Mindful violence: the visibility of power and inner life in Kill Bill
by Aaron Anderson
An analysis of screen action and violence in Tarantino’s Kill Bill reveals the integral relation between screen fights, narrative structure, characterization, and moral themes.

Pale Rider: environmental politics, Eastwood style
by Joseph K. Heumann and Robin L. Murray
Eastwood’s biting comment on hydraulic mining and plea for community control over the environment.

Cape Town Affair: right-wing noir, South African style
by Joseph K. Heumann and Robin L. Murray
Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street remade into a feature fiction about apartheid in South Africa.

“Woman” and “homeland” in Ritwik Ghatak’s films: constructing post-Independence Bengali cultural identity
by Erin O'Donnell 
A close look at the works of one of India’s most important filmmakers, analyzing the relation between his aesthetics and lifelong evaluation of India’s 1947 Partition.

The Passion of the Christ: reflections on Mel’s monstrous messiah movie and the culture wars
by Robert Smart
Parallels between the film and the results of brutal childrearing are traced, as well as the film’s relation to both the culture wars, historically, and to the most lowly “body genres,” especially the splatter film.

Bibliography on class in film and media studies
by Terri Ginsberg, Dennis Broe, and Chuck Kleinhans
Useful bibliography of important readings dealing with Marxist theories of class, race, women, and media. Compiled by the Caucus on Class of the Society for Film and Media Studies

China, broadly conceived
by David Leiwei Li
Review of Sheldon H. Lu’s China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

Documentary theory, new documentaries, and “contemporary events” fictions: a special section

Meditation on a freeway suicide: the sacrifice of autobiography
by James Tobias
Pathbreaking theoretical monograph on media and AIDs, AIDS and health care, AIDS activism, and the agency of people with AIDS.

Framing the unexpected
by Jean-Luc Lioult
A practicing photographer and film scholar explores the connections between carefully framing and anticipating images and capturing spontaneous occurrences.

Paradise Lost I & II: documentary, gothic, and the monster of justice
by Andy Opel
Social fear of working class “goth” boys and unequal justice for the rich and the poor lead to severe sentences for boys rushed to judgment in a murder case.