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Rehabilitation Administration, stated in his November 1943 acceptance address: ‘We must be guided not alone by the compelling force of human sentiments but also by dictates of sound common sense and of mutual interest.’ 8 However, it is to those ‘human sentiments’ that Hollywood cinema’s ‘sorrowful spectacle’ of suffering children (sorrowful meaning both showing and causing grief) is most likely (and
The Good Friday Agreement is widely celebrated as a political success story, one that has brought peace to a region previously synonymous across the globe with political violence. The truth, as ever, is rather more complicated than that. In many respects, the era of the peace process has seen Northern Irish society change almost beyond recognition. Those incidents of politically motivated violence that were once commonplace have become thankfully rare, and a new generation has emerged whose identities and interests are rather more fluid and cosmopolitan than those of their parents. In many other regards, however, Northern Ireland continues to operate in the long shadow of its own turbulent recent past. Those who were victims of violence, as well as those who were its agents, have often been consigned to the margins of a society clearly still struggling to cope with the traumas of the Troubles. Furthermore, the transition to ‘peace’ has revealed the existence of new, and not so new, forms of violence in Northern Irish society, not least those directed towards women, ethnic minorities and the poor. In Northern Ireland a generation after Good Friday, we set out to capture the complex, and often contradictory, realities that have emerged more than two decades on from the region’s vaunted peace deal. Across nine original essays, the book provides a critical and comprehensive reading of a society that often appears to have left its violent past behind but at the same time remains subject to its gravitational pull.
11 Silver screen sedition: auteurship and exploitation in the history of punk cinema Bill Osgerby ‘Will your school be next?’: mischief and mayhem at Vince Lombardi High Teen rebellion is a force to be reckoned with at Vince Lombardi High School. The setting for the punk-musical-comedy Rock ’n’ Roll High School (1979), Lombardi High has seen a succession of principals driven to despair by the recalcitrant students. Led by Riff Randell (P. J. Soles) – a nonstop party girl and fervid fan of punk stalwarts, the Ramones – the school kids are a font of adolescent
15 Between modernity and marginality: Celtic Tiger cinema Ruth Barton By the late 1990s, it was obvious that Irish film production had changed sufficiently for the phrase ‘Celtic Tiger cinema’ to signal something new. Although the term is used consensually, its exact definition is elusive. In keeping with the debate around what we knew and what we said during the boom, I will be considering later in this chapter the various political and social interpretations the films offer. In particular, I will be discussing how themes of social and geographical marginality
Confino (i.e., internal exile) was a malleable form of imprisonment during the Fascist ventennio. Confinement allowed Mussolini to bypass the judiciary thereby placing prisoners outside magistrates’ jurisdiction. The Regime applied it to political dissidents, ethnic and religious minorities, gender nonconforming people, and mafiosi, among others. Recent political discourse in and beyond Italy has drawn on similar rationales to address perceived threats against the State. This study examines confino from a historical, political, social, and cultural perspective. It provides a broad overview of the practice and it also examines particular cases and situations. In addition to this historical assessment, it is the first to analyse confinement as a cultural practice through representations in literature (e.g., letters, memoirs, historical fiction) and film. English-language publications often overlook confino and its representations. Italian critical literature, instead, often speaks in purely historical terms or is rooted in partisan perspectives. This book demonstrates that internal exile is not purely political: it possesses a cultural history that speaks to the present. The scope of this study, therefore, is to provide a cultural reading that makes manifest aspects of confino that have been appropriated by contemporary political discourse. Although directed towards students and specialists of Italian history, literature, film, and culture, the study offers a coherent portrait of confino accessible to those with a general interest in Fascism.
from almost three decades of conflict. In contrast, scriptwriters for both the big and the small screen have become ever more prepared to summon the ‘ghosts’ that continue to haunt a region with a notoriously violent recent history. Around the tenth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement (hereafter GFA), there began to emerge a series of dramas for cinema and television that focused ever more explicitly upon those – and perhaps that – lost during the conflict and the transition to peace. In calling our attention to the
served to initiate. That said, the two earliest H-Block films do display some pitfalls in their genre, inasmuch as they allow the conventions of what might loosely be termed ‘mainstream cinema’ to mask the intricacies of their subject matter. It is arguably, therefore, in McQueen’s account that we get a fuller sense of the historical shifts animated by the H-Blocks. In its experimental form, Hunger captures something of the fragmented and non-modern dialectics personified by the nonconforming prisoners. That this film eventually reverts to a more familiar and mythic
demographers, or poets from political scientists, are less easily insisted on in the productions of these different communities. Academic accounts raise the stated aspirations, expectations, and descriptions from particular locations and transmute them into broader, general accounts, which in their turn can inform the more particular. This book is no exception to that wide community of argument, explanation, and action which provides an unbroken though sometimes bumpy continuity from the vernacular to the academic. Plays, poetry, cinema, novels, cartoons, or theatre are not
; Paris-Soir launched a subscription to purchase a Maison de la Paix for the Chamberlains in the French countryside. 90 At the same time, the post-Munich period saw much soul searching and introspection, in tandem with a desire to resume normal life. The Paris police reported numerous people leaving flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, whilst Parisian cinemas and theatres reported a surge in post-crisis visitors. 91 In Britain, many newspapers began questioning the prudence of Munich, whilst a series of autumn by-elections provided worrying indications for
engineer a “forgetting” of traumas that they o riginally inflicted on victims’, a question of particular interest to the case of internal exile during Fascism with regard to recent discussions of exile as vacation.9 Ultimately, however, remnants of the trauma-inducing event return in the guise of symptoms, and Kaplan looks towards the cinema, with a particular eye on melodrama, to investigate ways in which a culture ‘can unconsciously address its traumatic hauntings’.10 Most of the films in the corpus of Italian cinematic works dealing with internal exile, we argue