Dialogic Cinephilia - July 7, 2020

Files, Gemma, Orrin Grey and Tyler Unsell. "Blood Quantum." Horror Pod Class #32 (July 2, 2020) ["The dead are coming back to life outside the isolated Mi’gMaq reserve of Red Crow, except for its Indigenous inhabitants who are strangely immune to the zombie plague."]

Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "Morning of the Mutants: On the Castrati." Weird Studies #72 (April 29, 2020) ["For over two centuries in early modern Italy, boys were selected for their singing talent castrated before the onset of puberty. The goal was to preserve the qualities of their voice even as they grew into manhood. The procedure resulted in other physiological changes which, combined with an unnaturally high voice, made the castrati the most prodigious singers on the continent. As Martha Feldman shows in her book The Castrato, a masterpiece of cultural history, the castrated singer was such a singular figure that he invited comparisons with angels, animals, and kings, attracting adoration and ridicule in equal measures. The castrato was a true liminal being, and as JF and Phil discover in this episode of Weird Studies, an unlikely herald of the present age."]

Holloway, Kali. "7 things the United Daughters of the Confederacy might not want you to know about them." Salon (October 6, 2018)  ["The organization keeps Confederate statues standing and spreads lies about America’s history of slavery."]

Izaakson, Jennifer. "Get Out: A bone-chilling, discomfort-inducing, laughter-provoking artistic and political triumph." Ceasefire (April 7, 2017)




Smalley, Gregory J. "Altered States (1980)." 366 Weird Movies (July 24, 2010)

Suarez, Francis. "Miami Mayor Francis Suarez on his Approach to Flattening the Curve." The Takeaway (July 2, 2020) ["Today, we go to one of the hardest-hit states for the virus, Florida, where differences between Governor Ron DeSantis and local leaders are leaving Floridians stuck in the middle. On Wednesday, Florida recorded 6,500 new cases of COVID-19, bringing the state’s total to nearly 160,000 since the pandemic began. More than 3,500 people have died. But Governor DeSantis has refused to take any more steps to close businesses or put in place any stay-at-home orders to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. The City of Miami has begun taking emergency measures to slow the spread of the virus, by requiring all residents to wear masks, or face coverings. The City of Miami also enacted a mandatory 10-day closure for businesses that don’t comply with the emergency guidelines. As part of our series with local leaders, we speak to Mayor Francis Suarez about the recent uptick and his plans to contain the virus further, as well as his own experience with the coronavirus: he had it in March."]

Suton, Koraljka. "Stalker: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Merger of Contemplative Style and Transcendental Substance Designed to Put Us in the Zone." Cinephilia and Beyond (ND) ["Should the purpose of moviemaking be for viewers to emerge from the experience transformed? Is there a deep sense of transcendental meaning that has to permeate a motion picture for it to be considered true art? Must directors see their vocation as a mission to help bring about enlightenment if they are to call themselves true artists? If your answer to these questions was a resounding yes, you are probably in great awe of the legacy Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky left in his wake. A deeply and unapologetically spiritual man, the revered filmmaker believed that art was entrusted with “the task of resurrecting spirituality,” as he pointed out in his interviews. He viewed art as a mirror that served the purpose of reflecting back to humanity that which he perceived to be the ultimate truth—that man is, in essence, a spiritual being and life itself a process of realizing, owning and acting in accordance with that truth. The art he made was, therefore, always in alignment with his personal mission of awakening the viewers to that which makes up the very core of mankind. In that respect, it could be said that Tarkovsky was not unlike the titular character of Stalker, his 1979 movie that would not only become a cult science-fiction classic but would also be named one of the fifty greatest movies of all time by the British Film Institute in 2012. For much like Tarkovsky himself, the protagonist is an archetypal guide who feels called to lead (both the literal and metaphorical) way, thereby enabling his passengers to come into contact with themselves and, by extension, grasp the meaning of (their) life."]

Taubin, Amy. "Apocalypse Vow: Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods." Art Forum (June 15, 2020)

West, Stephen. "Jürgen Habermas – The Public Sphere." Philosophize This! #143 (May 1, 2020) ["When transnational corporations with very specific ends they’re trying to achieve OWN major media outlets. When there is so much power in controlling people’s values…Habermas thinks the economic/governmental system COLONIZES the lifeworld. Where we used to sit around the dinner table and have discussions to determine our thoughts about the world…we now turn on a screen and are SOLD ways to think about things. The further we got from the origins of the public sphere in those coffee houses back in France …the further we got away from communicative rationality. We got so far away from it we could barely SEE it anymore…to the point where brilliant thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer wrote an entire book about rationality and didn’t even consider its existence! But for any chains we were supposedly wrapped in by the Enlightenment, Habermas thought the key to get us out of them was built into the Enlightenment all along. We just lost sight of it. The emancipatory potential of reason…reason’s ability to direct us AWAY from treating people as a means to an end…the type of reason GROUNDED in communication…GROUNDED in the pursuit of genuinely trying to understand the other person’s perspective and then working towards agreement…the type of reason that can allow us to make our decisions about things not by buying into an endless sales pitch, but by talking to our fellow citizens in the lifeworld comparing our individual perspecitives… True democracy, to Habermas, is when the lifeworld controls the system. Not the system controlling the lifeworld."]

Ziegler, Mary. "After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate." The Legal History Podcast #1 (May 25, 2019) ["Siobhan talks with Mary Ziegler, Stearns Weaver Miller Professor of Law at Florida State University College of Law, about her book, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate. Ziegler’s work uses the landmark American abortion rights case, Roe vs. Wade to explore litigation as a vessel for social change and the role the court plays in democracy. In addition to traditional archival research, Ziegler recorded over one hundred oral histories of people in the pro-life and pro-choice camps, allowing her to move beyond caricatures and delve more precisely into the catalysts for these individuals' points of view."]