Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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In the Name of the Father: Paul Czinner’s Fräulein Else and the Fate of the Neue Frau
Get PDFThe question that the filmmaker Rüdiger Suchsland repeatedly asks in From Caligari to Hitler: German Cinema in the Age of the Masses (2014), his incisive documentary about the great films of the Weimar Era, is based on Siegfried Kracauer’s landmark book of 1947: From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. In the book, Kracauer does not frame his famous thesis as the question Suchsland poses, but the critic does indeed suggest that during the 1920s German cinema somehow knew something that even the filmmakers who were making that cinema did not, or, at least, something of which they were not fully aware. Why else would they make film after film glorifying the authority of powerful men of obscure origins who were capable of inculcating something like madness in their followers as a means of controlling them? Thus it is with sinister male authority figures such as the title characters of Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari [The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari] (1920) and Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler [Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler] (1922). For Kracauer, Caligari ‘glorifie[s] authority’ and makes the title character ‘a premonition of Hitler’, while Dr. Mabuse is a ‘tyrant film’ set in a world that ‘has fallen prey to lawlessness and depravity’. And even though the criminal mastermind Mabuse is eventually brought to justice, the agent of the law is not so different from Mabuse himself, ‘a kind of legal gangster [who] is morally so indifferent that his triumph lacks significance’. ‘To be sure’, Kracauer concludes, ‘Mabuse is wrecked; but social depravity continues’
In the Shambles of Hollywood: The Decadent Trans Feminine Allegory in Myra Breckinridge
Get PDFWhen Twentieth Century Fox announced there would be a 1970 film adaptation of Gore Vidal’s controversial novel Myra Breckinridge (1968), Candy Darling considered it her prime opportunity to break into mainstream cinema. The novel follows its titular character, an addled trans woman obsessed with the films of the 1940s, as she seeks to claim her inheritance from an uncle who runs an acting academy in Hollywood. Darling, a trans woman herself, had begun her acting career in Andy Warhol’s movies, where she formed an important part of the Factory set along with other trans feminine people such as Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis. But these underground films had a limited circulation, and it was Darling’s deepest-held ambition to become a legitimate starlet. When she applied for the role, she was rejected in favour of the cisgender actress Raquel Welch [fig. 1]. ‘They decided Raquel Welch would make a more believable transvestite’, she recounted. While Welch obviously lent the production some star power at the time, Darling’s exclusion seems counterintuitive: she was about the same age as Myra in the novel and was also obsessed with vintage Hollywood, modelling herself after peroxide blonde actresses such as Lana Turner, Kim Novak, and Jean Harlow. She could recite whole passages from films such as Picnic (1955), demonstrating something of Myra’s encyclopaedic film knowledge; in fact, Warhol thought ‘she knew even more about forties movies than Gore Vidal did’. In the novel there are several references to Myra’s career as an underground film star prior to her transition that may well allude to films such as Warhol’s Flesh (1968), a film that Darling had actually been in. She was, in other words, already engaged in the sexual avant-gardism Myra Breckinridge apparently represented, as well as what in the novel becomes a tragi-comic obsession with the Golden Age of Hollywood.
 
Elliptical Thinking: Planetary Patterns of Thought in De Profundis
Get PDFIn an 1881 letter asking a friend to meet his mother, Oscar Wilde writes: ‘all brilliant people should cross each other’s cycles, like some of the nicest planets’. In comparing the people in his social circle to celestial bodies in orbit, Wilde sets forth an idea that will soon become literalized in images within and surrounding his works. An illustration in Salomé (1894) renders Wilde the actual ‘(wo)man in the moon’, through placing his distinguishing physiognomy – slightly drooping eyes and thick full lips – on a white circle [fig. 1], while many cartoons satirizing Wilde’s American lecture tour put his head at the centre of a plant that seems to be more sun than flower. An 1881 Punch cartoon by Edward Sambourne, ‘O.W.’, features Wilde’s head as the only visible centre of a sunflower, with crisp triangular petals extending outward so rigidly that they appear to emanate from his body [fig. 2]. Another cartoon appearing in Judge magazine, entitled ‘A Thing of Beauty Not a Joy Forever’, features a sunflower-adorned Wilde standing with his head and torso in the centre of an enormous shape of ambiguous identification [fig. 3]. A very large orange circle with small yellow triangles coming off it, the shape could either be an enormous sunflower or, given its absence of a stem and leaves, a sun. Be he the face of the sun or the man in the moon, Wilde is, in all three of these illustrations, combined with a celestial body
Chardin\u27s Lesson
Get PDFIn this essay I show how looking at two paintings by Jean-Simeon Chardin (1699-1779) in the National Gallery encouraged me to revisit the experience of providing art therapy for people with learning difficulties. In reflecting on my experiences, both of the paintings and of providing art therapy, I began to develop my thinking in relation to emotion and self-expression. My reading of art therapy literature, philosophy (Hegel 1977 and Butler 1987 & 1997), semiotics (Jakobson 1960) and neuroscience (Damasio 1999), then gave me the confidence to make a definitive statement in relation to ‘self-expression’. In presenting my arguments to readers I hope I will have encouraged art therapists to give attention to the cultural and social situation which facilitates the use of art materials to provide transformative experiences and support the development of relationship and self-awareness. Key words: Chardin, Art Therapy, Learning difficulties, emotion and feeling, self-expression.
Book Review. Art Therapy in Private Practice：Theory, Practice and Research in Changing Contexts. Edited by James D. West
No full textThis book is a rich compendium of sixteen writers’ thoughts, feelings, and insights into addressing art therapy in private practice in the UK as well as the writers’ experiences of private practice therapeutic work in situ and a brief view of academic research. The book is divided into five sections: Contexts and Collaboration; Working with Children, Families and the Child in the Adult; Training and Transmission; Governance and Supervision; and Research. The themes provide a broad stroke of considerations within the category of private practice of art therapy
Women Writing Decadence: An Introduction
Get PDFThere was a time when the fin de siècle seemed to be an all-male club. The dandies, Decadents, dukes, drug-addled dreamers, and sundry other down-and-outs lolled or strutted across the pages of turn-of-the-century literature and the literary history of that period, and if women entered the story, they figured only as muses, unattainable visions, or regrettably available resources who licensed men’s most vicious failings, such as prostitutes. As the explosion of interest in women writers and women’s writing shone a light on the neglected corners and forgotten by-ways of the literature of yesteryear, it was allowed with grudging reluctance that maybe there had been one or two women Decadents. In France, the name of Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery Vallette, 1860-1953) would often come up in this context, for example, as though the concession proved the general truth. Such women were still presented as an exception, however, and the paradigm remained unchanged
Gertrud Eysoldt and the Persistence of Decadence on the German Avant-Garde Stage
Get PDFIn October 1901, Max Reinhardt’s avant-garde Berlin cabaret ‘Schall und Rauch’ [‘Sound and Smoke’] added to its line-up a new skit entitled ‘Die Dekadenten’ [‘The Decadents’]. The piece was based on a parody of Decadent and Aestheticist sensibilities that had appeared in 1898 in the magazine Jugend [see Fig. 1]. In it, two young men lounge in a fin-de-siècle café, smoking, drinking absinthe ‘the way Verlaine used to’, and discussing the effects of specific colours on their nerves. After basking in the notion of a blue house with a green roof lit from within by a cadmium-yellow flickering light, the two barely escape dying of ‘an excess of bliss’ by getting up and leaving the café, carrying on their shoulders ‘the great weariness of the declining century’. The clichéd, overwrought Decadence of this 1898 vignette clearly still has traction in October 1901, as can be seen in a magazine illustration of Reinhardt’s ‘Schall und Rauch’ version [see Fig. 2]. Reinhardt had already lampooned the aesthetics of the Yellow Nineties in 1901, when his cabaret ensemble parodied Maurice Maeterlinck’s Symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande (1893) as ‘Ysidore Mysterlinck’s “Carleas und Elisande”’; but with ‘Die Dekadenten’, he underscored his apparent rejection of the Aestheticist, Decadent, and Symbolist traditions. It was on that very same ‘Schall und Rauch’ stage one year later, however, that the company gave its famous private performance of Oscar Wilde’s Salome with Gertrud Eysoldt (1870-1955) in the title role – the performance that would inspire Richard Strauss to write his 1905 opera. Over the course of the next several years, as ‘Schall und Rauch’ morphed into the Kleines Theater and Reinhardt also took on directorship of the Neues Theater and the Deutsches Theater, the same ensemble that had mocked ‘The Decadents’ in 1901 performed Salome over 140 times and brought a number of other Decadent and Symbolist plays to the attention of Berlin audiences.[ The association of Reinhardt with Decadence was soon strong enough that the critic Leo Berg could write in 1906 of there having been two types of young playwright at the turn of the century: ‘the Idealists … who clung to Shakespeare and Schiller, and the Decadents, who were adopted with great success by Max Reinhardt’
Herodias’ Story, Herstory – Kazimiera Zawistowska’s Poetry, Young Poland, and Female Decadence
Get PDFThe contradictory currents that shaped Europe at the turn of the century were reflected in the literary production of the time. The Polish literature of the fin de siècle is an especially interesting case in point: Poland, which had disappeared from the map of Europe completely for 123 years (from 1795 to 1918), was partitioned at that time and its own literary past was blended with cultural influences from Habsburg Austria, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Russian Empire. As a consequence, a distinctly new Polish literature emerged, one that captured the essence of cosmopolitanism. Maria Podraza-Kwiatkowska refers to the literature produced between 1890-1918 as ‘Młoda Polska’ [Young Poland] and chooses this term because of its neutrality that nevertheless captures the divergent tendencies within it, spanning Symbolism and Expressionism. In contrast to other scholars, Podraza-Kwiatkowska dismisses the terms ‘Decadence’ and ‘Modernism’ because they encompass broader phenomena than literature
Three Poems by Else Lasker-Schüler: New Translations and Notes
Get PDFElse Lasker-Schüler (11 February 1869 – 22 January 1945) was a German-Jewish author who, besides her eccentric lifestyle, is known for being an Expressionist poet and one of the most influential writers of early twentieth-century German literature. Lasker-Schüler spent most of her life in Berlin where she was well connected within the circles of the Berlin Bohème around 1900. She counted painter Franz Marc, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, poet Peter Hille, and critic Karl Kraus amongst her close friends. Under threat of Nazi persecution, she travelled to Palestine in 1934 and finally settled in Jerusalem in 1937. The outbreak of World War II prevented her return to Europe. In the winter of 1945 she died and was buried in Jerusalem
Frank Ledwidge, Aerial Warfare: The Battle for the Skies
Get PDFFrank Ledwidge, Aerial Warfare: The Battle for the Skies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 184pp. ISBN 978-0-19-881813-7 (hardback). Price £12.99