as he implored viewers of his thesis presentation to understand Roman Porno and Pink Cinema for its artistic value and subversion of gender norms. 

The panel concluded, closing out the two-day showcase with a short Q&A with participants and closing remarks from Professor Jane Gaines, a School of the Arts film professor. “The academy has been changed,” remarked Professor Jane Gaines in a discussion panel following the thesis presentations of Columbia’s MA Film and Media Studies class of 2021. 

Professor Gaines could have been referring to any number of things when she made this rather overarching statement (that her Master’s students were tuning into their thesis presentations from five different time zones comes to mind). 

However, following the four thought-provoking and poignant theses presented on this “Aesthetics” panel, we couldn’t help but agree—something has undeniably changed in academia, and more specifically, in the way we regard both American and world cinema. And these four theses were the evidence of this process of change. 

Banner Image via Zoom-in 2021 Columbia Event page