Best-known Films Research Articles

NAMES OF FILM AND MUSIC FESTIVALS AND AWARDS

The present paper analyses the main patterns used in naming the best-known film and music festivals and awards, following a comparative approach which involves reference to languages such as Romanian, English, French, Italian, and Spanish. Two approaches are proposed throughout the study: a socio-onomastic approach, which draws attention to the problematic status of this category of names that combine characteristics of scientific terms, proper names and common nouns (appellatives), on the one hand, and a linguistic approach, which is further developed from etymological, formal, lexical and semantic perspectives, on the other hand. The analysis proves an obvious preference of those languages towards using highly motivated signs, some of which can be twofold motivated: extra-linguistically, by the denomination pointing to the space where the respective film or music festival/award is held, and linguistically, by the derivational process that underlies the relationship between the denomination and the toponymic base. A series of patterns of naming have been identified, some of which are quite homogeneous and cross-cultural, whereas others tend to be culture-specific. Numerically, the names of film and music festivals and awards seem to prefer loan words (and more precisely, English/American words), followed by free adaptations, and internal means (especially compounds with a toponymic or anthroponymic base).

OSCAR, CÉSAR, LUMIÈRE AND THE OTHERS. SEMANTIC FIELDS AND SEMANTIC CHANGES WITHIN THE CINEMA-RELATED VOCABULARY

"The present study investigates the relationship between the cinema-related vocabulary and everyday language, by focusing on the main semantic changes that underlie the names of best-known film festivals and awards, as well as on the semantic fields they valorise. The relation should be understood as a twoway process, which involves shifts from both everyday language to the cinematic terminology, and vice versa.The examples analysed tend to favour three semantic changes (metaphor, metonymy and antonomasia), and three semantic fields (the animal, the vegetal and the chromatic field). Some nonprototypical uses of cinematic words and phrases are also referred to. However, both prototypical and non-prototypical uses of such words and phrases converge to demonstrate that the cinematic terminology is rather weak and is frequently open to lexicalisation, with possible shifts from common sense knowledge to common place and sometimes cliché."

Media Technologies and Formation of a Tourist Destination Brand: Foreign and Domestic Experience

The article summarizes the arguments within the scientific discussion on the impact of media technologies on the choice of a tourist destination. Thus, the emergence of film-induced tourism as a specific type of tourism is emphasized. The main purpose of the scientific research is to analyze a relatively new phenomenon of «film-induced tourism» and its types, as well as to determine the influence mechanisms of film and television media product on the formation of a tourist destination and its brand. Systematization of relevant literary works and approaches to the problem in question has shown that film-induced tourism is intensively developing and being actively popularized in the world. It has been widely recognized that the media product is undoubtedly increasing the number of visits to locations depicted in it, or locations associated with it, which, in its turn, forms the tourist destination brand. Moreover, the films that gained worldwide popularity after their release significantly contributed to the formation of famous tourist brands and attracted the attention of numerous tourists. The relevance of the scientific research in terms of Ukraine is evidenced by the fact that the development of film-induced tourism is not paid attention to by domestic scientists. Besides, the international experience of successful promotion of tourist destinations through media technologies is not duly implemented into domestic tourist practice. Foreign practical experience proves though that there is a firm correlation between the success of the film and television media product and the increase in tourist flows to a particular destination. The research of the problems raised in the article was carried out in logical sequence. There were considered theoretical aspects of film-induced tourism, particularly, impacts of media technologies on the development of tourist destinations, the use of mass media as a tool to form a tourist brand; there were revealed specific features of creating tourist brands, both on-location and off-location ones, as well as there was analysed the experience of Ukraine in the formation of on- and off-location tourist brands; there were provided the proposals to apply leading international practices for the promotion of film-induced tourism in Ukraine. The following groups of methods became a methodological toolkit of the research. Theoretical methods were used to perform the overview of scientific works, popular science literature and other relevant sources within the research; for the definition and systematization of the terminological apparatus of the research; for the critical study and generalization of the observed information. Analytical methods were used to diagnose the impact of media technologies on the development of certain destinations and to analyse tangible and intangible benefits of film-induced tourism obtained by tourist destinations. The research period under consideration is 2010–2018. The object of the study is a range of countries illustrating the best world practice in the development of film-induced tourism: The United States (particularly New York and Los Angeles tourist destinations), Canada, Scotland, Italy, France, New Zealand, Iceland, as well as the world best-known films that have become a vivid example of the formation and promotion of tourist destinations shown on the screen. Thus, it has been proved the undeniable influence of media technologies on the considerable increase in the number of mass tourists who were eager to visit the locations of their favourite films. The results of an empirical analysis of the correlation between the development of mass tourism and a significant increase in tourist visits to certain destinations due to media technologies are submitted in the article. The research theoretically proves and empirically confirms that there is interrelationship between the success of the media product and the development of mass tourism. Statistically it was substantiated by analyzing the number of tourists and their interest in locations used in movies, TV series and animated films. It should be noted, however, that the impact of such products is easier to observe in those countries and regions that have passed the stages of the formation of tourism industry as the leading one due to the tourism boom caused by a particular media product. In this case, the emergence of this type of tourism clearly affects the economy and the formation of the tourist image of the country. The results of the study can serve as a basis for further researches on the issue and the formation of the strategy for the development of film-induced tourism in Ukraine, where its possibilities, unfortunately, are used in fragments today.

Snapshots of Indian Otherness in Aparna Sen’s Cinema

Aparna Sen turned to film directing in 1980 after a highly successful career as an actor. Her debut film, 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981) highlights the loneliness of an elderly Anglo-Indian woman. One of her best-known films outside India is Mr & Mrs Iyer (2002), in which an upper caste Hindu woman saves the life of a Muslim stranger in an act of personal commitment with the Other. In 15 Park Avenue (2005), a film that focusses on schizophrenia, Sen shows how the female members of a family struggle to cope with mental illness. In this article I discuss how Sen explores different ways of being Indian in these three films and how she draws attention to values such as personal commitment and tenacity in the face of disability, ageing and communalism

Converting molecular layer deposited alucone films into Al2O3/alucone hybrid multilayers by plasma densification.

Alucones are one of the best-known films in the Molecular Layer Deposition (MLD) field. In this work, we prove that alucone/Al2O3 nanolaminate synthesis can be successfully performed by alternating alucone MLD growth with static O2 plasma exposures. Upon plasma treatment, only the top part of the alucone is densified into Al2O3, while the rest of the film remains relatively unaltered. X-ray reflectivity (XRR) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) depth profiling show that the process yields a bilayer structure, which remains stable in air. Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) measurements show that Al2O3 features are generated after plasma treatment, while the original alucone features remain, confirming that plasma treatment results in a bilayer structure. Also, an intermediate carboxylate is created in the interface. Calculations of Al atom density during plasma exposure point towards a partial loss of Al atoms during plasma treatment, in addition to the removal of the glycerol backbone. The effect of different process parameters has been studied. Densification at the highest temperature possible (200 °C) has the best alucone preservation without hindering its thermal stability. In addition, operating at the lowest plasma power is found the most beneficial for the film, but there is a threshold that must be surpassed to achieve successful densification. About 70% of the original alucone film thickness can be expected to remain after densification, but thicker films may result in more diffuse interfaces. Additionally, this process has also been successfully performed in multilayers, showing real potential for encapsulation applications.

Diva Diction

As a follow-up to the author’s 2018 analysis of New York City English in film, this article turns its attention to the whole country over the same 80-year period of 1930–2010, using acoustic phonetic, quantitative, and statistical analysis to identify the most important changes in the pronunciation of North American English by 40 European American leading actresses in their best-known films. Focusing mostly on vowel production, the analysis reveals a gradual shift from East Coast patterns rooted in the speech of New York City to West Coast patterns rooted in the speech of Los Angeles. Changes include a decline in /r/ vocalization, which is restricted almost entirely to the period before the mid-1960s; a decline in the low back distinction between /o/ and /oh/ (lot and thought); a new distinction between /æ/ (trap) and its allophone before nasal consonants (e.g., ham or hand); shifts of /æ/ and /oh/ to a lower, more central position in the vowel space; and fronting of the back upgliding vowel /uw/ (goose). These and other patterns correspond closely to those identified in the speech of ordinary people, revealing an intriguing parallel between public speech in the mass media and private speech in local communities.

<em>A Vermont Romance</em> Turns One Hundred: Vermont's Earliest Surviving Photoplay

A Vermont Romance Turns One HundredVermont's Earliest Surviving Photoplay Martin L. Johnson (bio) and Frederick C. Pond (bio) In 2016, a hundred-year-old film spent the year touring the northern half of Vermont, drawing audiences to refurbished opera houses and picture palaces. But the picture being celebrated for its centenary year was not D. W. Griffith's Intolerance or Lois Weber's Shoes, two of the best-known films made in 1916. Instead, Vermonters were watching what they believed to be the first feature film made in their state, the fetchingly titled photoplay A Vermont Romance. But A Vermont Romance is not a conventional feature picture. None of the people who appeared in the film had previous movie acting experience, and to our knowledge, none of them appeared in another film. The picture was not made by an upstart local production company hoping to enter the lucrative business of moviemaking. Instead, it was sponsored by a newspaper, the Vermont Advance, which in turn was established to promote a political organization, the Vermont Progressive Party. To complicate matters further, the film was not made by a Vermonter. Instead, it was shot by an English cameraman living in New York and a salesman and self-proclaimed "movie director" from Cleveland. While the film was seen widely in Vermont, which was the intent of its sponsor, it was not distributed out of state. Instead, it was celebrated at the time as one of the first statewide "contest films" and, after Photoplay magazine's "The Beauty and Brains" contest, held the same year, the biggest contest of its type. Participants competed to win parts in the production, with forty regional winners plus two "stars," who received the most votes statewide. One entered the contest by buying newspapers and newspaper subscriptions, or by convincing others to do the same. Although the paper claimed the contest a success, it was not successful enough to save the Vermont Advance, which folded within a year of the film's debut. The Vermont Progressive Party did not last much longer either. Not surprisingly, none of the picture's stars was able to parlay their screen debuts into an acting career. But the film itself survived, even though hundreds of nationally released movies made that year are lost, most likely destroyed by motion picture companies uninterested in keeping copies of their product.1 In this article, we discuss A Vermont Romance as two motion pictures. The first motion picture, made in 1916 as a "contest film," is a significant example of how the cinema came to reflect and project ideas about social status, celebrity, and identity in the 1910s, when classical Hollywood cinema itself was being formed. The second motion picture, discovered by local historians in 1964, is an example of how popular ideas about what cinema was informs how old movies are received and reproduced in contemporary culture.2 For us, the story of A Vermont Romance is not a singular history of the film's production, exhibition, and discovery but rather a dual history, one in [End Page 98] which the rediscovery of a film can be a transformative act, bringing a new significance to a work that was previously unknown to scholars, archivists, and popular audiences alike. For this reason, the story of the two Vermont Romance films provides a productive vantage point from which to think about the use and reuse of archival moving images in public history. With the recent success of Bill Morrison's Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) and Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), both of which make use of film footage from the 1910s, we anticipate that public historians, curators, archivists, and programmers in museums, libraries, and archives will increasingly turn to film as a way to fill the gap between past and present. The generations of local historians and archivists who worked to make A Vermont Romance better known in their state present a unique case study of how the process of discovery, preservation, and representation can alter the perception of an archival film. While A Vermont Romance's status as the state's "first" feature film made it of considerable interest, its paradigmatic...

The Curious Female Character in István Szabó’s <i>Sunshine</i>

Hungarian director István Szabó’s films usually feature the story of a young man on his way to becoming an adult during turbulent times in Hungarian history. Strangely enough, however, these stories are framed both visually and narratively in the presence of some female character—the plots, in fact, derive from the actions and decisions of these females. Zoltán Dragon’s paper charts the underlying narrative and visual design in one of the best-known films made by Szabó, Sunshine, identifying the pattern of visual storytellingwhose anchor point is one specific female figure, Vali, in the background. Vali’s role as a focalizing agency is to frame the predominantly male story and reveal the hidden or silenced content that creates an alternative family story.

As favelas cariocas nas chanchadas: de berço do samba a problema público

Este artigo traça um panorama histórico da representação das favelas cariocas nas comédias musicais cinematográficas brasileiras, conhecidas como chanchadas, dos anos 1930 ao início da década de 1960. Apontamos a presença mais constante da favela como cenário reproduzido em estúdio em números musicais das chanchadas lançadas até meados dos anos 1950. Tomando como marco o filme Depois eu conto (1956), a representação da favela passa a ser cada vez mais politizada no gênero. Em meio às polêmicas sobre as remoções das favelas e a atuação social da Igreja Católica na transformação deste tipo de habitação popular em “problema público”, analisamos Três colegas de batina (1961), em que uma favela adquire grande importância para sua trama, mas com um discurso ideológico distinto dos mais conhecidos filmes dos diretores do Cinema Novo.

Toward a History of French Ecocinema: Nature in Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Modernity

Toward a History of French Ecocinema: Nature in Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Modernity Brian R. Jacobson (bio) “We need to imagine the future, to dream it, before implementing it. And to achieve this, nothing is more powerful than cinema.”1 So propose Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent in the crowdfunding pitch for their box office hit documentary Demain/Tomorrow (FR, 2015).2 Selling environmentalist cinema as technoutopianism, Dion and Laurent insist that the solution to today’s environmental problems is another modernity, a “Third Industrial Revolution.”3 It’s an enticing idea that rests upon the too often unquestioned assumption that technology, despite being the very source of so many environmental problems, still remains the best solution.4 This paradox has a film-specific variant, one that goes beyond the widely acknowledged fact that cinema, especially in popular industries like Hollywood, depends upon resource extraction and consumption.5 As many already recognized in the 1930s, film was itself a product of the materials and processes of the Second Industrial Revolution. In the words of Lewis Mumford, it was a “specific art of the machine.”6 What kind of environmentalist imaginary can such a machine art be expected to produce? Can a medium sourced from and uniquely qualified to represent the world in the image of industrial modernity also, as Dion and Laurent propose, be the best tool available for imagining an alternative to it? To answer such questions, we need to revisit that earlier moment and the so-called “modernity thesis” that has often defined cinema’s place in it. That thesis emphasizes urban industrial life and new technologies with little attention to the ecological relationships that defined modernity from the beginning.7 If we want a cinema capable of generating a new environmentalist worldview, we need histories that both account for the ecology of modernity and highlight earlier efforts to [End Page 52] generate just such a cinema—call it an ecocinema—in the heart of modernization itself. In short, environmentalist filmmakers and “ecocinema” critics must not miss the opportunity to build upon film’s long engagement with ecological concerns. How might we write a history of cinema that makes those concerns as central to the narrative as technological and stylistic innovations or the worlds of machines, technologies, and urban life?8 This is the film-specific version of a response to climate change problems aimed at “unthinking” deep-seated modern narratives that privilege technological development, “progress,” and human ingenuity—that is, the work of the “Anthropocene” or “Capitalocene.”9 What new optics and historical narratives would such an unthinking create?10 Film scholars can start by extending histories of ecocinema to trace the cultural markers of the Anthropocene beyond films like Demain or even those made in the early days of institutionalized environmentalism in the 1970s.11 This article offers one such history of a French ecocinema by reconsidering the career of Dimitri Kirsanoff, an Estonian immigrant who investigated Parisian modernity from his arrival in the 1920s to his death in the 1950s.12 Kirsanoff ’s work, especially his best-known film, Ménilmontant (FR, 1926), has often been read as the reflection and formal outgrowth of modernity’s urban, industrial, and technological features. But his films were also shaped, in both content and form, by a concern for the ecological conditions of a modernizing world, nature in urban settings, and the environment in all of its changing meanings. Taking cues from Bruno Latour’s long-standing challenge to the separation of nature and culture in the very idea of modernity and Jacques Rancière’s more recent re-reading of modernity and the avant-garde, here I propose an eco-cinema modernity based on an alternative reading of what Rancière has described as art’s “distribution of the sensible.”13 My point of departure is Kirsanoff ’s interest in the persistent presence of nature and its temporalities, or what he theorized as “mouvement-temps,” or “time movements.” My argument turns on differently inflected readings of two aspects of Rancière’s re-definition of modernity: 1) the fabric of the sensible that Rancière finds expressed in the montages of daily life in Dziga Vertov’s...

Introduction: Revisiting André Bazin

Andre Bazin remains the best-known film critic and theorist of the mid-twentieth century. A regular film reviewer and columnist, co-founder of Cahiers du cinema, defender of Orson Welles, champion of Italian Neo-Realism and mentor to the French New Wave, Bazin was a major figure in French film culture and beyond. 2008 marked the fiftieth anniversary of his death and of the publication of the first volume of his most influential book What is Cinema? (Qu’est-ce que le cinema?). The anniversary provided a focus for an ongoing resurgence of interest in his work, of which this special number is one example.1 Until recently, research on Bazin has been hampered by three factors. First, only a very restricted portion of his work is available. A mere fraction of his writings (some 2600 articles in total) has been republished in French in book form, and little of this material has been translated into English. Many of the republished texts are not readily accessible: the standard current French edition of Bazin’s Qu’est-ce que le cinema? reprints only twenty-six of the sixty-three essays published in the first four-volume edition;2 Hugh Gray’s two-volume translation What is Cinema? also contains only twenty-six essays, albeit not the same twenty-six.3 The second factor that has dogged the reception of Bazin’s work is the currency of a simplistic version of his ideas, what Dudley Andrew and Herve Joubert-Laurencin have called ‘Bazinism’.4 Essentially, ‘Bazinism’ reduces Bazin’s work to four elements: a realist ontology, the ‘myth of total cinema’, a prescriptive aesthetics and auteur theory. First, Bazin’s realist ontology proposes that cinema as a medium is grounded in the photographic reproduction of the real.5 Second, the history of the medium is driven by a longstanding human impulse to represent reality as fully as possible (the ‘myth of total cinema’).6 Third, the realist vocation of cinema prescribes a film aesthetics that respects spatial and temporal reality by avoiding conspicuous editing and adopting instead the techniques of deep focus

Une peinture morale: Intertextuality in Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques

Film critics and scholars never tire of comparing the work of Henri-Georges Clouzot with that of Alfred Hitchcock. Despite the tenacity of the comparison, critics rarely discuss the two directors' attitudes toward literary texts. Both adapted some of their best-known films from contemporary popular fiction, with an insouciance about fidelity to the original source material. Hitchcock, furthermore, made it a matter of principle to avoid adapting canonized works of literature. his interviews with Francois Truffaut, he said that he would never make a film of Crime and Punishment, because the novel is someone else's achievement. He goes on, though, to offer a less self-regarding reason, invoking the autonomy of the literary work of art: In Dostoyevsky's novel, there are many, many words and all of them have a function (Hitchcock 71-72). Clouzot's approach to adaptation does not presuppose such a rigid hierarchy of literary texts. He based Manon (1949) on the novel by Abbe Prevost, setting the film in France during the Liberation era and in Palestine before partition. Not only did Clouzot alter the story's setting, he also transformed Prevost's proto-Romantic tale into a contemporary film noir. Manon was, however, one of Clouzot's less successful films, and afterward he chose not to follow the postwar fashion for making films inspired by well-known works of French literature. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that Clouzot the filmmaker lost interest in literature, apart from malleable works of contemporary romans policiers. One of his best-known films, Les Diaboliques (1955), is based on the novel Celle qui n'etaient plus by the crime-fiction writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. But the film shares its title with a collection of short stories by the nineteenth-century writer Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, with whom Clouzot shared a taste for tales of human weakness and depravity. After the opening credits, the film quotes the preface Barbey d'Aurevilly wrote to his short stories: Une peinture est toujours assez morale quand elle est tragique et qu'elle donne l'horreur des choses qu'elle retrace. This prologue comes off as a rather pretentious introduction to a suspense thriller in which the crime and the motives are so familiar to moviegoers. It would seem more apposite to Clouzot's earlier film, Le Salaire de la peur (1953). With respect to Barbey d'Aurevilly's stories, Jacques Petit suggests that the preface represents the author's sincere understanding of his own work while also serving a more pragmatic purpose. Barbey d'Aurevilly's Les Diaboliques first appeared in the early years of the Third Republic, under President Patrice MacMahon's conservative regime of Ordre morale. The preface, and particularly the words quoted by Clouzot, might have been written in anticipation of the scandal and the prosecution that the salacious and violent stories were to provoke (Petit 247). Clouzot himself was no stranger to scandal and prosecution, having been put on trial during the epuration for his Occupation-era film, Le Corbeau (1942), and banned from making films for two years. However, he faced no threat of censure for Les Diaboliques. According to Susan Hayward, Clouzot chose to open Les Diaboliques with the quotation because he was obliged to pay homage to Barbey d'Aurevilly as a condition for using the title (14). That may be the case. However, the conjunction of a literary allusion with the metaphor of narrative film as a painting offers too many possibilities to set aside lightly. Clouzot was, of course, very familiar with the world of painting. After Les Diaboliques, his next film was an innovative documentary about his friend Pablo Picasso. Le Mystere Picasso (1956), the two artists state as one of their objectives to montrer les tableaux qui sont sous le tableau. Taking seriously Clouzot's description of Les Diaboliques as une peinture ... morale, this article probes and finds the paintings beneath the painting. …

Dziga Vertov o del cinema come assenza. Ontologia del pensiero iconoclasta nel cinema

The entire work of Dziga Vertov can be read as a continuous attempt to transform cinema from a visual art to an antivisual art, an art ontologically iconoclast. In this essay I will try to develop this underestimated key of reading Vertov’s oeuvre. His iconoclasm is developed in two lines, the first one is technical and the second one is theoretical. In this essay we will deepen these two lines, starting from Vertov’s writings and from is best-known film, The Man with the Movie Camera (1929).

‘Moldy Art’: The exotic world of Jack Smith

ABSTRACTMary Jordan's film, Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (2007) presents a documentary portrait of New York film-maker and performer Jack Smith, an artist whose work has been as influential as it has been neglected. For a brief period in the 1960s Smith ran ‘Cinemaroc Movie Studios’, an underground film scene that paralleled and influenced Andy Warhol's film Factory. Jordan assembles Smith's friends and associates, contemporary artists and critics, along with excerpts from Smith's films, performance pieces and audio tapes, to provide an account of the artist's ‘life-work’, including his best-known film, Flaming Creatures (1963). This article takes up James Clifford's notion of ethnographic surrealism to examine Smith's life-work as an open exercise in self-portraiture, an intensively personal vision, but one that strives for the guarantee of objectivity, a type of ‘documentary truth’.

Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim Clashes (review)

NICKOLAS HAYDOCK AND E.L. RISDEN, eds., Hollywood in the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim Clashes. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2009. Pp. 311. isbn: 978-0-7864-4156-3. $39.95. In the immediate aftermath of Barack Obama's ground-breaking speech at Cairo University, this volume seems even more timely and important. Both Hollywood and the Holy Land are contested spaces, and both examine and intervene in each other's territory. In many ways, it is a mutual occupation. Nickolas Haydock's extensive introduction provides a concise overview of the diverse contents of the volume and includes his own intense examinations of treatments of the Crusades in narratives and in media that are generally less well-known than most of the examples examined in the following essays. He discusses the videogame Assassin's Creed, which seems to have a peculiar obsession with an Ismailite sect of the Shia. He also examines the animated Saladin and the BBC series Monkey Dust, which includes an episode on the Crusades. He concludes this section with a discussion of Raymond Khoury's The Last Templar before going on to examine the interplay of representation and Crusade and the image of 'Taking the Cross.' In 'Framing the West, Staging the East: Set Design, Location and Landscape in Cinematic Medievalism,' John M. Ganim provocatively investigates the implications of setting in a number of films, most amusingly in The Conqueror in which Utah stands in for Mongolia. More importantly, he shows how the long shot of Jerusalem (standardized, if not invented, by Cecil B. DeMille in The Crusades) opens the Holy City to appropriation by all those who gaze upon her. Haydock's essay, 'Homeland Security: Northern Crusades Through the East-European Eyes of Alexander Nevsky and the Nevsky Tradition,' begins the close examination of particular films (or groups of films) that will occupy most of the rest of the volume. His important essay analyzes what is probably the best-known film (Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky) dealing with the least well-known Crusade (at least to Western viewers) examined in the volume. Even less-known are the Eastern films in the tradition that he discusses, particularly Frantisek Vlacil's Valley of the Bees. In subsequent essays, Lorraine Stock ('Now Starring in the Third Crusade: Depictions of Richard I and Saladin in Films and Television Series') examines the Hollywood tradition (derived in large measure from Sir Walter Scott's The Talisman) of a close relationship between the two heroes and the role of Saladin as a healer. Paul B. Sturtevant examines Chahine's Saladin (probably the second most important film after Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky) in 'SaladiNasser: Nasser's Political Crusade in El Nasser Salah Ad-Din,' in which he carefully demonstrates how the film presents Saladin as an allegory for Nasser. While the film is propaganda, as Sturtevant stresses, it is pretty good propaganda and a significant correction of Hollywood's distortions of the East. Sturtevant's analysis is pertinent, although it sometimes feels as if he is being a little too apologetic for Chahine's politics and passions. Lynne Ramey ('Le geste que Turoldus declinet: History and Authorship in Frank Cassenti's Chanson de Roland') provides an elegant reading of one of the few films attempting to 'recreate' a medieval response to the Crusades. …

"Determined to prove a villain": Criticism, Pedagogy, and Richard III

Surprisingly little scholarly work has been done on how to teach William Shakespeare's Richard III at the college level, even though it presents specific textual and thematic problems for undergraduates. Aside from the play's reliance on a broad historical familiarity with the Wars of the Roses, students are often confused by its peculiar combination of archaic-sounding language and a modern-seeming protagonist and have to adjust to reading an early modern text about a late-medieval moment. This essay proposes a new approach to teaching Richard III, one that is informed by recent critical readings of the play as well as by theoretical models of subjectivity. I offer suggestions for teaching that aim to have students explore the simultaneous and contradictory presence in the play of different notions of selfhood, including the metaphysical and secular-humanist views, but also more modern constructions that take us into the realms of psychology and metatheatricality.In addition to this historical and theoretical focus, this essay looks to bridge the gap between performance-based pedagogy and text-based classroom practice by arguing for a treatment of the play that joins the two approaches in a meaningful way. In spite of the continued dominance of new historicism in criticism, the subfield of teaching Shakespeare has been, since the early 1980s, overwhelmingly oriented towards performance, whether this means having students act out scenes and discuss performance techniques or using film, video, and various electronic media in the classroom.1 In the final pages of the essay, I explore the openings and closings of three of the bestknown film versions of Richard III and consider how they can enrich a discussion of Shakespeare s complex treatment of subjectivity. Paradoxically, perhaps, modern film can enhance a historically aware conversation about Shakespeare, asking students ultimately to reflect on themselves and their situatedness in history and to consider where their own ideas about identity come from. As Bruce Smith has put it in a succinct discussion of teaching Shakespeare, project our own concerns, but they come back to us-or, at least, they should come back to us-transformed by the solidities of Shakespeare as a historical phenomenon. They come back to us in the form of (1997, 454). Enabling students to engage in this dialogue with Richard III is my central concern in teaching the play.The critical debate on Richard III (1592-93), initiated by E. M.W. Tillyard, has centered on the overall presentation of history in the play, and specifically on its status as a providential narrative in support of the Tudor Myth or as a secular, humanist, or even Machiavellian text that looks to human action in this world as a primary cause for historical change. In Stages of History Phyllis Rackin explains the uneven development in Renaissance historiography, which shows the same ambivalence. She notes that history writing of the period reveals the gradual separation of history from theology: explanations of events in terms of their first cause in divine providence were giving way to Machiavellian analyses of second causes-the effects of political situations and the impact of human will and capabilities (1990, 6). Although Rackin herself sees Richard III as dominated by the providential perspective, something she claims has meant a long-standing preference of conservative critics (55) for this play, the question of Shakespeare's treatment of history has by no means been resolved, as recent studies make clear. The play's plot structure, poetic formality, and final push for moralistic closure do not unequivocally overcome its Machiavellian protagonist, whose appeal undermines an appreciation of the final outcome. Both in Renaissance historiography and in Richard III, then, we encounter two ways of viewing historical events and the world at large-as governed by a divine being or by human agency. …

Capturing China in Globalization: The Dialectic of Autonomy and Dependency in Zhang Yimou's Cinema

In 1992 Zhang Yimou, doubtless China's best-known film director both domestically and abroad, released The Story ofQiu Ju (Qiuju da guansi), a dramatic feature about a peasant woman seeking justice for her injured husband.1 Qiu Ju signals several significant departures from earlier works that bear Zhang's auteurist signature. The extravagant display of exotic colors and customs and the exuberant celebration of the repressed spirit yearning its rightful release that characterize Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang, 1987), Ju Dou (1990), and Raise the Red Lantern (Dahong denglong gaogaogua, 1991) are remarkably absent in Qiu Ju. In their stead is a drab documentary look, which is both a deliberate withdrawal of a previous gaze at the mythical Chinese past and an insistent turn toward a contemporary China caught in the sharp relief of the rural and the urban. The film's break in Zhang's oeuvre appears even more striking given the retrospective vantage point we now occupy: the waning of a romantic overtone and the commitment to realism in Qiu Ju continue with such representative later films as To Live (Houzhe, 1994), a family saga of suffering and endurance, and Not One Less (1999), the tale of an adolescent girl fighting for public education. What could account for this sudden shift of aesthetics and ide-

The Fiction of Public Life

The Fiction of Public Life

Preface

PREFACE With this volume, the Women in German Yearbook enters its second decade, marked, we hope, more by continuity with its tradition of excellent and innovative feminist scholarship in all areas of German literature and culture than by dramatic change for the sake of change. But change there has been, too. New, for example, is a recent decision by the Editorial Board that seeks to broaden the extent to which work published in the Yearbook is read and discussed by scholars in other disciplines, such as feminist studies, film studies, other literatures, and history. To this end, a policy of publishing all articles in English has been established, the result of which can be evaluated in the present volume. Implementation, as many of our contributors can attest, has not been easy, particularly in the case of our wish to increase contributions by feminist Germanists in the Federal Republic and other countries abroad. While encouraging readers to tell us their responses to the new policy, we will continue to receive and review submissions in English or German and pursue the question of translation only after a manuscript has been accepted for publication. With thirteen contributions from three continents, authors from all ranks of the profession, topics ranging from the eighteenth century to recent years, and attention to philosophy, film, drama, popular literature, and theory, Volume 11 reflects the diversity of interests and talents on which the Yearbook has thrived. While our contributors hardly speak as one, the collection of their voices offers considerably more than cacophony: Articles that are significant in themselves, enter, when clustered together in ways unforseen by their authors, into engrossing dialogue with one another. The volume opens with a contribution from filmmaker Jutta Brückner, one of our special guests at the Nineteenth Annual Women in German Conference in October 1994, at St. Augustine, Florida. Her essay traces her attempts at expressing her own female subjectivity and documents her discovery that autobiography is inextricably grounded in the biography—and the body—of the mother. "The body," she asserts, "had to be reconstructed before language could be won back." Bruckner's analysis of the development that led to her stunning 1980 film, Years of Hunger (Hungerjahre), is followed by Maggie McCarthy's commentary on that film. Mc Carthy develops a detailed analysis of how experiences that evade language in the struggle for subjectivity are given expression through the images of the film. While McCarthy's ability to read Bruckner's film is grounded in the psychoanalytic theories of thinkers such as Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, Janice Mouton moves beyond Freudian models and draws upon D.W. Winnicott's insights on "play" and the "relational space" between the sisters in two of Margarethe von ? Women in German Yearbook 1 1 Trotta's best-known films. Employing yet another critical lens, Jennifer K. Ward examines von Trotta's first film within the historical context of feminist thought in the 1970s and the gendered moral code that Carol Gilligan explicated in her early work. The attention to early critical reception in Ward's analysis also serves as the point of departure for Renate Möhrmann's spirited critique of filmic representations of motherhood. Moving from Germany, Pale Mother {Deutschland, bleiche Mutter) to larger questions of the depiction of motherhood in the international history of film, Möhrmann locates the subversive potential of German women's film in its resistance to the narrative pattern that E. Ann Kaplan has categorized as the classic maternal melodrama: the sacrifice of the mother so that the child, who is almost inevitably male, can be integrated into the world of the fathers. Möhrmann concludes her arguments about the paradigm shift in German feminist film—and our film cluster, as well—with a provocative reference to the work of Brückner. Refocusing our attention on an earlier period, two articles assess the role of gender in censorship. Barbara Becker-Cantarino's essay on "gender censorship" examines the impact of Fichte's philosophy in establishing male tutelage over the intellectual and literary activities of women. Reference to women Romantic writers, such as Caroline Schlegel, Dorothea Schlegel, Thérèse Huber, and Sophie Mereau, demonstrates the extent...

The Casablanca man: the cinema of Michael Curtiz

Michael Curtiz (1888-1962) was without doubt one of the most important directors in film history, yet he has never been granted his deserved recognition and no full-scale work on him has previously been published. The Casablanca Man surveys Curtiz' unequalled mastery over a variety of genres which included biography, comedy, horror, melodrama, musicals, swashbucklers and westerns, and looks at his relationship with the Hollywood studio moguls on the basis of unprecedented archive research at Warner Brothers. Concentrating on Curtiz' best-known films - Casablanca, Angels With Dirty Faces, Mildred Pearce and Captain Blood among them - Robertson explores Curtiz' practical creative struggles and his friendships and rivalries with other film celebrities including Errol Flynn, Bette Davis and James Cagney, and his discovery of future stars. Casablanca Man is the first comprehensive critical exploration of Curtiz' entire career and, linking his European work and his subsequent American work into a coherent whole, Robertson firmly re-establishes Curtiz' true standing in the history of cinema.