Search results
Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work (1976) has proven challenging since its publication because readers and critics have trouble classifying it. The challenge may be related to a common feature of Baldwin criticism, namely a tendency to compare late career works to early ones and to find them lacking: the experimental nature of later works of nonfiction like No Name in the Street (1972), The Devil Finds Work, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985) does not square easily with the more conventional essays that made Baldwin famous in his early years. I attempt to reframe The Devil Finds Work not through a comparison to other Baldwin essays, but rather through a comparison to his fiction, specifically the novel Giovanni’s Room. I posit that a greater appreciation for Devil can result from thinking of it as a story, specifically the story of a failed love affair.
The author travels to St.-Paul-de-Vence, the site of Baldwin’s final decades, with the intention of understanding expatriation and/or exile more deeply. The intention of this visit is to fill in some of the gaps in Baldwin’s official biographies, which do not tend to dwell on his time spent in Provence as much as his time in Paris, Turkey, New York, and elsewhere. By interviewing a woman who knew Baldwin well during those years, the author manages to add new layers to his understanding of Baldwin’s late years, but finally arrives at the understanding that writing (rather than analyzing) is the main goal of the expatriate writer. Inspired by Baldwin’s muse, he stops contemplating his subject and gets to work, finally connecting the act of writing to expatriation by doing it.
more than 20,000 concerts, a third of which benefitted humanitarian causes. While Brena and Abramović presented as white East European women making it big beyond the Yugoslav borders—Brena as a pop folk icon and Abramović as a communist expatriate and acclaimed performance artist—Redžepova's body signaled a much less white and more exotic and discriminated against constituent body of people in Yugoslavia, namely the Roma population. As such, Redžepova's emancipatory strategies were subject to an additional barrier—not just the communist East, but struggles around
‘expatriate eye that defined the new British modernism on the 1960s’ 29 with a roll call that includes Losey’s and Antonioni’s films alongside Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing (1965) and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), an intense study of a sexually repressed and lonely young woman’s descent into madness. Orr develops his analysis of the expatriate eye by way of ‘a parallax view of British culture where it provides antithetical readings of image, action and motive within a single narrative’. 30 This constitutes something more than David Bordwell’s ‘aesthetics
about violence and dislocation ( Repulsion , Performance ), the centrality of outsider perceptions of the city (expatriate filmmakers or filmmakers new to London) and themes that recur frequently (a bunker-like reliance on the home, conservative tropes to do with the fear in the interloper or the crowd, fears of entrapment). There is a comparable discourse focused on inner spaces from British writers of the time, a trend that illustrates how the outside version of private space coincides with observations by long
your vision.’ 14 Much of this can be applied to Gilliam, and he also left America for broadly political reasons. But his dissatisfaction in the 1960s mirrored the views of many of his generation, and he left America on his own terms, rather than under political pressure. Gilliam could and did return to make films in America. In Said’s terms he was a critical expatriate rather than an exile. 15 But Gilliam’s defence
France to dominant French cultures and norms, but also to a multiplicity of cultural groups, diasporic neighbourhoods, migrant employment opportunities and public institutions. The number one tourist destination in the world, it is not only a magnet for French and migrant groups, but for expatriates, exchange students, diplomats and other creative or specialised workers from around the world. Chapter 4 (‘Capital centres: Polisse and Entre les murs’) explores the ways in which once-marginalised languages can occupy this contentious urban space, and renegotiate the
complex ways with what might be called its countercultural characteristics, its affinities with the international popular youth culture of the period. The film’s interest in this narcotic or psychedelic branch of the avant-garde as a complement to what Jonathan Eburne calls the ‘esoteric avant-garde’ is in part also a critical commentary on the influx of expatriates who moved to Mexico in search of spiritual psychedelic experiences. 31 This counterculture invasion arguably impacted the suspicion of jipismo , the Mexican hippie movement of la Onda , during the Luis
work and duties in former areas of colonial administration is often a powerful and distinctive expression of family life as experienced elsewhere. Expatriate non-working wives based at home might also have more time for filming while spouses were working. Domestic scenes of young children and family servants abound from some colonial postings overseas, shot by both parents, depending in part upon the colonial context
, Alexander Korda, born Sandor Laszlo Kellner, and his much-travelled cinematic troupe, principally fellow expatriates like his brothers, Zoltan and Vincent, as well as scenarist Lajos Biro, finally fetched up in England at the turn of the 1930s. ‘If Korda had not come to England, the British cinema of the thirties,’ noted Karol Kulik, one of his biographers, ‘might well have taken a different course. For the rest of his career, Korda brought ambition, recognition, imagination and glamour to an industry that needed his optimism and his showman’s talent.’ 5 The essential