Film journal

Marianne Kac Vergne and Julie Assouly, eds., From the Margins to the Mainstream Women in Film and Television (Bloomsbury, 2022)

David Lipson — 2026-02-27

From the Margins to the Mainstream Women in Film and Television edited by Marianne Kac Vergne and Julie Assouly comprises 11 chapters inserted into three distinct sections that analyze gender representation in cinema and television in a diachronic structure: Part I: Woman Speaking from the Margins, Part II: Women in Semi-Independent Cinema and, finally, Part III: Women Protagonists in Mainstream Television and Blockbusters.

Part I, however, does not start with the first chapter, but with Marianne Kac Vergne and Céline Murillo’s interview of the experimental Irish filmmaker Vivienne Dick whose early films helped define No Wave Cinema. The interview, fascinating in its own right, serves as a perfect transition towards Murillo’s first chapter “Lizzie Borden and Vivienne Dick: Fighting for Female Filmmaking,” using Vivienne Dick as a bridge. Indeed, Murillo compares Guerillere Talks by Vivienne Dick to Born in Flames by Lizzie Borden, emphasizing their feminist approaches and experiment...

Language and the Construction of the Hollywood Arab

Sara El Majhad — 2026-02-27

This article examines the representation of the Arabic language in Hollywood cinema as a crucial yet underexplored dimension of Arab identity on screen. Drawing on theories of multilingualism in fiction and post-Saidian critiques of Orientalism, this study analyzes how Arabic appears, disappears or is distorted through four polyglottal strategies: elimination, signalization, evocation and presence. Case studies ranging from Casablanca (1942) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) to Kingdom of Heaven (2005) and The Kingdom (2007) reveal that Arabic is rarely treated as a medium of cultural expression but functions, instead, as a cinematic tool to signal threat, exoticism or difference, often mediated by Western characters or narratives. The article situates the language within broader discourses of Orientalism and demonstrates how Hollywood’s handling of Arabic exemplifies the marginalization of minority languages in English-speaking cinema.

Christophe Gelly, Le dérèglement du monde : Formes de la dystopie en littérature et au cinéma (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2024)

Raphaëlle Costa de Beauregard — 2026-02-27

Le dérèglement du monde: Formes de la dystopie en littérature et au cinéma is a book written in French, whose title could be roughly translated as ‘The Disruption of the World: Dystopian Forms in Literature and Cinema’. The dystopian film genre is studied by Christophe Gelly with a special interest in audiovisual trans-mediation in a selected filmography ranging from Logan’s Run (Michael Anderson 1976) to Gattaca (Andrew Niccol 1997) and including titles such as The Handmaid’s Tale (Volker Schlöndorff 1989) and THX 1138 (George Lucas 1971). This is due to the specific relation in dystopias between the world of science fiction and the contemporary world of the reader and film viewer, aspects that Gelly refers to as the ‘sense of wonder’ and ‘the sense of reading’ (p. 13). The book is well worth reading as it provides an original approach to film studies, which makes it highly valuable for researchers in this field.

In the introduction (pp. 7–16), Christophe Gelly argues that in dysto...

Accented Speech and Overpoliteness in the Racialization of East Asians in Animated Cartoons of the Early Golden Age (1928–1945)

Camille Chane — 2026-02-27

This paper is about the use of linguistic variation to characterize Asians and Asian Americans in animated cartoons from the early sound era to the end of the Second World War. Certain speech patterns tend to be associated with Asianness in fiction and have become linguistic shorthands to denote the foreignness of stereotypical Oriental characters (for instance, the confusion between the sounds /r/ and /l/), the exact same way bright yellow skin, slanted eyes, and buckteeth serve as racial signifiers on a visual level. Colloquially referred to as “accent” or “broken English,” this phenomenon has been dubbed “Asian English,” “mock Asian,” and “yellowvoice” by critics. This paper puts recent findings about East Asian representation and language ideology in perspective by detailing how linguistic stereotyping operates specifically in animated cartoons, a form of entertainment whose portrayal of Chinese and Japanese caricatures has seldom been examined. Simply put, how does language, in...

How to Imitate a Foreign Accent: The Russian Accent in Advertisements for Comparethemarket.com

Ksenia V. Efremova — 2026-02-27

Minority representation has recently been increasing in advertising due to its proven effectiveness in stimulating customers’ purchase intention. Minority endorsers and actors, their visual and auditory portrayal may enhance the promoted brand and product authenticity in customers’ perception. Advertisers use minority accents to evoke the necessary associations in audiences and target the buying power of a wider range of social groups. Considering accent representations in advertising as highly stereotypical, the article addresses Russian accent imitations by English-speaking actors in Anglophone advertising to reveal the strongest out-group markers on the pronunciation level in non-native English speech associated with Russian speakers. The study focuses on the phenomenon of audible plosive-to-plosive release as a possible Russian accent marker. The differences in plosive-to-plosive release patterns in English and Russian are well described in linguistic and didactic publications; ...

Introduction: Minority Voices and Languages in English-Speaking Cinema and Television

Mikaël Toulza — 2026-02-27

Ever since the publication of American sociologist Louis Wirth’s 1945 article “The Problem of Minority Groups,” the term “minority” has referred to groups of individuals who receive unequal treatment and are subjected to discrimination because of physical or cultural characteristics. The definition of “minority” has, particularly since the advent of intersectional scholarship, evolved to take into consideration the variety of ways in which components of a marginalized subject’s identity intersect and complexify their experiences of oppression. The term now theoretically applies to any person who is socially disadvantaged because they do not fit into a symbolic norm in terms of gender, race, class, sexuality, and religion among others. Hegemonic norms also pervade linguistic identities and affect verbal and non-verbal manifestations and perception of Otherness. In this regard, the distinction made by Ferdinand de Saussure between “langage” (language as a concept), “langue” (the langu...

Traces of a Forgotten Language: Closet Discourse in Post-Closet Times?

Sébastien Mignot — 2026-02-27

The closet is more than a simple figure of speech, a mere metaphor for secrecy and disclosure. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in her foundational book titled The Epistemology of the Closet, explored some of the ways in which this hegemonic matrix of identity has structured Western societies. In this sense, it is more than the language of a minority, as it has had a profound impact on sexual identities at large. For a long time, the closet and the process of coming-out have been the process through which gay, lesbian and trans* identities have been lived and represented. If the closet long remained the hegemonic paradigm of representation of LGBTQ+ identities, it has been losing ground from the beginning of the 21st century, pushing Ron Becker to herald the beginning of a “post-closet” era. Drawing on concepts from queer theory, discourse analysis and Antoine Culioli’s theory of enunciative operations, this paper examines manifestations of the closet in four post-closet TV series and in so d...

A New Voice for the Poor White Southerner: Investigating Matthew McConaughey’s Accent, Persona and Performance

Marine Soubeille — 2026-02-27

Stereotypes about the US South, and more specifically, that of the “poor white trash” in film and TV series have populated the screens for more than half a century. Connoting backwardness, poor health, ultra-conservatism, violence and all kinds of deviances, the “white trash” character often embodies, like the South itself, many of the characteristics the American society would so readily discard as other. Although white, the poor Southerners have therefore become associated with a negative image of the US-American hero, and it is their voice, and more particularly, their accent, which immediately marks them as such. Matthew McConaughey, born and raised in Texas, appears in an important number of films taking place in the South, where his deep voice as well as his recognizable Southern accent have become a marker of what Southern culture sounds like to contemporary audiences. If the series True Detective (HBO, 2014) has him portraying a worn-out, cynical and alcoholic cop, in keepin...

“Another protest sent to Hollywood about so-called ‘Southern speech’”: The Racial Politics of Southern Dialect in Hollywood (1927–1957)

Claire Dutriaux — 2026-02-27

The rise of sound films, or “talkies,” brought a significant shift to the film industry, particularly in the portrayal of accents and regional dialects. While silent films generally avoided the transcription of distinct Southern speech, the introduction of sound foregrounded accents, making Southern dialects a point of contention in Hollywood. Southern audiences — especially white women — strongly criticized what they viewed as inauthentic portrayals of their speech, fearing that such depictions marked characters as lower-class or racially other. The representation of Southern accents thus became central to debates over regional identity and class, as Southerners lobbied for a more dignified image aligned with an idealized, upper-class South, but also sought to avoid depictions of themselves as part of a U.S. minority. This article investigates how Southern censors and audiences sought to shape the cinematic portrayal of their region, through fan mail, newspaper commentary, and cens...

Introduction: The Politics of Silence and Noise in U.S. Film and Television

Claire Dutriaux — 2026-01-07

Four days before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, The Hollywood Reporter announced that the President-elect had appointed three “special ambassadors” to Hollywood to serve as his “eyes and ears”: Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson, and Jon Voight. Beyond signaling a new level of federal intrusion in Hollywood’s cultural sphere, the decision revealed Trump’s intent to shape and constrain the industry’s diverse voices. The actors he selected were not neutral choices but emblematic ones: older, white, muscular men, whose careers were marked by scandal – ranging from allegations of rape to charges of antisemitism and racism. Their symbolic appointments reinforced a particular vision of Hollywood rooted in conservative, masculine, white identity, while implicitly sidelining the voices of women, people of color, and other groups struggling for representation.

This struggle for recognition had already been crystallized by April Reign’s viral #OscarsSoWhite campaign in 2015. After the Academ...