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Filmmaker Karen Thorsen gave us James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, the award-winning documentary that is now considered a classic. First broadcast on PBS/American Masters in August, 1989—just days after what would have been Baldwin’s 65th birthday—the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1990. It was not the film Thorsen intended to make. Beginning in 1986, she and Baldwin had been collaborating on a very different film project: a “nonfiction feature” about the history, research, and writing of Baldwin’s next book, Remember This House. It was also going to be a film about progress: how far we had come, how far we still had to go, before we learned to trust our common humanity. The following memoir explores how and why their collaboration began. This recollection will be serialized in two parts, with the second installment appearing in James Baldwin Review’s seventh issue, due out in the fall of 2021.
Filmmaker Karen Thorsen gave us James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, the award-winning documentary that is now considered a classic. First broadcast on PBS/American Masters in August, 1989—just days after what would have been Baldwin’s sixty-fifth birthday—the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1990. It was not the film Thorsen intended to make. Beginning in 1986, Baldwin and Thorsen had been collaborating on a very different film project: a “nonfiction feature” about the history, research, and writing of Baldwin’s next book, “Remember This House.” It was also going to be a film about progress: about how far we had come, how far we still have to go, before we learn to trust our common humanity. But that project ended abruptly. On 1 December 1987, James Baldwin died—and “Remember This House,” book and film died with him. Suddenly, Thorsen’s mission changed: the world needed to know what they had lost. Her alliance with Baldwin took on new meaning. The following memoir—the second of two serialized parts—explores how and why their collaboration began. The first installment appeared in the sixth volume of James Baldwin Review, in the fall of 2020; the next stage of their journey starts here.
Rather than write a classic biography of James Baldwin in the last cycle of his life—from his arrival in 1970 as a black stranger in the all-white medieval village of Saint-Paul, until his death there in 1987—I sought to discover the author through the eyes of people who knew him in this period. With this optic, I sought a wide variety of people who were in some way part of his life there: friends, lovers, barmen, writers, artists, taxi drivers, his doctors and others who retained memories of their encounters with Baldwin on all levels. Besides the many locals, contact was made with a number of Baldwin’s further afield cultural figures including Maya Angelou, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Angela Davis, Bill Wyman, and others. There were more than seventy interviews in person in places as distant as Paris, New York or Istanbul and by telephone spread over four years during the preparatory research and writing of the manuscript. Many of the recollections centred on “at home with Jimmy” or dining at his “Welcome Table.”
The Great War still haunts us. This book draws together examples of the ‘aesthetic pacifism’ practised during the Great War by such celebrated individuals as Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon and Bertrand Russell. It also tells the stories of those less well known who shared the attitudes of the Bloomsbury Group when it came to facing the first ‘total war’. The five-year research for this study gathered evidence from all the major archives in Great Britain and abroad in order to paint a complete picture of this unique form of anti-war expression. The narrative begins with the Great War's effect on philosopher-pacifist Bertrand Russell and Cambridge University.
in the 1970s and 1980s. Undertaking a close reading of the two films’ funding processes in this chapter, I investigate the ambiguous sexual citizenship (Bell and Binnie, 2000; Evans, 1993) shaped by the interplay between formal sexual policymaking and lesbian film production in Sweden at a moment in time when 196 196 Vulnerability and cultural policy homosexuality was on the threshold of becoming recognised as a civil rights issue. Drawing from original archival research and interviews, I shed light on the rhetorical twists and euphemisms through which
content. The case studies will be the BFI Player, the online portal of the British Film Institute, and the Swedish website Filmarkivet.se, which has created access to some of the digitised collections from the Swedish National Film Archives, administered by the Swedish Film Institute (SFI) and the National Library of Sweden (KB). As points of contrast and comparison, I will draw in the findings of my research on two queer ‘minor archives’:1 Bildwechsel, based in Hamburg, and the Lesbian Home Movie Project in Maine (Brunow, 2015; forthcoming). Heritage institutions, such
curricula, and the arrival of missionaries, especially members of the London Missionary Society (LMS). The full impact of the Anglicisation of Cape discourse can perhaps be traced to the publication of the Scottish missionary Dr John Philip’s Researches in South Africa (1828), which could be said to be the country’s first anti-slavery text as well as its first ‘minority’ report. In the text, not only did Philip equate the treatment of the Indigenous Khoesan to slavery, but he also charged the settlers with general inhumanity towards their indentured servants and a
. As well as the extraordinariness of his character, it was this apparent paradox which lay within Sassoon and, I began to realise, many others, which I wanted to explore when I began the research that forms the basis for this book. My earlier undergraduate research on the attitude of the Bloomsbury Group to the Great War had told me that, far from all opposing the conflict as one, as generally believed, the individuals who constituted this most famous circle of friends reacted in many different ways to the coming of war. Some of the younger ‘members’, such as the
: 217), a statement that fundamentally informs this study. There is no doubt Beckett’s oeuvre profits from readings that make sense of its complex standing in the world of ideas – it has been successfully researched within a number of contemporary and historical paradigms. The present study takes Beckett at his word, by assuming there is something worth exploring in his work primarily about feeling. In this reading, I attempt to fill what I regard to be somewhat of a lacuna in Beckett Studies: an undervaluation of the powerful, complex emotional states that form the
. For myself, the non-integrated childhoods of Beowulf have facilitated my own lack of critical care for the foundling Scyld and the orphan Beowulf. Despite being parent to a daughter, prior to the births of Carmela and Mary Ellard I had kept my research, my teaching activities, and my scholarly writing at a distance from children and, consequently, from the infant and child lives of Scyld and Beowulf. By letting Beowulf 's babies share narrative space with my own, I have learned to take seriously the infant lives and childhood experiences of Scyld and Beowulf and