The rough and the smooth : narrative, character and performance in Fingers (1978) and De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté/The Beat that My Heart Skipped (2005)

As is well known, Jacques Audiard’s De battre mon cœur s’est arrêté (2005) is a remake of Fingers (1978), directed by James Toback. Bucking the usual trend of remakes, De battre is popularly regarded as a more successful film than Fingers. The French film helped propel the careers of Audiard and stars Romain Duris and Niels Arestrup, whereas the careers of Toback and Harvey Keitel stalled in the wake of Fingers. The French remake is also seen as more aesthetically successful in its narrative structure and characterisation. Where Fingers – in some ways typical of the New Hollywood cinema – revolves around the hysterically improbable masculine crisis of Jimmy Angeleli, incarnated in Keitel’s hyperactive performance, Duris’s more nuanced acting creates a more plausible and likeable character in Thomas Seyr. Ironically, the usual complaint about film remakes – that the ‘copy’ tends to smooth out the rough edges of the ‘original’, resolving ambiguities in a neat narrative arc – is arguably as true as ever in this pair of films where the standard national identifications are reversed (the French film is a polished remake of the problematic American model). This article compares the two films through a close reading of the performance styles of Keitel and Duris and an analysis of the protagonists’ respective character trajectories. In the process, it asks questions about Audiard’s debt to American cinema and about his work with actors

The forest for the trees : political contexts for Godard's nature imagery in Film socialism and Adieu au langage

Jean-Luc Godard’s most recent feature films, Film socialisme (2010) and Adieu au langage (2014), are striking for their prominent imagery of nature: recurring images include water and forests, and one of the principal ‘characters’ of Adieu au langage is a dog. In many ways, this can be seen to prolong a long-term project of aesthetic research begun in Godard’s films of the early 1980s, complete with the sometimes dubious gender politics of that period. The recent films also include an historico-political tirade against technocracy. Yet nature in these films is prevented from becoming a transcendent opposing pole to technics through the extreme fragmentation of Godard’s imagery that reaches an unprecedented level of distillation at this late stage of his career. As such, this article suggests that the difficult, unstable form of these films marks a serious attempt to capture something of a new political reality

Michel Houellebecq and the International Sexual Economy

This paper explores the notion of an ‘international sexual economy’ in the work of the French writer Michel Houellebecq, and particularly his latest novel, Plateforme (2001). Houellebecq suggests that, since westerners no longer have the time or the inclination to sleep with each other, and since those in the third world have nothing to sell but their bodies, the exchange of cash for sex on a truly international scale is likely to represent the most lucrative sector of the global economy in the coming century. Whilst acknowledging the objections to this idea, the paper shows how it is based in a serious analysis of global capitalism which has something in common with the theoretical work of Jean-François Lyotard, in terms of both the postmodern and the libidinal economies. The paper further suggests that the virulent anti-psychologism of Houellebecq’s often brutal worldview implies a (largely undeclared) kinship with Friedrich Nietzsche. Finally, it offers an analysis of the ironic narrative strategies in Plateforme that are interpreted as the consequence of trying to criticize the cultural economy without being able to position oneself outside it

A numerical and experimental investigation of vibratory bowl feeders

Vibratory bowl feeders are widely used in automation processes for the storage, feeding and orientation of identical components for presentation to workstations or other mechanical handling devices. The investigation described here has been directed at modelling the dynamiC behaviour of vibratory bowl feeders, both to improve understanding of their behaviour, and to facilitate improvements in their design. The work undertaken has involved the following stages: i) A numerical model for the prediction of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the bowl feeder was developed, modelling the structure as a lumped parameter eight degree-of-freedom system; ii) The natural frequencies and mode shapes predicted by the model were compared with those obtained from experimental modal analysis. There was good agreement for the first three natural frequencies. Differences in the higher frequency modes indicated an overconstrained model which could be accounted for by the flexural vibration of the bowl; iii) A numerical model of the forced response of a bowl feeder when driven by a harmonic excitation was developed using a spreadsheet package, and verified experimentally; iv) The spreadsheet package was developed further, varying the geometric parameters of the bowl and springs over specified ranges. Changes in spring angles were investigated experimentally to verify the predicted values; v) A customised design tool was developed using the spreadsheet package to enable engineers to investigate the behaviour of different configuration feeders; vi) An investigation of the causes of dead-spots was undertaken. These were shown to be due to the asymmetrical arrangement of the springs and electromagnetic coil relative to each other; and vii) Solutions proposed to the problem of dead-spots were the use of four spring banks instead of three, and the specification of an annular shaped pole piece for the electromagnetic coil

The banality of monstrosity : on Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission

As so often with Houellebecq’s work, the shock and scandal of his most recent novel Soumission is not to be found where we might expect: despite the extraordinary coincidence of the book’s publication with the murderous Islamist attacks on Charlie Hebdo, Houellebecq imagines a proximate future in which France democratically elects a moderate Islamist party to government. Readers are asked to accept as logical developments that French citizens will agree to a national education system in which all teachers must convert to Islam, or a society in which women are not expected to work. This ability to make monstrous developments appear rational and even inevitable is familiar from Houellebecq’s earlier novels. This article situates the provocative conclusions of Soumission in the context of this earlier work, showing how the novel develops the author’s reflections on the nuisances of bureaucracy in late capitalism and further explores his hypothesis that religious faith is the only lasting foundation on which a society can be built, an idea explored here through Houellebecq’s detailed engagement with J. K. Huysmans

Deformations of asymptotically cylindrical G_2 manifolds

We prove that for a 7-dimensional manifold M with cylindrical ends the moduli space of exponentially asymptotically cylindrical torsion-free G_2 structures is a smooth manifold (if non-empty), and study some of its local properties. We also show that the holonomy of the induced metric of an exponentially asymptotically cylindrical G_2 manifold M is exactly G_2 if and only if its fundamental group is finite and neither M nor any double cover of M is homeomorphic to a cylinder.Comment: 31 pages, corrected proof of proposition 6.2