Pruning roses,producing space: Representing the social bond in the melodramas of Claude Chabrol

ABSTRACT

In a career that spanned over 50 years and as many films, Claude Chabrol regularly dissected the bourgeoisie, its modes and mores in numerous melodramas—some more conventional, others less so—including La Femme infidèle/The Unfaithful Wife (1969), Juste avant la nuit/Just Before Night Falls (1971), La Fleur du mal/The Flower of Evil (2003) and La Fille coupée en deux/The Girl Cut in Two (2007). This article examines this auteur's work in the field of a specific genre, the bourgeois melodrama, with particular attention to the recurring motif of gardening and its significance in the French context as a remarkably complex metaphor. The article focuses on the pruning of flowers in the grounds of stately homes as a long-running filmic representation of the maintenance of a socially acceptable facade masking deeply disturbing sins of the past. The article explores the issues of class and masquerade through a close reading of gardens as representations of space and as representational spaces in an interdisciplinary approach informed by Lefebvre's The Production of Space (1991), Gilman's Health and Illness (1995) and Seale's Constructing Death (1998).     

Camille Saint-Saëns's Changing Exoticism and the Interesting Case of La Foi

Saint-Saëns's exoticism—as well as his attitude toward non-Western music—evolved significantly over time. Three stages in its evolution can be identified, Fantasy, Traveloque, and Integration, the last of which can be observed in the music of his Trois Tableaux symphoniques d'après “La Foi,” which is based on the incidental music to a play set in ancient Egypt by Eugene Brieux. Through thematic transformation and the confounding of traditional expectations of exoticism, Saint-Saëns undermines the East-West dichotomy that characterizes his first two stages. At the same time, the music to La Foi reflects the composer's ideas on the role of religion in society.     

The Influence of Text—Present or Absent—in my Music

In this article I discuss the influence of text—in a broad sense—on my music. Careful elaboration of the written text (le travail d’écriture), made possible by musical notation, can be amplified in the context of computer music, where structural representations may suggest specific transformations of motives or intimate mutations of the sound itself. Certain texts have been influential to my musical options, especially the play Little Boy by Pierre Halet. The computer imposes complex mediations, whereas the voice is the closest sound source to the body: their confrontation brings a theatrical aspect, obvious in my composition Inharmonique. When texts are set to music, intelligibility is an issue. In Oscura, I introduce the spoken text in counterpoint with the song to preserve the poem's intelligibility. Words, poetic fragments, texts affect the mood of the music in L'autre face, Aventure de ligne, La Nouvelle Atlantide, Une aube sans soleil, Invisible, Mokee, The Other Isherwood.     

I Celti,la prima Europa: The Role of Celtic Myth and Celtic Music in the Construction of European Identity

Celtic music and mythology have played a crucial role in several contemporary processes of nation-building, usually addressed to stateless regions in Atlantic Europe. Nonetheless, when after the disintegration of the Soviet bloc Europe faced becoming a unified market (with the Maastricht Treaty), the Celts of the Iron Age appeared as the perfect ethnic explanation to endorse the idea of a rooted communal past. The lavish exhibition held in Venice in 1991—with the meaningful name I Celti: La prima Europa—became the official celebration of the new identity. The list of Celtic expansion after Venice 1991 is endless, music being a crucial component because of its popularity and communicativeness.     

Musicality of Language and “Corporeal Writing” in La Tragédie de Salomé (1907)

This article explores the seemingly paradoxical role of dance when the aesthetics of a literary movement such as Symbolism aspires to a wordless genre—a paradox articulated by Stéphane Mallarmé in his famous coinage “corporeal writing.” I propose a reevaluation of Symbolist thought on the musicality of language as a possible means of reconciling the disparity between pure words and pure movement. A Symbolist conception of the arts as analogous to one another allowed for poetic writing, through the intervening medium of sound, to approach dance through an integration of meaning and movement. Using the ballet-pantomime La Tragédie de Salomé (1907) as a case study, I argue that Florent Schmitt's score transfers the essence of language into music that, when accompanied by the synesthetic performance of Loïe Fuller, evoked the multisensory theatrical experience to which Symbolist dramaturgy aspired.     

La Captive and the power of love

Abstract

Many films dealing with sexuality do so through pushing ever further into a physical realism, but others—like La Captive/The Captive (Akerman, 2000) and Dut yeung nin wa/In the Mood for Love (Kar-Wei, 2000)—look to emphasize the subtler levels of the psychological. Through a series of retreats from conventional notions of realism, Chantal Akerman's La Captive abstracts thought from action and arrives at a work that tells us much about the oblique necessity of the obsessional. Working through the (direct) influence of Proust and, less intentionally, Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), the director finds a way of continually asking questions of the central character Simon, his lover Ariane, and by extension the audience as we're made aware that the object of affection is rather less significant than the subjective feelings we choose to attach to it. Akerman subsequently offers perhaps the most ambitious example yet of what we might call the ‘chaste enquiry’.     

Animals,ableism, activism

STATEMENT/ABSTRACT

My work explores two prominent visual discourses of disability—freakshow imagery and medical photography. These visual narratives see disability as sensational, horrifying, tragic and in need of cure. I interrupt these stereotypical narratives in order to present disability as something else—a political issue. My disability work, which includes large and small scale banners and prints, sits at the intersection of disability studies, medical intervention, sideshow history and animality in both a humorous and subversive manner, challenging the dominant ways disability has historically been viewed and interpreted in American culture.

Animals and animality are central themes in my work. In my series of paintings of animals in factory farms I paint animals who are not seen as individuals but simply as products. These paintings transform images usually dismissed as animal ethics propaganda into memorials. They are works of portraiture.

My practice often reveals the interconnections between the oppression of animals and the oppression of disabled people. I am interested in how ableism affects non-human animals, and in turn, how the oppression of animals perpetuates ableism. I explore these issues in much of my work, including in Animals With Arthrogryposis (a self-portrait with farmed animals who also have my disability).     

Pages from a re/claimed book

STATEMENT/ABSTRACT

‘Faulty Wiring’, ‘Brainwaves Kaleidoscope’ and ‘Words…More Beautiful’ are pages taken from an altered book project in which I explore questions about how the experience of learning disability is portrayed and replicated. Using a famous 1961 neurological disorders textbook, I first journaled the book, over-writing my thoughts, memories and reactions over the clinical text. Next I used a variety of media to make new imagery; stripping, painting, collaging these pages created fresh ideas of learning disability that exist alongside and over those originally portrayed in the book.

This project comes from a deep appreciation of books. Many people would be surprised how much I value books if they knew about my learning disability. The learning disabled have a long history of being stereotyped as unintelligent and mentally deficient—not usually qualities associated with a bookworm. However, the negative stereotype also does not fully fit my experiences either. I am more than this simplistic image portrayed by the media and history and I know my family and learning disabled peers are too. My art was born from frustration and lack of identification with these reductive stereotypes. I wanted a way to expand representations of this experience in a way that would be scholarly as well as accessible and engaging. So wanting to know more, it was natural for me to turn first to books—although perhaps not in the traditional manner.

Altering books is a form of mixed media artwork that changes a book from its original state into something different. Just as this 1961 neurological textbook represents knowledge and its traditional vehicle of scholarship, building collages on its pages changes the meanings of what others say we should be—numbers, clinical definitions, case studies, deviations from norms and neurological disorders—and makes it into something new. For me, altering this with biographical images becomes a powerful metaphor to highlight the ability in learning disability: I have the ability to insert myself into scholarship in unique ways, as well as, to actively refute overly simplified, binary stereotypes of being learning disabled.     

The masochistic fantasy made flesh: Michael Haneke's La Pianiste as melodrama

Abstract

Since its release in 2001, Michael Haneke's La Pianiste has been the subject of conflicting responses and readings from various critical camps. Taking Robin Wood's 2002 critical analysis of the film as its starting point, this article explores how the film might be read as a contemporary take on the melodrama, or ‘women's film’. The two focal points of Wood's analysis—the film's reliance on a musical motif and its foregrounding of bourgeois society—can be used to situate the film within a generic context. While Haneke's film aligns itself in many ways with the melodramatic tradition, the ultimate unspoken question of the film is not, however, the taboo subject of women's sexuality (Creed), nor the capitalist relations of production and class (Kleinhans) but the spectator's relationship to modern society and to the cinematic apparatus.     

A CULT FILM BY PROXY

This paper examines the film Space is the Place, a 1974 science‐fiction film starring jazz maverick Sun Ra. I determine why the film has attained cult status, and demonstrate how an understanding of Sun Ra's particular belief system helps to comprehend this text. Space is the Place has become a cult movie, I argue, due to its reception trajectory, but also because of its particular aesthetic features. In terms of the former, I pay particular attention to changing intellectual attitudes towards African American identities, as well as Sun Ra's increasing cultic status across a range of musical fandoms. It is this status within the musical world that leads to Space is the Place becoming what I call a ‘cult film by proxy’. Nevertheless, I also argue that textual features—such as excess, generic hybridity and ‘trashiness’—cement and contribute to its continuing cult reputation.     

Rhizome in the shadows: transplantation of Korean Running Man in the rise of screen-capitalism

ABSTRACT

In a potentially volatile policy environment as Mainland China, Korean Wave (hallyu) has penetrated into and continued survival in China through a new pattern of remakes in the context of bilateral tensions. Through a comparative examination of the Korean variety television programme Running Man and its Chinese remake Hurry up, Brothers, as a case study of the remakes, I explore how hallyu has become an amnyu (undercurrent) in the Chinese context. In this article, I conceptualize screen-capitalism to analyse and theorize emergent challenges and possibilities in a global context where collaborations flourish while conflicts remain, arguing for ‘transplantability’ as a rhizomatic quality that allows one screen culture to be connected or plugged into others outside of it, and that can be efficiently compatible with heterogeneous elements—other cultural, political, ideological, and linguistic communities—in diverse modes.     

History of resistance/resistance of history: Godard's Éloge de l'amour (2001)

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which some of the key insights of Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998) regarding the relations between film, history, thought and memory are taken up and used in the director's latest feature Éloge de l'amour (2001). Criticizing the commodification of history and memory by an American-led culture industry, Godard attempts to find a new way of filming history—or approaching history on film—that will preserve the alterity of the historical object. I discuss the ways in which the form of Éloge de l'amour—both its narrative structure and the composition of individual shots—takes its cue from this historical object (the past, the memory) which can only resist appropriation and settled interpretation. I suggest further that Godard's conception of love in this film—an unfulfilled promise that nevertheless haunts our memory and transforms our life—is in turn a response to this pervasive concern with the unfinished work of history.     

“The Times Do Not Permit”: Moerane,South Africa,Lesotho, and Fatše La Heso

Abstract

The symphonic poem Fat?e La Heso (My Country) was composed in 1941 by Michael Mosoeu Moerane (1904–1980) as a requirement for completing a BMus degree curriculum through Rhodes University College, which in those days was a satellite campus of the University of South Africa (Unisa). This article argues that both the writing of this work and its subsequent reception history have been adversely affected by various factors, beginning with the fact that Moerane was the first black South African orchestral composer and there have been almost no others since. This was Moerane's only work for full orchestra and he is better known as a composer of choral music in tonic solfa notation, but for historical reasons, the fields of African choral and European orchestral composition have not coincided. The work reflects Moerane's Pan- African sympathies and is avowedly nationalistic. Information about the work and about Moerane has always been scant; and finally, Moerane tried in vain to get the work published. He reacted suspiciously when Percival Kirby—with whom he had previously corresponded about the work—began to ask him personal questions in 1966, saying, “The times do not permit.” In this article, the genesis of Fat?e La Heso is explained, its structure and relations to African themes are described, and its reception history is explored, in order to promote a better and fairer understanding of this work's personal, historical, political, and cultural significance.     

Lindbergh’s Engine: Hollywood’s Transition to Sound and the Aviation Film

This article examines the history of the aviation film in light of the genre’s contributions to the evolution of ‘the talkie.’ Starting with the first sound newsreel of Charles Lindbergh’s take-off, the aviation film became a crucial but understudied site for the testing and development of sound technologies, as well as for the teaching of sound film literacy. Through readings of three classic aviation films—Wings (1927), Hell’s Angels (1930) and Dawn Patrol (1930 and 1938), as well as one outlier—Dorothy Arzner’s Christopher Strong (1933)—this article examines how the sound of flight was codified and argues that these films participated in what Miriam Hansen has termed Hollywood’s ‘vernacular modernism’ by popularising previously élite listening practices.     

The pedagogical aesthetic and formative experience: educating for aletheic imagination in the fine arts curriculum

Abstract

This article attempts to articulate the role of what I call the ‘aletheic imagination’ within contemporary aesthetic education and the fine arts curriculum, broadly conceived. In proposing such an idea I intend it to assist arts educators to undertake a more satisfactory pedagogical use of the aesthetic in theory and practice. Enriching the imagination by way of aletheia — ‘of one who speaks truthfully or frankly’ enabling a liberating syntax in aesthetic practice — encourages educators to highlight the multifaceted presence of the aesthetic in students’ artistic awareness. The aesthetic is the opening up of the immanent potential for meaning: an endorsement of perception which generates the communicative possibilities of imagination in creative action. Here I offer a critique and reappraisal of John Dewey's naturalistic metaphysic of thinking and experience in relation to education in contrast with Lev Vygotsky's transformative psychological aesthetic. I argue that their stances may contribute to a contemporary revitalization of aesthetic education and, conceived alongside the paradigm of the aletheic imagination, promote a more discerning visual arts philosophy and practice for our times.     

SHOT/COUNTER‐SHOT

The following paper is composed, not unlike a diptych, of two parts—‘Shot/Counter‐shot’. While the first part concentrates on what I take to be the dominant formal aspects of The Sopranos—seriality, citationality, and self‐reflexivity as well as the related question of ‘postmodern’ pastiche—the second part tackles what I take to be the dominant issue with respect to content: sexuality as well as its intimate double, aggressivity, and the ‘drive’ most closely associated with it, death. In general, the dual or dialectical composition of the piece is intended to reflect not only one of the fundamental telefilmic tropes—the so‐called ‘shot/reverse shot’—but the psychoanalytic scenario itself, which is structured, as in The Sopranos, around the shot/counter‐shot of the ‘talking cure’. As Tony Soprano, the quintessential ‘gangster’ analysand, says at one point to his psychoanalytically trained analyst, Dr Jennifer Melfi, laying bare his very real fears about engaging in the sort of emotionally inflammatory (and, for him, suspiciously ‘feminine’) colloquy that epitomizes psychoanalysis: ‘Is this a woman thing? You ask me how I'm feeling, I tell you how I'm feeling, and [then you] torch me for it?’     

Osvald Sirén,A History of Later Chinese Painting

The famous Bacchanal (Fig. I) in the National Gallery, attributed to Giovanni Bellini and — according to Vasari — finished by Titian,¹ shows one detail that is of special interest to the musicologist.     

Aesthetics of ambivalence: Dan Almagor and rock ideology in Israeli musical theatre

This article is about the emergence of the 1960s rock musical in Israel as an ambivalent response to Zionist ideology. I demonstrate that in the Israeli context rock music’s countercultural ethos has been just as integral to the genre’s adoption as have been its stylistic innovations. The ‘folk authenticity’ signified by this music empowered playwrights and songwriters like Dan Almagor to simultaneously mobilise and undermine signifiers of the dominant ideology, giving rise to an ‘aesthetics of ambivalence’. In this article, I examine two of Almagor’s musicals—Once There Was a Hasid (1968) and My Jerusalem (1969)—in order to assess how the playwright navigated these cultural tensions. In so doing, I place analysis of the shows’ production and reception in conversation with ethnographic interviews. In light of these materials, I argue that when popular music travels globally, ideologies about music’s power to shape political discourse, rather than its stylistic innovations, often govern local adaptations of the globalised style.     

Writing on music or axes to grind: road rage and musical community

In a world of alienation and road rage, music is valued not only as offering as model of community but also as a means of social education: the values of music as social good inform both teaching and writing on music. In this article, I examine ways in which values inform writing on music, arguing that they are often built into its basic metaphors, and that results in what might be called a discursive shallowness. I discuss different types of musical advocacy and the sometimes hidden agendas—the axes to grind of my title—that motivate them, illustrating this by comparing English- and French-language responses to my book Music: A Very Short Introduction. Finally, I discuss the sometimes overconfident association of analysis and value judgement, arguing for a rehabilitation of the ideal—however imperfectly achieved—of a value-neu tral discourse about music: the more modest our aims as writers about music, I conclude, the more likely we are to achieve them.     

The Gesture of Memorial: Ratmansky,Shostakovich, and the Chamber Symphony

In 2013, Alexei Ratmansky's Chamber Symphony premiered as part of his acclaimed Shostakovich Trilogy (2012–2013). In this article, I examine how Chamber Symphony demonstrates a political and memorial orientation toward the Soviet past. The creation of the work was prompted by an autobiographical interpretation of the ballet's music—an orchestrated version of the composer's Eighth Quartet. I analyze the choreographic devices Ratmansky uses to represent the memories of a central male character, presumably “Shostakovich.” I argue that Ratmansky's choreographed memorial widens in scope to include others who have suffered from artistic repression. Moreover, through his innovative movement vocabulary and dynamics, Ratmansky inverts the dominant, heroic language of Soviet-era ballet.