‘The Lost Highway of Greek Cinema’, cinema screenings and events (2016–2020)

Review of: I Chameni Leoforos tou Ellinikou Cinema (‘The lost highway of Greek cinema’), Afroditi Nikolaidou and Anna Poupou (2019) Athens: Nefeli, 232 pp., ISBN 978-9-60504-238-7, p/bk, €13

COMPARISON OF THE NOVEL “RUH ADAM” AND THE FILM “LOST HIGHWAY” WITHIN THE SCOPE OF THE INTERTEXTUALITY THEORY

The intertextuality is a theory based on the thesis “There is no unspoken word under the canopy of heaven”. Accordingly, no text of any genre whatsoever is entirely original and spoken for the first time. It certainly bears in itself the traces from texts that have previously found an expression. Although the intertextuality is a concept that dates back to old times when human starts to speak, it has been named by the postmodernism conceptualized in the 1960s. In intertextuality, every text is related to each other. The writer of the text creates his/her own text on the basis of the infrastructure created in his/her mind by those which were written before. Likewise, readers / audiences perceive different texts experienced by them by comparing with their previous experiences and establishing intertextual relations between them. In this context, the intertextuality is a multidimensional structure that includes text writers, texts and readers. In this study, Nihal Atsız’s novel, Ruh Adam (1972), and David Lynch’s film, Lost Highway, will be compared within the scope of the intertextuality theory. Common points between the both texts, one of which is from the world of literature and the other from the world of cinema, will be determined in terms of form and content. Keywords: intertextuality, Soul Man, Lost Highway, postmodernism

A Raised Bonnet on the Lost Highway: Whither Les Cleveland?

Six years have passed since Les Cleveland’s death in 2014 and next year will be the centenary of his birth. Recently, there have been two warm personal accounts of Cleveland the man and the respective writers’ personal relationships with him.1 However, amongst the obituaries published shortly after his passing, there was a tribute by Peter Ireland in which he claimed, “the reception of his work in the present day remains stalled”, and he concluded that although his “adventuring has ended . . . his work’s has just begun.”2 I would concur with the first of these claims and agree to some extent with the second. In what follows, I want to address possible reasons for this stalling by returning to the question of Cleveland’s place in photographic history and reexamining the significance of his framing within public exhibitions and related critical publications. I will argue that his position within local photographic history and intellectual culture in general needs to be clarified; and that the nature of his photography needs to analysed in more than purely local terms.

Distinguishing the Indistinguishable: Figures of Imperceptibility and Impossibility in Lost Highway and Caché

This chapter develops the account of figuration constructed in the previous chapter by means of an exploration of a particular figurative operation which it dubs "figurality by indiscernibility". Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon (1957), Michael Haneke's Caché (2005), and David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997) all contain images that are visually indistinguishable but which we come to understand to be in some sense distinct. The work of the art historian James Elkins on different kinds of "impossible" image is drawn upon in order to demonstrate the richly disorientating potential of this particular mode of figuration.

A música pop em David Lynch: canções de época em longas-metragens do diretor

Resumo Canções pop e de gêneros adjacentes dos anos 1950 e 1960 são um recurso que o diretor americano David Lynch passou a usar em seus filmes a partir de “Veludo azul” (Blue velvet, 1986) e chegou, de forma esporádica, à temporada de 2017 da série televisiva “Twin Peaks”. O objetivo deste artigo é avaliar se e o quanto tal prática reiterou nesses longas-metragens o contraste com as imagens alcançado no sound design de Alan Splet na filmografia de Lynch por meio dos efeitos sonoros, considerando-se ainda conexões desse uso com teorias do contemporâneo e da cultura pop. Para isso, são analisados os filmes “Veludo azul”, “Coração selvagem” (Wild at heart, 1990), “A estrada perdida” (Lost highway, 1997), “Cidade dos sonhos” (Mulholland Dr., 2001) e “Império dos sonhos” (Inland empire, 2006). Conclui-se que efeitos de sincronia e diacronia operam em simultaneidade, ressignificando e presentificando o passado dessas canções pop.