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This article complicates the notion that Steven Soderbergh‘s films are simply a refashioning of familiar materials, as evidenced by his ongoing appropriation of classical Hollywood and the European art cinema. Through a close analysis of The Limey (1999), this essay argues that Soderbergh‘s film interrogates the idea of familiarity, as such, beginning with the perceptual experience that it generates for viewers. With reference to Victor Shklovsky‘s notion of defamiliarization as well as Martin Heidegger‘s formulation of temporality in Being and Time, this discussion proposes that Soderbergh‘s reiteration of the filmic past can be seen as a meaningful event for film-critical practice that sheds new light upon issues of filmic temporality and film history.
Like many exiles and outsiders, Reisz was able to balance an emotional investment in his adoptive country with the ability to remain critically distanced enough to recognize and then de-familiarize the cultural tropes that make it tick. It’s hardly surprising then that, speaking specifically of Morgan’s political insecurities, Reisz admitted that ‘The character seemed very relevant to me, since I had had a left-wing youth
serious art to set up a defamiliarizing commentary on Morgan’s creative impotence, which is rooted in self-pitying solipsism. Although Morgan complains about being kicked out of Leonie’s attic – ‘I did all me best work up there’ – his ex-wife quickly reminds him that he hasn’t finished a painting in eighteen months, a fact that Napier reaffirms when Morgan visits the gallery. The problem is that the love-sick Morgan is so
woman, is Doctor Who gay? Or NB (non-binary)? (fan tweet cited in Leighton-Dore, 2018 ) New Doctor, new series, new companions … new challenges. It shouldn’t, perhaps, be too challenging. After all, science fiction is supposed to be about the new, the strange, the alien; defamiliarization or estrangement are key strategies for the genre. For various reasons, of course, science fiction, especially in mainstream media such as TV, tends not to live up to its potential of creating new worlds
perception around 1920, specifically in a few of the textual fragments that the editors of his Gesammelte Schriften have gathered under the rubric ‘On the Philosophy of Language and Epistemo-Critique’.18 Passages in Benjamin’s writings seem to try out procedures Kandinsky proposes for defamiliarizing words, perceiving them as if they were incomprehensible; we can see how Benjamin may have responded to, and transformed, Kandinsky’s proposals. In an outline for a philosophical exploration of language (which at that time he planned to write as his ‘second dissertation’, as
The gothic and death is the first ever published study to investigate how the multifarious strands of the Gothic and the concepts of death, dying, mourning, and memorialization – what the Editor broadly refers to as "the Death Question" – have intersected and been configured cross-culturally to diverse ends from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Drawing on recent scholarship in Gothic Studies, film theory, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Thanatology Studies, to which fields it seeks to make a valuable contribution, this interdisciplinary collection of fifteen essays by international scholars considers the Gothic’s engagement, by way of its unique necropolitics and necropoetics, with death’s challenges to all systems of meaning, and its relationship to the culturally contingent concepts of memento mori, subjectivity, spectrality, and corporeal transcendence. Attentive to our defamiliarization with death since the advent of enlightened modernity and the death-related anxieties engendered by that transition, The gothic and death combines detailed attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with rigorous close readings of artistic, literary, televisual, and cinematic works. This surprisingly underexplored area of enquiry is considered by way of such popular and uncanny figures as corpses, ghosts, zombies, and vampires, and across various cultural and literary forms as Graveyard Poetry, Romantic poetry, Victorian literature, nineteenth-century Italian and Russian literature, Anglo-American film and television, contemporary Young Adult fiction, Bollywood film noir, and new media technologies that complicate our ideas of mourning, haunting, and the "afterlife" of the self.
In a pair of interviews during the 1970s, Karel Reisz himself acknowledged this clear line of continuity in his work, he always thought of himself as a cinematic auteur, but stressed that it was a continuity of neither British nor Czech sensibilities. Like many exiles and outsiders, Reisz was able to balance an emotional investment in his adoptive country with the ability to remain critically distanced enough to recognize and then de-familiarize the cultural tropes that make it tick. Given his lifelong affinity for outsiders and exiles, it is clear that Reisz's personal background is crucial to any understanding of his cinema, not only because of his own exile from Nazism and subsequent displacement into a foreign culture. Because of his graduation into film-making from the academic world of film criticism, a realm largely alien to many of the veterans of the British film industry. The book discusses the 'kitchen sink' realism of the Angry Young Men, the birth of the British New Wave, and the Gorilla war.
dislodged from the body. Hence, they are accustomed to the existence of a body-object to be read by experts. Of course, that body-object enacted in a consulting room, hospital or laboratory is somehow related (through a discussion with a physician, for example) to the person involved. But it has become quite normal to have an autonomous body, with a significance of its own, detached from subjective experience. In order to understand the crucial transformation in the logic behind sex assignments as well as the role of the body therein, it is necessary to defamiliarize this
part of their gamble on eccentric authorship and authority. The eccentric citytext has always offered a different way of thinking about language and literature as modes of cultural formation and repositories of cultural memory, critically contending with the relationship between ‘centre’ and ‘margin’ so central to relatively recent and already problematized interdisciplinary modes of inquiry such as post-colonial studies. Hence perduring theoretical models developed by literary and cultural theorists including Shklovsky and Eikhenbaum on defamiliarization or
conveying meaning, but as an affective register of home. To learn a new language or to take the trouble to speak and falter in a second or third language are ways of de-familiarizing one’s sense of home, of undoing a stable sense of how language is owned and made into one’s home. In terms of its broader political implications, theatrical spectatorship as a mode of witnessing is what makes it possible for Issa’s state of semi-legality to become visible, and for empathetic connections to be formed. It makes it possible to imagine being in a similar position, and also to