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Fantasy cinema in France: from long neglect to new blood The privileging of director over genre in French film criticism – most explicitly in the politique des auteurs (see chapter 1 ) – has mitigated against the habitually formulaic genres that make up fantasy film: horror, fairy-tale and science fiction. Moreover, despite the pioneering work of Georges Méliès, and later of
, tortured or driven into madness. Sam works happily enough as a functionary in the Department of Records division of the Ministry of Information, although in his dreams he is an Icarus-like superhero who swoops through clouds in search of his dream girl. But Sam’s comfortable fantasy world is disrupted when an innocent man, Archibald Buttle, is mistaken for supposed terrorist, Harry Tuttle, and is then
8 Fantasy, fallacy and allusion: reconceptualising British landscapes through the lens of children’s cinema Suzanne Speidel The British Landscape, more than almost any other, save perhaps that of the Netherlands, has been shaped by humans. The countryside is a fabrication, an artifice, reinvented every so many years or generations to match and mirror the latest currents in farming, industry, road building or the rush of people to and from the city. Even seemingly unchanged landscapes, like those of the Lake District, are not exactly still. Once, before
1 Fantasies of urban futures In 1945, in common with many other British towns and cities, Hull and Manchester produced comprehensive, detailed redevelopment plans. Unlike pre-war plans, which tended to be somewhat piecemeal, usually dealt with specific areas of cities and were rarely published, a significant number of the post-war plans for cities and larger towns were printed in impressive books, garnering much press attention and were accompanied by well-attended public exhibitions.1 These Plans were a spectacular mix of maps, representations of modern
When Clive Barker's Weaveworld was first published in 1987, it was quite understandably consigned to the genre of fantasy/horror, and the book is undoubtedly a remarkable and thrilling example. However, when read from a different perspective, the tale transcends the immediate limitations of its genre to provide a thought-provoking and
6 Filmic reality and ideological fantasy 8 Ideological reality: Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1995) F or film studies, the key insight that can be derived from the writings of Slavoj Žižek is that reality cannot be separated from fantasy. Films do not occupy a domain of fantasy that can be straightforwardly distinguished from reality; films do not provide audiences with fantasy escapes from reality; films do not provide us with illusions of reality. Rather, if films are fantastic, then they are fantastic in the same way that reality itself is fantastic
burgeoning women’s movement, in July 1972. Perhaps this is why, in 1974 , McGrath’s ‘Wonder Woman’ struck Lyons as ‘a feminist macho poem’ (Dugan 1979 : 96). In it, McGrath speculates about the pick-up lines a woman might use to entice famous men if she were in a position of social power (Walsh 1976 : C2). In McGrath’s role-reversal fantasy, the female narrator tells bodybuilder Charles Atlas that she has dreamed of him standing on a beach, trousers rolled up, staring pensively out to sea. Atlas replies, ‘At last
2 Fantasy factories The success of The Adventures of Robin Hood is often credited with inaugurating the cycle of costume adventure series that followed in the late 1950s. This was the ‘golden age’ of the television swashbuckler as a cycle of adventure series came forth from the British studios at Nettlefold, Twickenham and Elstree: The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, The Buccaneers, Sword of Freedom, William Tell, Sir Francis Drake. ITP, which had a hand in all those series, led the way, though
Conducting an analysis of some of the most candid interview materials ever gathered from former Irish Republican Army (IRA) members and loyalists in Northern Ireland, this book demonstrates through a psychoanalysis of slips of the tongue, jokes, rationalisations and contradictions that it is the unconscious dynamics of the conflict — that is, the pleasure to be found in suffering, failure, domination, submission and ignorance, and in rivalry over jouissance — that lead to the reproduction of polarisation between the Catholic and Protestant communities. As a result, it contends that traditional approaches to conflict resolution which overlook the unconscious are doomed and argues that a Lacanian psychoanalytic understanding of socio-ideological fantasy has great potential for informing the way we understand and study all inter-religious and ethnic conflicts and, as such, deserves to be further developed in conflict-management processes. Whether readers find themselves agreeing with the arguments in the book or not, they are sure to find it a change from both traditional approaches to conflict resolution and the existing mainly conservative analyses of the Northern Ireland conflict.
devotion’ that lay beneath the wealthy and high society of Victorian London. Combining these conspiratorial utterings with Fawcett’s future war fantasies, George Griffith’s 1894 work The Angel of the Revolution explored the machinations of the unsubtly named ‘Inner Circle of the Terrorists’, who plan to spark a global revolution by attacking capital cities with airships armed with ‘dynamite, melanite, fire-shells and cyanogen poison grenades’. Notably, the revolution Griffith envisioned had no real purpose beyond