Eye candy for the blind: re-introducing Lyotard's Acinema into discourses on excess, motion and spectacle in contemporary Hollywood

Jean-François Lyotard's 1973 essay ‘Acinema’ is explicitly concerned with the cinematic medium, but has received scant critical attention. Lyotard's acinema conceives of an experimental, excessive form of film-making that uses stillness and movement to shift away from the orderly process of meaning-making within mainstream cinema. What motivates this present paper is a striking link between Lyotard's writing and contemporary Hollywood production; both are concerned with a sense of excess, especially within moments of motion. Using Charlie's Angels (McG, 2000) as a case study – a film that has been critically dismissed as ‘eye candy for the blind’ – my methodology brings together two different discourses, high culture theory and mainstream film-making, to test out and propose the value of Lyotard's ideas for the study of contemporary film. Combining close textual analysis and engagement with key scholarship on film spectacle, I reflexively engage with the process of film analysis and re-direct attention to a neglected essay by a major theorist, in order to stimulate further engagement with his work.

Backtracks: a devised performance

Backtracks aimed to investigate critical relationships between audio-visual technologies and live performance, emphasising technologies producing sound, contrasted with non-amplified bodily sound. Drawing on methodologies for studying avant garde theatre, live performance and the performing body, it was informed by work in critical and cultural theory by, for example, Steven Connor and Jonathan Rée, on the body's experience and interpretation of sound. The performance explored how shifting national boundaries, mobile workforces, complex family relationships, cultural pluralities and possibilities for bodily transformation have compelled a re-evaluation of what it means to feel 'at home' in modernity. Using montages of live and mediated images, disrupted narratives and sound, it evoked destablised identities which characterise contemporary lived experience, and enacted the displacement of certainties provided by family and nation, community and locality, body and selfhood. Homer's Odyssey framed the performance: elements could be traced in the mise-en-scène; in the physical presence of Athene, the narrator and Penelope weaving mementoes from the past into her loom; and in voice-overs from Homer's work. The performance drew on personal experiences and improvisations, structured around notions of journey. It presented incomplete narratives, memories, repressed anxieties and dreams through different combinations of sounds, music, mediated images, movement, voice and bodily sound. The theme of travel was intensified by performers carrying suitcases and umbrellas, by soundtracks incorporating travel effects, and by the distorted video images of forms of transport playing across 'screens' which proliferated across the space (sails, umbrellas, the loom, actors' bodies). The performance experimented with giving sound and silence performative dimensions, including presenting sound in visual and imagistic ways, for example by using signs from deaf sign language. Through-composed soundtracks of live and recorded song, music, voice-over, and noise exploited the viscerality of sound and disrupted cognitive interpretation by phenomenological, somatic experience, thereby displacing the impulse for closure/destination/home.

Storytelling in song: television music, narrative and allusion in 'The O.C.'

Television’s long-form storytelling has the potential to allow the rippling of music across episodes and seasons in interesting ways. In the integration of narrative, music and meaning found in The O.C. (Fox, FOX 2003-7), popular song’s allusive and referential qualities are drawn upon to particularly televisual ends. At times embracing its ‘disruptive’ presence, at others suturing popular music into narrative, at times doing both at once. With television studies largely lacking theories of music, this chapter draws on film music theory and close textual analysis to analyse some of the programme's music moments in detail. In particular it considers the series-spanning use of Jeff Buckley’s cover of ‘Hallelujah’ (and its subsequent oppressive presence across multiple televisual texts), the end of episode musical montage and the use of recurring song fragments as theme within single episodes. In doing so it highlights music's role in the fragmentation and flow of the television aesthetic and popular song’s structural presence in television narrative. Illustrating the multiplicity of popular song’s use in television, these moments demonstrate song’s ability to provide narrative commentary, yet also make particular use of what Ian Garwood describes as the ability of ‘a non-diegetic song to exceed the emotional range displayed by diegetic characters’ (2003:115), to ‘speak’ for characters or to their feelings, contributing to both teen TV’s melodramatic affect and narrative expression.

Contemporary women playwrights

A co-edited selection of extracts from plays by contemporary Irish women playwrights, with Introduction by Anna McMullan and Caroline Williams.

Oi! Oi! Oi! : class locality and British punk

This article looks at the controversial music genre Oi! in relation to youth cultural identity in late 1970s’ and early 1980s’ Britain. As a form of British punk associated with skinheads, Oi! has oft-been dismissed as racist and bound up in the politics of the far right. It is argued here, however, that such a reading is too simplistic and ignores the more complex politics contained both within Oi! and the various youth cultural currents that revolved around the term ‘punk’ at this time. Taking as its starting point the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ conception of youth culture as a site of potential ‘resistance’, the article explores the substance and motifs of Oi!’s protest to locate its actual and perceived meaning within a far wider political and socio-economic context. More broadly, it seeks to demonstrate the value of historians examining youth culture as a formative and contested socio-cultural space within which young people discover, comprehend, and express their desires, opinions, and disaffections.

Performing performers: embodiment and intertextuality in the contemporary biopic

The actor’s body is of critical importance to the biopic’s representation of ‘real’ lives, to issues of physical and gestural resemblance, and in its role as the dramatic vehicle; acting out significant moments, embodying transformations. Through detailed examination of Beyond the Sea (2004), De-Lovely (2004), Molière (2007), films which foreground the construction, and constructedness, of life through performance and spectacle, this chapter explores the self-reflexive and intertexual embodiment of life stories. It focuses on the material details of performance in relation to distinctly contemporary strategies of film style and tone, and how these connect to questions of expectation and agency.

Contemporary ordinary language philosophy

There is a widespread assumption that ordinary language philosophy was killed off sometime in the 1960s or 70s by a combination of Gricean pragmatics and the rapid development of systematic semantic theory. Contrary to that widespread assumption, however, contemporary versions of ordinary language philosophy are alive and flourishing, but going by various aliases—in particular (some versions of) "contextualism" and (some versions of) "experimental philosophy". And a growing group of contemporary philosophers are explicitly embracing the methods as well as the title of ordinary language philosophy and arguing that it has been unfairly maligned and was never decisively refuted. In this overview, I will outline the main projects and arguments employed by contemporary ordinary language philosophers, and make the case that updated versions of the arguments made by ordinary language philosophers in the middle of the twentieth century are attracting renewed attention.

The lake-dwellings in Holderness, East Yorkshire, revisited: a journey into antiquarian and contemporary wetland archaeology

The story presented in this paper began in the 1880s with the discovery of five unusual wet sites in the low-lying region of Holderness, East Yorkshire, during drainage works: West Furze, Round Hill, Barmston Drain, Gransmoor and Kelk (fig 1). The changing interpretation of the significance of these wet sites, from contemporary local accounts to their 'expert' publication early in the twentieth century (Smith 791I), contributed to the tale of the Holderness lake-dwellings, echoing the then already famous lake-dwellings of the Alpine region and elsewhere in Europe (Keller 1878). The tale of the Holderness lake-dwellings survived more recent work intact, as excavators approached the sites without challenging the preconception of these being genuine lake settlements (eg Varley 1968).

Samuel Beckett, the Gate Theatre Dublin, and the contemporary Irish independent theater sector: fragments of performance history

From 1991, when the Dublin Gate Theatre launched their Samuel Beckett Festival featuring nineteen of Beckett’s stage plays, to more recent years, the Gate dominated Irish productions of Beckett’s theater. The Gate Beckett Festival was remounted in 1996 at the Lincoln Center, New York, and at the Barbican Centre, London, in 1999, and individual or grouped productions have toured regularly since then in Ireland and internationally. However, since the Irish premiere of Waiting of Godot at the Pike Theatre in 1955, in addition to several Beckett plays mounted by the National Theatre, many independent Irish theater companies, such as Focus Theatre, Druid Theatre, and more recently Pan Pan Theatre, Blue Raincoat Theatre, The Corn Exchange, and Company SJ (under director Sarah Jane Scaife), have produced Beckett’s drama. While acknowledging earlier Irish productions, this essay will consider the role of the Dublin Gate Beckett Festival and the Beckett Centenary celebrations in Dublin in 2006 in greatly enhancing the marketability of Beckett’s work, and will discuss the proliferation of productions of Beckett’s stage plays (as opposed to stage adaptations of the prose work, which is a topic for another essay) in the independent theater sector in the Republic of Ireland since 2006. In addition to giving an overview of these recent productions, the essay will consider some issues at stake in creating or constructing performance histories