Search Results

In Mike Leigh’s 1996 film Secrets and Lies a black woman seeking her birth mother enters a white family, and shatters its walls of illusion. The family, and the audience, confront the questions of what distinguishes true from false marital and familial love. The film exhibits these distinctions in a thoughtful way, rather than preaching or arguing about them. It creates an object of enlightening contemplation rather than fuelling a sugar rush of feeling by violent sensory stimulation. This is what distinguishes art from propaganda or advertising. But film’s sheer sensory power makes it uniquely susceptible, among the arts, for perversion in the latter ways. So ironically, artistically serious film must exercise an almost anti-filmic restraint. The temptation to overwhelm the critical faculties of its audience, to pander to its prejudices or desire to be ‘thrilled’, must be resisted.

In Body of Lies Ridley Scott explores the relentless clash of ideologies and religion in the Middle East. This realistic spy movie doesn’t take the usual dashing and romantic approach; it is gritty and violent. Roger Ferris, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is on dangerous ground differentiating those who want to help him from those who want to kill him. To further complicate his life, his CIA boss, Ed Hoffman, portrayed by Russell Crowe, who communicates with his operative primarily via telephonic communication, is working against Ferris behind his back for his own political and personal purposes. Although the film has a logic of its own, audiences found it confusing and critics gave it mostly negative reviews.

This chapter challenges the idea that the invocation of the Muses in early Greek Poetry means that poets saw themselves as reporting historical facts. Referring to Homeric epic, Hesiod, and archaic lyric poetry, it points to a variety of indicators that the authors were aware of their own invention of new material and expected their audiences also to be aware of this invention. Key examples include Hesiod's reported meeting with the Muses, Stesichorus’ two prologues on Helen and epodes by Archilochus referring to invented episodes. The overall implication is that there is a wide awareness of the possibility of what we call ‘fiction’ even if there is no genre which is explicitly presented as fictional and no term corresponding to the idea of fiction.

This chapter examines the films of Steven Soderbergh. Soderbergh's twenty feature films present a diverse range of subject matter and formal styles. They range from his 1989 breakthrough hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape, about the sex lives of four twenty-somethings, to social-problem films such as Erin Brockovich and The Informant! (2009). Even the cost of making his films has shown great variety, ranging from the six-figure budget for Schizopolis (1996) to the star-studded Ocean's series blockbusters (2001, 2004, 2007) that averaged nearly one hundred million dollars to produce. The eclecticism in Soderbergh's movies would appear to invalidate a claim to the distinctive style typical of film authorship. However, the chapter argues that the variety of his work and the commercial viability of some of his films are prominent aspects of his individual style.

This chapter examines James Cameron's True Lies (1994). True Lies depicts how digital and information technology can be abused. A significant part of the drama in the film is derived from the ease with which a camera can so readily satisfy peoples' voyeuristic impulses, and is crucial to the development of the plot and the film's presentation of a recurrent motif that is centred on the ‘screening’ and ‘filtering’ of reality through a captured image. The film critiques American imperialism, and how surveillance has become increasingly embedded in the material culture of so many peoples' daily lives. It also served as a catalyst for Cameron's conception not only as a ‘storyteller’, but also as a resource-intensive filmmaker.

This chapter examines science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s novel The Penultimate Truth and Lies, Inc. (formerly known as The Unteleported Man), which form a kind of portal for working through the one history without parallel or alternative. In The Penultimate Truth, it’s all a fair, a show, in love of war: to cut losses on the human side, the Terran population was provided vast mine-like shelters while total nuclear war commenced on Mars. A new world order of Yance-men rule the Earth from their vast estates. Mankind below must watch the show of ongoing total war, films made in the meantime by Eisenbludt of Moscow. The premier filmmaker is Gottlieb Fischer of West Germany. The simulacrum of the world leader, Talbot Yancy, was also designed by Fischer and made in Germany. The polarization between West and East was maintained for the captive audience in the underworld.

Gives a close analysis of two of Plato’s most controversial images: the analogy of the soul and state and the suggestion that the rulers will have to lie to the citizenry, including especially the myth of the metals. These are understood as images of justice (the form), and their limitations as images are revealed. The analogy of the soul and state conceives of each analog as composed of three parts. But the first city Plato has Socrates imagine in the Republic does not have three parts, and then when the arguments for partitioning the soul are given, the principle Socrates offers for finding different parts is misapplied. Alternative formulations of this principle bring other problems, and Plato’s own conclusion of his arguments seems to leave open the possibility that there may be even more parts of the soul than those he has identified. As for Plato’s lying rulers, the apparent problem derives from Plato having a very different conception of truth than the two-valued conception familiar to contemporary philosophers. Plato’s rulers seek to establish the best images of this kind of truth.