Film International - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2024

This article looks at Giulietta Masina’s role in Federico Fellini’s Giulietta degli spiriti and the part she plays in Fellini’s re-shaping of the oppositional stance which underpins his artistic mythos. To highlight her unique contribution to his evolving meta-narrative, this article compares the importance of taboo erotic pleasure for Masina’s character, Giulietta, and for Fellini’s male protagonists in earlier films, in their parallel efforts to defy the social prohibitions on pleasure, especially extra-marital pleasure, potentially limiting their personal liberty and self-determination. This comparison reveals the various, subtler facets of pleasure uniquely experienced by the male protagonists, which are illuminated by Freud’s understanding of the psychological contradictions at the heart of pleasure, including what Aaron Schuster calls the pleasure of pleasure’s ‘failure’. Conversely, the implications of the far less subtle, even grotesque erotic pleasures which tempt and terrify Giulietta show Fellini refining his ethos of personal liberation by extending the reach of the self into the furthest regions of prohibited pleasure, and exploring extreme, unpleasurable pleasure, or jouissance.

Around November 2019 – the month and year in which Blade Runner ([1982] 2007) is set – the internet was awash in articles asking versions of the same question: ‘Did Blade Runner accurately predict the future?’ Commentators weighed in, assessing the extent to which the future that the film predicted had, in fact, materialized. Similarly, Blade Runner has been hailed as a prophetic film that prescientlyanticipated the world in which we now live, and moreover one that has left an indelible legacy in popular culture. Appealing as such claims may be, establishing their truth is more demanding than some suppose. Once we start inquiring into such issues, other questions concerning a film’s relationship to events that predate and postdate it crowd in as well. How can we tell whether something is amongst a film’s sources? How can we determine what properly belongs to its legacy? This article examines these issues with respect to Blade Runner in particular with the aim of drawing conclusions concerning science fiction films more generally. It argues that prediction is an imposition upon science fiction; anticipations are fundamentally distinct from predictions; veridically attributing ‘sources’ and ‘legacies’ to a film requires the identification of real causal connections; and that Blade Runner's stature as a motion picture is in no need of the extravagant claims that have sometimes been made on its behalf.

Rudolph Valentino was idolized by female audiences and dismissed by journalists and mostly White males as a new cinematic type quite apart from societal norms. Often playing minority ethnic lovers (excluding White minorities) on-screen with unique mannerisms and personality traits, he challenged White patriarchal America at a time when immigrants and women asserted themselves as a new force in society and in the economy. In public, his media interactions were prodigious and often contentious feeding into the burgeoning star-making system of Hollywood. His varying cinematic and public personae formed by women and men in the film industry and from his own unabashed self, influenced the cult of the male sex symbol and introduced a new discourse on ‘otherness’ both sexually and racially.