Playing With Tempests

2019 ◽  
Vol 137 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-69
Author(s):  
Andreas Mahler
Keyword(s):  
Peter Greenaway ◽  
Derek Jarman ◽  
Romance Plot ◽  
Aesthetic Structure ◽  
Opening Up

Abstract Current adaptations of Shakespeare’s Tempest invariably tend to focus on the postcolonial. Despite the indubitable contemporary political relevance of the postcolonial in Shakespeare’s play, this article argues that a much larger receptional impact of it lies in its aesthetic structure. Drawing on the Tempest’s comedic nature, it contends that the play’s ‘romantic’ content (or syntagmatic romance plot) is secondary only in relation to its primary point of enabling, and staging, funny and/or metafictional inventions and ideas (i. e. paradigms), thus displaying and corroborating the play’s elaborate polyperspectivity. This ‘open perspective structure’ (M. Pfister) finds itself in particular taken up in the cinematographic Tempest adaptations by Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway, who use the well-known plot to foreground, and celebrate, the possibilities and options of the multimedium ‘film’. But where Greenaway tends to re-harmonise this unleashed plurality again by synchronising all the different paradigms back into a unified (and at times rather lengthy and monotonous) celebration of art as art, Jarman takes the play’s enabling structure much more seriously in opening up his movie to a well-nigh endless inclusion of ever more unexpected, and new, paradigms of pleasure.

The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Stamm
Keyword(s):  
Social Hygiene ◽  
Queer Cinema ◽  
Shared History ◽  
Todd Haynes ◽  
Derek Jarman ◽  
Aids Crisis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
John Greyson ◽  
Opening Up

The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era returns to the historical moment of the AIDS crisis and the emergence of New Queer Cinema to investigate the phenomena of queer biopic films produced during the late 1980s–early 1990s. More specifically, the book asks why queer filmmakers repeatedly produced biographical films of queer individuals living and dead throughout the years surrounding the AIDS crisis. While film critics and historian typically treat the biopic as a conservative, if not cliché, genre, queer filmmakers have frequently used the biopic to tell stories of queer lives. This project pays particular attention to the genre’s queer resonances, opening up the biopic’s historical connections to projects of education, public health, and social hygiene, along with the production of a shared history and national identity. Queer filmmakers’ engagement with the biopic evokes the genre’s history of building life through the portrayal of lives worthy of admiration and emulation, but it also points to another biopic history, that of representing lives damaged. By portraying lives damaged by inconceivable loss, queer filmmakers challenge the illusion of a coherent self presumably reinforced by the biopic genre and in doing so, their films open up the potential for new means of connection and relationality. The book features fresh readings of the cinema of Derek Jarman, John Greyson, Todd Haynes, Barbara Hammer, and Tom Kalin. By calling for a reappraisal of the queer biopic, the book also calls for a reappraisal of New Queer Cinema’s legacy and its influence of contemporary queer film.

Moving Pictures, Still Lives

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
The Past ◽  
Peter Greenaway ◽  
Derek Jarman ◽  
Tableaux Vivants ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Moving Pictures ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Moving Pictures, Still Lives revisits the cinematic and intellectual atmosphere of the late twentieth century, exploring the work of artists and philosophers who complicated the usual association between the past and tradition or the future and modernity. The book retraces the “archaeomodern turn” in media and theory that viewed the past as a repository of abandoned but potentially transformative modern experiments. Three theoretical chapters consider key figures—Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, and Serge Daney—who grappled with the late twentieth century’s characteristic concerns, including history, memory, and belatedness. It reframes this theoretical work on film as a mourning play for revolutions past and a means of reviving the possibilities of the modern age (and its paradigmatic medium, cinema) during periods of political and cultural retrenchment. Like Daney, the book emphasizes the value of looking at cinema and the century in the “rear—view mirror,” at the aging of a quintessentially modern art like film, and at the phantoms that remain after the passage into the era of new media. The second part of the manuscript, titled “The Cinema of Painters,” is structured around a series of interactions among media, filmmakers, and national traditions. It examines late twentieth—century filmmakers who systematically adopt strategies normally associated with other visual media or art forms, especially painting. Focusing on Alain Cavalier, Terence Davies, Jean—Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, and AgnèVarda, the book concentrates on films that fill the frame with a succession of tableaux vivants, still lifes, illuminated manuscripts, and landscapes.

scholarly journals When Peter Met Sergei: Art Cinema Past, Present and Future in Eisenstein in Guanajuato

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 312-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Hoyle
Keyword(s):  
Art Cinema ◽  
Prodigal Son ◽  
British Art ◽  
Peter Greenaway ◽  
Aspect Ratios ◽  
Shared Interest ◽  
Derek Jarman ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The City ◽  
New Phase

Peter Greenaway has established himself as one of British cinema's most distinctive film-makers. Yet he also remains one of its most controversial and problematic figures. In the 1980s and early1990s, alongside Derek Jarman, Greenaway came to embody British art cinema. He subsequently has taken on the paradoxical status of a major film-maker who simultaneously exists on the margins. He has also become a self-imposed exile who believes that his unique brand of art cinema is best appreciated on the continent. In effect, Greenaway has become British art cinema's prodigal son. This article focuses on Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015), a semi-fictionalised account of the ten days that Eisenstein spent in the city of Guanajuato while filming the uncompleted Que Viva Mexico! The article argues that what makes Eisenstein in Guanajuato so resonant is the way in which Greenaway both celebrates cinema's past while also daring to suggest a possible future. Indeed, while this article will show that the film is part of a new phase in Greenaway's career which is devoted to biographical films about artists, Eisenstein in Guanajuato is no simple biopic of Eisenstein. Rather, it offers a complex fusion of both the Russian and British film-makers’ theories about the cinema, particularly their shared interest in film aspect ratios and the concept of the total art work. Furthermore, it stands as a superb illustration of Greenaway's vision of cinema as an interactive and encyclopaedic medium. As this is a co-production between the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Finland and Mexico, which featured no British investment and, at the time of writing, has yet to be shown in the UK, this article will also show that we require new ways of theorising art cinema not only in British but also in international contexts.

Seeking to uncover biology's chemical roots

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (5) ◽  
pp. 435-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Addy Pross
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Biological Systems ◽  
Significant Development ◽  
The Road ◽  
Physical Chemical ◽  
Systems Chemistry ◽  
Biological World ◽  
Inanimate Matter ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Opening Up

Despite the considerable advances in molecular biology over the past several decades, the nature of the physical–chemical process by which inanimate matter become transformed into simplest life remains elusive. In this review, we describe recent advances in a relatively new area of chemistry, systems chemistry, which attempts to uncover the physical–chemical principles underlying that remarkable transformation. A significant development has been the discovery that within the space of chemical potentiality there exists a largely unexplored kinetic domain which could be termed dynamic kinetic chemistry. Our analysis suggests that all biological systems and associated sub-systems belong to this distinct domain, thereby facilitating the placement of biological systems within a coherent physical/chemical framework. That discovery offers new insights into the origin of life process, as well as opening the door toward the preparation of active materials able to self-heal, adapt to environmental changes, even communicate, mimicking what transpires routinely in the biological world. The road to simplest proto-life appears to be opening up.

Opening up the field

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tori DeAngelis
Keyword(s):  
Opening Up

Rereading Klein’s “Some reflections on ‘The Oresteia’ ”—the evolution of the mother–daughter relationship in four generations of Chinese women

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-59
Author(s):  
Xu Jianqin
Keyword(s):  
Mutual Influence ◽  
Chinese Women ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Developmental Context ◽  
Child Relationship ◽  
Mother Daughter Relationship ◽  
Foot Binding ◽  
Mother Child Relationship ◽  
Reform And Opening Up ◽  
Opening Up

This article analyses the evolution of the mother–daughter relationship in China, and describes the mothering characteristics of four generations of women, which in sequence includes “foot-binding mothers”, “mothers after liberation”, “mothers after reform and opening up”, and “mothers who were only daughters”. Referring to Klein’s ideas about the mother–child relationship, especially those in her paper “Some reflections on ‘The Oresteia’ ”, the author tries to understand mothers and their impact on their daughters in these various periods of Chinese history, so as to explore the mutual influence of the mother–daughter relationship in particular, and the Chinese cultural and developmental context in general.

Diaghilev and British Writing

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

This article explores the diversity of British literary responses to Diaghilev's project, emphasising the way in which the subject matter and methodologies of Diaghilev's modernism were sometimes unexpectedly echoed in expressions of contemporary British writing. These discussions emerge both in writing about Diaghilev's work, and, more discretely, when references to the Russian Ballet find their way into the creative writing of the period, serving to anchor the texts in a particular cultural milieu or to suggest contemporary aesthetic problems in the domain of literary aesthetics developing in the period. Figures from disparate fields, including literature, music and the visual arts, brought to their criticism of the Ballets Russes their individual perspectives on its aesthetics, helping to consolidate the sense of its importance in contributing to the inter-disciplinary flavour of modernism across the arts. In the field of literature, not only did British writers evaluate the Ballets Russes in terms of their own poetics, their relationship to experimentation in the novel and in drama, they developed an increasing sense of the company's place in dance history, its choreographic innovations offering material for wider discussions, opening up the potential for literary modernism's interest in impersonality and in the ‘unsayable’, discussions of the body, primitivism and gender.

Gertrude Stein's Transmasculinity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Coffman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ernest Hemingway ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
False Consciousness ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
Carl Van Vechten ◽  
The Media ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Opening Up

By reading written and visual artefacts of Gertrude Stein’s life, Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity reframes earlier scholarship to argue that her gender was transmasculine and that her masculinity was positive rather than a self-hating form of false consciousness. This book considers ways Stein’s masculinity was formed through her relationship with her feminine partner, Alice B. Toklas, and her masculine homosocial bonds with other modernists in her network. This broadens out Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s account of “male homosocial bonding” to include all masculine persons, opening up the possibility of examining Stein’s relationship to Toklas; masculine women such as Jane Heap; and men such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Carl Van Vechten. The Introduction and first four chapters focus on surfacings of Stein’s masculinity within the visual and the textual: in others’ paintings and photographs of her person; her hermetic writings from the first three decades of the twentieth century; and her self-packaging for mass consumption in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Whereas the chapter on The Autobiography underscores Toklas’s role in the formation of Stein’s masculinity and success as a modernist, the final three register the vicissitudes of the homosocial bonds at play in her friendships with Picasso, Hemingway, and Van Vechten. The Coda, which cross-reads Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) with the media attention two museum exhibits about her attracted between 2011 and 2012, points to possibilities for future work on the implications of her masculine homosocial bonds with Vichy collaborator Bernard Fäy.

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