Anatomy of an Ovidian Cinema: Mysteries of the Wax Museum

2017 ◽  
pp. 84-100
Author(s):  
Vito Adriaensens
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Visual History

There’s poetry in wax. From Pygmalion’s ivory Galatea turning waxen to the touch, to the anatomical Venuses strewn erotically across the halls of La Specola in Florence, or wax mannequins melting slowly on celluloid, the haptic nature of the medium is intrinsically uncanny. Lifelike statues have been haunting our visual history for centuries, and as Kenneth Gross has aptly remarked, the idea of a statue coming to life could be bound to the opposing thought: that the statue was once something living. It is precisely this tension that lies at the heart of a number of films inspired by the wax museum and its mostly static inhabitants. This cultural phenomenon was made most famous by Madame Tussaud, who by the end of the eighteenth century had risen to fame crafting wax counterparts of notorious individuals. The wax creations’ semblance of life has unnerved visitors ever since, and cinema was quick to pick up on the mysteries of the wax museum, trying its best to transfer the magic of the medium to celluloid.

Reflections

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-576
Author(s):  
Laura Engel
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Visual History ◽  
Contemporary Artists

Contemporary artists Elizabeth Colomba and Fabiola Jean-Louis employ eighteenth-century subject matter, iconography, and media to reimagine the visual history of Black women. Putting Colomba’s and Jean-Louis’s work in dialogue with my own, I return to the premises of my book Women, Performance, and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist (2019), to re-examine, interrogate, and acknowledge my position as a white scholar.

From Nina to Nina: Psychodrama, absorption and sentiment in the 1780s

1996 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Castelvecchi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Late Eighteenth

Paisiello's Nina ‘is sentimental comedy at its worst…. Its sentimentality is to modern ears perfectly unbearable, and we cannot understand how the whole of Europe was reduced to tears by these infantile melodies.’ Edward Dent's opinion might well be shared, though perhaps less frankly expressed, by more than one musicologist of following generations. Yet the fact remains that eighteenth-century Europe was indeed reduced to tears by operas on the story of Nina: an attempt to ‘thicken’ our understanding of that cultural phenomenon is the aim of the present essay. In its first part – focusing on Marsollier's and Dalayrac's Nina, the source for Paisiello's opera – I try to reconstruct a web of relationships between the practices of psychiatry emerging in the late eighteenth century and the theatrical and aesthetic cultures of the time. In the second part, aspects of Paisiello's setting are read as a composer's effort to create an operatic language responsive to the culture of ‘sensibility’ shared by eighteenth-century humanists and physicians.

The Many Musical Medievalisms of Disney

2020 ◽  
pp. 689-708
Author(s):  
John Haines
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Sleeping Beauty ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
Common View ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Animated Films ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Middle Ages

This essay argues that the Disney Company is one of today’s main purveyors of medievalism. The idea of Disney as a force for medievalism may strike some academic readers as odd, given the still common view of medievalism as a primarily academic phenomenon. Rather, as argued in the first part of this essay, medievalism is a widespread cultural phenomenon, originating in the sixteenth century, out of which academic medievalism emerged in the eighteenth century. As part of this broader cultural medievalism, the Disney Company has played an increasingly important role in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Rather than the literalist historical medievalism that usually preoccupies academics, the Disney Company has followed a looser approach centered on key stereotypes, in keeping with the earliest and most pervasive concept of the Middle Ages from the sixteenth century onward. In all its medievalist products, ranging from early animated films to Fantasyland’s iconic monument the Sleeping Beauty Castle, Disney has made music a primary concern.

scholarly journals Millennialism, rapture and “Left Behind” literature.

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pieter GR De Villiers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon

This article represents a research overview of the nature, historical roots, social contexts and growth of millennialism as a remarkable religious and cultural phenomenon in modern times. It firstly investigates the notions of eschatology, millennialism and rapture that characterize millennialism. It then analyses how and why millennialism that seems to have been a marginal phenomenon, became prominent in the United States through the evangelistic activities of Darby, initially an unknown pastor of a minuscule faith community from England and later a household name in the global religious discourse. It analyses how millennialism grew to play a key role in the religious, social and political discourse of the twentieth century. It finally analyses how Darby’s ideas are illuminated when they are placed within the context of modern England in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century. In a conclusion some key challenges of the place and role of millennialism as a movement that reasserts itself continuously, are spelled out in the light of this history.

scholarly journals Of God and Reason in XVIII C. British North America

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (28) ◽  
pp. 145-168
Author(s):  
Carlos Acosta Gastélum ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
British North America ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Religious Enthusiasm ◽  
Intellectual Environment ◽  
Ideological Context ◽  
Cultural Force

The following article intends the description of the religious and intellectual environment in prerevo-lutionary America. It is divided into two main sec-tions: (1) a religious one where I will cover the most significant elements, and the ideological context of what was the most decisive cultural force in the formation of the new country ?Puritanism?; and (2) another that succinctly describes the particular shape that enlightened thought acquired in that part of the British Empire.A description of eighteenth-century Puritan North America requires a closer look at the ver-sion of Calvinism prevalent in the Northeastern seaboard, and therein to the cultural phenomenon of religious revivalism. Now connected to these variables lie a series of theological conceptions that shaped Puritan belief and practice in manifold ways, and that will be covered in the first section of this work: Arminianism, Antinomianism, Millen-nialism, and Religious Enthusiasm, among others.

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