Cinematic Texts Research Articles

The use of film as an intervention in addressing gender violence: Experiences in a South African secondary school

abstract In the South African film Yesterday, the filmmaker’s concern is to highlight the harsh social realities of violence and to offer ways of conceptualising, visualising and critiquing violence. In so doing the film offers both a political and pedagogical space for audiences to consider issues of gender violence at school and in the broader society. In this article, I outline how I used this award winning film with Grade 11 learners to address issues of gender, and especially gender-based violence. I argue that issues of gender and sexuality should not be confined to one subject such as Life Orientation but rather should be integrated across the curriculum. The study raised issues which are pertinent to South African society and will continue to be relevant until gender equality is attained. The study is unique and innovative within the isiZulu discipline in that it has employed a cinematic text rather than a conventional print text to address issues of gender and sexuality. It investigated Grade 11 learners’ responses to gender, sexuality and gender violence representations in the film through comprehension and other meaning-making activities. The activities involved questions and discussion before and after viewing the film by focusing on the interplay between the cinematic text and the lived experiences of the learners. The use of critical literacy and feminist theory enabled some of the learners to deconstruct texts. Findings show that through film analysis as a pedagogical intervention, these learners not only acquired analytical and interpretative skills but also critical thinking skills, particularly in the context of gender. The findings have pedagogical implications for isiZulu teachers in that the practice of exploring different texts and applying innovative teaching methods have great potential for engaging learners in a critical social issue such as gender inequality.

Cargo 200: a bricolage of cultural citations

Persistently revisiting the notion of a Godless society, Aleksei Balabanov directly dialogued with Fedor Dostoevskii’s cursed question and established a permanent touchstone for his own representations of Russia/the USSR, with the help of William Faulkner’s potboiler Sanctuary, in Cargo 200 (Gruz 200, 2007). Balabanov assembled a cinematic text for viewers, drawing on philosophical ideas articulated by the character Ivan Karamazov, filtered through a vulgar reinterpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche and constructed within the context of socialist realism’s own version of the Grand Inquisitor. Faulkner’s entire novel was forcibly relocated to the Soviet Union, where the degradation of the American South is offered as the wreckage of an industrial civilization tottering on the verge of collapse – or the late Stagnation period. Through the bricolage of Dostoevskii and Faulkner, Balabanov explores the realities of a Godless, morally corrupt Soviet society in which anything and everything is permitted. In so doing, Balabanov invites audiences to reassess Vladimir Putin’s new national unity that relied heavily on sanitized memories of a Soviet past, a Soviet Union that had demanded that citizens renounce personal freedom in order to enjoy collective economic and social stability.

Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days (2007) and Beyond the Hills (2012): Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu and the paradoxes of ‘anti-national national cinema’

Abstract This discussion of Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s internationally circulated ‘popular highbrow’ films – 4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile/Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days (2007); and Dupa dealuri/Beyond the Hills (2012) – is grounded in the auteur theory. In particular, the analysis telescopes in on the thematic motif of surveillance that animates the two films. At the same time, on a Foucauldian view, the motif plays out in distinct forms in each cinematic text. In Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, surveillance in the late Ceaus¸escu-era is depicted as gaining expression through the internalized discipline of the monadic subject. In contrast, in the contemporaneous Beyond the Hills, surveillance implicates the practices of the pure community convened in distinction to an exiled other. Psychoanalytic concepts (primal crime, return of the repressed) are also summoned to tease out the social tensions in the films. Mungiu’s work vigorously cross-­examines the official mythologies of national harmony; in other words, Mungiu may be construed as engaging with what Mike Wayne calls ‘anti-national national cinema’. However laudable the practice of socially conscious critical film is, auto-problematization of ‘peripheral’ nations may also bring reproduction of marginalization in its train when the films circulate internationally.

Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera: Thoughts on the Computation of Style and Narrative Structure

ABSTRACTThis article proposes a way for producing cinematic representations of contemporary urban environments based on the close study of Dziga Vertov’s mechanisms for story and plot development as instantiated in Man with a Movie Camera. Our investigation of screen cities and the way the image of the modern metropolis is constructed in cinema focuses on the examination of, and the experimentation with, the screen language of the “city symphony” film genre. This is pursued in two parts that tackle distinct - but to a certain extent complementary - aspects of the research. The first part of the article - the analytical segment- summarizes the results of the shot-by-shot formal analysis and the statistical processing of the accumulated metadata for Vertov’s cinematic text with the aim of mining relevant concepts for an informed discussion on aspects of film form and style for “city symphonies.” The second part of the article - the experimental one - attempts to transliterate the results of our analysis into the novel language of nonlinearity for the digital, interactive screen. This is deemed particularly important because, as this article suggests, a better understanding of the “city symphony” form will enable the production of more immersive filmic constructs about current urban phenomena.

The Humanities and Artisanal Education: Technocrats and Artisans in the Contemporary University

This essay is an exploration of the ways in which the practices of the arts and humanities have been understood through craft and play. It argues for a historical understanding of quality mass higher education as a postwar phenomenon and offers a critique of technological solutions to the dilemma of providing quality higher education. Through a series of close readings of literary, cinematic, and sculptural objects and texts, this article looks at reactionary and progressive meditations on the temporality of craftsmanship. It explores the work of D. W. Winnicott, Martha Nussbaum, Christopher Newfield, Philip Roth, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Ann Agee.

Colonial Era Korean Cinema and the Problem of Internalization

This paper analyzes several films produced in Korea during the era of its colonization by Japan that pose interesting questions about the problem of internalization, or colonization of the mind. While on the one hand, these works can seem to present examples of Korean characters quite literally internalizing the voices or visions of Japanese authority, they can also problematize the assumption that there is a distinct subject with an established “inside” open to absorbing such commands. This is further complicated, I will argue, by the fact that the cinema of the Japanese metropole was itself often contradictory, despite and sometimes because of its place in a colonial empire. These Korean films offer multiple examples of complex subjectivities crisscrossed by split subjectivities and intersubjective relations that render it difficult to clearly demarcate “internal” and “external.” This paper will be one step in an effort to use close stylistic and film analysis to consider the questions of colonial film and cultural colonization on the level of the cinematic text.

Symbolism in Flux: The Conceptual Metaphor of "World Liquescence" Across Media, Genres and Realities

“Symbolism in Flux: the Metaphor of World Liquescence across Media, Genre and Realities” examines cultural implications of conceptual metaphor, in this case the metaphor of liquescence of the human emotional domain. The central question discussed in my paper is how poetics of water is metaphorically present in visual discourses of boundary transgression and blending, both static and dynamic, namely painting and film of the Russian Symbolist period. In my analysis of the painterly and cinematic texts selected, I apply concepts from cognitive linguistics, specifically Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory that see the roots of the human proclivity for metaphor in somatic embodied experiences. They provide tools and terms useful for theorizing discourses that implement the “water principle” as their modus operandi in approaching various metaphysical issues. They are particularly instrumental within the specific historical-cultural context of Russian Symbolism with its close attention to stirrings of the soul which in many cases are expressed via the “water metaphor.” I look at representations of the conceptual blend fusing human and water ontologies in these “Silver Age” texts: two paintings by V. Borisov-Musatov and two scenes from a film by E. Bauer. The innovative aspect of my work is found in my applying it to interacting art forms, which supports the central stance of Conceptual Metaphor Theory: that metaphor is not just a figure of language, but first and foremost, a figure of thought.

The (W)hole in the Archive

This article turns its attention to the accounts that Foucault and Derrida made following their encounters with archives, and it relates these accounts to the files of the former East German secret police. Derrida and Foucault located differing qualities of authority in the archives that they consulted, yet they are shown here to converge around a problem of non-integrity in the structuration of the archive as supposed guarantor of epistemological sovereignty. A terminology of sovereign integrity dominates the Stasi's files, so that they sit in stark contrast with the literary and cinematic texts that grapple with the Stasi's legacy — texts that are beset with images of inconsistency and perforation. When read in dialogue with the poststructuralist accounts of the archive, these spy files and the cultural works that emerged after their opening enable new reflection on the ethics of visiting archives, as an act of doing justice that nonetheless risks collapsing the fragments of complex pasts into the narrative wholes of the political present.

Thanatochronotope in Cinematic Texts of St. Petersburg and Kiev

Represents the author coined notion of thanatochronotope, which is used for description of art works aesthetically, optically, and rhythmically determined by the object­matter of death. The concept is applied to analysing the complex “representative urban cinematic texts” of St. Petersburg and Kiev in the films by Russian and Ukrainian directors, namely Lev Kulidzhanov, Andrei Eshpaj, Alexander Sokurov, Andrei Khrzhanovsky, Ivan Dykhovichny, Alexei Balabanov, Sergei Masloboyschikov, Alexander Shapiro et al. To resolve some theoretical and historical problems of film art the author conceptualizes the notions related to the representative urban cinematic text, which was not identified within the general notion of urban text previously. The article reveals both the specificity of the St. Petersburg cinematic text and its heterogeneity. The notion of thanatochronotope provides for analysing both the representative urban cinematic text and its decadent paradigm within the frame of the film thanatology approaches that swiftly develops as a new philosophical and culturological method. This approach is also used for Kiev cinematic text analysis and its comparison with the St. Petersburg cinematic text.

Carmilla, Camilla: The Influence of the Gothic on David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

Carmilla, Camilla: The Influence of the Gothic on David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

The attack of the Pig Rabbit: the mediatized object of the Korean Wave

This article focuses on the manner in which film and television-related merchandise help re-create the tactile experience of objects on screen through their intimate connection to the brand instituted within the cinematic text. Using the example of the Pig Rabbit doll, a stuffed animal featured in the popular Korean TV series You're Beautiful (2009), I trace the multiple cinematic, digital and offline trajectories of the cultural object in a mediatized environment. You're Beautiful gained a cult following on the internet and gave rise to Japanese and Taiwanese television remakes, an edited film version as well as a bestselling soundtrack. The sales of its merchandise also skyrocketed, particularly the Pig Rabbit doll, which spawned a number of fan-made versions. Instead of privileging the physical movement of concrete objects, I look at the way in which cinema and the internet intervene in the formation of the brand as it is produced, consumed and distributed both online and offline.

Fedorova, Milla. Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York: America and Americans in Russian Literary Perception (review)

SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 518 literature does not reduce itself to the principle that ‘we are all the same’, a temptation that Tolstoi’s own polemical pronouncements might tend to affirm. Rather — and this is where the transnational becomes very handy indeed — Foster permits interpretation of Tolstoi as one whose notion of world literature affirms variety and difference rather than confining them to the strenuously concealed margins of a hegemonic view. In the end Foster’s engaging study makes a crucial point: that, far from being a monologist or solipsist or hegemonic universalist, Tolstoi developed an ever more nuanced recognition of the incredibly complex interplay of different influences on which any cultural product must depend. In this sense, Foster captures the slippery Tolstoi of War and Peace who argued so eloquently against viewing an event from one perspective, who claimed that events are created by reciprocal interaction in regard to which no one interaction can pretend to describe the event as a whole. To have returned this magnificently plural Tolstoi to us, as Foster has in lucid and mercifully jargon-free prose, is a substantial achievement. Clemson University Jeff Love Fedorova, Milla. Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York: America and Americans in Russian Literary Perception. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2013. xi + 229 pp. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $49.00. With brief glimpses backward and forward, this book offers the first indepth study of Russian literary travelogues to America in the crucial years between the twilight of the Romanov empire and the triumph of Stalinism. That description is too narrow, however, to encompass what Fedorova actually addresses. She considers a wide swathe of materials, including fictional, poetic, essayistic and cinematic texts that depict, through Russian eyes, journeys to America and Russian-authored ‘reverse travelogues’ about American characters encountering the Soviet Union. Fedorova’s larger ambition, then, is to analyse what she describes as the Russian ‘American narrative’ in all its genres and with all its invariants and modifications in the context of Russian and Soviet cultural and technological rivalry with the United States. Fedorova’s analysis pursues two modes of approach. First, there is a synchronic account of three stages of development from pre-Revolutionary to early Soviet and Stalin-era travelogues to America. Briefly stated, there is a shift from idealistic populist encounters with an American utopia or dystopia to ideologically-driven depictions of a false paradise and capitalist hell followed later by more nuanced accounts of the United States as an imperfect REVIEWS 519 model society. Each period is epitomised by several prominent writers. The harsh disillusionment of Korolenko and Gor´kii yields to the hyperbolic denunciations of Esenin and Maiakovskii succeeded by the anecdotal and factual cross-country accounts by Pil´niak and Il´f and Petrov. Second, Fedorova launches a diachronic argument that links all three periods within a larger pattern of recurrent motifs and fixed archetypes that is said to constitute Russia’s ‘American narrative’. In this regard, an initial focus on a select set of influential literary travelogues and their dialogic relationship to one another gradually is subsumed within a more mythopoeic construct — namely, a stable Russian ‘chronotype’ of America. The scholarship that informs this study is comprehensive with regard to both primary and secondary sources. With rare exceptions, the primary texts under close scrutiny are not readily available for classroom use nor are they ‘major’ enough to figure in most academic curricula. Fedorova’s discussion lends depth to underappreciated works by Korolenko, Esenin, Pil´niak and Marietta Shaginian; she also draws attention to valuable recent Russian publications on the topic by Etkind (2001) and Arustamova (2009). Along the way, there are some surprising insights such as the differential treatment of blacks and native Americans and the recurrent theme of the ‘arrested voice’ of the monolingual Russian observer who goes unheard and ‘tongueless’ in America. Chapter five provides an interesting addendum with its enriching discussion of cinematic (Kuleshov’s Mr. West) and poetic (Marshak’s Mister Tvister) ‘reverse travelogues’ depicting fictional American travellers in the USSR. The conclusion sketches all too briefly a post-Soviet epilogue in which the Russians’ ‘otherworldly’ image of America persists; a sequel volume would be most...

Queer Questions

As rights claims on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity occupy an increasingly prominent place in international politics, it seems clear that the long-running Woman Question has been supplemented by a set of variously articulated “queer questions.” Drawing on postcolonial, feminist and queer theory, and readings of queer literary and cinematic texts from India and Iran, this article explores moments of resonance, intersection and tension between the Woman Question and queer questions. It argues, first, that contemporary queer questions echo the preoccupations of the Woman Question even as they are uncannily prefigured by it; second, that these questions have been mutually disruptive of one another, so that queer questions are not simply a rerun of the Woman Question; and third, that differences between these questions are problematically flattened out in projections of shared futurity articulated in the abstract universality of “human rights.” Navigating the shared pasts, fraught presents and imagined futures of Woman and queer questions, the article brings queer critiques of temporality to bear on the concerns of postcolonial queer activism. It elucidates opportunities and challenges for alliance between the subjectivities interpellated by these various questions. In addition, it asks how the proliferation of new subjectivities under the sign of “queer” troubles notions of universal human rights.

Black Women’s Memories and The Help

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The past several decades have seen an outpouring of literary and cinematic texts that take what is commonly known as the modern Civil Right Movement or the southern freedom struggle as their subject. The recent resurgence of interest in the Civil Rights era among writers, musicians, and performance and visual artists acknowledges the transformative impact of the activism, rhetoric, theology, and iconography of the period. Not only did the Civil Rights Movement substantially alter the socio-political (and spatial) configuration of relations within the United States, but it also exerted a profound influence on other political movements for equality around the world. Mainstream representations frequently confirm popular constructions of the Movement as a primarily southern phenomenon that occurred from the mid 1950s through the late 1960s. In this view, the Movement is a chapter in a progressive, ameliorative vision of United States history where southern extremists were pitted against cross-racial coalitions led by morally courageous and spiritually inspired individuals. Through shared sacrifice and exemplary action, activists triumphed over white supremacy, delivering the nation from its past injustices into a bright future of freedom, equality, and opportunity. This interpretation of the Civil Rights Movement, common to Hollywood films such as Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning (1988), Martin Davidson's Heart of Dixie (1989), Richard Pearce's The Long Walk Home (1990), Rob Reiner's Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), or made-for-television films such as Robert Dornhelm's Sins of the Father (2002) (to name only a few) has maintained some measure of currency because it encourages viewer complacency and self-satisfaction. It allows Americans to identify post-Emancipation racism with its most obvious symbols and perpetrators, confine it to the Jim Crow South, sentimentalize its spiritual discourse and sainted martyrs, and convince ourselves that those days are over. It allows us to believe that with legalized segregation behind us, the doors of American opportunity are now open to all. Numerous scholars have sought to understand this fascination with the Civil Rights era in the United States. Herman Gray, Jennifer Fuller, and others contend that cultural products--literary texts, television series, films, music, theatre, etc.--that look back on the Movement tell us at least as much about how contemporary culture views its own racial politics as they do about the past they purport to represent, often conveying the fantasy that the United States has triumphed over and transcended its racial past. (1) Both versions of The Help--Kathryn Stockett's 2009 novel and the eponymous film directed by Tate Taylor--generated considerable controversy upon their release. Their popularity testifies to the hold the Movement era retains upon the American cultural imaginary: the novel spent 100 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List, and the screen adaptation was the thirteenth top-grossing film of 2011. The film and novel both recall several of the tropes that recur through out many popular representations of the genre: they center on white characters; they locate racist behavior in the most ignoble characters; and they sentimentalize relationships between black workers and their white employers. Yet even as these works invoke the American cultural memory of an earlier period, they also challenge the conventions of representing that period by foregrounding black women's memories. While the texts depend upon the exploitation of black women's experiences, black women's acts of remembrance constitute sites of resistance within the dominant narrative. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] BLACK WOMEN'S MEMORIES Black women's memories play a central role in both the novel and the film. Eugenia Skeeter Phelan, the principal white character, yearns for more than marriage, children, and a cozy life in Jackson, Mississippi, her hometown, the conventional path that middle-class white women like her mother and girlhood friends followed during the 1950s and '60s. …

Thought-Perception Beyond Form or, the Logic of Shame

ThoughT-PerCePTion beyond forM or, The logiC of ShaMe Raji Vallury Timothy Bewes, The Event of Postcolonial Shame, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2011, 224ppFew books published recently in the field of postcolonial studies can rival the virtuosic brilliance of Timothy Bewes' The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Dense, challenging and thought-provoking, the work's dazzling erudition, which combines highly inventive readings of an impressive array of philosophers, writers, literary and cinematic texts, opens new critical inroads into the relation between ethics and aesthetics. Bewes' central thesis is that shame constitutes the event which gives material form and expression to the irresolvable tension between the ethical and the aesthetic that is the hallmark of postcolonial literature, indeed of all modern writing. Pace Joseph Conrad, Bewes defines shame as 'the experience of a prolonged incommensurability between a form and a substance . . . in a world of desolate unintelligibility' (pp2-3). Shame in other words, is the text's formal articulation of its ethical, political and representational inadequacy. Sartre's insight into the 'shameful' structure of perception, which destabilises the encounter between the subject of knowledge and the object of its comprehension, functions as Bewes' analytical point of departure, while Hegel, Lukacs, Adorno, Badiou and Deleuze provide the conceptual tools needed to theorise a practice of postcolonial writing 'freed from the shaming, subtractive consciousness of a being who writes' (p192). True postcoloniality, or freedom from the shame built into the very structure of colonialism: such is the radical thought to which Bewes' book attempts to give form. Illuminating the paradoxically inseparable distances, gaps and dislocations between the subject and object of perception, form and event, revolutionary potential and realisation, aesthetics and ethics in the works of writers such as Joseph Conrad, T.E. Lawrence, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, J.M. Coetzee, Caryl Phillips, and Zoe Wicomb, The Event of Postcolonial Shame seeks to reformulate critical enquiry within postcolonial studies 'not positively, by the presence of certain cultural motifs, identity formations, historical struggles, or emancipatory goals, but negatively, by an incommensurability that is materialized whenever such presences are produced or named as the object or the subject of a work' (p7). As I will suggest a little later, the luminous clarity of Bewes' negative critique, which posits the necessary conjoining of shame and form, and which attempts to shed light on the event of shame as 'a modality of thought that cannot adequately be accounted for by language, or reduced to what is expressible in language' (p14), risks leaving the political in the dark by underscoring failure as the constitutive measure of the success of literature and by privileging the ethical as 'a permanent rendering inadequate of form' (p19).As mentioned earlier, shame is the literary form that emblematises the gap within the perceiving subject, 'between the I as experienced by the self and the self as it appears to and is reflected in the eyes of the other' (p24). Bewes deconstructs the ontology of the subject that sustains Sartre's formulation of the perceptual relation that engenders the structure of shame (a formal relation that cannot be viewed as an ethical response to political inequality, but must be seen as a determinant condition built into the very apparatus of power), by arguing for shame as an experience of the dissolution and evacuation of the self. The vector of this process of de-subjectification, as Bewes demonstrates through his Deleuzian reading of Lawrence, is the negation of perception (and perceptibility) towards nothingness and abstraction (p36). The impossibility of representing the dissolution of the self towards imperceptibility finds formal expression in the shame of the postcolonial novel, of shame as the form of the experience of perceptual dissonance and discrepancy (p46). …

Quegli oggetti oscuri: proiezioni e burattini del desiderio tra letteratura e cinema

The paper deals with one of the most popular female projections or phantoms of male desire, that is the charmer who never cedes, by comparing some literary and cinematic texts. This “allumeuse” which turns men into puppets in a dynamic of impossible seduction is the protagonist of La Femme et le Pantin (1898) by Pierre Louys (1870-1925), whose unforgettable Conchita from Sevilla was inspired by the young Charpillon who maddened the expert seducer Casanova. Conchita’s fame was deepened by the numerous adaptations of the text for the screen, especially von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman (1935) starring Marlene Dietrich, Duvivier’s La Femme et le Pantin (1959) with Brigitte Bardot, and Bunuel’s free and outstanding reinterpretation in Cet obscur objet du desir (1977). In the end, the adaptation of the novel Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura (1874) by Portuguese Eca de Queiros (1845-1900) which Manoel de Oliveira directed in 2009 will be evoked to argue that the unattainable female character could represent a projection of the male protagonists’ desire and romantic idealizations as well as of their fears and bourgeois conventions.

Geopolitical Representations: A Textual Analysis of the Turkish Film VALLEY OF THE WOLVES - PALESTINE

This article focuses primarily on geopolitical representations in the Turkish film Valley of the Wolves—Palestine and on the film's cinematizing of Israel's military actions against Palestinians. Through textual readings of the film, the author highlights three main discussion points by conducting textual readings of the film: (1) reading the film as a counter-geopolitical text that challenges the definition of what are known to be Palestinian and Israeli territories; (2) reading the film as a cinematic text that (re)negotiates Jewish identity and who can be categorized as “good” or “bad” Jews; and (3) reading the film as a political document that attempts to reverse “territorial truth” attached to the imaginative geography of the Promised Land. Reading of selected conversations and action scenes constitutes an important element of the author's analysis of the film.

Middle Kingdom on the Margins: The Perilous Journey of Chinese into the MLA and Other Radical Ruminations

Middle Kingdom on the Margins: The Perilous Journey of Chinese into the MLA and Other Radical Ruminations

Marcel Carne

This monograph could hardly be more timely, its publication coinciding with a lavish exhibition devoted to Les Enfants du paradis at the Paris Cinémathèque (October 2012–January 2013) and the issue of a new, restored French DVD edition of the film (Second Sight Films, 2012). After a long period of underestimation, connected undoubtedly with the Cahiers du cinéma critics' effective dismissal of Marcel Carné as Exhibit A in the rogues' gallery of cinéma de qualité, the director's pre-war œuvre is at least now more judiciously evaluated, with gendered and star-studies approaches (as in the work of Edward Baron Turk and Ginette Vincendeau respectively) playing a significant role in this shift. The problem with discussing Carné as an auteur is the perceived tailing-off of his work after the end of the Second World War and of his partnership with Jacques Prévert, as a result of which many of the later films are difficult or impossible to view. Jonathan Driskell, in only the second English-language monograph on the director and the first for upwards of twenty years, contributes appreciably to a fleshing-out of Carné's later career, by way of succinct but well-contextualized analyses of his less familiar films. He grasps the bull of Carné's fluctuating critical reputation firmly by the horns, attributing it at least in part to ‘his decision to continue making films under the Nazi Occupation’ (p. 1), and offers an erudite and well-documented overview of his work. He is particularly persuasive in attributing Les Enfants' iconic place in French cultural history to ‘the significant popular appeal it had in 1945’ (p. 69). The book is, alas, marred by a periodic tendency towards what I would describe as ‘messageitis’, as with the assertion apropos Les Visiteurs du soir that, ‘[b]ecause the characters ultimately accept their fate and do not fight back against the Devil, they can be seen as complicit with the Occupation’ (p. 64) — a singularly inappropriate hypostatization of the cinematic text, though qualified immediately afterwards by the recognition that such allegorical readings leave much to be desired. There is a scattering of omissions: Jean-Pierre Léaud's derision of Les Visiteurs in Jean Eustache's La Maman et la putain (1973) surely called for mention; and errors: Malou in Les Portes de la nuit appears to change gender when referred to as ‘Milou’, while Jacques Becker's Rendez-vous de juillet turns into Rendez-vous de Paris. Driskell's comprehensiveness is not always matched by his incisiveness, as the overuse of epithets such as ‘metaphysical’ and ‘transcendent’ attest, but this monograph will be of value to all scholars, and indeed students, of French cinema.

In(visible) Bruges by Martin McDonagh

This paper examines the ways in which In Bruges by Martin McDonagh constitutes the cinematic Bruges. It explores the peculiarities of the narrative and the ways intertextual references are made to the artworks associated with the cultural history of Bruges (Flemish painting, Georges Rodenbach’s novel Le Carillonneur) and the references to the texts which bear no relation to the history of Bruges (films on Venice, other cinematic texts, literary texts by McDonagh). The exploration of these narrative devices reveals that the interfusion of different discourses revitalizes and changes the ‘Bruges myth’ which occurs in a hypertextual dialogue with the ‘Venetian myth’. The analysis of hypertextual dialogue shows the essential difference between the two textual cities. Instead of the excess of the visible, typical of representations of Venice, the film introduces the principle of the limitation of the visible as the main feature of Bruges. This inspires the conclusion connected to the model of travelling which In Bruges proposes.