Intertextuality and the Breakup of Codes: Coppola\u27s Apocalypse Now

For all of the aesthetic flaws focused on by critics at its release in 1979, there is little question that Apocalypse Now is a pivotal American film, certainly in its description of the gradual transformation of mainstream cinematic narrative. If only by virtue of its use as a reference point for describing other films and cultural phenomena, Coppola\u27s film is a remarkable cultural artifact. Intertextual analysis of this film is necessary as it leaps the boundaries of genre categorization on an on-going basis, discovers new audiences, separates itself from the specific issue it addresses (Vietnam) to become important to other types of discourse, and enters into a wide-ranging discussion of the nature of apocalyptic consciousness in mass society and postmodern art

Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties, by Peter Biskind

Book review by Christopher Sharrett of Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. 371 pp

Notes on Cinema and the Romantic World-View

An examination of the cinema\u27s relationship to romanticism demonstrates the problematical business of periodizing an art movement and showing its relationship to a specific political/historical movement. Although the cinema did not exist during the years roughly 1798-1850, it is fair to say that the international cinema from its inception has embodied the controlling spirit and dialectic of Romanticism. It is extraordinary that relatively little has been said about the connections of film to the sensibility that arose with the emergence of industrialism and the bourgeoisie in the first half of the nineteenth century. Lecture given at the Romanticism Past and Present Institute for secondary school faculty, sponsored by Sacred Heart University and the Connecticut Humanities Council. The writers of these essays had the specific task of selecting and presenting their material with secondary school faculty and their students in mind

Video Nasty: The Moral Apocalypse in Koji Suzuki’s Ring

Although overshadowed by its filmic adaptations (Hideo Nakata, 1998 and Gore Verbinski, 2002), Koji Suzuki’s novel Ring (1991) is at the heart of the international explosion of interest in Japanese horror. This article seeks to explore Suzuki’s overlooked text. Unlike the film versions, the novel is more explicitly focused on the line between self-preservation and self-sacrifice, critiquing the ease with which the former is privileged over the latter. In the novel then, the horror of Sadako’s curse raises questions about the terrors of moral obligation: the lead protagonist (Asakawa) projects the guilt he feels over his self-interested actions, envisaging them as an all-consuming apocalypse

Balancing act: exploring the tone of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

This paper provides an analysis of The Life Aquatic in the context of debates around tone, irony, the Smart Film, the New Sincerity and the Quirky. It argues that Anderson is one of a small but significant number of filmmakers to escape from the indiscriminate irony of fin de sie`cle cinema, and finds The Life Aquatic Aquatic a particularly interesting film in which to explore such matters because of its ready artifice, strong elements of pastiche and measuredly preposterous excesses. Offering a critical analysis, the paper balances an engagement with some of the systemic elements of the film’s tone with the detailed organisation of tonal elements in particular sequences

The technologies of isolation: apocalypse and self in Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Kairo

In this investigation of the Japanese film Kairo, I contemplate how the horrors present in the film relate to the issue of self, by examining a number of interlocking motifs. These include thematic foci on disease and technology which are more intimately and inwardly focused that the film's conclusion first appears to suggest. The true horror here, I argue, is ontological: centred on the self and its divorcing from the exterior world, especially founded in an increased use of and reliance on communicative technologies. I contend that these concerns are manifested in Kairo by presenting the spread of technology as disease-like, infecting the city and the individuals who are isolated and imprisoned by their urban environment. Finally, I investigate the meanings of the apocalypse, expounding how it may be read as hopeful for the future rather than indicative of failure or doom