Reproducing Ripley
The horror and science fiction film genres are not often thought to be venues for feminist articulations of identity and desire. Conversely, they are genres usually aimed toward attracting a male audience through a glorification and hyper signification of masculine desires. In an unlikely genre, the Ridley Scott created character, Ellen Ripley (Alien, 1979), emerges as an unlikely champion of a feminist voice...

Canadian Identity in "Dead Ringers"
Over the past twenty or thirty years, cultural and artistic debates around the world have increasingly challenged modernist ideologies. In the West, there have been great upheavals in dominant values prompted by the women's movement, developing questions around the consequences of rapidly advancing technologies, and the growing confusion over unified cultural identities in the light of an increasingly immigrant/multi-racial world...

Exploring the 'Monstrous-Feminine' in Australian Cinema
Feminist theories have argued that women in film have been represented in terms of a phallocentric (male) ideology. The feminine has been constructed by the morals and values of the masculine ideal - woman as wife, woman as mother, woman as mistress/femme-fatal/whore. Australian cinema, though susceptible to the same phallocentric ideologies of other Western cinemas, has tended toward an uncanny representation of women...

Alphabet
David Lynch was still a young man just finishing art school when, in 1968, he was commissioned to make the film Alphabet. In his reluctance to associate himself with any particular artistic movement, Lynch combines philosophies and techniques from surrealist, expressive theories with the emerging postmodern concepts coming out of the art revolution of the 60’s...

A Postmodern Look at "Blade Runner"
Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner is an illustration of postmodern concerns on many levels. Most compelling, however, are the discourses around identity, humanity, and reality – the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ of our existence. For the purposes of this essay, I will focus my postmodern discussion of Blade Runner around the denotative and connotative signs that challenge the essentialisms of identity and humanity when analyzed through the discourses of the ‘cyborg myth’, gender construction, hyperreality and the simulacrum, and grand narratives (or ideology )...

Gender Difference and Feminine Constructs in "Metropolis"
Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1926) is actively engaged in the negotiation of numerous cultural discourses – Socialism, class struggle, Capitalism, and technology… - it is, however, the film’s engagement in gender discourses that, I believe, have the greatest consequences for the emerging sphere of feminist film and cultural theory...

"Metropolis", the Cyborg and Contradictions in Psychoanalysis
The image of a female cyborg is defined by conflicting psychoanalytic readings. In his film Metropolis (1926), Fritz Lang sets the framework for future theories of hybridized identities, which aim to expose the limitations of psychoanalytic theory in constructing a gendered subject...

Larry Fessenden and Horror as Activism
When considering strategies for activist art, horror films don’t usually jump to mind. Generally, film in itself, is a prohibitive medium for making activist art (due largely to constraints of budget and distribution). However, the aspects of film that make it an unlikely venue for activist criticism are the same limitations under which the horror industry has flourished...