Alexander Dovzhenko's Cinematic Visions

DEATH, BIRTH ORDER AND ALEXANDER DOVZHENKO'S CINEMATIC VISIONS "What man shall live and not see death, or save himself from the power of the grave?" -- Psalms 89: 48 ALEXANDER Dovzhenko (1894-1956), one of the pioneers of Soviet filmmaking in the 1920s, created a cinematic universe with three types of death. His villains died "grotesquely," but his heroes experienced "beautiful deaths, without suffering."(1) The filmmaker considered only one type of death an absolute evil: the "senseless death", a category which included "the victims of war."(2) But for Dovzhenko, the loss of life in his films never became the final conclusion. As exemplified by the grandfather's death scene in Earth, dying constituted an integral part of the great chain of life.(3) Dovzhenko created these interpretations specifically for the screen. His treatment of death did not express his true reaction to the end of life,..

Modèles ecologiques pour l'extrapolation des effets écotoxicologiques enregistrés lors de biotests in situ cheZ Gammarus

[Departement_IRSTEA]Eaux [TR1_IRSTEA]BELCAInternational audienceEvaluating the effects of chemical contamination on populations and ecological communities still constitutes a challenging necessity in environmental management. However the toxic effects of contaminants are commonly measured by means of organism-level responses. Linking such effects measures with ecological models is a promising way to apprehend population-level impacts. In this way, population models are currently increasingly used in predictive risk assessment procedures, but their use in environmental diagnostic framework remains limited due to their lack of ecological realism. The present study with the crustacean amphipod Gammarus fossarum, a sentinel species in freshwater monitoring, combines a dual field and laboratory experimental approach with a population modelling framework. In this way, we developed an ecologically-relevant periodic matrix population model for Gammarus. This model allowed us to capture the population dynamics in the field, and to understand the particular pattern of demographic sensitivities induced by Gammarus life-history phenology. The model we developed provided a robust population-level assessment of in situ-based effects measures recorded during a biomonitoring program on a French watershed impacted by past mining activities. Thus, our study illustrates the potential of population modelling when seeking to decipher the role of environmental toxic contamination in ecological perturbations

Re-examining Dovzhenko's Political Environment: A Response to Riley

John Riley \'A (Ukrainian) Life in Soviet Film: Liber\'s _Alexander Dovzhenko_\' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 31, September 200