Camera Obscura articles from May 2003

Camera Obscura archives from May 2003

The Jewish closet in Europa, Europa.
May 1, 2003... This essay will explore the representation of the Jewish closet in Agnieszka Holland's Europa, Europa [Hitlerjunge Salomon] (Germany/ France/Poland, 1990). Based on the autobiography of Salomon Perel, the film traces the succession of...

Memory once removed: indirect memory and transitive autobiography in Chantal Akerman's D'Est.
May 1, 2003... In the Imaginary Jew, contemporary French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut laments that while his Jewishness furnished him with the deepest, most precious aspects of his identity, on closer examination, it was an identity not conferred on him by...

AIDS and gay cinephilia.
May 1, 2003... In Positiv, the opening short film in Mike Hoolboom's six-part compilation film Panic Bodies (Canada, 1998), the viewer is faced with a veritable excess of the visual. The screen is divided into four equal parts, suggesting both a wall of video...

The quick and the dead: surrealism and the found ethnographic footage films of Bontoc Eulogy and Mother Dao: the Turtlelike.
May 1, 2003... When he was on the other side of the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him. --intertitle, F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu You are standing alone on an endless road. The sun is blinding hot. The only sound is that of the wind. All of a sudden...

Taking it personally: male suffering in 8MM.
May 1, 2003... Male suffering is nothing new to films. Male characters have undergone torture and endured pain for their beliefs, their country, their honor, their women, their family, and their friends since films began to tell stories. (1) In a narrative...

Books received.
May 1, 2003... Alter, Nora M. Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema, 1967-2000. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Bachman, Gregg, and Thomas J. Slater, eds. American Silent Film: Discovering Marginalized Voices. Carbondale: Southern...