Showing papers in "Literature-film Quarterly in 2004"

Reading (and writing) the ethics of authorship: Shakespeare in Love as postmodern metanarrative

Abstract: "Answer me only this: are you the author of the plays of William Shakespeare?" -Viola De Lessups to Will Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love Although Shakespeare in Love (1998) enjoyed rave reviews in the popular press, some critics in the intelligentsia question the artistic significance of the film's postmodern aspirations. In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, for example, Martin Harries reserves special disdain for the intrusion, via a series of anachronisms, of popular culture into the film's screenplay, written by Marc Norman and playwright Tom Stoppard.1 Harries ascribes these textual gestures to a desire on the filmmakers' part to pander to Hollywood narcissism: "The anachronisms give a comforting illusion of closeness," Harries writes, "but this closeness can never overcome the distance between entertainment as industry and the more fragile and, finally, more mysterious business of the Globe, the Rose, and the Theater" (B9). For Harries, Norman and Stoppard's screenplay only succeeds in satisfying Hollywood's ostensible yen for reinvisaging itself, rather implausibly, as an Elizabethan theatrical enterprise. A. O. Scott similarly derides Shakespeare in Love as "a frisson of self-congratulatory pleasure." A Senior Editor of Lingua Franca, Scott devotes particular attention to problematizing Stoppard's obvious role in the construction of the film's anachronistic puns, linguistic games, and witty textual paradoxes. "What we get is mostly less than meets the eye: the erudition of the cocktail party and the emotional range of a good TV sitcom, middlebrow pleasures dressing up in the trappings of high learning," Scott writes. Troubled by what they perceive to be the film's intellectual masquerade, Harries and Scott essentially misconstrue the narrative structure of Norman and Stoppard's screenplay as the mere product of linguistic high jinks and textual diversions, rather than as a carefully constructed and highly literate text that offers valuable insight into contemporary conceptions of authorship, the semantics of love, and the humanistic possibilities of postmodernity. In fact, Scott even refuses to acknowledge Shakespeare in Love's explicitly postmodern narrative design, preferring instead to refer to John Madden's Academy-Award-winning film as "brain-teaser modernism" and as "modernism without difficulty." Clearly, modernism implies a literary tradition that essentializes art forms through its adherence to a universal belief system founded upon logic, rationality, and the existence of a moral center. Scott's flawed terminology hardly begins to account for the postmodern narrative philosophy that undergirds Shakespeare in Love. Availing themselves of such techniques as metanarration and parody in their screenplay, Norman and Stoppard recognize the indeterminacy of language and the multivocality inherent in the kinds of intertextual discourse evinced by such Stoppard plays as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) and Travesties (1974). As with Shakespeare in Love, the latter play argues for the elasticity of history as Stoppard stages an imaginary encounter in early twentieth-century Zurich that features Lenin, James Joyce, and Dadaist Tristan Tzara. In Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (1992), Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth observes that "the best definition of postmodern narrative might be precisely that it resolutely does not operate according to any form of historical time, that is, representational time, and in many cases directly parodies or disputes that time and the generalizations it allows to form" (43). Postmodernists such as Stoppard deliberately flaunt the constructed nature of history and the sanctity of historical truth in their texts. Shifting back and forth across the arbitrary borders of linear time, such writers embrace the resulting multiplicity of cultural perspectives that the negation of history necessarily allows. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard challenges modernist notions of authorship by narrating Shakespeare's Hamlet from the play's textual margins. …

Taming 10 Things I Hate About You: Shakespeare and the Teenage Film Audience

Abstract: When I first paired William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew with Gil Junger's film adaptation 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), my students' responses to the juxtaposed works of art revealed a number of fascinating and deeply rooted ideological conflicts While more than willing to dissect the gender trouble readily observable in Shakespeare's sixteenth-century play, my students steadily resisted any serious critique of the recent film version In fact, one young pre-med/biology major blurted out with a touch of good-natured resentment, "I just like the movie, okay?" Other students valiantly rose to defend 10 Things and launched a number of arguments stressing the enlightened perspective on gender espoused by the film Typical comments included: "The females in the movie were given more freedom to choose and decide for themselves," or "In this movie girls are given more power of choice The film tries to even out the balance of power between men and women" And most comments of this kind ended with an evaluative statement much like the following: "I really enjoy the movie and feel they did a good job" The students' enthusiastic responses to the film also voiced a number of striking contradictions Although acknowledging the film's exploration of peer pressure and high school cliques, my students continually asserted for the main characters a basic level of independent subjectivity (characterized by volition or agency) entirely in contrast with the social context created by the film The students who did recognize the film's treatment of peer pressure and socially formed identity were still at great pains to balance the peer pressure theme with the possibility of independent choice and identity One young man wrote in a response activity: In 10 Things I Hate About You the genders each still are bound to roles such as in the Shakespeare version However, they are bound to those roles with different circumstances In the movie they are bound to their roles because the high school social order causes them to want to be "cool" In my opinion, the movie shows the relationships as "people" instead of "control" The roles may still be a bit uneven [between the genders] but the relationships I believe equal this out because in the relationships they are dealt with as people not as one controlling the other In this student's rationalization, oddly enough, conformity becomes a choice The characters conform because they choose to be cool, and the socially formed gender roles can be tolerated because the love relationship creates an illusion of equality The varied responses of my students coupled with their almost uniform approbation of the film and censure of the play prompt questions that lead the critic to speculation on the nature of contemporary culture and to renewed investigation into Shakespeare's vexed early comedy An analysis of The Taming of the Shrew, 10 Things I Hate About You, and student responses to both works suggests that what students find most offensive about Shakespeare and most satisfying about 10 Things may derive not simply from the two works' treatment of gender but from their assumptions about an even more basic concern-that of ontology and the nature of human subjectivity1 In a discussion of Shakespeare pedagogy, Martha Tuck Rozett urges scholars to pay attention to "first readings, "arguing that the novice reader's interpretation illuminates the text and reveals the ideological positioning of students: "When first readings are held up to scrutiny, they often reveal much about the way students read selectively, making connections, forming judgments, and, in effect, creating their own version of 'the text'" (211) Clearly, Shakespeare's Taming and lunger's film adaptation prompted strong "first readings" in my students, readings that reveal students' interpretive mechanisms when digesting the entertainment created for their consumption Packaged in the appealing visual language of teenage America, Junger's film glosses over the complex of gender and power dynamics that the rougher edges of Shakespeare's drama leave exposed …

Othello: A Hawk among Birds

Abstract: In their modern cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello, director Tim Blake Nelson and screenwriter Brad Kaaya remain very true to the Shakespearian text-with the obvious exception of the language, as O uses contemporary American English Some critics, in fact, have noted that Nelson and Kaaya are too true to the play to make the film work in this age and medium Peter Travers, reviewing the film for Rolling Stone, notes, "O relies on plot mechanics from the Bard that make no sense in a contemporary context" (116) Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times echoes Travers's concern with context-in trying to make the film contemporary for a younger audience, he believes, "the adaptation has rendered the material artless" (E1) Amy Taubin of the Village Voice has other, related concerns: It's simply impossible to accept that these are high school kids That's particularly true of Hugo [the Iago character]: His skill at reading the psychology of his pawns and his ability to delay his own gratification for what seems like an entire semester while he gulls Odin [the Othello character] bespeak a level of experience and self-control beyond that of any adolescent (115) Taubin feels that the elements of the play do not work when funneled through the consciousnesses of teenagers She goes on to assert that had the makers of O been more concerned with the characters than with faithfulness to the Shakespearian plot, "O might have been more than an unresolved mixture of gimmickry and good intentions" (115) Certainly, there are both good and bad reviews of Nelson's film, but the overwhelming concentration of the negative ones, as evidenced by Travers, Mitchell, and Taubin, is that Nelson and Kaaya are too faithful to the play much to the detriment of the film However, this author argues that the tragedy of Othello/Odin, now set in a South Carolina prep school, is a complex and powerful one owing much of its success to its very adherence to Shakespeare's ingenious rendering of human evil and jealousy Nonetheless, the true power of this adaptation resides in several carefully chosen departures from the Shakespearean text, most notably the contraction of Shakespeare's menagerie of animal images into a single powerful, unifying image-the hawk In an interview that Nelson provided for the DVD version of O, he enigmatically states, "the point of the film is pretty clear in its very concept" In other words, the very fact that a Shakespearian tragedy, especially one as utterly dark as Othello, could be convincingly transplanted into a contemporary South Carolina high school is the entire disturbing point of Nelson's production Certainly other filmmakers-most notably Orson Welles, Sergei Yutkevich, and Stuart Burge-have successfully lifted Othello to the silver screen Other directors, like Nelson, have moved away from tradition to do so In 1995, Oliver Parker finally cast a black man, Laurence Fishburne, in the role of Othello (although Gordon Heath was the first black Othello to appear on screen in a 1955 BBC television production1) Patrick McGoohan turned Othello into the 1974 rock opera Catch My Soul, and Othello tackled the Wild West in 1956 in Delmer Daves's Jubal Nelson, though, is the first to lay Othello in the hands of mere teenagers The fact that he could credibly do so is the film's very meaning Inherently, O is a comment on the dark and tragic behaviors that often plague contemporary high schools and the timelessness of such primal human emotions like jealousy and rage In order to truly make his point that the message is in the concept, Nelson adheres closely to Shakespeare's original text As a result, there is virtually a one-to-one correlation between Shakespeare's characters and those in O, and those characters play out the plot almost exactly as originally penned Aside from the language, however, there are several strikingly important ways in which Nelson and Kaaya stray from Shakespeare's text …

Blade Runner and the Postmodern: A Reconsideration

Abstract: The ambivalence implicit in the two versions of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982; "Director's Cut," 1992) echoes the diverse and divided critical responses to the film(s). Indeed, this film about authenticity and simulation has been so thoroughly interpreted and rewritten-by even its director-that a naive return to the "original" is, perhaps fittingly, untenable. This essay does not advance a new reading, but rather takes as its subject the ideologies of interpretation evident in criticism of Blade Runner, particularly its problematic encounter with postmodernism. In hindsight, this encounter testifies to fundamental ambiguities in the postmodernist enterprise, ambiguities with significant social and political implications. I will argue that postmodern accounts of Blade Runner depend on a series of strategic exclusions. Such accounts effectively displace not only modernist readings of the film, but also questions of narration, genre, popularity, and the specificity of the film medium. Lost amid the theoretical battlefield of the modern and postmodern are the film's material and ideological contexts; Blade Runner's cultural intelligibility is blurred by the modern/postmodern exchange. This critical impasse underscores the troubled politics of postmodernism as it confronts commercial narrative and other forms of popular culture. Roughly speaking, critical responses to Blade Runner fall on either side of a modern/postmodern line. Postmodernist accounts diametrically oppose reading strategies dependent on conventional aesthetic notions (narrative, character, structure, reference, metaphor, symbol, etc.) that collectively we might term modernist. These two approaches entail radically different positions on the nature and function of interpretation. Modernist readings presuppose the film's structural and semiotic depth, in stark contrast to the postmodernist emphasis on its surfaces. Some modernist interpretations discern Utopian fantasies of redemption and transcendence embedded in the film's apocalyptic veneer. A postmodernist approach, by contrast, emphasizes the film's resistance to the interpretive impulse, its voiding of symbolic, utopian, and narrative meaning. The depthless postmodern surface incorporates fragments of once-meaningful codes and conventions that are now blankly cited without context or referent. The result is not a coherent aesthetic structure but an opaque and resistant pastiche. Interestingly, the two versions of the film document a similar ambivalence about narration, depth, and Utopian potential. The significant changes in the 1992 "Director's Cut" place the "original" in quotation marks, summoning in the process the question of filmic authorship and the much-discussed relation between the cinematic auteur and commercial film production. Furthermore, by foregrounding the question of authenticity, the phenomenon of the "Director's Cut" restages a central concern of both postmodernism and the 1982 film. One might argue that the "Director's Cut" functions as a kind of postmodernist reading of the "original," one that likewise suppresses narrative cues and utopian intimations. Ridley Scott's 1992 version omits the studio-enforced "happy ending" and Harrison Ford's voice-over narration, and introduces the chic postmodern suggestion-via the unicorn dream sequence-that Deckard himself might be a replicant. At the same time, however, the "Director's Cut" is also a modernist gesture. In particular, the voice-overs are a noir genre determinant, and their erasure lessens the film's legibility as commercial narrative in favor of modernist indeterminacy-a tendency supported by the "new," more ambiguous ending. In fact the voice-overs are a touchstone of postmodernist readings. From the perspective of pastiche, the voice-overs are exemplary instances of cultural citation, blank allusions to an incongruous noir sensibility. The voice-overs and "happy ending" are either conventional or opaque, egregious or essential, depending on the critic's vantage point. …

1 +1=1: Impossible Translations in Andrey Tarkovsky's Nostalghia

Abstract: I. Impossible Homelands Shot in Italy prior to his exile from the Soviet Union, Andrey Tarkovsky's 1983 film Nostalghia remains his most ironic film. It tells the story of Andrey Gorchakov, a Russian poet living in Italy. He is researching the life of Pavel Sosnovsky, a Medieval Russian musician who lived most of his life exiled in Italy and committed suicide upon his return to Russia. In less than a year following its completion, Tarkovsky's own life began to resemble closely the life of his film's protagonist, as he would live in exile in Italy. Commenting on this similarity in his theoretical and autobiographical work, Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky writes, "How could I have imagined as I was making Nostalghia that the stifling sense of longing that fills the screen space of that film was to become my lot for the rest of my life; that from now until the end of my days I would bear that painful malady myself?" (202).1 Although it remains ironic that nearly every shot of Nostalghia expresses these very same feelings of helplessness and rootlessness prior to Tarkovsky's actual experience of them, the accuracy to which Tarkovsky expresses those feelings is startling. An entry from his diary, for example, dated 25 May 1983 and written while in exile, reads, "A Bad day. Terrible thoughts. I'm frightened. I am lost! I cannot live in Russia, nor can I live here" (202). Nostalghia explores the very same question that haunts Tarkovsky's diary, as Gorchakov proves unable to live in Russia or Italy, his present torn apart by nostalgic desires. But where can one live if one cannot live in either Russia or Italy? The stunning last image of Nostalghia provides an improbable solution to Gorchakov's inability to live anywhere by suggesting that he can only live in both Russia and Italy at the same time. To be sure, the imaginary spatiality implied by such an answer can exist only on film and in the film image. It is impossible, obviously, to live in Russia and Italy at the same time. Tarkovsky's own fate was to die in exile from cancer after the completion of his film The Sacrifice (1986). In Nostalghia, however, he grants Gorchakov's nostalgic longings an impossible synthesis: even if only in death, Russia and Italy are unified in the film's final image. But in order to properly understand the synthesis provided by the final image, it is essential to articulate the root causes of Gorchakov's nostalgia as they run deeper than his simple distance from home. As Tarkovsky states in Sculpting in Time, nostalgia overcomes Gorchakov because he remains unable "to find a balance between reality and the harmony for which he longs, in a state of nostalgia provoked not only by his remoteness from his country but also by a global yearning for the wholeness of existence (204-05). The addition of the latter cause complicates the temporality of Gorchakov's nostalgia: not only does his longing for a past homeland make his present unendurable, but his "yearning" for a future global Utopia also rips apart the present. The brilliance of Nostalghia lies in Tarkovsky's ability to visualize the translations between Gorchakov's different states of mind and the temporal structures of the nostalgic desires that entrap him. Exploring how the trope of translation operates in key scenes throughout the film becomes central to understanding the redemptive synthesis Tarkovsky grants Gorchakov in the film's final image. I will focus on how Tarkovsky both visualizes the trope of translation and dramatizes it through the interactions among the film's three characters: Gorchakov, Eugenia, his translator, and Domenico, a local mad man. II. Multiple Worlds and Untranslatable Art Tarkovsky introduces the idea of the multiple worlds that inhabit singular spaces in three key moments early on in Nostalghia. The stunning opening sequence where Eugenia makes Gorchakov wait as she stops by a cathedral to see a painting of the Lady Madonna marks the audience's first encounter with the trope of translation between multiple worlds and different states of mind. …

Reframing the Chinese Cultural Revolution in Diaspora: Joan Chen's the Sent-Down Girl

Abstract: After the remarkable success of her directorial debut Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl (Whispering Steppes, 1998), Joan Chen was once asked why she chose to make a film set in the 1966-1976 Chinese Cultural Revolution. Chen answered, "It was a story about my generation, about a whole ten years of our lives, and nobody really told it" (Caswell). Adapted from a novella by the Chinese diaspora woman writer Geling Yan, Chen's film narrates the tragic life of Xiu Xiu, a teenage girl who, like millions of Chinese youths, was sent to work in China's remote rural areas during the Cultural Revolution. Although Chen herself escaped the "sent-down movement," she grew up witnessing the plight of many people caught in that massive exile, including her family members. For Chen, then, the memory of the sent-down movement registers the most haunting aspect of the Cultural Revolution, its dehumanizing nature matched by few other events of history. "It was almost like the Vietnam war here," Chen once told an interviewer in America. "The psychological effect is that generation[s] would be talking about it. It's the most important thing for them. I mean, nothing can be compared to the Holocaust . . . but I think the Cultural Revolution and the sending down of the children are of that kind of importance for humanity" (Palmer). Chen's determination to explore the universal implications of a local event derives from her position as a Chinese artist in diaspora who seeks to reclaim Chinese history. Such an undertaking challenges the home regime of power and knowledge, which likes nothing better than erasing the Chinese people's memory of that "ten-year calamity." While Chen's diasporic reconstruction of Chinese history offers refreshing insights about an important aspect of the Cultural Revolution, it also generates problematic contradictions that reduce the aesthetic appeal she invests in the film. The sent-down movement, in which Chen's narration is set, is known in China as shangshan xiaxiang ("up to the mountains and down to the villages"). It is one of the key strategies by which Mao Zedong and his radical colleagues carried out the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In fact, the vision of completely restructuring Chinese society by mingling educated youths with the laboring masses had taken shape in Mao's thought as early as his guerrilla years. For instance, in a famous 1939 speech on "The Orientation of Youth Movement," Mao maintained that the only progressive criterion for judging the actions of a Chinese youth is "whether or not he is willing to integrate himself with the broad masses of workers and peasants and does so in practice" (Selected Works 246). After the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, took power in China, Mao constantly urged urban intellectuals to reform their worldview by going to work in the "vast universe of the countryside." The Cultural Revolution allowed Mao to put this vision into serious experiment. The nationwide sent-down campaign was officially kicked off on 22 December 1968, when the CCP's People's Daily published Mao's "supreme directives" stating that "it is necessary for the educated young people to go to the countryside to be reeducated by the poor and lower-middle peasants" (Bernstein 57). By the end of 1976, when the large-scale campaign stopped, over sixteen million urban youths had been sent to the countryside, forming the largest migration movement in human history (Leung xvii; Pan xi). In China, the sent-down youths are referred to as zhiqing, or "intellectual youths," and the word zhiqing has become synonymous with an entire generation doomed to senseless sacrifice and abandonment. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution, there have been two major types of zhiqing narrative in China. The first type, mostly prose fiction produced during the period from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, belongs to the so-called "scar literature," named after Lu Xinhua's 1978 short story "Shanghen," or "Scar. …

The Cold War's "undigested apple-dumpling": Imaging Moby-Dick in 1956 and 2001

Abstract: On 10 September 2001, I was writing the following as a chapter in my book project about canonical novels adapted into Cold War American films: In Approaches to Teaching Moby-Dick, one of a series of pedagogically-oriented Modern Language Association books on classic literature, Martin Bickman makes the following claim about the 1956 Hollywood film version of Melville's mid-nineteenth-century novel, directed by John Huston: There is widespread agreement . . . that the 1956 Warner Brothers film of Moby-Dick, casting Gregory Peck as Ahab and something like the Goodyear Blimp as the whale, is unsatisfying. Milton R. Stern, however, ingeniously shows in "The Whale and the Minnow: Moby-Dick and the Movies" how a comparison of the film with the book can highlight the nature and strengths of the latter. (15) As much of my previous work on film adaptation has shown-for example, my defense of Martin Ritt's 1959 melodramatic film version of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury-the elitist assumptions imbedded in such a knee-jerk critical assault on Hollywood films need to be challenged.1 This paper proposes to question the "widespread agreement" that the only things to be said about Huston's film version of Moby-Dick are that it is obviously inferior to Melville's original and that it sports a rubbery special effects whale. To pursue such a project, I will explore a set of critical approaches to Melville's novel that center on the 1950s as a crisis point in Moby-Dick criticism. In particular, this critical strand centers on the New Historicism's assault on accepted notions of the meanings of the key texts of the American Renaissance. Led by "New Americanist" Donald Pease, this criticism has suggested that the increased attention to Moby-Dick in post-World War II America was driven by Cold War ideology. By reading F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance as expressive of these ideological concerns, Pease argues, in his essay, "Moby-Dick and the Cold War," that Melville's novel was appropriated during the Cold War as a direct expression of a simplistic battle of good and evil, between an Ishmael who allegorically codes for freedom and a totalitarian Ahab. Of course, more generalized studies of the Cold War critical establishment's ideologically-driven readings of canonical literature have situated the Moby-Dick case within a larger paradigm. Geraldine Murphy's "Romancing the Center: Cold War Politics and Classic American Literature" is one such case in point. This paper will use such criticism as a methodology for interrogating John Huston's film as a critical act, engaging with the Cold War assumptions as to the meaning and scope of Melville's Moby-Dick as it would have been understood circa 1956. First and foremost, such criticism pushes the apocalyptic components of Melville's novel to the foreground. A novel that uses the Pequod as a microcosm of American diversity-in terms of class and race-ends with the destruction of that symbol. Furthermore, as Lakshmi Mani proposes in The Apocalyptic Vision in Nineteenth Century Fiction, Melville's apocalyptic ending relies on the vast ocean as the site of imperialist conquest and its failure, an ocean that clearly resonates with Pacific atomic bomb testing prevalent in the American consciousness of the 1950s. Thus, when Pease suggests, "That final cataclysmic image of total destruction motivated Matthiessen and forty years of Cold War critics to turn to Ishmael, who in surviving must, the logic would have it, have survived as the principle of America's freedom and who hands over to us our surviving heritage," it can be made resonant with Huston's film's Cold War activation of Richard Basehart-as-Ishmael's ideological survival of the United States in its conflict with the Soviet Union. Continuing with such top-down political readings of the film, one would observe that Melville's engagement with theories of leadership-contained in his examination of Ahab's ruination of the "ship of state" and its resonance with Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, for example-would be pertinent for a film made at the moment of Dwight Elsenhower's 1956 defeat of Adlai Stevenson. …

"I WON'T DANCE, DON'T ASK ME": Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost and the American Film Musical

Abstract: Kenneth Branagh's film Love's Labour's Lost, which adapts Shakespeare's play to the conventions of the American film musical, received mixed reviews; however, no one can deny that it was a huge disappointment at the box office.1 I believe that this failure is mainly due to the fact that many of the aspects of the American film musical imported by Branagh into Love's Labour's Lost clash with basic elements of the play's construction, rendering the final product an artistically flawed piece of cinema. Specifically, Love's Labour's Lost is a play about women who decline to dance with men, both literally during the Masque of the Muscovites and metaphorically at the end of the play, when the women refuse (for the time being) to enter the state of matrimony symbolized by the dance.2 The genre of the American film musical, however, depends upon the literal and metaphorical willingness of women to dance, so Branagh cuts the Masque of the Muscovites and adds an entirely new ending in which the men serve out their penances and reunite with the women, presumably in marriage. Moreover, the American film musical also relies for much of its appeal upon the dancing talents of its performers, yet Branagh, by casting actors rather than dancers, fails to deliver the virtuoso performances that the genre demands. Therefore, the movie tends to satisfy neither those viewers expecting a recognizable version of Shakespeare's play nor those prepared to judge Love's Labour's Lost by the conventions of the American film musical. Rick Altman, in his book The American Film Musical, offers four propositions that define the components and relationships between the main characters in this cinematic genre. First, the film "progresses through a series of paired segments matching the male and female leads." While traditional plot structures are based on a series of events whose order is established by causality, the narrative structure of the American film musical depends upon the obligation to allow the audience to perceive parallels between the characters who will ultimately fall in love and marry. As Altman continues, "The sequence of scenes is determined not out of plot necessity, but in response to a more fundamental need: the spectators must sense the eventual lovers as a couple even when they are not together, even before they have met" (28). Branagh responds to this generic element by rearranging Shakespeare's scenic order at the beginning of the play so that a scene featuring the four male leads is immediately followed by a parallel segment focusing on their four female counterparts. As in Shakespeare's play, Branagh's opening scene (after the first newsreel segment) shows Berowne, Longaville, and Dumaine swearing to forsake women in favor of a three-year course of study with the King of Navarre. But at the point when Berowne prophesies that he will be the last to break his oath, Branagh skips the arraignment of Costard and all of 1.2 (the first scene between Arrnado, Moth, Dull, Costard, and Jaquenetta) to move directly to the arrival of the Princess (2.1). Within the generic framework, the two groups of four lovers function as parallel units, analogous to the single male-female couple in the typical musical. Even so, Branagh takes care to convey, before the lords and ladies come into contact, that within the two groups, one man and one woman are destined for each other. As some reviewers have noticed, Branagh builds into the characters' costumes a color-coding scheme that matches the hue of each lady's attire with the tie of the man who will soon fall in love with her.3 In the oath-taking sequence, the men wear plain white shirts and black academic gowns, which help to emphasize the brightly colored ties they wear as belts around the waists of their dark trousers. By the point in 2.1 at which the men arrive on the scene, we observe that they have spiffed themselves up by putting on their ties in the conventional fashion, and even before they turn to meet the women, the film's color scheme makes it unmistakable that the King will pair off with the Princess, Berowne with Rosaline, and so on. …

"To Be or Inter-Be": Almereyda's End-of-Millennium Hamlet1

Abstract: The most recent film version of Hamlet, by independent American director Michael Mmereyda (Nadja, 1994; Trance, 1998), locates the tragedy of the Prince of Dennark in New York City in the year 2000. Elsinore court is turned into a multimedia corporation, and we are given a very realistic cinematic representation of a postmodern world saturated with video technology. As Almereyda himself has noted, "There's hardly a single scene without a camera, a photograph, a TV monitor or electronic recording device of some kind" (Hamlet Headquarters). The film uses the play's essential motif of Hamlet's quest-his search for proof of his uncle's crime, for moral transparency, for true mutuality, for a definitive answer to the question of existence-in order to address an end-of-millennium anxiety regarding the collapse of human relationships and the growth of personal alienation in a media-driven world of hi-tech communications. Apart from attention, Hamlet's multiple searches entail clarity of mind and a capacity for discerning. At the beginning of the play (and the film), Hamlet tells his mother that he "knows not seems" (1.2.76). But Almereyda's film makes it very clear, on the contrary, that he is very well aware of "seems": this Hamlet is a would-be filmmaker, a young man obsessed with video images. He suffers from a sort of screen addiction. Wherever he goes he carries a portable video unit, a digital camera, and a palm monitor. Technological reproduction devices seem to be natural extensions of his body. How, under such circumstances, can he possibly know "where truth is hid" (2.2.158)? How can he discover the meaning of life in a situation like this, where life has become a matter of negotiation between essence and simulation; where reality and facade, being and performing, have blurred into one; and where human relationships have become a disembodied dial-up network? These are the issues that are central to Almereyda's film. The director introduces Hamlet by having him deliver part of the "What a piece of work is a man" speech. In Shakespeare, the speech comes in the second scene of Act 2. By rearranging the text in this way, Almereyda contrives to tell us, from the outset, something essential about the psychological and emotional state of his protagonist: that is, he is a young man afflicted by sadness, confusion, and frustration. Moreover, the speech-originally part of a conversation between Hamlet and his fellow students from Wittenberg-becomes here a sort of technological soliloquy. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern disappear. They are replaced by Hamlet's digital replication, and as a result, Hamlet's desire to open his heart to his old friends becomes solipsistic meditation. What we see is a virtual Hamlet talking to the real one-the flesh-and-blood Hamlet-from the screen of a portable video unit. Almost immediately, therefore, we have a glimpse of what Almereyda regards as the most problematic and paradoxical outcomes of a mass media and technological society. The problem, in this opening scene, is loneliness. Not only does Hamlet feel lonely, he is lonely. The paradox, on the other hand, lies in the fact that we have a virtual man, made up of pixels, voicing his skepticism about the human condition, about man, and the "quintessence of dust." A monitor man lecturing us on matters of conscience and spirit. To be sure, this paradox is a direct by-product of our hi-tech end-of-millennium society, one in which, as Jim Collins puts it, "television is often seen as the 'quintessence' of postmodern culture" (Storey 176). Above all, Almereyda's Hamlet is an alienated young man.2 Melancholy and introversion are the consequences of a technological addiction that estranges him from other human beings, and blurs the borders between reality and .simulacra. Notwithstanding the recent family crisis-and the uncanny, disturbing revelations of the Ghost-he looks as though he lost his mirth well before his father's death. …

A Bout De Souffle: The Film of the Book

Abstract: Not the cinematic adaptation of a literary pretext: A bout de souffle (1960) by Jean-Luc Godard is based on an original treatment. Nor the book of the film: A bout de souffle (1960) by Claude Francolin is the literary adaptation of a cinematic pretext, but it is a bad book, unworthy of the film (though it was deemed worthy of re-publication in a Belgian book club edition the next year). This article describes the intertextual import of a single, six-second shot: a film of a book. Ten minutes from the end of A bout de souffle, Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) scrutinizes a pile of books; Patricia (Jean Seberg) is in the room, Mozart is on the record player. In close-up, as Michel’s point-of-view, the camera pans down a book cover, delivering the following information: ‘Maurice Sachs | Abracadabra | roman | nrf | “Nous sommes des morts en permission” | LENINE’. A thumb of the hand holding the book is also in shot. The quotation from Lenin, ‘We are dead men on leave’, is on a publicity band wrapped around the book.

The Truth Is out There in Elsinore: Mulder and Scully as Hamlet and Horatio

Abstract: Hamlet has become a special favorite in the ten years closing the twentieth century. Within a few years of each other, popular film stars Kenneth Branagh (1996) and Mel Gibson ( 1990) opted to perform in major film productions of the play, and in 2000 Ethan Hawke took a turn in an especially noirish version. Eric Mallin and Linda Charnes note that the 1990s have also brought us film "paratexts" of Hamlet-"stories that transform or fundamentally reconceive Shakespearean concerns" (Mallin 128). Mallin looks at Last Action Hem (1993), and Charnes at LA. Story (1991; 11-16), as two significant examples of such paratexts adapting the mythos of Shakespeare's Hamlet to late twentiethcentury concerns. Although not citing any specific examples other than Last Action Hero, Mallin also points out, "there are many paratextual Hamlets in Hollywood" (128). One important paratext that should be included is Chris Carter's The X-Files. The relationship between Hamlet and The X-Files only struck me within the past few years. I was inwardly grumbling one Sunday evening that I was much too brain-weary to be reading Hamlet to prepare for a Tuesday evening class, when I could be relaxing by watching The X-Files. I unexpectedly found myself thinking that much of what I considered pleasurably challenging about The X-Files could be found in Hamlet: mysterious, dark, confusing settings; characters and circumstances begging for illumination; irruptions of the supernatural and preoccupation with madness, disease, and infection; a brooding, sardonic hero driven to find order and truth in a confusingly chaotic, dangerous world; mordant humor; and a bulwark against despair in the humor, loyalty, and integrity of friends. I was particularly struck by how two of the catch phrases connected with the program clearly connected with the play I was reading: "the truth is out there" and "trust no one." My students seized on comparisons between the play and the television series in class discussions. One pointed out that another catch phrase, "all lies lead to the truth," snapped into her mind when she considered that the final conspiracy to kill Hamlet ultimately not only went astray to kill the perpetrators, as well as an unintended victim (Gertrude), but in doing so also exposed the plot itself, Claudius's earlier crimes, and most likely Hamlet's sins. These class discussions piqued my interest to study more deeply how the mythos of Shakespeare's Hamlet informs The X-Files, as well as how and why The X-Files reworks that myth. Simon Irvine and Natasha Beattie see The X-Files as resulting from social and philosophical conditions "peculiar to the present historical moment": "I want to believe," "The truth is out there," and "Trust no one." These statements are catch cries that concisely capture the Zeitgeist. The end of this century is privy to the hyper-acceleration, deconstruction and re-imagining of the social, the cultural, and (he political, which is a state of play bound to television. ("Conspiracy Theory") This description may very well describe the spirit of the last decade of the twentieth century, but it also recalls the Zeitgeist of the era in which Hamlet was created and revenge tragedy flourished. Severe competition between Anglicans and Puritans for the imprimatur of divine truth; anxiety over finding a stabilizing replacement for Elizabeth; consequent fears about Jesuit conspiracies; terror of either becoming the prey of witchcraft or of being accused of practicing witchcraft; shifts in power and money to merchant classes; and awareness of the popular media's (plays, pamphlets, sermons) power to shape perceptions of truth as well as morality also suggest a "Zeitgeist" of "deconstruction and re-imagining of the social, the cultural, and the political."1 Thus, describing The X-Files as just embodying a Zeitgeist "peculiar" to the time period in which it was created is much too limiting. More accurately, the television series draws on a mythos of Western culture also shaped by anxieties about loss of faith in benevolent higher powers (spiritual and political), in human relations, and in one's own integrity-traits bespeaking a stable, beneficent reality. …

The Promethean Apparatus: Michael Almereyda's Hamlet as Cinematic Allegory

Abstract: Shakespeare's cinematic renaissance ended on a high note in the twentieth century with John Madden's Shakespeare in Love ( 1998) achieving seven Academy Awards at the 1999 Oscars. What Hollywood seemed at last to acknowledge at this event is the approach toward Shakespearean appropriation by filmmakers across the globe that has become marked by, in Kenneth Branagh's words, "a clearer cinematic logic" (Burnett and Wray 173). Emergent cinematic technology-from CGI to DVD-promoted exciting developments in the film industry. Baz Luhrmann's MTV-saturated William Shakespeare's Romeo + ju liet ( 1996) kick-started a trend in Shakespearean cinema that is expressed most recently by the digitally composed The King is Alive (dir. Kristian Levring, 2002) and Rave Macbeth (dir. Klaus Knoesel, 2001). Both these films in particular serve as examples of what cinema has to offer Shakespearean appropriation throughout the following century. As the first film of the new millennium to adapt a Bardic text, Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000) signals this discursive and technological abundance as cinematically as possible. Denmark here is a New York corporation, ostensibly involved in film production. Hamlet, played by Ethan Hawke, is constructed as a filmmaker obsessed with observing his environs and forefathers through a camera lens. The production's preoccupation with an entirely fragmented and appositely filmic milieu underscores an emphatically postmodern approach to Shakespeare's most filmed of plays in the same moment as constructing cinema as what I would call a "Promethean apparatus."1 Translating as "he-who-sees-before," Prometheus is the mythic figure of innovation who stole fire from Zeus to enable mankind to see for the first time.2 In deploying fire and suggestibly Promethean themes of foresight and cinematic innovation, Almereyda's film appears to rework cinema as a Promethean apparatus in terms of a visually organized dichotomy of presence and absence. Shakespeare's "presence" in this aesthetic reconfiguration is a vital index in reassembling concepts of temporality at the current moment. I read Almereyda's production as allegorically enlivening cinema in these contexts in a number of ways. First, the tools and techniques of film production that are showcased here display those elements of cinematic apparatus that are available to the consumer for individual use. second, I would argue that Almereyda takes as his point of departure the cultural debate toward the end of the twentieth century that both queried and welcomed a "purely cinematic" Shakespeare. Third, as cinema enters its second century, the production vocalizes the anxieties attendant to cinematic potential. Indeed, the relative boom of film technologies leading up to our current historical juncture emphasizes the importance of cinema as a regenerator of ideologies, artistic developments, and global mindscapes. Fourth, I contend that Hamlet alludes to cinema's inception at the end of the nineteenth century, and queries whether this inception was simply the manifestation of cinematic realizations already prevalent in premodern society, that is, the preoccupations with perception, presence, and absence in such discourses as Plato's cave simile in his fourth century B.C. text The Republic, that underline modern technologies as the culmination of explicitly Promethean concerns (Plato 255-65). Gaby Wood, in her cogent study of artificiality in Edison's Eve of 2002, made a similar connection when she described the birth of cinema as a "Promethean, or Pygmalionesque, event" (Wood 168). In the application of recent film theories to this production, moreover, Shakespeare's play unfolds before a cinematic audience in illuminating, highly relative ways. For example, Christian Metz's theory of cinema as a signifier of the Lacanian Imaginary finds a parallel here with the ghost of Hamlet's father. In Metz's words, "the imaginary, by definition, combines within it a certain presence and a certain absence" (Metz 248-49). …

It's Not Easy Being Pink: Tarantino's Ultimate Professional

Abstract: When discussing the films of Quentin Tarantino, it seems that style is what attracts the attention of critics, scholars, and actors. Tarantino's gift for writing remarkable dialogue, his use of violence, his nonlinear chronology, and his ability to create rich and interesting characters are so striking and powerful that they dominate the discussion. In describing his response to the script of Pulp Fiction, Samuel L. Jackson said: I sat down, read the script straight through, which I normally don't do, took a breath, and read it again, which 1 never do, just to make sure it was true. That it was the best script I'd ever read . . .When people see killers for hire they think that they sit at home, they clean their guns . . . and all these other things. But Quentin takes you into a world where you actually find out that they gossip. They talk about their lives outside of what they do. he has the facility for creating every day language and sensibilities for his characters. (Dawson 106-07) And Jeffrey Dawson, the author of Quentin Tarantino: The Cinema of Cool, echoed Jackson's views: That such characters (especially jules and Vincent) can exist so vividly is an uncommon thing in the world of modern cinema and beyond anything else-beyond the structure, the acting, the dialogue, the popular culture, the filmic references or anything else, it is, in the opinion of this author-the overwhelming reason why Tarantino as a fdmmaker has achieved such remarkable success. (Dawson 189-90) Yet, while acknowledging these obvious qualities, is there more to Tarantino's films? What about substance? Does he address important issues about the human condition, -or should we simply be grateful for the exhilarating ride he provides, and leave it at that? Tarantino himself seems to opt for the ride. Some years ago, he observed: My stuff, so far, has definitely fallen into what I would consider pulp fiction. If you're going to get historical, then the whole idea of pulp, what it really means, is a paperback you don't really care about. You read it, put it in your back pocket, sit on it in the bus, and the pages start coming out, and who gives a fuck? When you're [sic] finished it, you hand it to someone else, or you throw it away. You don't put it in your library. (Woods 102) Yet, we might reasonably ask whether Tarantino's films do more than their creator realized? Does anything of value remain after the viewers have recovered their breath? In answering this question we might consider how Reservoir Dogs deals with the issue of professionalism. What does it mean to be a professional? Is this a commendable quality worthy of praise? What causes people to become unprofessional? And when this does happen, is it something to be condemned, or do other, perhaps more admirable, qualities emerge? The term "professional" is commonly used as an expression of praise. To refer to people as "professionals" is to do more than identify their employment or even indicate that they have mastered a certain type of work. The term also involves living according to a particular set of values. The "true professional" is one who can minimize emotional involvements with colleagues, and can subordinate personal likes and dislikes, as well as the claims of family, friends, and organizations, to the demands of his employment. As they structure the priorities in their lives, those who live according to this ethic elevate the ideals of the workplace over all others. The values of professionalism seem to dominate the first part of Reservoir Dogs. The early scenes involve the planning of a jewelry store heist and then bring together the men who will carry this out. all of these men are career criminals. The organizer, Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney), is the head of a crime syndicate. For this particular robbery, Cabot and his devoted son, Nice Guy Eddie (Chris Penn), have selected six men they know well, but who do not know one another. …

Mansfield Park and Film: An Interview with Patricia Rozema

Abstract: Patricia Rozema is a Canadian film director whose adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (Miramax, 1999) produced a torrent of varying receptions, ambivalent at best, denigrating at worst. The novel itself is not highly popular with Austen readers/critics and it was adapted only once for the BBC and broadcast as a miniseries in 1983 before Rozema released her vision of the novel on film in 1999. This interview is meant to interrogate the choices behind her clearly politicized interpretation of the story. Since she is both the screenwriter and director of the film production, Rozema embodies an interesting case of the reading, envisioning, and rewriting process of literary classics like Austen's and representing them in the twentieth century's most popular medium, the cinema, which has its own methods of communication. In this interview, I investigate Rozema's reading of the text, the ideological stances that informed, affected, or shaped her reading experience, and her position in relation to the issue of fidelity to the original text, which is still at the core of any critical assessment or indeed general reception of film adaptations of classic/canonic works of literature. Our dialogue took place through written correspondence and I received the answers to my questions in March 2003, when Rozema was busy working on a film and I was still researching Austen and film adaptations in England. I hope this interview sheds some light on the stages of filming Mansfield Park and highlights some of the central issues regarding film adaptation in general, and that of Austen's novel in particular.* Hiba Moussa: What factors do you think make a book adaptable? Patricia Rozema: The moral core of the piece needs to be built into the turns of events themselves, not just the prose description of those events. Some novels declare themselves in their interpretation of events and some, the ones that are more easily adapted, declare themselves in the very fabric of the causal relations. HM: How much do socio-historical circumstances, whether those shaping the time you read the, book or the time the book was produced, affect your reading and understanding of a novel? PR: They affect me very much. In fact, that is what I added to Mansfield Park, the movie. I felt like we couldn't fully understand Austen's subtle statement about captivity if we didn't know that the issue of slavery was raging in every home in Britain at the time. And I felt morally obligated to explain that the extraordinary amount of leisure time these people enjoyed was purchased with the sweat and blood of slaves in the West Indies. HM: Does English literature have a special significance to you? PR: Of course it does. HM: Do you think that studying literature at a university prepared you for the role of adapter and do you think that it is a prerequisite for a successfully well-informed screenplay? PR: The more you know about different parts of life, the richer your work can be. Acquiring some analytical skills around novels definitely helps. HM: What is the main purpose behind adapting literary classics in your opinion? PR: To examine stories that bear re-examination. Tales that are rich in humanity need to be re-interpreted. Re-fashioning them into a different media expands the complexity of our understanding. Collective re-awakening. HM: How important is fidelity to the original text when you want to adapt it? PR: Fidelity is critical. The movie should have a different title if it serves an entirely different purpose than the original text. But you cannot underestimate what a radical thing it is to change from one art form to another. An author slaves to start with just the right word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph. The sounds of the words are crucial. But all the demands of words and prose are lifted when you make a movie. The physical presence makes many unnecessary and some necessary ones impossible. …

Julie Taymor's Titus: Deciding Not to Cut

Abstract: The first time I saw Julie Taymor's Titus, I was both fascinated and horrified: fascinated by the boldness and cleverness of the iconography and horrified by the various forms of violence to which the characters' bodies were submitted. This reminded me of the early modern literary genre of the anatomical blazon and of the spectacular dissections that took place in the anatomy theatres during the second part of the sixteenth century and the first part of the seventeenth century throughout Europe. All Renaissance artists were strongly influenced by the mixed feelings of fascination and horror inspired by those public dissections, and Shakespeare was no exception to the trend insofar as various appropriations of and references to the blazon are disseminated in his sonnets (cf. sonnets 20, 23, or 145) and plays (Twelfth Night, Coriolanus, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, or Titus Andronicus). As David Hillman and Carla Mazzio state: "Parts of the body are scattered throughout the literary and cultural texts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe."1 A few centuries later, the everlasting craze for hemoglobin, scattered limbs, and big thrills is given full satisfaction on the screens. Julie Taymor, in her adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, has composed a strikingly visual reworking of Renaissance "Baroque fantasies of the imagination."2 The trope of fragmentation at the root of the anatomical blazon initiated by Clement Marot in 1535 is here particularly analogous to the rhetoric of film editing developed in Titus. Originally, the poetic partition of the female body and the subsequent praise or denigration of the selected body parts were the constituting elements of the anatomical blazon. As far as Titus and Lavinia are concerned, the anachronism implied in a cinematic emblazoning of some of their body parts involves a fracture of bodily and gender representations as well as a shift in intention from the blasonneurs' point of view. Depriving the human body (most often female) of its wholeness in an attempt to objectify it, annihilating any trace of identity (here again feminine), and eventually subduing it was the profession of faith of the early modern blazoners. The desire to dissect a body discursively and impose a dominion upon a selected body part stems mainly from assumptions that: ". . . the part, in the early modern period, becomes a subject, both in the sense of being 'subjected'-of being isolated and disempowered-and of being 'subjected'-imagined to be endowed with qualities of intention and subjectivity."3 Representations of corporeality are also central to Titus Andronicus where the body's fragmentation and its loss of coherence acquire a collective perspective and become a synecdoche of political havoc and social dismantlement. It is thus through the disintegrated bodies of Titus and Lavinia that the politics of national threat and racial invasion get worked out. On the other hand, the emblazoning process of the editor of Taymor film, Francoise Bonnot, does not obey the same early modern imperatives of bodily conquest and dominion in Titus-the sadistic load contained in a Renaissance blazon is not here clearly perceptible-for if film editing is essentially based on deconstructive, paradigmatic methods (cutting), most of the time it aims at constructing coherent narratives and characters. As far as Titus is concerned, the repeated shots of body parts (mostly close-ups) stand for the anaphora upon which the anatomical blazon is based and which is so prominent in Shakespeare's text (becoming a kind of throbbing and haunting litany). The selected body parts emblazoned in Taymor's Titus are self-evidently the hand and the head. As the film unfolds, alternations of praise and blame in the representations of these body parts closely coalesce with the modulations of Titus's identity as his masculinity or masculine attributes (reason, courage, honor, virtue, and virtus amongst others) are ruthlessly assaulted from all sides. …

Godard's King Lear: Referents provided upon request

Abstract: I. Art Imitates Life: The Fragmentation of Lear Jean-Luc Godard's 1987 King Lear is a film whose back-story is the stuff of legend. King Lear takes to an extreme Godard's signature tactic of alluding, in the context of a completed film, to the conditions of that film's production; here, Godard goes so far as to figure the film's back-story significantly in the "text" of the film. As the story goes, Godard and Cannon Films producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus drew up a contract on the proverbial napkin at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival.1 Cannon Films, the producers of Death Wish II (1982) and The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington (1977), expected a prestige production, with Godard helming a team that would involve Norman Mailer as lead actor and writer of a Mafia-inflected script, along with his daughter Kate. Production on the film was delayed for a year, with Godard as well as his producers registering dissatisfaction with the final project; in fact, Godard's film opens with a recorded phone conversation wherein a Cannon representative demands delivery of the finished film. Similarly, there were problems between Godard and his star actor/writer: Kate and Norman Mailer left the set after one day of shooting (a day characterized by, as Godard describes in voice-over during the film, "a ceremony of foul behavior"), although Godard incorporated into the film's final cut two versions of a long take with his original leads. With a defiant intertitle declaring King Lear to be "A Film Shot in the Back," and with multiple references to the film's troubled history, Godard foregrounds the conditions of production that so drastically fragmented his film. King Lear, a film that is primarily "about" the reconstruction of lost masterpieces, becomes in this respect a Godardian meditation on the impossibility of resurrecting his film from its disastrous beginnings. Beyond its troubled origins, King Lear, an extremely free adaptation of Shakespeare's play, is an odd and strangely disjointed film. Set in a postapocalyptic world wherein "movies, and more generally art, have been lost and do not exist," King Lear loosely recounts William Shakespeare Jr. V's attempt to reconstruct the lost works of his ancestor; he is aided unwittingly in this quest by Don Learo (an aging mobster) and his daughter Cordelia, who seem to be "living" the script of Shakespeare's play without being aware of it. William is (somewhat) wittingly aided by a Prof. Pluggy (played by the filmmaker himself), who is similarly attempting to revive the art of cinema. Received poorly by film critics and Shakespeare critics alike, the film has drawn little of the close analysis, theorization, and explication that other Godard films attract. On the heels of his Je Vous Salue Marie (1985), Godard's Lear recasts some of the narrative and stylistic strategies that characterize the earlier film: Godard seem[s] to be saying goodbye to one style of filmmaking-dispensing with plot, characterization, narrative drive, ordinary structures of aural and visual montage, sets, camera movement, in short, most of the functions of classical cinema-to create a series of cinematic meditations for his own edification and spiritual survival. (Dixon 176) Wheeler Winston Dixon here overstates, to some degree, the similarity between the two films. Godard in Lear pushes many of these strategies-particularly the more disjunctive ones-to their extreme end; the symbology and iconography that can be, with difficulty, unraveled in Marie become increasingly personalized, stylized, and opaque in Lear. Although there is, as Peter Donaldson notes, an element of risk involved in "imposing a factious unity on a work that flaunts its lack of unity and closure" (192), certain underlying structures and impulses in this disjointed film do seem to draw together its disparate narrative strands. Godard's King Lear works, in its narrative discourse as well as its style, to provide a critical reflection on its own subject matter and process: Godard's film enacts theory. …

The Politics of Intimacy in Hanif Kureishi's Films and Fiction

Abstract: Author, playwright, and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi navigates freely between the written genre and the filmed genre, from screenplay to film or novel to television, finding his written works often translated to the big screen (My Beautiful Laundrette [Frears, 1985], Sammy and Rosie Get Laid [Frears, 1987], My Son the Fanatic [Prasad, 1997]) or turned into television adaptations (The Buddha of Suburbia [BBC, 1993]). His writing, especially in novel or short story form, has a visual quality that transcends the separation between the written word and the filmed frame. In fact Kureishi's narratives tend to float seamlessly in a postmodern, postcolonial aesthetic, mixing a linguistic and visual cocktail that includes humor and seriousness, references to high culture and lowbrow culture, with a dash of raw sex, poured into characters, who, "intoxicated and frustrated" at the same time, possess a common trait: they are always attempting to live life "this intensely" (The Buddha of Suburbia 15). The most confounding moments in Kureishi's films, plays, novels, and novellas are probably the most intimate ones-when a couple is communicating through touch, from the gentle kiss to a more erotic embrace. Furthermore, this intimate contact often takes place in typically impersonal environments-harsh, cold, gray London neighborhoods that do not normally appear on tourist maps. Kureishi's London is his London, or rather the South London neighborhoods where he grew up, on the edges. In Patrice Chereau's loosely based film adaptation of the novella Intimacy (2001), a man and a woman share very intense physical moments that make their "Wednesday" encounters verge on the edge of soft porn. But what makes these intimate encounters so compelling is that they take place in the man's disheveled apartment, "somewhere" in London, on one of those gray days that hover over many northern European cities any time of the year. Marked by a tube station, gray brick row houses, wide open streets where cars occasionally drive by, bus shelters, and a lone unremarkable pub, the London of Kureishi, both austere and familiar, indexes a bland urban backdrop. From this melancholy, almost two-dimensional theatrical backdrop-an aesthetic specific to someone who also works in the theater-the inhabitants emerge, giving the city its "corpo/reality." Discussing his collaboration with French director Patrice Chereau on the film Intimacy, Kureishi comments: If our age seems "unideological" compared to the period between the mid-sixties and mideighties; if Britain seems pleasantly hedonistic and politically torpid, it might be because politics has moved inside, into the body. The politics of personal relationships, of private need, of gender, marriage, sexuality, the place of children, have replaced that of society, which seems uncontrollable. ("The Two of Us" 4) This movement of politics from the "outside" to the "inside," well into the body in some cases, permeates many of Kureishi 's works. From his first film, My Beautiful Laundrette, to the novella Intimacy (1998), the need for love and intimacy plays itself out in an "indoors" completely turned away from the public spaces of London's streets, shops, bars, pubs, nightclubs, and apartment blocks. The recurrence of bodies embracing, hands touching, faces gazing intensely into each other's eyes in cramped places-in the backroom of a laundromat, or on the disheveled floor of a sparsely furnished apartment-conveys the desperate need for human intimacy in an otherwise impersonal and often alienating urban environment that has become completely devoid of romance. The couple in the film Intimacy meets every Wednesday in the man's apartment, an improvised living space that he has just moved into after leaving his wife and children. The couple hardly talks, they just grunt. While the sex scenes are filmed in a highly carnal and erotic fashion, the viewer does begin to feel a change in the tone of the weekly encounters, as the camera pulls back, revealing two people whose physicality conveys what Kureishi himself refers to as "the power of impersonal sexuality. …

The Voice That Fills the House: Opera Fills the Screen

Abstract: "My intention," Thomas Edison predicted in 1893 in the New York Times, "is to have such a happy combination of photography and electricity that a man can sit in his own parlor, see depicted upon a curtain the forms of the players in opera upon a distant stage and hear the voices of the singers" Even if Edison never fully realized his own predictions-his attempts at synchronized-sound opera and musical films ended after a disastrous studio fire in 1914-subsequent events have borne him out Most of us, declares Richard Fawkes in Opera on Film, have first experienced opera not in the opera house, but on our television and video screens at home And as Ken Wlaschin writes in his invaluable compendium, Opera on Screen: A Guide to 100 Years of Films and Videos, "We are the heirs of Edison's dream, the first generation to have access in our homes to a century of screen opera" (vi) Among all the theatrical events rendered in and on film, the opera film is one of the most challenging and problematic It presents a challenge in the commingling of the disparate elements of theatrical artifice, vocal music, and cinematic realism that is perhaps unique in the history of film adaptation But then, as Mario Cavaradossi sings in Puccini's Tosca, "Art, in its mystery, blends different beauties" As a theory, it is perhaps workable; but as a practicality, it yields some occasionally dubious results In the era of the silent film, for example, beginning as early as 1897, the lack of synchronized-sound technology did not daunt filmmakers like the Lumiere brothers, Georges Melies, and D W Griffith from releasing hundreds of brief adaptations of grand operas-some of them only a few minutes in length Charles Gounod's Faust, particularly, provides a suitable case history It has been adapted to the screen (for better or worse) more than any other opera In 1897 the Lumieres produced two short scenes from the opera-Mephistopheles's supernatural apparition and Faust's transformation from wizened old scholar to stalwart youth In 1904 Melies's Faust et Marguerite stomped the opera into a twenty-minute adaptation in twenty short tableaux Melies, who portrayed Mephistopheles, thoughtfully distributed a compilation score along with the silent film (the first such compilation made available in this fashion), since the pianist down front could hardly be expected to be conversant with grand opera A more scenic, "cinematic" Faust was released by Film d'Art in 1910, employing exterior location shooting and extra scenes deriving from Goethe rather than from Gounod Inevitably, Hollywood followed suit and found plenty of appropriately melodramatic potentials for mainstream entertainment in the opera Elements of the opera formed the musical backdrop for Lon Chaney 's legendary The Phantom of the Opera (1926) and for the MGM classic epic, San Francisco (1935), when Jeanette MacDonald indulged herself in the Trio of the finale Whether the music or MacDonald brought the town to its knees is a matter of open debate Meanwhile, it is not generally known that there were many attempts during the so-called silent era to produce opera films accompanied with cylinders and discs of recorded sound Performers had to lip-synch their roles to prerecorded music (rather in the way it is done today); and the sound cylinders and/or discs were later synchronized to the projection systems in the theatres Baritone Victor Maurel, the creator of the title role of Falstaff, appeared and sang excerpts from the role in the Phono-Cinema Theatre at the Paris Exposition in 1900 Three years later a British company produced about fifty sound films, including excerpts from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado As part of a series of so-called "Phonoscenes," Alice Guy Blache produced her version of the aforementioned Faust In 1906 a French company called Chronophone released excerpts from Leo Delibes's Lakme and Verdi's Il Trovatore Other processes at the time included euphonious names like Synchroscope, Vivaphone, and Cinephonograph, and Edison's short-lived experiment, Kinetophone …

Oedipus Rex by Pier Paolo Pasolini the Palimpsest: Rewriting and the Creation of Pasolini's Cinematic Language

Abstract: Oedipus Rex is a fundamental text of the Western world, dating back to Ancient Greece. Freud's recent psychoanalytic reinterpretation of the text has made it one of the most significant myths of our time. Adapting it to the screen is therefore a special challenge. The film is bound to invoke the audience's previous knowledge of both the myth and the play in effecting a rewriting or, to borrow from Gerard Genette, a "palimpsest." As Naomi Greene explains: "not one but three texts infuse Edipo Re: the Oedipus tale of Greek myth and drama, Freud's reading of that tale and his elaboration of the Oedipus complex and Pasolini's references to his own childhood" (151). Indeed, all three texts deal with the definition of what it is to be human, and from that point of view, they have both a universal and an individual dimension. Since the story gives an explanation of the sexual construction of man through Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, it was particularly interesting to Pasolini as an autobiographical text. As a palimpsest, the film functions as a complex and interesting text: it turns into a map of the soul, a translation of the works of Freud and his successors, which defines the various elements that build up the psyche. From this point of view, it is also a rewriting of Sophocles's analysis of the role of free will and fatality in shaping man's destiny, recast in the contemporary framework of psychoanalysis. Moreover, this functioning of the film as palimpsest is crucial to its meaning. It deals with escaping one's fate, with the questioning of what is said and written, or in other terms, with changing the word. It is a reflection on rewriting and translating, in several meanings of these terms. It rewrites crucial texts. The film also works as a translation of the psyche, a map of what Pasolini calls "brute images" in his essay "The Cinema of Poetry." In fact, it is a translation of his essay in visual terms, or, in other words, to quote Millicent Marcus, it is an "umbilical" film. The film thus becomes a reflection on the act of seeing and expressing. First, I shall look at the way Pasolini uses Sophocles's text to rephrase the dilemma between fatality and free will in psychoanalytic terms. Then, I will study the map of the psyche that is given in the film, adapting Freud's research to the Oedipus myth. Finally, I will analyze how the film becomes an examplar of Pasolini's cinematic theory and a general reflection on language and communication. His conception of "the cinema of poetry," and in particular of "free indirect subjective," is fundamental in his style of filmmaking. He argues that a film must be an act of unmediated vision, which makes the choice of Oedipus Rex as the subject of his umbilical film all the more revealing. The film thus deals with cinematic language in particular, looking into its status as a fundamental tool of human communication. The play Oedipus Rex, written by Sophocles, deals with the role of the human being in shaping his own life. Sophocles takes a stance on the scope of free will and destiny. In fact, the myth of Oedipus is about escaping one's fate, a fate that is given by the gods and foretold by the oracles. The play however brings forward a religious view of life, emphasizing both the role of destiny and the inability to grasp that knowledge. It is thus also about humankind's hubris. This is obvious from the very beginning of the play when the protagonist states: "you all know me, the world knows my fame: I am Oedipus" (159). Oedipus wants to be equal to the Gods: he is the King; he wants to know who he is, and what he is. He embodies the intellectual hubris for which he is punished. The price of knowledge is blindness. One cannot see the truth without being physically hurt. This was the case of Tiresias, Oedipus's foil. One of the central themes of the play is thus seeing and understanding, which are placed in contrast. In the very first lines, Oedipus explains "I would be blind to misery" (159) and the priest answers "you see us before you now" (160). …

ABSENT PRESENCES IN LIMINAL PLACES: Murnau's Nosferatu and the Otherworld of Stoker's Dracula

Abstract: "Life is nothings"1 - Bram Stoker Athough the credits of F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu2 acknowledge Bram Stoker's Dracula as the fictional source of Henrik Galeen's screenplay,3 most critics tend to dismiss any thematic connection between novel and film. To Lane Roth, for instance, Nosferatu, far from being "an individual filmrnaker's vision of a literary work," is essentially "an expression of the German Zeitgeist" of the Weimar Republic and, particularly, of the "mysticism and fantasy" that the expressionist Schauerfilm had inherited from traditional German Romanticism (312-13). David Walker concurs, adding that Nosferatu's "teutonic flavor" actually undermines it as an "adaptation that best captures the spirit [of Dracula]" (48). Such exclusively "Germanic" interpretations should not go unquestioned, however, for Murnau takes more than just a few plot elements from Dracula. I intend to examine this issue, thereby redressing the balance in favor of Stoker's influence by suggesting that Dracula offered Murnau a complex reworking of major Gothic motifs extracted from Germanic literature and culture. Arguably, then, what seems to have inspired Murnau to rework Dracula on film was an awareness that Stoker had appropriated much of Murnau's own aesthetic affinities with the German Romantic spirit in his novel. In order to demonstrate how Murnau distills the Stimmung or existential mood of German Romanticism through Stoker's influence, I shall focus on two intermeshed aspects of what critics label Nosferatu's fantastic Germanness: absent presence and liminal landscape. As Angela Dalle Vacche rightly remarks, Murnau "slim[s] his protagonist down to an evanescent, flickering fragment of the German nocturnal imagination [. . .]" (182). Lloyd Michaels echoes her insight by observing that what distinguishes the Murnau and Herzog Nosferatus from other non-German film versions of Dracula is that their vampire-counts, "[un]like their English-speaking counterparts [. . .] manage to signify elusiveness, rather than presence, lack rather than excess [. . .]" (68). The implication is that there is something innately Germanic about the motif of absent presence on which Murnau pivots his Nosferatu, and which he culturally bequeaths to Werner Herzog's 1979 remake. Conversely, it could be argued that Murnau inherited this bizarre theme from, say, Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, whose novel The Magic Ring epitomizes the German Romantic obsession with the shadowy self fragmenting into a more insubstantial parallel realm. Such a preoccupation with the ghostly double of a dislocated or dissolving personality is clearly an earlier manifestation of Helldunkel, which Lotte H. Eisner defines as "a sort of twilight of the German soul" (8). In terms of Nosferatu as adaptation, however, this is only half the point. For absent presence is a reiterated theme in Dracula. That Nosferatu terrifies the Empusa's sailor by his diaphanous appearance owes, in fact, much less to such Hoffmann doppelganger tales as "The Story of the Lost Reflection" than to Stoker's description of the Demeter mate's ordeal with Dracula's physical vacuity: "On the watch last night I saw It, like a man, tall and thin, and ghastly pale. It was in the bows, and looking out. I crept behind It, and gave It my knife, but the knife went through It, empty as the air" (113). Such testimony confirms that Dracula's disappearing act before Olgaren's eyes is neither a product of madness on this sailor's part nor a trick of the dark, but rather Dracula's uncanny ability to be, and not to be, simultaneously. Evidently, then, what haunts the Empusa's hold-an entity through whose insubstantiality stacked coffins are clearly visible-originates from what lurks on the Demeter's bow: the spectre of "no one"(112). The disclosure that Dracula's realm is darkly ethereal is further proof that he is the literary prototype of Murnau's translucent count. "I love the shade and the shadow" (32), Dracula tells Harker, whose initial encounter with him as the dark driver establishes the latter's physicality as one of immaterial materiality: "When he [Dracula] stood between me and the flame he didn't obstruct it, for I could see its ghostly flicker all the same" (18). …

Taking Possession: Neil LaBute Adapts a Postmodern Romance

Abstract: In Neil LaBute's film Possession, the subtitle of the adapted work has gone missing. A. S. Byatt's novel was Possession: A Romance. On its publication in 1990, those who expected mawkish sentiment forgot their suspicions once immersed in that huge and varied book. Certainly there are two love stories at the center, but they are very cerebral affairs. Byatt's fiction tackles-in alarming and allusive detail-science, art, religion, and anything else that occurs to her encyclopedic mind. Her Booker Prize winner additionally traces shades of the meaning of "romance": the lure of the quest, the intricacies of intellectual obsession, and the nostalgic beauty of past eras. Possession might be called a "maximalist" novel, replete with parody, poetry, fairy tales, and a postmodern detective story to which only the readers, not the characters, have full access. That Neil LaBute should drop "romance" from his title is ironic, because romance (in its conventional form, centering on male/female relationships) is the one element in this cornucopia of styles he has resolutely emphasized. The result is a film that could have abounded with ideas but is instead ordinary. This is ironic given LaBute's background; the films and plays he has written and directed (including the Sundance Festival hit In The Company of Men) have shown him to be darkly satirical and pointedly capable of handling difficult moral and intellectual material. The film begins as the novel does. Drafts of love letters from Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam) fall out of a neglected book into the present-day grasp of the apparently insignificant scholar Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart). While attempting to solve the mystery of the intended recipient, Roland joins forces with icy feminist academic Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow). Uncovering the passionate and tragic love affair between Ash and fellow poet Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer EhIe), Roland and Maud fall, more comically, into an uneasy parallel situation with their nineteenth-century counterparts. Possession, the novel, will surely show itself to be one of the most enduring artifacts of literary postmodernism. Like John Fowles and Umberto Eco, Byatt playfully offers a smorgasbord of postmodern tricks, such as a mixture of fictional and historical characters, and invented intertexts. But at the same time she wryly explodes the cavalier postmodern attitude that serves up incongruous combinations of mystery, bodice ripper, and academic commentary. She asks if this is truly what we desire from fiction. She also wants readers to contemplate the spectacle of postmodern thinkers Maud and Roland-fragmented, lonely, knowledgeable in theory but confused in practice. Their creativity squashed by the critical contemplation of texts, Roland and Maud are paralyzed whenever they contemplate love. Byatt gives them deliciously silly, stuttering conversations, defining themselves as "[matrices] for a susurration of texts and codes" (273). "We never say the word Love, do we-we know it's a suspect ideological construct," Maud says to Roland (290). In place of this crabbed postmodern negativity, LaBute's film provides quite another exchange between Roland and Maud. Discussing their shared inability to feel passion, Paltrow smiles ruefully at Eckhart and says, "Yes, aren't we just modern?" Frankly, no. Roland and Maud aren't modern at all. They are postmodern, and that's their problem. Modernism, for all its experiments, took life and art seriously, while postmodernism dabbles in parody and even nihilism, suggesting that art and morality may have little meaning. Modernism is practically the only topic that Byatt does not tackle in Possession. The Victorian hunger for and overweening confidence in knowledge, the postmodern dilemma of having too much information and not enough faith or idealism-these are at the heart of Byatt's novel, but modernism is not. LaBute has decided that the film audience does not care what postmodernism is, and possibly he is correct. …

Brian Aldiss's Billion Year Spree: An Interview

Abstract: "This making and unmaking of ideas doth very properly denominate the mind active...." Bishop Berkeley's challenge to the creative imagination, written in the eighteenth century, is appended to Brian W. Aldiss's most recent collection of essays, The Detached Retina: Aspects of Science Fiction and Fantasy (1995). For Aldiss, as well as for Berkeley, it constitutes a credo of the speculative mind. Cineastes know Aldiss from several films that have been adapted from his work, including Roger Corman's Frankenstein Unbound (1990) and Steven Spielberg's A.I. (2001). The latter film derives from extensive notes and script drafts that Aldiss and Stanley Kubrick worked on during the years of their collaboration, from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. Moreover, science fiction readers and fans know that Aldiss holds a distinguished place in the ranks of science fiction litterateurs. (I hasten to add that he always refers to himself as more of a surrealist than a maker of what he describes as "that tired old oxymoron, science fiction.") Now approaching his eightieth birthday, Aldiss has garnered every conceivable honor and award in the field, including the prestigious Hugo and Nebula Awards, the British Science Fiction Award, and the first James Blish Award. In addition to his prolific output of speculative fiction, he is a noted novelist, critic, anthologist, and essayist. His trilogy of novels derived from and expanding upon Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau-respectively, Frankenstein Unbound (1973), Dracula Unbound (1991), and An Island Called Moreau (1980)-are classics in the postmodern interrogation of the Gothic Tradition. Hothouse (1962) and Report on Probability (1967) launched the "New Wave" of British experimental speculative fiction. His Helliconia Trilogy (1982-1985) is ranked among the modern classics of apocalyptic fables. His autobiographical works include A Soldier Erect (1971), a chronicle of his years in Burma during the Second World War. No more thoughtful and sharply intelligent examinations of the history of science fiction exist than his two volumes, The Billion Year Spree (1973) and its sequel, The Trillion Year Spree (1986). He writes and speaks with equal authority on the works of Sophocles, the aforementioned Bishop Berkeley, William Godwin, G. K. Chesterton, Aldous Huxley, and Philip K. Dick. And threading through most of his works is the scarlet thread of an irrepressible, picaresque humor, placing him in a tradition extending from Rabelais to his late friend, Kingsley Amis. Film enthusiasts perhaps know him best for his short story, "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," which inspired the Spielberg-Kubrick film, A.I. In short, Brian Aldiss is an outstanding example of that vanishing breed, the Man of Letters. Aldiss came to the University of Kansas in July 2004, where he was being inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Under the guidance of author and educator James Gunn, the University has for many years been the site of the Institute of Science Fiction Studies and its annual summer writers' seminars. The Institute founded the Hall of Fame several years ago. Next year the Hall of Fame will be relocated to the newly built Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, Washington. Surrounded by his many colleagues, including' his longtime friend, writer Harry Harrison (also an inductee), and writers James Gunn, Greg Bear, and Gregory Benford, Aldiss was in top form during the installation. He clearly enjoyed himself, discoursing to the packed hall at length about his life and work. "It seems that when you get fossilized, it's time to start a museum," Aldiss said at the time, wryly. "I remember twelve years back when the Conference of the Fantastic was negotiating for a Hall of Fame. It was to be near Clearwater. We were pretty sold on that, but it never came off. And then it almost went to Cleveland. Rock 'n roll claimed it instead. …

C. B. DeMille: 70 Annotated Films

Abstract: C. B. DeMille: 70 Annotated Films Roberts. Birchard. Cecils. DeMille's Hollywood. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2004. index. Illustrated. 430 pp. $39.95 cloth. Of all the great Hollywood pioneers, Cecil B. DeMille has been the one most commonly neglected and slighted, his importance marginalized. Maybe DeMille was too much of a crude American original, as adept as D. W. Griffith at exploiting ingrained prejudice. The Cheat (1915), for example, is probably as racist in it premise and implications as The Birth of a Nation was, though on a more epic scale. Griffith insulted a more vocal minority that would shame his reputation 50 years after his death, when the Directors Guild of America erased his name from its annual award. Had academic film history been starting rather than ending under the influence of political correctness, Griffith might not have fared so well from the beginning, no matter whether he invented and reformed film narrative through the not-so-subtle development of parallel montage. Next to Griffith who started about six years earlier, DeMille was the second great pioneer. D. W. Griffith became an icon, however, while DeMille ended up becoming a sort of cartoon stereotype of Hollywood directors. Ironically, in terms of box office, the cartoon was ultimately more successful than the icon commercially. Perhaps Griffith fared better than DeMille with the critics because Griffith was not such an obvious vulgarian, ready to find his way into viewer's hearts through the imagined bathtubs of antiquity. But surely critical hostility goes deeper than DeMille's cynical Biblical vulgarity. Looking at such a DeMille feature as This Day and Age (1933), liberal viewers (a tribe responsible by and large for the writing and conceptualization of "film history," something of an oxymoron, since many film "historians" are not real "historians," by either training or inclination) could easily conclude that this law & order propaganda vehicle that approves the lynch-mentality thinking of a group of well-meaning but ignorant high school nazis intent on depriving a local thug of his civil rights could only have been made by a rabid Republican archconservative. Robert Birchard admits that the film "has been branded a fascist tract," but he then attempts to dodge that bullet by calling the film an "allegory." Such a fancy label, however, cannot obliterate the film's disrespect for individual rights, when the "boys" exact a confession out of a criminal by dangling him by his ankles over a pit of rats. Birchard also dodges the ghastly implications of the film's message by hiding behind production details. Repulsive though this film may be, it was effectively made on not much of a budget. Like D. W. Griffith, DeMille certainly knew how to manipulate emotions at the expense of discretion and tact. The book's Preface poses questions such as "What set DeMille apart?" His vulgarity and his cynicism, perhaps his detractors might say, but that's too facile an answer; it could also be his business sense and his talent. "Why did he remain successful," when others did not? Because he was better qualified than others to think like a mogul, or maybe because he kept his finger on the national pulse and compromised his "vision" accordingly? Because his Right-leaning tendencies protected him during the era of Cold War hysteria? Is there any other reason why The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)-which wasn't, really, so "great," despite its inflated title-should have won the Best Picture Oscar? …

The Passion of Mel Gibson

Abstract: There's something almost hoary about Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004). Not that John Debney's score isn't hip (voices, flutes, thrumming electronic drums) and Gibson's Jesus stoic and cool and capable of sustaining pain beyond normal human limits. No, what I mean is that the film, no matter its message, can't help but expose its venerable cinematic underthings to the viewer. Every dolly, every pan, cut, dissolve, altered frame speed, and subjective camera technique are laid right out there, while the characters emote in Aramaic and Latin (though often they sounded to me like Nicol Williamson as Merlin chanting a spell in John Doorman's powerfully mysterious and religious Excalibur [1981]), as if what we were watching was supposed to be, well, the Gospel, but obviously it's not. Movies in general have a poor record of historical accuracy and Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is no exception. Pontius Pilate, for example, as David Denby noted in his New Yorker review, "is not the bloody governor of history [. . .] but a civilized and humane leader tormented by the burdens of power-he holds a soulful discussion with his wife on the nature of truth" (84). Pasolini managed to cut through the gauze to revelation in his The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1966), but such an aesthetic feat is beyond Gibson's more commercial sensibilities. Gibson's movie opens with a shot of a full and cinematic Gothic moon in a cloudy night sky tinged a grayish blue, as is the fog, then Caleb Deschanel's fluid camera pulls down and dollies through on its search for Jesus and a few of his disciples in a garden somewhere outside Jerusalem (Gethsemane). Jesus's back (played by the makeup team and the torso of James Caviezel) looks like a crumpled map riven with blood canals. The film's color-coding at the beginning-blue for Jesus, gold for the greedy Jewish priests in the temple-also partakes of the film's quaintness. Even the demons that whiz by Judas (Luca Lionello) seem a bit old-fashioned with their startle effects, as do other filmic devices, e.g. Mary shot from ground level as she clutches the dust and dirt where Jesus's blood recently was splattered for some twenty minutes of screen time, then the camera descending through the earth to Jesus chained in a room, head raised, sensing his mother above-a minor example of this film hero's supernatural abilities. Christ also replaces a soldier's lopped off ear lost when the disciples fight hack, briefly and in slow and stutter motion, as Jesus is arrested. Monsters have a grand film history, but, like comedy, are hard to do. Children with demon eyes harass Judas until he hangs himself. In the arms of Satan we see the back of a child's head, until it turns to reveal its demon face, reminiscent of Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), another filmed venture into the Christian Gothic. Gibson's eyebrowless, androgynous (at best) Satan (played by the actress Rosalinda Celentano) eyes Jesus seductively, lets an insect wriggle into her nose, and releases from somewhere under her robe a snake. Near the end we see this cartoonish devil (isn't there also a hint in her figure of Bergman's Death from The Seventh Seal [1956]?) in an overhead shot curling in agony and despair because she's lost another one to Jehovah. Then Satan dissolves into the cloudy evening sky whence the film began and where no doubt, even as I write, the cosmic battle rages on. Like voyeurs we track Jesus, as does Satan on one side of the crowd, Mary (Maia Morgenstern) or Mary Magdalene (Monica Bellucci) on the other. Neither they nor we can get enough of the spectacle of torture. Only a few in the crowd are disturbed enough to turn away or offer Jesus succor. But Gibson doesn't shy away from Jesus's pov cither. Breughelesque uglies leer at the camera and hand-held shots subjectively swirl and turn and fall with Jesus before he impressively thunks to earth, though none of these thunks are as forceful as the stomp Jesus gives the snake that slithered out from under Satan's dress earlier in the movie. …

Bottom's Wife: Gender and Voice in Hoffman's Dream

Abstract: In his screenplay to William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999), director Michael Hoffman characterizes Shakespeare's play as "like a magic mirror [that] enchants us and reflects back to us who we are" (Hoffman Introduction, n. p.). To say that it both "enchants" and "reflects" is to premise Shakespeare's play as both fantasy and mimesis. Hoffman's casual conjunction of two nearly contradictory positions describes the film itself: it revels in escapist fantasy, and yet it also engages the realities of contemporary culture. The film reflects back to millennial American culture one version of "who we are"-a consumer culture absorbed in fantasy and enchantment. The film revels in beautiful images and sound, unabashedly exploiting the eye- and ear-candy of digital accessibility. With its pop-star casting, glossy flesh shots, and lush soundtrack, Hoffman's Dream is a document in the temptations of virtual imagery and sound. Many American consumers have unprecedented tools for the manipulation of virtual fictions. On my iMac®, I can create and reproduce images and tunes of unprecedented lushness using the tools of virtual fantasy-iPhoto(TM), iMovie(TM) and iTunes®. CDs, DVDs, websites, and HDTV can give us all instant access to the virtual. Now Michael Hoffman has given us another virtual tool, his Shakespearean iDream.1 When I quoted Hoffman just now, I truncated his characterization of the play. Let me make amends. He actually writes that it "enchants us and reflects back to us who we are, and what we know of love" [emphasis added]. Love is ostensibly connected in the film with what "we know," with what might be called the "real" world. The convoluted courtship of the young lovers leads to "real" sex (or at least nudity) and marriage. Theseus and Hippolyta are presented as a "real" engaged couple caught up in familiar prenuptial tensions. Oberon and Titania are a little more difficult to imagine as real lovers-Rupert Everett and Michelle Pfeiffer in bed together? But their fairyland quarrel seems to resolve as nicely into their world as the squabbles of, say, Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock. Centrally, the film makes Bottom's desire for love seem real: Kevin Kline engages us in a touching romance of awakened middle-age male sexuality, with just enough realism to make him the focus of audience identification-at least for middle-aged males. But for all its gestures toward the real, love in Hoffman's Dream seems more virtual than real. The flesh we see is as artificial as the "mud" that covers and displays Hermia and Helena and as virtual as the glitter that accompanies Titania. The film's "shimmering skin-splendor" (Deilaeder 185) seems as distant from real sex as is the cool nudity of the pre-Raphaelite painters.2 This highly cosmetic film was appropriately tied in with a product line of Max Factor (Lehmann 267). Even its phallic references-both Lysander and Bottom seem to sport erections-are more coy than arresting, kept at a virtual distance by the edge of the picture frame. Above all, Bottom's experience of love and sex, so clearly the emotional center of the film, seems unreal.3 We are led to believe that Bottom will be transformed by Titania: this sensitive soul, longing for beauty, frustrated by a barren marriage, is given a night of bliss. The screenplay wants us to feel a change: "Bottom is left smiling. . . . His eyes fill up with a strange kind of joy" (Hoffman 114). But in the film itself, there is no joy at the end. Bottom's iDream hath no bottom: nothing really changes. He is left only with a tiny golden crown, a mere token of his sexual encounter. He is no freer from the traps of frustrated desire than he ever was. Like any good date movie, this romantic comedy avoids material and social complications. Bottom and Titania, like Kate and Leopold, cannot take too much reality. Hoffman gives us instead the transparency of the virtual, the chance to participate in fantasy without an irritable reaching after fact and reason. …

Fate and Free Will in the Cider House Rules: Novel to Hollywood

Abstract: As a writer, John Irving exhibits conflicting, coexisting impulses toward the goodhearted and grim facts of life in all his work.1 He creates wonderful communities of extremely good, lovable people. Yet, as the last line in The World According to Garp expresses, "we are all terminal cases."2 In Irving's fiction, everyone-no matter whom-is destined for a certain path. InA Prayer for Owen Meany, Owen explains this by example: "I don't want to be a hero . . . it's that I am a hero. I know that's what I'm supposed to be."3 In The Cider House Rules, Irving's sentimentality and startling brutality align themselves with implications of free will and determinism. Homer Wells's journey concludes with resigned acceptance of the truth that he is fated to perform abortions-even though he has refused his whole life-and to ultimately succeed Dr. Wilbur Larch as "doctor" and head of St. Cloud's orphanage, another calling he does his best to avoid. Cider House displays a world of determinism inherent in the life of the crucial character, and as an overriding dynamic of the fictional universe. The Hollywood film, conversely, exaggerates Irving's sentimental and optimistic vision of human nature while minimizing his darker tendencies, especially that of impinging fate. The film provides a strikingly more upbeat portrait of human possibility and free will, suggesting that life offers opportunities for making important, pivotal decisions. Homer searches for answers, hoping to heroically take charge of his own life and affect it for the better. "Whether I shall turn out to be a hero of my own life," he reads repeatedly from David Copperfield, "or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."4 Ultimately, the pages of Cider House show Homer not as a hero, but as one destined by fate; coming to terms with the sense that little of existence is genuinely a matter of individual human control or choice. In the novel Cider House, Homer is fated to leave the oiphanage over and over, fail in the outside world, and return. Larch acknowledges this in a fitful letter while Homer is away as a young adult: "Just because you're having the time of your life . . . don't you dare forget how to be of use-don't you forget where you belong" (337). Several families try and ultimately fail to adopt Homer when he is a child. This background is set up in both mediums, but in the novel it contributes to Homer's ultimate fate to return, whereas in the film his failed adoptions are simpler, less disturbing, and aligned with free will. In his novel, Irving devotes a thick chapter titled "The Boy Who Belonged to St. Cloud's" to Homer's trials and rejections by four successive foster families-thus setting up the foundational argument for Homer's belonging to St. Cloud's. The first adoptive family returns the infant Homer because he never cries-contentment is a quality he has had little choice but to learn in an orphanage. Family number two resides in the neighboring town of Three Mile Falls. They miss having a child making noise around the house and proceed to abuse Homer in order to make him wail. Homer's third familythe seemingly homey, moral Professor Draper and his wife, "Mom" to all-institute unfair and severe punishments, making Homer recite the family's prayer mantra: "I am vile, I abhor myself (19). Homer's fourth and final trial with a potential family consists of a camping trip with the lively Winkles, who end up killing themselves in a logging river-a spectacle Homer observes. Through Irving's chronology of each of Homer's adoptions and depictions of why each fails, it seems there is some force working against Homer, fating him for rejection. he is misunderstood, abused, or abandoned by every family he attempts to belong to-as if he is fated to find only the wrong kind of families. Homer is left with the impression that there is an inordinate amount of chaos out in the world; these failures and returns make Homer who he is. …

Chaucerian Fabliaux, Cinematic Fabliau: Pier Paolo Pasolini's I racconti di Canterbury

Abstract: Despite claiming first prize at the 1972 Berlin Film Festival, Pier Paolo Pasolini's I racconti di Canterbury has never garnered widespread scholarly acclaim. Many Pasolini scholars have condemned the film or apologized for its failings, especially in comparison to the preceding film in Pasolini's Trilogia della vita, Il Decameron. Sandro Petraglia, for example, criticizes I racconti di Canterbury as an outright failure when contrasted to Il Decameron: "I racconti di Canterbury e un brutto calco divitalizzato . . . Tutte le storie del primo film si sono coagulate nel secundo in una preziosa ma sottile operazione di rimasticamento" (105) ("The Canterbury Tales is a poor devitalized copy. . . . The stories from the first film all have coagulated in the second one in a mannered, but subtle, act of rehashing").1 Martin Green summarizes the negative response to I racconti di Canterbury as focusing on "its unevenness, its amateurish editing and acting, and its obsession with sexual intercourse, scatology, and male genitalia" (46). Without question, a large portion of the audience of I racconti di Canterbury deems the film a blatant artistic failure. Although Pasolini's emphasis on intercourse, scatology, and genitalia may provoke his viewers' disdain, we must view these tropes, not as an adolescent interjection into his reconstruction of the Chaucerian world, but as an integral part of his artistic motivation. Pasolini, through his creative decisions as writer and director, privileges a world of fabliau over other medieval genres evident in Chaucer's texts. Thus, it is critical to view I racconti di Canterbury as a cinematic vision of a now extinct genre, the medieval fabliau. Through the lens of the fabliau, the faults of I racconti di Canterbury fade and the film's comic brio and aggressive, transgressive force come into sharper and more humorous focus. Chaucerian Fabliaux Since my argument is that scholars have overlooked Pasolini's debt to the fabliau, a brief review of the genre may be helpful. The fabliau, which flourished in thirteenth-century France and which Chaucer used as the basis for many of his tales, candidly and hilariously depicts a world of erotic obscenity, scatological excess, earthy pleasure, and sexual betrayal. Reading Charles Muscatine's description of the fabliau, one can see that it applies equally well to I racconti di Canterbury: [T]he . . . fabliaux seem relatively unimportant; they are certainly unpretentious. Some of them are narratives so slight as to raise the question of why they were written down at all. They have further tended to repel interest, or at least public discussion, for their frequent prurience. Some of them are no more than extended "dirty jokes." (2) Unpretentious, slight, repellent, prurient, dirty-these words both describe the generic trappings of the fabliau and call to mind criticisms of I racconti di Canterbury. Thus, criticizing the film for its faithful adherence to the tropes of the genre would be similar to criticizing science fiction films for portraying extraterrestrial life or westerns for depicting gunfights. Rather than seeing I racconti di Canterbury as an artistic failure due to Pasolini's decision to foreground the fabliau, a genre unknown to many as it died with the waning of the Middle Ages, we should view the film on its own terms as a cinematic fabliau. Certainly, Pasolini privileges the fabliau over any other Chaucerian genre. The sketches of I racconti di Canterbury, in order, are based on "The General Prologue," "The Merchant's Tale," "The Friar's Tale," "The Cook's Tale," "The Miller's Tale," "The Wife of Bath's Prologue," "The Reeve's Tale," "The Pardoner's Tale," "The Summoner's Tale," and "The Summoner's Prologue." Of these ten episodes, six-"The Merchant's Tale," "The Friar's Tale," "The Cook's Tale," "The Miller's Tale," "The Reeve's Tale," and "The Summoner's Tale"-are fabliaux.2 "The Wife of Bath's Prologue" may not be a fabliau per se, but Alison of Bath represents a fabliau ethos in her hearty sexuality and boisterous personality; likewise, "The Summoner's Prologue," with its depiction of a swarm of friars in Satan's anus, needs little manipulation to reveal its fabliau spirit. …

Contrasting Visions of a Saint: Carl Dreyer's the Passion of Joan of Arc and Luc Besson's the Messenger

Abstract: Emerson, writing in Nature, describes his perceptive experience as though he were a "transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God" (10). Emerson's immersion into complete spiritual realization of nature is interesting for, among other reasons, the visual metaphor he uses to express an unquantifiable experience. A "transparent eyeball" is, literally, a blind eye. The phrase "transparent eyeball" is a kind of paradox-what kind of eye cannot see? But we understand this usage of Emerson's as a metaphor, and its paradoxical nature is important. To make sense of it, we need to redefine in what terms "seeing" is meant. Emerson intends "seeing" as sense experience plus insight; hence the visual metaphor. But in this redefinition, Emerson also anticipates the material basis for the plastic art form that will best express the modem artists' ability to evoke the spiritual through the real world: the motion picture. Andre Bazin writes that the motion picture is "in itself a kind of miracle," and emphasizes that the cinema re-establishes the "ambiguity of reality" to the world ("Cinema and Theology" 393). The cinematic image is a factual one; it is materially real, which presents us, according to Stanley Cavell, with an ontological paradox: the mimetic quality of motion pictures makes a world present to us viewers as real, yet we are screened from this world at the same time. In other words, we participate in the viewing experience of a real world, but one that we know by the images and impressions it leaves behind. The fact that an analogy to religious experience can be seen here was not lost on Bazin. The cinema is the art form of modernity; that is, it not only presents a subject, but also imitates itself in the process. Bazin considers it this way: Only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation, a kind of decal or transfer. The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model. (What is Cinema? Vol. 1, 14) Given the popularity of religious subjects for films, this suggests that Emerson's "transparent eyeball" represents in modernity the position of the viewer, under the influence of the dual phenomena of suspension of disbelief and persistence of vision. The viewer becomes "nothing" in the confines of the theater (or the TV), taken into the presentation of the world on screen. And, the viewer "sees all," all that the camera allows; this is the necessary lynchpin of modernity that defines the transcendent experience of cinema. I have chosen for this paper to consider two films that very nearly bracket the history of cinema: Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (France, 1928), and Luc Besson's The Messenger (France, 1999). Dreyer, a German Protestant with no real concern for religion or politics, and Besson, a French director with an eye toward the epic possibilities of contemporary cinema, worked two opposing angles of the Joan story. Their films, of course, reflect the time of their production, the commercial context, and budget constraints. But when these concerns (though valid) are dismissed, we can see that Dreyer worked well within a style Bazin would come to define as Neorcalism in bringing the human story of Joan to life, while Besson pursued a kind of nation-founding mythic tale of epic scope, one that necessarily sublimates the divine mission of Joan to the historical qualities of his spectacle. Dreyer's film opens with a shot of the actual text of the court proceedings of Joan's trial, attesting to the fact that he wished to make a film about the trial itself, and as close to the event as possible. …

Imitating the Siren: West's the Day of the Locust and the Subject of Sound

Abstract: Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust foregrounds the dilemma of the artist as he confronts the emergent culture industry of the 193Os, an industry which, in the form of the Hollywood studio system, is characterized by its capacity to absorb all that enters its domain. In its attempt to make Hollywood both the subject of its narrative and the object of its critique, West's novel offers a particularly explicit case in point. For even as Locust enacts a scathing critique of the Hollywood dream factory, much of its aesthetic remains indebted to the techniques of the Hollywood industry it ostensibly attacks. ' It is this paradox that draws attention to the novel's final passage. Here, in the aftermath of a riot set off by the rumor of a star's appearance at a movie premier, protagonist and proto-artist Tod Hackett is escorted away from the scene of the crime in a police car: He was carried through the exit to the back street and lifted into a police car. The siren began to scream and at first he thought he was making the noise himself. he felt his lips with his hands. They were clamped tight. he knew then it was the siren. For some reason this made him laugh and he began to imitate the siren as loud as he could. (185) In the context of the preceding melee and the seductive power of Hollywood cinema, the "siren" in this passage emerges as a multivalent signifier. It signals both the police car's alarm and the enthralling song of the mythical femme fatales endowed with the power to lure sailors to untimely deaths. In West's novel, Hollywood cinema proves to be siren-like in the full sense of the term, the aggressive pulse of an aesthetic law and a seductive call to self-destruction. At the close of the novel, the artist is apparently entrapped in both. Thus Tod's siren-scream articulates the double bind of the novel itself as a narrative that seems complicit in the very representational practices it attempts to critique.2 More than perhaps any of the Hollywood novels of its era, Locust challenges critics with the question of whether "West's splintered narrative 'writes in' Hollywood modes of representation only to write them off," or whether it merely imitates the siren and its ideological imperatives (Strychacz 194). The vast majority of contemporary criticism refuses to choose one option over the other, maintaining instead that West's novel is "quintessentially protopostmodern" (204), and thus can be seen as a text that does both at once. Within this context, Tod's scream emerges as evidence of the collapse of cultural hierarchies, of the illusory nature of authenticity, and of the "nudging commitment to doubleness and duplicity" that Linda Hutcheon has so influentially identified as postmodernism's "distinctive character" (1). Thus, for Susan Edmunds, for example, Tod's scream is an impotent protest against "the lengthening embrace of high art and mass culture" (322), and for Rita Barnard it is evidence of the precession of simulacra, "the apocalypse of the second hand" (172).3 Imitating the siren, Tod presages the role of the postmodern artist as an act of critical defamiliarization; he reveals the naturalized law of aesthetics and the law of desire as equally simulacral and mutually dependent.4 From within a critical paradigm distracted by Locust's affinity with the postmodern, the scholarship surrounding the novel has remained deaf to the sound of Tod's siren-scream and, more generally, to the role of sound in the novel. Yet, Hollywood had only just accomplished its transition from the silent era to the era of the talkie, a transition in which the studio system solidifies its power and silences the host of challenges to the dominant mode of classical Hollywood cinema that proliferate in the intervening years. Placing Tod's scream within the material history of the production and reproduction of sound both problematizes the novel's affiliation with an emergent postmodern aesthetic, making visible the historically specific contingencies and aesthetic possibilities too easily erased or dehistoricized under the postmodern banner. …

East Meets West: Representing the Possessed Child in Frank De Felitta's/Robert Wise's Audrey Rose

Abstract: An interest in Eastern religion and spiritual practice has been a feature of Western culture since the 189Os. However, from the late 1960s throughout the 1970s the exposure to Eastern influences became almost overwhelming. Spokespersons and religious bodies such as the Divine Light Mission, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) and Osh International were making themselves visible across US cities and campuses, finding a receptive audience among a large section of young Americans disenchanted with the established judeo-Christian traditions. For them the manifold forms of Eastern spirituality such as Buddhism and Hinduism seemed "purer than American religious institutions that now were perceived as hopelessly intertwined with a decadent, unjust culture and political order" (Lippy 210). These Western truth seekers were drawn first and foremost to the otherness of Eastern religion, which "offered mainstream Americans an avenue of transcendence and a sense of liberation that more traditional Western forms of religion had not provided for them" (Albanese 284). The New Age movement of the 1970s emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s hippie era and drew on both Eastern mysticism and Western occultism. It encompassed wide-ranging interests, from astrology, crystal healing, and reincarnation to "channelling," altered states of consciousness, and out-of-body experiences. In the midst of this religious diversity, Americans could draw on whatever religious philosophy suited their needs best. As Lippy puts it: "Individuals were free to pick and chose aspects of Asian practice to add to whatever else they already did in their efforts to construct a world of meaning for themselves" (211). It is this highly syncretic "grab-bagging" approach to religion that informs the treatment of the possessed child in Robert Wise's 1977 film of Frank De Felitta's 1975 best-selling novel, Audrey Rose. Made in the wake of William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), Wise's neglected and underrated film treats reincarnation as a form of possession (Nicholls 141). Through the years, the film has attained a certain cult status. It is unfortunate, as one reviewer pointed out, that Audrey Rose should be "dismissed en masse by critics as 'an Exorcist rip-off,' precisely what it isn't" (Everson 373-74). Although clearly indebted to the possessed child phenomenon, which began with the 1971 publication of William Peter Blatty's sensational bestseller, Audrey Rose is more a reaction to and reworking of The Exorcist than a "rip-off," minus the sensationalism, special effects, and vulgarity. The weaknesses in De Felitta's B-grade novel are inherent in his script for the film and it is Wise's mostly intelligent and restrained direction that transcends its potboiler source. ' Here, in mood and style, Audrey Rose resembles a British film. However, Audrey Rose's possessed child theme places it firmly within the American cultural tradition. It may be seen that the possessed child is fundamentally an American phenomenon whose formative influences are to be found in New England Puritanism and its fascination with witchcraft and the possessed child. Here also may be traced the enduring strains of CaI vinist ideologies of childhood in American culture. This has been reinforced by the modern ascendancy of Roman Catholicism in that country, to which Puritanism owes its origins. Both theologies exhibit a common preoccupation with the body as a temple of evil, located as the site of a Manichean struggle between the forces of good and evil. The points of contact between their discourses may explain why we have a particularly compelling representation of the possessed child in The Exorcist, where the Puritan Gothic meets the Catholic (conversely, it may also explain the dearth of such narratives in an English cultural context where Anglican theology prevails). In Audrey Rose, the presence of an Eastern/New Age intersection further demonstrates the possessed child's cultural constructedness. …