In recent years, analysts of cinematic ghosts have called for ways of “learning to live with ghosts”; in this paper, I argue that Richard Linklater's Before trilogy—1995's Before Sunrise, 2004's ...Before Sunset, and 2012's Before Midnight—models precisely such a process. I attend to the crucial role of ghosts in sparking and sustaining the romance at the heart of Before, and I argue that Linklater's trilogy is not only ghost-written (relying formally on ghosts) and ghost-ridden (relying narratively on a preponderance of them) but a staging ground for ghost-righting, an active ghosting in the vein of Derrida's spectral ethics. Issues considered include traditional narrative patterning of love and death; ghosts and (dis)embodiment in Western cinema; spectrality in the work of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes; questions of temporality, duration, and fear of death; romantic historiography; and the intimate politics of Before.
Rod Mengham, Fellow in English and Curator of Works of Art at Cambridge University's Jesus College, taught at the University of Lódz as British Council lecturer in the years 1984-1988, while the ...installation Madame B which Dorota Filipczak is concerned with in her text, created by a Dutch cultural and literary theorist Mieke Bal, together with a British video artist Michelle Williams Gamaker, was shown for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in Lódz between December 2013 and February 2014. In her extensive essay, Paulina Ambrozy analyzes two postapocalyptic novels, David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress and Cormac McCarthy's The Road, focusing on the relationship between language and the dehumanized post-apocalyptic reality, as well as on the ability of language to resist the apocalypse. Mieke Bal, a visual artist and a critic in visual studies, was a special guest of Text Matters #4, which opened with Dorota Filipczak's conversation with her, "Mieke Bal: 'Writing with Images.'" The volume's closing section contains Norman Ravvin's recollections and comments on the Canadian-Jewish conference held by the Department of American Literature at the University of Lódz in April 2014, as well as two interviews.
Wes Anderson, Austin Auteur KORNHABER, DONNA
Texas studies in literature and language,
06/2018, Letnik:
60, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In addition to early assemblages like the German collection This Is an Adventure! edited by Christian Vittrup (Ludwig, 2010); Wes Anderson and Co., a special issue of New Review of Film and ...Television Studies edited by Warren Buckland (10.1, March 2012); and Peter Kunze's The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), there now stand Whitney Crothers Dilley's The Cinema of Wes Anderson: Bringing Nostalgia to Life (Columbia UP, 2017) and my own Wes Anderson (U of Illinois P, 2017), part of the Contemporary Film Directors series. In "The Great Frame-Up: Wes Anderson and Twee Narrative Contrivance," Tom Hertweck pays special attention to the role of framing devices (both narrative and meta-filmic) in introducing, sequestering, and defining those worlds for Anderson's audiences. Here Mclennan, building on recent work in the area of age studies, recasts Anderson's supposed fixation on youth and childhood culture as an interest in encounters between innocence and experience across the lifespan, tracing human experience along a far greater spectrum of life stages than are normally given consideration in Hollywood storytelling.
Beginning with Margaret Atwood's novella
and its staging in regional and experimental theaters in Canada, the U.K., and around the world, this essay traces a long history of network mediation for the
..., beginning with the performative decisions made by itinerant rhapsodes, who variously selected, arranged, and circulated the Homeric epics in ancient Greece, and extending well into the twenty-first century, in the self-conscious invocations of the
by filmmakers such as the Coen Brothers and Richard Linklater. Crowdsourcing, the unruly and never-ending input from masses of people, is the morphological ground of the epic, an art form energized by its downward percolations. Penelope, that infinitely patient and longsuffering wife, becomes a variety of things as a result, much changed since Homer's times. In the hands of Atwood, she shares the stage with her twelve maids.
Digital Déjà Vu Lurie, Peter
Film quarterly,
03/2015, Letnik:
68, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In a key sequence in the second Trilogy feature (Before Sunset, 2004), Jesse expresses a fear that he'll "dissolve into molecules" if someone embraces him. Later in the film--or, rather, following ...its close--Celine does just that and, naturally, Jesse remains intact. Moreover, and importantly, their relationship takes a decisive step toward realization. The film may not show the couple embrace and then make love, but the audience will soon learn that they in fact procreate, producing the twin girls who appear in the opening of the next and final (thus far) installment of the series, Before Midnight (2013). Here, Lurie examines cinephilia, loss, and medial integrity in Richard Linklater's Before trilogy.
About Time Stone, Rob
Film quarterly,
03/2015, Letnik:
68, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Remembrance without nostalgia is a crucial sentiment in the cinema of Richard Linklater, whose films tend to look both forward and back but invariably end on moments that recognize the newness of the ..."nowness." Boyhood (2014) is an accumulative work in many senses, one that ties off many loose ends left hanging by both the experimentation and the conventions of his films. Tracing themes of temporality throughout and alongside the evolution of new media prompts consideration of the present, when belated recognition gives way to celebration of one of the most important filmmakers in world cinema, but also draws attention to the tension between past and future filmmaking technology. Here, Stone examines Boyhood and Linklater's Before trilogy.
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