The film The Small Back Room was written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and released in 1949. It is the wartime tale of an injured and embittered back-room scientist, who is recruited to help combat a new kind of explosive device. Based on Nigel Balchin’s 1943 novel, the film significantly alters the story’s climactic seq…[Read more]

This chapter is a study of music and violence in action films set in Rio de Janeiro’s poorest neighborhoods. It traces how the Brazilian films Cidade de Deus [City of God] (2002) and Tropa de Elite [Elite Squad] (2007) rely both on visual language that emphasizes hyperrealistic slum violence, and on musical tropes that carry a local meaning l…[Read more]

Forty years ago, in his seminal essay, ‘The Whites of Their Eyes’, Stuart Hall admonished the left for its – our – collective failure in figuring out how to fight back against racism effectively. Sadly, his criticism is no less valid today than it was then, and we still have a lot to learn about how to defeat racism once and for all. We’ve k…[Read more]

The literary representation of Chopin in the period leading to and through early 20th-century modernism shows a contradiction between two expressive identities: a compound of refinement, delicacy, and sensitivity, the expression of a beautiful soul too good for this world, and a ravenous, violent force of desire that sooner or later takes the form…[Read more]