“A Panorama of Gay Life”: Nighthawks and British Queer Cinema in the 1970s

2021 ◽  
pp. 434-456
Author(s):  
Glyn Davis
Keyword(s):  
Queer Cinema ◽  
Four Corners ◽  
Production History ◽  
Queer History ◽  
Key Events

This chapter details the production history and reception of Paul Hallam and Ron Peck’s film Nighthawks (1978), often recognized as a “classic” of British LGBTQ cinema. It centrally engages with Vito Russo’s suggestion that the film offered “a community reaction to itself.” Making the film was a lengthy undertaking: the chapter draws on Peck and Hallam’s archives to reconstruct its creation, and unpacks Peck’s involvement with the Four Corners collective and its influence on the content and form of Nighthawks. The film is situated in relation to key events in British queer history and the landscape of British filmmaking during the decade, as well as in relation to Richard Dyer’s landmark 1977 film season “Images of Homosexuality.” The film’s “sequel,” Strip Jack Naked (1991), is also explored as a partial atonement for Nighthawks’s omissions.

Revising Plants, man and life: Edgar Anderson reshapes a classic book

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Kleinman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Evolutionary Synthesis ◽  
Ernst Mayr ◽  
Active Participant ◽  
Evolutionary Mechanism ◽  
Popular Work ◽  
Scientific Attention ◽  
Key Events ◽  
Jesup Lectures

On at least four occasions, Edgar Anderson (1897–1969) began revising his book Plants, man and life (1952). Given both its place in Anderson's career and his place in the development of evolutionary theory in the mid-twentieth century, the emendations are noteworthy. Though a popular work, Plants, man and life served as the distillation of Anderson's ideas on hybridization as an evolutionary mechanism, the need for more scientific attention on domesticated and semi-domesticated plants, and the opportunities such plants provided for the study of evolution. Anderson was an active participant in several key events in what historians have come to call the Evolutionary Synthesis. For example, he and Ernst Mayr shared the 1941 Jesup Lectures on “Systematics and the origin of species”. Anderson's proposed revisions to his book reflect both an attempt to soften certain acerbic comments as well as an attempt to recast the book as a whole.

Early Cinema in Scotland

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Local Newspapers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of ◽  
International Audience

This collection of essays, drawn from a three-year AHRC research project, provides a detailed context for the history of early cinema in Scotland from its inception in 1896 till the arrival of sound in the early 1930s. It details the movement from travelling fairground shows to the establishment of permanent cinemas, and from variety and live entertainment to the dominance of the feature film. It addresses the promotion of cinema as a socially ‘useful’ entertainment, and, distinctively, it considers the early development of cinema in small towns as well as in larger cities. Using local newspapers and other archive sources, it details the evolution and the diversity of the social experience of cinema, both for picture goers and for cinema staff. In production, it examines the early attempts to establish a feature film production sector, with a detailed production history of Rob Roy (United Films, 1911), and it records the importance, both for exhibition and for social history, of ‘local topicals’. It considers the popularity of Scotland as an imaginary location for European and American films, drawing their popularity from the international audience for writers such as Walter Scott and J.M. Barrie and the ubiquity of Scottish popular song. The book concludes with a consideration of the arrival of sound in Scittish cinemas. As an afterpiece, it offers an annotated filmography of Scottish-themed feature films from 1896 to 1927, drawing evidence from synopses and reviews in contemporary trade journals.

‘What we are up against’: Lindsay Anderson and The Old Crowd

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 332-350
Author(s):  
Tom Sutcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Critical Reception ◽  
Production History

Drawing on the invaluable experience of watching Lindsay Anderson at work and on lengthy interviews with the director, this article traces the production history and critical reception of The Old Crowd, an Alan Bennett play which Anderson directed for London Weekend Television in 1979. In so doing it paints a picture of an ITV environment very different from that of today, one in which there was far more scope for formal experimentation and innovation, but it also demonstrates all too clearly the critical hostility and incomprehension which greeted directors like Anderson who were determined to take advantage of this relatively liberal climate in order to stretch the medium to its limits.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

How to Define the Czechoslovak Underground

2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 42-46
Author(s):  
Barbara Bothová
Keyword(s):  
Significant Influence ◽  
The State ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The West ◽  
State Security ◽  
The Third ◽  
Key Events

What is an underground? Is it possible to embed this particular way of life into any definition? After all, even underground did not have the need to define itself at the beginning. The presented text represents a brief reflection of the development of underground in Czechoslovakia; attention is paid to the impulses from the West, which had a significant influence on the underground. The text focuses on the key events that influenced the underground. For example, the “Hairies (Vlasatci)” Action, which took place in 1966, and the State Security activity in Rudolfov in 1974. The event in Rudolfov was an imaginary landmark and led to the writing of a manifesto that came into history as the “Report on the Third Czech Musical Revival.”

The Process of Globalization and Its Impact on Media

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 150
Author(s):  
Veton Zejnullahi
Keyword(s):  
New Technology ◽  
World Order ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Media Access ◽  
Four Corners ◽  
The World ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Human Eyes ◽  
The Impact

The process of globalization, which many times is considered as new world order is affecting all spheres of modern society but also the media. In this paper specifically we will see the impact of globalization because we see changing the media access to global problems in general being listed on these processes. We will see that the greatest difficulties will have small media as such because the process is moving in the direction of creating mega media which thanks to new technology are reaching to deliver news and information at the time of their occurrence through choked the small media. So it is fair to conclude that the rapid economic development and especially the technology have made the world seem "too small" to the human eyes, because for real-time we will communicate with the world with the only one Internet connection, and also all the information are take for the development of events in the four corners of the world and direct from the places when the events happen. Even Albanian space has not left out of this process because the media in the Republic of Albania and the Republic of Kosovo are adapted to the new conditions under the influence of the globalization process. This fact is proven powerful through creating new television packages, written the websites and newspapers in their possession.

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