UP Journals (Univ. of Pretoria)
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Postmodernising the lady vampire: melancholy, isolation, and the female bloodsucker
Get PDFThis article focuses on three films that facilitate a de-mystification of the vampire by resisting the mythological pretext, and often even the horror or romance conventions, of earlier vampire films. While the films in question – The Addiction (Ferrara 1995), Let The Right One In (Alfredson 2008) and Trouble Every Day (Denis 2001) – are undeniably aware of preconceived notions of the vampire, they are more preoccupied with the psychological implications of vampirism as an illness than making reference to any of their precursors. Their emphasis on the burden of vampirism takes away from the conventional vampire advantages such as sex appeal and special powers.
While most recent work on the vampire film has focused on direct comparisons between contemporary films, this grouping of specific postmodern examples considers which traits recurrently stray from the conventions. Thus, the focus is not on the fact that each of the films in question depict protagonists that drink blood and have a propensity to kill, but on the way they exclude aspects such as the mythical background story and the erotically mysterious vampire in order to present a more realistic figure, burdened by the weight of his or her intense desire for blood
International Design Alliance Congress 2011: There is no way that design can sustain its current trajectory
Get PDFThe multidisciplinary design sector has evolved dynamically over the past decade and one of the most critical results has been the formal formation of the International Design Alliance (IDA) in 2005. The IDA is a strategic venture between international organisations representing design. The alliance was created by two founding partners – the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (Icsid) and the International Council of Graphic Design Associations (Icograda).1 In 2008, the IDA added the International Federation of Interior Architects/Designers (IFI) to the alliance as the third partner. The alliance is based on the desire of its partners to ‘do together what they cannot do alone’, concentrating on opportunities arising from multidisciplinary collaboration (Icograda 2011a).
Editorial
Get PDFApproaching the city of Pretoria/Tshwane from the south, one is greeted by three monumental structures perched atop three hills surrounding Pretoria, from west to east: the Voortrekker Monument, Freedom Park, and the University of South Africa (UNISA), each one of them a dense conglomeration of symbols, emblems, and iconsforged out of concrete, rock, earth and stone. Not far behind this formidable threesome follows another massive fortress marking the entrance to the city – Pretoria Central Prison.
Guest editorial for themed section Black Panther and Afrofuturism: theoretical discourse and review
Get PDFThis article proposes that Black Panther, with its aesthetic and thematic emphasis on Afrofuturism, as well as its spectacular technical production, makes a unique contribution to cinematic history in several significant ways. In order to establish these noteworthy contributions, both the film and Afrofuturism are engaged with. This article is divided into three distinct parts. Part I provides a brief theoretical overview of Black Panther and Afrofuturism. Part II, a short review, follows. Co-authored by Mark Kirby-Hirst, the review contextualises and analyses the film within the bounds of Afrofuturism and twenty-first century art and film criticism, in an effort to argue for the relevance and import of such a unique and yet mainstream piece of cinema history; which, we conclude, is owing in no small part to the rise in popularity of decolonising tendencies in the humanities, in art, and in wider twenty-first century visual culture. The last section of this article, Part III, provides a brief synopsis of the contributing articles to this special themed section of Image & Text
Black Panther: a reception analysis: African Perspectives on Marvel’s Black Panther
No full textSince first screenings, Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018) generated a host of celebratory and circumspect literature. The author performed a scoping approach in order to delineate the thematic concentrations (forthcoming). Of significance was the lack of audience reception apart from a Brazilian study (see Burocco 2019) and reflections on watching the film (see Washington 2019). Afrofuturism was deemed a suitable lens through which to view Black Panther as a film contesting political economic bondage of neoliberal globalisation. Avery Rose Everhart (2016) proposes useful categories of displacement, interruption, and disruption as potentially generative for Afrofuturistic thinking. While Black Panther was commemorated, Jalondra Alicia Davis’s (2017) caution holds well in terms of scrutinising the structures that inscribe Black success and progress. A reception analysis was therefore conducted to look at how young, Black viewers received the film. The first and third group of respondents consisted of dominantly female university students who live in the suburbs of Ethekwini in South Africa. The second group of respondents were dominantly male youth who live in an informal settlement in the Ethekwini region. The paper chronicles the respondents’ reception of the film through an Afrofuturist lens
Book Review: African somaesthetics: cultures, feminisms, politics
Get PDFThe American pragmatist, Richard Shusterman, has given shape to a field of study known as somaesthetics. In his formulation of this field, Shusterman (1999:302) recommends that, in philosophical discourse and in relation to aesthetic experience, close attention should be paid to ‘bodily states and experiences’. His concern is especially to place the thinking body and its capacity of knowing at the centre of academic attention and to develop awareness of how the living body is experienced, used, and cultivated in particular situations. African somaesthetics: cultures, feminisms, politics ( 2020) t akes u p S husterman’s p roposal b y a pplying t he d iscourse o f somaesthetics to issues of race and gender in the contemporary African context. The chapters in this volume, therefore, focus on interrogating the body in African cultures in the context of colonisation, decolonisation, and globalisation. In her introductory chapter, editor Catherine F. Botha briefly explains that the contributors take Shusterman’s conception of somaesthetics as a provocation that arouses and stimulates thinking around the importance of attending to the lived body in understanding human existence. Thus, e ach c hapter offers a u nique a nd refreshing v iew o n the s ignificance of the bodily dimension of aesthetic expression and experience in general. An interesting array of topics are covered in the volume, including albinism, film, philosophy, cultural activism, and various forms of dance including ballet, contemporary dance, and break dancing
Montage in play
Get PDFMontage is commonly identified solely with film-editing. Why this is the case when conceptually it is synonymous with the practice of collage is due largely to the Soviet insistence that Russian editing practices – montage – differed substantially from Hollywood editing practices. In asserting the specificity of a Soviet montage practice which seeks to entirely control the message of film for the spectator, Sergei Eisenstein set himself against the thinking of his rival and contemporary Dziga Vertov. In this dispute, the focus becomes the politics of reading more generally. This dispute around the politics of active reading is later echoed and amplified in Jacques Derrida’s arguments around the postcard, and picked up in South Africa around the understanding of a recent montage text, 40 nights/40 days: from the lockdown. The dynamics of what it is to be a “fearful reader” are here taken further through the question of montage in play and the politics of reading in the moment of Covid-19
The art of labour: Representations of childbirth by Reshada Crouse and Christine Dixie: Hitting home: representations of the domestic milieu in feminist art
No full textSince the mid-1980s, there have been numerous instances of South African women ar tists representing pregnancy or making works reflecting on motherhood. A representation of the birth process itself is, however, unusual. In this article, the focus is placed on two women artists who have used this atypical subject matter. Reshada Crouse represented the birth of her first child in Danielle and Me and Danielle in 1975, returning to the theme many years later in Homo Sapien – Spiritual Animal (2021). Christine Dixie represented childbirth in a large body of art entitled Parturient Prospects, which she started in 2005 while pregnant with her second child and completed after the birth in 2006. She, too, returned to the theme later, using the matrices of her Birthing Tray works from the Parturient Prospects project to make The Harbingers in 2016 and adding varnish, colour, and cotton stitches to one of the sets of prints making up the Birthing Tray series in 2022. It is suggested that, for both artists, the theme enabled feminist responses to practices of childbirth as well as other formative moments in their lives. It is also suggested that both artists respond to discourses from the West, but in different ways. While Crouse positions her art as offering a parallel but female point of view to male ‘masters’ whose works have had an impact on her, Dixie suggests a commonality between early modern discourses about childbirth and those to do with the colonisation of Africa
Labour, love, or violence? Farieda Nazier’s Don’t Make Me Over (2021): Hitting home: representations of the domestic milieu in feminist art
No full textDon’t Make Me Over (2021) is a videographic piece by South African artist Farieda Nazier comprising performance, music, poetry, curated settings, and sculptural assemblages, which forms part of her Post(erity) Project. The title—Don’t Make Me Over—is based on the 1962 song of the same name originally recorded by Dionne Warwick and later covered by Sybil in 1987. While an integral and fundamental component of the work, the artist emphasises that her interpretation of the popular hit is not a music video. Throughout this article, I discuss how Nazier enacts scenes of both compliance and defiance against the conflation of femininity and the domestic milieu, and the embodied violence of patriarchal norms dictating feminine ‘beauty’ and behaviours—the former exasperated by a history of racialised oppression and unequal power relationships in South Africa, which further conflate blackness with labour, but particularly domestic labour. Moreover, I examine how the video implies an abusive relationship dynamic in which the female subject appears entangled, set against the backdrop of The Forge theatre in Johannesburg, thereby implying the masquerade of gender identity and emphasising the narrative quality of the work as a whole
Gazing upon the mother giving birth : anxieties and aliens in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012)
Get PDFThis article explores the female hero and more significantly, the female alien – the Trilobite – in Ridley Scott’s science fiction film, Prometheus (2012). The female alien reveals social, cultural and sexual anxieties that are projected onto the audience. Using a feminist film analysis, this article explores how horror in the science fiction film responds to gendered cultural shifts that disrupts the view that cinema is constructed for the viewing pleasure of a patriarchal society. Through a particular scene in the film, and through gazing at the mother alien giving birth, this article explores how cinema wields potential to disrupt the male gaze, and identify with female sexuality and the female body. Employing a feminist psychoanalytic framework, the article shows the film’s potential to grapple with the issues of the female unconscious, revealing the female alien as a site of power through her procreative potential. The Alien franchise has garnered significant attention from feminist film theorists, focusing predominantly on the alien Xenomorph. This analysis instead focuses on the alien Trilobite, as the mother and progenitor of the Xenomorph