Showing papers in "Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory in 2004"
TL;DR: The World and the Jug essay as discussed by the authors was a vigorous argument on behalf of African American cultural vitality and the African American artist's creative autonomy in the early 1960s, when the notion of an African American literature was virtually inconceivable to the most sophisticated literary critics, both within and without the academy.
Abstract: Irving howe's 1963 essay \"Black Boys and Native Sons\" is today remembered primarily for occasioning Ralph Ellison's eloquent rebuttal, \"The World and the Jug,\" a vigorous argument on behalf of African American cultural vitality and the African American artist's creative autonomy. From our historical vantage point, Ellison seems to have trumped Howe, for critics have generally followed Ellison in judging Howe presumptuous and narrowly prescriptive (if not inadvertently racist). But Howe's essay might be better remembered as a rather bold defense of Richard Wright and call for an African American literary opposition at a moment when Wright's critical stature was at its lowest, and when the notion of an African American literature was virtually inconceivable to the most sophisticated literary critics of the day, both within and without the academy. Howe used the highly select recognition afforded first Wright, and then Ellison and James Baldwin at the expense of Wright, as the surest gauge of national cultural tendencies he assumed to be deeply political. In effect, his subject was the politics of canon formation. Published in his own venue Dissent, which though anti-Communist sought to keep socialist political possibilities alive in the wake of McCarthyism, \"Black Boys and Native Sons\" articulated divisions within a loose community of white, largely Jewish, New York-based intellectuals that the consensus-oriented political and aesthetic culture of the early Cold War era was threatening to render insignificant. This entailed challenging the modes of modernist aesthetic resistance espoused in particular by the once radical Partisan Review, and a seemingly widespread willingness on the part of adversarial intellectuals to embrace the possibilities of Americanism.1
20 citations
TL;DR: In 1853, Love led a lynch mob to capture Joaquin Murieta and his partner "Three Fingered Jack" as mentioned in this paper, who were executed by Love and his rangers.
Abstract: As legend has it, Joaquín murieta, the (in)famous California Mexican bandit, met his demise in 1853 at tne hands of Captain Harry Love, a Texan transplanted to California and hired to lead a legally sanctioned lynch mob to capture Murieta and his notorious partner \"Three Fingered Jack\" dead or alive. Being Mexican in post-Mexican War California, Murieta and \"Jack,\" a.k.a. Manuel Garcia, came back more dead than alive. Love decapitated Murieta and cut off Jack's hand as a way of proving their identities to California's lawmakers and collecting the $1,000 reward for Murieta's \"capture.\" Unfortunately, Murieta was such an enigmatic figure—as much folklore as fact by the time Love and his rangers were hired—that no one, Love included, could positively identify the head as belonging to one of the five feared Mexican bandits named Joaquin who sacked the highways, houses, and travelers of rancho California during the Gold Rush. Nevertheless, by August 1853, the pickled head traveled the state as a circus exhibit for
14 citations
TL;DR: A parodie tribute to the Revolutionary War memorial atop Boston's Bunker Hill as mentioned in this paper suggests the insufficiency of the one-note marble biography of a forgotten Revolutionary War veteran, which he equates to a "dilapidated old tombstone retouched," as a birthday gift to the monument.
Abstract: At the cornerstone ceremony for the Revolutionary War memorial atop Boston's Bunker Hill, Daniel Webster predicted in 1825 that the planned monument would \"proclaim the magnitude and importance of [the American Revolution] to every class and every age\" (Webster 6). Herman Melville, characteristically, decided to talk back. Melville dedicated Israel Potter (1855) to that monument, offering his fictional revision of the life of a forgotten Revolutionary War veteran, which he equates to a \"dilapidated old tombstone retouched,\" (1349) as a birthday gift to the obelisk. He deferentially addresses the war monument as the \"Great Biographer\" of Bunker Hill's soldiers, but the sustained attention to Potter's tribulations in his own novel suggests the insufficiency of the one-note marble biography. The dedication's parodie tribute situates a small, individual monument at the foot of a large, impersonal one, making clear what the taller structure is built upon: the under-remarked lives and deaths of many men like Potter, each of whom has a story that the official monument effaces in its drive to legitimate the Revolution. By \"restoring\" one of these erased individual stories, Israel Potter cuts the abstract obelisk down to size.
11 citations
TL;DR: Yellow bird, otherwise known as John Rollin Ridge, claimed that his novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the celebrated California Bandit (1854), told part of the history of the state of California, although most readers have since concluded, with David Farmer and Rennard Strickland, that Yellow Bird's story of the youthful and charismatic Mexican bandit is a strictly literary work as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Yellow bird, otherwise known as John Rollin Ridge, claimed that his novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854), told part of the history of the state of California, although most readers have since concluded, with David Farmer and Rennard Strickland, that Yellow Bird's story of the youthful and charismatic Mexican bandit is a "strictly literary work" (25). Yet, Farmer and Strickland's collection of the author's journalistic writings provides essential personal, historical and anthropological context for understanding Yellow Bird's novel, which, although it has a clear literary source, nevertheless finds both its aim and motive force in history. For recent writers aware of the "paradoxical logic at the heart of Ridge's relentlessly ironic and, therefore, ambiguous novel," Yellow Bird's imagined, fictional history consciously "undermines the project of 'history'" itself (Mondragón, 173, 176).1 Neatly collapsing Western distinctions between fiction and the "realities" recorded in unauthored "history," Yellow Bird presents his Mexican bandit as a brilliant "author who act[s] out his own tragedies" (Life 109), orchestrating various "scenes" and expanding the "theater" of his operations in such a way as to suggest that he is nothing if not the brilliant and inventive author of the events enacted in his history. The Cherokee author shows us his hero shaping his life as a story, planning its "grand climax" to the "loud
8 citations
TL;DR: The year of the New York World's Fair of nineteen thirty-nine was the year of Orson Welles' "Radio and the Martians" (1937), which fused two mechanical invaders of the American home, the radio and the Marsians as discussed by the authors, and was also a year of continuing depression in America, with millions at the mercy of assemblylines and bread-lines.
Abstract: Nineteen thirty-nine was the year of the New York World's Fair, in which corporate America triumphantly unveiled its "World of Tomorrow," an imagined future of prosperity through technological (and commercial) advance. It was also a year of continuing Depression in America, with millions at the mercy of assemblylines and bread-lines, and of the beginnings of war in Asia, Africa, and Europe, with machines of mass destruction gearing up for global holocaust. The year before, Orson Welles had convulsed the nation (or at least New Jersey) by fusing two mechanical invaders of the American home, the radio and the Martians; a year earlier, the Roosevelt administration had issued Technological Trends and National Policy (1937), a prescription for curing the nation's ills through the salve of technological savvy. While art critics Sheldon and Martha Cheney's Art and the Machine (1936) enthused over contemporary artforms that reflected the "peculiar beauty" (xi) of "machine-age speed, precision, and efficiency" (97), artist Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) portrayed
7 citations
TL;DR: Metamora was the Indian drama of the nineteeth-century American theatre as discussed by the authors, and through it Metacom, the actual name of the Wampanoag leader, became the Indian.
Abstract: etamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags marked the height of a craze for Indian chiefs as tragic heroes on the American stage. Beginning with John Nelson Barker's 1808 dramatization of the Pocahontas myth, The Indian Princess, or, La BeUe Sauvage, an Operatic Meio-Drame, and continuing through the 1840s, at least seventy-five such plays were written in the nineteenth-century United States (Moody, \"Introduction\" 203), but only one achieved lasting success. \"Metamora was the Indian drama of the nineteeth-century American theatre,\" wrote theater historian Richard Moody, and through it Metacom, the actual name of the Wampanoag leader, became the Indian
6 citations
TL;DR: Mitchell and Gilman as discussed by the authors pointed out that women were more than angels of the house, they embodied home itself, and women's suffrage was anathema to men.
Abstract: Despite the shared interest in baffling and pointless patterns suggested in these epigraphs, few cultural figures from late nineteenth-century America seem more at odds than S. Weir Mitchell and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Not only does the depressed narrator in Oilman's \"The Yellow Wallpaper\" fear being sent to Mitchell for one of his cures should she not \"pick up faster\" while under the care of her physician-husband (18), Gilman herself directly criticized Mitchell's treatment: \"the real purpose of the story was to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways\" (Living 121). Even a cursory look at his public life clearly indicates that Mitchell's \"errors\" extended beyond his medical practice. A staunch Victorian until his death in 1914, Mitchell spoke out against women's suffrage and advanced university training: \"I believe that if the higher education or the college life in any way, body or mind, unfits women to be good wives and mothers there had better be none of it\" (\"Address\" 5). Women, for Mitchell, were more than angels of the house, they embodied home itself:
6 citations
TL;DR: Turn-of-the-century typologies of male adolescence, however, anxiously circulated alongside typologies (homo) sexual perversion as discussed by the authors, and the paramount instance of this connection occurs in child psychologist G. Stanley Hall's widely popular Adolescence (1904), an encyclopedic overview of ''boyology''.
Abstract: ILLA CATHER ALWAYS HAD A SPECIAL INTEREST IN BOYS, but it certainly wasn't sexual. Turn-of-the-century typologies of male adolescence, however, anxiously circulated alongside typologies of (homo)sexual perversion. The paramount instance of this connection occurs in child psychologist G. Stanley Hall's widely popular Adolescence (1904), an encyclopedic overview of \"boyology\" that practically invents its subject matter ex nihih. Hall argues throughout that \"adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born\" (xiii); yet various disorders—neuroses, psychoses, and abnormal morphologies—frequently mar the individual's journey
5 citations
TL;DR: The Life in the Iron Mills (LITM) as mentioned in this paper is a short novel written by Rebecca Harding Davis, who introduced the proletarian world of Hugh Wolfe and his friends, and attracted notice as a point of origin for social realism and a stunning depiction of class inequities.
Abstract: ITH ominous lines like these, Rebecca Harding Davis opened her short novel Life in the Iron Mills ( 1861 ), asked her readers to peer out of their genteel and sterile drawing rooms, and introduced the proletarian world of Hugh Wolfe. Published in James Fields's The Aûantic Monthly in April, 1861, her story garnered even Hawthorne's and Emerson's attention. Republished by Tillie Olsen in 1972, it attracted notice as a point of origin for social realism, a stunning depiction of class inequities, and a complex feminist text.1 A Cultural Edition of contextual documents and her recently republished, supplemented autobiography have enabled fresh approaches to her work. Seldom have \"mud and foul effluvia\" proven so inviting for so many readers.
5 citations
4 citations
TL;DR: The Star of the Sea was a place where the sea turtles crawled out by moonlight to lay their eggs and the sound of the sea was like an overtone of eerie applause, the clapping of the palms of the palmettos as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The island had once been home to pirates and runaway slaves, and giant sea turtles that crawled out by moonlight to lay their eggs. I no longer remembered what brought me there. And always the sound of the sea, like an overtone of eerie applause, the clapping of the palms of the palmettos. I was dreaming, slightly intoxicated, and I found myself standing outside the little Catholic church, Stella Maris, \"Star of the Sea.\" The priest stood before me, a beaten, disheveled man with ashes on his robes and the unmistakable aroma of alcohol like an unholy ghost drawing us closer. \"These people,\" he said, waving his arms around at his imaginary flock, \"they think love's easy, something nice and tidy that can be bought, that makes them feel good about themselves. Believe me, it's a horrible thing to love. Love is a terribk thing, terrible!\" James Tate, \"Stella Maris\
TL;DR: For instance, this article pointed out that the valorization of personal enclosure asserted itself in such "domestic" texts (as I call them) as Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959) and Sylvia Plath's Ariel (1966).
Abstract: Alluding t? the U. S. Cold War policy of "containing Communism," first articulated in George Kennan's "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in 1947, Alan Nadel has aptly labeled American life during the 1950s "containment culture" (x), and the historian Elaine Tyler May has referred to women's lot in Cold War America as "domestic containment" (xxv-xxvi). More recently, Deborah Nelson has noted how both poetry and law, responding to Cold War surveillance, actively pursued privacy during this era. In poetry, the valorization of personal enclosure asserted itself in such "domestic" texts (as I call them) as Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959) and Sylvia Plath's Ariel (1966).1 In law, the phenomenon took the form of a "right to privacy" constructed by the Supreme Court in Griswold ? Connecticut (the birth control case of 1965) and Roe ? Wade (the abortion case of 1973). Lowell and Plath publicized private spaces in poetry, whereas Justice William O. Douglas sacralized private spaces, especially the bedroom, in legal discourse. Overall, the era seemed awash in discourse about public and private spaces, or as Hannah Arendt termed them in 1958, referring back to classical Greek democracy, the polis and the oicfvia (22-78). 2 Since the polis has a heterogeneous character whereas the oichia has by definition the unitary qualities of the household, this public-private binary could easily mutate into a cosmopolitan-nativist dichotomy, which Philip Rahv in the unconsciously racialized language of his era called a split between "paleface" writers (such as T. S. Eliot) and "redskin" writers (such as Walt Whitman).3
TL;DR: English Bob is an anomaly, a monarchist on the loose in American frontier society as discussed by the authors who lives dangerously, for his crude assertions about the superiority of monarchy to presidential government are repeatedly, and offensively, pushed in the faces of his several American auditors.
Abstract: ����� For well over a century after the American Revolution, jurists on both sides of the Atlantic were engaged in a series of conversations about the nature of sovereignty. These conversations were initiated by the Declaration of Independence, and focused on the Constitution of the United States—a document which, famously, avoids the term "sovereignty." Although such discussions took place in two Common Law countries, they were not directly dialogic; indeed, the several voices in both countries are addressed primarily to audiences within their own legal culture, and refer to the other culture for examples of dysfunctional polity. A similar transatlantic exchange about sovereignty takes place in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (which is set in 1880-81), suggesting that the constitutional consciousness of Victorian Britain offers an unlikely but fruitful context in which the film may be interpreted. The character English Bob is our main signpost to the political implications with which the film is richly laden. The film's only overt political theorist, English Bob is an anomaly, a monarchist on the loose in American frontier society. He lives dangerously, for his crude assertions about the superiority of monarchy to presidential government are repeatedly, and offensively, pushed in the faces of his several American auditors. A newspaper headline visible in the railway scene in which he first appears—"President Garfield in Critical Condition"—provides the theme for a discourse on the dangers of democracy and republicanism, which Bob sustains throughout his presence in the film. English Bob is obsessed with the assassination
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TL;DR: Ophuls and Renoir as discussed by the authors outline a broad parallel between Max Ophuls' and Jean Renoir's artistic trajectories and argue that the comparison between the two artists' careers and œuvres, far from being a gratuitous rhetorical device, is justified historically and susceptible of sharpening our understanding of the aesthetics of two major filmmakers.
Abstract: hat I propose t? do is threefold: first, outline a broad parallel between Max Ophuls and Jean Renoir, two filmmakers with profoundly European roots, whose masterpieces are primarily associated with French cinema, before and after World War II, and who were both active in Hollywood where they had gone into temporary exile in the intervening war years; second, question the relevance of such a parallel; third, take a closer look at a number of possible pairings between specific works by the two filmmakers. In the process I hope to demonstrate that the comparison between the two artists' careers and œuvres, far from being a gratuitous rhetorical device, is justified historically and susceptible of sharpening our understanding of the aesthetics of two major filmmakers.
TL;DR: The scene could well be from one of Kubrick's films: the impersonal setting, the tentative meeting of strangers, the prospect of stilted conversation, and then the comic yet poignant intrusion of the body's ineluctable demands as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The scene could well be from one of Kubrick's films: the impersonal setting, the tentative meeting of strangers, the prospect of stilted conversation—and then the comic yet poignant intrusion of the body's ineluctable demands. Beneath the veneer of social pretense lies the intractable problem oforganic finitude; within such an ordinary, human, and filmable encounter lie the elements of philosophical inquiry. Alexander Walker points to intellectual coherence as one of Kubrick's distinctive characteristics: \"Only a few film directors possess a conceptual talent—that is, a talent to crystalize every film into a cinematic concept\" (7). Walker pinpoints this conceptual focus: \"a persistent interest in the symbolic analysis of society through its enduring myths and fables\" (15). According to Mario Falsetto, Kubrick's films can be understood with respect to a series of conceptual polarities: \"Subjective/objective, classical/modernist, rational/irrational,
TL;DR: In the final pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gabks, the daguerreotypist Holgrave presents Phoebe Pyncheon with a disturbing object: a miniature of her uncle's corpse, taken moments before in the house's gloomy parlor as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In the final pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gabks, the daguerreotypist Holgrave presents Phoebe Pyncheon with a disturbing object: a miniature of her uncle's corpse, taken moments before in the house's gloomy parlor. Although modern critics almost invariably chafe at the improbable turn of events that concludes the novel, concurring with F. O. Matthiesson's charge that the \"final pages drift away into unreal complacence\" (334), none has singled out this concluding image as particularly unsatisfactory. What makes the omission surprising is that of all the unrealistic aspects of the conclusion, the production of the daguerreotype may qualify as the most unrealistic. Holgrave chooses to lodge in the House of the Seven Gables precisely because its darkness prevents him from becoming \"too much dazzled with my own trade\"; as he explains to Phoebe, \"It is like a bandage over one's eyes to come into it'Xçi).1 The parlor in particular, Hawthorne persistently reminds us, is shrouded in constant shadow. Yet Holgrave employs his \"sunbeam art\" there to create a portrait of Judge Pyncheon clear enough to serve as evidence of his cause of death.
TL;DR: Gustave de beaumont's 1835 novel of a doomed interracial love affair Marie; or, Shvery in The United States, stands as a peculiar response to the theoretical work of his far more famous traveling companion.
Abstract: Gustave de beaumont's 1835 novel of a doomed interracial love affair Marie; or, Shvery in The United States,1 stands as a peculiar response to the theoretical work of his far more famous traveling companion. But while it is frequently considered by Tocqueville scholars as little more than a trifling footnote to Democracy in America,2 Beaumont's novel represents an interesting endeavor—an attempt to work through and respond to Tocqueville 's claims about American democracy through the medium of fiction. Where Tocqueville posits \"equality of social condition\" as \"the creative element from which each fact [of American society] derives\" (9), Beaumont asserts as his point of departure that the defining fact of American life and moral character is an \"odious\" racial prejudice and vast social inequality. Where Tocqueville claims that such equality will make revolutions unimaginable in America (634-45), Beaumont's novel subtly ponders the one exception that Tocqueville allows, almost parenthetically, for slavery: \"If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon the American soil. That is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions but their inequality which may give rise thereto\" (641). Such questions of revolution and social equality were very likely on the minds of both Beaumont and Tocqueville as they landed in New York in May 1831. Having sworn the oath of loyalty to the newly enthroned Louis-Philippe in the aftermath of the July Revolution— which deposed the Bourbon king, Charles X, and marked the end of the
TL;DR: Ophuls and his father, Max Ophuls, whose works and legacy are examined in this issue of Arizona Quarterly, the world historical events of the past century had immediate and lasting effects on life and art as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: During the past several decades, \"Ophuls\" has perhaps been best known to the American public as a name on a marquee in Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977). In that film, Alvy Singer (Allen's character) is obsessed with Marcel Ophuls' monumental work on the French Resistance (and lack thereof), The Sorrow and the Pity (1971), and feels a moment of triumph when, after their breakup, he glimpses ex-girlfriend Annie, a new convert to the importance of Holocaust history, at a screening of the film. While for Alvy Singer as American Jew the intersection between the world historical moment and his own life seems perplexingly both indirect and absolute, for Marcel Ophuls and his father, Max Ophuls, whose works and legacy are examined in this issue of Arizona Quarterly, the world historical events of the past century had immediate and lasting effects on life and art. Exiled from his homeland because of the rise of Nazi Germany, Max Ophuls not only died a French film director but spent time as an American one, and through his artistry and craftsmanship made small but serious contributions to the film industries of Italy and Holland. Even in the august milieu of exiled German Jewish film directors of the 1930s and '40s, who left a powerful imprint on all aspects of the Hollywood film industry, Ophuls' career was an unusually international one. But despite the wide recognition his unique style has received from scholars and cinéphiles, and despite Allen's laudable publicity for the family name, Max Ophuls has remained relatively unknown outside this circle of aficionados. Max Ophuls was born Max Oppenheimer in 1902 in Saarbrücken, Germany. He took the name \"Ophüls\" (hereafter \"Ophuls,\" for reasons
TL;DR: It's a story straight out of Victorian fiction: a fashionable teenager is plunged into poverty due to her father's business failures, turns to writing for solace and financial support, and on her first attempt produces the best-selling novel in the country as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: It's a story straight out of Victorian fiction. A fashionable teenager is plunged into poverty due to her father's business failures, turns to writing for solace and financial support, and on her first attempt produces the best-selling novel in the country. Skip ahead a decade, and the young woman still rises at four every morning to write with her sister, still produces best-selling novels—and still cannot afford winter clothes. To pay the bills she begins churning out children's books, working herself to exhaustion but barely making ends meet. \"Aunty says I look as if I were working too hard,\" she writes in her journal, \"—look delicate—I dare say. I have been working to the edge of possibility; and it is difficult and hazardous; one easily goes over the line.\" But she perseveres, writing prolifically until her death. Though critical acclaim and wealth are never again to be hers, she satisfies herselfwith the adoration of readers and family and the sense that she has fulfilled her calling in life. \"God can give what he will,\" she determines, \"—and if he pleases not, why, then it is well too .... I am content\" (A. Warner 461-62, 459)· Susan Warner's career not only sounds like a Victorian novel, it in fact tells the story of American Victorian fiction—of the nineteenthcentury publishing industry and the authors and readers who sustained it. Religious books for children flooded the literary marketplace in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Publishers of books destined for Sunday schools often required authors to produce new titles quickly, relinquish their copyrights, and abide by narrow moral and literary stan-
TL;DR: In that not so long ago era of Herculean drinking, the 1950s, nearly all of the grown-ups I knew in my small home town south of Buffalo began their nightly regimen with 5pm cocktails (to help them "unwind" from work) after a brief intermission for the family dinner, they carried on with more boisterous beak-dipping (Scotch on the rocks separated the serious fun-lovers from the faint of heart) until close to midnight as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In that not so long ago era of Herculean drinking, the 1950s, nearly all of the grown-ups I knew in my small home town south of Buffalo began their nightly regimen with 5pm cocktails (to help them "unwind" from work). After a brief intermission for the family dinner, they carried on with more boisterous beak-dipping (Scotch on the rocks separated the serious fun-lovers from the faint of heart) until close to midnight. Throughout this same period, I had an untrained, unhousebroken, and largely unapproachable fox terrier named Pal as my pet, and he became firmly linked in my mind with the loud, laughter-plated downstairs revels that sang me to my sleep on countless school nights and weekends. In his perverse habit of preferring living room furniture and car-
TL;DR: To admit the truth, my feelings about World War II amount to a kind of popular piety, and my sequential memories begin with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the very moment that commmenced to shape my childhood imagination.
Abstract: To admit the truth, my feelings about World War II amount to a kind of popular piety. My sequential memories begin with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the very moment that commmenced to shape my childhood imagination. There I was at the age of four, reading the Sunday comics on the living room floor, the Phantom, Prince Valiant, gaudy heroic pictures, when the front door burst open and my father and uncle blew in like a tempest. On their way back from a professional meeting in New York City they had heard the news on the car radio. I remember big black overcoats, wrath and fedoras. My father at once had a stiff highball, and it made him fiery. A sober and deliberate man, he died at the age of ninety after a life of robust good health and conservative investment policy. I suppose that may have been the only time anyone ever saw him, as we say now, impaired. But it was really his passion, and not the rye, that elevated him that famous day. After some ranting and seething—the image of that indignant red face is suspended in my memory like a flag—father took steps. He placed a call to Tokyo and asked to speak at once to the Imperial Palace. If only he could give Hirohito a tongue-lashing, he thought, he could end the nonsense right there. But the operator kept telling him that the long-distance connections across the Pacific were disabled. This only increased his frustration, and thus of course his wrath. Not until my adolescence was father again so stirred.
TL;DR: The Reckless Moment (1949) remains one of the most difficult to see of Max Ophuls' films, and two contemporary films as discussed by the authors have evoked it, The Deep End (2002) by supposedly drawing on the same source novel and Far from Heaven (2003) by parallel lines of dialogue, a maid named Sybil, and at least one shot that explicitly echoes the ophuls film.
Abstract: hile The Reckless Moment (1949) remains one of the most difficult to see of Max Ophuls' films, two contemporary films have evoked it, The Deep End (2002) by supposedly drawing on the same source novel and Far from Heaven (2003) by parallel lines of dialogue, a maid named Sybil, and at least one shot that explicitly echoes the Ophuls film. As is typical of contemporary filmmaking, the newer films are both shot on location, although a New Jersey town stands in for Hartford in Far from Heaven and the Hudson River for the Connecticut. The RecUess Moment does make use of location shooting in a manner that became more common for Hollywood films in the post-World War II period. This is to say, we see these locations mostly in establishing shots and transitional moments, while actual scenes for the most part play out in studio sets or against back projection. Both of the later films feature a spatial metaphor in their titles, appropriately since their use of setting is chiefly metaphorical. In The Deep End, the Lake Tahoe setting is real enough, but it is also something of an inside joke similar to giving the name of the James Mason character in the Ophuls film (Donnelly) to a different character; in the earlier film, Lake Tahoe is where mother Lucia tries to send daughter Bee after Darby's death is discovered. The Hartford of Far from Heaven is a fantasy world at two removes, Todd Haynes' dreamworld vision of Douglas Sirk's dreamworld
TL;DR: Costuming is often regarded as tangential rather than central to the creation of received meaning; it is associated with frivolous ''feminine'' ornamentation rather than with a serious ''masculine'' narrative; there is also the perception that costuming is subordinate to other more dominant and transparent carriers of narrative and meaning that have well-established critical vocabularies to describe them.
Abstract: As PAM cook and other feminist film scholars have argued, costuming is a neglected but important element of mise-en-scène in the cinema (41; Gaines 7). This relative neglect is an overdetermined phenomenon: costuming is often regarded as tangential rather than central to the creation of received meaning; it is associated with frivolous \"feminine\" ornamentation rather than with a serious \"masculine\" narrative; there is also the perception that costuming is subordinate to other more dominant and transparent carriers of narrative and meaning that have well-established critical vocabularies to describe them. Even within feminist film criticism, the relative neglect of costuming may be related to the perception that the specifics of costuming are not worth looking at very carefully since their broader functions seem so obvious. In this line of thinking, costuming is largely a tool for women's oppression: it satisfies the fetishistic gaze of the male and turns the woman into a fetish object. Laura Mulvey implicitly articulates this theoretical position on costuming in her seminal 1975 article, \"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,\" when she argues for the fetishistic effect of the female image on film's male spectators (6-18). According to Mulvey, all (heterosexual) males who view the cinema function psychologically as fetishists who, according to Freud, require a fetish in order to make the \"castrated\" woman into an \"acceptable\" sexual object. The fetish is the object through which the male subject holds at bay his knowledge of the woman's anxiety-provoking castration. The woman's castration is disavowed in an \"I know but nevertheless\" psychological formula that follows the pattern first set in childhood when the boy discovers the mother's castration and disavows it with a magical formula that attributes a phallus to the mother through the fetish: \"In this fetish she has a
TL;DR: In the case of Lola, the first versions of the French and the German Lola were not cut against the director's wishes, but the second versions were butchered behind his back into third versions as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Film history is full of masterpieces financed by rubber checks," as François Truffaut once said: "Sounder financing and less adventurous financiers do not necessarily make for better pictures. They only make for more reasonable pictures" (Ophuls, "Confidentially Ours" 23).1 "Loh Montés premiered at one hundred forty minutes, but was cut (against the director's wishes) to one hundred ten minutes for distribution."2 Even in 2003 you could read this misinformation on websites. The one hundred forty minutes are still in many books. But this dualistic vision of brave filmmakers and butcher-like producers, victims and perpetrators, is much too simple (not only) in the case of Lola. The first versions of the French and the German Lola were not cut against the director's wishes. But the second versions were butchered behind his back into third versions. The length of the newly restored version corresponds to the one hundred sixteen minutes of the German premiere version. The strange one-hundred-forty-minute rumor started in 1958 when Richard Roud published Max Ophuls: An Index. Since then, the rumor of this never-verified length was repeated for nearly fifty years. The more Lola was cut, the greater the chaos of prints and reedited versions, the more people would exaggerate the original length. To complete the confusion: Lola, never had one original: it started with three and it ended with none. Nothing was reasonable, normal or moderate around and about Lola. In 1955 it was the most expensive picture made in Europe after World War II. With a budget of more than eight million D-Marks—which
TL;DR: G??? A METIC as mentioned in this paper is a re-construction of Max Ophuls' Lola Montés (1955) and it is one of the greatest road movies of all time.
Abstract: G??? A METICULOUSLY RECONSTRUCTED VERSION of Max Ophuls' Lola Montés (1955) beginning to receive screenings at conferences and selected venues just after the centennial of its director's birth, it seems the ideal time to revisit the film and the fascination it still engenders despite the rocky road it has traveled.1 Ophuls' adored and reviled film, a romanticized and incredibly lavish \"biopic\" of the scandalous nineteenth-century dancer and her many famous paramours, has certainly received its fair share of attention in cinema studies, and critics have noted its highly self-conscious narration and reflexivity.2 To my knowledge, however, no one ever has categorized Lola Montés as among the greatest of all \"road movies\" and then considered its central issues of gender, performance, the marketing of the female body, and the institution of image production from this starting point. Furthermore, I would argue that this singular film is one of its director's most profound commentaries upon a half-century of cinema and American mass culture as well. Ophuls' films always combine a bittersweet, nostalgic romanticism with sophisticated cultural commentary, satirical irony and a serious yet playful sense of abstraction. It is with this same combination of light-hearted good humor, clear-eyed affection and reflexive cultural critique that I hope to extend the impressive body of work on this film by means of an offbeat new reading. So let our journey with Ophuls' final and most controversial work, an allegorical historiography meditating upon Cinema itself, begin.
TL;DR: In the films of Max Ophuls there are endless staircases which organize both the lives of householders and the movements of worldly soirées; there are women who fall from on high, through windows, into the void... and there are carriages that glide along in the countryside, cartloads of flowers, sleds in the snow as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In the films of Max Ophuls there are endless staircases which organize both the lives of householders and the movements of worldly soirées; there are women who fall from on high, through windows, into the void . . . and there are carriages that glide along in the countryside, cartloads of flowers, sleds in the snow. . . . If staircases come from the theater, more precisely from the recommendations of Alexandre Tairov regarding the necessary elements of staging—recommendations that Ophuls saw fit to follow in his spectacles beginning in the 1920s—sleds and carriages represent a new encounter, specific to the cinematic medium. This is an encounter between an ancient dramatic apparatus, which the director knows and masters, which organizes his writing—that of movement as a trope for life—and a much more ambiguous device, in which the camera takes living nature itself into account. The snow of Austrian countrysides (Liebelei), the beaches of the Adriatic, of the English Channel, or the Pacific (in Madame de . . ., Le Pfoisir, The Reckless Moment), German wheatfields or the rapeseed of Normandy are just such natural realities taken into account—one may well ask how and at what point—by Ophuls' cinema, by his taste for artifice and by his will to compose. What role are they playing, these "already-present" forms, these realities seized before becoming tropes? How do they impose themselves as an autonomous pattern in the tight weave of Ophuls' compositions? Briefly, what is nature doing in Ophuls' world? What is it doing in the world of a man whose formative medium is theatrical artifice (in which "the truth of life becomes the lie of art," to cite an expression
TL;DR: Ophüls' selection of Erich Kästner's two-page exposé for a film with the title "Dann schon lieber Lebertran" (''I'd Rather Have Cod Liver Oil''") was not necessarily spontaneous or fortuitous.
Abstract: In the summer of 1 93 1, Max Ophüls, a theater and radio director, receives his first contract, from Universum Film AG (Ufa), to direct a short film. For the film's story, he relates, Ophüls was allowed to select material from the Ufa repository: \"in Krausestrasse in front of bookshelves almost as high as a house, crammed with manuscripts. I was free to choose a story of my own choice. 'There is one best director for each one of these stacks of paper,' I thought. 'Where is my stack?'\" (Ophüls 140). Ophüls' selection of Erich Kästner's two-page exposé for a film with the title \"Dann schon lieber Lebertran\" (\"I'd Rather Have Cod Liver Oil\") was not necessarily spontaneous or fortuitous. He also remembers having met screenwriter Billy Wilder and talking with him about choosing a script (Ophüls 140). At that time, Wilder already was in contact with Pressburger about developing a screenplay for a film version of Kästner's best-selling children's book ,\"Emil und die Detektive\" (\"Emil and the Detectives\") which Ophüls had directed on stage in Breslau with Paul Barney in December 1930:1 \"I met Kästner in a café. He brought another man who was meant to write the screenplay. His