Search Results

This concluding chapter traces the forms of rebelliousness discernible in comics monsters by highlighting the rebellious romantic heritage ensconced in the comics medium itself. It summarizes the shared and distinct romantic features embodied by the monstrous protagonists in the previous chapters. This is followed by a brief close reading of Emil Ferris’ My Favorite Thing is Monsters to show how many of the romantic features brought out through the other comics reappear in this graphic novel. Drawing links between the prominence of the spectacular and the spectacle in the analyzed stories as well as the medium, the chapter then elaborates on the embedding of romantic features and monstrous inclinations in comics, especially on spectacularity as an inevitable accompaniment to rebelliousness. The chapter ends with a brief coda on the presence of Romanticism through monsters in contemporary culture.

The second chapter elaborates on the history of Romantic monsters and their connections to comics monsters as well as the medium of comics. It describes the context of the burgeoning romantic visual culture, including the perpetuation of imaginative prints by William Blake and Francesco de Goya as well as the increase in freak shows and other forms of entertainment based on visual illusions. This underscores the close ties between entertainment, 'spectacularity' (which combines theatricality and the spectacle while also alluding to specters) and monsters, while also showing how more rebellious, anti-Enlightenment strains crept in through the interest in the abnormal and the increasing space offered for unbridled emotionality at the ends of both production and reception. The inclinations towards ambiguity and even human-like renditions discernible in the literary monsters created by Mary Shelley and Victor Hugo are discussed. Three monsters with strong romantic inclinations—Frankenstein’s monster, Baudelairian ennui, and the trickster (included for his playful ambiguity and love for the spectacle)—are introduced which personify the different potentialities of the medium while having commonalities with comics monsters.

This chapter begins by drawing out the similarities between Baudelairian Romanticism—especially the Baudelairian monster, ennui—and the protagonists and aesthetics of Enki Bilal’s Monstretetralogy. The ambiguity of the monster is likened to the relativization of good and evil discernible in Baudelaire's works. In addition to discussing the problematization of memory, the chapter also highlights connections between monstrous spaces and its monstrous inhabitants. A discussion of the amorphousness of monstrosity is followed by an examination of the roles of specularity and rebelliousness. The chapter ends with a brief reflection on how Monstreand fluid monsters reflect on modern and contemporary history. Comparisons are also made between Baudelaire's modern ennui and Bilal's postmodern monster, both of which reflect upon a broader cultural change and experience of everyday life.

This chapter shows how both the content and the structure of The Crow illustrate the notion that the monster is an embodiment of affect and representative of ruptures with logic and chaos. The Crow reflects the disruption that is part of both monstrosity and Romanticism. The chapter begins by unpacking the fragmented structure of the comic, which incorporates literary and visual references to Romanticism as well as diverse, mostly romantic, poems and post-punk, gothic rock lyrics in those fragments. Being fragments, these elements are also gothic in their intertextual cravings. The role of emotions in the story is then examined followed by a concluding section on the theatrical aspects of intense emotionality and its central role in the protagonist's quest. Spectacularity is complemented by the Crow's self-stylization as a painted figure with a permanent smile, immortal on one hand, but still deeply traumatized, for although he quickly heals from the shots directed at him, he still bleeds. The final section also discusses the coexisting ghostliness and spectactularity of the Crow’s revenge while also elaborating on the unfulfilled nature of his vengeful quest.

This chapter revisits Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987) and highlights the film’s innovative employments of sound as metaphor and spectacle that speak to the larger issues of gender, sexuality, national identity, and human nature. As a formal analysis of the film and its indigenous songs and musical themes exhibits, Zhang Yimou and Zhao Jiping’s idiosyncratic, legendary collaboration and superlative synthesization of image-music-text have not only created an extraordinary spectacle that few other films could match, but have also sparked a new trend of cross-production and cross-fertilization between popular music and film since the late 1980s.

In chapter five, attention turns to nineteenth-century attempts to represent the increasingly incendiary politics of urban Britain. The long nineteenth century was a period of significant political upheaval, civil unrest and the complete reorganization of the nation’s political power base. In this climate of conflict and change, visual representations of collective action and the violence that frequently ensued were used to promote and condemn specific towns and the urban project in general. Using journalistic images and pictorial commemorative souvenirs of events such as the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 and the Bristol riots of 1831, chapter five explores the manner in which towns’ political identities were forged, circulated and interpreted.

Focusing on long and short prose pieces which emerged in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, this chapter traces the shift from writers’ personal responses to the events to more considered, longer fictional works. The author, Catherine Morley, observes how many writers felt bereft of purpose after the attacks, unable to find words commensurate with the visual spectacle and psychological devastation of the day. While covering a range of contemporary literary writers including Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith and Jay McInerney, the chapter concentrates on Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man (2007), John Updike’s Terrorist (2007) and a selection of works from Ulrich Baer’s edited collection, 110 Stories: New York Writers After September 11 (2002), including Siri Hustvedt’s short essay on the inefficacy of language in the wake of trauma. The discussion of DeLillo and Updike addresses themes such as performance, spectacle, memory, language and the redemptive role of art in the processes of grief.

This chapter turns to the science of stagecraft, and to the endless recreations and adaptations of the wonders, magic, and treasures of the Arabian Nights that took place within the shows culture of nineteenth-century Britain. These authorless, ownerless tales presented ideal theatrical opportunities to display the rich landscapes, domestic interiors and dazzling treasures of the East within the public spaces of Britain. In so doing, they facilitated a kind of ‘virtual’ tourism, whereby audiences might participate in the adventurer’s narrative of discovery, infiltration, exploration, and safe return, without ever leaving England. At the same time, however, such performances fostered a self-reflective, inward movement, as an imaginative destination of childhood became a physical space that might be stepped into, examined and explored. Performances of the Arabian Nights had a disturbing capacity to evoke and to disrupt childhood memories, as they were reliant upon a substantial amount of labour and technical expertise in order to realise fully the workings of magic and the apparently spontaneous eruption of the supernatural on stage. As a vehicle for exploring the material and technological limits of nineteenth-century stagecraft, the wonder and enchantment of the Arabian Nights thus became inextricably intertwined with the wonder of machinery and technical ingenuity, as new techniques were developed for representing fantasy and manufacturing magic.

This chapter follows on closely from the previous one by seeking to conceptualise music consumption and its necessary ‘other’ — production — within a paradigmatic framework that suspends orthodox structuralist models of hegemony polarised by dominant and subordinate socio-economic classes, in favour of dynamic interactionist models which systematically explore concrete, everyday cultural practices. These dynamic interactionist approaches to cultural practices do not all neatly fit into the same ‘spectacle, narcissism, and performance’ framework, but they necessarily contain elements of the Spectacle/Performance Paradigm in their movement away from structural Marxism. After first evaluating the most ground-breaking theories into everyday consumption and production, it applies those theories of greater usefulness for the aims of this research to the relative merits of studies into audiences and — more pressingly — performances.

Chapter 5 focuses on what appears to be one of the most conscious responses to the Burkean challenge: the invention of the panorama by the Irish-Scottish painter Robert Barker in the late 1780s. By literally removing the edges of representation, and immersing its viewers within an uninterrupted circular view, the panorama created a striking illusion of reality which, at least while the medium was still novel, caused unprecedented spectatorial thrills. While the medium could be linked to a tradition of illusion and immersion which predated the Enlightenment reflexion on the sublime, Barker clearly saw its relevance as a means to deny the limitations of painting. The chapter’s analyses of programmes, narratives and descriptions of panoramas by Robert Barker, Henry Aston Barker, Robert Ker Porter and Robert Burford suggest that this conception of the panorama as the most adequate pictorial vehicle of the sublime was to endure for several decades.

For Jean-Luc Nancy there appear to be three ways in which art today is contemporary: conceptual non-identity with itself, being in tune with its own questioning, above all a political signification. Nancy is in agreement with the first two, the third he disclaims. Art's conceptual non-identity is consonant with its self-questioning, for the question which art unfolds is the ontological one of what it is; a question which makes art different from itself in itself. According to this twofold conception, art is before anything else the exposition of the question ‘What is art?’ It will be argued in this paper that art is our ‘disengagement’ from signification, our ‘suspension’ from it; it ‘isolates what we call a “sense,” or a part or feature of this sense… so as to force it to be only what it is outside of signifying’. Sense beyond signification is the abandonment of the signifier and the forswearing of the appropriation of signifieds in favour of opening, opening the world to its sense, opening the world to its possibilities.

Like many before him, Foucault draws a strong connection between language and death. He describes the aversion of discourse in similar terms which he later used to posit the biopolitical “ban” on death: “I am supposing that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers”. In order to respond to such a claim, the chapter weighs three related issues: the news media, ideology, and consciousness raising. It examines Agamben's treatment of Debord's Society of the Spectacle, offering a model for analyzing the role of the media in the discussion of biopolitics. It also highlights the connection between the loss of language as the loss of what is common to man and as a manifestation of the society of the spectacle.

This chapter argues against action cinema's reputation for narrative paucity, by demonstrating the ways in which the action film is highly narratively communicative. Using Avatar and I, Robot as case studies, the chapter shows how narrative information is communicated not just through dialogue and action but through the audio-visual presentation of those elements. Audio-visual presentation can supplement explicit narrative information with thematic detail that then shapes our responses to subsequent narrative developments and action sequences. The chapter elaborates the concept of the action hero's ‘narrative of becoming’ that articulates the protagonist's physical and emotional trajectory towards achieving full occupation of the heroic action body. This narrative of becoming is an integral part of the main narrative thrust that moves the ?lm towards its resolution. In this formulation action sequences display the extraordinary capacities of the action hero, but in a manner that is inextricably linked with narrative process. Rather than being discrete tests of the hero's stamina, agility and ingenuity, action sequences operate developmentally across the action ?lm to construct the hero's ‘becoming-powerful.’

This chapter discusses the aesthetic tendencies evident in the construction of the contemporary action sequence, exploring what might be at stake in their inclusion and popularity, and the ways in which they are narratively expressive as well as spectacular. The stylistic and representational aspects of the staging of speed, risk and mastery are investigated using Fast and Furious and Live Free or Die Hard as case studies, and the discussion of action cinema as sensory experience is developed in relation to these dimensions. The chapter ends with an explicit emphasis on sound design, considering the sound strategies used in the contemporary action sequence to stage the body, and their consequences for a film's representational hierarchy.

Peter Chan’s 2005, Perhaps Love, depicts the filming of a musical film, and serves as a prime example of mise-en-abîme metacinema, or in other words, the metacinema of production. Close reading of the film reveals the circulation of musical genre conventions from Bollywood to Hollywood to Hong Kong and China. Key among these conventions are the display of spectacular images of singing and dancing in combination with dazzling editing speeds reflecting the influence, particularly, of Baz Lurhmann’s Moulin Rouge! Gender relations, always an important focus in musical film, here point to postcolonial formations linking (and distinguishing) mainland China, Hong Kong, and Hollywood, and which, in the end, abandon the female lead.

This chapter introduces the importance of text and images of writing for feminist art practices in the late 1960s and 1970s. Beginning with the 2008 exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, it demonstrates that an engagement with language was a significant part of women artists’ efforts to resist the ways in which late-twentieth-century visual culture reinforces the idea that women should serve as the other of patriarchal culture. The introduction presents the three artists who are the focus of the book – Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly – and argues that the ‘writerly’ qualities of the artwork they produced in the 1970s undermines the visual dominance of spectacle culture and the production of woman as a sign that represents passivity and sexual availability. The introduction also makes a case for pairing the artwork of Piper, Spero, and Kelly with the writings of Angela Davis, Valerie Solanas, and Laura Mulvey. In aligned historical contexts, these writers also addressed the limited range of images through which women were allowed to appear, and thereby suggest what it means to receive the artwork’s call to other women to collaborate on the project of creating a feminist imaginary.

It analyzes both the treatment of violence and the metafictional discourses that the body of films develops on the topic. Despite the director’s claims in early interviews, the movies reveal an awareness of how sensitive and complex it is: violence is a core feature of the films not so much by token of its presence, but because it is the point where the aesthetics, ethics and politics of the films converge—this explains why discussions of violence inevitably crop up in each chapter, as in writings on Tarantino in general.

Chapter 1: “Tableaux Mort: Execution, Cinema, and Carceral Fantasies” explores the nature of the carceral imaginary within the context of the early execution films, Galvanism and the electrical wonder show, and the Phantasmagoria. I use the contested cultural meanings of electricity and capital punishment as suggested in The Execution of Czolgoszto discern how electrocution represented in examples as diverse as an episode of Harry Houdini’s Master Mystery series (1919), a fictional reconstruction of Ruth Snyder’s 1928 electrocution in Picture Snatcher(Lloyd Bacon, 1933), and The Green Mile(Frank Darabont, 1999). These films satisfy a psychic impulse to witness punishment and incarceration while illuminating the long durée of punishment as embodied spectacle in numerous nineteenth century entertainment.