Introduction

Sternberg’s films are famous for their close-ups of the female face. This Introduction discusses the way in which Dietrich’s face functions in his early sound films. Whereas silent cinema charged the human face with carrying the plot or at least with taking up the narrative slack between intertitles, sound film with its additional resources for expounding the narrative opens a space for a face that is inscrutable. Sternberg’s films release the face for spectacle without thereby surrendering it to the gaze of the moviegoer: in its independence of the enclosed world of a narrative, Dietrich’s face is in a position to look out and back at the spectator. Contrasting Morocco with An American Tragedy (in which Dietrich does not appear), the Introduction argues that there is thus an image of autonomy that Sternberg and Dietrich construct and that contributes an (often overlooked) ethical dimension to their cinema of spectacle.

The Martyr, the Moviegoer: Bhagat Singh at the Cinema

This article attempts to rethink Indian anticolonial agitator Bhagat Singh within four alternative lineages, rooted in his often undiscussed love of early Hindi and American cinema. To date, Bhagat Singh has often been confined within the rubrics of a properly political form of revolution, whereby revolution is recognizable to the colonial state. To rethink revolution requires scholars to question the repetition of these colonial logics by moving away from the “recognizably political” to other forms of anti-authorial, anticolonial practices. This article focuses on Bhagat Singh’s viewing and response to the 1927 American iteration of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the 1927 Hindi film Wildcat of Bombay. The article considers the ways in which Bhagat Singh moved beyond “properly political” forms of agitation in favor of affective, aesthetic, and experiential models of movie-going in the early twentieth century. By doing so, it reorganizes the categories of “world literature” away from the nation-state in favor of worldwide circulation, distribution, and interpretation.

Emotional classification and visualization of movies based on their IMDb reviews

Purpose The purpose of this study is to detect these reviews’ complex emotions, visualize and analyze them. Movie reviewers’ moviescores and reviews can be analyzed with respect to their emotion content, aggregated and projected onto a movie, resulting in an emotion map for a movie. It is then possible for a moviegoer to choose a movie, not only on the basis of movie scores and reviews, but also on the basis of aggregated emotional outcome of a movie as reflected by its emotion map displaying certain emotion map patterns desirable for the moviegoer. Design/methodology/approach The authors use the hourglass of emotion model to find the emotional scores of words of a review, then they use singular value decomposition to reduce the data dimension into singular scores. Once, they have the emotional scores of reviews, the authors cluster them by using k-means algorithm to find similar emotional levels of movies. Finally, the authors use heat maps to visualize four dimensions in a figure. Findings The authors are able to find the emotional levels of movie reviews, represent them in single scores and visualize them. The authors look the similarities and dissimilarities of movies based on their genre, ranking and emotional statuses. They also find the closest emotion levels of movies to a given movie. Originality/value The authors detect complex emotions from the text and simply visualize them.