Every face on Vanity Fair’s Hollywood covers 1995-2008

‘Every face on Vanity Fair’s Hollywood covers 1995-2008’ renders an ethnographic-like study of Hollywood celebrity as a cinematic experience. Viewers are presented with constantly mutating portraits that violently twist and shear into other faces, while an immersive soundscape echoes the turbulent painterly surface. Through technical processes of scaling, looping and image morphing; the work explores a positive affectual response to the seductive power of celebrity imagery. Conceptually, given Vanity Fair magazine’s prestigious stature, the work also performs an ethnographic-mapping of the popularity of Hollywood stars over time, while at the same time creating in-between, ‘mutant’ versions of their visages. The installation explores the potential for fan-based responses to pop culture to lead to artworks that enable a more critical response to the subjective and intersubjective dynamics of celebrity portraiture. Questions are raised about how these cultural forms impact pop culture fans, and their role in the mapping of culture and social experience.

Additional crayfish survey of Checkley Brook, Hollywood End Brook and Black Brook (Goyt) 1999

This is the report on the Additonal Crayfish Survey of Checkley Brook, Hollywood End Brook and Black Brook from 1999 by the Environment agency. The aim of the 1999 survey was to obtain a more complete picture of the crayfish distribution in those areas. It contains sections on the sampling methodology which followed the sampling done in 1998, the results of the sampling indicating the species of crayfish occurring in the sampling areas and some discussion and conclusions for each area. The appendix I contains maps locating the sampling points and past records. The appendix II contains detailed information of the sampling points.

The New Face of Global Hollywood: Black Hawk Down and the Politics of Meta-Sovereignty

This paper uses Ridley Scott’s 2001 film blockbuster Black Hawk Down to examine the claim that popular film is the ‘newest component of sovereignty’. While the topic of the film – the 1993 UN/US intervention in Somalia – lends itself to straightforward politicisation, this paper is equally interested in the film’s production history and its reception by global audiences. While initial reactions to the film focused on its ideological commitments (e.g. racism, collusion between Hollywood and the Pentagon, post-11 September patriotism), these readings continually posed an imagined ‘America’ against ‘the world’. This paper argues that Black Hawk Down is not about sovereignty as traditionally conceived, that is, about national interest shaping global affairs. Rather, Black Hawk Down articulates, and is articulated by, a new and emerging global order that operates through inclusion, management and flexibility. Drawing on recent theoretical debates over this new logic of rule, this paper illustrates how Black Hawk Down invoked much more diffuse, complex and deterritorialized categories than national sovereignty. In effect, Scott’s film goes beyond traditional notions of sovereignty altogether: its production, signification and reception deconstruct simple notions of ‘America’ and ‘the world’ in favour of what Hardt and Negri call ‘Empire’, what Zizek calls ‘post-politics’, and what we refer to as ‘meta-sovereignty’.

From Frank Miller to Zack Snyder, and Return: Contemporary Superhero Comics and Post-Classical Hollywood

Film adaptations of superhero comic-books offer a particularly rich case study to analyse narrative strategies of contemporary Hollywood cinema. The serial structures adopted by the comics they are based on, as well as their use of the spectacular potential of the image, provide a successful model for current audiovisual productions. Without completely abandoning classical techniques, these adaptations try to find a new balance between narrative and digital phantasmagoria. This paper discusses some significant examples of this genre, including adaptations of classical DC and Marvel franchises and more recent series, as well as other comic-book influenced films such as The Matrix and Unbreakable.

"Picture yourself in my place": Fitzgerald em Hollywood

Esta dissertação estuda a intertextualidade entre as obras literárias de F. Scott Fitzgerald e a escrita para cinema nos anos formativos de Hollywood das décadas de 1920 e 30, assim como a influência da sétima arte não só nos romances de Fitzgerald, como em alguma literatura norte-americana da época. Por outro lado, considerando o trabalho de Fitzgerald como argumentista em Hollywood, analisa-se alguns dos guiões em que colaborou, comparando a linguagem cinematográfica da sua prosa com a literária do seu cinema. Na experiência e obra de Fitzgerald está representada uma questão paradigmática sobre a eterna relação de amor e ódio, influência e angústia, ou “angústia da influência” (para tomar emprestado o conceito de Harold Bloom), entre a literatura e o cinema, ao mesmo tempo que nos leva a parafrasear a pergunta de Michel Foucault: o que é um autor no cinema?

1948-1965: o declínio do paradigma clássico e a emergência do maneirismo de Hollywood

O presente trabalho, investiga as origens históricas e as características formais do maneirismo de Hollywood, através de uma análise da produção cinematográfica dos estúdios de Hollywood, entre o final da década de 1920 e o fim do chamado studio system (em meados da década de 1960). Tal como o maneirismo histórico, o maneirismo hollywoodiano constitui um fenómeno artístico complexo e contraditório, cujas origens remontam ao estilo germânico introduzido no cinema dos estúdios em final dos anos vinte, por cineastas europeus como F.W. Murnau, Paul Leni, Rouben Mamoulian e James Whale. Tendo eclodido no final da II Guerra Mundial, período que assinala o início crise do sistema social, cultural e industrial que havia originado o cinema clássico, o maneirismo de Hollywood nasceu de uma consciência do cinema em relação ao seu passado. Obrigado a concorrer com a chamada “modernidade” cinematográfica europeia e com a ficção televisiva (que se apropriara do modelo clássico), o cinema de Hollywood explorou novos temas e géneros cinematográficos e investiu na exibição da técnica e do aparato tecnológico, forçando os limites do paradigma clássico, através de uma retórica de efeitos maneiristas que, não implicando um corte radical com o classicismo, representou uma clara tentativa de renovação formal, levada a cabo por cineastas como Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, Douglas Sirk, Stanley Donen e Jerry Lewis. A coexistência de varias correntes estéticas no cinema do pós-guerra (1945-1968), período em que, a par das últimas grandes obras clássicas, o maneirismo enquanto manifestação estética emergiu como modelo dominante, permite-nos concluir que o chamado cinema “clássico” (do estúdios de Hollywood) incluiu também, desde cedo, um cinema maneirista.

Hollywood and world cinema influences: tracing intertextuality in the works of two contemporary filmmakers from Francophone Africa; Mahamat Saleh Haroun and Abderrahmane Sissako

Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass Anton Chekhov Representations of Africa in cinema are almost as old as cinema itself and date back to Hollywood’s silent era. Most early examples feature the continent as a mere exotic backdrop and include The Sheik (Melford 1921), soon followed, in 1926, by George Fitzmaurice’s Son of the Sheik starring Rudolph Valentino. The next decade brought Van Dyke’s Tarzan movies, Robert Stevenson’s King Solomon’s Mines (1937), and, on the European side, Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko (1936). For representations of Francophone Africa by Africans themselves, the viewing public more or less had to wait, however, until decolonisation in the 1960s (with, for example, Sembene Ousmane’s Borom Sarret and La Noire de…, both released in 1966 and, in 1968, Mandabi). Since then Francophone African cinema has come a long way and has diversified into various strands. Between Borom Sarret and Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s 2006 Daratt, Saison sèche - or the same director’s Un homme qui crie, almost half a century has elapsed. Over this period, films inevitably have addressed a spectrum of visual, ideological and political tropes. They range from unadorned depictions of the newly independent states and their societies to highly aestheticised productions, not to mention surreal and poetic visions as displayed for instance in Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973). Most of the early films send an overt socio-political message which is a clear and explicit denunciation of a corrupt state of affairs (Souleymane Cissé’s Baara, 1977). They aim to trigger strong emotional and political responses from the viewer, in unambiguous support for the film-maker’s stand. Sembene himself declared: “I consider cinema a means of political action” (Murphy 2000: 221). Similarly, the Mauritanian director Med Hondo wishes to “take up this technical medium and to make it a mouthpiece on behalf of [his] fellow Africans and Arabs” (Jeffries 2002: 11). All this echoes the claims of the Fédération Panafricaine des Cinéastes (FEPACI, founded in 1969), an organisation “dedicated to the liberation of Africa”. In sharp contrast to the incipient momentum given Francophonie by Bourguiba, the Nigerien Hamani Diori and the Senegalese Senghor, who invoked a worldwide communauté organique francophone, FEPACI called for “the creation of an aesthetics of disalienation… [using] didactic... forms to denounce the alienation of countries that were politically independent but culturally and economically dependent on the West” (Diawara 1996: 40). Sembene’s Xala (1974) became the blueprint for this, to this day the best-known vein of Francophone African cinema. Thus considered, this pedigree seems a million miles from mainstream global cinema with its overriding mission to entertain. A question therefore arises: to what extent can a cinema that sprang from such beginnings be seen to interface in any meaningful way with a global film industry that, overwhelmingly and for a century, has indeed entertained the world – with Hollywood at its centre?