[0.1] Abstract - Foreword to Issue 5: Using Criticism and Theory: 2026
[0.2] Keywords - criticism, theory, traditional criticism, videographic criticism, male gaze, whiteness, oppositional gaze, horror, melodrama, feminist film studies
Coppa, Francesca. 2026. “Foreword to Issue 5: Using Film Criticism & Theory: 2026,” Muhlenberg Visions. Volume 4, No. 1.
[1] One of my deepest pleasures as a film studies professor is watching students take the film criticism and theory on my syllabus and run in their own, idiosyncratic, deeply personal aesthetic directions. Muhlenberg’s Film Studies CUE is structured like a graduate seminar wherein we read and discuss works that are not just key texts, but broadly useful texts: Laura Mulvey’s work on the male gaze, Richard Dyer’s work on whiteness, bell hooks’s articulation of an oppositional gaze, Carol Clover’s work on horror and melodrama, Tania Modleski’s feminist audience studies, Linda Williams on the body genres.
[2] This year’s seniors take those works in delightfully fresh directions. Wilhelmina Blackwood playfully applies Richard Dyer’s work on white male spectacle and male “bodybuilders” to talk about “the original built body” - that of Frankenstein’s creature. Her essay is a sophisticated gender-based reading of Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation of Frankenstein, and it explains a lot about who liked (and who didn’t like) the film. Lindsay Batzar launches an incisive critique of the white male anxiety at the heart of the so-called “puzzle film” - e.g. movies with twists and turns where reality refuses to make sense. Megan Petrozzo uses Richard Dyer’s theories of whiteness to make us look at an old favorite in a new way, doing a race-based reading of Back To The Future and showing me things in that movie I’d never seen before. Amanda Miller does a complex, Lacanan reading of the thwarted mother-daughter dyad in Michael Haneke’s 2001 film The Piano Teacher, showing how Erika cannot escape her mother’s gaze, and so cannot form a mature sexual attachment outside of the structures of sado-masochism. Kristin Dlugos celebrates the “final girls” - the female survivors - of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, and Charis Bakirtzis looks at the ways in which Czech filmmaker Věra Chytilová mocked and frustrated the male gaze years before Laura Mulvey coined the term, creating images that gleefully frustrate scopophilic pleasure and female characters who rampage joyfully across the screen. Lastly, Hanajah White-Wise looks at how a new generation of Black auteurs are reimagining historically white cinematic genres like the boxing movie and historical fantasy, putting Black characters at the center of the story and giving them the sort of meaningful arcs and narrative agency rarely seen in these genres.
[3] From mainstream Hollywood to the Czech New Wave, from racebent genre movies to remade classics to erotic thrillers, there is a lot in this issue: comedy and horror and everything in between. We hope you enjoy reading these essays.