Film Studies Resources: August 31, 2022

Acolytes of Horror. "Saint Maud: God As A Self-Portrait." (Posted on Youtube: May 12, 2021) ["Having recently found God, self-effacing young nurse Maud arrives at a plush home to care for Amanda, a hedonistic dancer left frail from a chronic illness. When a chance encounter with a former colleague throws up hints of a dark past, it becomes clear there is more to sweet Maud than meets the eye."]

Bordwell, David.  "Movies By the Numbers." Observations on Film Art (July 14, 2022)  ["James Cutting’s Movies on Our Minds: The Evolution of Cinematic Engagement, itself the fruit of many years of intensive studies, builds on these achievements while taking wholly original perspectives as well. Comprehensive and detailed, it is simply the most complete and challenging psychological account of film art yet offered. I can’t do justice to its range and nuance here. Consider what follows as an invitation to you to read this bold book."]

Elbri, Bilge. "Event Horizon Gets Better With Age." Vulture (August 18, 2022) ["Twenty-five years ago, Paul W. S. Anderson released one of the gnarliest, most unforgettable science-fiction horror films ever made, but it took most people a few years to realize it. Starring Sam Neill, Laurence Fishburne, and a spaceship that had just returned from a journey through Hell, Event Horizon came out in August 1997 and bombed with critics and audiences alike. (Those of us who were fans of the picture back then can tell you how lonely an experience that was.) But over the years, Anderson’s film grew in reputation. This was due partly to the indelible quality of its imagery: its brief but deliriously grotesque glimpses of Hell, the medieval-torture-device-like design of its titular spaceship, not to mention a final act that featured a mad Sam Neill running around naked and on fire after gouging out his own eyes. (“Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see.”) Anderson understood how to shock audiences — maybe too well, since members of his studio were notoriously outraged when they first saw the film — but Event Horizon carries a fascinating cautionary tale about our inability to let go of the past, a tale enhanced by a cast that brings real depth to what might, on paper, have looked like fairly disposable genre work."]

Gardner, Caden Mark. "Polyester." Reverse Shot (August 3, 2022) ["Polyester (1981) was the first John Waters film of the eighties, and it has an unmistakably different vibe from his earlier films. Waters and his muse, Divine, had not worked together since her tour de force performance as Dawn Davenport in 1974’s Female Trouble, and with Polyester, the Waters-Divine collaboration feels less content to ride on pure shock value. Instead, they are stretching their artistry and deepening their approach to performance with a devilish wink. Polyester is on its surface a cocktail of pop culture artifacts where the cross-gender drag casting of Divine as Francine Fishpaw becomes less of a punkish transgression than an homage to the tradition of the “women’s picture” melodramas of the 1950s—with the added stunt of Odorama scent, achieved with scratch-and-sniff cards. While Polyester is an undeniable transition film for Waters, which feels informed by the changing standards of Hollywood and the world around him, it’s also very much the work of a prankster."]

Gould, Steve. "The Elgin and El Topo plunge NYC into Midnite Madness."  MUBI Podcast (July 7, 2022) ["In 1970, a scruffy repertory theater — led by the visionary Ben Barenholtz — quietly placed a print ad in the Village Voice, advertising midnight screenings of a Spanish-language western they claimed was "too heavy to be shown any other way." The movie was Alejandro Jodorowsky's EL TOPO, and it'd kick off the "Midnite Movie" craze that changed moviegoing. Hear the history of the Elgin Theater and its legendary, weed-soaked screenings of EL TOPO, featuring commentary from ex-Voice critic J Hoberman, Amy Nicholson of the podcast "Unspooled," ex-Elgin programmers Chuck Zlatkin and Steve Gould...and Jodorowsky himself."]

Levenson, Joey. "Graphic Design on Screen: Inside Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with Tina Charad." It's Nice That (August 13, 2022) ["The 2019 film is littered with parodic references and allusions to a very real and very specific time and place, of which Tina was responsible for. She approached the film as it is: a period piece. “On historical projects, I like to work with the researcher, especially on big budget features like this one,” she explains. After breaking down the sets needed, plus the props and all the small details in the script from Tarantino, Tina would get to work coming up with endless design concepts to fill the visuals of the film. Tarantino’s star-studded release was a more meticulous project than most, as Tarantino is a director known for his incredible attention to detail in the mise en scene. “We started with props and then went store-by-store in Hollywood looking to see what was there for inspiration for the film’s location shoots,” Tina says. “It was quite hard to recreate storefronts for old Hollywood, as a lot of photographs of them weren’t even in colour. So we took some artistic liberty with Quinten [Tarantino].” Additionally, the film is known for its abundance of fake – and incredibly convincing – movie posters featuring the cast playing actors in old Hollywood, as well as entirely made-up products, stores and studios they all engage with. “We tried to mimic that time and place of the 60s. But if I couldn’t find a reference, I’d go into the advertising of that time, mainly by browsing historical newspapers from California,” Tina explains on the process of world-building. “I treated every prop and storefront as if it was real, taking it back into a 60s style or maybe even 50s.”"]

Mulvehill, Charles. "Harold and Maude find new life at The Westgate." MUBI Podcast (July 14, 2022) ["Hal Ashby's HAROLD AND MAUDE debuted to generally poor reviews, and worse box office. But in suburban Minneapolis, a humble second-run neighborhood theater called The Westgate found the film an audience...and helped turn it into one of the biggest cult hits of all time. Host Rico Gagliano gets the story from HAROLD AND MAUDE producer Charles Mulvehill — one of the few living members of the film's creative team — and an endearing cast of local characters who, back in 1972, found themselves part of a one-in-a-million phenomenon."]

Russell, Nicholas. "An American Werewolf in London." Reverse Shot (July 14, 2022) ["John Landis claims the inspiration for 1981’s An American Werewolf in London came in 1969, when, as a production assistant on Brian G. Hutton’s World War II caper Kelly’s Heroes, he witnessed a Roma ritual. “It was an elaborate gypsy funeral rite which the film’s crew witnessed from the back of a truck as they passed by,” The Telegraph recounted in a retrospective piece on the film in 2016. “The corpse was being buried feet-first, wrapped in garlic, in a deep grave right in the middle of a crossroads.” Later, the piece mentions Landis’s love of the 1941 Universal classic The Wolf Man, which, coincidentally, features a Roma caravan harboring a werewolf that goes on to infect Lon Chaney Jr.'s Larry Talbot. The similarity seems a little too involved to be true. At the very least, even if Landis’s story checks out, it is the necessity of the Roma element that, in some way, concretizes and emboldens the cinematic character of the werewolf: an ethnic outsider, perceived as a monstrous abomination. In his film, Landis trades overt exoticism of the creature’s origins for a narrative about exoticism itself."]

Schnelbach, Leah. "Want a Movie About an Eldritch Glory Hole of Surprising Depth? Try Glorious." Tor (August 24, 2022) ["Mostly I’m glad that Glorious exists. The last few years have seen amazing additions to the horror canon, and the fact that a small movie can be unapologetically gross and splatter-y, but also make a big thematic swing, and mostly work, and find large-scale distribution, makes me very, very happy. Join me in the rest stop bathroom for a non-spoiler review, won’t you?"]

The Worst Person in the World (Norway: Joachim Trier, 2021) [Ongoing Archive for the film: "Chronicles four years in the life of Julie, a young woman who navigates the troubled waters of her love life and struggles to find her career path, leading her to take a realistic look at who she really is."]

ENG 102 Resources: August 29, 2022

Benton, Michael and Michael Marchman. "So long—it’s been good to know ya: Remembering Howard Zinn." North of Center (February 13, 2010) ["Zinn, as much as anyone in our lives, revolutionized how we understand our history, ourselves, and, our roles as educators. “In a world where justice is maldistributed,” he wrote, “there is no such thing as a neutral or representative recapitulation of the facts.” We agree. There is tremendous injustice in the world and as educators we feel a deep responsibility to our students, our community, and ultimately to ourselves, to acknowledge these injustices, to seek explanations for them, and to challenge them. Zinn provided a model for us, urging us to encourage our students to be active participants in democracy rather than passive spectators. And he showed us how to do it." Howard Zinn is the author of the landmark A People's History of the United States and many other books/articles.]

Eisen, Lauren-Brooke. Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Colombia University Press, 2017. ["When the tough-on-crime politics of the 1980s overcrowded state prisons, private companies saw potential profit in building and operating correctional facilities. Today more than a hundred thousand of the 1.5 million incarcerated Americans are held in private prisons in twenty-nine states and federal corrections. Private prisons are criticized for making money off mass incarceration—to the tune of $5 billion in annual revenue. Based on Lauren-Brooke Eisen’s work as a prosecutor, journalist, and attorney at policy think tanks, Inside Private Prisons blends investigative reportage and quantitative and historical research to analyze privatized corrections in America. From divestment campaigns to boardrooms to private immigration-detention centers across the Southwest, Eisen examines private prisons through the eyes of inmates, their families, correctional staff, policymakers, activists, Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees, undocumented immigrants, and the executives of America’s largest private prison corporations. Private prisons have become ground zero in the anti-mass-incarceration movement. Universities have divested from these companies, political candidates hesitate to accept their campaign donations, and the Department of Justice tried to phase out its contracts with them. On the other side, impoverished rural towns often try to lure the for-profit prison industry to build facilities and create new jobs. Neither an endorsement or a demonization, Inside Private Prisons details the complicated and perverse incentives rooted in the industry, from mandatory bed occupancy to vested interests in mass incarceration. If private prisons are here to stay, how can we fix them? This book is a blueprint for policymakers to reform practices and for concerned citizens to understand our changing carceral landscape."]

 Gardner, Caden Mark. "Polyester." Reverse Shot (August 3, 2022) ["Polyester (1981) was the first John Waters film of the eighties, and it has an unmistakably different vibe from his earlier films. Waters and his muse, Divine, had not worked together since her tour de force performance as Dawn Davenport in 1974’s Female Trouble, and with Polyester, the Waters-Divine collaboration feels less content to ride on pure shock value. Instead, they are stretching their artistry and deepening their approach to performance with a devilish wink. Polyester is on its surface a cocktail of pop culture artifacts where the cross-gender drag casting of Divine as Francine Fishpaw becomes less of a punkish transgression than an homage to the tradition of the “women’s picture” melodramas of the 1950s—with the added stunt of Odorama scent, achieved with scratch-and-sniff cards. While Polyester is an undeniable transition film for Waters, which feels informed by the changing standards of Hollywood and the world around him, it’s also very much the work of a prankster."]

Gould, Steve, et al. "The Elgin and El Topo plunge NYC into Midnite Madness."  MUBI Podcast (July 7, 2022) ["In 1970, a scruffy repertory theater — led by the visionary Ben Barenholtz — quietly placed a print ad in the Village Voice, advertising midnight screenings of a Spanish-language western they claimed was "too heavy to be shown any other way." The movie was Alejandro Jodorowsky's EL TOPO, and it'd kick off the "Midnite Movie" craze that changed moviegoing. Hear the history of the Elgin Theater and its legendary, weed-soaked screenings of EL TOPO, featuring commentary from ex-Voice critic J Hoberman, Amy Nicholson of the podcast "Unspooled," ex-Elgin programmers Chuck Zlatkin and Steve Gould...and Jodorowsky himself."]

Herzog, Katie. "The Pride Generation." Conversations with Coleman (July 17, 2022) ["In this episode, we talk about Katie's upbringing as a lesbian in a less than accepting environment. We also discuss the rapid rise in the salience of trans issues in the past couple of years, the element of social contagion, and the recent rise of Gen Z girls with gender dysphoria. We talk about the mission creep of gay rights organizations and the increasing salience of drag queens in the culture as well as the backlash against them. We discuss the concept of being non-binary and the difference between male and female sexuality. We also talk about pedophilia and so-called virtuous pedophiles. We discuss puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and gender reassignment surgery. Katie also gives advice to parents with gender dysphoric children. We go on to talk about trans women in sports and the so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill and much more."]

Kumar, Bhavik and Mini Timmaraju. "Trigger Laws Make Abortion Off Limits for Millions; Patients Face 'Intolerable' Risk & Uncertainty." Democracy Now (August 26, 2022) ["Millions of pregnant people in the United States have now lost access to abortion in their state since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Anti-abortion “trigger laws” have gone into effect in numerous states across the country, including Texas, where it became a felony to perform an abortion starting Thursday,​​ punishable by up to life in prison. We speak to Dr. Bhavik Kumar, a Texas-based abortion provider, and Mini Timmaraju, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, about how doctors are navigating the legal environment after the end of Roe v. Wade. “What I’ve seen over the last seven years of providing abortion care in Texas is that politics has found its way into my exam room, into my health center. It’s soaked its way into everything I do as a healthcare provider,” says Kumar, who adds that conservative politicians have attacked both abortion and trans healthcare in similar ways. Meanwhile, Timmaraju says even anti-abortion laws that allow abortion under extreme circumstances undercut bodily autonomy by leaving life in the hands of a panel of judges or hospital staff. “It’s an absolutely intolerable way to manage reproductive healthcare in this country,”"]

Russell, Nicholas. "An American Werewolf in London." Reverse Shot (July 14, 2022) ["John Landis claims the inspiration for 1981’s An American Werewolf in London came in 1969, when, as a production assistant on Brian G. Hutton’s World War II caper Kelly’s Heroes, he witnessed a Roma ritual. “It was an elaborate gypsy funeral rite which the film’s crew witnessed from the back of a truck as they passed by,” The Telegraph recounted in a retrospective piece on the film in 2016. “The corpse was being buried feet-first, wrapped in garlic, in a deep grave right in the middle of a crossroads.” Later, the piece mentions Landis’s love of the 1941 Universal classic The Wolf Man, which, coincidentally, features a Roma caravan harboring a werewolf that goes on to infect Lon Chaney Jr.'s Larry Talbot. The similarity seems a little too involved to be true. At the very least, even if Landis’s story checks out, it is the necessity of the Roma element that, in some way, concretizes and emboldens the cinematic character of the werewolf: an ethnic outsider, perceived as a monstrous abomination. In his film, Landis trades overt exoticism of the creature’s origins for a narrative about exoticism itself."]

Ryan, Chris. "Civilized to Death." Dosed #16 (August 22, 2022) [Chris Ryan is the co-author of Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What it Means for Modern Relationships. His latest book is Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress: "Most of us have instinctive evidence the world is ending--balmy December days, face-to-face conversation replaced with heads-to-screens zomboidism, a world at constant war, a political system in disarray. We hear some myths and lies so frequently that they feel like truths: Civilization is humankind's greatest accomplishment. Progress is undeniable. Count your blessings. You're lucky to be alive here and now. Well, maybe we are and maybe we aren't. Civilized to Death counters the idea that progress is inherently good, arguing that the "progress" defining our age is analogous to an advancing disease. Prehistoric life, of course, was not without serious dangers and disadvantages. Many babies died in infancy. A broken bone, infected wound, snakebite, or difficult pregnancy could be life-threatening. But ultimately, Christopher Ryan questions, were these pre-civilized dangers more murderous than modern scourges, such as car accidents, cancers, cardiovascular disease, and a technologically prolonged dying process? Civilized to Death "will make you see our so-called progress in a whole new light" (Book Riot) and adds to the timely conversation that "the way we have been living is no longer sustainable, at least as long as we want to the earth to outlive us" (Psychology Today). Ryan makes the claim that we should start looking backwards to find our way into a better future."]

Sale, Anna, et al. "No Call Goes Unanswered: A Lifeline in Wyoming." Death, Sex, and Money (July 13, 2022) ["As the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline becomes a 3-digit number, 988, I visit a call center in Wyoming, which had the highest suicide rate per capita in the US in 2020. If you or someone you love is at risk of harming themselves, or needs some help with mental health, call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 800-273-8255. After July 16, you can just dial ‘988.’"]

West, Steven. "Bruno Latour - We Have Never Been Modern." Philosophize This! #169 (August 20, 2022) [Bruno Latour's book We Have Never Been Modern: "With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith. What does it mean to be modern? What difference does the scientific method make? The difference, Latour explains, is in our careful distinctions between nature and society, between human and thing, distinctions that our benighted ancestors, in their world of alchemy, astrology, and phrenology, never made. But alongside this purifying practice that defines modernity, there exists another seemingly contrary one: the construction of systems that mix politics, science, technology, and nature. The ozone debate is such a hybrid, in Latour’s analysis, as are global warming, deforestation, even the idea of black holes. As these hybrids proliferate, the prospect of keeping nature and culture in their separate mental chambers becomes overwhelming—and rather than try, Latour suggests, we should rethink our distinctions, rethink the definition and constitution of modernity itself. His book offers a new explanation of science that finally recognizes the connections between nature and culture—and so, between our culture and others, past and present. Nothing short of a reworking of our mental landscape. We Have Never Been Modern blurs the boundaries among science, the humanities, and the social sciences to enhance understanding on all sides. A summation of the work of one of the most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and replacing the rest with a broader, fairer, and finer sense of possibility."]

Blindspotting (USA: Carlos López Estrada, 2018)

Blindspotting (USA: Carlos López Estrada, 2018: 95 mins)

Eggert, Brian. "Blindspotting." Deep Focus Review (August 7, 2018)

Enzo and Eve. "Wakanda Deferred." Hammer & Camera #16 (July 12, 2019) ["Enzo and Eve of the Marxist "propaganda circle" Unity & Struggle to discuss their article, "Black on Both Sides: Grappling with BLM in Movies", and to review the past year of Black cinema. Among the films discussed are Black Panther, Blackkklansman, Sorry to Bother You, Blindspotting, and Us."]

Henderson, Odie. "Blindspotting (2018)." Roger Ebert (July 20, 2018)

King, Graham. "Blindspotting and Seeing Both Sides of the Picture." Difference, Power, and Discrimination in Film and Media: Student Essays. ed. Stephen Rust. (Open Publication: 2018)

Lazy Dog Films. "Blindspotting (2018): Identity Politics In A Gentrifying Oakland." (Posted on Youtube: October 18, 2020) ["Blindspotting, released in 2018, follows Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal as two men navigating through a gentrifying Oakland. With Collin (Diggs) just days away from his probation, he witnesses a police shooting, sending him down a path where he questions his identity. Written over ten years, Diggs and Casal tackle complex issues from race to identity with ease. Blindspotting’s core theme is explored through a black and white man's eyes as their environment forces them to put their identity in perspective. Blindspotting, in its 90-minute runtime, manages to present issues like racism, police brutality, and gentrification while examining toxic masculinity and identity without feeling bloated."]

Reyes, Steven. "Blindspotting and the Perception of Blackness." (Posted on Youtube: July 3, 2020) 

Film Studies Resources: August 25, 2022

 An analysis of the metaphorical meanings of multiverse stories, and what they reflect about the burdens of modern existence.

Ethan Hawke has been talking to IndieWire’s Eric Kohn and Peter Rinaldi at Filmmaker about—among many other things—his six-part documentary series The Last Movie Stars. As David Fear writes in Rolling Stone, the careers of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward span “many eras and way stations of twentieth-century cultural history: the Actor’s Studio generation, the Method-mad 1950s, the rise of TV, the theatrical revolution happening on Broadway, the socially conscious Sixties, the anything-goes New Hollywood Seventies.” But Hawke’s series “also doubles as a portrait of the agony and ecstasy of matrimony—an affectionate yet psychologically fraught, zero-prisoners-taken look at a union that had been lionized as a fairy-tale come true and was anything but.” - David Hudson (July 22, 2022)

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Eggert, Brian. "The Gray Man." Deep Focus Review (July 14, 2022) ["A good action movie is difficult to find. Although dozens are released every year, few have more to offer than some impressive stunts, fast-paced fight choreography, or eye-popping sequences of destruction. They supply the requisite thrills, but once the credits roll, they often fade from memory. The problem isn’t the action; it’s the banal characters. Rarely do action movies give us compelling heroes or villains who make a lasting impression. The Fast and Furious series may provide one over-the-top vehicular extravaganza after another, but its dopey family and one-note baddies couldn’t be less engaging. Sure, the John Wick movies started with a compelling revenge story, but the character’s unwavering composure doesn’t have many dimensions. Invulnerable heroes from the killing machine John Rambo to the infallible Dominic Toretto obliterate their opponents and come away barely dented. By contrast, consider characters such as John McClane in the original Die Hard (1988) or Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) that elevate all the trappings of an entertaining actioner, lending humanity and vulnerability to their heroes. Enduring action movies give their characters a sense of humor or depth of feeling beyond point and shoot. "]

Hudson, David. "Lessons From Bob Rafelson." Current (July 28, 2022) ["The first shot is to grab the audience and the last shot is to redeem yourself,” writer, director, and producer Bob Rafelson told the Los Angeles Times’s Kristine McKenna in 1986. Rafelson, who died last week at the age of eighty-nine, often didn’t know what that redemption would look like until a day or two before he shot the final scenes of his films. Two of his best, Five Easy Pieces (1970) and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)—together, they “stand as a kind of bitter eulogy diptych said over the shallow grave of American Dreamism,” writes Michael Atkinson for Sight and Sound—were shot in sequence and strayed from the screenplay long before the final crack of the clapboard."]

Jones, Eileen. "Bodies Bodies Bodies Is a Bad Class Satire and a Boring Film." Jacobin (August 18, 2022) ["Like so many horror films attempting to be subversive, Bodies Bodies Bodies tries to satirize the upper class. But all it delivers are tired, lazy tropes about Gen Z."]

Loayza, Beatrice. "David Cronenberg’s Tableaux of Pain and Pleasure." The Nation (July 21, 2022) ["The body, that object of eternal obsession, perpetually surveilled and self-policed, is a site of great danger. Errant bodies, then, are as much a threat to the status quo, testing our willingness to embrace the monstrous. In Crimes of the Future, prior to a scene in which a live surgery is staged as a public performance, the phrase “Body is reality” flashes on a small television set: It is through the body, Cronenberg argues, that we experience and make sense of our lives; through the body that ideas, desires, and fears find palpable expression. If his films promiscuously stake out the possibilities of the future and the novel ways in which we might inhabit it, then the body is a testing ground where the ineffable and the unthinkable might be grasped for the first time."]

Mikulec, Sven. "Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers: A Force to Be Reckoned With." Cinephilia and Beyond (July 17, 2022) ["A squad of six British soldiers head into the Scottish Highlands to perform a routine training exercise against a Special Air Services unit, but upon reaching their destination, they find the mauled remains of their SAS colleagues. The single survivor is either unable or unwilling to clearly explain what the hell happened, so the group retreat to a lonely, seemingly abandoned house in the company of Megan, a zoologist who they happen to stumble across along the way. As the night quickly approaches, they realize nothing is like it seems and the danger they’re facing is much darker than they could have possibly anticipated. Repeatedly attacked by werewolves, killed off one by one by a horrifying force far more superior than anything they had encountered before, the unit tries to stand their ground and survive through the night. Morning might indeed bring salvation, but until the sun rises they are stranded in the middle of enemy territory, forced to fight on unequal terms."]

O., Kenny. "Breaking conventions? Political ideology of films with explicit sex." Open Screens 5.1 (2022) ["Explicit sex in films on general release remains rare, even if it has significantly increased since the late 1990s. Commentary on explicit arthouse films has tended to focus on those also containing sexual violence, and debates have often revolved around whether explicit imagery constitutes art or pornography. Relatively little attention has been paid to explicit romantic films, and to what leads some of them to gain notable international visibility, while others languish in obscurity. This article examines 9 Songs and Love, two of the most discussed and financially successful arthouse films with a romantic storyline that also devote significant screen time to explicit images of sex. It argues that their success can be attributed in part to their conservative sexual and gender politics, and their ideological proximity to conventional heterosexual pornography. They are contrasted with The Story of Richard O. and Daughters of Fire, two explicit films that struggled to gain critical attention or financial reward. These latter films are shown to have fundamentally different ideological foundations, including radical ideas about sex and gender, and an embrace of the artistic value of the pornographic. Such an ideological gap can be considered a contributory factor in the divergent destinies of these explicit romantic films."]

Subissati, Andrea and Alexandra West. "Class Act: Society (1989)." The Faculty of Horror #109 (Jule 30, 2022) ["The elite are literally a different breed in Brian Yuzna’s cult classic film about the perils of popularity and privilege. In this episode, Andrea and Alex dive into the mystique that surrounds the wealthy and explore why they need the rest of us to survive."]

Tafoya, Scout. "The Unloved, Part 104: Ambulance." Roger Ebert (August 1, 2022) ["Somehow, it happened. Michael Bay earned a place in the Unloved. He made his best movie and no one liked it and it made no money. Well sir, you're welcome around these parts anytime. Enjoy this look at our premiere vulgarian's attempt to go "straight," and shake your head with me in horror at the culture that said no to a film as electrifying as Ambulance."]

ENG 102 Resources: August 17, 2022

Berkshire, Jennifer, et al. "Reading the Room." On the Media (August 12, 2022) ["An old threat has returned to classrooms across the country — and it’s made of pages and ink. On this week’s On the Media, hear what it means to ban a book, and who has the right to choose what kids learn. Plus, meet the student who took his school board all the way to the Supreme Court in the 80s. 1. Kelly Jensen, editor for Book Riot who writes a weekly update on “book censorship news,” on what it means to ban a book. 2. Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, hosts of the education podcast “Have You Heard,” on the rights—both real and fictional—of parents to shape what their kids learn. 3. OTM reporter Micah Loewinger takes a deep dive into our nation's history of taking books off shelves, with the 1982 Supreme Court decision in Island Trees School District v Pico. Featuring: Steven Pico, then student and plaintiff in the case and Arthur Eisenberg, New York Civil Liberties lawyer, who represented him."]

Coffee, John C. "How Corporations Get Away With Crime." Capitalisn't (July 22, 2022) ["When it comes to corporate rulebreaking, data from 2002 to 2016 reveals that the US government arranged more than 400 "deferred protection agreements" as a means of deterrence. Under these, a company acknowledges what it did was wrong, pays a fine, promises not to misbehave for a period of time -- and thus is largely let off the hook. Columbia Law School Professor and author of "Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Crisis of Underenforcement", John C. Coffee, says these have done little to deter future wrongdoing. Coffee joins Luigi and Bethany, both of whom have also extensively researched and exposed corporate wrongdoing, to discuss how to reform aspects of enforcement, such as self-reporting mechanisms, internal investigations, independent external auditors, whistleblowers, and even shame and humiliation."]

Eggert, Brian. "The Gray Man." Deep Focus Review (July 14, 2022) ["A good action movie is difficult to find. Although dozens are released every year, few have more to offer than some impressive stunts, fast-paced fight choreography, or eye-popping sequences of destruction. They supply the requisite thrills, but once the credits roll, they often fade from memory. The problem isn’t the action; it’s the banal characters. Rarely do action movies give us compelling heroes or villains who make a lasting impression. The Fast and Furious series may provide one over-the-top vehicular extravaganza after another, but its dopey family and one-note baddies couldn’t be less engaging. Sure, the John Wick movies started with a compelling revenge story, but the character’s unwavering composure doesn’t have many dimensions. Invulnerable heroes from the killing machine John Rambo to the infallible Dominic Toretto obliterate their opponents and come away barely dented. By contrast, consider characters such as John McClane in the original Die Hard (1988) or Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) that elevate all the trappings of an entertaining actioner, lending humanity and vulnerability to their heroes. Enduring action movies give their characters a sense of humor or depth of feeling beyond point and shoot. "]

Forsthoefel, Andrew, et al. "Walden & the Natural World of Transcendentalism." Open Source (July 21, 2022) ["It’s one of many odd points to notice about Thoreau at his 200th birthday: that the non-stop writer was equally a man of action, a scientist and a high-flying poet whose imagination saw that “the bluebird carries the sky on his back;” and still a workman with callused hands, at home in the wild, a walker four hours a day on average, in no particular direction. His transcendentalism was all about the blossoming intersection of nature-study and introspection, fact and idea, detail and ideals. In his pine grove, on his river, at his pond, the outdoor Thoreau."]

Hannah-Jones, Nikole. "The Country We Have." Throughline (July 28, 2022) ["Is history always political? Who gets to decide? What happens when you challenge common narratives? In this episode, Throughline's Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei explore these questions with Nikole Hannah-Jones, an investigative journalist at the New York Times and the creator of the 1619 Project. Since the project launched in 2019, a majority of U.S. states have tried to ban teaching about race, racism or the 1619 Project specifically. And there has been a significant rise in the number of book challenges and bans. Yet many classrooms across the country have embraced the curriculum and resources that have spun out of the original project. It has pushed people on both sides of the political spectrum to ask how our framing of the past affects the present, to interrogate what we remember and don't remember as a society — and whether we need a shared historical narrative to move forward." If you would like to read more on the topic, here's two books: The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, by Nikole Hannah-Jones and Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, by Lerone Bennett, Jr.]

Hudson, David. "Lessons From Bob Rafelson." Current (July 28, 2022) ["The first shot is to grab the audience and the last shot is to redeem yourself,” writer, director, and producer Bob Rafelson told the Los Angeles Times’s Kristine McKenna in 1986. Rafelson, who died last week at the age of eighty-nine, often didn’t know what that redemption would look like until a day or two before he shot the final scenes of his films. Two of his best, Five Easy Pieces (1970) and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)—together, they “stand as a kind of bitter eulogy diptych said over the shallow grave of American Dreamism,” writes Michael Atkinson for Sight and Sound—were shot in sequence and strayed from the screenplay long before the final crack of the clapboard."]

Hughes, Peter. "A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues (Aurum Press 2021)." New Books in History (July 4, 2022) ["The ongoing debate surrounding who gets to determine the subjects of public commemoration, particularly in the form of statues, has become more heated over the past few years. In his timely book, A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues (Aurum Press, 2021), Peter Hughes examines the long history of statues being used to articulate the values of rulers, governments, organizations, and average citizens. Of course, that also means statues are often targets of people who want to challenge those values. In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss whether the motivation for public commemorations, as well as the opposition to them, can be found first and foremost in a society’s emotional relationship to the person (or god, for that matter) being commemorated, as is suggested in the book’s title; or, if the timeless debate over who does and doesn’t get commemorated is really about power."]

Keegin, Joseph M. "What is Punk?" What is X? (August 15, 2022) ["The dog days of late summer call for a break from discussions of concepts like Time, War, and Virtue and a turn to a subject that, though significant, probably lacks its own Platonic form: Punk. Joining Justin for this episode of “What Is X?” is our own Joey Keegin—a contributing editor at The Point and a veteran of punk scenes of the 1990s and 2000s. Once a hitchhiker and freight train hopper and DIY participant, Joey is estranged from punk now yet still inspired by it. Why? To ask what punk is, Joey points out, is to ask more than simply what punk music is—because it’s “a promise,” he says, “of a way of living, a promise of a way of being together with other people.” But when it’s just as punk to be straight-edge as it is to be addicted to heroin, how do you sort the good from the bad? Can there even still be punk after the death of rock? Together, Justin and Joey attempt to sort out these distinctions. Along the way, they discuss whether it’s possible for a punk to age gracefully, what punk understands about modernity that hippies didn’t, and why Socrates was not a punk—but was maybe a hardcore kid."]

Stone, Asa B. and Eli Revelle Yano Wilson. Beer and Society: How We Make Beer and Beer Makes Us. Lexington Books, 2022. ["Beer and Society: How We Make Beer and Beer Makes Us takes readers on a lively journey through the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of the modern beer world. This book illustrates that beer is far more than a beverage. As a finely-crafted cultural product, beer can be a part of our identity, a source of pleasure and camaraderie, an object of connoisseurship, and a livelihood for those who are behind the beer itself. Drawing on leading sociological and psychological perspectives, the authors argue that our enduring relationship with beer reflects the very roots of our society, including its collective values and norms, power structures, and persistent inequities based on race, gender, sexuality, and social class. Beer and Society explores beer as an embodiment of who we are and a force to energize social change."]

Tafoya, Scout. "The Unloved, Part 104: Ambulance." Roger Ebert (August 1, 2022) ["Somehow, it happened. Michael Bay earned a place in the Unloved. He made his best movie and no one liked it and it made no money. Well sir, you're welcome around these parts anytime. Enjoy this look at our premiere vulgarian's attempt to go "straight," and shake your head with me in horror at the culture that said no to a film as electrifying as Ambulance."]

ENG 281: Fall 2022 Responses

Exemplary Responses:

Cayenne Rose: Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Cayenne Rose: The Garden of Eden

Alyssa Greene: The Tree of Life - A Boy Struggles with Life, and Learns From It

Tayler Thompson: Nomadland - The Journey

Tayler Thompson: Uncut Gems - Pure Chaos

Lythean Lim: The Green Knight

Joshua Verax - Parasite: Leaches on Society

Cayenne Rose: Uncut Gems

Alyssa Greene: Parasite

Miguel Rodea - Midsommar: A Nightmare Relationship

Miguel Rodea - Sorry to Bother You: Code Switching in America

Matthew Lewis - Midsommar: A Bad Trip

Lythean Lim: Midsommar Crisis

Lythean Lim - Sorry to Bother You: The Ultimate Twist

Logan Christian: The Cycle of Life and Death in Midsommar

Logan Christian: Sorry to Bother You

Logan Christian: Blackkklansman

Joshua Verax - Blackkklansman: The Hate That Exists

Candace Wethington - Sorry to Bother You, and Your Views on Capitalism

Candace Wethington - Blackkklansman: Connecting the Past with the Present

Tayler Thompson - Blackkklansman: Justice

Miguel Rodea - Cam: A Lackluster Ending to a Good Movie

Miguel Rodea - Blindspotting: Identity Crisis

Matthew Lewis: (Cam) Way too real

Logan Bryant: Cam

Candace Wethington: Cam - Alice in Internetland

Brady Barnes: Annihilation - What would you do when faced with death?

Tayler Thompson: Blindspotting - The Full Picture

Tayler Thompson: Annihilation - The Shimmer

Miguel Rodea: Annihilation - A GOOD Example of how to use CGI for a movie.

Cayenne Rose: The Witch

Tayler Thompson: The Witch

Logan Christian: The Witch

Logan Bryant: The Witch

Connor Haun: The Witch

Candace Wethington: The Witch

-------------------------------------------

Class Profiles:

S

Aidan Thomas 0 - E

Alyssa Greene 10 (The Witch; Annihilation; Blindspotting; Cam; Blackkklansman; Sorry to Bother You; Midsommar; Parasite; Portrait of a Lady on Fire; Uncut Gems) - A

Candace Wethington 10 (The Witch; Annihilation; Blindspotting; Cam; Blackkklansman; Sorry to Bother You; Midsommar; Parasite; Dear White People; Titane) - A

Cayenne Rose 10 (The Witch; Annihilation; Sorry to Bother You; Parasite; Uncut Gems; Don't Look Up; Judas and the Black Messiah; Portrait of a Lady on Fire; Titane; Pig) - A

Conner Haun 9 (The Witch; Blindspotting; Cam; Blackkklansman; Sorry to Bother You; Midsommar; Parasite; Portrait of a Lady on Fire; Uncut Gems) - A

Daniel Bowling 0 - E

Joshua Verax 10 (Annihilation; Blindspotting; Cam; Blackkklansman; Sorry To Bother You; Midsommar; Parasite; Portrait of a Lady on Fire; Uncut Gems; Promising Young Woman) - A 

Logan Bryant 10 (The Witch; Annihilation; Blindspotting; Cam; Blackkklansman; Sorry to Bother You; Midsommar; The Evening Hour; Parasite; Gaia) - A

Logan Christian 10 (The Witch; Annihilation; Blindspotting; Blackkklansman; Sorry to Bother You; Midsommar; Parasite; Prey; Beasts Clawing at Straws) - A

Lythean Lim 10 (The Witch; Annihilation; Cam; Blackkklansman; Sorry to Bother You; Midsommar; Parasite; Portrait of a Lady on Fire; Uncut Gems; Nomadland) - A

Matthew Lewis 9 (The Witch; Annihilation; Blindspotting; Cam; Blackkklansman; Sorry to Bother You; Midsommar; Parasite; Uncut Gems) A (Final Grade C)

Miguel Rodea 10 (The Witch; Annihilation; Blindspotting; Cam; Sorry to Bother You; Midsommar: Parasite; Portrait of a Lady on Fire; Uncut Gems; Nomadland) - A

Samantha Mangan 10 (The Witch; Annhilation; Blindspotting; Cam; Blackkklansman; Sorry to Bother You; Midsommar; Parasite; Don't Look Up; Pig) - A

(Morgan) Tayler Thompson 10 (The Witch; Annihilation; Blindspotting; Cam; Blackkklansman; Sorry to Bother You; Midsommar; Parasite; Portrait of a Lady on Fire; Uncut Gems) - A 

Professor: Michael Benton 

Final Project Responses: 

Alyssa Greene: [Track: Epic Films] 5 (Australia; The Queen; The Tree of Life; Memoirs of a Geisha; The Last Samurai) - A

Candace Wethington: [Track: Bluegrass Film Society] 5 (Saint Maud; The Evening Hour; Gaia; Time; Prey) - A

Cayenne Rose: [Track: Romance Films] 4 (The Garden of Eden; Dear White People; Lady and the Tramp; Pride and Prejudice) - B

Connor Haun: [Track: War Films] 5 (All Quiet on the Western Front; Hacksaw Ridge; Lone Survivor; Fury; American Sniper] - A

Daniel Bowling: [Track: Bluegrass Film Society]

Joshua Verax: [Track: Bluegrass Film Society] 5 (Kajillionaire; Gaia; Time; Prey; Dear White People) - A

Logan Bryant [Track: Bluegrass Film Society] 5 (The Worst Person in the World; Great Freedom; Saint Maud; I Am Not a Witch; Kajillionaire) - A

Logan Christian [Track: Bluegrass Film Society] 5 (The Worst Person in the World; Saint Maud; I Am Not a Witch; Kajillionaire; Gaia) - A

Lythean Lim: [Track: A24 Films] 5 (Promising Young Woman; The Green Knight; Nope; The Lighthouse; Judas and the Black Messiah) - A

Matthew Lewis: [Track: Reason vs Faith] 0 - E

Miguel Rodea: [Track: Christopher Nolan] 5 - Insterstellar; The Dark Knight; The Dark Knight Rises; Batman Begins; Inception - A

Samantha Mangan: [Track: Tom Hanks] 5 (Saving Private Ryan; Road to Perdition; A League of their Own; The Polar Express; The DaVinci Code) - A

Tayler Thompson: [Track: Extra regular responses] 3 (Nomadland; Promising Young Woman; Don't Look Up; Titane; Judas and the Black Messiah) - A

Verification of Read/Understand the Syllabus:
Aiden Thomas
Alyssa Green
Brady Barnes
Candace Wethington
Chloe Dowler
Connor Haun
Daniel Bowling
Joshua Verax
Logan Bryant
Logan Christian
Lythean Lim
Matt Lewis
Miguel Rodea
Samantha Mangan
Tayler Thompson

ENG 102 Resources: August 12, 2022

Benson, Jared and Nick Lee. "Are Labor Strikes Illegal in the United States? The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947." Revolution and Ideology (August 12, 2022) ["We discuss a short history of labor strikes in the United States and how the federal government dramatically reduced the power of labor with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947."]

Delcomyn, Fred and James L. Ellis. "A Backyard Prairie: The Hidden Beauty of Tallgrass and Wildflowers (Southern Illinois University Press, 2021)." New Books in Architecture (August 4, 2022) ["In 2003 Fred Delcomyn imagined his backyard of two and a half acres, farmed for corn and soybeans for generations, restored to tallgrass prairie. Over the next seventeen years, Delcomyn, with help from his friend James L. Ellis scored, seeded, monitored, reseeded, and burned these acres into prairie. In A Backyard Prairie: The Hidden Beauty of Tallgrass and Wildflowers (Southern Illinois UP, 2021), they document their journey and reveal the incredible potential of a backyard to travel back to a time before the wild prairie was put into plow rows. It has been said, “Anyone can love the mountains, but it takes a soul to love the prairie.” This book shows us how. The first book to celebrate a smaller, more private restoration, A Backyard Prairie offers a vivid portrait of what makes a prairie. Delcomyn and Ellis describe selecting and planting seeds, recount the management of a prescribed fire, and capture the prairie’s seasonal parades of colorful flowers in concert with an ever-growing variety of animals, from the minute eastern tailed-blue butterfly to the imperious red-winged blackbird and the reclusive coyote.
This book offers a unique account of their work and their discovery of a real backyard, an inviting island of grass and flowers uncovered and revealed. We often travel miles and miles to find nature larger than ourselves. In this rich account of small prairie restoration, Delcomyn and Ellis encourage the revival of original prairie in our backyards and the patient, beauty-seeking soul sleeping within ourselves."]

Durgnaut, Raymond. A Long Hard Look at Psycho. British Film Institute, 2010. ["Upon its release in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho divided critical opinion, with several leading film critics condemning Hitchcock's apparent encouragement of the audience's identification with the gruesome murder that lies at the heart of the film. Such antipathy did little to harm Psycho's box-office returns, and it would go on to be acknowledged as one of the greatest film thrillers, with scenes and characters that are among the most iconic in all cinema. In his illuminating study of Psycho, Raymond Durgnat provides a minute analysis of its unfolding narrative, enabling us to consider what happens to the viewer as he or she watches the film, and to think afresh about questions of spectatorship, Hollywood narrative codes, psycho-analysis, editing and shot composition. In his introduction to the new edition, Henry K. Miller presents A Long Hard Look at 'Psycho' as the culmination of Durgnat's decades-long campaign to correct what he called film studies' 'Grand Error'. In the course of expounding Durgnat's root-and-branch challenge to our inherited shibboleths about Hollywood cinema in general and Hitchcock in particular, Miller also describes the eclectic intellectual tradition to which Durgnat claimed allegiance. This band of amis inconnus, among them William Empson, Edgar Morin and Manny Farber, had at its head Durgnat's mentor Thorold Dickinson. The book's story begins in the early 1960s, when Dickinson made the long hard look the basis of his pioneering film course at the Slade School of Fine Art, and Psycho became one of its first objects."]

Elkin, Rosetta S. "Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation (University of Minnesota Press, 2022)." New Books in Geography (July 20, 2022) ["In Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation (U Minnesota Press, 2022), Rosetta S. Elkin explores the procedures of afforestation, the large-scale planting of trees in otherwise treeless environments, including grasslands, prairies, and drylands. Elkin reveals that planting a tree can either be one of the ultimate offerings to thriving on this planet, or one of the most extreme perversions of human agency over it. Using three supracontinental case studies--scientific forestry in the American prairies, colonial control in Africa's Sahelian grasslands, and Chinese efforts to control and administer territory--Elkin explores the political implications of plant life as a tool of environmentalism. By exposing the human tendency to fix or solve environmental matters by exploiting other organisms, this work exposes the relationship between human and plant life, revealing that afforestation is not an ecological act: rather, it is deliberately political and distressingly social. Plant Life ultimately reveals that afforestation cannot offset deforestation, an important distinction that sheds light on current environmental trends that suggest we can plant our way out of climate change. By radicalizing what conservation protects and by framing plants in their total aliveness, Elkin shows that there are many kinds of life--not just our own--to consider when advancing environmental policy."]

Harman, Graham. "Architecture and Objects." University of Minnesota Press (July 27, 2022) ["Exploring new concepts of the relationship between form and function while thinking through object-oriented ontology (OOO), Graham Harman (Architecture and Objects) deepens the exchange between architecture and philosophy, providing a new roadmap to OOO’s influence on the language and practice of contemporary architecture."]

Like Stories of Old. "Multiverses, Nihilism, and How it Feels to be Alive Right Now." (Posted on Youtube: July 31, 2022) ["An analysis of the metaphorical meanings of multiverse stories, and what they reflect about the burdens of modern existence."]

MacLeod, Alan. "Most of the “fact-checking” organizations Facebook uses in Ukraine are directly funded by Washington." Monthly Review (August 8, 2022)

Moore, Lisa Jean. "Our Transgenic Future: Spider Goats, Genetic Modification, and the Will to Change Nature (New York University Press, 2022)." New Books in Medicine (July 20, 2022) ["The process of manipulating the genetic material of one animal to include the DNA of another creates a new transgenic organism. Several animals, notably goats, mice, sheep, and cattle are now genetically modified in this way. In Our Transgenic Future: Spider Goats, Genetic Modification, and the Will to Change Nature (NYU Press, 2022), Lisa Jean Moore wonders what such scientific advances portend. Will the natural world become so modified that it ceases to exist? After turning species into hybrids, can we ever get back to the original, or are they forever lost? Does genetic manipulation make better lives possible, and if so, for whom? Moore centers the story on goats that have been engineered by the US military and civilian scientists using the DNA of spiders. The goat’s milk contains a spider-silk protein fiber; it can be spun into ultra-strong fabric that can be used to manufacture lightweight military body armor. Researchers also hope the transgenically produced spider silk will revolutionize medicine with biocompatible medical inserts such as prosthetics and bandages. Based on in-depth research with spiders in Florida and transgenic goats in Utah, Our Transgenic Future focuses on how these spider goats came into existence, the researchers who maintain them, the funders who have made their lives possible, and how they fit into the larger science of transgenics and synthetics. This book is a fascinating story about the possibilities of science and the likely futures that may come."]

Nguyen, Mai and Pauline Greenhill. "Uncanny sounds and the politics of wonder in Christian Petzold’s Undine." NECSUS (Spring 2022) ["In the story of Undine, a water sprite leaves her aquatic origins to marry a human and acquires a soul in the process. The narrative ends tragically when her lover betrays her and she is obliged to kill him according to the laws of the elemental spirits. Related to figures such as the sirens of Greek mythology, the Lorelei of Clemens Brentano and Heinrich Heine, Melusine in French folklore, and selkie narratives of Celtic and Norse oral traditions, the first writings on this nymph can be traced back to Swiss physician and natural philosopher Paracelsus. Popularised as a literary fairy tale in 19th century Germany by the Prussian writer Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Undine’s story has inspired numerous incarnations. For instance, it served as the source material for operas by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1812-1814) and others, a play by Jean Giraudoux (1938), and most famously Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale Den lille havfrue (‘The Little Mermaid,’ 1837). Films referencing ‘Undine’ date from the silent era and come from Austria, Canada, France, Ireland, and the US, as well as three from Germany: Rolf Thiele’s Undine 74 (1974), Eckhart Schmidt’s Undine (1992), and Christian Petzold’s Undine (2020) – our subject here. Movies based on or inspired by Andersen’s tale are of course much more common."]

Robin, Corey. "The Enigma of Clarence Thomas (Metropolitan Books, 2019)." New Books in Biography (August 4, 2022) ["Most people can tell you two things about Clarence Thomas: Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, and he almost never speaks from the bench. Here are some things they don't know: Until Thomas went to law school, he was a black nationalist. In college he memorized the speeches of Malcolm X. He believes white people are incurably racist. In The Enigma of Clarence Thomas (Metropolitan Books, 2019), Corey Robin--one of the foremost analysts of the right--delves deeply into both Thomas's biography and his jurisprudence, masterfully reading his Supreme Court opinions against the backdrop of his autobiographical and political writings and speeches. The hidden source of Thomas's conservative views, Robin argues, is a profound skepticism that racism can be overcome. Thomas is convinced that any government action on behalf of African-Americans will be tainted by this racism, and that the most African-Americans can hope for is that white people will get out of their way. There's a reason, Robin concludes, why liberals often complain that Thomas doesn't speak but seldom pay attention when he does. Were they to listen, they'd hear a racial pessimism that sounds shockingly similar to their own. Cutting across the ideological spectrum, this unacknowledged consensus about the impossibility of progress is key to understanding today's political stalemate. Corey Robin is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center."]

Film Studies Resources: August 9, 2022

Durgnaut, Raymond. A Long Hard Look at Psycho. British Film Institute, 2010. ["Upon its release in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho divided critical opinion, with several leading film critics condemning Hitchcock's apparent encouragement of the audience's identification with the gruesome murder that lies at the heart of the film. Such antipathy did little to harm Psycho's box-office returns, and it would go on to be acknowledged as one of the greatest film thrillers, with scenes and characters that are among the most iconic in all cinema. In his illuminating study of Psycho, Raymond Durgnat provides a minute analysis of its unfolding narrative, enabling us to consider what happens to the viewer as he or she watches the film, and to think afresh about questions of spectatorship, Hollywood narrative codes, psycho-analysis, editing and shot composition. In his introduction to the new edition, Henry K. Miller presents A Long Hard Look at 'Psycho' as the culmination of Durgnat's decades-long campaign to correct what he called film studies' 'Grand Error'. In the course of expounding Durgnat's root-and-branch challenge to our inherited shibboleths about Hollywood cinema in general and Hitchcock in particular, Miller also describes the eclectic intellectual tradition to which Durgnat claimed allegiance. This band of amis inconnus, among them William Empson, Edgar Morin and Manny Farber, had at its head Durgnat's mentor Thorold Dickinson. The book's story begins in the early 1960s, when Dickinson made the long hard look the basis of his pioneering film course at the Slade School of Fine Art, and Psycho became one of its first objects."]

Eggert, Brian. "Titane." Deep Focus Review (October 3, 2021) ["In the first images of Titane, the camera lingers on engine parts shot like sweaty appendages, dripping with perspiration and vibrating orgasmically with the motor’s hum. The metal shimmers with grease and droplets of oil, and its curves look almost fleshy in the way they bend and give way to the rolling shapes in the undercarriage. French director Julia Ducournau films these inhuman auto parts like erotica, exploring the connection between bodies and automobiles in ways not attempted since David Cronenberg’s controversial 1996 film, Crash, about the relationship between the little death and the death drive. The link between sexuality and cars has been there for a long while. After all, why do they call a mechanic’s workspace a body shop? Consciously or not, motorheads make these connections as well. Car magazines and calendars pair bikini-clad women with muscle cars and hot rods, coupling sex and automobiles in literal and figurative terms. Ducournau’s film considers how the male gaze creates this strange relationship of images and takes the next logical step. The result is something wildly original, brutally visceral, oddly funny and tender, and singular in its vision."]

Goh, Robbie B.H. Christopher Nolan: Filmmaker and Philosopher. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. ["Christopher Nolan is the writer and director of Hollywood blockbusters like The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, and also of arthouse films like Memento and Inception. Underlying his staggering commercial success however, is a darker sensibility that questions the veracity of human knowledge, the allure of appearance over reality and the latent disorder in contemporary society. This appreciation of the sinister owes a huge debt to philosophy and especially modern thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida. Taking a thematic approach to Nolan's oeuvre, Robbie Goh examines how the director's postmodern inclinations manifest themselves in non-linearity, causal agnosticism, the threat of social anarchy and the frequent use of the mise en abyme, while running counter to these are narratives of heroism, moral responsibility and the dignity of human choice. For Goh, Nolan is a 'reluctant postmodernist'. His films reflect the cynicism of the modern world, but with their representation of heroic moral triumphs, they also resist it."]

Like Stories of Old. "Multiverses, Nihilism, and How it Feels to be Alive Right Now." (Posted on Youtube: July 31, 2022) ["An analysis of the metaphorical meanings of multiverse stories, and what they reflect about the burdens of modern existence."]

Lowenstein, Adam. Horror Film and Otherness. Columbia University Press, 2022. ["What do horror films reveal about social difference in the everyday world? Criticism of the genre often relies on a dichotomy between monstrosity and normality, in which unearthly creatures and deranged killers are metaphors for society’s fear of the “others” that threaten the “normal.” The monstrous other might represent women, Jews, or Blacks, as well as Indigenous, queer, poor, elderly, or disabled people. The horror film’s depiction of such minorities can be sympathetic to their exclusion or complicit in their oppression, but ultimately, these images are understood to stand in for the others that the majority dreads and marginalizes. Adam Lowenstein offers a new account of horror and why it matters for understanding social otherness. He argues that horror films reveal how the category of the other is not fixed. Instead, the genre captures ongoing metamorphoses across “normal” self and “monstrous” other. This “transformative otherness” confronts viewers with the other’s experience—and challenges us to recognize that we are all vulnerable to becoming or being seen as the other. Instead of settling into comforting certainties regarding monstrosity and normality, horror exposes the ongoing struggle to acknowledge self and other as fundamentally intertwined. Horror Film and Otherness features new interpretations of landmark films by directors including Tobe Hooper, George A. Romero, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Stephanie Rothman, Jennifer Kent, Marina de Van, and Jordan Peele. Through close analysis of their engagement with different forms of otherness, this book provides new perspectives on horror’s significance for culture, politics, and art."]

Nguyen, Mai and Pauline Greenhill. "Uncanny sounds and the politics of wonder in Christian Petzold’s Undine." NECSUS (Spring 2022) ["In the story of Undine, a water sprite leaves her aquatic origins to marry a human and acquires a soul in the process. The narrative ends tragically when her lover betrays her and she is obliged to kill him according to the laws of the elemental spirits. Related to figures such as the sirens of Greek mythology, the Lorelei of Clemens Brentano and Heinrich Heine, Melusine in French folklore, and selkie narratives of Celtic and Norse oral traditions, the first writings on this nymph can be traced back to Swiss physician and natural philosopher Paracelsus. Popularised as a literary fairy tale in 19th century Germany by the Prussian writer Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Undine’s story has inspired numerous incarnations. For instance, it served as the source material for operas by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1812-1814) and others, a play by Jean Giraudoux (1938), and most famously Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale Den lille havfrue (‘The Little Mermaid,’ 1837). Films referencing ‘Undine’ date from the silent era and come from Austria, Canada, France, Ireland, and the US, as well as three from Germany: Rolf Thiele’s Undine 74 (1974), Eckhart Schmidt’s Undine (1992), and Christian Petzold’s Undine (2020) – our subject here. Movies based on or inspired by Andersen’s tale are of course much more common."]

Patell, Cyrus R.K. Lucasfilm: Filmmaking, Philosophy, and the Star Wars Universe. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. ["From A New Hope to The Rise of Skywalker and beyond, this book offers the first complete assessment and philosophical exploration of the Star Wars universe. Lucasfilm examines the ways in which these iconic films were shaped by global cultural mythologies and world cinema, as well as philosophical ideas from the fields of aesthetics and political theory, and now serve as a platform for public philosophy. Cyrus R. K. Patell also looks at how this ever-expanding universe of cultural products and enterprises became a global brand and asks: can a corporate entity be considered a “filmmaker and philosopher”? More than any other film franchise, Lucasfilm's Star Wars has become part of the global cultural imagination. The new generation of Lucasfilm artists is full of passionate fans of the Star Wars universe, who have now been given the chance to build on George Lucas's oeuvre. Within these pages, Patell explores what it means for films and their creators to become part of cultural history in this unprecedented way."]

Resina, Joan Ramon. Luchino Visconti: Filmmaker and Philosopher. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. ["Luchino Visconti (1906-1976) was one of Europe's most prestigious filmmakers, who rose to prominence as part of the Italian neo-realist movement, alongside contemporaries Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. Famous for his elegant lifestyle, as friend of Jean Renoir and Coco Chanel amongst others, his vibrant technicolour dramas are also known for their decadence and stunning display of aesthetic mastery and sensory pleasure. Looking beyond this colourful façade, however, Resina explores the philosophical implications of decadence with a particular focus on three films from the late phase in Visconti's production, Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), and Ludwig (1972). From the incestuous relationship between decadence and power to decadence as an outcome of straining toward formal perfection, Resina uncovers the unity and philosophical cohesiveness of these films that deal with different subjects and historical periods. Reading these films and their decadence in light of the time of filming and Visconti's own sense of cultural doom, Resina further demonstrates the relevance of Visconti's philosophy today and how much they still have to say to our contemporary situation."]

Sinnerbrink, Robert. Terence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. ["Many critics have approached Terrence Malick's work from a philosophical perspective, arguing that his films express philosophy through cinema. With their remarkable images of nature, poetic voiceovers, and meditative reflections, Malick's cinema certainly invites philosophical engagement. In Terrence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher, Robert Sinnerbrink takes a different approach, exploring Malick's work as a case of cinematic ethics: films that evoke varieties of ethical experience, encompassing existential, metaphysical, and religious perspectives. Malick's films are not reducible to a particular moral position or philosophical doctrine; rather, they solicit ethically significant forms of experience, encompassing anxiety and doubt, wonder and awe, to questioning and acknowledgment, through aesthetic engagement and poetic reflection. Drawing on a range of thinkers and approaches from Heidegger and Cavell, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, to phenomenology and moral psychology Sinnerbrink explores how Malick's films respond to the problem of nihilism the loss of conviction or belief in prevailing forms of value and meaning and the possibility of ethical transformation through cinema: from self-transformation in our relations with others to cultural transformation via our attitudes towards towards nature and the world. Sinnerbrink shows how Malick's later films, from The Tree of Life to Voyage of Time, provide unique opportunities to explore cinematic ethics in relation to the crisis of belief, the phenomenology of love, and film's potential to invite moral transformation."]

Tsui, Curtis. "The Evolution of a 'Superpig': Designing Okja, from Start to Finish." The Current (July 14, 2022) ["A tale about a girl’s bond with her beloved “superpig”—an animal she must eventually rescue from the clutches of the evil corporation that genetically engineered her—Okja provided a new challenge: its shy titular creature needed to be a source of affection, not fear, inviting touching and cuddling while also maintaining a massive heft that would prove attractive to the greedy food industry. And because of the real-world setting of the film, which moves from the tranquility of the South Korean mountains to the commotion of New York City, Okja would need to seem plausibly realistic, yet also unlike anything existing in nature. The following images chart the evolution of the creature, as Bong and Jang tackled initial design concepts, incorporated feedback from collaborators, and continued to refine details until they arrived at the lovable superpig we see on-screen."]

ENG 102 Resources: August 8, 2022

Abdelfatah, Rund, et al. "The Mystery of Inflation." Throughline (August 4, 2022) ["Gas. Meat. Flights. Houses. The price of things have gone up by as much as nine percent since last year: the same amount of money gets you less stuff. It's inflation: a concept that's easy to feel but hard to understand. Its causes are complex, but it isn't some kind of naturally-occurring phenomenon — and neither are the ways in which governments try to fight it. This week, we look at the history of inflation in the U.S., how we've responded, and who pays the price."]

Biagetti, Samuel. "Nag Hammadi Library and the Gnostic Gospels." Historiansplaining (August 1, 2022) ["The secretive Gnostic stream of Christianity, which taught a radically different metaphysics and spiritual cosmology from "orthodox" doctrine in the first four hundred years of the church, was largely lost to history, until 1945, when a camel-herder in a remote part of Egypt stumbled upon an old ceremic jar with 13 massive books containing 52 ancient Gnostic texts. We consider what the so-called "Nag Hammadi LIbrary," which may have been hidden in the desert to protect it from destruction, reveals about the origins and importance of the Gnostics' secret teachings."]

Brown, Vincent. Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War. Belknap Press, 2022. ["In the second half of the eighteenth century, as European imperial conflicts extended the domain of capitalist agriculture, warring African factions fed their captives to the transatlantic slave trade while masters struggled continuously to keep their restive slaves under the yoke. In this contentious atmosphere, a movement of enslaved West Africans in Jamaica (then called Coromantees) organized to throw off that yoke by violence. Their uprising—which became known as Tacky’s Revolt—featured a style of fighting increasingly familiar today: scattered militias opposing great powers, with fighters hard to distinguish from noncombatants. It was also part of a more extended borderless conflict that spread from Africa to the Americas and across the island. Even after it was put down, the insurgency rumbled throughout the British Empire at a time when slavery seemed the dependable bedrock of its dominion. That certitude would never be the same, nor would the views of black lives, which came to inspire both more fear and more sympathy than before. Tracing the roots, routes, and reverberations of this event across disparate parts of the Atlantic world, Vincent Brown offers us a superb geopolitical thriller. Tacky’s Revolt expands our understanding of the relationship between European, African, and American history, as it speaks to our understanding of wars of terror today."]

Eggert, Brian. "Titane." Deep Focus Review (October 3, 2021) ["In the first images of Titane, the camera lingers on engine parts shot like sweaty appendages, dripping with perspiration and vibrating orgasmically with the motor’s hum. The metal shimmers with grease and droplets of oil, and its curves look almost fleshy in the way they bend and give way to the rolling shapes in the undercarriage. French director Julia Ducournau films these inhuman auto parts like erotica, exploring the connection between bodies and automobiles in ways not attempted since David Cronenberg’s controversial 1996 film, Crash, about the relationship between the little death and the death drive. The link between sexuality and cars has been there for a long while. After all, why do they call a mechanic’s workspace a body shop? Consciously or not, motorheads make these connections as well. Car magazines and calendars pair bikini-clad women with muscle cars and hot rods, coupling sex and automobiles in literal and figurative terms. Ducournau’s film considers how the male gaze creates this strange relationship of images and takes the next logical step. The result is something wildly original, brutally visceral, oddly funny and tender, and singular in its vision."]

Goh, Robbie B.H. Christopher Nolan: Filmmaker and Philosopher. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. ["Christopher Nolan is the writer and director of Hollywood blockbusters like The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, and also of arthouse films like Memento and Inception. Underlying his staggering commercial success however, is a darker sensibility that questions the veracity of human knowledge, the allure of appearance over reality and the latent disorder in contemporary society. This appreciation of the sinister owes a huge debt to philosophy and especially modern thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida. Taking a thematic approach to Nolan's oeuvre, Robbie Goh examines how the director's postmodern inclinations manifest themselves in non-linearity, causal agnosticism, the threat of social anarchy and the frequent use of the mise en abyme, while running counter to these are narratives of heroism, moral responsibility and the dignity of human choice. For Goh, Nolan is a 'reluctant postmodernist'. His films reflect the cynicism of the modern world, but with their representation of heroic moral triumphs, they also resist it."]

Lowenstein, Adam. Horror Film and Otherness. Columbia University Press, 2022. ["What do horror films reveal about social difference in the everyday world? Criticism of the genre often relies on a dichotomy between monstrosity and normality, in which unearthly creatures and deranged killers are metaphors for society’s fear of the “others” that threaten the “normal.” The monstrous other might represent women, Jews, or Blacks, as well as Indigenous, queer, poor, elderly, or disabled people. The horror film’s depiction of such minorities can be sympathetic to their exclusion or complicit in their oppression, but ultimately, these images are understood to stand in for the others that the majority dreads and marginalizes. Adam Lowenstein offers a new account of horror and why it matters for understanding social otherness. He argues that horror films reveal how the category of the other is not fixed. Instead, the genre captures ongoing metamorphoses across “normal” self and “monstrous” other. This “transformative otherness” confronts viewers with the other’s experience—and challenges us to recognize that we are all vulnerable to becoming or being seen as the other. Instead of settling into comforting certainties regarding monstrosity and normality, horror exposes the ongoing struggle to acknowledge self and other as fundamentally intertwined. Horror Film and Otherness features new interpretations of landmark films by directors including Tobe Hooper, George A. Romero, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Stephanie Rothman, Jennifer Kent, Marina de Van, and Jordan Peele. Through close analysis of their engagement with different forms of otherness, this book provides new perspectives on horror’s significance for culture, politics, and art."]

Patell, Cyrus R.K. Lucasfilm: Filmmaking, Philosophy, and the Star Wars Universe. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. ["From A New Hope to The Rise of Skywalker and beyond, this book offers the first complete assessment and philosophical exploration of the Star Wars universe. Lucasfilm examines the ways in which these iconic films were shaped by global cultural mythologies and world cinema, as well as philosophical ideas from the fields of aesthetics and political theory, and now serve as a platform for public philosophy. Cyrus R. K. Patell also looks at how this ever-expanding universe of cultural products and enterprises became a global brand and asks: can a corporate entity be considered a “filmmaker and philosopher”? More than any other film franchise, Lucasfilm's Star Wars has become part of the global cultural imagination. The new generation of Lucasfilm artists is full of passionate fans of the Star Wars universe, who have now been given the chance to build on George Lucas's oeuvre. Within these pages, Patell explores what it means for films and their creators to become part of cultural history in this unprecedented way."]

Resina, Joan Ramon. Luchino Visconti: Filmmaker and Philosopher. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. ["Luchino Visconti (1906-1976) was one of Europe's most prestigious filmmakers, who rose to prominence as part of the Italian neo-realist movement, alongside contemporaries Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. Famous for his elegant lifestyle, as friend of Jean Renoir and Coco Chanel amongst others, his vibrant technicolour dramas are also known for their decadence and stunning display of aesthetic mastery and sensory pleasure. Looking beyond this colourful façade, however, Resina explores the philosophical implications of decadence with a particular focus on three films from the late phase in Visconti's production, Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), and Ludwig (1972). From the incestuous relationship between decadence and power to decadence as an outcome of straining toward formal perfection, Resina uncovers the unity and philosophical cohesiveness of these films that deal with different subjects and historical periods. Reading these films and their decadence in light of the time of filming and Visconti's own sense of cultural doom, Resina further demonstrates the relevance of Visconti's philosophy today and how much they still have to say to our contemporary situation."]

Schauer, Frederick. The Proof: Uses of Evidence in Law, Politics, and Everything Else. Belknap Press, 2022. ["In a world awash in “fake news,” where public figures make unfounded assertions as a matter of course, a preeminent legal theorist ranges across the courtroom, the scientific laboratory, and the insights of philosophers to explore the nature of evidence and show how it is credibly established."]

Sinnerbrink, Robert. Terence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. ["Many critics have approached Terrence Malick's work from a philosophical perspective, arguing that his films express philosophy through cinema. With their remarkable images of nature, poetic voiceovers, and meditative reflections, Malick's cinema certainly invites philosophical engagement. In Terrence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher, Robert Sinnerbrink takes a different approach, exploring Malick's work as a case of cinematic ethics: films that evoke varieties of ethical experience, encompassing existential, metaphysical, and religious perspectives. Malick's films are not reducible to a particular moral position or philosophical doctrine; rather, they solicit ethically significant forms of experience, encompassing anxiety and doubt, wonder and awe, to questioning and acknowledgment, through aesthetic engagement and poetic reflection. Drawing on a range of thinkers and approaches from Heidegger and Cavell, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, to phenomenology and moral psychology Sinnerbrink explores how Malick's films respond to the problem of nihilism the loss of conviction or belief in prevailing forms of value and meaning and the possibility of ethical transformation through cinema: from self-transformation in our relations with others to cultural transformation via our attitudes towards towards nature and the world. Sinnerbrink shows how Malick's later films, from The Tree of Life to Voyage of Time, provide unique opportunities to explore cinematic ethics in relation to the crisis of belief, the phenomenology of love, and film's potential to invite moral transformation."]