Set Of Films Research Articles

I would rather be a cyborg than a Barbie: hyperfeminine nostalgia and patriarchal futurity in Barbie

I examine portrayals of digital media and technology in Barbie, analysing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) symbolism in conjunction with the film's thematic commentaries on gender and contemporary affects. I draw my theoretical framework from Tracey Mollet's conceptualisation of twenty-first-century American nostalgia and Donna Haraway's iconic discussion of the cyborg, tracing all appearances of digital screens and devices, media franchises, computer software and virtual platforms in the film. I demonstrate that Barbie consistently associates ICT with toxic masculinity and corruptive futures, while disassociating desirable feminine spaces and interactions from technological artifacts and their use. This gendered representation of technology is contextualised within two competing nostalgias portrayed in the film: a hyperfeminine, commercialised girlhood and a masculine, nationalist and patriotic past. Analysing the strategic placement of digital ICT across the film's settings – Barbie Land, the Real World and Kendom – I illuminate the paradoxical relationship between the film's selectively feminist message and its dichotomous portrayal of technology. This case highlights the challenges of portraying feminism without stakes in popular culture, evoking Sarah Banet-Weiser's observations of neoliberal girl-power narratives in the guise of feminism. Ultimately, I argue that the portrayal of technology in Barbie reinforces biological essentialism, revitalising archaic logics which fixate on the physical gendered body as the motivator for feminist solidarity; moreover, it overlooks the importance of digital spaces in feminist praxis and theory, complicating its status as a pop feminist film.

Screenings from the archive: Nelisita (1982), an African vernacular‐language fiction set in rural southern Angola and its illuminating cinematic chain

AbstractNelisita (Carvalho, 1982, Nelisita: narrativas nianeka), a pioneering African vernacular‐language fiction film from the early phase of Angolan cinema, inspired me to conduct a series of interconnected exercises in visual anthropology. I produced an experimental archive‐based remake (Ponte, 2016, 127 stills or 34 scenes from Nelisita) and screened it in both transnational urban contexts and an Angolan rural context reminiscent of the film's setting. This article discusses the multi‐sited chain of production and reception of this short archival remake and various localized contemporary responses to it. The article examines an evolving concern with the materiality of the archive and how both foreign urban and familiar rural audiences received the film's narrative and change of genre.

Cultural distance perceived by Chinese audiences in the Korean film Silenced: a study of cross-cultural receptions in film content elements

IntroductionIn the realm of cross-cultural film dissemination, cultural distance emerges as a pivotal factor influencing the reception of domestic audiences to foreign cinematic productions. Despite Korea's thriving film industry and China's vast film market, the cultural distance experienced by Korean films in China remains largely unexplored. This study focuses on the Korean film Silenced, renowned as a classic that champions justice in Korea.MethodBy employing qualitative survey and thematic analysis, this study investigates the cultural distance perceived by forty-four Chinese audiences when watching Silenced.ResultsThe findings revealed that various content elements, such as the film's setting, translation of verbal expression, non-verbal expression of film characters, and visuals/non-diegetic music did not exhibit cultural distance among Chinese audiences. Nevertheless, the plots of morally compromised characters with positive identities, theme exploration of societal darkness and human darkness, and tragic ending introduced a palpable sense of cultural distance perceived by Chinese audiences.DiscussionThis study scrutinizes the outcomes through the lenses of Korean film and Chinese audiences. While certain aspects of Korean cinema and Chinese audience preferences exhibit cultural proximity, mitigating barriers to appreciation in select content domains, Silenced adeptly employs the plots, themes, and ending to delve into the darkness of human nature and societal dynamics. However, under the influence of China's official propaganda and film censorship, Chinese participants evinced a constrained appreciation for cinematic portrayals of human and societal darkness. Concurrently, Chinese participants manifested expectations for films to provide a source of relaxation, a notion incongruent with the oppressive ambiance evoked by Silenced.

Relevance of Tea Shops and Cafes as Spaces for plot progression in Malayalam Cinema

Currently One of the most significant mass media for communication and storytelling is film. The film uses images, music, and sound effects to convey creative ideas, concepts, and emotions. Through its capability for visual portrayal, films engage, comprehend, and influence audiences. This paper entitled ‘Relevance of Teashops and Cafes as Spaces for Plot Progression in Malayalam Movies’ studies how films especially Malayalam films use the space of teashops and cafes in movies as a space of plot progression. Even though these locations are a necessary component in the production of Malayalam films, the role of teashops and cafes in the making of a film is a less-explored topic. The concept of space is crucial to the creation of films. A perfect setting is necessary for conveying all of the essence of the movie to the audience as well as the core idea of the movie. The movie makes use of space for a variety of things, including setting up sets, filming scenes, and establishing distinct places. When Malayalam movies are taken into consideration the presence of a teashop or a cafe has always been an inevitable part. The locations of teashops and cafes were given a lot of attention in movie narratives, particularly in Malayalam films. In the atmosphere of these places, significant story developments and character growth take place. The teashop settings have been a major part of setting the overall tone and portraying the beauty of the film's setting in the majority of ancient Malayalam films. The cafes in the new Malayalam film function similarly by improving the mood of the film by creating lovely settings. The audience will be drawn to these locations as a result. The study attempts to provide a comprehensive understanding of the significance of teashop and cafe scenes in Malayalam films. The study focuses on the purpose of the teashop and café environments in the development of the story and other significant events in the film's narration. The study will use a qualitative methodology. Six major Malayalam films will be the subject of the analysis. For the study, a content analysis of six films from different periods that prominently featured cafe and teashop settings was chosen.

Kostum Tjokroaminoto dalam Mendukung Setting Ruang dan Waktu pada Film Guru Bangsa: Tjokroaminoto

Costume design is an important part of artistic direction and plays a crucial role in supporting a film's setting and time period. This study focuses on the costumes worn by the main character, Tjokroaminoto. The film's setting ranges from Tjokroaminoto's teenage years to his adulthood, and the costumes used create an authentic atmosphere during that time period. The research method used is qualitative research, using primary and secondary data sources obtained from interviews, observations, and literature studies. After the data is collected, data analysis is carried out through the process of reduction, presentation, conclusion drawing, and verification. The results show that the film's historical setting, "Guru Bangsa: Tjokroaminoto," is effectively conveyed through the costumes worn by the characters, which help to express space, time, social status, and three-dimensional character. Tjokroaminoto's costume consists of several parts such as basic clothing, headwear, bodywear, footwear, and accessories. The costume worn by Tjokroaminoto portrays a priyayi who comes from the Javanese region with a division of the time period when the story takes place.

A Sociolinguistics Analysis of Stereotypes in the Freedom Writers Movie

Stereotypes are viewed negatively since they indicate negative preconceptions about others. Hence, stereotypes are important to study because people might unknowingly employ stereotypes about others in regular encounters. Stereotypes are also found in many films, one of which is in the film "Freedom writer." The aims of this study are to analyze the categories of stereotypes that existed in the film Freedom Writer and to identify the functions of the stereotypes that are produced in the film. The researcher uses descriptive qualitative research. This research is a sociolinguistic approach of stereotypes occurring in the movie entitled Freedom Writers. The data is all utterances in the movie. The data analysis technique is carried out by employing sociolinguistics theory. The results of this study show that there are three categories of stereotypes occur: gender, race, and physical traits. The characters in Freedom Writers represent a diverse range of races, and their frequent interactions enable them to readily observe the different characteristics associated with their respective races. Consequently, due to the film's setting in a multicultural society, various stereotypes regarding race, with a particular emphasis on conflicts related to skin color, are prevalent. These stereotypes are influenced by cultural factors within this context.

Overjoyed Homegirl

Overjoyed Homegirl

Hierarchy of Arthur’s Needs: A Reflection of Psychological and Social Problems in Joker Movie

The film brings a cultural instrument that educates people. People can see the psychological aspects through the characters and social situation, which influences the characterization in the film. This study examines Joker (2019) a movie containing the psychological conflicts and the society problems of discrimination system in this era which affects much on the character of Arthur who suffers pseudobulbar affect. The researchers used Maslow’s Theory of Human Needs to analyze Arthur’s need to reflect society’s problem needs. A descriptive qualitative method was used in this study because it focused on the human needs of the main character. The primary data was taken from the dialogue in the film, while the secondary data was from articles discussing Arthur Fleck and society as the film's setting. The technique of collecting data was documentation while analyzing data was divided into three stages. First was data reduction; the researcher classified the data of Arthur ‘s needs and explained why they are classified into those categories. The second was data display; the data is structured and presented so that it is easier to be understood. Then, the researchers presented the data into the display categorized on each dialogue that reflected Arthur’s needs levels and the social problems faced by Arthur. Finally, the conclusion was delivered by describing Maslow's data and theory of human needs and elaborating the description of social issues at that era. The result revealed Arthur Fleck had difficulty fulfilling his basic human needs such as physiological, safety, love and belongingness and esteem needs because of the government's broken system and how society treats a person who suffers mental health disorder like Arthur Fleck. The failure to fulfill those needs has made Arthur actualize himself as the cold-blooded clown, The Joker. Then, it helps him to be recognized and being acknowledged by others.

The Spy Story Behind The Third Man

Abstract The Third Man symbolically stands for espionage. Indeed, though its storyline concerns friendship and the hunt for an unscrupulous black-market dealer, the film has been connected to the Cold War struggle between intelligence services since its release in 1949. This perception is partly related to the film's setting—the bombed-out ruins of Vienna— which was then (and still remains) a major hub for spies. What has been less noted, however, is that the film's origins itself represent an espionage story. All major figures involved had a background in intelligence, from the author Graham Greene, to the producer Alexander Korda and the figure of Harry Lime, whose real-life model was the KGB mole Kim Philby. By drawing upon archival material as well as secondary literature, this article explores this other history of The Third Man and puts the film in the context of postwar Austria, and highlights how real-life events and personalities inspired its story.

The Aesthetics of Stagnation: Ashley McKenzie's <em>Werewolf</em> and the Separated Society

The Aesthetics of Stagnation:Ashley McKenzie's Werewolf and the Separated Society Sean O'Brien (bio) Separated from his product, man himself produces all the details of his world with ever increasing power, and thus finds himself ever more separated from his world. The more his life is now his product, the more he is separated from his life. —Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle The development of large-scale industry expresses itself, finally, in the extrusion of workers from the factory—deindustrialisation. Beyond the factory gates, workers find themselves wandering in an immense infrastructure, that of modern life, which reflects back to them not their growing power, but rather, their impotence. They see not a world of their making, but rather a runaway world, a world beyond their control, perhaps beyond anyone's control. —Endnotes, "A History of Separation" [End Page 208] Ashley McKenzie's bleak and beautiful film Werewolf (2016) would appear to tell a story about opioid addiction.1 The film's protagonists, Vanessa (Bhreagh MacNeil) and Blaise (Andrew Gillis), are both recovering addicts on a methadone treatment program, frequenting pharmacies for their medicine and conversing with government bureaucrats and clinic doctors about their progress and mental health. And yet McKenzie's feature debut avoids the tragic excess of conventional junkie movies. There are no thrilling scenes of the characters getting high, stealing, or performing sex work, as one might typically expect to find in a film about drug addiction. As McKenzie says in an interview, "I talked to different people in the methadone program, but I'm not trying to make some sort of exposé."2 In fact, Werewolf is hardly a story at all, at least not in the generic sense of a conventionally defined narrative arc. And while the departure from linear narrative has long been an avant-garde mainstay, the film's recursive structure and oblique close-ups suggest a suffocating constriction instead of some sense of freedom from the dictates of a commercial film industry that we might associate with earlier avant-garde cinema such as the French nouvelle vague. This is because Werewolf, as I hope to show, is first and foremost a cinematic meditation on precarity as a social experience of economic stagnation, one that attends to the gendered forms that precarity assumes in an era of deindustrialization. Werewolf dwells in the everyday reality of recovery and its banal routines, but the opioid epidemic—which has spread throughout both rural and deindustrialized regions across North America—appears in the film not as the primary cause of the characters' suffering but instead as a tragic symptom of their precarity. Viewers might be forgiven for not recognizing the film's setting in present-day Cape Breton, an island in the Atlantic Canadian province of Nova Scotia that was once a hub of industrial activity. While Cape Breton Island has come to be known for its natural beauty through the promotional work of its tourism industry in an attempt to fill the considerable gap left by the flight of manufacture and extractive trades, Werewolf captures the hardscrabble existence of life in the postindustrial region in its depiction of two homeless addicts scraping by with a rusty lawn mower in the former mining town of New Waterford. United in their isolation, Blaise and Nessa (as she's known) seem to have little left to do but wander the blasted waste-lands of capitalist ruin, mowing lawns and killing time between methadone doses, until the tensions of the couple form push them apart. Drawing out the consequences of economic stagnation for the aesthetics of cinematic realism, this essay explores the [End Page 209] relationships between precarity and deindustrialization in McKenzie's film through a Marxian account of the figure of separation. In the conclusion to Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson writes that "Marx's fundamental figure for social development and dynamics (a figure that runs through the Grundrisse, connecting the 1844 manuscripts in an unbroken line to Capital itself) . . . is the fundamental notion of separation (as when Marx describes the production of the proletariat in terms of their separation from the means of production—i.e., enclosure, the exclusion of...

Mapping a Modern Diegesis: Terre des Hommes and Robert Altman's Quintet

This project maps the locations in the old Expo 67 site in Montréal used in the film Quintet (Robert Altman, 1979). It reflects upon how the representation of the international, modern architecture and design of the Expo pavilions could shift from signifying promise and potential for social betterment to becoming indexes of technological catastrophe and social decay. It also looks at how the architecture of Expo 67, both as a site of technological spectacle and as an impromptu film set, has disappeared. The interface for the project reflects the process of looking for something that has been forgotten. Like the characters of the film Quintet, lost in a nuclear winter landscape, the reader wanders through expanses of white space to find remnants of the expo site and of the film's set, to find artefacts and fragments of meaning.

Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (review)

Reviewed by: Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace Joshua B. Fisher Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace. By Mark Thornton Burnett. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. 240. $79.95 (hardcover) In this engaging study, Burnett explores the complex interrelationships between globalization and Shakespeare films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. On one level, the book contributes to the growing number of volumes surveying recent Shakespeare on film and television, including Judith Buchanan's Shakespeare on Film (2005), Kenneth Rothwell's A History of Shakespeare on Screen (2004), Samuel Crowl's Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era (2003), as well as much earlier studies such as Jack Jorgen's seminal Shakespeare on Film (1977). Burnett cogently examines nearly two-dozen Shakespeare films ranging from mainstream Hollywood productions such as Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Oliver Parker's Othello (1995), Michael Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999), and Michael Radford's The Merchant of Venice (2005) to relatively obscure (and sometimes hard to find) art house films such as Greg Lombardo's Macbeth in Manhattan (1999), Gavin Bedford's The Street King (2002), Roger Goldby's made for television Indian Dream (2003), and David LaChapelle's clothing commercial Romeo & Juliet (2005). Although it provides useful production information about a number of films made between the mid 1990s and the early 2000s, Burnett's book is much more than a survey of recent Shakespeare films. Firmly grounded within current theoretical work on globalization, the study is also a highly nuanced and richly theoretical examination of how recent Shakespeare films "self-consciously contemplate Shakespeare's status as an icon in relation to the global marketplace" (3). That is, it explores how the films are both shaped by and acutely responsive to "the dictates of world consumerism and late capitalist modalities of consumption" (3). In this regard, the book is much more openly theoretical than many recent book-length studies of Shakespeare on film and in-line with texts such as Lynda Boose and Richard Burt's Shakespeare, the Movie collections (1997; 2003) as well as Courtney Lehmann's Shakespeare Remains: Theater to Film, Early Modern to Postmodern (2002) and Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe's recent New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (2007). Incorporating timely theoretical work on globalization by Jan Aarte Scholte, Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, Michael Walsh, Richard Langhorne, and others, Burnett makes a compelling [End Page 267] case for the ways in which Shakespeare films around the new millennium both reflect and refract the "enabling cultural dimensions of globalization." As such, the film productions considered here respond to their own locations within the global marketplace, self-consciously contemplating and thematizing such concerns as identity formation and hybridity, the interrelationship between the local and the global, national and religious affiliation, impersonation and performance, and the stakes of spiritual fulfillment. At the heart of Burnett's study lies the paradox of globalization, at once allowing for "bonding and interconnectivity" while "policies of integration…dislodge, divide, and even eradicate the indigenous" (2). Particularly strong are the chapters exploring this paradox as it materializes in relation to notions of identity formation both within the films and in the shaping of the films themselves. One such instance is Burnett's deft analysis of recent filmic productions of Hamlet and Macbeth to articulate how local and regionally rooted representations of identity provide sites of withdrawal from the self-effacing, "nowhere landscapes" that circumscribe the larger global picture. Discussing Stephen Cavanagh's Hamlet (2005), for example, Burnett charts how the film's setting in Londonderry, Northern Ireland registers an evocative narrative of historical and contemporary associations that invigorates "a richly determined local distinctiveness" while confronting Shakespeare's "global status as a transnational voice" (63). Other particularly illuminating chapters focus on racial identity and hybridity in the global economy (discussing Parker's Othello and Tim Blake Nelson's "O"), the stakes of filming The Merchant of Venice in the context of post-Holocaust memory and identity, and the implications of globalization as a "spur to spirituality" and renewed spiritual dimensions (discussing The King is Alive and Macbeth in Manhattan). These sections of the book showcase Burnett...

Editor's Introduction: Multicultural and Multilingual Aesthetics of Resistance

Either get out, get white or get along. --George Schuyler, Black No More (11) As George Schuyler sarcastically comments his novel Black No More (1931), US culture seems to offer its multiethnic or non-white citizens few choices: Either get out, get white or get along (11). Exiting the system, whitening, or assimilation are posited as the only viable options for ethnic subjects. Yet this issue of MELUS illustrates that ethnic writers often undermine such simplistic choices through a multicultural and multilingual aesthetics of resistance. As W. Lawrence Hogue points out his essay, for postmodern theorists such as Jacques Derrida, meaning the West is defined terms of binary oppositions, a violent hierarchy which one of the two terms governs the Within the white/ethnic binary opposition the United States, the ethnic subject often becomes defined as an inferior other. However, many of the authors discussed this issue deconstruct this binary through oppositional and resistant aesthetic practices; furthermore, some of these authors take western modes of writing or subjectivity--such as sentimentalism or the persona of the slave--and turn these modes inside out, so they no longer exclusively signify subjugation or abjection. These writers thereby participate the project of reclaiming and repositioning ethnic subjectivities. By turning to multicultural aesthetics or by deforming western tropes, they may undermine or challenge Eurocentric modes of writing, releasing the potential of ethnic subjectivity to transform not only art, but culture itself. In her essay, Property Rights and Possession Daughters of the Dust, Nancy Wright argues that Julie Dash's landmark 1991 film uses specific aesthetic practices--such as visual images and voice-overs--to talk back to Anglo-American political and legal theories of property from the historical period represented the film, which positions the ancestors of enslaved Africans and First Nations people as the dispossessed. Wright argues that the film Gullah and First Nation groups enact a concept of their relationship to the land that is communal and custodial, rather than property based. Two sequences the film associate characters and the landscape with communal property relationships--a montage which Iona Peazant reads aloud a love letter from Saint Julian Last Child, and a sequence of images set the family graveyard, where Nana Peazant explains to her great-grandson Eli Peazant his relationship to his unborn child and ancestors. As Wright astutely notices, in these sequences, visual images locate the themes of family, possession, and property a matrix of historical allusions to property law and legal rights of ownership. They also contest visually and aesthetically the dominant view of the residents of Dawtaw Island (the film's setting) as the dispossessed. These characters may lack individual, exclusive rights to property, but their communal relationship to the land endows them with agency and allows them to retain their culture. Aesthetic practices used by eighteenth-century poet Wheatley--a diasporic presence and the creation of a distinct black slave persona and perspective--also endow her work with agency and cultural identity. In Phillis Wheatley, Diaspora Subjectivity, and the African American Canon, Will Harris argues that few critics have accounted for the uniqueness of Wheatley's contributions to diaspora writing. Wheatley's poetry was recognized England and France as a watershed literary feat and became a focal point for discussion of diasporal literary accomplishment among individuals such as Voltaire, John Paul Jones, and Francois, the Marquis de Barbe-Marbois. To understand the diasporal impact of Wheatley's poetry, Harris argues, her writing must be compared to black writers whose works preceded or paralleled hers and to contemporaneous writers who may have been influenced by her work. …

Black Orpheus, Myth and Ritual: A Morphological Reading*

Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro; M. Camus, 1959) drew on classical myth and ritual to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Yet no one has analyzed the film with reference to its classical background. This paper argues that the film closely follows two narrative patterns (Separation-Lirrunality Incorporation and the Heroic Journey) employed by the myth of Orpheus and Eury dice, and related stories. This morphological approach reveals the cinematic Euridice as a "female adolescent initiand" whose loss of virginity and death are foreshadowed from her first scene. The film's setting of Carnaval promotes Euridice's adolescent ini tiation as it duplicates ancient Greek Dionysian festivals. Orfeu emerges as not only a shamanistic hero, but also an associate of Apollo and, antithetically, an avatar of Diony sus and substitute sacrifice for the god. Finally, the film not only replicates but also reinvents the ancient, rural and European myth of Orpheus and Eurydice by resituat ing it in a modern city of the Africanized "New World."

Comparison of the validity and reliability of two image classification systems for the assessment of mammogram quality

To compare the reliability and validity of two classification systems used to evaluate the quality of mammograms: PGMI ('perfect', 'good', 'moderate' and 'inadequate') and EAR ('excellent', 'acceptable' and 'repeat'). New South Wales (Australia) population-based mammography screening programme (BreastScreen NSW). Thirty sets of mammograms were rated by 21 radiographers and an expert panel. PGMI and EAR criteria were used to assign ratings to the medio-lateral oblique (MLO) and cranio-caudal (CC) views for each set of films. Inter-observer reliability and criterion validity (compared with expert panel ratings) were assessed using mean weighted observed agreement and kappa statistics. Reliability: Kappa values for both classification systems were low (0.01-0.17). PGMI produced significantly higher values than EAR. Agreement between raters was higher using PGMI than EAR for the MLO view (77% versus 74%, P < 0.05), but was similar for the CC view. Dichotomized ratings ('acceptable' or 'needs repeating') did not improve reliability estimates. Kappa values between raters and the reference standard were low for both classification systems (0.05-0.15). Agreement between raters and the reference standard was higher using PGMI than EAR for the MLO view (74% versus 63%), but was similar for the CC view. Dichotomized ratings of the MLO view showed slightly higher observer agreement. Both PGMI and EAR have poor reliability and validity in evaluating mammogram quality. EAR is not a suitable alternative to PGMI, which must be improved if it is to be useful.

Basic principles of anamorphic composition

A note on critical methodology A t one and the same time the motion picture image is both a flat, two-dimensional pattern of light and dark and an illusory three-dimensional reproduction of the scene that appeared in front of the camera. Critics and audiences almost never notice the two-dimensional pattern, responding instead to the stories that unfold in the illusory three-dimensional world. It takes an unusually assertive image something like the bone tossed into the air in prehistoric times in 2001 that with a cut instantaneously becomes a similarly shaped spaceship in flight to make viewers notice a graphic element as such while a story takes place. When I first began to view anamorphic films to see whether there were any compositional strategies filmmakers might have used in the 1950s and 1960s to organise the wider image, I expected that whatever I might discover would be embodied in the apparent three-dimensional space of the image. Yet as I studied films from those years, I found myself unexpectedly attending to the two-dimensional qualities of their images, especially at moments of shot change and camera repositioning. Increasingly, continuities of line and shape came to define composition in ways I had never expected. Eventually, I came to understand that these two-dimensional qualities served as formal keys to the disposition of three-dimensional elements, And in understanding this, I realised that traditional methods of cinematic analysis were no longer appropriate. Not surprisingly, once I concentrated on the two-dimensional qualities of the image as graphic design, I discovered that the language and assumptions of typographers and graphic designers were much more relevant to understanding anamorphic composition than I ever expected. Most useful of all has been the concept of the grid as a rational and objective regulative system. In books and magazines the grid insures a uniformity of lay-out from page to page. The quartered grid in anamorphic filmmaking provides a similar uniformity of composition from shot to shot. The two dimensional pattern of the grid that underpins the placement text and image on the printed page functions equally well to underpin the placement of a film's apparently three-dimensional elements. Josef Muller-Brockmann's suggestion in Grid Systems in Graphic Design, the standard work on the subject that 'as a controlling system the grid makes it easier to give the surface of space a rational organisation', applies equally well to the motion picture image as to the printed page.2 I explain the experiences that brought me to the ideas discussed in this essay in order to alert readers that what they will encounter here has little to do with traditional ways of discussing cinematic composition. Instead of discussing the placement of camera and actors as a directorial decision, for example, I shall define their placement according to a grid uniformly designed into a film's sets. As one might expect from my unusual approach, my discussion is not based upon written documents. Rather, its conclusions are drawn from the careful examination of more than one hundred anamorphic films released between 1953 and 1965. Those films released before 1960 were filmed primarily in the CinemaScope anamorphic process; the

What's in a Name: Two Films Titled Moll Flanders

230 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:2 What's in a Name: Two Films Titled Moil Flanders Moll Flanders, directed by Pen Densham, screenplay by Pen Densham. Moll Flanders, directed by David Atwood, screenplay by Andrew Davies. "The book is, like, a total classic." According to the Los Angeles Times (14 June 1996), this remark was the only evidence that Defoe's novel had been read by anyone attending an opening-night party in Westwood for the stars of MGM's "Moll Flanders" along with about seven hundred of their most intimate associates. The Los Angeles Times also reports that nothing was said about the film's setting beyond expressions of surprise by several guests who "weren't aware that Wonderbras were so commonly available in eighteenth-century England ." Live and learn. Given the level of literacy and historical insight thus displayed by MGM's finest, it is easy to see why the film "Moll Flanders" is, like, a total disaster. The pace is excruciatingly slow. Robin Wright miscast as Moll is a pouting, stony-faced woman too old for her initial scenes, too matronly for plausibility at the story's conclusion, and insufficiently alluring to sustain interest in the various states of dress and undress through with the plot's tedious erotic adventures take her. She would do better as Joan of Arc in some version more lugubrious than Shaw's masterpiece. John Lynch's unnamed artist, the great and only true love of Moll's life in the film, is equally earnest, equally dreary, and equally uninteresting in a part to which a better actor with a better script might have given some life and wit. But wit is in very short supply throughout Pen Densham 's screenplay except for his heavy-handed stroke of naming the evil madam of Moll's brothel Mrs Allworthy. Those who know their total classics must admit that Densham named the film's sneering villainess with totally awesome irony. Otherwise Densham's work, which is modestly advertised as "based on the character from the novel by Daniel Defoe," displays mostly bigotry, moments of third-rate Gothic horror, cloying sentimentality, bizarre nostalgia, and timid political correctness. The film's bigotry is aimed at Roman Catholics. It is manifested in scenes depicting harsh treatment culminating in sexual abuse that Moll suffers in the convent to which she is consigned upon upon being removed from her birthplace in Newgate Prison, where her mother was hanged immediately after Moll's birth. The hard-hearted nuns who run Moll's convent along with a salacious depraved priest assigned to hear its inmates' confessions all seem like escapees from a staunchly anti-Catholic Gothic novel set amid the claustrophobic wickedness of an imaginary Renaissance Italy, not the landscape of Defoe's England. When a thirty-something-looking but supposedly adolescent Moll arrives one day in the confessional box outside of which she has been standing in line and placidly knitting like some would-be Madame Lafarge waiting for a revolution, the drooling priest opens the grill and sticks a hand through to fondle Moll's breasts. Duly outraged, our heroine skewers the offending hand with a knitting needle (atta girl!), only to find herself evicted after the ensuing brouhaha to wander homeless through London's mean streets. REVIEWS 231 Attracted by a cosy red lantern (get it?) hanging outside Mrs Allworthy's establishment , Moll finds shelter there, eventually understands and accepts its purposes, then sells her body (at what seem inflated prices for the merchandise ) to a series of extravagant but disgusting old rakes with shabby underwear, unseemly impatience, and evidently (there is no other explanation) failing eyesight . Mrs Allworthy's brothel, no less than the creepy convent which it replaces as Moll's place of confinement, seems designed mainly to evoke Gothic terror. The hackneyed scenes in these places might have been marginally effective instead of unintentionally self-parodic if only the producers had gone the whole hog and hired as scriptwriter Stephen King. Cloying sentimentality is the prevailing mode. Moll's early adventures are framed within a narrative of how her poor little abandoned daughter Flora is discovered, rescued from a dismal orphanage, and restored to her...

THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF PRESENT-DAY RADIOLOGY IN DIAGNOSIS OF CARCINOMA OF THE CARDIAC END OF THE STOMACH WITH SUGGESTIONS FOR IMPROVEMENT

The defective use of radiology by clinician and radiologist is prevalent. The causes and consequences are discussed in regard to carcinoma of the cardiac end of the stomach. Present-day results are so poor that a new approach is suggested. A comprehensive setof films should be secured to show adequately all regions of the stomach, each region in two planes, and the gastro-enterologist, as well as the radiologist, should set his mind to the interpretation of these films. Such methods, applied in other branches of surgery and medicine, have led to an increase in diagnostic efficiency. The failure of the cardiac end to balloon when the patient is supine, with the stomach as full as possible, is a sign of advanced carcinoma. Attention is drawn to this, not as a new sign, but as one that is frequently overlooked. A technique has been suggested in the hope of securing the detection of growths when they are as large as a cherry, to supplement the present technique, which often overlooks them even when they are the size of a cricket ball. These supplementary views are like all other methods in medicine. They have their fallacies and their difficulties. But they should not be discarded on this account.