Filmmaker Joshua Troxler has shared with me some thoughts that add interesting points and correlations to my article recently published at Film Quarterly, “The Monstrification of Underdevelopment in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema: Ava Yvy Vera and Seven Years in May“:
“For whatever reason it made me think of James Whale’s films – mainly the Frankenstein series and the Invisible Man. The face of the monster reflected inside and outside at the same time of a mirrored system hidden inside walls. I remember feeling like he’s attempting to reach past the walls, the construction of narrative and form in a capitalist system built out of and for escape. And that while a part of it, dreading to be locked in it, he made images for his own and based around his own oppression and for his oppressors. I think if we viewed multiple systems of early cinema, or maybe all of it, as forms of processing development we discover a mode of storytelling that’s unique to the foundations of process world-wide.”
Joshua Troxler is a filmmaker, and he has taught at Hunter College, Elon University, and Columbia University.