Spielberg's Film Research Articles

The Power of the Face: The Affective Mechanism of Spielberg's Face

The close-up of the face in Spielberg's films becomes the director's unique authorial signature, which has a strong cinematic impact, so why do Spielberg's faces stimulate an affective experience in the audience? The affective mechanism of Spielberg's face is divided into three levels: stimulation of affective experience, role identity, and ethical responsibility, from mild concern to the viewer's empathy for the face of the other, which eventually becomes the basis for moral perception, in addition to the fact that the face of the other reverses the viewing pattern of the subject-object relationship.

Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life ed. by Ruha Benjamin (review).

Reviewed by: Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life ed. by Ruha Benjamin David Theodore (bio) Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life Edited by Ruha Benjamin. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Pp. 416. The scholars in this edited collection merge American race and ethnicity studies with science and technology studies. The book's title plays on the word capture: technology is captivating, editor Ruha Benjamin suggests, in that it takes hold of both bodies and imaginations, imprisoning us in deleterious mental, physical, and social structures. In his foreword, sociologist Troy Duster evokes social construction, writing that algorithms and robots can be racist because racist societies constructed them. Benjamin's premise is more pointed: the technology that enthralls us in our daily lives is precisely the technology that enables social control of racialized people. Technoscience embeds and extends carceral states. Sometimes multiauthor collections don't hang together well. This one does. The project began with a symposium Benjamin organized at Princeton University in 2015, entitled "Ferguson Is the Future." Four presenters from that symposium are in this book; three of them, Benjamin and sociologists Alondra Nelson and Dorothy Roberts, contribute interviews rather than studies. Sprightly curated into three sections, the twelve chapters move from physical imprisonment to digital surveillance to speculation about a postcarceral future. One binding theme is the practice of including the author in both the scholarly framework and the narrative arc. The leitmotif here is Duster's aphorism, "Scratch a theory, you find a biography," laid out in his interview with Benjamin in the book's fourth section. Andrea Miller, for instance, begins a chapter on drones and policing by recounting a 2016 visit to a lasershow at Stone Mountain Park near Atlanta. Mitali Thakor's analysis of how police use digital tools to track child pornography began with three years of ethnographic fieldwork. Madison Van Oort probed the fastfashion retail industry by working in it. Another theme is that activist scholarship should take inspiration from art. Benjamin cites novelist Octavia Butler in the introduction, bluntly assessing fiction writers as kin to STS scholars. Thus liberated, the writers range wide in their sources. R. Joshua Scannell looks at Stephen Spielberg's film Minority Report to address the sociological harms of anticipating crimes before they happen. Anthony Ryan Hatch cites the television show Chopped in his plea to cut the link between corporate food production and prison life. And Christopher Perreira uses a 2008 Chicano novel by Alejandro Morales to understand racialized medical care in a Southern California tuberculosis sanatorium. [End Page 867] As a result, the authors invoke history often but rarely have historical questions or arguments. Neither race nor science nor technology develops or changes over time in any meaningful way; digital surveillance through data tracking is no different, conceptually, than physical imprisonment. Britt Rusert for instance, takes the concept of "laboratory life," applies it to the colonial plantation, and then uses that rubric to analyze black biopower in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. To get a view of the questions about race and technology posed to historians, scholars might read this collection alongside archive-based studies such as Benjamin Wiggins's Calculating Race (Oxford UP, 2020), which traces the twinned histories of race and actuarial risk, and Charlton McIlwain's Black Software (Oxford UP, 2020), which covers racial justice and the development of computing technology (both books were reviewed in the July 2021 issue of this journal). Still, the optimistic commitment to creative activist scholarship makes any concerns about historiography pedantic. The word "liberatory" in the subtitle is a vector. The authors suggest that existing states of affairs can serve as foils for imagining the future. Lorna Roth discusses the liberatory potential of Shirley Cards, the reference photographs created by Kodak for verifying skin color balance. Tamara K. Nopper's chapter on credit scores and the harms of digital profiles urges action. Ron Eglash theorizes a generative form of technological antiracism. And Nettrice R. Gaskins coins the term "techno-vernacular creativity" to explain how underrepresented ethnic groups use technology for cultural production through adaption and remixing—making new by making do with what's available here and now...

Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History, edited by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi

Reviewed by: Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History ed. by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi Norman Vance (bio) Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History, edited by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi; pp. xxvii + 285. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2020, $82.50, $27.50 paper. Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History is exciting and scholarly. This edited collection by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi shows how the Victorians could travel in imagination through time and space, above and beneath the earth and under the sea. They could draw on the work not just of historians but of geologists, geographers, oceanographers, anthropologists, archaeologists, paleontologists, and more-or-less well-informed fantasists such as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. The twelve chapters travel widely across different disciplines, using ideas of time to illuminate many facets of the Victorian knowledge explosion, from the age of the earth to the ambivalences of the new machine age, from Anglo-Saxon poetry and biblical scholarship to submarines and deep-sea cables. Verne's 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1876) is used in Clare Pettitt's chapter "At Sea," and Wellsian fantasy is briefly mentioned by Daniel Wilson in the concluding chapter on "How We Got Here," but Wells's The Time Machine (1895) and the time traveler who uses it are oddly absent. So is Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), which was inspired by geology and paleontology, which brought prehistoric creatures back to life and paved the way for later dinosaur fantasies such as Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912) and Steven Spielberg's film Jurassic Park (1993). Despite some helpful cross-referencing, the sheer range and diversity of encounters with time and history described in the book present problems of coherence. Rachel Bryant Davies's "Through the Proscenium Arch," an entertaining chapter on children's toy-theater focused on a cheerfully jumbled version of "The Siege of Troy" (a popular 1833 equestrian re-enactment), is interesting in itself, but it is a long way from the seemingly grown-up science and apparent high seriousness of other chapters. At first sight the four sections labelled "Narratives," "Origins," "Time in Transit," and "Unfinished Business" do not seem to have very much to do with each other. But Romanticism, particularly the Romantic quest and the Romantic cult of mystery and gothic strangeness, provides an understated continuity or common thread, even if the quests of scholars, scientists, and spiritualists were often inconclusive and the dawning awareness of complex antecedents and of unimaginable antiquity disconcertingly eroded earlier certainties. As Michael Ledger-Lomas observes in his chapter "On Pilgrimage," "the venerable urge to be a pilgrim shaped how Victorians thought about the passage of time and the scholarly investigation of time" (157). This extended to geological time. Well-travelled Lord Byron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18) read about geology and made imaginative use of it, as Clare Pettitt observes. The influential geologist Charles Lyell, a contemporary of the younger Romantics, read his Byron, while Victorians such as the Tennyson of In Memoriam (1850) read their Lyell and found no comfort in the abysses of geological time that he disclosed. Simon Goldhill makes a valiant attempt to hold things together in an ambitious chapter on the quest for origins, "Ad Fontes." His title invokes Erasmus and, behind him, the Latin Bible. Goldhill contrasts humanist delight in Greek culture as the source or fountainhead of all knowledge with the sadder and wiser Victorian acceptance of the [End Page 585] elusiveness of their quest for ultimate sources and the destabilizing nature of the enterprise. A classical scholar himself, he draws on the history of textual scholarship, both classical and biblical, to illustrate the point. Special textual authority attaches to the original manuscript, but the original manuscripts of ancient texts have not survived. One of the great discoveries in nineteenth-century biblical scholarship was Codex Sinaiticus, now in the British Library, a fourth-century manuscript containing the earliest surviving text of the entire New Testament. Its scholarly primacy is indicated by identifying it as "aleph," the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, though the manuscript was a...

Ludus, World Building, and the Prescience of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One

Ludus, World Building, and the Prescience of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One Tom Ue (bio) The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the face of education. Joyce Lau, in Times Higher Education, is not alone in wondering whether we are currently experiencing a version of the future of postsecondary education.1 As a report reprinted in University Affairs indicates, some 1.6 billion students worldwide migrated to virtual learning in March 2020, and education, as we know it, is expected to change forevermore: the "return" to normalcy will almost certainly witness increases in "blended learning," in the "use of open educational resources," and in the "use of technology for components of learning."2 In this climate, Ernest Cline's New York Times bestseller Ready Player One (2011) is right at home. Set in 2045, the novel sees many characters pivoting from their dystopian reality to the Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation (OASIS), what the central protagonist Wade Watts, in the very first page, characterizes as "a massively multiplayer online game that had gradually evolved into the globally networked virtual reality most of humanity now used on a daily basis."3 My own journey into Cline's worlds began shortly after the release of Steven Spielberg's feature film adaptation (2018). I read the novel in preparation for an upper-year undergraduate seminar, on dystopian fiction, that I was to teach at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Through close reading of texts by Jonathan Swift, H. G. Wells, Yann Martel, and others, this course investigates and responds to the resurgence of the genre's popularity in our own times and contextualizes this movement in relation to a number of historical, theoretical, and critical frameworks. My interest in Ready Player One arises out of its hospitality to so many different kinds of interpretations, from Marxist to ecocritical readings, and its insights into critical issues ranging from counterfactual narratives to participatory culture. The novel can productively be read for its contribution to the histories of children and young adult, genre, and science fiction. Since that course, Cline has been at the centre of my teaching and research. I revisited Ready Player One in my first-year classes on reading popular culture (2018–19), writing for the arts (2020), and reading and writing about the economy (2021) at Dalhousie University, NSCAD [End Page 149] University, and Cape Breton University respectively. I have written and co-written, with my brilliant former student James Munday, a number of essays on both the book and the film; and we are presently at work on The Worlds of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, the first book-length study of Cline. I have explored the insights that Spielberg's film offers for life after the pandemic.4 My aims here are to examine Cline's portrayal of Ludus and, in so doing, to suggest some ways in which he envisions our negotiations with virtual realties. By drawing key support from Cline's descriptions of this planet of schools, I argue for the novel's resonance in this historical moment as we capitalize on the affordances and grapple with the challenges of virtual learning. Wade introduces us to the OASIS by way of his school.5 Apparently "the most boring planet in the entire OASIS," Ludus "had been designed as a place of learning," and so it lacks "a single quest portal or gaming zone anywhere on its surface."6 Wade attends OASIS Public School (OPS) #1873, seemingly a close approximation of a real thing. Short of stopping to examine one's surroundings, one cannot discern much that is out of place: My virtual surroundings looked almost (but not quite) real. Everything inside the OASIS was beautifully rendered in three dimensions. Unless you pulled focus and stopped to examine your surroundings more closely, it was easy to forget that everything you were seeing was computer-generated. And that was with my crappy school-issued OASIS console.7 When Wade returns to the OASIS, he finds his avatar Parzival right where he left him the night before, "in front of my locker on the second floor of my high school": "I touched my locker door and it popped open...

Screening Prophetic Machines: Preemption, Minority Report, and the Problem of Multiple Endings

“Screening Prophetic Machines” argues that director Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report (2002) stages inconsistencies in the ideological fantasies of prophetic inevitability and preventive action that sustained the George W. Bush administration's post 9/11 policy of preemption, otherwise known as the Bush Doctrine. It observes that the film hyperbolizes this policy through the science-fictional tropes of the “prophetic machine,” which fuse preemption's speculative logics, traumatic affects, and excessive responses with contemporary media, screens, and surveillance to figure the American War on Terror and its ideological foreclosure of alternative futures. While acknow-ledging these parallels, however, this essay complicates criticism that proposes Minority Report inadequately critiques or even uncritically reproduces Bush-era ideology. Instead, it locates Minority Report's politics in cinematic form, claiming that the film's multiple possible endings suggest an array of possibilities for both narrative and prophetic closure that, when understood to be in tension, subvert assertions of preemptive certainty. Drawing from Fredric Jameson's work on utopian fiction, this essay thus examines how preemptive discourse and cinematic form converse in the film, and ultimately contends that Minority Report, because of its resistance to narrative closure, redirects attention from metaphysical discourses of fate and inevitability to the potential dangers of misplaced trust in interpretive authority.

Jurassic World: just how impossible is it?

In the movie business, bigger is usually better, bigger spaceships, bigger disasters, bigger dinosaurs and the latter was especially true in the latest installment of the Jurassic Park franchise, Jurassic World. Although the Indominus rex knocked the Tyrannosaurus rex into a cocked hat when it came to size, strength, speed and special abilities, the ‘scientific’ details of its creation are perhaps not so far-fetched if you accept the original premise of Jurassic Park. However, that is a big IF! Twenty years ago many of us enjoyed the scientific ideas suggested by Jurassic Park, either in the Michael Crichton book or in the Spielberg film. For those younger readers who haven't seen the original film; the idea was that scientists had managed to extract dinoDNA from a mosquito that had been trapped in prehistoric amber. This DNA was attached to a nucleic acid scaffold from a frog and ‘voila!’ there were more Stegosauri, Brontosauri and T. rex's than you could shake a pipette at! Inevitably as we left the cinema, we asked if this would ever be ‘possible’? Indeed there are current efforts to recreate long-extinct creatures, although on a slightly less ambitious scale. Whatever the source of your dinosaur DNA; be it from fossilized bones or from an amber-trapped mosquito, the chances of it being intact are essentially nil making the idea of the creation of new dinosaurs from preserved DNA more fiction than fact.

‘Your household accounts have always been so interesting’: family relations and gender politics in Lincoln's two ‘houses’

Since the release of Stephen Spielberg's Lincoln (2012), film critics and scholars have debated the film's depictions of race and who was responsible for abolition, as well as its historical accuracy and the actors' portrayals of the Lincolns and key characters in the White House and House of Representatives. There has been a more scattered response, however, to the film's representations of family relationships and gender politics. This essay explores how the film blends twenty-first century perceptions about nineteenth-century expectations of fathers and mothers, men and women, and political and familial agency. The film encourages this type of analysis by turning the two ‘Houses’ into sites for affirming, reinforcing, policing, and challenging gender appropriate practices.

Seeing Lincoln: Spielberg's film and the visual culture of the nineteenth century

This article is a re-examination of Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln in an effort to understand the film's engagement with nineteenth-century visual culture. Rather than consider whether or not the visual details of the film look, to modern audiences, to be authentic representations of the past, the author asks her readers to view the film as a reflection of how the Civil War era appeared to those who lived it, seeing the mid-nineteenth-century through the eyes of its inhabitants and the significance of photography to its visual culture.

‘This isn't usual, Mr. Pendleton, this is history’: Spielberg's Lincoln and the production of historical knowledge

This brief essay considers the ways that Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln produces historical knowledge. As many scholars have pointed out, there are details in the film that are not borne out by the historical record. A much more important critique, persuasively articulated by historian Kate Masur, takes issue not with isolated facts, but with overall interpretation. She argues that the film erases the work African Americans did to fight for their own freedom. The goal here is not to champion the film, but rather to use the space to examine the film's narrative and stylistic strategies, including affective engagement, for producing a certain kind of historical knowledge, and also to consider the political ramifications of this kind of knowledge. More specifically, this essay asserts that the film is written and structured in such a way as to register, in a completely unsentimental way, African American demands for equality and the stakes of those demands. Finally, by insisting that the fundamental goal of democracy is equality, the film brings into relief some of Jacques Rancière's contemporary ideas about what constitutes the political.

Bicycles, Airplanes and Peter Pans: Flying Scenes in Steven Spielberg's Films

In Steven Spielberg's cinema the flight is a recurring theme. Flying scenes can be sorted into two classes: those involving a realistic flight – by aircraft – and those involving a magical flight – by supernatural powers. The realistic flight is influenced by the war stories of Spielberg's father – a radio man in U.S. Air-force during WWII – and it is featured in such films as Empire of the Sun (1987), Always (1989), and 1941 (1979). The magical flight is influenced by James M. Barries' character Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy, 1911), which is quoted directly in E.T. the Extraterrestrial (1982) and, above all, in Hook (1991), which is a sequel to Barrie's story. These two types of flying scenes are analysed as to their meanings, compared to the models that influenced them, and surveyed as to their evolution across Spielberg's films. A central case study is the episode The Mission from Amazing Stories (1985), in which the realistic and the magical flights overlap.

Editorial

This issue of CINEJ focuses on a varity of topics: American tourism to Mexico and 1950s Hollywood film, cinematic pedagogy of Gilles Deleuze and Manoel de Oliveira, United Arab Emirates building a national cinema, crowdfunding in documentaries, flying scenes in Steven Spielberg's films, Rudaali in film narrative, a brief history of motorcycle in cinema, romantic relief in the Hollywood Blockbuster, filmosphy of Turkish cinema and flash animation as a counter cultural tool.

The American Experience: The Abolitionists by Rob Rapley (review)

Reviewed by: The American Experience: The Abolitionists by Rob Rapley Carol Faulkner The American Experience: The Abolitionists. Producer Rob Rapley. Executive Producer Sharon Grimberg. WGBH Boston, 2013. 151 minutes. Marking the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, this three-part documentary traces the history of the radical antislavery movement through the interconnected lives of (in order of appearance) Angelina Grimké, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown. While some of these reformers receive more attention than others, the documentary places abolitionists at the center of the national struggle over slavery and serves as a useful challenge to the popular portrayal of emancipation in Stephen Spielberg's film Lincoln (2012). As the narrator states at the end of part 2, these abolitionists, with their passion and perseverance, forced Americans to take sides on the slavery issue. The documentary is less clear on how they did so and what it took to sustain a movement for forty years. Its surprising strength is the actors who play the five abolitionists; they capture the spirit and drive of activists like Garrison and Grimké, who in still images appear cold and unappealing to undergraduates. With each episode lasting just over fifty minutes, the documentary will work well in the classroom. The first part is the strongest and most compelling, following the spark of abolition in each of the main characters. Grimké fights a lonely battle in her native South Carolina slaveholding family, leaving the south for Philadelphia, and eventually, Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). Douglass experiences the brutality of the peculiar institution as a slave in Maryland. A devout Christian, Garrison converts from gradualism to immediatism after living and working with African Americans in Baltimore. Stowe observes the controversy surrounding abolitionism in the border city of Cincinnati. The murder of abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy kindles Brown's Calvinist fire. This part is not without its frustrations: The filmmakers and historians ignore Quakers who, even with their limitations, were the only whites to consistently oppose slavery before the 1820s. Instead, the historians associate the abolitionist strategy of moral suasion [End Page 83] with evangelical Christianity, ignoring these abolitionists' various and evolving religious perspectives. In Baltimore, for example, Garrison worked for Quaker newspaper editor Benjamin Lundy. After Grimké moved to Philadelphia, the Society of Friends became her spiritual home. The filmmakers, whose work is produced for American Experience/WGBH, also miss opportunities to discuss the geographic diversity of the antislavery movement (in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, or Rochester) for a Boston-centric interpretation. Part 1 concludes with Grimké's marriage to fellow abolitionist Theodore Weld and the ideological differences that split the AASS in 1840. In parts 2 and 3, the individual biographies are overwhelmed by a more national history. As is fitting, Douglass emerges as the main character, beginning with his escape from slavery and his alliance and subsequent break with Garrison. Here, Garrison appears as a strategic foil for Douglass and Brown, with no attempt made to grasp his continuing commitment to nonviolence. The documentary also shifts to the familiar national drama: the War with Mexico, the Compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Act, and the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe's grief after her son's death from cholera and her shared emotional pain with slave mothers separated from their children inspired a great antislavery novel, but she is out of place in a documentary about abolitionists. The film rightfully credits her novel with convincing many Americans that slavery was wrong, but it fails to mention that Uncle Tom's Cabin advocated colonization rather than abolition. Further, the filmmakers do not connect Stowe's novel to the painstaking research and revelations in Angelina and Theodore Weld's American Slavery As It Is, which the filmmakers mention in part 1. In the third part, the violent conflict over slavery builds, with the caning of Charles Sumner, Bleeding Kansas, John Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry, the Civil War, and, finally, emancipation. With comments from experts such as David W. Blight, R. Blakeslee Gilpin, Tony Horwitz, and John Stauffer, this episode illuminates the dynamic relationship between Douglass and Brown. Instead of Lincoln the emancipator, the documentary reveals Douglass's...

The Gaze and The Spielberg Face: Steven Spielberg's Application of Lacan's Mirror Stage and Audience Response

Through the theoretical framework of Jacques Lacan's “mirror stage,” this study employs statistical analysis to code the frequency with which Spielberg utilizes the “gaze” in his work to emotionally influence viewers by providing them with desirable images of the human face. This study examines if these psychologically desirable images are used with more frequency in Spielberg's successful films, thus providing quantitative support for the assertion that Spielberg “manipulates” his audience through his signature style.

The Poetics and Perils of Faction: Contemporary French Fiction and the Memory of World War II

In an essay published in the summer 2011 special issue of Le Debat entitled L'Histoire saisie par la fiction, the British historian Anthony Beevor describes and denounces the proliferation in contemporary culture of fictional works he labels faction. As Beevor describes them, these works include novels, films, television shows, and other entertainments that take as their subject matter important historical events and offer up provocative mixtures of fact and fiction that all too often not only distort history but in fact revise and falsify it, sometimes deliberately. As such, they mark a significant departure from earlier American variants of in works by the likes of Truman Capote in In Cold Blood, for example, or Norman Mailer in Armies of the Night. These earlier works offered highly imaginative literary accounts of current events happening at the time of writing and challenged less the borders between fiction and history than they did those between literature and journalism. (1) The dangers of contemporary as he defines it are in Beevor's view essentially twofold. First, given that the subject matter of much recent is the terrible traumas of the recent past (the Holocaust, the Cold War, the experience of totalitarianism), mixing fact and fiction irresponsibly can give aid and comfort--not to say ammunition--to politically motivated forms of historical revisionism in the present. The word faction itself of course implies a parti pris, and sometimes an extreme political position. The second danger of faction, closely related to the first, is that in a world that is becoming increasingly historically illiterate, works of can be quite persuasive in peddling what Beevor labels counter-knowledge (37), and not just to a small minority of fanatics looking for welcome confirmation of their extremist and historically dubious views. Depending on its entertainment value and degree of verisimilitude or plausibility, a work of might well take in a large and gullible public, promoting false understandings of the past that can prove politically problematic in the present. Of course, in a world in which fiction is routinely peddled as fact by governments in order to justify particular actions--who has forgotten Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction?--faction is merely one method of promoting historical untruths and manipulating and dumbing down the general public. And anything seems possible if, as the Spanish novelist Javier Cercas points out, surveys as recent as 2008 indicated that fully one-fourth of all English people believed that Winston Churchill was a fictional character and therefore never existed (5). As Beevor observes, although works of can and do focus on a wide range of historical events and traumas, the preferred subject matter of most of those works is World War II. Drawing on the American context, Beevor cites--critically--several films, most notably Saving Private Ryan. While the British historian praises the opening sequence of Spielberg's film showing the Normandy landings as the most authentic battle scene ever filmed, the rest of the movie, he argues, descends into an endless recycling of Hollywood cliches that distort history while reassuring Americans today of their eternal innocence and goodness (36). This makes them--us--all the more dangerous in the world today, in Beevor's view. As for the British context, from which he also draws examples, Beevor is sharply critical of the television series Cambridge Spies. In one episode, the Soviet mole Kim Philby learns from his superior in 1941 that the British government has decided not to warn the Soviets of the impending Nazi invasion. In point of fact, as Beevor notes, Churchill warned Stalin many times about the imminent Nazi threat, to no avail (35). What of the French context? This will be the subject of the remainder of this article. Let me note first that while Beevor's observations on in Le Debat offer an excellent general framework, they do not identify some of the most salient characteristics of French and the historical, moral, and ethical issues it raises. …

Sequel to Kitzmiller's Anopheline Names: Their Derivations and Histories

The derivations of the names of 74 Anopheles species and one subgenus are explained together with accounts of the life and scientific work of people who have been honored by having a mosquito named after them. Descriptive accounts are given of geographical locations, whether towns, regions or counties, that have had anopheline species named after them.

GODARD'S LIST: WHY SPIELBERG AND AUSCHWITZ ARE NUMBER ONE

Godard has consistently voiced his disapproval of Spielberg's Schindler's List. Critics have noted this antipathy yet there is currently no detailed analysis of Godard's specific objections. This article attempts to remedy this omission. In the first half, the author focuses on the motivation and logic that underpin Spielberg's film, paying particular attention to the qualms expressed in Godard's Éloge de l'amour over the moral and philosophical dubiousness of employing witness testimony as a means of recreating the past in the present. Then, in the second half, the author analyses the politics of identification in a selection of Godard's films to argue that Schindler's List is made ethically palatable for mainstream audiences through the use of manipulative erotic imagery. There, two critiques are brought together to suggest that Godard's primary objection to Schindler's List is that it constitutes an uplifting consideration of the Shoah that precludes a more serious rumination on an event that ruptures the histories of both the cinema and the twentieth century.

It's a shark eat shark world: Steven Spielberg's ambiguous politics

This paper attempts to put forward a playful interpretation of the films of Steven Spielberg, by relating them to the workings of capitalism. This relationship is understood in terms of both the form and content of his films, and also in terms of how Spielberg's films operate culturally as products of Hollywood, which is itself a capitalist machine par excellence. Capitalism is in particular defined as a system that produces its own ‘others’; that is, capital produces its own outsiders and opponents in order to be able to consume them so as always to be expanding. In Spielberg's films, we see a range of attitudes taken towards ‘others’: some are depicted as irrevocably evil and to be destroyed, while others again are threatened with destruction, but elicit our sympathy and often escape. These differing attitudes towards ‘others’ demonstrate the ambiguous nature of Spielberg's representations of (and relation to) capital. Is he, like Jaws, a shark that cannot stop feeding? Or is he a shark hunter, ready to skewer capital precisely by bringing it ever closer to its end?

Review article: Nothing much to phone home about (with exceptions): four books on Spielberg

10,000 word review of four more or less concurrent academic/critical books on Spielberg's films, including Warren Buckland, directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the contemporary blockbuster; Lester D Friedman, Citizen Spielberg; Andrew Gordon, Empire of dreams: The science fiction and fantasy films of Steven Spielberg and Nigel Morris, The cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of light.

Man as Rescuer and Monster in Steven Spielberg's Film Text "Schindler's List"

This journal article addresses the confrontation between two extreme representations of man in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993): the rescuer and the monster. It is my contention that these representations simplify two of the moral options – good versus evil – from which men can freely choose according to both Judaism and Catholicism, which are the two religious cults the film alludes to. This article has a three-fold structure. The first part focuses on the godlike representation of Oskar Schindler and his relation to key episodes in the Bible. The second one deals with Amon Goeth, Schindler’s mirror image and the incarnation of evil in the film. The third part surveys Spielberg’s blending of religious traditions in some films prior to Schindler’s List. As a conclusion it is proposed that the godlike man who rescues his people is not only Oskar Schindler, but also Steven Spielberg.

Hollywood's D-Day From the Perspective of the 1960s and the 1990s: The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan

Cinematic history from Hollywood is intriguing not only for its perspectives on the past but, also, for what it says about the times in which the films went into production. Often the creators of motion pictures address concerns of the present when they fashion stories about the past. This characteristic is certainly evident in the case of movies depicting events and problems associated with World War II. For instance, Bataan(1943) shows United States forces fighting bravely in the face of an overwhelming enemy. The movie's tragic conclusion, in which all of the Americans die, symbolizes the difficult position of American soldiers in the Pacific during the early period of the war (Basinger 45-46). In another example of conditions of the present weighing heavily on a cinematic treatment of the past, the creators of Patton (1970) planned to tell the story of a heroic general when they moved their project toward production in the 1960s. By the time they were ready for major photography, however, controversies over the Vietnam conflict made the intended gung-ho portrait of General Patton problematic. Consequently, the filmmakers shaped their story and advertising in ways that suggested a complex and sometimes critical portrait of their subject's militarism (Toplin, History By Hollywood, 163-164). It is useful, then, to consider the messages and appeal of two films that are among the most influential American movies about the Second World War, The Longest Day (1962) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). Both deal with the invasion of France's beaches on June 6, 1944, and each became a blockbuster, drawing large audiences in the United States and abroad; each proved a surprising success because, in 1962 and 1998, the traditional war film seemed to have run its course; and each film was the project of a leading Hollywood mogul who had racked up a long list of movie successes. Darryl Zanuck was the major force behind The Longest Day (he produced the movie and directed more than half of its scenes). Saving Private Ryan owed its success largely to Steven Spielberg. Why did these movies resonate with audiences in 1962 and 1998? In which ways did Zanuck's and Spielberg's films address different or similar concerns of the American people in 1962 and 1998? How did critics' reactions differ, and in which ways do these distinctions throw some light on changing attitudes toward war? Above all, did these films contribute to the public's appreciation of history, even though each communicated very different impressions of warfare and history? The Longest Day Darryl Zanuck look a substantial risk when he made The Longest Day. After years of splendid successes (including many Academy Awards) as a producer and head of production at Twentieth Century Fox, he seemed to be losing his magic in the early sixties. Zanuck's work on Cleopatra turned out to be a fiasco (the long-delayed picture eventually appeared in theaters in 1963). That expensive historical epic left Fox stretched financially. Yet, while Cleopatra was in production, Zanuck proposed to make the most expensive black-and-white war epic in Hollywood's history. His $10 million gamble succeeded magnificently. The Longest Day grossed seventeen million dollars in the United States and reaped millions more abroad, and it is still shown on network TV at least once annually. Zanuck's movie carried a symbolic message regarding the Cold War. It showed that American, British, and French troops could cooperate to defeat a common enemy. In 1944 the Allies successfully challenged Nazi Germany; and in the sixties, the movie seemed to suggest, those very Allies could successfully confront the communists (Ambrose in Carnes). Zanuck made this message more workable by depicting the German leadership with a modicum of empathy. German military commanders in The Longest Day seem confused, fumbling, and sometimes comic. They are not enthusiastic about Nazi policies, and, in one telling moment in the story, a general complains about Hitler's foolish leadership, blaming the Fuhrer, especially, for the failure of the German counteroffensive (Custen 362). …