Introduction

Author(s):  
J.P. Telotte

This chapter surveys the body of science fiction cartoons that appeared in approximate parallel to a burgeoning SF literature during the first years of film and continuing to World War II. It situates this material within the production and exhibition practices of the film industry and links it to modernist aesthetics, emphasizing modernism’s primary concerns with revisioning both the world and the self. It then describes the key memes typically found in these films—space vehicles and space travel, robots and mechanical figures, aliens and alien worlds, and inventions and inventors—while also suggesting the broader impact of the cartoons. Through the comic treatment of these memes, it argues, animation helped to make the SF genre both more familiar and less threatening to a wide audience.

Prima Donna ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 89-118
Author(s):  
Paul Wink

This chapter, “An Athenian Interlude,” analyzes a major turning point in Callas’s life associated with her move, at age thirteen, from New York City to Athens. In Athens, she experienced poverty, personal humiliation, and, during the World War II years, threats to her life. But her singing benefited from the strong mentorship she received from Elvira de Hidalgo, which helped launch her operatic career. Callas’s success as a singer with the Greek National Opera fueled resentment among her older and more established colleagues who envied her talent and resented being dethroned by a mere teenager who spoke Greek with an American accent. Poverty and conflicted relations at home with her mother and sister failed to compensate Callas for hostility at work. A significant gain in weight further undermined her self-confidence. Her experiences during the seven years spent in Athens exacerbated the split between Callas, the self-assured artist, and Maria, the vulnerable young woman.


PMLA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 568-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Bérubé

After a decade of working in disability studies, I still find myself surprised by the presence of disability in narratives I had never considered to be “about” disability—in animated films from Dumbo to Finding Nemo; in literary texts from Huckleberry Finn to Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays; and, most curiously, even in the world of science fiction and superheroes, a world that turns out to be populated by blind Daredevils, mutant supercrips, and posthuman cyborgs of all kinds. Indeed, I now consider it plausible that the genre of science fiction is as obsessed with disability as it is with space travel and alien contact. Sometimes disability is simply underrecognized in familiar sci-fi narratives: ask Philip K. Dick fans about the importance of disability in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and you'll probably get blank stares. But the Voigt-Kampff empathy test by which the authorities distinguish humans from androids was, Dick tells us, actually developed after World War Terminus to identify “specials,” people neurologically damaged by radioactive fallout, so that the state could prevent them from reproducing. That aspect of the novel's complication of the human-android distinction is lost in the film Blade Runner, but the film does give us an engineer with a disability that involves premature aging, which links him intimately to the androids who have life spans of only four years.


2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-142
Author(s):  
Maja Szűcs

Abstract The name of Hungarian animation film maker George Pal (1908-1980) is almost unknown, both in his home country Hungary and in the Netherlands. His 110th birthday anniversary passed without any commemoration in spite of the fact that he was a key figure in the Dutch animation film history. In this article I would like to demonstrate why we should see Pal as the founder of the Dutch industrial animation production and which role he has in the research on the cultural relations between the Netherlands and Hungary in the period before the World War II. His influence on the Dutch animation film industry has been hardly analyzed until now. On the base of source research, which adds to the incomplete publications, I would like to prove why the invitation of Pal to the Netherlands in July 1934 had a fundamental influence on the Dutch animation production. Later on, this research will be the beginning of a thorough study of the importance and the network of George Pal in the Netherlands.


Author(s):  
J.P. Telotte

Before flying saucers, robot monsters, and alien menaces invaded the movies of the 1950s, there was already a significant body of animated science fiction, produced by such studios as Disney, the Fleischers, and Terrytoons. That work has largely been overlooked or forgotten, despite the fact that the same pre-World War II era that produced this group of short films also saw the more prominent development and flourishing of SF as a literary genre. This book surveys that neglected body of work to show how it helped contribute to the burgeoning SF imagination that was manifested in pulp literature, serials, feature films, and even World’s Fairs of the era. It argues that prewar cartoons helped to create a familiarity with the scientific and technological developments that were spurring that SF imagination and build an audience for this new genre. Demonstrating the same modernist spirit as SF literature and feature films, these cartoons adopted many of the genre’s most important motifs (rockets and space travel, robots, alien worlds and their inhabitants, and fantastic inventions and inventors), offered comic visions of the era’s growing fascination with science and technology, and framed that matter in a nonthreatening fashion. Popular animation thereby not only added another dimension to the SF imagination, but also helped prepare postwar audiences to embrace SF’s vision of the future and of inevitable change.


Author(s):  
J. P. Telotte

This book considers the impact that the new art of film had on the development of the emerging science fiction (SF) genre during the pre- and early post-World War II era, during the time that the genre was trying to locate an identity, develop its key themes, and even settle on a name. Focusing on the primary venue for early SF literature, the popular pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, and Astounding Stories, it traces this early film/literature relationship by examining four common features of the pulps: stories that involve film or the film industry; film-related advertising; editors’ commentaries and readers’ remarks on film; and cover and story illustrations. All these features demonstrate an interest and even a fascination with the movies, which, as many of SF’s readers, writers, and editors recognized, demonstrated a modernist agenda similar to that which characterized the literature. By surveying these haunting traces of another medium in early SF discourse, this book shows how that cinematic influence penetrated and, both consciously and unconsciously, helped shape the experience of SF, as well as the cultural idea of SF during this formative period.


Author(s):  
Eleftheria Thanouli

THE THIN RED LINE AND THE HOLLYWOOD WORLD WAR II TRADITION The Thin Red Line is a three-hour epic about the World War II, directed by Terrence Malick, who made his comeback to the film industry after 20 years with a subject that had been neglected for almost as long.(1) The film is based on James Jones' novel, published in 1962, which was first adapted for the big screen by Andrew Marton in 1964 rather unsuccessfully. For many years, the book seemed to defy cinematic adaptation due to its deliberately choppy, episodic storyline, its lack of a single heroic protagonist and the multiplicity of perspectives.(2) However, Malick tried to overcome these obstacles by creating a film which broke "most of the commercial rules about narrative and drama"(3), as a critic observes. My interest in The Thin Red Line is therefore twofold: firstly, I will try...


2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-53
Author(s):  
Clive Davenhall

Regular telescopic astronomical observations made from balloons began after World War II, though scientific, particularly meteorological, ballooning dates from the mid-nineteenth century. However, astronomical ballooning has a curious prehistory at the dawn of lighter-than-air travel in the 1780s. The self-styled Dr Katterfelto (c.1743?-99) was a German-born travelling showman, lecturer and considerable self-publicist who in 1784-85 claimed to have made important astronomical discoveries from observations made from a balloon. It is unlikely that he made any such observations, or, indeed, any balloon flights. However, the episode throws some light on the world of the itinerant, eighteenth-century astronomical lecturer and the diffusion of contemporary astronomical and scientific knowledge.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba

The essay discusses selected poems from Thomas Hardy's vast body of poetry, focusing on representations of the self and the world. Employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts such as the body-subject, wild being, flesh, and reversibility, the essay offers an analysis of Hardy's poems in the light of phenomenological philosophy. It argues that far from demonstrating ‘cosmic indifference’, Hardy's poetry offers a sympathetic vision of interrelations governing the universe. The attunement with voices of the Earth foregrounded in the poems enables the self's entanglement in the flesh of the world, a chiasmatic intertwining of beings inserted between the leaves of the world. The relation of the self with the world is established through the act of perception, mainly visual and aural, when the body becomes intertwined with the world, thus resulting in a powerful welding. Such moments of vision are brief and elusive, which enhances a sense of transitoriness, and, yet, they are also timeless as the self becomes immersed in the experience. As time is a recurrent theme in Hardy's poetry, this essay discusses it in the context of dwelling, the provisionality of which is demonstrated in the prevalent sense of temporality, marked by seasons and birdsong, which underline the rhythms of the world.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-41
Author(s):  
Maftuna Sanoqulova ◽  

This article consists of the politics which connected with oil in Saudi Arabia after the World war II , the relations of economical cooperations on this matter and the place of oil in the history of world economics


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