Camera Obscura articles from December 2002

Camera Obscura archives from December 2002

The dream of the nineteenth century.
December 1, 2002... What is cinema? Nothing. What does cinema want? Everything. What can cinema do? Something.--Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinema In Histoire(s) du cinema (France, 1988-98), Godard explores the "nothing" that cinema now is, and the...

Innovating women's television in local and national networks: Ruth Lyons and Arlene Francis.
December 1, 2002... Newsweek's cover story on 19 July 1954 called Arlene Francis "the quick queen of television." (1) In the same year, Look magazine reported that Ruth Lyons was known as "Miss Ohio" because her "chitchat" had "the force of law." (2) These tropes...

Projections and intersections: paranoid textuality in Sorry, Wrong Number.
December 1, 2002... Plots originate in knots, and knots are created when the lines circumscribing the worlds of the narrative universe, instead of colliding, intersect each other. In order to disentangle the lines in their domain, characters resort to plotting,...

A star is porn: corpulence, comedy, and the homosocial cult of adult film star Ron Jeremy.
December 1, 2002... In a 1995 episode of MTV's Beavis and Butthead, "Career Day," the eponymous, flatulent, nose-picking adolescent duo take their usual spot on the couch and watch a music video by an alternative rock band called the Meices, providing their usual...

Itsy-bitsy spiders and other pieces of the real in Dead Calm.
December 1, 2002... The function of the tuche, of the real as encounter--the encounter in so far as it may be missed, in so far as it is essentially the missed encounter--first presented itself in the history of psycho-analysis in a form that was in itself already...

Books received.
December 1, 2002... Adams, Rachel. Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Aitken, Ian. European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001....