It's not only rock and roll: rockumentary, direct cinema and performative display

The documentary form commonly referred to as rockumentary has become, since its inception in the early 1960s, a staple of American direct cinema. In keeping with its associations with observational direct cinema, rockumentary emphasizes showing over telling; that is, rockumentary privileges the visual capacities of documentary over patterns of exposition. While the ‘documentary display’ of rockumentary is comparable to certain features of  the early ‘cinema of attractions’ it exceeds such features in its focus on  performance. Typically, an emphasis within documentary theory on unmediated and unreconstructed access to the real as the basis of documentary film has not admitted a place for notions of performance before the camera. Rockumentary, with its relentless foregrounding of the performing body and the performance of musicians, revises this  understanding. This essay examines rockumentary within the context of direct cinema as a mode centred on a documentary performative display as it operates within selected works from the 1960s to the present. The film theorist Brian Winston has claimed that ‘[d]irect cinema made the rock performance/tour movie into the most popular and commercially viable documentary form thus far.’ The inverse of this assessment may be closer to the mark: the rockumentary turned direct cinema into a commercially and widely available form, one which the rockumentary has at times returned to and superseded in its scopic attention to performative display.

Playful learning : Melville's artful art in Moby-Dick

It remains one of the great ironies of American literary history that Melville's Moby-Dick struggled so long for critical and popular recognition. It is a peculiar text (but, then, so are Hawthorne's novels), a romance of the whale fishery that involves such explorations of language itself, of words, metaphor, symbol, allegory and the processes (and significance) of narrative construction. This article analyses its 'peculiarities' as fundamental indicators of Melville's 'playful art' to argue the usefulness of a concept of 'play' to its appreciation. That Moby-Dick is allusive and multi-layered is well known. But for what apparent purpose and to what effect? Here, a claim is made that Melville simultaneously constructs and deconstructs meaning by demonstrating that things ('in complex subjects') never come simply or singly. The later Barthes and Derrida become part of this ship's crew and Moby-Dick is a postmodernist novel avant la lettre.

Experiences of men with breast cancer: a qualitative study

Background
Recent reports indicate that male breast cancer rates are increasing in North America. While there have been numerous large-scale studies examining women's experiences with breast cancer, to date there have been no North American studies examining what a man experiences with a breast cancer diagnosis. The objective of this qualitative study was to describe the experiences of a sample of Canadian men diagnosed with breast cancer.

Methods
After written informed consent, unstructured audio-taped interviews were conducted with 20 men. Since little is known about a man's experience with breast cancer, an exploratory qualitative approach was utilized.

Results
Participants experienced concerns related to the lack of awareness of male breast cancer within both public and health professional groups. Many men suffered stress related to the cancer diagnosis, body image concerns and role strain. The lack of male-specific breast cancer information was identified as a major concern. All denied interest in traditional support groups. In retrospect, a number of men felt the breast cancer experience vastly improved their lives.

Conclusions
Needs identified by participants include increased public and health professional awareness of male breast cancer, written information specific for men, and male participation in breast cancer research. Further study is also necessary to identify supports considered helpful by men with breast cancer and other malignancies.

My life / Bill Clinton

Described as a 'diary dump' and as a monstrous ego trip, Bill Clinton's 957-page autobiography My Life is packed with the names of nearly everyone he's met since he started school, in chronological order. David Palmer teaches American Studies at Flinders University, Scott Burchill lectures in International Relations at Deakin University. On this week's Book Talk they talk with Jill Kitson about Clinton's book and agree on its historical importance.

Anti-Americanism: recent sources

Anti-American sentiment has, it would seem, increased in the wake of the election of George Bush, jr. and the US’s response to the events of
September 11. Commentators within the US, and globally, have analysed the recent variants of a long-standing condition. Below is a review of recent coverage of the phenomenon. The entries for the print sources are divided into:

(1) analyses of anti-Americanism written in the US,
(2) accounts of international expressions of anti-Americanism.