Summer 2003

	*Summer 2003*





	Introduction Welcome to a particularly exciting new issue of Latent Image. I am happy to report this past year has been marked by unprecedented change in and expansion of our LI universe. Where normally in the past, we have labored in earnest to publish our one respectable journal per academic year, the issue you now hold in your hands marks, for this year, our third! More		Tomatoes and Puberty "In 1963, Alfred Hitchcock made a motion picture entitled The Birds, a film which depicted a savage attack upon human beings by flocks of winged creatures. People laughed. In the fall of 1975, 7 million black birds invaded the town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, resisting the best efforts of mankind to dislodge them. No one is laughing now." More

	Taiwanese Identity in the Films of Hou Hsao-hsien The cinema of Taiwanese director Hou Hsao- hsien is one of identity as perceived through history and personal experience. For almost twenty years he has been one of only a few artists to represent to the West an image of modern Taiwan. That Hou is a “Taiwanese director” already connotes a sense of identity, but to fully understand his work, we must understand first what it means to be “Taiwanese.” More		Mimicking as Homage: The Case of Cecil B. DeMille Cecil B. DeMille is an unsung auteur, a seminal founder of Hollywood, a progenitor of Paramount studios, a master of the American biblical epic, and one of the most successful and prolific of the Tinseltown directors. Not surprisingly, he was frequently mimicked, parodied and referred to both on- and off-screen in both glowing and derogatory terms. Nowadays, the breadth and depth of this homage legacy is not always acknowledged or even recognised, thus denying DeMille his true worth to both screen culture and Hollywood history. More

	The Cultural Aesthetic of Wong Kar-Wai In the films of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai, most images flash across the screen, appear and disappear before the viewer’s eyes in quick flashes of recognition. These images do not seem to be highly planned but incidental; the perfect shot decided upon at the time of shooting.... More		Viewing Hitchcock through Freud Attaching Freudian or Oedipal stigma to Hitchcock’s films is something film critics/literary theorists have come to expect when studying Hitchcock’s work (as well as cinema in general)....

	Examining a Lost Gem: The Candy Snatchers The 1972 theatrical release of Last House on the Left was a landmark in drive-in and exploitation history. It was the beginning of the popular “rape-revenge” horror subgenre, which invited entries from not only the United States, but Canada, the UK, Italy, and Japan....		Film as a Language Since their inception, films have been viewed around the world as highly influential and popular artistic commodities. Particularly in the United States, films are created as demographically-friendly exercises of pop culture, to the point where I feel sorry for any studio executive who has to hear the words “the next My Big Fat Greek Wedding” more than once a day....

	The Sexual Repression of Margaret White Director Brian De Palma’s experimental horror film Carrie, based on the novel by Stephen King,is a remarkable psychological analysis of the way a fixated mind can interpret (or misinterpret) the mores and standards of religious dogma....