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This article identifies sea-burial as a topos of the early nineteenth-century imaginary that draws on both Gothic tropes and Romantic reformulations of Gothic aesthetics in order to signal a sea changed poetics of shifting dislocation, decay, and denial in the work of Felicia Hemans. The loss of a corpse at sea makes visible the extent to which any act of posthumous identification relies upon a complex network actively maintained by the living. This article will also develop our understanding of the ways in which Gothic tropes of burial might extend into specifically maritime literary cultures of the early nineteenth century. This strand of a nautical Gothic reflects not only nineteenth-century anxieties about nautical death but the corporeality of both individual and cultural memory. Such representations of sea-burial negotiate a nautical Gothic aesthetic that might propel new understanding of the relationship between poetry and the material dimensions of affective memorialization.
This book is a collection of essays that offers a new lens through which to examine Spain's cinematic production following the decades of isolation imposed by the Franco regime. The films analysed span a period of some 40 years that have been crucial in the development of Spain, Spanish democracy and Spanish cinema. The book offers a new lens to examine Spain's cinematic production following the decades of isolation imposed by the Franco regime. The figure of the auteur jostles for attention alongside other features of film, ranging from genre, intertexuality and ethics, to filmic language and aesthetics. At the heart of this project lies an examination of the ways in which established auteurs and younger generations of filmmakers have harnessed cinematic language towards a commentary on the nation-state and the politics of historical and cultural memory. The films discussed in the book encompass different genres, both popular and more select arthouse fare, and are made in different languages: English, Basque, Castilian, Catalan, and French. Regarded universally as a classic of Spanish arthouse cinema, El espíritu de la colmena/The Spirit of the Beehive has attracted a wealth of critical attention which has focused on political, historical, psychological and formal aspects of Víctor Erice's co-authored film-text. Luis Bunuel's Cet obscur objet du désir/That Obscure Object of Desire, Catalan filmmaker Ventura Pons' Ocana. Retrat Intermitent/Ocana. An Intermittent Portrait, Francisco Franco's El Dorado, Víctor Erice's El sol del membrillo/The Quince Tree Sun, and Julio Medem's Vacas/Cows are some films that are discussed.
embodies not just the trace of the body on screen, but those elements which are not traced indexically but which nevertheless form part of cultural memory.6 Laura Mulvey’s notion of a ‘delayed cinema’ from her book Death, 24x a second, observes how being able to use the pause and rewind functions using today’s technologies puts us in control of our subject and allows us to get close to our icons. Time, for Mulvey, is often viewed in terms of its ‘archivability’ (Mulvey, 2005). The body’s filmic traces, film’s contingency and the paradoxes of the capturing of the
to reflect the critical and popular acclaim afforded his most recent work to date, De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (2005). Audiard’s work reflects several of the dominant preoccupations of contemporary French cinema: an engagement with realism (the phenomenon of the ‘new new wave’), the interrogation of the construction of (cultural) memory, narratives of exclusion and déliaison sociale and a
, memorialised past is increasingly dependent upon, and recycled within, audiovisual representations such as those found in popular film. My aim is to consider how 1990s Hollywood cinema has activated a selective, revised sense of the past, and how memory approaches to film history are able to analyse this. In particular, I will stress how popular cultural memory is drawn upon as an aesthetic and commercial strategy of Hollywood
selected come from the opening decade of the twenty-first century, lies an examination of the ways in which established auteurs (Almodóvar, Garci, Saura) and younger generations of filmmakers (Cesc Gay, Alejandro Amenábar, Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo) have harnessed cinematic language towards a commentary on the nation-state and the politics of historical and cultural memory. In the age of globalisation, it is perhaps not surprising
a broader academic project to give voice to the historically silenced. Trauma Studies can thus be seen as a body of theoretical scholarship that addresses itself to cultural memory, to the modes in which traumatic historical events are representationally transmitted in time and space, to the politics of memorialising such events and experiences and to the cultural significance of vicarious modes of witnessing trauma. And as such, it is an entirely apposite discipline through which to read that most traumatic and traumatised of film genres – cinematic horror, a
There have been vigorous debates about the condition and prospects of auteur cinema in France over the last decade, debates that seem mostly to have gone unreported in anglophone criticism of francophone cinema. But these have been paralleled by a revival of international debate about the status of the auteur: in their extended chapter on auteur cinema added to the second edition of Cook's
Screening the Hollywood Rebels in 1950s Britain explores the relationship between classic American films about juvenile delinquency and British popular youth culture in the mid-twentieth century. The book examines the censorship, publicity and fandom surrounding such Hollywood films as The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, Rock Around the Clock and Jailhouse Rock alongside such British films as The Blue Lamp, Spare the Rod and Serious Charge. Intersecting with star studies and social and cultural history, this is the first book to re-vision the stardom surrounding three extraordinarily influential Hollywood stars: Marlon Brando, James Dean and Elvis Presley. By looking specifically at the meanings of these American stars to British fans, this analysis provides a logical and sustained narrative that explains how and why these Hollywood images fed into, and disrupted, British cultural life. Screening the Hollywood Rebels in 1950s Britain is based upon a wide range of sources including censorship records, both mainstream and trade newspapers and periodicals, archival accounts and memoirs, as well as the films themselves. The book is a timely intervention of film culture and focuses on key questions about screen violence and censorship, masculinity and transnational stardom, method acting and performance, Americanisation and popular post-war British culture. The book is essential reading for researchers, academics and students of film and social and cultural history, alongside general readers interested in the links between the media and popular youth culture in the 1950s.
memory as inherently oppositional, Sturken develops a concept of ‘cultural memory’ that is more varied and ambiguous, that lays stress on memory’s production through images, sites, objects and representations, but that neither inherently celebrates nor castigates manifestations of memory in the cultural terrain. Adapting her argument to events in American history and culture, she writes that