In plain view : the body as site of detection and inscription in serial killer narratives ; ein Essay

At the beginning of every story of murder there is always a body. If the murderer is a serial killer, there is, of course, more than one. More importantly, the bodies left by the serial killer are not likely to be intact and whole. What he leaves behind and what we, the audience, will get to see is the body in pieces, dismembered, scattered. A series of snapshots, partial views, and close-ups, inflicting cold sharp shocks, is all we may glimpse: the head of Benjamin Raspail floating in a jar of formaldehyde in The Silence of the Lambs, a finger removed by the serial killer from his landlord’s hand in Kalifornia, a ziploc bag of fingers recovered from a flooded drainpipe in When The Bough Breaks, a surgically severed hand used to leave misleading fingerprints on a wall at a crime scene in Seven

Boundary Crossing and the Construction of Cinematic Genre

BOUNDARY CROSSING AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF CINEMATIC GENRE: FILM NOIR AS "DEFERRED ACTION" The Frame-Up: Theoretical ConsiderationsIn recent years, critical consensus in cinema studies has begun to coalesce around the idea that, in a sense, there never was such a thing as film noir. Thomas Elsaesser, for example, comes to this conclusion after examining what might be called one of the foundational myths of film noir, the "connection between German Expressionist cinema and American film noir" (Elsaesser: 420). (1) Ever since this story about noir's origins has solidified into one of the "commonplaces of film history," Elsaesser argues, it has become difficult to see film noir for what it really is, "an imaginary entity whose meaning resides in a set of shifting signifiers" (Elsaesser: 420). Following a critical rather than a cinematic tradition, he traces the consolidation of the genre's identity back to the intervention of German exiles like..

Dead Center: Berlin, the Postmodern Gothic, and Norman Ohler\u27s Mitte

Cultural critics often frame present-day Berlin as a space of historical discontinuities, a nexus of modernity and postmodernity that, in its orientation toward the future, represents post-reunification Germany in all its complexity. However, this framing tends to suppress Gothic imagery, of which traces can be found in the critical discourse on the city. Recuperating such Gothic tropes from critical discourse, and then consciously and strategically re-deploying them, can be a valuable strategy for opening up new venues of thinking about the lingering presence of the past, the high cost of modernization, and the uncanny emotional and affective dimensions of urban space. While this project of recuperation has been taken on in some critical analyses of Berlin, most notably among them Brian Ladd\u27s The Ghosts of Berlin (1997), it is the new German literature on Berlin that proceeds more boldly into the terrain of the Gothic. Among this new Berlin literature, Norman Ohler\u27s critically acclaimed Gothic novel Mitte (2001) stands out as a cogent analysis of the new Berlin and of the problems of inhabiting a decentralized urban space and reconnecting it to authentic historical experience

Film remakes, the black sheep of translation

Film remakes have often been neglected by translation studies in favour of other forms of audiovisual translation such as subtitling and dubbing. Yet, as this article will argue, remakes are also a form of cinematic translation. Beginning with a survey of previous, ambivalent approaches to the status of remakes, it proposes that remakes are multimodal, adaptive translations: they translate the many modes of the film being remade and offer a reworking of that source text. The multimodal nature of remakes is explored through a reading of Breathless, Jim McBride's 1983 remake of Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle (1959), which shows how remade films may repeat the narrative of, but differ on multiple levels from, their source films. Due to the collaborative nature of film production, remakes involve multiple agents of translation. As such, remakes offer an expanded understanding of audiovisual translation

Dead Center: Berlin, the Postmodern Gothic, and Norman Ohler's Mitte

Cultural critics often frame present-day Berlin as a space of historical discontinuities, a nexus of modernity and postmodernity that, in its orientation toward the future, represents post-reunification Germany in all its complexity. However, this framing tends to suppress Gothic imagery, of which traces can be found in the critical discourse on the city. Recuperating such Gothic tropes from critical discourse, and then consciously and strategically re-deploying them, can be a valuable strategy for opening up new venues of thinking about the lingering presence of the past, the high cost of modernization, and the uncanny emotional and affective dimensions of urban space. While this project of recuperation has been taken on in some critical analyses of Berlin, most notably among them Brian Ladd's The Ghosts of Berlin (1997), it is the new German literature on Berlin that proceeds more boldly into the terrain of the Gothic. Among this new "Berlin literature," Norman Ohler's critically acclaimed Gothic novel Mitte (2001) stands out as a cogent analysis of the new Berlin and of the problems of inhabiting a decentralized urban space and reconnecting it to authentic historical experience