Camera Obscura articles from September 2003

Camera Obscura archives from September 2003

Too close, too far: cultural composition in Straub and Huillet's Too Early, Too Late.
September 1, 2003... At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored.... Most often, our perception of the city is not sustained, but rather partial, fragmentary, mixed with other...

Hoodoo economics: white men's work and black men's magic in contemporary American film.
September 1, 2003... In a November 2000 editorial in Time entitled "That Old Black Magic," columnist Christopher John Farley notes that a spate of recent US films, including The Legend of Bagger Vance (dir. Robert Redford, 2000), What Dreams May Come (dir. Vincent...

The rhetoric of passion.
September 1, 2003... Carl-Theodor Dreyer's 1928 French film The Passion of Joan of Arc [La passion de Jeanne d'Arc] takes shape around the tension between its mode of representation and the subjectivity it represents. Dreyer's Joan is the Joan of popular mythology....

Jane Campion's selling of the mother/land: restaging the crisis of the postcolonial subject.
September 1, 2003... Matricide and Postcolonial Melancholia In Imaginary Homelands, Sahnan Rushdie argues that for contemporary global citizens, "of all the many elephant traps lying ahead... the largest and most dangerous" one is "that form of internal exile...

The practice and politics of "freeing the look": Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs.
September 1, 2003... Much of the initial reaction to Jonathan Demme's film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs (US, 1991) (1) centered on the film's problematic depiction of serial killer Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine), as this depiction participated in a history of...

Books received.
September 1, 2003... Barnes, Peter. To Be or Not to Be. London: British Film Institute, 2002. Barrios, Richard. Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall. New York: Routledge, 2003. Chion, Michel. Eyes Wide Shut. London: British Film...