Imaginations (Journal)
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“MIRRORING TERROR”: THE IMPACT OF 9/11 ON HOLLYWOOD CINEMA
Get PDFBy drawing upon Siegfried Kracauer’s concept of cinema as a “mirror” of society, this article explores the impact of the “terror years” since 2001 on US cinema. Hollywood was the main cultural apparatus for coping with 9/11, which had left Americans struggling in the “desert of the real” (Žižek). Visual content simplifies traumatic events like the terrorist attacks for audiences—often expressing them in simple Manichean black and white terms and thereby offering moral guidance, unity, and a sense of destiny. Hollywood’s response to 9/11 included all these different aspects: It appealed to an “unbroken” spirit, strove to reassert the symbolic coordinates of the prevailing American reality, and mobilised for a response to new challenges. With time passing, Hollywood also incorporated the mounting doubts and dissent associated with this process. As the review of relating movies of the “terror years” demonstrates, the American film industry has examined, processed, and interpreted the meaning of the terrorist attacks in great variety: Ranging from merely atmospheric references to re-enactments, from pro-war propaganda to critical self-inquiry
IMAGINING PLACE: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF HOW CULTURAL OUTSIDERS AND INSIDERS RECEIVE FICTIONAL REPRESENTATIONS OF PLACE IN CARYL FÉREY’S UTU
Get PDFI provide empirical evidence from a longitudinal cross-cultural reader reception survey showing that cultural outsider (French) and insider (New Zealand) readers are differently influenced by the geographically and culturally-situated elements in Utu (French 2004, English translation 2011), a crime novel set in contemporary New Zealand by French writer Caryl Férey. After reading the novel, both cultural outsider and insider readers changed their opinions towards the image portrayed by Férey, even when his cultural claims were incorrect. Furthermore, for French readers, this influence extended beyond Utu’s final page to opinions about New Zealand and its inhabitants
AUSSTEIGEN (GETTING OUT) IMPOSSIBLE—MONTAGE AND LIFE SCENARIOS IN ANDRES VEIEL’S FILM BLACK BOX BRD
Get PDFAndres Veiel’s 2001 documentary film, Black Box BRD, links the biography of Alfred Herrhausen, RAF victim, with one of the 3rdgeneration RAF terrorists, Wolfgang Grams. In my paper, I trace how the film’s aesthetics introduce an image montage of two life scenarios by establishing both parallels and contrast, and therefore, following Susan Haywards definition “creates a third meaning” (112). I examine how the film establishes an aesthetic concept of Aussteigen (getting out)—along of the alive, visible bodies—the contemporary interviewees, and dead, invisible bodies—of Herrhausen and Grams
KANAK IMAGINARIES: A SENSE OF PLACE IN THE WORK OF DÉWÉ GÖRÖDÉ
Get PDFThe study of the Kanak imaginary in the work of the first published Kanak (indigenous) New Caledonian writer shows this to be permeated by a sense of place. Rootedness in, and intense community with the land is not incompatible with the fluidity of ancestral criss-crossing of the Pacific or of constant border-crossing(pathways of exchange between groups) but nonetheless remains central. The ‘hinterland’ constituted by the places of the tribu (customary lands) sets up a challenge to the dominance ofNouméa la blanche and Déwé Görödé’s articulation of places of identity re-negotiate the urban/regional or Noumea/Bush/Tribu nexus to counterbalance or contest national (French) imaginaries. Yet Görödé’s work presents both a return to a Kanak Place to Stand and a critical self in process (the latter situated in a ‘no man’s land’). The places in her work are ultimately ‘cognitively dissonant’: the marginal or hinter-land of Kanak imaginaries (the tribu), can hold (to) their own both outside and inside the city yet also open themselves up internally to multiplicity and critique
SHOOTING HISTORY: AN INTERVIEW WITH SWISS ARTIST CHRISTOPH DRAEGER ABOUT THE REENACTMENT OF TERRORISM IN HIS VIDEO INSTALLATION BLACK SEPTEMBER (2002)
Get PDFThis contribution introduces to the video installation Black September (2002) by Swiss artist Christoph Draeger and presents statements of the artist given in an interview in 2012. Draeger collects media representations of disasters in order to reconfigure their inherent sensationalism later in his artworks. The video installation Black September consists of appropriated footage from a documentary movie and video sequences from a re-enactment of the historical events of September 5th 1972, the terrorist attack during the 20th Olympic Games in Munich. Even the artist himself gets involved in the play in his mimikry of a hostage-taker and terrorist. Thus he questions the conditions of the mutual constitution of cultural memory and collective memory. His video installation creates a “counter image” in reaction to the “omnipresent myth of terrorism”, generated by the tragedy of 9/11 and the media reports in its aftermath. Both terrorist attacks, in Munich 1972 and in New York 2001, mark a turning point in the visual dominance of terrorism. In the case of September 11th, the recurring images of the airplane-attacks and the explosion of the WTC, followed by its collapsing, symbolize the legacy of the “terror of attention”, that would affect every spectator. The video questions the limits of the “disaster zone” in fictional reality and mass media. The artwork re-creates central scenes of the event in 1972. It brings the terrorist action close to the spectator through emersive images, but technically obtains a critical distance through its mode of reflection upon the catastrophe.The installation Black September stimulates and simulates history and memory simultaneously. It fills the void of a traumatic narrative and tries to recapture the signs that have been unknown yet
NZ@FRANKFURT: IMAGINING NEW ZEALAND’S GUEST OF HONOUR PRESENTATION AT THE 2012 FRANKFURT BOOK FAIR FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF LITERARY TRANSLATION
Get PDFWith over 7,000 exhibitors from over 100 countries and circa 300,000 visitors each year the Frankfurt Book Fair is a playground for political, economic, and cultural imaginings, including many domestic and foreign places. The Book Fair is often conceived of and studied as a site of intercultural politics and commerce but has not yet fully been explored as a site of translation and translator’s agency. This essay offers critical reflections upon metaphors for the translator, arguing that a shift of the base metaphor in comparative literature studies of translation from conflict to friction could redirect interdisciplinary translation studies. I propose that the friction metaphor leads toward an appropriate balance between complex detail and ordering reduction of data that allows us to describe the intensity and the challenges of translation without recreating the old-established realities we already know
“INSPIRED BY REAL EVENTS”—MEDIA (AND) MEMORY IN STEVEN SPIELBERG’S MUNICH (2005)
Get PDFSteven Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich tells the story of an Israeli counter-terrorist team in the aftermath of the hijacking and massacre at the Olympic Games in 1972. The film spawned broad discussion about its historical accuracy and its political standpoint. While criticism primarily focused on the historiographical representation of the actions depicted, this paper analyzes in two steps the genuinely filmic mode of historical representation ofMunich. First, the analysis discusses the interplay of two conflicting narrative strategies that negotiate the character development with the political struggle. And second, analysis focuses on the two formal devices at the core of the narrative conflict: The reflexive framing of television in the depiction of the Munich massacre as a traumatic media event and the excessive transformation of its memory in a series of flashbacks. Such elaboration of the narrative and formal strategies reveals the implicit historiographical structures of the film and suggests that the notion of ‘cultural trauma’ serves as the preferential—but problematic—template in telling the history of terrorism and violence
IT’S A KIND OF MAGIC: SITUATING NOSTALGIA FOR TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS AND THE OCCULT IN GUY RITCHIE’S SHERLOCK HOLMES
Get PDFGuy Ritchie’s recent blockbuster success with a revisionist Sherlock Holmes is the latest in a series of popular films and fiction to have reinvigorated a nostalgic imaginary of London’s past that places the former capital of the Empire at the crossroads of a persistent Manichean battle between empiricist-driven technological progress and traditions of occult knowledge supposedly submerged in the 17th century yet continuing to trickle into the heart of the Empire from its colonies. By tracing some of these historical layers sedimented into 21st-century popular imaginaries of London’s past, this paper explores the mechanisms of popular culture’s production of nostalgia that mediate public memories and histories and suture them to the imaginary urban geographies that constitute the space of the global city through its metonymic sites and its materialized histories
THE AESTHETICS OF VIOLENCE AND POWER IN ULI EDEL’S DER BAADER MEINHOF KOMPLEX
Get PDFThe confluence of art, politics, and aesthetics has a troubled and troubling history, and the article reflects on that by examining the aesthetics of Uli Edel’s filmDer Baader Meinhof Komplex in terms of its use of iconic historical and—in terms of film history—stereotypical images. The absence of conventional narrative structures in the film opens it up to methods of understanding and critique that use image and montage as a means of analysis, rather than examining a cogent (because absent) narrative. By cataloguing the use of different genre conventions and iconic film images and tropes, the article points toward the development of a “terror(ism)” genre