Category Archive for: ‘Issue 45 – First Release’

Three Small Gestures

A general understanding of the gesture – its ideal proportion, the conventions and parameters of its normal usage, its relation to or putative origin in expression and feeling – is pointedly reflected in Hamlet’s address to the Players, who are preparing, he fears, to overdo it: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc’d it to you, trippingly on …

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The Sensations of Aisthesis “Exposed” in William Castle’s The Tingler (1959)

I am William Castle, director of the motion picture you are about to see. I feel obligated to warn you that some of the sensations – some of the physical reactions which the actors on the screen will feel – will also be experienced, for the first time in motion picture history, by certain members of this audience. I say …

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Into the Neon Horizon: The Postmodern Vision of Walter Hill

To date, filmmaker Walter Hill has received relatively little scholarly attention – this, despite Michael J. Anderson’s contention that “the director’s exceptionally rich first decade of productivity” constitutes “one of the finest of any American filmmaker” of the New Hollywood generation. [1] On those occasions when he is singled out for critical attention (usually of the journalistic as opposed to academic …

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“The One and the Eight” and cultural production in modern China: how a poem about the Anti-Japanese War written in the 1950s was transformed as a film in the 1980s and for television in 2015.

一个和八个 Guo Xiaochuan’s (1919-1976) poem “The One and the Eight”, written in 1957, has subsequently been adapted as a film that was released in 1984, and a thirty nine episode series first broadcast on Chinese television in 2015. The storyline is simple. Set in northern China in 1941 at the height of the Anti-Japanese War (1937-45), Guo’s poem tells the …

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Elaine May: Dispassionate

I. Schmuck Elaine May made her film-directing debut in 1971 with A New Leaf, in which she also appeared. This was preceded by many years of stage work, most notably for the improvisational Compass Players in Chicago in the 1950s that would eventually lead to her collaborations, between 1957 and 1961, with Mike Nichols. But her roots in theatre may …

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