Screen - recent issues

Grizzly ghost: Herzog, Bazin and the cinematic animal

Jeong, S.-H., Andrew, D. — 2008-03-12

In Grizzly Man Werner Herzog approached the sacred moment of death theorized by Bazin in relation to animals and humans. Herzog who has always edged up to the brink of extreme danger, this time follows Timothy Treadwell inside the jaws of animal life and death. Grizzly Man contributes to animal film/animal philosophy in the way it sets Herzog's sober investigation and reflection about human beings against Treadwell's maniacal failure to ‘become-animal’. Or did he fail? Treadwell's guerilla video, with its deranged language performance, is like an animal scream; it makes him at home within the grizzly maze, perhaps at home inside the grizzly itself. Herzog's film re-territorializes this errant descent into becoming-animal. But Treadwell survives beyond Herzog. He survives as a spectre to us, as he addresses us as if in a live-TV situation. We who listen to and see him after his death serve as his ghostly audience during his performances. In a certain way, this grizzly ghost encounters our phantom selves through the medium of Herzog's mundane documentary inquest.

'The viewers have ... taken over the airwaves'? Participation, reality TV and approaching the audience-in-the-text

Holmes, S. — 2008-03-12

Through reality TV, television has become increasingly fascinated by our power relations with the medium. As such, it pivots on the concept which has historically occupied centre stage in the study of media audiences. But the advent of interactivity has also prompted calls for a reassessment of the relations between viewer and text, production and consumption, agency and authorship. This essay suggests that this shift need not lead us away from the ‘text’ itself. Although regular viewing of reality TV may not involve participating in the interactive opportunities on offer, this does not change the fact that such programmes self-consciously dramatize a set of power relations between text and viewer as central to their textual form. Thus, in focusing on programmes such as Big Brother and Eden, this essay argues that the representation of ‘the audience’ demands analysis in its own right. As the interactive power of the audience is woven into the narrative textures of reality TV, the programmes aim to insist upon viewer agency, and a more permeable boundary between viewer and screen. Yet they also suggest (sometimes inadvertently) a more uncertain picture, offering glimpses into reality TV's genuinely precarious – and potentially subversive – play with notions of ‘power’.

The television personality system: televisual stardom revisited after film theory

Bennett, J. — 2008-03-12

If film stars are defined by the paradox of their simultaneous ordinariness and unattainability, then television personalities have been conversely defined by their ordinariness and attainability. Associated with the tropes of intimacy and authenticity of television, the television personality is deemed to be an ‘authentic’ depiction of their ordinary selves. This essay does not set out to challenge this distinction between film star and TV personality per se, but rather attempts to address television personalities in terms of their own medium specificity. Building on Karen Lury's (1995) work on television performance, I suggest that, once we examine their ordinariness, authenticity and ‘just-as-they-are-ness’ more closely, we can usefully pay attention to television personalities as texts that resonate with wider cultural meanings. To achieve this, I draw distinctions between what I term the ‘televisually skilled’ and ‘vocationally skilled’ performer, whereby the latter is defined by their presentation of some skill external to that of television presentation itself. Paying particular attention to Alan Titchmarsh as an exemplar of this later category, I argue that far from creating ‘agreeable voids’, as Ellis depicts the television personality, ordinariness and authenticity function precisely as a site of their economic, textual and cultural importance, often concealing complex and contradictory ideological meanings.

'Paranoia, paranoia, everybody's coming to get me': Peep Show, sitcom, and the surveillance society

Mills, B. — 2008-03-12

This essay examines the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show. The programme employs an innovative shooting style in which the audience is aligned with the characters' points-of-view, and also has access to the inner thoughts of its main protagonists. It is argued that in distinguishing between social action and unrestrained subconscious thoughts the programme demonstrates the effects of social norms on behaviour. This idea is related to Foucault's notion of the panopticon, in which surveillance becomes an everyday aspect of contemporary living. The essay also shows how the particularities of the sitcom genre have always been about issues of looking and surveillance, and that the shooting style adopted by Peep Show may call the traditional audience positions offered by sitcoms into question.

Bette Davis: introduction

Shingler, M. — 2008-03-12

Bette Davis: actor/star

Shingler, M., Gledhill, C. — 2008-03-12

'What would Bette Davis do?' British reactions to Bette Davis in the 1940s: a case study of Now, Voyager

Glancy, M. — 2008-03-12

Don't let's ask for the moon - we have a star! Bette Davis as gay icon

Sikov, E. — 2008-03-12

Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies and the Home

Boddy, W. — 2008-03-12

Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection and Film History

Moen, K. — 2008-03-12

Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film

Wasserman, T. — 2008-03-12

Trading Culture: Global Traffic and Local Culture in Film and Television

Rixon, P. — 2008-03-12

Transgender on Screen

Stewart, J. — 2008-03-12

The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas

Zielinski, G. — 2008-03-12

Contributors

2008-03-12

Notes to Contributors

2008-03-12

Entomology as anthropology in the films of Luis Bunuel

Begin, P. — 2007-11-22

Luis Buñuel's interest in entomology is well-known, from the death's head moth in Un chien andalou to the framed tarantula in Le Fantôme de la liberté; however, it is an aspect of Buñuel's oeuvre that has been largely ignored in scholarly criticism or treated uncritically as another one of the director's many ‘obsessions’. This article takes seriously the director's entomological penchant by exploring the way in which it becomes conjoined with a surrealist vision that translates into a distinct cinematic language. A thorough examination of L’Âge d'or and Las Hurdes through Buñuel's unique entomological lens reveals the progressive deployment of a philosophical outlook akin to Roger Caillois's ‘comparative biology’, which observes in the insect world an aperture for studying the human condition through ‘objective ideograms’. By substituting an entomological perspective for an anthropological approach, man's instinctual nature is allowed to surface from beneath the rubble of culture. It is an aspect of Buñuel's early films that is part and parcel of his views on ‘anti-artistic’ film, which, in filmic terms, produces a levelling effect among biological species and ultimately affirms the humanistic aims of surrealism.

Exile and longing in Abderrahmane Sissako's La Vie sur terre

Balseiro, I. — 2007-11-22

This essay is a study of Abderrahmane Sissako's La Vie sur terre/Life on Earth as conceptual cinema, focusing on the theme of displacement. Part of the series ‘2000 Seen by’, organized with support from the ‘Mission for the celebration of the year 2000’, La Vie sur terre is Mali's contribution to French commemorations of the new millennium. Ten independent directors were invited to make a film about the last day of the twentieth century in their countries of origin. Born in Mauritania, trained as filmmaker in the Soviet Union and residing in France, Sissako responded by creating a film on both the nature of exile and the life cycles of the inhabitants of his father's village. The challenge was to produce a feature that captures Africa's connection to and isolation from Europe. To the richly portrayed West African setting, Sissako injects the political and poetic spirit of Martinican Aimé Césaire and his critique of colonialism. In approaching La Vie sur terre as conceptual cinema in which exile becomes the locus for intense creation, this article strives to articulate how Sissako mediates the tensions posed by the experience of separation from and entanglement with the native land.

Winsor McCay's warped spaces

Telotte, J.P. — 2007-11-22

This essay examines the use of space in a variety of Winsor McCay's animated films, from Gertie the Dinosaur to The Pet. While recent animation criticism, such as that of Esther Leslie and Paul Wells, has emphasized the links between the cartoon and the avant garde in the 1920s and 1930s, that commentary has largely excluded McCay's work from consideration, in part because of its obvious embeddedness in the popular discourse of vaudeville and the newspaper comic strip. I want to establish a similar link for McCay by focusing on how his films engage with space – how it becomes not simply the site of narrative but an implicit subject of his narratives as well. In that treatment we can see another dimension of the modernist spirit at work, a level on which his films implicate not simply an assault an on the social status quo, such as we find in later animated films, but also on what we might term the phenomenological status quo, that is, on both the organization of and the audience's experience of space itself.

The politics of Ostalgie: post-socialist nostalgia in recent German film

Enns, A. — 2007-11-22

The word Ostalgie – a combination of the German words for ‘nostalgia’ and ‘east’ – has emerged in Germany over the last few years as part of a widespread reevaluation of the history of the former German Democratic Republic. This term is often associated with communist kitsch, and it thus appears to illustrate nostalgia's inherent failure to engage with history. Rather than interpreting recent Ostalgie films as a sentimental whitewashing of the harsh realities of living under a totalitarian regime, however, this essayargues that they actually represent a critique of Germany's current socio-economic-political situation. It is certainly more than coincidental that this phenomenon has emerged at a time when Germany is experiencing a massive economic crisis, record-breaking unemployment, and severe cuts in health care and education that have only increased the disparity between east and west. When understood within this context, the nostalgia for the east in recent German films can be seen as a reexamination of the utopian hopes and expectations surrounding German reunification and a critique of a capitalist system that has failed to adequately address current economic and cultural challenges.

Africa's Lost Classics: introduction

Bisschoff, L., Murphy, D. — 2007-11-22

Colonialism and modern lives in African cinema

Bakari, I. — 2007-11-22

Discovering Africa's Orson Welles

Cousins, M. — 2007-11-22

South African cinema: histories and futures

Maingard, J. — 2007-11-22

Women pioneers of Arab cinema

Armes, R. — 2007-11-22

Digging for gold

Givanni, J. — 2007-11-22

Plan Images Archives

Louyot, A. — 2007-11-22

Drawing trauma: visual testimony in Cache and J'ai 8 ans

Austin, G. — 2007-11-22

Dreams of a Nation: on Palestinian Cinema * Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World * Iranian Cinema: a Political History

Chaudhuri, S. — 2007-11-22

Americanizing the Movies and 'Movie-Mad' Audiences, 1910-1914

Glancy, M. — 2007-11-22

Pastiche

Cohan, S. — 2007-11-22

'Quota Quickies': the Birth of the British 'B' Film

Napper, L. — 2007-11-22

Where Does it Happen? John Cassavetes and the Cinema at Breaking Point

Harbord, J. — 2007-11-22

Contributors

2007-11-22

Notes to Contributors

2007-11-22

Two modes of prestige film

Cagle, C. — 2007-10-11

Sex after death: Francois Ozon's libidinal invasions

Cavitch, M. — 2007-10-11

Sex and the censors: the femme fatale in Juan Antonio Bardem's Muerte de un ciclista

Evans, J. — 2007-10-11

Returning to actuality: fukeiron and the landscape film

Furuhata, Y. — 2007-10-11

Television studies and the idea of criticism

Corner, J. — 2007-10-11

A response to John Corner

Lury, K. — 2007-10-11

Creativity: from discourse to doctrine?

Schlesinger, P. — 2007-10-11

Spanish Visual Culture: Cinema, Television, Internet * Television in Spain: From Franco to Almodovar

Labanyi, J. — 2007-10-11

Cinema at the End of Empire: a Politics of Transition in Britain and India

Dass, M. — 2007-10-11

The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang Minnelli

Orr, J. — 2007-10-11

British TV and Film Culture in the 1950s:'Coming to a TV Near You!'

Barr, C. — 2007-10-11

From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings * The Lord of the Rings: Popular Culture in Global Context

Petrie, D. — 2007-10-11

Redesigning Women: Television after the Network Era

Williamson, L. — 2007-10-11

Contributors

2007-10-11

Notes to Contributors

2007-10-11