Virginia Woolf, Filmmaker

2021 ◽  
pp. 604-621
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Shin
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
General Overview ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Modes Of Engagement

This chapter considers the afterlives of Virginia Woolf, beginning with a general overview and then turning to Woolf’s legacy in film. Whereas a few filmmakers have attempted to adapt Woolf’s works with varying degrees of success, a handful of twenty-first-century filmmakers have moved towards alternative modes of engagement beyond adaptation. Mark Cousins, François Ozon, David Lowery, and Alex Garland, this chapter suggests, have embraced Woolf as an experimental filmmaker, as one of them. Her writing helps focalize the explorations of identity, loss, and survival in What Is This Film Called Love? (2012), Under the Sand (2000), A Ghost Story (2017), and Annihilation (2018). No longer are Woolf’s biography, her body, or even particular works at the forefront of her legacy; this chapter argues that in this eclectic group of films, Woolf and her writing are not only vaporized and reconfigured but also, problematically, domesticated and neutered.

Contemporary Ghosts

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-143
Author(s):  
Murray Leeder
Keyword(s):  
Reality Television ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
The Media ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Western Media

This chapter tracks the dominant trends of the twenty-first-century ghost. It argues that Sadako, the techno-onryō from Ringu (1998), has proved a model that would spread in countless ways, cementing the idea of the media ghost in both Asian and western media, sometimes focused on new technology but with a surprising tendency to evoke ‘outdated’ media as haunted/haunting residue. It also discusses the availability of the ghost not only to popular media like reality television and to middlebrow horror films such as those of Blumhouse Pictures, but also to ‘legitimate’ art, like Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger (2007) and works by films like film auteurs like ApichatpongWeerasethakul, Guillermo del Toro and Guy Maddin. It proposes that many of these works provide their own critical commentary on the ghost story itself.

Post-Horror

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Church
Keyword(s):  
Political Identity ◽  
First Century ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Popular Film ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Witch ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Entertainment Value

Horror’s longstanding reputation as a popular but culturally denigrated genre has been challenged by a new wave of films mixing arthouse minimalism with established genre conventions. Variously dubbed “elevated horror” and “post-horror” in popular film criticism, texts such as The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch, It Comes at Night, Get Out, The Invitation, Hereditary, Midsommar, A Ghost Story, and mother! represent an emerging nexus of taste, politics, and style that has often earned outsized acclaim from high-minded critics and populist rejection by wider audiences. Post-Horror is the first full-length study of one of the most important and divisive movements in twenty-first-century horror cinema. It argues that the affect produced by these films’ minimalist aesthetic has fueled taste-based disagreements between professional film critics, genre fans, and more casual viewers about whether the horror genre can or should be upheld as more than a populist entertainment form, especially as the genre turned away from the post-9/11 debates about graphic violence that consumed the first decade of the twenty-first century. The book thus explores the aesthetic qualities, historical precursors, affective resonances, and thematic concerns of this emerging cycle by situating these texts within revived debates between over the genre’s larger artistic, cultural, and entertainment value. Chapters include thematic analyses of trauma, gaslighting, landscape, existential dread, and political identity across a range of films straddling the line between art-horror and multiplex fare since approximately 2013.

scholarly journals From the play to the event: Delineating phenomena of theatrical activity in Greece at the turn of the twenty-first century

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Platon Mavromoustakos
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Study ◽  
First Century ◽  
Dramatic Play ◽  
General Overview ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Fundamental Shift

Attempting a general overview, this article may be understood as a preliminary requisite towards a more systematic study of theatrical activity in Greece since the turn of the twenty-first century. At the heart of this approach lies the fundamental shift from the dramatic play to the performance event, which has taken place both in theatre practice and theatre studies since the 1960s. The hypothesis underlying this study is that in Greek theatre the transition commenced after the reestablishment of democracy, becoming more broadly evident in this century. Some of the main points discussed are the profile of the new generation of theatre creators, the role of some major theatrical events and organisations, institutional transformations, new forms of collectivity in theatrical activity, the persistent demand for extroversion, dramatic production and its links to the stage.

Great Poets Do Not Die: Maggie Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (2014) As Metaphor For Contemporary Biofiction

2020 ◽  
pp. 399-411
Author(s):  
Bethany Layne
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Real Life ◽  
First Century ◽  
Keynote Address ◽  
The Real ◽  
Michael Cunningham ◽  
Twenty First Century

This chapter takes as its subject Maggie Gee’s novel Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (2014), which imagines what might transpire if Woolf were to be resurrected in twenty-first-century New York. She is conjured by the fictitious novelist Angela Lamb, who is visiting the Berg Collection in preparation for a keynote address at an international Woolf conference. As a contemporary novelist who recalls her subject to life, lends her clothing and helps her to sign her name, Angela is symbolic of the real-life novelists who recreated Woolf in their own image and reinterpreted her works in line with their respective versions. The chapter thus contends that Gee’s recent manifestation of Woolf-inspired biofiction may be read successfully as an extended metaphor for the twenty-year-old subgenre. This originated with Sigrid Nunez (1998) and Michael Cunningham (1998) and extends to recent work by Priya Parmar (2014) and Norah Vincent (2015). The chapter first examines issues of content, focusing on Gee’s presentation of Woolf’s suicide and sexuality. The discussion is then expanded to think critically about Woolf-inspired biofiction as a subgenre, particularly the ethical issues attendant on its invasion of the subject’s privacy.

Let the quiet ones in

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johnny Walker
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Recent History ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Market Positioning ◽  
Industry Trade ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Web ◽  
Trade Press

Chapter 6 returns to industry, and charts the re-emergence of Hammer Films, which, after thirty years, finally went back into film production in the 2000s. Drawing from primary sources such as the industry trade press and interviews, the chapter reflects on Hammer’s recent history, considering briefly the tumultuous 1980s and 1990s, before assessing the company’s market positioning between its re-launch in 2007 with the web serial Beyond the Rave (Matthias Hoene, 2008), through its theatrical success with the blockbuster The Woman in Black in 2012, up until the release of its lower-budgeted ghost story, The Quiet Ones (John Pogue) in 2014. Ultimately, taking into account Hammer’s prominence in much discourse around classic British horror, I use its millennial incarnation to assess its relevance (or not) to the identity of British horror in the twenty-first century.

Beyond Broadcasting? TV for the Twenty-First Century

2008 ◽  
Vol 126 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Meikle ◽  
Sherman Young
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Current Phase ◽  
Online Video ◽  
Video Streams ◽  
Cultural Norm ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Modes Of Engagement

TV is being reshaped, reimagined and reinvented in unpredictable ways. Broadcasting has become only one of a set of options for the distribution of TV content, alongside cable, DVDs, internet downloads, and online video streams. Simultaneously, audiences have embraced new modes of engagement with audio-visual products, with many seamlessly shifting from the role of consumer to that of producer. Broadcasting still reigns, but its place as the normative television form is under greater threat than ever. The articles in this issue of MIA suggest that, while it may no longer be the cultural norm, broadcasting may still have a role to play in whatever television becomes. The current phase of television suggests contested continuities rather than radical seismic shifts, as the new technologies open up possibilities beyond broadcasting. Of most interest is the emerging tension between what newly empowered users want television to be, and the institutional desire to dictate the direction and pace of change.

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