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2 The Massacre of the Innocents: infanticide and solace in the seventeenth-century Low Countries Stijn Bussels and Bram Van Oostveldt In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, many writers, dramatists and visual artists from the Low Countries told the biblical story of the Massacre of the Innocents. The dreadful story of Herod’s slaughter, from which Jesus narrowly escaped, had already been popular for centuries, but in this period it was represented remarkably often in the Dutch Republic, as well as in the Spanish Netherlands. The many
This article reveals how screenwriter Stephen Volk‘s idea for a sequel to The Innocents (1961, Jack Clayton) became, over the course of fifteen years, the British horror film The Awakening (2011, Nick Murphy). It examines practitioner interviews to reflect on creative labour in the British film industry, while also reorientating the analysis of British horror film to the practices of pre-production, specifically development. The research reveals that female protagonist Florence Cathcart was a major problem for the project and demonstrates how the Florence character changed throughout the development process. Repeatedly rewritten and ultimately restrained by successive male personnel, her character reveals persistent, problematic perceptions of gender in British horror filmmaking.
entanglements between visual media and humanitarianism. Meanwhile, other historians, international relations scholars, and political theorists have shed much light on the visual politics of aid, including works on the innocent figure of the child to depoliticize controversial contexts and build empathetic responses to distant suffering ( Burman, 1994 ; Campbell, 2012 ; Fehrenbach, 2015 ; Gigliotti, 2018 ; Gorin, 2015 ; Taithe, 2010 ), the dehistoricization and feminization of the refugee
credits Eglantyne Jebb, who co-founded the Save the Children Fund in 1919, with the ‘innovation’ of pushing beyond the focus on children for national reform projects to ‘recast them as universal symbols and the valued building blocks of a peaceful, internationalist future’ (177). By WWII, images of malnourished children had ‘popularized the notion of “the civilian” as imagined through the figure of the innocent endangered child’ (191). This ‘interpretive lens
This book explores why Jack Clayton had made so few films and why most of them failed to find a large audience. It examines the kind of criticism they generated, sometimes adulatory but sometimes dismissive and even condescending. The book hopes to throw light on certain tendencies and developments within the film industry and of film criticism, the British film industry and film criticism in particular. The fact that Clayton's films fit David Bordwell's paradigm of the art film is one explanation why producers had difficulty with him and why mainstream cinema found his work hard to place and assimilate. Clayton's pictorial eye has sometimes antagonised critics: they often take exception to some aspect of his mise-en-scene. Clayton had come to prominence with Room at the Top, around the time of the British 'Free Cinema' movement and immediately prior to the so-called British 'new-wave' films of the early 1960s from directors such as Tony Richardson and John Schlesinger. Thorold Dickinson's evocation of the Russian atmosphere and, in particular, his use of suspenseful soundtrack to suggest ghostly visitation undoubtedly had an influence on Jack Clayton's style in both The Bespoke Overcoat and The Innocents. The critical controversy concerning the status of Jack Clayton as director and artist is probably at its most intense over The Pumpkin Eater. Clayton stressed the importance of an opening that established right away the situation of 'a woman in crisis' but wanted to delay the Harrods scene so as to build up an atmosphere of suspense.
5 Unravelling the binaries: The Innocent and Black Dogs In the next two novels, the private–public nexus is extended in different ways. Both works engage with international politics, and particularly with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. In this respect, The Innocent and Black Dogs, taken together, represent a significant phase of political writing. At the same time, there is a retreat from the extraordinarily empathic treatment of the personal in The Child in Time. This is understandable in the sense that the literary gesture that determines that
perversities generated by the social and familial dominance of masculinity.7 Before discussing Saturday, I want to consider two novels in which the relations between abstraction and concretion, gender and the body, are especially revealing: The Comfort of Strangers and The Innocent. In the first, Venice functions both as a concrete labyrinth in which the central characters get lost and a symbolic site of psychic exploration. Within it, the characters of the novella more or less embody, more or less transgress, conventional correspondences between men and masculinity, and
the notion of terrorism are distortions that derive either from the dominant state-centred paradigm of international relations or from the theory of the just war which claims that combatants are legitimate targets while non-combatants are not. The claim that terrorism involves intentional attacks upon the innocent raises a number of questions. I will discuss two. First, what is the relevant sense of ‘innocence’? As I will use it here, ‘innocent’ has two senses, one formal, the other substantive. In the formal sense, a person is innocent when he has done
Twenty years after it was made, a waiter in a restaurant brought a message to Jack’s table from an unknown guest. The note was addressed to him and read: ‘ The Innocents is the best English film after Hitchcock goes to America.’ It was signed Frangois Truffaut. (Karel Reisz, Guardian , 25 March 1995
) Jack Clayton was born in Brighton on 1 March 1921. Brought up by his mother and not knowing his father, he had an unsettled, solitary childhood. Karel Reisz always thought that The Innocents , an adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw , was the perfect subject for Clayton, precisely because he would understand so acutely the feelings of the young boy Miles who finds the adult world so frightening and