By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “This is the end My only friend, the end Of our elaborate plans, the end Of everything that stands, the end No safety or surprise, the end I’ll never look into your eyes again Can you picture what will be So limitless and free Desperately in […]
Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s – Part 4
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. This is the fourth and final part of “Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s.” Follow these links for previous installments: Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. As the 1960s drew to a close, so did the string of dark comedies; the real world was bleak […]
Capitalism Eats Itself: Gluttony and Coprophagia from Hoarders to La Grande Bouffe
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “Recently my dull life seems to have no meaning I am stuck with someone We’re not communicating I want to buy Have you been affected I need consoling You could be addicted” (“Spend, Spend, Spend,” The Slits [1979]) Consumption. Excess. Gluttony. Hoarding. Waste. Massive debt. The […]
Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s – Part 3
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. This is the third article in a 4-part series. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here. Death has often been used to comic effect in films, but an all out assault on what Jessica Mitford termed “the American way of death” is another […]
Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s – Part 2
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. This is the second article in a 4-part series. You can read Part 1 here. With sick comedy beginning to bubble up through the margins of the studio system in Hollywood, filmmakers in Britain soon leaped on the bandwagon. The country was in a “gallows humour” […]
Embracing The Apocalypse: A World Without People
August 21, 2012
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “If civilization goes down, that Would be an event to contemplate.” (Robinson Jeffers, “May-June, 1940”) Human-centered popular folktales of Apocalypse and Doomsday narratives of every imaginable scenario are undeniably as powerful and plentiful as they have been from the beginnings of human narrative tradition. Indeed, apocalyptic […]
Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s – Part 1
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “There’s a story about an adolescent boy who was taken to a psychiatrist. The doctor drew a rectangle on a sheet of paper and showed it to the boy. ‘What does it make you think of?’ he asked. The boy looked at it and said, ‘Sex.’ […]
Central Thematic Conflict in 21 Grams and Babel
By Anna Weinstein. Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga is best known for writing ensemble films about the effects of tragedy on human life—how tragedy can both pull apart and bring together. His scripts present a kaleidoscopic view of human interconnection, that people across cultures, borders, and class systems are, when all is […]
The Aura in the age of New Materialism
By Jonathan Rozenkrantz. When Walter Benjamin proclaimed the aura lost, he was hardly writing in grief. Being a Marxist, he saw in the means of technical reproduction – primarily manifested in the cinematic medium – art’s final liberation from the bonds of ritual and tradition. The “aura” – basically signifying […]
Subverting Capitalism and Blind Faith: Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “It’s not a likable movie. Even me, myself, I hate the film.” (Pascal Laugier) Pascal Laugier’s radically experimental horror film Martyrs (2008) is a persuasive and explosive leveling of capitalism, which is not limited to materialism, the Catholic Church, the cynical genre of torture porn, and […]