Spectacular narratives: Twister, independence day, and frontier mythology

Big-screen spectacle has become increasingly important to Hollywood in recent decades. It formed a central part of a post-war strategy aimed at tempting lost audiences back to the cinema in the face of demographic changes and the development of television and other domestic leisure activities. More recently, in an age in which the big Hollywood studios have become parts of giant conglomerates, the prevalence of spectacle and special effects has been boosted by a demand to engineer products that can be further exploited in multimedia forms such as computer games and theme-park rides, secondary outlets that can sometimes generate more profits than the films on which they are based. These and other developments have led some commentators to announce, or predict, the imminent demise of narrative as a central component of Hollywood cinema. But the case has been considerably overstated. Narrative is far from being eclipsed, even in the most spectacular and effects-oriented of today’s blockbuster attractions. These films still tend to tell reasonably coherent stories, even if they may sometimes be looser and less well integrated than classical models. More important for my argument, contemporary spectaculars also continue to manifest the kinds of underlying thematic oppositions and reconciliations associated with a broadly ‘structuralist’ analysis of narrative. This very important dimension of narrative has been largely ignored by those who identify, celebrate or more often bemoan a weakening of plot or character development in many spectacular features

Weighing up the qualities of independence: 21 grams in focus

At the heart (literally) of 21 Grams (2003) is a concern about questions of identity; of measuring that which seems ineffable – the essence of life, or what makes us distinct, unique as individuals, or otherwise. My aim in this paper is to use the film to attempt a similar, if less lofty, enquiry into the current identity of American independent cinema, a sector that often seems equally resistant to being clearly or definitively pinned down and categorized. 21 Grams is a useful exemplar of a number of significant trends in the contemporary indie sector, including both its situation in the industrial landscape and its most distinctive formal qualities. Industrially, the film lies in a position poised between all-out independence and attachment to the empires of the Hollywood major studio-distribution operations. Formally, and in the intersection between form and content, it also occupies a something of a hybrid position: alternative in some dimensions, especially its narrative structure and the use of hyper-realistic visual textures, but also more familiar-conventional in others, including a storyline that might otherwise seem closer to the stuff of somewhat implausible melodrama. In each case, I suggest, this can be taken as representative of a significant proportion of the American independent sector more widely

Following in the steps: Gus Van Sant’s Gerry and Elephant in the American independent field of cultural production

This paper considers Gus Van Sant's Gerry (2002) and Elephant (2003) as manifestations of contemporary American independent cinema that, characteristically, balance departures from mainstream/Hollywood convention with the use of frameworks that locate such films as marketable to particular niche audiences. The initial focus is on the use of formal devices, particularly in the very-long take, that mark these films out as distinct from typical mainstream production. Aspects of international art cinema are drawn upon to situate such films within particular regions of the independent spectrum—the latter being understood here as an example of what Pierre Bourdieu terms a 'field of cultural production', in this case one that stretches from the avant-garde to the margins of Hollywood. Formal analysis is considered in relation to the substantive content of the two films and the specific contexts in which each was produced and distributed, and in relation to the kinds of audiences to which they are likely to be targeted

An application of decomposable maps in proving multiplicativity of low dimensional maps

In this paper we present a class of maps for which the multiplicativity of the maximal output p-norm holds when p is 2 and p is larger than or equal to 4. The class includes all positive trace-preserving maps from the matrix algebra on the three-dimensional space to that on the two-dimensional.Comment: 9 page

Tectonics, volcanism, landscape structure and human evolution in the African Rift

Tectonic movements and volcanism in the African Rift have usually been considered of relevance to human evolution only at very large geographical and chronological scales, principally in relation to longterm topographic and climatic variation at the continental scale. At the more loca1 scale of catchment basins and individual sites, tectonic features are generally considered to be at worst disruptive and at best incidental features enhancing the preservation and exposure of early sites. We demonstrate that recent lava flows and fault scarps in a tectonically active region create a distinctive landscape structure with a complex and highly differentiated topography of enclosures, barriers and fertile basins. This landscape structure has an important potential impact on the co-evolution of prey-predator interactions and on interspecific relationships more generally. In particular, we suggest that it would have offered unique opportunities for the development of a hominid niche characterised by bipedalism, meat-eating and stone tool use. These landscape features are best appreciated by looking at areas which today have rapid rates of tectonic movement and frequent volcanic activity, as in eastern Afar and Djibouti. These provide a better analogy for the Plio-Pleistocene environments occupied by early hominids than the present-day landscapes where their fossil remains and artefacts have been discovered. The latter areas are now less active than was the case when the sites were formed. They have also been radically transfomed by ongoing geomorphological processes in the intervening millennia. Thus, previous attempts to reconstruct the local landscape setting adjacent to these early hominid sites necessarily rely on limited geological windows into the ancient land surface and thus tend to filter out small-scale topographic detail because it cannot be reliably identified. It is precisely this local detail that we consider to be of importance in understanding the environmental contribution to co-evolutionary developments

Discovering Shakespeare’s Personal Style: Editing and Connoisseurship in the Eighteenth Century

This chapter examines the use of connoisseurial rhetoric by Shakespeare editors and critics over the course of the eighteenth century, beginning with Alexander Pope in 1723–5 and concluding with George Steevens in the 1780s and 1790s. Connoisseurship was originally developed by art critics as a discourse for authenticating paintings and drawings. Beginning with Pope, however, literary editors began to draw upon it as an analogy for representing authorial style. As I shall show through an examination of Steevens’s work in compiling the first chronological catalogue of William Hogarth’s prints and paintings, this convergence between art criticism and textual criticism involved more than a simple exchange of metaphors. Connoisseurship offered critics such as Steevens new ways of looking at artworks and assessing their genuineness, modes of vision that could be applied as readily to plays as to paintings. The eighteenth-century art market relied upon the expertise of the connoisseur, who could guarantee that a given painting stemmed from the hand of a particular master. Shakespeare publishing in the eighteenth century likewise came to depend on the expertise of the editor, who could reliably identify Shakespeare’s personal style and distinguish the genuine from the spurious

Opthalmic Teaching Problems: The Ayes Have It

The problems associated with the teaching of ophthalmology to medical students in today\u27s university setting are by no means unique to ophthalmology. However, these problems are more severe in small departments such as ophthalmology and are more disruptive to the teaching process than similar problems in larger departments. The purpose of this paper is to identify some of the more important teaching problems and propose solutions to them

Quantitative theory and econometrics

Econometrics ; Money theory