Author Archive for: ‘Anne Rutherford’

Palimpsests of time and space: palpable space Sometimes the very best essays are the ones that reveal their flaws with the greatest clarity. Cynthia Contreras’ analysis of Kobayashi Masaki’s film, Harakiri (Japan, 1962), titled “Kobayashi’s Widescreen Aesthetic”, represents a limit case in the application of some key methods of art history and the study of visual culture to the analysis of film.[1] …

. . . chopped up at the blink of an eye, whether relatives or friends, cleared out completely . . . (Bowen 207) These lines, quoted from a performance staged in 1978 to applaud the achievements of the Suharto regime, celebrate the massacre of between 500,000 and 2 million people that clinched the victory of Suharto’s forces in purging Indonesia …