A Guest Post by Christopher Smit, associate professor of media studies at Calvin College and author of The Exile of Britney Spears.
The continued success of any institution of higher education has always been tethered to its willingness to be flexible, expandable, and ruthlessly committed to students. As budgets shrink, student demographics shift, and debates about what constitutes “liberal arts education” heat up, this is now, perhaps more than ever, the case. Tried and true formulas are being challenged by new economic, technological, and cultural changes. And when I look around at the faces of my colleagues, I see a bit of panic.
A good deal of our contemporary unease seems to originate from successful books like The Shallows by Nicolas Carr in which it is argued that the digital age is negatively affecting the brain arrangements of our students. Carr’s book claims that the silent generation has been the victim of a cross cultural dumbing down; the vast amounts of surface communication offered by social networking, Google, blogs, etc., has left no room for depth of thought. Bad news for a generation that seems more interested in speed than it is in quality. The new media mind, as it were, is a direct threat to higher educational goals like contemplation, well tendered analysis, or depth of any intellectual kind.
American Independent Gothic: A Travelogue by John Berra
Over at the University of Stirling’s Gothic Imagination blog, John Berra of Directory of World Cinema fame is making good use of his stint as a guest blogger to assemble a travelogue of what he’s termed the “American Independent Gothic,” that is to say filmmakers operating outside the Hollywood system and “filtering elements of the Gothic through their respective regional visions of the United States.” So far, he’s covered Bad Lieutenant (1992), Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987), and the David Lynch psycho-thriller Mulholland Drive (2001). Each of John’s post will focus on a different film tied to a certain geographical region, from bustling cities to the dusty highways of the midwest.
Written by film studies luminaries David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Observations on Film Art is a well-read blog on all aspects of film aesthetics. Recently, they shared their thoughts on Intellect’s Danish Directors 2:
"Danish Directors, by Mette Hjort and Ib Bondebjerg, has become a standard companion to the most successful “small cinema” on the European scene. Now it has a successor in Danish Directors 2: Dialogues on the New Danish Fictional Cinema, edited by Mette Hjort, Eva Jorholt, and Eva Novrup Redvall. Once again, we get lengthy, in-depth interviews covering the value of film education, the vagaries of funding, and filmmakers’ creative decision-making. Lone Scherfig, Christoffer Boe, Per Fly, Paprika Steen, and many other major figures are included."
Christoph Schlingensief, acclaimed German director, actor, and artist, passed away on Saturday, August 21 in Berlin. One of the most controversial and innovative figures both in his home country of Germany and abroad, Schlingensief had been making art for three decades across a diverse range of fields, including film, television, activism, opera, and theater.
Born in 1960 in Oberhausen, Schlingensief studied philosophy, art history, and German. He then turned to acting and directing, receiving widespread recognition first for Germany Trilogy and continuing on to create a groundbreaking and politically engaged body of work. He was most recently developing ideas for next year’s Venice Biennale for which he was to represent Germany.
“Schlingensief was a hugely influential artist in Germany. His work encouraged the audience to think critically and creatively about issues like immigration, unemployment, homelessness, the rights of disabled people, and the Nazi legacy in contemporary Germany.”
New Volume in Intellect’s Directory of World Cinema Series
From the raw realism of John Cassavetes to the postmodern nightmares of David Lynch, the films that have emerged from the American independent sector represent a national cinema that has generated worldwide devotion and discussion. The Directory of World Cinema: American Independent provides an insight into American independent cinema through reviews of significant titles and case studies of leading directors, alongside the explorations of the cultural and industrial landscape of key genres. The cinematic lineage of dysfunctional families, Generation-X slackers, and homicidal maniacs take their place alongside the explicit expressionism of the American underground, making this a truly comprehensive volume.
About the series:
Intellect’s Directory of World Cinema aims to play a part in moving intelligent, scholarly criticism beyond the academy by building a forum for the study of film that relies on a disciplined theoretical base. Each volume of the directory will take the form of a collection of reviews, longer essays, and research resources, accompanied by film stills highlighting significant films and players.
Today is Bastille Day, or, as it is known in France, La Fete Nationale, a celebration commemorating the storming of the Bastille prison in Paris on July 14, 1789. And though it’s a pity we’re not partying along the Champs-Elysees, we here at Cryptonym would like contribute to the festivities with a list celebrating all things French.
The first title, especially fitting for the occasion, is Visualizing the Revolution by Hubertus Kohle and Rolf Reichardt. An innovative and lushly illustrated study, Visualizing the Revolution surveys the rich and multifaceted visual culture of the French Revolution, exploring its creation and how it conveyed the new revolutionary sensibilities of the era. Unlike most studies on art of the French Revolution, Visualizing the Revolution embraces a wide range of artistic genres—including prints, architecture, painting, and sculpture—and also draws upon archival documents to investigate the period’s aesthetic concerns. The authors break new ground in methodology and interpretative practice as they tease out the web of connections between these various historical artifacts and argue for the central place of the arts in the transmission of ideas and the political manipulation of the populace.
Staying with the visual arts, Studies in French Cinema looks at the development of French screen studies in the United Kingdom over the past twenty years and the ways in which innovative scholarship in the UK has helped shape the field in English- and French-speaking universities. Covering a wide range of key films—contemporary and historical, popular and auteur—the volume provides an invaluable overview for students and scholars of the state of French cinema and French film studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Next on the list: Sartre. A list celebrating all things French is incomplete without a nod to the twentieth-century French intellectual. Penned in 1943–44 as a commission for French filmmakers Pathe, Sartre’s screenplay Typhus centers on the improbable couple formed by the disgraced former doctor Georges, who has sunk to the lowest depths of a highly stratified colonial society, and Nellie, a down-at-heel nightclub singer, whose partner succumbs to the typhus epidemic sweeping the country. Set in Malaya during the British protectorate, Typhus is both a turbulent love story in the best traditions of Western popular cinema and an existentialist tale of moral redemption that shares many fascinating parallels with Albert Camus’s novel The Plague.
And finally, the wine. Wine drinking culture has traditionally been a source of pride for the French. In fact, to many it is an essential part of what it means to be French. In Wine Drinking Culture in France, Marion Demossier examines wine consumption in France since the 1970s, arguing that it cannot be separated from the wider cultural context in which it takes place but also revealing how recent social, economic, and political forces have transformed wine’s role in constructing France’s national identity.
And so concludes our all things French list on this Bastille Day. Click here and here to celebrate with more of our French titles.
Christoph Schlingensief: Art without Borders, due out in August from Intellect, is featured on the artist’s official website where you can also whittle away those last few hours before happy hour reading up on Schlingensief’s other projects including an in–the–works opera village in Burkina Faso and an upcoming joint exhibit with rocker and Schlingensief disciple Patti Smith.
In addition to the first book–length English-language critical assessment of his body of work in film, television, theater, and opera, Christoph Schlingensief: Art without Borders includes an interview with the outspoken artist himself.
From Gumshoe to Pressure to The Boy Who Turned Yellow, a retrospective at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival will celebrate the oft–overlooked films of 1970s Britain. Says film studies scholar Paul Newland on this misunderstood period:
“Clearly, historians for quite a long time have chosen not to look at this period, perhaps because the feeling was that the films that did get made were frankly appalling. But the festival is clearly showing that is simply not the case. Very interesting films were being made. Not always great films, but intriguing and often offbeat films.”
For statesiders unable to attend, Newland has a new book, Don’t Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s, out this month with Intellect that sheds light on the important genres from this period as well as the nature of British film culture and its relationship to pop culture, television, and the cultural underground.
For more information, please visit the event page or click through to the article in yesterday’s Herald Scotland. A review of Newland’s book also appears in this morning's The List.
Once a run–down mill town, Pawtucket, just four miles north of Providence on the banks of Rhode Island’s Seekonk River, has seen significant change since the late nineties when it began offering urban–style loft space in the city’s twenty–three abandoned former textile mills to working artists. As momentum grew for the new arts district, mayor James Doyle hired cultural policy scholar Ann Galligan to draft a strategic cultural plan to promote art in Pawtucket.
Back in 2004, the New York Times ran an article about Pawtucket’s urban renewal which is now treated to a chapter, written by Galligan, in the forthcoming second edition of Cultural Quarters, edited by planning expert Simon Roodhouse for Intellect Books.
To learn more about Pawtucket’s thriving arts district—one of one hundred nationwide, please visit the book announcement in this morning’s Pawtucket Times where Galligan’s “roadmap” for the city is discussed.
Lumberton, aka Wilmington, North Carolina. The home of Intellect’s North American editorial office, and stage for the surreal underworld of David Lynch7rsquo;s haunting 1986 film, Blue Velvet. To celebrate the launch of The Film Paintings of David Lynch, Intellect's Book Publishing Manager took a tour of “Lumberton”, retracing the steps of Blue Velvet’s historic movie landscape. Below are her photos accompanied by excerpts from the script.
80. INT. BEAUMONTS' CAR/LINCOLN STREET – NIGHT
Jeffrey and Sandy turn in to the street where Dorothy Vallens lives and glide to a stop close to the building. Jeffery cuts the engine.
Sandy’s school: New Hanover High School
61. EXT. CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL – DAY
Jeffrey is parked across the street from the school. High school kids are pouring out the front door. In a moment he sees Sandy come out with two or three other girls. They walk down the sidewalk away from Jeffrey.
The Police Station, 115 Redcross Street, Wilmington
173. INT. POLICE STATION – DAY
Jeffrey climbs the stairs up to Detective Williams' office.
“David Lynch started to make films as an art student in the mid–1960s at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia because he wanted a painting that “would really be able to move.” This fine art sensibility has persisted throughout his film–making career in which he has produced a singular and remarkable body of work which crosses the borders between different art forms and thus challenges some of the tenets of film theory as it currently stands.
In Lynch’s practice the film set is treated as a living painting which changes and develops via intuition and experimentation as the work is made. This fine art approach is apparent from his first feature film, Eraserhead (1976), through to his experimental pieces on his website, DavidLynch.com, and becomes even more pronounced in the labyrinthine digital film–making of Inland Empire (2006). The open nature of much of the work also provides a space for the viewer to become enmeshed in the complexities of what is presented on screen, and who can thereby become an ‘extra’ by becoming embroiled in the continuing life of the films as audiences critically engage with them, in print and digital forms, producing supplementary knowledge beyond the rigidities of an auteur approach to film studies.
The connection between startling individual images and diachronic narrative in these films creates a dialectic that problematizes the relationship between different art forms, and which may, partly, account for the wide divergence of critical responses to these films as they cross boundaries between film and fine art. In box office terms some of the films might be considered wilful failures, such as the seemingly paradoxical decision to make a prequel feature film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), after the television series had been stopped, but this is a film the director felt compelled to make and whose critical reputation has in fact grown over the years. These films are situated within the North American film industry, but at its edges, and which perhaps explains some of the responses to the work. His later films, particularly Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006), critique the history of the industry and particularly, Hollywood, from the position of women damaged by their attempts to become film stars.
In a practice that fully embraces new technology it will be fascinating to see where Lynch goes next. For him the freedom that digital technology provides brings film-making and painting closer together as greater creative control is brought into the film-maker’s hands. This increased freedom is also present for the viewer, in terms of interactions with the film text in the cinema, on DVD and the internet, in either a professional or amateur capacity, in which the continued engagement with this body of work provides these ‘extra’ voices with an expanding, unfolding space for critical interactions to extend the life of the films and to provide supplementary knowledge.
The end results of Lynch’s film paintings are always startling; continually moving, changing shape and creating new forms; no wonder they elicit such strong reactions, as this short extract from Inland Empire indicates.”
Late April has heralded a number of appearances by our authors. Below are recapped some of the week’s events:
Intellect Books author Alfredo Cramerotti presented a lecture at London’s Rivington Place with some interesting observations on art and investigative journalism. Cramerotti is the author of Aesthetic Journalism and the forthcoming title, The Blind.
Philip Bell was a guest on The Philosopher’s Zone where he raised concerns about cultural studies as taught in university. Confronting Theory is Bell’s latest publication with Intellect. A podcast may be found here.
Finally, Swan Isle Press poet Marjorie Agosin, author of The Light of Desire, was featured along with filmmaker Alicia Scherson on the CBC Writers and Company program “Aftershock: Chile in Transition.” A podcast is available here.
G. James Daichendt on the Need for the Artist-Teacher
Artist-Teacher: A Philosophy for Creating and Teaching from Intellect Books received much attention at the most recent College Art Association meeting, for many practicing artists in academia are faced with the same challenges in the attempt to balance creative and academic work. Here, author G. James Daichendt, explores how the artist-teacher balance can benefit both the professor and the students.
The profession of teaching art has a rich and complicated history. From apprenticeship relationships to contemporary art education research degrees, the goals and standards in the field of teaching have changed dramatically. But has this change been progressive? The majority of degree granting art programs never talk about what good teaching looks like—despite the fact that art instruction influences the way it is made. In fact, the two fields of art education and art rarely interact or collaborate. The result of this dilemma is art departments with no exposure to their own history of teaching and art education departments divorced from the art world—a pity for both parties that results in poor teaching. However, the concept of the artist-teacher represents a successful integration of education within the core discipline of art production. The unfortunate division is frustrating but I believe those who value art instruction at the highest levels will embrace the concept of the artist-teacher.
The differences between the field of education and the field of art are at the root of this divide. Artists are certainly interested in different or contradictory goals than teachers. The role of the artist and the role of the educator each hold their own history, theories, and training. An artist is generally thought of someone who creates art on a full-time basis and regularly exhibits in galleries or museums. Often, a teacher works in a much more structured format like a school where the main emphasis is the development and education of students or student-artists. Mentors in the same field then reinforce the artist and teacher roles. Those brave souls who then choose to tackle teaching and making art at the highest level have to adjust to the tension these two roles play in their dual professions.
I can remember my own struggles as a young art teacher. The professional day encompassed meetings, curriculum planning, professional development, and on top of that—actually teaching! Trying to mix studio time into this hectic schedule became difficult and frustrating. However, I had my priorities set wrong. The field of art education values teaching but often misses the essential core of art instruction—which is art! It was only through studying the lives of great artist-teachers that I began to see how art and education really compliment one-another. It was through these artist-teachers that I finally understood how powerful this concept could be and how art making can be central to teaching practice.
The term artist-teacher, teaching artist, and artist-educator have been used in recent years to qualify a commitment to each of these roles (art and education). Emphasizing the word artist in one’s title clarifies the importance of creating art. However, I suggest that this term is more than just a descriptor but an actual concept for bringing art making philosophies into the classroom. I found that the very best teachers are not pedagogy experts but those who actively embrace their studio thinking processes in the classroom. Re-inventing what it means to be an art teacher involves being an artist and applying this passion in the classroom. By viewing the classroom through the discipline of art, this space becomes a canvas in which the artist-teacher manipulates the students and curricula like the elements and principles of design. As a philosophy of teaching, artist-teacher is not considered a dual role but it involves the integration of artistic experiences in the classroom. I feel these two activities—teaching and making art––actually supporting one-another, despite being difficult to balance.
Becoming better teachers in our colleges and high schools requires a strong commitment to the field of visual art and education. Art departments are short sighted in their collected memories and art education programs need to strengthen their relationships with art departments. Each field needs one another and is encompassed within the concept of the artist-teacher. I want to encourage artistic thinking and teaching at all levels and not simply mimetic approaches to teaching. Trends and weak philosophies will not sustain interest nor will it fulfill the ambitions of great art teachers. The activities of artists are some of the most exciting and ambitious thinking happening—our teaching of art should reflect this same experience. If you are interested in becoming an artist-teacher or you feel that you have lost that essential core to your teaching agenda—I encourage you to study the great artist-teachers of the past and reflect what you can draw from their experiences.&mdashG. James Daichendt, Ed.D.
The accompanying illustrations are images of Arthur Wesley Dow—one of him in the studio and one of his student drawings—an exemplary artist and teacher discussed in Daichendt's book.
Intellect Books invites all of you near the University of Victoria to join them for the launch of Applied Theatre, edited by Monica Prendergast and Juliana Saxton.
In the folk musical, living means singing (and dancing), which arise out of everyday existence: Okhapkin's sweeping the yard turns into a lively dance; the policeman's whistle imitates the song of a nightingale; the Melkovodskites play not only folk instruments, but also the everyday artifacts that surround them (logs, jugs, saws, kitchen utensils), and their work (driving a wagon, pulling up a sail, steering a ship) passes naturally into song and dance. Singing or other artistic performance also denotes living rightly—that is, in harmony with the natural order—and all the townspeople are gifted in music or dance except for Byvalov. He cannot dance (his attempt at a lezginka in his office, after escaping the town's talent show, is unrhythmical and wooden); he cannot sing and at the Olimpiada performance he lets out a falsetto squawk. He knows nothing about classical music and claims personal acquaintance with a "Comrade Shul'bert," nor does he care about folk music, as evidenced by his rejection of Strelka's group and the poor quality of the balalaikas produced by his factory.
As a folk musical, Volga-Volga also incorporates aspects of the balagan or carnival street show, first adopted by Meierkhol'd and elaborated by Eisenstein in their theatrical productions, and therefore perfectly familiar to Aleksandrov, Erdman, Il'inskii, and others of Meierkhol'd's circle. Alesha lays bare the subtext by referring to Strelka's group as "your balagan." The film's prologue and epilogue (the verse introductions of major characters and moralizing conclusion) are double-coded as typical of folk performance, while remaining within the genre conventions of 1930s Western comedy films which employ introductory cameos and direct audience address in the coda of comedian comedy. In both instances, the direct address frame underscores the fictional aspect of the performance.
Advertising material published for the premiere of Volga-Volga plainly points to the one-dimensionality of the film's characters by depicting them all as comedic masks. Strelka's vigor and high spirits do not devolve from our understanding of her character, but simply function as her external tag. In the same way, Alesha represents reflexive choler, Byvalov self-importance and careerism, and the Lotsman boastful dissimulation. Byvalov, the most blatantly parodic figure of the film, displays a farcical resemblance to a pig: short, stiff neck, stocky torso, short legs and mincing gait, snub nose, and the dull glance of small, swollen eyes. Lest we miss the point, in the telegram-shouting scene, he is framed with pigs in the background and finally steps on one, precipitating swine chaos in the river.—Rimgaila Salys
Part Two: The Films of Grigoria Aleksandrov: The Radiant Path
Today, film scholar Rimgaila Salys leads us through a viewing of The Radiant Path (or The Shining Path) a Soviet musical comedy from 1940 by Grigoria Aleksandrov.
Although each of the heroines of Aleksandrov's musical films—whether Aniuta, Marion Dixon, or Strelka—is in some respect a Cinderella type who escapes obscurity, poverty, or degradation to achieve fame, deserved recognition of her talent, personal happiness, and—beginning with Circus—political consciousness, this persistent paradigm emerges in its most literal form in Aleksandrov's last musical comedy, The Radiant Path. Tania Morozova, an uneducated country girl working as a servant and nanny in a provincial town, is fired by her bourgeois mistress for disparaging her employer to a handsome new arrival, engineer Lebedev. Party organizer Pronina takes Tania in hand, sends her to literacy classes, and places her in a textile factory, where Tania gradually rises through the ranks to become a skilled weaver. After reading about Stakhanov’s record, Tania devises a plan to operate a greater number of weaving machines, overcomes the factory director’s opposition, and eventually sets a Stakhanovite record herself. She is awarded the Order of Lenin in a Kremlin ceremony and afterward, looking into a magic mirror, imagines her future as a people’s deputy and Lebedev's partner.
Tania's ritual initiation into a higher world (she wears a white dress and the set is flooded with light) will both transform her into a leader who will now mentor others (the public context) and will allow her to love (the private sphere). Tania's flight to the mountains, coming as it does after the award ceremony, functions as the physical expression of transcendence, the upward vector signified by the paradigmatic "ever higher." Her travels take her from the Kremlin out over the city to distant snow-capped mountains, thereby uniting periphery and center before she returns to Moscow, the sacred omphalos, for the finale of the film. As Tania's song addressed to the country ends ("Hello, land of heroes, land of dreamers, land of scholars"), her white Kremlin dress is replaced by a dark power suit and she takes the wheel of the car, thereby actualizing her transformation from worker into leader and public figure. In the textile pavilion, Tania's suit is replaced by a less severe, but still business-like, pale dress covered by a dark duster, more appropriate to the love scenes that will conclude the film.
After her automobile flight, Tania returns to Moscow, to the Agricultural Exhibition, another symbolic space metonymic to the "fairy tale come true" of the entire land. The actual agrarian countryside is represented by the exhibition grounds as a well-manicured park. Although Tania's transformation is initially located in the future (underscored by the gilded mirror frame visible around the edges of the flying automobile scenes), as she descends to the Agricultural Exhibition, steering her car toward Mukhina's gigantic Factory Worker and Collective Farm Woman, the looking glass frame disappears, leading the audience to perceive the subsequent Agricultural Exhibition scenes as present reality. The mise-en-scene—actual exhibition grounds and fictional textile pavilion—together with Tania's metamorphosis into engineer and deputy to the Supreme Soviet, has collapsed time, staging the future in the present. The finale of The Radiant Path elevates the narrative to the symbolic register of Socialist Realist representation.—Rimgaila Salys
Part One: The Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov: Circus
Your faithful publicity spy at Cryptonym will admit that she has a near obsession with depressing films, the more they rip her heart out and stomp on it (in a thought-provoking way of course), the more she adores them. Yet, sometimes the bleakness is just too much and something playful and a little absurd is in order for a change of mood. This is where the musicals of Grigorii Aleksandrov come in.
In this first part of a three part series, Cryptonym has invited noted Russian film scholar Rimgaila Salys, author of The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov to introduce us to some of the fun and provocative films that were among the most popular works of Russian cinema in the 1930s and ’40s. For today's installment, Salys looks at Circus, an eccentric work from 1936.
For Aleksandrov, the transition from the pomp, pageantry, and pathos of the Hollywood musical to the Stalinist grand style and spectacle was a natural one. The successful musical—and especially the folk musical—expresses the ritual values of a society that coincide with the ideological values of the producer, in this case the Soviet State, so that Stalinist myths and their visual elaborations enter Circus naturally as a function of the genre. Aleksandrov's musical was perhaps the first Soviet film to give full and direct expression to the core myths of high Stalinism. Like many Socialist Realist heroes, Marion Dixon undergoes a painful rite of passage as part of her path to consciousness and incorporation into Soviet society. Her arrival in the Soviet Union may be seen as separation; learning about Soviet society in Moscow under Martynov's tutelage expresses the transition. Dixon suffers initiation, regression into chaos, and symbolic death via Kneishitz's public revelations regarding her illicit past. At one point he tells Dixon, "This city has driven you mad!" Madness is not excluded from the death-experience of the initiate. Traumatized by the public exposure of her past, Dixon runs away from the circus arena and literally faints from shame and horror. By forming a proper family with Martynov, she transforms her formerly illicit and dark sexuality into a healthy, wholesome femininity, figured by the white sweater and skirt of the fizkul’turnitsa. She is resurrected into the great Soviet family in the Red Square finale of the film. Her sexual "spontaneity" is first stabilized and made passive within the family unit and then transformed into consciousness and subsumed to the state patriarchy during the second finale.
The success of the show "Flight to the Stratosphere" (the Soviet cannon is mounted on a car—much more modern) parallels the now successful love of the couple, whose cultural values—domestic and foreign, capitalist and communist—have been reconciled. The sexual transcendence of flight is now melded with national transcendence, just as Martynov's cupid wings have been replaced by the wings of Icarus. Dixon and Martynov make their entrance as equals, dressed in unisex aviators' jumpsuits, capes and Flash Gordon helmets, and descend the grand staircase to the rhythm of "Song of the Motherland." Symbols of Soviet air power abound, from propellers on the showgirls' tank tops to their imitation of whirring blades in front of a triangular bank of propellers to the stratospheric rocket itself. The glorification of military might is paradigmatic for the folk musical, as in Busby Berkeley's synchronized marching and flag waving in Footlight Parade (1933) and the battleship number of Born to Dance (1936). In the Soviet instance, feats of aviation, such as the rescue of the Cheliuskin crew, also signify communication and unity between the center and the marginal areas of the Motherland.—Rimgaila Salys
The Winter 2009 issue of Variant features a review ofThe Place of Artists' Cinema, Maeve Connolly's seminal work on site, space, and cinema architecture in film and video works by artists.
From the review:
"Maeve Connolly's arguments in The Place of Artists' Cinema force us to think of 'artists' cinema' as a form or practice that raises interesting questions."
Stephen King on the Big Screen author interviewed on BBC radio and Zone Horror
Mark Browning, author of Stephen King on the Big Screen, was interviewed by BBC Radio Kent about the terrifying and eerie film adaptations of Stephen King's work. Listen to the interview here.
Browning also gave an exclusive interview to TV's Zone Horror. An excerpt:
"To be widely accepted, directors/writers usually have to compromise the elements which make horror special to such an extent, that it no longer becomes recognisable as 'horror.' . . . Mainstream cinema and the full range of what the horror genre can be, are really worlds apart."
The Columbia Free Times features an insightful review ofThe Trustus Plays, a collection of three full-length, award-winning performance texts by American playwright Jon Tuttle. Each play was a winner of the national Trustus Playwrights Festival contest and was then produced by the Trustus Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina.
From the review:
"While the genres vary, all of The Trustus Plays revolve around a protagonist who must ultimately make a choice 'freighted with ontological implications.' Tuttle, not unlike Brecht, admits that he himself had to search his own work to find its ultimate meaning."
If your plan for the New Year includes watching new films and learning more about cinema, you might be interested in this offer from our colleagues at Intellect:
Indulge your mind this January with Intellect's festive film offer. If you subscribe to any of Intellect's film journals before January 31, 2009 you will receive a book of your choice from the film range absolutely free! There are over 35 books and fourteen journals to choose from at Intellect.
Though the University of Chicago Press offers all of Intellect's books available for order, in order to take advantage of this subscription offer and claim your free book, please email marketing@intellectbooks.com
Intellect would like to announce that the new issue of IQ is now available to download from their website. IQ lets you in on all the latest releases and what the authors, editors and publishers at Intellect have to say.
Hear what it is that makes Intellect stand out from the crowd in an exclusive interview with Intellect's Journals Manager, Ravi Butalia: "As we grow and mature as a company, we are realizing that the privilege of publishing cutting-edge academic research goes hand in hand with deep-rooted social responsibility."
Read relevant and up-to-date articles, including "Unsung Heroes: New Musical Theatre & the Creative Industries" in which editors of Studies in Musical Theatre, Dominic Symonds and George Burrows, discuss the state of musical theatre today; Piers Plowright interviews the editors of the The Soundtrack and art fans won't want to miss the book focus article on Art, Community and Environment.
David Cronenberg Exhibition at the Rome Film Festival
Our colleagues at Intellect share this recent report from the Rome Film Festival
Mark Browning, author ofDavid Cronenberg: Author or Filmmaker?, contributed to one of the text commentaries for a special exhibition, forming part of the 2008 Rome Film Festival. Chromosomes, featured fifty specially-enhanced close-ups, all with accompanying commentary, from a range of Cronenberg’s work, spanning over 30 years. It followed previous exhibitions on the work of Peter Greenaway, Michael Nyman and Atom Egoyan, all initiated by Volumina, a cultural body concerned with bringing Art and Film together in new and surprising ways. In 2005, they organized an exhibition to accompany Cronenberg’s lushly-illustrated, limited edition book, Red Cars, featuring a screenplay about the Ferrari dynasty and the battle for the 1961 Formula One championship. Browning’s commentary complemented a still from Spider, one of Cronenberg’s more underrated works. Links between Cronenberg and literature, the focus of Browning’s book, are particularly pertinent, not just in the light of Red Cars but Cronenberg’s keenly-awaited debut as a novelist, due for publication next year, provisionally entitled Consumed. The exhibition was at the Palazzo della Esposizioni in Rome.
Review: Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring by Michael Mangan
The Times (UK) recently ran a review of Intellect Books' Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring. In addition to recounting an anecdote about an ill-fated encounter with Uri Geller, reviewer Mark Stafford discusses the struggles of jugglers, court performers, and conjurers through the ages, who were often regarded as dangerous occultists by their contemporaries. He praises Performing Dark Arts for its unparalleled scope and erudition amongst a glut of how-to guides for amateur magicians:
If you want a book that reveals "the secrets of street magicians" you will be disappointed. If you want to learn about the one trick that all good conjurers have up their sleeve, the oldest in the book—here it is, rehearsed across the centuries. It is to make sure that whichever cup the audience looks under—mere chicanery or actual sorcery—the ball is not there. It is to "leave us balanced between two explanations," where we can enjoy the possibility of phenomenal powers, without the genie escaping the bottle.
