Camera Obscura articles from September 2002

Camera Obscura archives from September 2002

Contagion and the boundaries of the visible: the cinema of world health.
September 1, 2002... World Health and the Dialectics of Visibility and Invisibility Even a cursory glance at contemporary US film and television reveals a cultural obsession with contagious disease, both as a biological threat and as a rhetorical trope...

Consuming distractions in Prix de beaute.
September 1, 2002... We annihilate beauty when we link the artistic creation with practical interests and transform the spectator into a selfishly interested bystander. The scenic background of the [photo] play is not presented in order that we decide whether we...

Conceptions and contraceptions of the future: Terminator 2, The Matrix, and Alien Resurrection.
September 1, 2002... The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity. --Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology ...

Spectacles of history: race relations, melodrama, and the science fiction/disaster film.
September 1, 2002... This essay, on the political and cultural significance of the disaster films of the 1990s, was completed in 1999. I had just finished the editorial revisions on the original version for inclusion in this issue when the terrorist attacks of 11...

Can "we all" get along? Social difference, the future, and Strange Days.
September 1, 2002... Several of the disparate character-driven narrative threads in Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days (US, 1995) connect with the murder of Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer), a popular African American political leader and rap musician. Jeriko One's entry...

Strange Days and the subject of mobility.
September 1, 2002... This is not like TV, only better. This is life. It's a piece of somebody's life. It's pure and uncut--straight from the cerebral cortex. I mean, you're there, you're doing it, you're seeing it, you're hearing it, you're feeling it. --Lenny...

Books received.
September 1, 2002... Abel, Richard, and Rick Altman, eds. The Sounds of Early Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Abrams, Nathan, Ian Bell, and Jan Udris. Studying Film. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Bernardi, Daniel, ed....