Monty Python Research Articles

The Punk Turn in Comedy: Masks of Anarchy

The Punk Turn in Comedy: Masks of Anarchy

Peer review at the Ministry of Silly Walks

BackgroundFifty years ago, the groundbreaking British sketch series Monty Python’s Flying Circus premiered on BBC One and forever changed the world of comedy. The humour transcended mere absurdity by poking a subversive finger in the eye of buttoned-up British society. Here, we commemorate this cultural milestone and simultaneously call attention to an emerging concept in the health sciences, termed simplified peer review. The union of these disparate subjects motivates a formal gait analysis based on one of the troupe’s most iconic sketches, “The Ministry of Silly Walks”, a satire of bureaucratic inefficiency. Research questionThe sketch portrays peer review as exceedingly efficient, lasting all of 20 s. But was it fair? The answer depends on how one measures silliness. If silly walking can be defined as deviations from typical walking, then it can be quantified using video-based gait analysis. MethodsTo assess the quality of peer review at the Ministry of Silly Walks, we measured knee flexion in the sagittal plane of motion and calculated the Gait Variable Score (GVS) for three gait cycles, those of the Minister (n = 2) and Mr. Pudey (n = 1), an applicant for a Research Fellowship. ResultsFor the Minister, we found large deviations from typical walking across two gait cycles (GVSknee(1) = 33.6, GVSknee(2) = 23.3), whereas the gait of Mr Pudey produced an intermediate score (GVSknee = 16.3). By this measure, Mr Pudney’s walk is 3.3 times more variable than typical walking, whereas an exemplary silly walk is 6.7 and 4.7 times more variable, respectively, than typical walking. SignificanceOur analysis corroborates the Minister’s assessment: Mr Pudey is a promising applicant and deserving of a Research Fellowship to advance his silly walk. We suggest that the sketch holds special resonance and uncanny prescience for researchers in the health sciences today.

Very silly party politics: surrealism and satire in the ‘Pythonesque’

2019 sees the 50th anniversary of the iconic British television comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC: 1969–74). This article focuses on the concept of ‘Pythonesque’, placing the broadly political satirical content that is evident within the Pythons’ mainstream TV work and in selected subsequent film work at the centre of the notion of ‘Pythonesque’. It will be suggested, moreover, that the Pythons’ socio-cultural critical position is embedded in a long established British literary satirical tradition. Further, this article will aim to show that ‘Pythonesque’ incongruity, whilst adopting the aesthetic of the nihilistic cabaret of the Dadaists, was further influenced by the contemporary strain of British vernacular surrealism that permeated twentieth century popular performance through Music Hall, Variety comedy and The Goons, and also borrows Surrealist satirical perspectives. This evaluation of ‘Pythonesque’ fusion of satirical and surreal elements will posit that the comedians were simultaneously behind the times; of their time; and, in their prescience, some ways ahead of their time in their construction of humorous commentary on British societal mores and their vividly underscoring of the absurdity of the institutions they targeted.

Jesus and Brian: Exploring the Historical Jesus and His Times via Monty Python's Life of Brian by Joan E. Taylor

Reviewed by: Jesus and Brian: Exploring the Historical Jesus and His Times via Monty Python'sLife of Brian by Joan E. Taylor Chris L. de Wet Taylor, Joan E. 2015. Jesus and Brian: Exploring the Historical Jesus and His Times via Monty Python's Life of Brian. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Paperback. ISBN 978-0567658302. Pp. 288. $29.95. This engaging edited volume is the product of a conference that took place at King's College in June 2014. The main question the book asks is what we can learn about the historical Jesus from the 1979 Monty Python film, Life of Brian. The conference itself was a great success and even had the involvement of two of the original actors, John Cleese and Terry Jones. Jones was also the director of the film. In my opinion, this book is indeed a must-read for any scholar interested in the study of the historical Jesus. One contributor in the book, James Crossley, even characterises the film as a legitimate part of the quest for the historical Jesus. It is a very accessible and socially relevant book as well that will definitely appeal to a wider audience. Of course, anyone reading the book should view the movie first, which is highly entertaining (if one is amenable to satire, that is). The film is especially known, and even notorious, for its satirical humour. In fact, after reading this volume, I watched the film again and managed to appreciate it anew, particularly its subtle yet clever references to historical Jesus scholarship of the late 1970s. Despite becoming something of a cult classic, the original film had a mixed reception at the time of its release. Most famous are the responses by Malcom Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, who felt that the film was blasphemous and that it ridiculed and belittled Christ. Several chapters in the volume engage with the responses by the Church of England, especially the chapters by Richard Burridge and David Tollerton. Burridge looks at the response of the Church to the film, and argues that both Church and academy missed an opportunity to engage creatively with the life of the historical Jesus in wider society. Tollerton looks at the notion of blasphemy, both within the film and in extraneous responses to it, showing how fluid the character of blasphemy can be across various time periods and cultures. [End Page 196] Several chapters in the book also illustrate how scholars may look for critical receptions of primary Jesus-texts in unfamiliar and surprising places, as in the film, and how receptions of primary texts also recreate these primary texts. An overall argument the book successfully makes is that Life of Briancan help us not only to better understand the historical Jesus, but also to better understand ourselves and others as readers of the Gospel texts. The chapter by Joan Taylor, the editor of the volume, challenges readers to rethink the notion of reception exegesis by closing the gap between the primary text and its cultural reception. This is a crucial point in the book, and is nuanced further in the chapters by Bart Ehrman (on parody as historical method) and Paula Fredriksen (on the relationship between exegesis and the invention of tradition). Primary texts are constructed by means of their reception. There are no neutral readings. Rather than trying to avoid cultural receptions of texts, cultural receptions may be used as constructive conversation partners in the process of exegesis. Aspects like satire, parody and humour, in general, are regarded as alternative and creative apparatuses for exegesis and historical analysis. Readers should not assume that the studies in this book are uncritical of the film. Amy-Jill Levine's chapter shows that Life of Briandoes reinforce heteronormative gender stereotypes, but perhaps not intentionally. Rather, when viewers approach the film with their own presuppositions of first-century Galilean society, it becomes easier to reinforce gender and heteronormative stereotypes. Levine does concur that Life of Brian, and some other Python films, actually show how absurd patriarchy can be. It stands to reason that by approaching the historical Jesus through the lens of a film like Life of...

Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship by Sarah Ruhl Max Ritvo

Aira turns that story into one about a writer of commercial gothic novels who, aware of his work’s puerility, stops writing . He spends his time consuming opium, delivered by a dealer adamant to stay in the narrator’s house indefinitely. Meanwhile, his ghostwriters have become a criminal Buenos Aires gang that acts according to standard gothic tales they had written before (in interviews Aira states he has read every gothic story). Within that story there are quibbles and pontifications about what literature is or what a writer does and of course about the avant-garde as a kind of sabotage. Humor, along the lines of Buster Keaton and Monty Python during a bus trip across central Buenos Aires with a stranger named Alicia (following a real route that Aira takes), and sensuality are not absent from those digressions ; nor is the sense that Aira is going somewhere by going nowhere, since after all he is contributing to the commercialization of other conventions. If “it’s complicated” could summarize Aira’s writing, Prins is a magnificent reappraisal of what he is up to now aesthetically, which is summarized in the last sentence as creating worlds in which reality has little to do with what he has called “dreamlike realism” and more with a novelist’s efforts to preserve his genius in a world that can know everything. Will H. Corral Madrid, Spain Tsitsi Dangarembga This Mournable Body Minneapolis, Minnesota. Graywolf Press. 2018. 284 pages. This Mournable Body continues the narrative of Tambudzai, the protagonist from Tsitsi Dangarembga’s critically acclaimed novel Nervous Conditions. This Mournable Body engages strongly with the politics, economics, and culture of Zimbabwe in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries while highlighting the lives and trials of its women. The title of the novel references “Unmournable Bodies,” Teju Cole’s 2015 essay for the New Yorker. The “unmournable bodies” in Cole’s essay are military combatants and civilians whose deaths are “not meaningful” to westerners for a number of reasons. Dangarembga turns the phrase on its head by drawing attention to a body’s righttobemournedregardlessofideological convictions. The novel focuses particularly on women’s bodies, which suffer a tremendous amount of physical and emotional Books in Review Sarah Ruhl & Max Ritvo Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship Minneapolis. Milkweed Editions. 2018. 336 pages. THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK of letters, accomplished playwright Sarah Ruhl reminds us that her friend and student, Max Ritvo, wanted to be remembered for his poems. But during a reading for Poetry magazine in July 2016, Ritvo himself admitted that “the poems only make sense in part because they were written by a dying twentyfive -year-old.” Whether or not readers are familiar with these circumstances before picking up Letters from Max, we learn early on that the entire book is underpinned by a very particular kind of urgency. The fact of Ritvo’s illness (a years-long struggle with Ewing’s sarcoma), while never foregrounded in the vivid and uncanny poetry throughout these letters, sets the stage for a beautiful, grounded, and intensely abbreviated search for meaning. I, too, spent much of adolescence teetering and pumped full of poison. I was concerned in writing this review that my intimate knowledge of adolescent cancer might somehow cloud my ability to portray the book in its own, unaltered light. My error was in assuming that any light is unaltered by those that stand within it, and the readers of this book are invited in early and repeatedly. It’s as if both Ruhl and Ritvo understood too well the urgent pull and hesitation that comes with being a part of such intensity. Early on, the conversations begin to shift and refract at speeds that assume deep familiarity and a radical level of trust. Even in moments when a reader less well versed in Hume and Wittgenstein might get lost, we’re carried by the buoyancy and excitement for language and life that these authors shared; a remarkable sense that we’ve been invited into some shaking, jeweled center: “You complimented my ear. Nobody ever compliments my ear. Secretly, I am very proud of my ear. Everything in my life, the fabric of my life itself...

'Who are the Britons?': Questions of Ethnic and National Identity in Arthurian Films

Many films depicting the European Middle Ages delve into issues of nation building and national identity. This is problematic for the early medieval period and for Arthurian cinema. Whether or not a historical King Arthur ever existed, nation states as we know them certainly did not, and both national and ethnic identity are difficult to discern for Britain in the early Middle Ages. This essay looks at issues of national and ethnic identity raised by three Arthurian films: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), King Arthur (2004), and The Last Legion (2007). (CAS)

Comparison of normal random number generators

The sampling in statistical surveys and numerical calculations as well as simulation testing of probabilistic models in virtually all fields of knowledge require a com-puter endowed with pseudorandom numbers generators. The main goal of the study is to compare the normal random number generators using various criteria. The properties of 12 random number generators for a normal distribution were investigated. Then, the family of generators was extended by two so-called application generators and a new approach for checking the quality of generators was adopted. A ready-made tool pre-pared in C++ and in Visual Basic for Application (VBA) for conducting self-contained research using generators was presented. All Monte Carlo simulations were carried out in C++, while the calculations were performed in the VBA editor using the Microsoft Excel 2016 spreadsheet. The analysis of the obtained results shows that the generators with best properties are: MP Monty Python, R, Biegun and Ziggurat. The worst generators, are: BM Box-Muller, Wallace, Iloraz and Excel.

Identidades culturales a través de textos audiovisuales satíricos: El caso de "La Vida de Brian"

Life of Brian parodies a mythical narrative of Western culture in order to satirize cultural stereotypes after May 1968, at the time of transition to an economic model of global deregulation of markets. Monty Python work with detachment strategies to reenchant a depleted political sphere; however, with regard to the problem of multiculturalism, his account does not offer solutions for the diversity of the publics. Neither the old nor the new Institutions are represented by offering viable political horizons. Christianity, the Establishment or the New Left are described with scepticism at best or cynically, at worst. In short, only the posture of perplexity and astonishment of Brian serves as a common value in the construction of a public sphere whose main trait is a postmodern oxymoron, the individualistic gregariousness

Joan Taylor: Jesus and Brian: Exploring the Historical Jesus and His Times via Monty Python’s Life of Brian

Joan Taylor: Jesus and Brian: Exploring the Historical Jesus and His Times via Monty Python’s Life of Brian

Venstrefløjens bibel – Kierkegaard og den slovenske skole

This paper deals with the theological, philosophical and political issues that, in the train of thought from the Slovenien philosopher Slavoj Žižek, is to be sought in the ‘logic of incarnation’ at work in the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments. It also deals with the question of how to connect this framework with a new revival of the left. Following the argument of the two thinkers a joke of Monty Python will be put to the test and discussed as a coincidence of the ‘concrete universal’. What does the ‘concrete universal’ mean and how is it connected to Kierkegaard’s Christianity?

Influence of Monte Carlo generations applied for modelling of measuring instruments on maximum distance error

The paper presents a study of the influence of Monte Carlo (MC) generations, applied for modelling measuring instruments, on the maximum distance error. This modelling refers to the frequency domain and is based on the weighted least-squares (WLS) method. The MC generations were produced by the four pseudo-random number generators that are directly related to a Gaussian distribution. These generators are: Basic Box-Muller, Polar Box-Muller, Monty Python and Ratio of Uniforms. Thus, the main task of this paper is an assessment of the influence of the MC generations provided by these generators on the values of error. The effect of generator selection on the model parameters and associated uncertainties was also considered. The numerical calculations were carried out for the accelerometer PCB393B05 that was chosen as being examples of measuring instruments intended for the measurement of acceleration.

Portable Modernisms: The Art of Travelling Light by Emily Ridge

Reviewed by: Portable Modernisms: The Art of Travelling Light by Emily Ridge Susanne S. Cammack Portable Modernisms: The Art of Travelling Light. Emily Ridge. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Pp. 224. $105.00 (cloth); $105.00 (paper); $105.00 (eBook). Luggage in the early twentieth century was glamorous in its materiality and its possibilities for mobility. In Portable Modernisms, Emily Ridge sets out to explore how luggage—valises, purses, suitcases, trunks, etc.—serves as an apt metaphor for much of modernity. Her work covers an impressive breadth of material, from trade journals discussing how best to display luggage in store windows to Punch's satirical depiction of ways to "Carry a Suit-case in an Unsuspicious [End Page 607] Manner" that might as well have inspired Monty Python's "Ministry of Silly Walks" sketch. Borrowing methodologies from thing theory and material culture, Ridge argues that the literature of modernity is particularly influenced by the culture of portability and its omnipresent materiality. Ultimately, portability in all its iterations—from literal luggage to metaphorical rootlessness—shaped modernism and its literary output. Ridge begins by examining the literary evolution from the "house of fiction" to the "civilisation of luggage," phrases used by Henry James in his 1908 Preface to The Portrait of a Lady (1880) and by E. M. Forster in Howards End (1910), respectively. The "house of fiction" has idiomatically come to mean that fiction is structured largely like a Victorian house and is "something solid and hermetic, often synecdochically representative of a larger social whole" (32). This understanding of the phrase, however, is not an accurate representation of James's meaning: "[a] close reading of his model reveals a disfigured structure in the throes of transition" and presents the house's potential collapse, according to Ridge (37). She compares this structure to a "proto–modernist Tower of Babel" rather than a solid Victorian house (37). And considering the phrase was used by James as an introduction to his book nearly thirty years after its initial publication, the potential collapse of the Victorian model seems logical. The year after James's Preface, Forster considers the "civilisation of luggage" from the vantage point of one of fiction's great houses (and "houses of fiction") in Howards End. Ridge examines Forster's reluctance to venture too far into modernism and "portability," but the house's future is precarious throughout the novel, which also emphasizes the undercurrent of portability and transience in the new twentieth century. Despite Forster's mixed feelings about the shift toward portability, he provides us with its catchphrase and launches Ridge's exploration. Perhaps the most striking form of portability Ridge establishes in her first chapter is a well–traveled hatbox described in Max Beerbohm's short story "Ichabod" (1900). The hatbox is covered in a curated collection of traveling labels that serves as a "private autobiography" of the owner's travels, an articulation of self, and a narrative text in its own right (cited in Ridge, 42). Had Odysseus had such a hatbox on his travels, Beerbohm asserts, "Homer would have seen in it a sufficient record, a better record than even he could make, of Odysseus' wanderings. We should have had nothing from him but the Iliad" (44). The hatbox becomes a "playfully reimagined" form of the Homeric Odyssey twenty years before James Joyce's Ulysses, becoming a symbol of the modernist author "writing and dwelling in motion" (51)—like Joyce who wrote parts of Ulysses upon an upturned packing-case-turned-desk (54). This establishes a trend in modernist writing that emphasizes "routes over and above roots" (56). Ridge then argues that the "civilisation of luggage" holds particular potential for women since a woman's bag, purse, or luggage can become a "subversive emblem" for female self–sufficiency and autonomy (20). The more a woman takes control of her portable property, the greater the implications for a woman's rights to landed property and political autonomy; therefore, the New Woman, the suffragette, and the enfranchised woman are all connected to the question of who controls a woman's bags. For instance, in an 1894 Punch illustration, a Miss Sampson offers to carry a Mr. Smithereen's bag; the...

God Mocks: A History of Religious Satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert by Terry Lindvall

Reviewed by: God Mocks: A History of Religious Satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert by Terry Lindvall Heather Ladd Lindvall, Terry. God Mocks: A History of Religious Satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert. New York: New York UP, 2015. Pp. xi+ 347. An ambitious study of a long and rich comic tradition, Terry Lindvall's God Mocks: A History of Religious Satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert is an informative, yet problematic, introduction to religious satire in Western culture. Lindvall begins his broad survey by discussing the Jewish and Greco-Roman satire of the ancient world, and his first two chapters are "Circumcised Satirists" and "Caesar Salad Satirists." From there, he covers many forms and genres of English, American, and continental satire on spiritual matters, grouping satirists by nationality and geographic region. The idea of the satirist as prophet is a theme Lindvall introduces and develops in God Mocks, a title that intimates the divine origins of satire; he recognizes the foundations of contemporary satire in the moral joking of the Hebrew prophets, who practiced the "restorative art of exposing folly and sin and summoning one's audience to be corrected and cleansed" (18). Sensitive to changes in satiric tone and style, he notes the shifting aims of the satirist, who at different points in history has alternately privileged moral instruction or entertainment. Tracking this genre's evolution, Lindvall posits that each age has its own particular vice to which satirists respond, but observes continuities within this tradition, namely the extent to which religious satire was directed at Church corruption. Laughter, a crucial by-product of satire, is a central issue in God Mocks. Lindvall touches on a number of important theories of laughter (e.g. Hobbes, Freud, etc.) and acknowledges the transhistorical importance of satirical laughter within a community of believers; he cites historically specific debates about comedy's place in Christianity, referencing Augustine's skepticism about laughter and Isaac Barrow's sermon on the uses and abuses of humour. God Mocks raises—and tries to answer-perennial questions about the nature of satire: Should it target individuals or general social ills? How does it differ from mockery? Should it deploy shame? Also, does it actually work? Lindvall presents various definitions of "true satire," his own and others, including a twentieth-century editor of Punch, who avers that "the business of a humorous or satirical magazine must be to ridicule the age in which we live, and particularly those set in authority over us" (253). Lindvall excels in showing links between satiric themes and works across time, connecting Monty Python's Life of Brian with the "Rabelaisian spirit of carnival" (256) and discussing the enduring image of satire as a "glass" or mirror of vice and folly in several chapters. He regularly references other scholarship on western humour and, perhaps most helpfully, brings up important concepts and terms as various writers and their works are considered. For instance, in his chapter on medieval satire, Lindvall explains the comic celebration of the Feast of Fools (festa stultorum) and describes the "art of flyting," which he pithily describes as "a sort of medieval jousting with insults" (66). [End Page 331] Lindvall positions the major authors of each chapter on a "quad of satire," the quadrants being humour, rage, ridicule, and moral purpose. Though some academics might balk at the imprecision of this evaluative exercise, readers new to this material will undoubtedly find these graphs helpful. Indeed, throughout God Mocks Lindvall does a fine job of distinguishing between the satiric modes of different historical periods, citing, for example, the emphasis on purposeful critique in Reformation satire, while noting its continuities with Medieval satire, namely its coarseness. His precis of François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel in Chapter Four, "Medieval Jesters and Roosters," is an excellent introduction to this sprawling, bawdy masterpiece. Clearly comfortable in the early modern period, Lindvall engages with the humanist satire of Thomas More and Erasmus and the scatological writings of Luther, who, like Swift after him, equated sin with shit. God Mocks generally complies with accepted meta-narratives about historical periods (e.g. the wildness of the Restoration), although...

Los Misterios de Las Monjas Vampiras (The Mysteries of the Vampire Nuns)

Los Misterios de Las Monjas Vampiras (The Mysteries of the Vampire Nuns)

The ageing body in Monty Python Live (Mostly)

This article analyses representations of the ageing body in the live televised show Monty Python Live (Mostly) (2014). The famous satire group performed in the O2 arena in London, and the show was telecast live in cinemas and aired on television across the world. In the show, the group members, now in their 70s, reprise a series of their most popular sketches and introduce a few new sketches. This analysis focuses on the ways in which representations of the ageing body intersect with representations of gender and sexuality in order to discuss how the boundaries for appropriation and subversion become blurred in the context of the show. This article combines theory of mediatisation with cultural gerontology and feminist theory in order to bring these issues to light. I argue that the show offers an appropriation of the female ageing body – often exemplified through cross-dressing – but also a subversion of sexuality for ageing bodies (both male and female). This article forms part of ‘Media and the Ageing Body’ Special Issue.

The law on the wall

In the Monty Python film The Life of Brian, one of the most memorable moments is that particular scene in which a Roman soldier corrects Brian for misspelling ‘ROMANI ITE DOMUM’ in graffiti (having written ‘ROMANES EUNT DOMUS’ instead) and, as a punishment, makes him write it a hundred times over the wall surrounding the city. Even if this may be taken just as a funny scene, there are reports of people voicing their discomfort at the politicians of the time by writing on walls, both in Ancient Greece and Rome (although one hopes with better grammar than our friend Brian). As the origins of graffiti date back more than 2,000 years and considering how mainstream it has now become, the small amount of research that has been done on this topic from a copyright perspective really is surprising. Despite there being many works that deal with the topic incidentally, it was about time that someone provided a real taxonomy on the matter—such as the one Iljadica presents in her book.

Jesus and Brian: Exploring the Historical Jesus and His Times via Monty Python’s Life of Brian., edited by Taylor, Joan E.,

Jesus and Brian: Exploring the Historical Jesus and His Times via Monty Python’s Life of Brian., edited by Taylor, Joan E.,

Movieola by John Domini

Reviewed by: Movieola by John Domini DeWitt Henry (bio) John Domini. Movieola! Dzanc Books, 2016. I’ve followed John Domini’s fiction since choosing him the winner of Boston University’s undergraduate writing contest some forty-five years ago. He has steadily progressed in his career, publishing story collections, novels, poetry, and criticism. In his latest story collection, Movieola!, he not only has fun with meta-fictional ironies, but verges on flashes of poetry, as in “Assassins: Story Board to Date,” when his Hollywood pitchman imagines assassins in love: “For the two of them every orgasm’s as distinct and gorgeous as a snowflake.” Movieola! features studio people: directors, producers, scriptwriters, performers, and wannabes, who are inspired, jaded, worldly, crass, and frantic to cash in on such market trends as vampires, assassins, romance (spiced up by kink and bisexuality), movie making itself—and by extension storytelling and the power of imagination. Domini’s own prose is quick-witted and closely packed; his ear for the trade idiom, precise; and his specialty breath-taking riffs, such as: “Can’t you grok the beauty of it, the bendy neverendingness of it, the superlunary concept? Our project was totally dying but with a cry in the night we slap on the paddles and defibrillate. It’s adrenalined, it’s flashing and yearning, it’s bending and bending!” His comedy recalls that of Mel Brooks and Monty Python, as he invents the half-baked, vapid stories that his fictional creators invent. In “Royal Jelly, Pitch, and Yaw,” for instance, an eager, sycophantic assistant develops the idea for a zombie love story with Silverlake, a movie executive, who boasts: “We’re off-the-wall, [End Page 43] and never before seen.” Their script will open with the wedding of a female scientist and her handsome zombie boyfriend, who has been converted to eating fish and pizza by means of a special inoculation that the woman has discovered; guests attend on both sides, and all of the groom’s friends are also converted zombies. From there, we move to “back story and the arc.” During a zombie apocalypse, the boyfriend had broken into the woman’s lab and tried to eat her alive and she had jabbed him with a needle. The woman, who is dark skinned like the “Grandma or Great-Grandma” pictured on her lab’s wall beside her diploma as “the only person in the world with a doctorate in the undead,” had managed to save the groom and his kind. Once sprayed with the vaccine, all the zombies were turned into “another slave race,” managed by Grandma. Apparently a happy ending! Except that the script then returns to the wedding, where the inoculation’s side effect of raging appetite takes hold. The groom’s kiss morphs into a bite. The bride is infected. One thing leads to another (“Silver Lake: See how our inspiration brings up one promising fillip after another?”) and the “Reveal,” finally, is that the woman (now inseminated with zombie sperm/royal jelly by the grandma, who had also once herself been inseminated) unknowingly has been “zombie spawn” all along. She delivers a baby girl, who, in a closing shot (as gleefully described by the producer’s assistant), is “about to bite her pet hamster in the neck. Ha-ha, ha-ha… . One last splash of adrenalin, that’s what you’re buying with the ticket.” The two creators are ecstatic, convinced they have a hit. “Silver Lake: But isn’t that our true calling? . . . to rub these antiques till a genie pops out? Don’t we want to be the first living-dead movie to break huge in Europe?” In “Bookstores of Hollywood,” an ambitious young scriptwriter, Nola, magically succeeds. Her studio seeks a big project. As she sits in a Starbucks in Barnes and Noble, she is inspired to visualize a production that instantly becomes manifest, transforming the bookstore and nearby mall into a huge drive-in half-shell. She sits on top, while her imagined movie plays larger than life. The flustered bookstore manager teeters nearby, astonished. Then the half-shell collapses back to Starbucks, at which point wannabes ply her with business cards, the event...

Film Chronicle:

Film Chronicle: Jefferson Hunter (bio) Labyrinth of Lies, directed by Giulio Ricciarelli (SPE, 2016) Fury, directed by Fritz Lang (Warner Home Video, 2005) Anatomy of a Murder, directed by Otto Preminger (Criterion Collection, 2012) Witness for the Prosecution, directed by Billy Wilder (Kino Lorber, 2014) The Trial, directed by Orson Welles (Amazon Instant Video) The Defenders: Season One, created by Reginald Rose (Shout! Factory, 2016) Have Gun—Will Travel: The Complete Series, created by Sam Rolfe and Herb Meadow (Paramount, 2016) The Bride Wore Black, directed by François Truffaut (MGM, 2015) Adam's Rib, directed by George Cukor (Warner Home Video, 2000) The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus 16-ton Megaset, directed by Ian McNaughton et al. (A&E, 2005) Two and a half thousand years ago, in The Eumenides, the concluding work in the Oresteia, Aeschylus dramatized the trial of Orestes for the murder of his mother, Clytemnestra. The Furies are the prosecutors, while citizens of Athens make up the jury, Apollo acts as Orestes' counsel, and Athena presides over the trial on the Hill of Areopagus. The themes of the first two plays of the Oresteia, implacable hatred and death-for-death vengefulness, with the Furies following the spoor of Orestes' blood guilt like a pack of hunting dogs, are now replaced by reasoned judgments and an eventual verdict, which exonerates Orestes. Moreover it provides the Furies an honored place in civilized Athenian society and a complimentary, euphemizing name change to the Eumenides, or the Kindly Ones. In other words, the principle of justice prevails. As Aeschylus views it, justice may be imperfect, a work in progress, messy in the way democracy itself is messy, but still a cause for celebration. It is an ideal to which our own courts have aspired ever since. Artistically speaking, The Eumenides establishes the genre of courtroom drama, employing features—the cut-and-thrust of forensic argument, outbreaks of passion on the witness stand, crucial decisions made by the judge, even the sleaziness of certain legal tactics (Apollo introduces dubious scientific evidence)—which have subsequently become standard onstage. And onscreen: over and over again, the cinema has been summoned to the courts. There have been legal films set in small Southern towns (To Kill a Mockingbird), in Manhattan, where what's being bitterly litigated is the custody of a child (the five-Oscar-winning Kramer vs. Kramer), and in Boston, where an ambulance-chasing hack played by Paul Newman brings malpracticing doctors to justice (Sidney Lumet's The Verdict). Films [End Page 266] have depicted court martials (The Caine Mutiny, A Few Good Men, Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory) and kangaroo courts set up by criminals to try one of their own (Fritz Lang's M and Joseph Losey's remake of M, where the kangaroo court meets in a parking garage). Environmental degradation has gone on trial (Erin Brockovich), as has discrimination against AIDS victims (Philadelphia) and the theory of evolution (Inherit the Wind, one of numerous film adaptations of a courtroom stage play). Many will have seen Stanley Kramer's Judgement at Nuremberg (1961), which with ponderous earnestness examines the complicity of German jurists in the Nazi regime; fewer the excellent, modestly budgeted German film Labyrinth of Lies (2014), directed by Giulio Ricciarelli. This drama follows the idealistic young prosecutor Johann Radmann as he happens upon Nazis who have risen to positions of power in 1950s Frankfurt and tries to call them to account. Ricciarelli's is actually a pre-courtroom film, that is, one which forswears the drama of a trial to focus instead on the tedious preparations for it, the research in warehouses crammed full of paper records, the slow assembly of a forensic team, and the often fruitless search for witnesses. It also focuses on the psychological damage done to Radmann as he grows more frustrated, even despairing, at the obstacles put in his way. He lives in a West Germany grown prosperous in the Wirtschaftswunder and determined to stand mute about some of its citizens' wartime activities, as the original German title indicates: Im Labyrinth des Schweigens, "In the Labyrinth of Silence." In the end, a kind of justice is achieved, a kind...

Exultemur et laetemur. Riscritture inglesi e angloamericane della storia di Cristo

The novel genre has explored – with its peculiar possibilities – the dynamic changes, in significance and expectations, that the figure of Christ, a “character” strictly codified in the Gospels, has inspired again and again in different contexts. The starting point is the examination of constants and variants in the representation of Christ in the discourse developed in the period that stretches from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the end of the last century (Renan, Wallace, Papini, Mauriac, D. H. Lawrence, Moore, Graves, Kazantzakis, Artaud, Moorcock, Bulgakov, Endō, Saramago) – rewritings that have reinterpreted historical and religious facts in order to transform them into something else: epitome, metaphor, objective correlative, scapegoat.The aim of this paper is to analyse a number of British and Anglo-American literary texts and films of the last decades which have used irony or explicit laughter as instruments for retelling in heterodox – but only apparently blasphemous – ways the life of Jesus, between canonical and apocryphal Gospels, making it new material, euphoric and vital hypostasis. This was possible only after the appearance of Nietzsche’s antichrist, after the figure of Christ had become, in the nineteenth century, Hegelian (Strauss), proto-communist (Sauriac and Lynn Linton) and positivist (Renan). In particular, two texts will be analyzed: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (2002), by Christopher Moore, and The Second Coming (2011) by John Niven, and also classic films such as Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), and Dogma (1999), directed by Kevin Smith. In these works of the twenty-first century, Christ is still a character who has to fulfil his destiny, in one way or another; these texts represent real theological fictions, complex constructions that want to draw, in an effective way, a reassuring road to salvation, a customised paradise.