Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers

BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI'S THE DREAMERS (2003): POLITICS OF YOUTH REMEMBERED Bertolucci's films have always been politically engaged. Undergoing psychoanalysis in the 1960s left him fascinated by dreams and their resemblance to cinematic sequences. However, he declared that he could not bring together his interests in politics and aesthetics. For me it's very difficult to succeed in mixing together the idea of beauty that I have as a moral fact and a reduction of reality in political terms, exactly because I think they are two irreconcilable things. (Cited by Purdon, 1971: 7) The Dreamers finally realised his long-standing ambition to make a film dealing with the events of Paris in 1968. Much more than a mere reconstruction of those events, this was to become the Bertolucci film that wove together sex, psychoanalysis, memory, dreaming, revolution and filmic style in a rich tapestry. Bertolucci always wanted to make cinema new and strange..

Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask

Output Type: Book Revie

Million Dollar Baby

MILLION DOLLAR BABY: BOXING GRIEF AS Ed Buscombe remarks in his review of Million Dollar Baby (USA, 2004) it, like most movies that feature boxing, does not make fighting its principal subject, but deploys it as a metaphor for life (2005: 67-8). In this sub-genre, themes such as courage, loyalty, comradeship, endurance, betrayal, blind anger and one form or another of corrupt behaviour (both in and out of the ring) commonly occur. At various times the main protagonists in Million Dollar Baby show most of the virtues and vices just listed. They provide, so to speak, the basic topography against which Million Dollar Baby is plotted. The film is distinctive, however, because while these moral issues are constantly in the background, it foregrounds two less familiar themes - firstly, the strange, counter-instinctive skills that the boxer must learn; and secondly, the repression and displacement of grief together with the necessity..

Katherine Spring, Saying it with Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema and Michael Slowik, After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926-1934

Output Type: Book Revie

The physician's melancholia

An account of Dr Gregory House's disposition and how it mirrors the psychology of his team of doctors

'Birth: Eternal Grieving of the Spotless Mind'

In Jonathan Glazer’s Birth, Anna, a 35-year-old woman widowed for ten years, is on the point of remarrying. A boy Sean comes to her apartment saying that he is her late husband, who was also called Sean. Anna and her family initially find refuge in polished derision from the ten-year old’s persistent claims. But the boy collapses after she forbids him to see her again, and the shock of it ends for her the safe option of scepticism. Helpless before the dawning realisation that the boy is indeed her late husband reborn, Anna soon obsessively starts planning to elope with him. Now read on..

The Son's Room

PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF: THE SON'S ROOM Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what will fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish. Sigmund Freud, Letter to Ludwig Binswanger (1929) PHILIP FRENCH makes the point that La Stanza del Figlio (the Italian title of The Son's Room) carries a pun. In addition to 'the room' explicit in the English version, stanza also means a verse in both languages, thus suggesting the idea of 'a poem or part of a life left standing' (2002). In this pun lies the key to what makes..

Arthur Dulay and John Grierson: fitting Drifters (1929)

This article arises from an unexpected discovery among the papers held in John Grierson’s Archive at the University of Stirling, which stimulated historical analysis. The document in question makes it possible to locate Drifters in the short-lived period of transition from silent to sound films. The moment when Grierson’s film was first screened to audiences at the end of 1929 coincided with the technological transition in British cinema from accompaniment by musicians playing live in the auditorium to the introduction of fully synchronized sound on film. Arthur Dulay’s ‘Musical Suggestions for Drifters’ furnish plain evidence of not only how complex the work of projectionists and their assistants could be, but also how, until the transition to recorded sound was complete, a variety of methods was deployed in different cinemas to add music and sound effects to pictures. The transition from silent to sound film occurred comparatively rapidly, when seen against the long timespan of the silent era. For those caught up in it, however, it must have seemed a protracted change, with musicians having to live with deepening anxiety over their future while projectionists, independent cinema-owners and managers had to tackle the day-by-day delays in wiring their picture houses, acquiring, installing and learning how to operate expensive equipment

Empowering Cinema Operators in the USA and UK, 1927-1933

When cinema owners and managers in the USA and the United Kingdom wired their theatres for sound, most of them promptly dismissed their orchestras. As a consequence of that and other economic, technical and aesthetic alterations then underway in the cinema business, a significant change occurred in relations between exhibitors and a key group of employees in the years from 1927 to 1933. These were the workers (generally known as ‘operators’) responsible for screening the films. This paper focuses on the changes that the introduction of recorded sound, together with alterations in the business and political environments, brought to operators’ workplace duties and conditions of employment in both the United States of America and the United Kingdom