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It has been widely asserted that nationhood is inseparable from narration. This vague claim may be clarified by understanding that nationalism is bound up with the universal prototypical narrative structures of heroic, romantic, and sacrificial tragi-comedy. This essay considers an historically important case of the emplotment of nationalism - the sacrificial organization of German nationalism between the two world wars. It examines one exemplary instance of this emplotment, F. W. Murnau‘s Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror (1922). However unintentionally, Nosferatu represents the vampire in a way that is cognitively continuous with Nazi representations of Jews. The films sacrificial emplotment of vampirism is, in turn, continuous with Nazi policies. That continuity places the film in a larger discourse that helped to make Nazi policies possible.
In Gothic and Romantic writing, dreadful uncertainty often appears in the figure of the Wandering Jew. In Gothic novels, this ambiguous figure appears at moments when systems of meaning and belief are suspended or have collapsed into despair. The Wanderer produces the terror occasioned by its uncertain status and reinforces the structures of meaning that return in the movement away from its dreadful uncertainty. Romanticism founds itself upon this moment of uncertainty. Desires for a new order lead the Romantic writer through the collapse of the old order and into the moment of dread that the Wanderer represents. In their search for grounds of hope, Romantic writers must either face this figure of uncertainty or risk becoming entangled in the same systems of values they seek to repudiate and transcend.
facilities. I had the answer. I would use the time researching and planning some film proposals. A few ideas had been bouncing around my head for some months, but one in particular kept drawing me back again and again. That was Communism and the Jews. When I grew up in postwar London one of the political ideas still floating around at the time was that somehow Jews as people, and Bolshevism as a movement, were somehow dramatically intertwined. However, I was intelligent enough to know that this idea of Judeo-Bolshevism, or that Communism was a Jewish conspiracy, was a myth
confronting the increasingly well-documented complicity of Hungarians in the persecution and murder of the majority of the nation's Jews. In the memorable phrase of Daniel Goldhagen, many Hungarians, particularly members of the Arrow Cross, a long-established fascist party that seized control of the government in November 1944, have turned out to be ‘willing executioners’. Arrow Cross gendarmes, as many survivor accounts attest, were enthusiastic participants in the speeded-up management of the final solution in the waning months of the war, even as the increasing dominance
common ( 1968 : 98). Dreams of shame and guilt, for instance, in which antisemitic hatred is internalised by Jews, are ubiquitous in The Third Reich , including those in which dreamers appear to have visibly ‘Semitic’ features, and in which dark hair and complexions come to figure in opposition to ‘all that is blonde’ ( 1968 : 87). As counterparts to those of fascist resistance, these dreams often disturbed their dreamers
guerre 1939–1945 ) was republished in French in 2019. This work predates Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams ( 1966 ) – perhaps the better known collection of nocturnal visions induced by the Nazi regime in the interwar period. 2 Collected between 1939 and 1947 among French civilians of the hinterland, French soldiers cut from their regiment, foreigners from enemy and Allied countries, Jews who had been hunted or
Golder’s weakening heartbeat, and a soft violin can be heard on the soundtrack. When Golder dies, the violin subsides and the ambient sounds of waves and the ship’s engine build to a peak. For many scholars, the most troubling aspect of David Golder is its anti-Semitism. Garçon (1984) notes that negative depictions of Jews were commonplace in 1930s French cinema. Lynn Higgins (2012) writes that Duvivier gives Jews an ‘oppressive visual presence’; Soifer, an older German Jew who walks on tiptoe to save shoe leather, is given a hooked nose, a high voice, and an
space, the decision to shoot on a sound stage imbues the film with an unsettling claustral quality. Production designer Serge Piménoff and cinematographer Nicholas Hayer craft a series of grim, desolate scenes that appear almost noir-ishly abstract. At one point, Alice and Alfred discuss their future together near a church where canticles are being sung. Later, Alice discovers Hire’s secret identity, and we are introduced 9 ‘are an allegory for the fate of the 76,000 Jews deported from France under the Vichy regime’. 147 1946–56: Darkness and light 147 to
This is the first book-length study of one of the most significant of all British television writers, Jimmy McGovern. The book provides comprehensive coverage of all his work for television including early writing on Brookside, major documentary dramas such as Hillsborough and Sunday and more recent series such as The Street and Accused.
Whilst the book is firmly focused on McGovern’s own work, the range of his output over the period in which he has been working also provides something of an overview of the radical changes in television drama commissioning that have taken place during this time. Without compromising his deeply-held convictions McGovern has managed to adapt to an ever changing environment, often using his position as a sought-after writer to defy industry trends.
The book also challenges the notion of McGovern as an uncomplicated social realist in stylistic terms. Looking particularly at his later work, a case is made for McGovern employing a greater range of narrative approaches, albeit subtly and within boundaries that allow him to continue to write for large popular audiences.
Finally it is worth pointing to the book’s examination of McGovern’s role in recent years as a mentor to new voices, frequently acting as a creative producer on series that he part-writes and part brings through different less-experienced names.
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.