Within the history of modernity, the tragic shape and ethical concerns of the Antigone myth have ... more Within the history of modernity, the tragic shape and ethical concerns of the Antigone myth have made it a touchstone for understanding contemporary cultural and political realities. This essay traces the modernist processes of adaptation, citation, displacement, and revision that have often characterised the relations between filmmakers and this phenomenon. Focussing in particular on those films that subvert the authority of narrative realism and the laws of conventional – ‘classical’ – film language, it traces how particular social contexts and commitments have inevitably constructed different images of Antigone – how the Antigones that emerge in early or ‘silent’ cinema, for example, compare with those from other film and media forms, including television, video and installation art works.
In any post-conflict society, the work of creating an effective framework for truth and reconcili... more In any post-conflict society, the work of creating an effective framework for truth and reconciliation is fraught with challenges that those in power will often seek to manage and manipulate. In this article we explore the critical role of the arts within the discourse of political reconciliation in contemporary Northern Ireland. Taking contemporary theatre and screen culture as our case-studies, we assess the extent to which these modes of cultural production create alternative spaces for dialogue and reconciliation in a dysfunctional post-conflict democracy, where the responsibility of political institutions and elites is failing to adequately address the rights of victims and survivors.
This article explores how post-war documentary film-makers negotiated complex social, formal, and... more This article explores how post-war documentary film-makers negotiated complex social, formal, and autobiographical issues associated with representing mental illness and its treatments, and the extent to which their respective approaches helped to challenge conventional attitudes to alternative psychotherapies – especially within the context of advances in new documentary film-making technologies, alongside a wider culture of social activism. Focussing on A Look at Madness ( Regard sur la folie; Mario Ruspoli, 1962 , France) and Now Do You Get It Why I Am Crying? ( Begrijpt u nu waarom ik huil?; Louis van Gasteren, 1969 , Netherlands), the article discusses how the collaborative, democratic aims of cinéma direct coincided with the ethos of institutional psychotherapy, and compares this with the relations between the documentary form and the subject of LSD-assisted psychotherapeutic techniques in Van Gasteren's film.
Special Issue of Screening the Past, vol. 29, 2010: ISSN 1328-9756 Contents 1. George Kouvaros: H... more Special Issue of Screening the Past, vol. 29, 2010: ISSN 1328-9756 Contents 1. George Kouvaros: He’s Not There: Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother. 2 Lara Thompson: Monochrome Now: Digital Black and White Cinema and the Photographic Past. 3. Sarinah Masukor: The Album of Everyday Life: The Photograph in the Films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan. 4. Sam Rohdie: Profils Paysans. 5. Des O’Rawe: Cinema Lucida: Johan van der Keuken and the Meaning of Loss. 6. Rebecca Sheehan: The Time of Sculpture: Film, Photography and Auguste Rodin. 7. Frances Guerin: Film as an Archive for Photography: The Portraitist as Witness to the Holocaust. 8. Ji-hoon Kim: David Claerbout’s Digital Pensive Images.
The cinema of Takeshi Kitano happens somewhere between formality and improvisation, elegy and abs... more The cinema of Takeshi Kitano happens somewhere between formality and improvisation, elegy and absurdity, distance and familiarity. If continuities exist in his films, they rarely do so in stable, reliable forms: a shot can suddenly linger until it seems to belong elsewhere; matching and shot-reverse-shot conventions seldom matter; vivid, primary colours will refuse to disperse; dialogue is minimal and silence, profuse. Shooting tends to be sequential, done to a schedule that promises few certainties – time is short and re-shoots are rare. Screenplays are scribbled and sketched out on bits of paper, ‘constructed around a few central ideas that may or may not drive the plot along’. Editing is a game, a puzzle to be solved once the film has revealed itself and not before: ‘The shooting process is like moulding and colouring the plastic parts for a model … building the model is the fun part’. Genre conventions – particularly those associated with the Yakuza genre – are readily distorted; occasions of random and ritual violence are not simply interrupted, they often transcend their own seriousness. Actors (most notably, the ‘Beat’ Kitano himself) can act by not acting; characters – like the loosely woven fabulae they inhabit – remain enigmatic and psychologically insubstantial. A restless, impulsive imagination presides over the entire production process: responding to spontaneity rather than conforming to propriety seems to be the aesthetic keystone of Kitano’s method. This article examines Dolls/Dooruzu (2002), focussing on how Kitano applied his seemingly anarchic sensibility to the task of rendering the ornate, literary theatre of Bunraku puppetry into the forms and structures of a contemporary cinema. The film itself is comprised of three loosely interwoven Chikamatsu variations: two tragic lovers embarking on a journey to their death (the bound beggars); a retired Yakuza boss trying to make amends for abandoning his sweetheart years before (the remorseful ‘warrior’); and a young man who blinds himself rather than see the scarred face of his idol, a reclusive former pop star who survived an accident (the infatuated servant). Each story presents characters and situations that correspond obliquely to archetypes and motifs from the Bunraku/Kabuki repertoire, and others that correspond more exactly to those from Kitano’s own film oeuvre: angels, shorelines, surfboards, flowers, bridges, fireworks, daft teenagers, and Yakuza gangsters. However, in maintaining his confidence in strategies of openness, informality, and play, Kitano’s film emerges as much more than a stylish cinematic allegory of contemporary Japanese society and its fraught cultural formations. Nothing if not contradictory, Kitano’s imagination carries Dolls in a different direction, towards the possibility of reconciling theatre and cinema, artifice and truth, love and death.
... Golden Coach, the expressive and dynamic presence of colourlike the music of Vivaldi ... Mag... more ... Golden Coach, the expressive and dynamic presence of colourlike the music of Vivaldi ... Magnani's (neo-) realist associations (what Renoir referred to as her usual style) might have ... film as a light comedy. 26 Magnani's performance (itself a performance within a performance ...
Within the history of modernity, the tragic shape and ethical concerns of the Antigone myth have ... more Within the history of modernity, the tragic shape and ethical concerns of the Antigone myth have made it a touchstone for understanding contemporary cultural and political realities. This essay traces the modernist processes of adaptation, citation, displacement, and revision that have often characterised the relations between filmmakers and this phenomenon. Focussing in particular on those films that subvert the authority of narrative realism and the laws of conventional – ‘classical’ – film language, it traces how particular social contexts and commitments have inevitably constructed different images of Antigone – how the Antigones that emerge in early or ‘silent’ cinema, for example, compare with those from other film and media forms, including television, video and installation art works.
In any post-conflict society, the work of creating an effective framework for truth and reconcili... more In any post-conflict society, the work of creating an effective framework for truth and reconciliation is fraught with challenges that those in power will often seek to manage and manipulate. In this article we explore the critical role of the arts within the discourse of political reconciliation in contemporary Northern Ireland. Taking contemporary theatre and screen culture as our case-studies, we assess the extent to which these modes of cultural production create alternative spaces for dialogue and reconciliation in a dysfunctional post-conflict democracy, where the responsibility of political institutions and elites is failing to adequately address the rights of victims and survivors.
This article explores how post-war documentary film-makers negotiated complex social, formal, and... more This article explores how post-war documentary film-makers negotiated complex social, formal, and autobiographical issues associated with representing mental illness and its treatments, and the extent to which their respective approaches helped to challenge conventional attitudes to alternative psychotherapies – especially within the context of advances in new documentary film-making technologies, alongside a wider culture of social activism. Focussing on A Look at Madness ( Regard sur la folie; Mario Ruspoli, 1962 , France) and Now Do You Get It Why I Am Crying? ( Begrijpt u nu waarom ik huil?; Louis van Gasteren, 1969 , Netherlands), the article discusses how the collaborative, democratic aims of cinéma direct coincided with the ethos of institutional psychotherapy, and compares this with the relations between the documentary form and the subject of LSD-assisted psychotherapeutic techniques in Van Gasteren's film.
Special Issue of Screening the Past, vol. 29, 2010: ISSN 1328-9756 Contents 1. George Kouvaros: H... more Special Issue of Screening the Past, vol. 29, 2010: ISSN 1328-9756 Contents 1. George Kouvaros: He’s Not There: Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother. 2 Lara Thompson: Monochrome Now: Digital Black and White Cinema and the Photographic Past. 3. Sarinah Masukor: The Album of Everyday Life: The Photograph in the Films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan. 4. Sam Rohdie: Profils Paysans. 5. Des O’Rawe: Cinema Lucida: Johan van der Keuken and the Meaning of Loss. 6. Rebecca Sheehan: The Time of Sculpture: Film, Photography and Auguste Rodin. 7. Frances Guerin: Film as an Archive for Photography: The Portraitist as Witness to the Holocaust. 8. Ji-hoon Kim: David Claerbout’s Digital Pensive Images.
The cinema of Takeshi Kitano happens somewhere between formality and improvisation, elegy and abs... more The cinema of Takeshi Kitano happens somewhere between formality and improvisation, elegy and absurdity, distance and familiarity. If continuities exist in his films, they rarely do so in stable, reliable forms: a shot can suddenly linger until it seems to belong elsewhere; matching and shot-reverse-shot conventions seldom matter; vivid, primary colours will refuse to disperse; dialogue is minimal and silence, profuse. Shooting tends to be sequential, done to a schedule that promises few certainties – time is short and re-shoots are rare. Screenplays are scribbled and sketched out on bits of paper, ‘constructed around a few central ideas that may or may not drive the plot along’. Editing is a game, a puzzle to be solved once the film has revealed itself and not before: ‘The shooting process is like moulding and colouring the plastic parts for a model … building the model is the fun part’. Genre conventions – particularly those associated with the Yakuza genre – are readily distorted; occasions of random and ritual violence are not simply interrupted, they often transcend their own seriousness. Actors (most notably, the ‘Beat’ Kitano himself) can act by not acting; characters – like the loosely woven fabulae they inhabit – remain enigmatic and psychologically insubstantial. A restless, impulsive imagination presides over the entire production process: responding to spontaneity rather than conforming to propriety seems to be the aesthetic keystone of Kitano’s method. This article examines Dolls/Dooruzu (2002), focussing on how Kitano applied his seemingly anarchic sensibility to the task of rendering the ornate, literary theatre of Bunraku puppetry into the forms and structures of a contemporary cinema. The film itself is comprised of three loosely interwoven Chikamatsu variations: two tragic lovers embarking on a journey to their death (the bound beggars); a retired Yakuza boss trying to make amends for abandoning his sweetheart years before (the remorseful ‘warrior’); and a young man who blinds himself rather than see the scarred face of his idol, a reclusive former pop star who survived an accident (the infatuated servant). Each story presents characters and situations that correspond obliquely to archetypes and motifs from the Bunraku/Kabuki repertoire, and others that correspond more exactly to those from Kitano’s own film oeuvre: angels, shorelines, surfboards, flowers, bridges, fireworks, daft teenagers, and Yakuza gangsters. However, in maintaining his confidence in strategies of openness, informality, and play, Kitano’s film emerges as much more than a stylish cinematic allegory of contemporary Japanese society and its fraught cultural formations. Nothing if not contradictory, Kitano’s imagination carries Dolls in a different direction, towards the possibility of reconciling theatre and cinema, artifice and truth, love and death.
... Golden Coach, the expressive and dynamic presence of colourlike the music of Vivaldi ... Mag... more ... Golden Coach, the expressive and dynamic presence of colourlike the music of Vivaldi ... Magnani's (neo-) realist associations (what Renoir referred to as her usual style) might have ... film as a light comedy. 26 Magnani's performance (itself a performance within a performance ...
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