Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles) ISSN (Print) 0036-9543 - ISSN (Online) 1460-2474 Published by Oxford University Press[425 journals]
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Pages: 259 - 282 Abstract: The virtual reality (VR) documentary Traveling While Black (2019), directed by the Emmy- and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Roger Ross Williams, begins by situating its user as if seated in a large, empty cinema. As the pictured screen displays archival black-and-white film clips of African Americans engaging in various forms of travel, the voice-over narration describes what it has been like to travel while Black in the United States, emphasizing the restrictions and dangers of the Jim Crow era. The last clip pictured on the diegetic screen shows the exterior of Ben’s Chili Bowl, an iconic restaurant in Washington, DC, that as the voice-over explains was (in its earlier instantiation as a pool hall) included in The Negro Motorist Green Book (1936–67), Victor Green’s guide that listed hospitable places for African American travellers during that period (figure 1). As the establishment’s co-founder Virginia Ali recounts, Ben’s Chili Bowl has served as a safe haven for African Americans since its founding in 1958. With an image of Ben’s Chili Bowl holding on the pictured screen, a dissolve replaces the depicted cinema space and black-and-white screen image with a full-colour, 360-degree view of the restaurant exterior (figure 2). Most of the remainder of Traveling While Black’s running time is spent within the interior of Ben’s Chili Bowl, which serves as the site of first-person testimonies from African Americans about their experiences of both racism and antiracist activism in the past and the present. PubDate: Thu, 21 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjad029 Issue No:Vol. 64, No. 3 (2023)
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Pages: 283 - 305 Abstract: ‘This is an impressive document that should be shown throughout the world’, the celebrated Brazilian director Glauber Rocha reportedly declared in 1970 after a private screening of the Spanish film Lejos de los árboles/Far from the Trees.11 After another limited showing held that same year, the Spanish film critic Miquel Porter Moix called it ‘one of the most important films made in this country since the origins of cinema’.22 In more recent times, Jaume Figueras has singled it out as the one Barcelona School-era film that should be ‘preserved for history’.33 Notwithstanding these declarations, Far from the Trees is still far from being a well-known film.44 This is due in part to the longstanding critical marginalization of the Barcelona School, a diverse group of filmmakers working in the Catalan capital in the 1960s who sought out alternatives to the dominant Madrid-based New Spanish Cinema, exemplified by filmmakers such as Carlos Saura, which they associated with an outdated social realism and overly legible political allegories.55 The relative obscurity of Far from the Trees also reflects the success of censorship in the final stages of the Francisco Franco dictatorship. The film was shot and edited over the course of seven years, beginning in 1963, by a high-profile team of Spanish film professionals under the direction of Jacinto Esteva. While exposing socio-economic inequities and exploitation, it is largely composed of images of popular and religious rites and festivities. A number of scenes represent Spaniards as obsessed with death and engaging in literal and metaphorical forms of self-flagellation, including a ceremony in which survivors of disease – even young children – are carried in procession in coffins borne by their family members (figure 1). Other passages feature humans tormenting and sacrificing non-human animals; at one point, for instance, hooded figures push a donkey representing the devil over the side of a cliff and then attack it with pikes.66 The international press screening of Far from the Trees at the San Sebastián film festival in June 1970 was cancelled at the last minute and the film was subsequently banned; according to the censors’ report, the work presented ‘a unilateral vision of a barbaric Spain, without any positive counterpoints’.77 Notwithstanding the prohibition, the work was shown that summer in non-official sessions in both Madrid and Barcelona, and Spanish newspapers and magazines published glowing reviews. When the film was finally released to the general public two years later, after extensive cuts, one critic decried that it made little sense to prohibit images of public activities that were not themselves prohibited.88 Even the reviewer for the Franco-aligned newspaper ABC complained that the film had been mutilated by the censors.99 In the wake of that pruning and riffing on the film’s title – inspired by the popular phrase ‘far from the trees, one can see the forest’ – another critic lamented that neither trees nor forest could be discerned.1010 PubDate: Thu, 21 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjad030 Issue No:Vol. 64, No. 3 (2023)
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Pages: 306 - 324 Abstract: In L’humanité/Humanity (1999), Bruno Dumont effects a gesture characteristic of his work over the past 25 years. Part way through this early film, the camera lingers on a painting hanging on the wall, before turning to the face of a man, slumped over in bed, staring blankly back at it.11 Pharaon de Winter is the name shared by both men pictured: the artist in the self-portrait, a late 19th-century painter from Bailleul in French Flanders, where the film, like several of Dumont’s, is set; and his fictional great-grandson, a torpid police detective (Emmanuel Schotté) struggling to investigate a brutal murder. Later, having given the painting to a gallery in Lille, we see the detective back in the room, this time looking at the space where it once hung. The close-up, having passed from portrait painting and photography into early film as the privileged figure of interiority, may nowadays seem the victim of its own ‘undoing’, with its importance as the main site of affective divulgation diminishing amid a contemporary surfeit of images.22 The film’s two sequences register this history across the century, but once the portrait is interred in the gallery Dumont does not turn away from this paradigmatic figure in its filmic form. The lingering focus on the emptiness on the wall, as the impassive, affectless face looks on, heralds the director’s ongoing return to the viewed and viewing body in a way that speaks of affect, but only in its insistent illegibility or unyielding absence. PubDate: Thu, 21 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjad032 Issue No:Vol. 64, No. 3 (2023)
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Pages: 325 - 331 Abstract: The loss of Laura Marcus in September 2021 has affected people across multiple academic communities and diverse fields of study. Many have mourned her passing as an intellectual force – as ‘Marcus’ the authoritative scholar of 19th- and 20th-century literature, biographical writing, feminism and psychoanalysis, whose insights unpacked the rhythm of modernism in the English language. Yet something else is evident from the various articles, events and obituaries that commemorate her, and from the very moving and personal memorial at New College, where she was a Fellow and Oxford’s Goldsmiths Professor of English Literature. It is the fact that Laura Marcus inspired not only great international respect, but also a rare degree of affection. To the many colleagues to whom she was a friend or a mentor, she inescapably remains ‘Laura’ as well as ‘Marcus’. PubDate: Thu, 21 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjad025 Issue No:Vol. 64, No. 3 (2023)
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Pages: 332 - 341 Abstract: In the autumn of 1927, Winifred Ellerman, the feminist author who wrote under the pen name Bryher and who also happened to be heir to a large shipping fortune, married the young Scottish artist, novelist and cinephile Kenneth Macpherson. This was largely a marriage of convenience; both of them were gay, and Bryher had already embarked on her lifelong relationship with the third member of the POOL collective, the poet Hilda Dolittle (H.D.), with whom Macpherson had had an affair the previous year. Nevertheless, the relationship also represented a meeting of minds and a confluence of aesthetic interests. In her memoir, The Heart to Artemis, Bryher recalls how later that autumn she and her new husband were walking around the lake at Territet, the picturesque Swiss town where they and H.D. were living, when ‘Kenneth compared the ripples drifting across the water with an effect that should be tried on screen’. Recalling her own enthusiastic participation in the culture of ‘little reviews’ in Paris in the early years of the decade, Bryher said to Macpherson, ‘If you are so interested, why don’t you start a magazine'’. And so Close Up was born, observes Bryher, typically disavowing the extent of her financial support, ‘on a capital of sixty pounds’.11 PubDate: Thu, 21 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjad027 Issue No:Vol. 64, No. 3 (2023)
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Pages: 342 - 347 Abstract: If there was any particular moment in the history of cinema that seemed to light up all the remarkable circuitry of Laura Marcus’s unexampled brain, it was surely the ‘coming of sound’ to the medium, an event that elicited from her the most ingenious methodological braiding of film studies, psychoanalysis, feminism, theories of modernity, and empirical archival excavation, in all the storied literature on this topic. PubDate: Thu, 21 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjad024 Issue No:Vol. 64, No. 3 (2023)
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Pages: 348 - 356 Abstract: This essay reflects on the resonant movements between literature, sound and cinema generated by Laura Marcus’s work, focusing primarily on her 2015 essay, ‘The rhythm of the rails: sound and location’.11 It also looks forward to the posthumous publication of Marcus’s final monograph, Rhythmical Subjects, which promises to explore the notion of rhythm as ‘a still unrecorded utopia of interdisciplinarity’ and ‘an entirely new way of measuring the emergence, eclipses, and reappearances of the Modern at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century’.22 With an erudition and historical range typical of her work, this larger project on rhythm, like the exemplary case study that is the focus here, is intrinsically connective and resonant in its impetus and thinking. Resonance, to quote one OED definition, is ‘the reinforcement or prolongation of sound by reflection or by synchronous vibration’. That sense seems apposite in this context. For the purposes of this essay, reflection, vibration and synchrony signal a generative sympathetic movement between objects or forms: a movement that never collapses one form into another whilst marking the co-presence and integrity of both. Julie Beth Napolin distils ‘resonance’ as method thus: ‘One system acts upon another near it spatially or akin to it vibrationally. It is the physical, social, linguistic, and psychological fact of the more than one.’33 Analogizing further, resonance can be enlisted to describe the consolidating movements of acts of criticism that depart from and question historical appropriations of various kinds. This understanding of resonance captures a defining feature of Marcus’s work: a way of thinking, writing and researching that always attends to the specificity of the medium that is its object, whilst tracing affinities and alignments with acuity and subtlety. PubDate: Thu, 21 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjad028 Issue No:Vol. 64, No. 3 (2023)
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Pages: 357 - 363 Abstract: At the beginning of Mira Nair’s 2006 adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2003 novel The Namesake,11 we see calligraphic writing in Bengali appearing on a painted background alongside the English opening credits, to the sound of a departing train. In the first shot after the credits, the camera tracks a suitcase bearing the inscription ‘A. Ganguli’ as it is carried through the bustle of a railway station on the head of a porter. A reverse-shot then shows us someone following the suitcase – a young man whom we later come to know as Ashoke Ganguli. Next we see a rural Indian landscape through a train window that momentarily merges with the film screen, still accompanied by the sound of the train. What follows is set inside the train compartment, where we see Ashoke explaining to an elderly man that he is reading Nikolai Gogol’s short story ‘The Overcoat’ from a book given to him by his grandfather. The next scene takes place at night in the same compartment, when the older man tells the younger of his travels to England and America. ‘It was like a dream’, he says, as the film cuts to another view of the window and the now darkened landscape, before he encourages his fellow traveller to ‘pack a pillow and blanket’ and ‘see the world’. Ashoke replies that his ‘grandfather always says that is what books are for. To travel without moving an inch.’ A few seconds later the calm of the compartment is violently disturbed: a rapid series of shaking, handheld shots accompanied by a chaotic soundscape establishes the scene of an accident, which is marked as the film’s primal scene, both disconnected from and foundational to its diasporic narrative. After a few seconds of black screen, the opening credits resume and give the film its own proper name, The Namesake, before it effectively starts again. PubDate: Thu, 21 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjad026 Issue No:Vol. 64, No. 3 (2023)
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Pages: 364 - 374 Abstract: In their account of the ‘evolution of entertainment from “folk” art to “popular” art’,11 Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel identify the interlinked processes of delocalization, individualization and cultural discontinuity that accompanied the transition from relatively localized forms of community culture to more globalized forms of mass culture. They argue that the move away from a folk culture grounded in oral forms ‘close to “life” and “people”’,22 within firstly the popular spectacle of the music hall and then later the cinema, led to increasingly industrialized forms of dominant popular culture that became ‘in essence, an art of the performer, rather than the art of a community. The community had become an “audience”: the art had been individualised.’33 PubDate: Thu, 21 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjad031 Issue No:Vol. 64, No. 3 (2023)
Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
[425 journals]
