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2 New realisms Hôtel des Amériques (1981) Hôtel des Amériques opens with a shot of a moonlit beach, shoreline and promontory, the gentle waves audible on the soundtrack. The caption ‘Biarritz’ appears, followed by opening credits over the same shot announcing the presence of the film’s two stars, Catherine Deneuve and Patrick Dewaere. The credits continue after a fade to a montage of black and white archive footage of the town, accompanied by the first presence on the soundtrack of a melancholic Philippe Sarde melody played on piano and strings which will
stylisation and even formal experimentation, the films of le jeune cinéma are usually raw and naturalistic, with a documentary aesthetic that reflects their often bleak socio-political content. As a result, this new genre has also been termed ‘new realism’ or ‘the return of the real’ (see for example Powrie 1999 ). Possibly influenced by the ultra-naturalistic shooting practices laid down by Lars von Trier
This essay seeks to define a Gothic tendency in the ‘viscerality’ of some recent and prominent Scottish women writers: Janice Galloway, Alison Kennedy and Louise Welsh. The argument addresses an alienating tension in this ‘viscerality’ between a fabular form and the impression of a new realism of social surfaces. This is a Gothic of cruelty and violent representation of the body, which opens a Scottish urban culture, portrayed as a synecdoche for divided consciousness, to fables of sexual and political alienation.
The book begins with a consideration of the origins and influences that have shaped Mathieu Kassovitz's development as a director, but also the cultural context within which he emerges as a filmmaker. It argues new realism, the banlieue. The book examines the American influences evident in all of Kassovitz's films to date as a director and explores the continuity and difference between his films as actor and director. The first phase of Mathieu Kassovitz's career comprises his short films and feature films up to and including
This book has sought to argue for Kassovitz’s importance in contemporary French cinema as a filmmaker whose work has engaged with (and, in some cases, helped shaped the direction of) key shifts in French cinema since the early 1990s, such as: new realism, the banlieue film and the ‘post-look’ spectacular genre film. In so doing, one of the central concerns in these
, Mazower’s approval of the demise of humanitarian interventionism has been made explicit. There’s a ‘new realism’, he says, that is welcome; again, the ‘new maturity in international relations’ is to be viewed positively. His reasons for thinking so are, in short, that ‘the way leaders treat their people is not the only problem that counts in international affairs‘. One is bound to accept the truth of this, of course – it isn’t the only problem that counts in international affairs. Still, the fact that assaults by a state on its own citizens are one of the more
to minds and bodies of workers inevitable? Or is there a difference between high pressure production in socialist Russia and in Henry Ford’s Detroit?’99 The New Realism of John Dos Passos’s Airways Inc. The Daily Worker was considerably more congratulatory about Dos Passos’s Airways Inc., which was the final NPT production, opening in February 1929 at the Grove Street Theatre. A. B. Magil commended Airways Inc. as the best NPT play because ‘it has been written, unlike certain other New Playwrights offspring, with intelligence, clarity, and discipline’, and didn
This book argues that John Ashbery has continually formulated the apothegm appropriate to his moment. It explores how and when the poet himself can be thought to have got it wrong. Ashbery's paradoxical status is an effect of his critical treatment. Introducing his Harvard lectures, Ashbery mentioned Pasternak twice: as a major poet who had influenced him, and as a poet of the jump-start variety', someone he reads to stimulate his own poetry. Like Pasternak's, Ashbery's career could be described as a perpetually changing attempt to understand the situation as a whole, and as a struggle to develop a form of expression through which the situation, including his relation to it, might be articulated. The book offers an account of Ashbery's poetic career. It is not a life of the poet. The closest we have to a life of Ashbery is David Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde. As Lehman himself observes, 'Ashbery is certainly the least autobiographical of modern poets. No one's poems have less to do with the details of his life'. The detail of Ashbery's life that particularly interests critics is his sexuality. The book indicates how Ashbery's poetry of the occasion has developed, how it has dealt with the issues and problems the period has posed its major poets, and how it has faced up to and resolved tensions internal to itself.
The ambitions of this book are twofold, one fraternal and one methodological. It shows that the realist tradition is alive and well in Europe, by presenting a sample of European scholars working under the realist paradigm - including Russia. Introducing neoclassical realism to a European academic audience poses a particular challenge. For Europeans, the American discourse of 'bringing intervening variables back in' sounds curious. In sum, the American approach privileges neorealism at the expense of classical realism. In the United States, neoclassical realism is essentially a research programme aimed at explaining how states filter systemic factors through domestic structures, thus explaining foreign policy output on the basis of both systemic and domestic variables. Neoclassical realism, as it stands, is thus some sort of 'neorealism + domestic variables'. It is an attempt to respond to the shortfalls of structural realism by (re)incorporating variables located within the famous 'black box'. Domestic factors are yet clearly relegated to second-order status, as they play the role of intervening variables in the so-called missing link between power resources and foreign policy output. American ontological approaches and methodological preferences give neoclassical realist literature a decidedly scientific rationalism, grounded in material factors. In Europe, however, the English school and constructivist approaches have emphasized the non-material aspects of international relations, factors that were taken seriously by classical realist authors but which became a victim to the attempt to 'scientize' the discipline. Neorealist approaches see the structure of the international system as the driving force behind changes in European politics.
There can be no doubt about the huge impact that Tony Blair had on the Labour Party. Labour has always been a party which embodied a high degree of internal pluralism, based on its internal factions and tendencies, its federal relations with affiliated organisations, its divided central authority, and its changing amalgam of leadership and democratic internal arrangements. Under Blair, however, there was a new centralising managerial impetus behind the search to make 'New Labour' a united and effective political force and in doing so to undermine other centres of internal power. It was generally expected, therefore, that in creating and reinforcing the leader's supremacy there would be a uniformity and homogeneity to managerial activities on his behalf. The General Election result of 2005 left Blair with a reduced majority still seeking to push through controversial legacy legislation which was to the right of the Labour Party mainstream, and still attempting also to change party and union representation. 'The Blair supremacy', such as it was, is presented as an important example of highly motivated and focused political skills but it is also evaluated as an education in broader and longer term collateral and consequential damage. The book ends with an epilogue where the party management of the new Leader, Brown is examined in the light of the inheritance from Blair, including the problems exacerbated before an election result that became recognised as 'the end of New Labour'.