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.
Thursday, March 11 at 12 noon
Department of Theatre
University of Victoria
Listen to John Berra's talk on Contemporary Japanese Cinema
Intellect author and editor of the Directory of World Cinema: Japan, Dr John Berra, was recently a special quest speaker at the Coventry East Asian Film Society. His topic focused on Contemporary Japanese Cinema— Domestic Appeal vs International Prestige.
If you missed John's scintillating lecture fear not, CUEAFS offer the opportunity to listen to a podcast of the talk.
For this third and final installment, film scholar Rimgaila Salys leads us through a viewing of Volga-Volga a Soviet musical comedy from 1938 by Grigoria Aleksandrov.
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
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
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 of The 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."
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."
Read the full interview here.
The Columbia Free Times features an insightful review of The 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.
Download your copy today.
Our colleagues at Intellect share this recent report from the Rome Film Festival
Mark Browning, author of David 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.
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.
Learn more about Performing Dark Arts