Central to the analysis of a corpus of films dealing with current psychosocial conditions in Chile and the challenges of communal reconciliation, are the concepts of collective memory and social trauma. Chilean cinema of the postdictatorship reflects a society whose channels of communication have been broken, in which the past continues to be a…[Read more]

Distinct modes of social and psychological angst are noted in a significant number of films from Chile and New Zealand, becoming most evident in the way family relations are portrayed, and in various modes through which the protagonists relate to their natural and social environment. This article focuses on the films In My Father’s Den (Brad M…[Read more]

Bibliography on late medieval and early modern book production in the German speaking areas.

Disciplina de graduação oferecida na Faculdade de Comunicação da Universidade Federal da Bahia no segundo semestre de 2017. Mais informações em: https://www.incinerrante.com/textos/cinema-internacional-cinemas-africanos-2017-2

Configurações político-ideológicas, estéticas e geográficas dos cinemas africanos, em perspectiva histórica e…[Read more]

Proponho a análise do filme O mundo (2004), de Jia Zhangke, como alegoria aberta da globalização. A noção de alegoria aberta, ou abertura alegórica, possibilita abordar a globalização como condição de possibilidade do filme (que decorre, em parte, da participação da China nos circuitos globais de capital e de comércio) e como horizonte de…[Read more]

Com base na hipótese de que a emergência histórica dos cinemas africanos e sua contemporaneidade são indissociáveis de uma reivindicação do direito de olhar, de narrar e de imaginar o mundo, este artigo busca estabelecer um quadro conceitual para uma história das formas de imaginação do comum nos cinemas africanos. Nessa história ainda a escrever…[Read more]

Discussion about the relation of Juan Muñoz works, Volker Schlöndorff film “The Drummer boy” and Günter Grass novel “Die Blechtrommel”.

The central topic of João Botelho’s “Um adeus português” (1986), is memory in 1980s Portuguese society. The film alternates scenes from 1973, during the colonial war in Africa, with scenes set in 1985, in rural and urban areas of Portugal. In the present essay, I argue that the film enacts the need for a conversation among the Portuguese by opti…[Read more]

Entry for “The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism” on Senagelese filmmaker and writer Ousmane Sembène.

Review of American Road Narratives: Reimagining Mobility in Literature and Film by Ann Brigham (University of Virginia Press, 2015)

Digital technology is enabling a reconceptualization of film and cinema. The pliability of digital media opens up, particularly, the theory and practice of montage to revision. This pliability allows for cheap and easy copying and combining of images, and, relatedly, the transition from film frame to digital screen provides a less precious and…[Read more]

The article examines how the depiction of American suburbia in motion pictures illustrates the physical, cultural, and demographic changes in modern suburban society. Particular attention is paid to the portrayal of the suburban landscape in the 1999 film “Office Space,” written and directed by Mike Judge. The “polymorphous” landscape of “Office…[Read more]

This article examines Franz Marc’s writing as a discrete project. Marc’s contradictions and complications invite a complex reaction as does his tendency to deliberately misread and misstate both historical events and the work of other people. Here I also embed a new and previously unpublished photograph of Marc found during research in Nuremberg in 2015.

Semesterprogramm des Hauptseminars “Ausgrenzungstexte”

An analysis of the early work of Downtown Community Television (DCTV).

“Whereas before culture in the form of capitalism had alienated men and women from their nature, and nature in general, now that self-same creative, autonomous nature has been brought within the framework of capitalism, making capitalism more palatable. Even so, as I argue below, this enveloping of nature by culture requires “family” to rem…[Read more]

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

This essay analyzes Zorns Lemma (1962–1970), a film made by American artist Hollis Frampton (1936–1984). Noting Frampton’s use of Robert Grosseteste’s thirteenth-century treatise De luce [‘On Light’] as a key aspect of the film’s soundtrack, the essay argues that Grosseteste’s investigations of light as a medium played a key role in Frampton’s t…[Read more]

Steven Spielberg’s 2002 Minority Report narrates two interrelated stories. The micro
story concerns a family, a kidnapped son, the ensuing trauma, and the work of mourning that
follows. The macro story concerns criminal justice, social stability, and hermeneutics at the level
of the nation state. The problem for both stories is ontological a…[Read more]

This paper discusses Pacific Rim as a film deeply concerned with birth, in particular the horror of birth, and the process by which birth is assimilated. The film may then be seen as part of an unbroken commentary on nuclear
weapons insofar as it is our technological, capitalistic, and nuclear capability that allows
us to close the “breach” and…[Read more]