Spartan Daily, December 2, 2003

Volume 121, Issue 63https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/9929/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, October 7, 1959

Volume 47, Issue 11https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/3927/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, October 2, 1981

Volume 77, Issue 22https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/6798/thumbnail.jp

The Cosmological Liveliness of Terril Calder\u27s The Lodge: Animating Our Relations and Unsettling Our Cinematic Spaces

I first saw Métis artist Terril Calder\u27s 2014 stop-frame feature, The Lodge, an independently made, relatively small- budget film, at its premiere at the ImagineNative Film + Media Arts festival, held annually in Toronto, Canada. The feature-length animation played to a full house at the Light-box Theater downtown. Many were there to attend the five-day festival, which is dedicated to Indigenous media made by and for Indigenous people. Others were there because as members of Toronto\u27s general public they wanted to catch a movie during a night out in the city. Since then The Lodge has shown at various other independent venues. It isn\u27t what you might think of as commercial fare. Its audiences are not huge. However, for those who do view The Lodge, the film presents a creative space to rethink our sense of boundaries in a number of ways: boundaries between human/nonhuman, white/Indigenous, male/female, spectator/film-object. In this essay, I argue that the film is thus an invitation to question the naturalness of hegemonic identity assumptions that demarcate such boundaries. I interviewed Calder (via Skype and subsequent email correspondence) soon after I saw the film, and I situate a close textual analysis of the film within the context of her intent and the burgeoning scholarly dialogue between Indigenous studies and ecocritical studies. The scholarly dialogue, as Joni Adamson and I write in the introduction to our recent anthology, Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos (2016), argues for clear sighted understandings of multi-faceted human/more-than-human relationships that exist outside of binaries imposed by Western notions of progress . Similarly, Steven Loft, coeditor of Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, writes of an Indigenous media cosmology that is replete with life and spirit, inclusive of beings, thought, prophecy, and the underlying connectedness of all things and that is not predicated on Western foundations of thought (xvi). Calder extends such Indigenous worldviews of connectedness to cinema and animation in particular

A gaze of one's own : feminist film theory, with application to Klute

This study is concerned with the development of a field of film theory around the place of the female spectator. Chapter 1 presents an historical overview of some trends in the development of film theory, with emphasis on the emergence of a paradigm in which theories of semiotics, ideology and psychoanalysis intersect. It critically assesses the establishment of a dominant theory founded in the notion of film as art, proposing certain parallels between this and contemporary Leavisite literary theory, and notes auteurism as the point of departure from this into the consideration of film as popular culture. It then traces the impact of the critiques by Barthes and Foucault of authorial intentionality, Althusser's theory of ideology and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in the shift to a body of film theory centrally concerned with the notion of film as text. The feminist intervention is located at the meeting point of this theory with the concerns of the emergent women's movement, and is traced in its development from the "image of" criticism of Rosen and Haskell to Claire Johnston's and Laura Mulvey's seminal work on women and representation. Chapter 2 focuses on some of the theoretical considerations of the image and the gaze, extends these into the theory of cinema as an apparatus, and outlines feminist critiques of apparatus theory. Accounts of representation and the image are drawn from Bill Nichols, John Berger, and Peter Wollen's summary of C.S. Peirce. In the shift of theoretical interest to the process of viewing film, Munsterberg's account of the psychology of vision is noted. The psychoanalytic construction of visual meaning is traced through Lacan's elaboration of the mirror phase to its significance for cinema in the centrality of desire and the gaze. The consequent development of a model of cinema as an apparatus by Baudry and Metz is followed. The feminist criticism of the androcentricity of this model is traced, both through its outright rejection, and through specific critiques by Teresa de Lauretis, Jacqueline Rose, Kaja Silverman, Mary Ann Doane and Constance Penley. Chapter 3 follows three theorists in their attempts to account for female spectatorship: Laura Mulvey's theory of oscillation, Teresa de Lauretis's double identification and Mary Ann Doane's accounts both of textual strategies of specularization in the "woman's film" and the masquerade are considered. Chapter 4 presents an analysis of the text Klute in order to apply some of the theoretical implications, particularly around questions of female subjectivity and spectatorship. It situates Klute within its historical context, in relation to the cinema industry and the emergent women's movement, and within the terms suggested by its generic structuration. The Conclusion provides a summary of my intention to provide an overview of this difficult and fertile field of debate. An Appendix provides a script of Klute

Do You Think You\u27re What They Say You Are? Reflections on Jesus Christ Superstar

Jesus Christ Superstar (dir. Norman Jewison, 1973) is a hybrid which, though influenced by Jesus films, also transcends them. Its rock opera format and its focus on Holy Week make it congenial to the adaptation of the Gospels and its characterization of a plausible, non-stereotypical Jesus capable of change sets it apart from the traditional films and aligns it with The Last Temptation of Christ and Jesus of Montreal. It uses its depiction of Jesus as a means not of reverence but of interrogation, asking him questions by placing him in a context full of overtones of the culture of the early 1970s, English-speaking West, attempting to understand him by converting him into a pop-idol, with adoring groupies among whom Jesus struggles, out of context, in an alien culture that ultimately crushes him, crucifies him and leaves him behind