Monthly Archives: September 2013

    The following responses were submitted by PMC readers using regular e-mail or the PMC Reader’s Report form. Not all letters received are published, and published letters may have been edited.   Reader’s Report on Michael Joyce’s “Twelve Blue” (PMC 7.3):   “Twelve Blue” reminded me of this excerpt from from Salman Rushdie’s Haroun […]

Arkady Plotnitsky  Literature Program Duke University aplotnit@acpub.duke.edu   and Richard Crew Department of Mathematics University of Florida crew@math.ufl.edu   The following exchange between Richard Crew and Arkady Plotnitsky is in response to Plotnitsky’s essay, “‘But It Is Above All Not True’: Derrida, Relativity and the ‘Science Wars,’” which appeared in PMC (7.2) in January, 1997. […]

Hassan Melehy Department of Romance Languages University of Vermont hmelehy@zoo.uvm.edu   Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.   At a time when Hollywood is as formulaic as ever, when the representatives of French cinema we receive in the U.S. seem to be attacking critical thought (Luc Besson’s The Fifth […]

Benzi Zhang The Chinese University of Hong Kong bzhang@cuhk.edu.hk   Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.   It eludes no scholar’s observation that in recent years the interest in Chinese cinema has increased dramatically. Among recent attempts to offer a theoretical approach to contemporary Chinese […]

Mark Welch Department of Nursing and Health Studies University of Western Sydney ma.welch@nepean.uws.edu.au   Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996.   The subtitle of Eric Rentschler’s latest book, The Ministry of Illusion (1996), gives a strong clue to its real purpose. He speaks of the Nazi […]

Anthony Enns Department of English University of Iowa anthony-enns@uiowa.edu   Woods, Alan. Being Naked Playing Dead: The Art of Peter Greenaway.Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996.   It is significant that the subtitle of Alan Woods’ new book, Being Naked Playing Dead, is not “The Films of…” or “The Cinema of…” but rather “The Art of Peter […]

  Kim Fedderson and J.M. Richardson Department of English Lakehead University Kim.Fedderson@Lakeheadu.ca Mike.Richardson@Lakeheadu.ca   Looking for Richard. Dir. Al Pacino. Twentieth Century Fox, 1997.   Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard opens with the words “King Richard” appearing first on the screen with the other syllables necessary for completing the title being added gradually. This device […]

Edward Brunner Department of English Southern Illinois University ebrunner@siu.edu   Prelinger, Rick. Ephemeral Films 1931-1960: To New Horizons and You Can’t Get there from Here. CD-ROM. New York: Voyager, 1994.   Prelinger, Rick. Our Secret Century: Archival Films from the Dark Side of the American Dream: Volume 1: The Rainbow is Yours with Volume 2: […]

Peter Donaldson Department of Literature Massachusetts Institute of Technology psdlit@mit.edu Introduction   In these pages I trace how Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books reads The Tempest anachronistically, as a play about the end of books and the advent of electronic forms. Greenaway finds The Tempest relevant to this shift because, as he puts it, we […]

Adrian Miles Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology amiles@rmit.edu.au   This work presents a hypertextual reading of a key sequence, the song-and-dance number “You Were Meant for Me,” from Kelly and Donen’s 1956 musical Singin’ in the Rain. The sequence is read as characteristic of the film’s general semiotic principles, which combine several levels of seduction […]

William D. Routt La Trobe University w.routt@latrobe.edu.au   Abstract: This article attempts a preliminary understanding of the experience–or sensation–of place evoked in the cinema, based on some of the earliest films and their spectators. It exposits certain ideas contained in Vachel Lindsay’s The Art of the Moving Picture and finds a delirious resemblance between these […]

Jorge Otero-Pailos School of Architecture Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico jotero@mit.mit.edu   …the concept of reality is always the first victim of war.   –Paul Virilio, paraphrasing Kipling (War and Cinema 33)   Vacillating Realities   At the corner of the bar a man in a white suit, probably an American business traveler, asks for […]

Joseph Christopher Schaub Department of Comparative Literature University of Maryland Joseph_C_SCHAUB@umail.umd.edu Introduction   Contemporary discussions about gender in cyberspace often rely on assumptions about the immanently liberatory potential of technology.   Animated image constructed by author using Man With a Movie Camera production stills.   Undoubtedly much of this enthusiasm for technology has been generated […]

Stephen Mamber Department of Film/TV University of California at Los Angeles smamber@ucla.edu   …the cinematographic image is in the present only in bad films.   –Deleuze   Stanley Kubrick’s racetrack robbery caper film The Killing (1956) is a conceptual exercise in time travel.[1] Using a narrator reminiscent of Dragnet, or the impersonal narrators of Kubrick’s […]

Gina Marchetti University of Maryland and Nanyang Technological University tgmarchetti@ntu.edu.sg     Figures 1 and 2: Posters for To Liv(e) and Crossings.   Introduction   This article looks at the changing shapes of global Chinese cinema through the works of Hong Kong/New York filmmaker Evans Chan. As Chinese films cross beyond traditional borders, they move […]

Robert Kolker University of Maryland rk27@umail.umd.edu   This issue of Postmodern Culture grew from a conviction that the critical and scholarly study of film could make more use of computer-based image technologies. In our discipline (as in any other humanities undertaking) quotation and illustration constitute proof and demonstration. In the past, we have been restricted […]