Imaginations (Journal)
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BLACK WOOL AND VINTAGE SHOES: THE WELLINGTON LOOK
Get PDF“He told me I didn’t look like I was from Wellington,” a friend, from a small town almost two hours away, confided to me over a cocktail in a downtown bar. This article asks, what is the Wellington look that this statement describes? How does it produce and reflect Wellington’s reputation as the locus of arts and politics in Aotearoa/New Zealand? It examines how the inhabitants of Wellington weave the fabric of the city together through their dress, analyzing how Wellington-based media, boutiques, designers, and locals together create a style that is distinctively ‘Wellington.
“JEDES HERZ…”: TERROR AND HORROR IN DIE FETTEN JAHRE SIND VORBEI
Get PDFHans Weingartner’s Die Fetten Jahre Sind Vorbei, also known by its American title The Edukators, explores the relationship of a young anti-capitalist activist, Jan, with his own friends, the bourgeousie he opposes, and himself. Jan and his friends engage in some relatively benign but disruptive “terrorist” acts. Though the film cannot be said to belong to the horror genre, Die Fetten Jahre Sind Vorbei nonetheless employs horror elements and tropes to expose the intrinsically subjective definition of terrorism, and to explore terrorism’s relationship with the “other.
HIGH-RISE ZHIVAGO
Get PDFThis paper discusses the Taganka Theatre’s production of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, staged in a remote Moscow suburb. Performed in a Soviet-built palace of culture, the show radically reinterpretsZhivago, transforming it from an intensely personal to a collective narrative. Drawing on a chapter from my book Theatre in Passing: A Moscow Photo-Diary (Intellect 2011), the paper refers to Marvin Carlson, who argues that theatre buildings and their locations greatly impact the overall meaning of a show. Citing evidence provided by cultural theorists, architectural critics, as well as authors and artists, I expand on my earlier discussion of suburbs – a fertile subject attracting a wealth of contradictory opinions. I illustrate my discussion with images of high-rises inspired by the avant-garde photographer Alexander Rodchenko, and pictures of soup cans and cases of Coca-Cola – my tribute to Andy Warhol, who, like Rodchenko, rejected the old in favour of the new. I conclude with a nostalgic shot of a single-family dwelling, reminiscent of the spaces depicted in Pasternak
ASKEW POSITIONS—SCHIEFLAGEN: DEPICTIONS OF CHILDREN IN GERMAN TERRORISM FILMS
Get PDFThis essay discusses the appearance of children in films that negotiate the legacies of West left-wing German and global terrorism. The four films discussed in this essay depict children in Schieflagen (askew positions), but use these images to create rather different political messages. InDeutschland im Herbst (1978), Die bleierene Zeit(1981) and Innere Sicherheit (2000), children are melodramatic devices that convey a sense of national tragedy, nostalgia for “innocence,” and/or a nationally coded sense of hope. As opposed to representing such an uncanny mixture between melodramatic victim and national symbol, children in the recent film collaborationDeutschland 09 (2009) are the face of the present. Deutschland 09 depicts children as disconnected from German history, which relieves them of the burden of national representation and, as a result, offers a potential for a less normative and more diverse perspective on Germany’s history and present. While their missing connection to national history leaves them to appear detached and confused, this confusion can be read as a search for different understandings of history and belonging in twenty-first century Germany
IN SEARCH OF AUTHENTICITY: TIME AND SPACE IN RUSSIAN HORROR FILM
Get PDFThe paper looks into recent Russian horror films, exploring how the genre conventions associated with Hollywood are transformed and upheld in Russian cinema. The paper argues that the use of space, particularly urban venues, in horror films establishes a sense of authenticity and marks otherwise derivative generic productions as uniquely Russian. The films examined are Night and Day Watch duology (2004, 2006), Trackman (2007) and Dead Daughters (2007); all are set in contemporary Moscow