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This chapter recounts how, despite serious financial woes and impending bankruptcy, the Wharton brothers pressed forward with a new serial. Using the profits from their feature The Great White Trail, they entered into a contract with the recently retired chief of the United States Secret Service William J. Flynn and, with much ado, began making preparations for the filming of a multipart patriotic picture, The Eagle's Eye (1918). Their first serial production since the Hearst-backed Patria, it had a similarly nationalistic theme, and it would, they believed, restore them to prominence and solvency. Whereas Patria indulged Hearst's conspiracy theories about a Mexican–Japanese alliance intent on invading the United States at its western border, The Eagle's Eye was based on actual German spy plots that Flynn had discovered and thwarted. While The Eagle's Eye was the only feature picture that the brothers produced in 1918, they completed another short propaganda film of considerable merit: The Mission of the War Chest.

This chapter examines The Eye (Gin Gwai 2002), as a material and metaphoric representation of pan-Asian cultural flows. It traces “pan-Asian-ness” in the film and looks at how it is intertextualized with other national cinemas and the film's sequel, The Eye 2 (2004). It also emphasizes that the film's central theme—the confusion over identity—is reflected in the popularity of such cross-cultural themes throughout Asian horror cinema.

This chapter offers a treatise on brown, the color of soil and compost. Though seemingly a hue consigned to decay, brown matter, the very substance that allows for growth and fertility, is life. Specific attention will be paid to The Bluest Eye and Paradise as Morrison deftly ties soil fecundity and biodiversity to race. It is of note that Morrison frames The Bluest Eye, a novel that explores the devastation of racism, with a discourse on soil health and marigold seeds. In Paradise, Morrison again returns to dirt, specifically compost, which she analogizes to the rich lives of a multigenerational group of women. In prioritizing brown as the first chapter of Toni Morrison and the Natural World, this book begins, as Morrison does, by centering African Americans. The universe of color in Morrison’s fiction is inside a palette of browns.

This chapter looks at the last decade and a half of Maya Deren's life and career, examining the films Meditation on Violence (1949) and The Very Eye of Night (1958). Meditation on Violence mobilizes incompletion primarily in its themes and form, as it embraces a non-resolving arc. The film addresses themes regarding the balance of energies, taking as its subject the Wu-Tang and Shao-Lin martial arts that seek to create this balance. Meanwhile, The Very Eye of Night is an exemplar of incompletion in its themes, medium-specific concerns, and practical progress toward completion as a film. It shows the simultaneous freedom and frustration of Deren's work when it is shaped by aspects of incompletion, in this case mainly through its collapsing of the negative/positive, light/dark, and heavenly/bodily divides, as well as by its development as a project.

The first rape novels, written in the 1970s, demand that rape be understood as violation. The traditional readerly reaction of voyeuristic pleasure to depictions of rape is replaced by feelings of shock and horror more appropriate for this subject matter. The 1970s rape novel offers a new script for the rape story that focuses primarily on the experiences of the victim. This recentering is achieved through the unflinchingly realistic portrayal of sexual violence on the page. These novels portray rape as rape, allowing the reader to understand the violence enacted upon the victim’s body, the brutality impressed upon her mind, and the devastating personal and communal repercussions of the act.

Saul Bass realized the potential of the journey as a narrative device for both his titles and his films. Travel invariably involves a goal, both geographic and conceptual, but more often than not, the journey itself is the goal, as if the mere accomplishment of the quest leads to the acquisition of knowledge. Bass’s title sequence for Martin Ritt’s The Edge of the City (1957), his first title to use the narrative trope of the journey, inserts his typical designs for graphic city lights over live-action images. His titles for Walk on the Wild Side (1962), directed by Edward Dmytryk, may be his most celebrated: the black cat slinking through an urban landscape metaphorically circumscribing the film’s “cat house.” Bass’s two sponsored films for the New York World’s Fair, From Here to There (1964) and The Searching Eye (1964), both describe journeys of visual discovery. Quest (1983), in contrast, is a spiritual and metaphoric journey in the guise of a science fiction film.

The Eye (Gin Gwai, 2002) and its two sequels (2004, 2005) deal with pan-Asian film production, gender, and identity. The films seem to embrace a transnational outlook that that fits a shared Southeast Asian cinematic and cultural agenda. Instead, they disclose tensions about Hong Kong’s identity, its relationship with other countries in the region, and its mixture of Western and Eastern traditions (Knee, 2009). As horror films, The Eye series feature transpositional hauntings framed by a visual preference for understanding reality and the supernatural that is complicated by the ghostly perceptions of their female protagonists. Thus, the issues explored in this film series rely on a haunting that presents textual manifestations of transposition, imposition, and alienation that further evidence its complicated pan-Asian look. This chapter examines the films’ privilege of vision as catalyst of a transnational, Asian Gothic horror aesthetic that addresses concepts of identity, gender, and subjectivity.

This chapter argues that in the novels that address the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s — Jazz, The Bluest Eye, and Sula — Morrison examines the opportunities and pitfalls that ‘freedom’ proscribed by segregation entailed. Together with Home, which is set primarily in the 1950s but which incorporates retrospective depictions of earlier decades, these novels enlist classical notions of ‘fate’, ‘sacrifice’, and classical purification rituals in their representations of city and town life, and of the continuing quest for a viable black identity. It argues that Jazz writes against dominant American versions of pastoral (epitomized by Leo Marx) in its depiction of black urbanization, and that Home enacts a complex dialogue with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The chapter ends by discussing the political implications of the final rejection of Aristotelian ‘catastrophe’ or ‘calamity’ in Morrison's trilogy and other texts.

This chapter examines African cosmologies and the nature of spiritual power and beliefs, alongside axiological ideas of beauty and value in Toni Morrison's first novel The Bluest Eye. In this novel, Morrison used the metaphor unyielding earth to refer to white supremacy. She also explored the psychic breach of having been looked upon with the evil eye and suggested that there may be a need for an alternative view of God, one that aligns itself to the image of the person in the mirror that would yield self-acceptance for all African people.

This chapter examines a Latin motto in Song of Solomon and the transformed version of Atlas in The Bluest Eye to discuss Morrison's reclamation or reinvention of the classical tradition, and of tradition itself, as transnational and potentially radical processes.

From The Bluest Eye to Home, Toni Morrison’s novels take up the subjects of place and displacement, home and homelessness, belonging and exile, memory and loss. Readers are always invited to bring whatever knowledge they have to the scene. Morrison’s later novels evoke places that are described with verisimilitude yet inscribe spiritual cartographies (as in Paradise), and maps of places at once alluring and evanescent. In these places readers are forced to confront what Morrison calls “vulnerable humanity,” the selves that exist in her fiction beneath ideologies of race, selves that could exist in the world if readers summoned her domesticated race-free paradise into being. Although the essay draws its illustrations from a range of novels, it focuses on The Bluest Eye and Home. One rule, however, is consistent: if the scene is to come alive, readers are compelled to make their own imaginative acts in response to the worlds that the text creates. (151 words)

This chapter examines the writings of Toni Morrison about witnessing and dealing with death. It discusses the commentaries of Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Francois Lyotard on Morrison's novels and suggests that her focus on origins upends the presumptive temporality of witnessing by revealing the entanglement of a future catastrophe with the desire for amnesia and severance from the past that so often appears to be a source of freedom. This chapter also contends that from The Bluest Eye through Tar Baby, Morrison questioned the processing of witnessing and most of her novels are filled with the necessity of remembering forgetting.

An extensive conversation with Dutch-Indonesian filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich, about the development of what he calls “Single-Shot Cinema.” Helmrich discusses his early attempts to make complex single-shot films, including Jermand auf der Treppe (1994), a 50-minute single-shot documentation of an experimental performance. For Helmrich cinema is movement, and he has developed a variety of techniques and devices (the Steadywings, Orbit) for facilitating cinematic movement. Helmrich speaks to the evolution of his Indonesian Trilogy (The Eye of the Day, Shape of the Moon, Position among the Stars), his decade-long documentation of an Indonesian family in the throes of personal and cultural change; and his films about Islam in Indonesia, revealing the ways in which Islam and traditional Indonesian culture both meld and conflict.

This essay testifies to Toni Morrison’s willingness to probe racial experiences that are painful to the touch. As a novelist Morrison enters her “own” territory with the same self-risking dedication that she draws on when entering “other” territory. “Imagining is not merely looking or looking at,” she writes; “nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work, becoming” (4). A “becoming” in which one’s prior identity does not remain intact poses the question (notably in The Bluest Eye): what are the risks of “becoming” what one writes about? What happens to the faculty of judgment in these moments, especially when the character that the writer has “become” approaches the monstrous? Weinstein examines not the white “others” Morrison has created, but rather the reflexive light Morrison has shed on her “own” people as she explores extremes of white-conditioned black distress. (148 words)

This focuses on Vantage, Taxonomy, and the Anamorphic (a scopic regime visually encoded that must be interpreted to come into focus.) Subject texts include Spiderman, The Story if an Eye, Shallow Hal, and the Shrek films.