59 research outputs found
Hamlet + Ophelia = ?
No full textThis short one act play tells the story of the last few minutes in the lives of a re-imagined Hamlet and Ophelia. Their post-apocalyptic world is crumbling around them and their disillusionment and disgust causes them to make the ultimate rebellion; suicide. Along with the surreal staging of the Prince's evil King Claudius and Queen Gertrude, apparently alive and looking down on them from their portrait frames, this play crosses other boundaries imposed by standard theatrical conventions by placing actors in the audience, who, in the climactic finish, take Hamlet's advice and join him and Ophelia in the noble act of self-slaughter. Described by Linda Hassell, script assessor for Playlab Queensland, as; "Existentialist in nature, the piece portrays the pointlessness of existence, metaphorically depicting those very fine lines between patricide and genocide, death and regeneration, sexuality and terrorism and hope and despair . . . a very (dare I say it?) profound piece of writing." Certainly, 'Hamlet + Ophelia = ?' is not for everyone. It is deliberately provocative and disturbing. The author has tried to push the concept of theatre as entertainment out the door and onto the garbage heap and he makes no apologies for this. Another less flattering comment than Ms. Hassell's came from the A.C.T. Writers Centre when Jose Marques asked; "What are you trying to do, drive people away from the theatre?" To this the author should have answered "Sure, why not?" This short play was published in the October 2002 issue of "Ygdrasil: A Journal of the Poetic Arts" (online)
The sorrows and sufferings of young Werther; a Stageplay
No full textAlthough numerous English literary translations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "nobility in suicide" - themed, epistolary, psychological and therefore "untheatrical"(Atkins 1949) novel "Die Leiden des jungen Werthers" (1774) have been published none of the resultant English stage translations have ever been described as faithful to the original. The various obstacles to the creation of a faithful translation for the English language stage were analysed in the author's Master of Creative Arts thesis at the University of Melbourne, Australia. The first obstacle is caution by Christian playwrights regarding the proscribed theme of nobility in suicide. Related to this is the second obstacle: the fear of producing "imitative" suicides, which have been labelled "The Werther Effect" by sociologists (Phillips 1974). Other obstacles are form-related rather than theme-related and include the absence of an authoritative English literary translation and the difficulties in translating to the stage the psychological and epistolary novel. With reference to Goethe's three tiered moodel of translation (translated by Lefevere 1977) and cinema academic Geoffrey Wagner's "Three modes of adaptation" (Wagner 1975) the author has attempted to write a "prosaic", "transpositional" and unaugmented stage translation by identifying and addressing each of the obstacles, the hypothesis being that if these obstacles were systematically addressed and overcome, then an English language stageplay closely equivalent in meaning to the prominent ideas, themes and form of the novel that is, a work arguably faithful to the novell could be created. The research lead to the resultant creation "The Sorrows and Sufferings of Young Werther; a Stageplay" which was submitted as the creative work component (30%) of the author's thesis in September 2003 (receiving an overall grade of first class honours). This two act play was published in the April 2004 issue of "Ygdrasil: A Journal of the Poetic Arts" (online)
Hyperlinking history and illegitimate imagination : the historiographic metafictional E-novel
No full text‘Historiographic Metafiction’ (HM) is a literary term first coined by creative writing academic Linda Hutcheon in 1988, and which refers to the postmodern practice of a fiction author inserting imagined--or illegitimate--characters into narratives that are intended to be received as authentic and historically accurate, that is, ostensibly legitimate. Such adventurous and bold authorial strategies frequently result in “novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (Hutcheon, A Poetics 5). They can be so entertaining and engaging that the overtly intertextual, explicitly inventive work of biographical HM can even change the “hegemonic discourse of history” (Nunning 353) for, as Philippa Gregory, the author of HM novel The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), has said regarding this genre of creative writing: “Fiction is about imagined feelings and thoughts. History depends on the outer life. The novel is always about the inner life. Fiction can sometimes do more than history. It can fill the gaps” (University of Sussex). In a way, this article will be filling one of the gaps regarding HM..
Yours faithfully: "Die Leiden des jungen Werthers" for the English-language stage
No full textAlthough numerous different translations of Goethe's 1774 'nobility in suicide'-themed epistolary, psychological and therefore "untheatrical" novel "Die Leiden des jungen Werthers" have been published, no English-language stage adaptation has ever been described as "faithful". With reference to Goethe's three-tiered model of translation and cinema theorist Geoffrey Wagner's "Three modes of adaptation" the author has attempted to write a prosaic, transpositional and unaugmented translation/adaptation for the English-language stage. Each of the obstacles to faithful translation/adaptation were addressed, the hypothesis being that if the obstacles were systematically overcome, then an English-language stageplay closely corresponding in meaning to the principal themes of the novel - that is, a work arguably faithful to the novel - could be created
The Evolving Human and Dream-like, Screen-based Media
No full textWith rare exceptions, film theorists have traditionally focussed on culturally symbolic criticism in a persistent denial of the biological function and benefit of film-going. There has been a recent reversal of this trend, however, with the development of a cognitive theory of film, which Nicolas Tredell describes as an approach whereby "A film can be regarded as a simulation of a (possible) real-life situation that engages the viewer’s intellect, emotions and body, and that involves a complex negotiation between fiction and reality" (2002: 259). One aspect of this attempt to include science in the understanding of film has been neoteric work by William Evans on the evolutionary aspects of film-going. He argues that "humans have evolved to prefer television and film to print media [… because] it seems real to us [and because] humans are hardwired to attend and respond to visual stimuli, especially when visual stimuli include other people [...] engaging in salient behaviour" (2005: 200-201). But this elegantly simple explanation of the evolutionary significance of film and other screen-based media needs further elaboration. Firstly, Evans fails to consider the evolutionary benefits that accrue from Revonsuo's 2005 theory of the threat rehearsal function of film-going, in that films are like dreams. Secondly, in emphasizing the reality of the screen's moving image, he neglects to consider why humans attend to unrealistic film such as animations, which I argue are even more dream-like than non-animated films, using the example of Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940). Thirdly, he omits consideration of the evolutionary function of a film auteur who is assigned the virtual status of tribal elder. Hence I make a tendentious claim regarding the evolutionary benefit of film-goers assigning the status of 'auteur' to an individual writer/director, despite the well known collaborative nature of film-making, and (dare I say) the out-of-fashion Barthesian notion of the death of the author. Regarding Disney once again, one notes the absence of certain genres of cinema in his otherwise heterogeneous body of work: he has never made a war film or action movie. Such exclusions, only apparent when the huge oeuvre he has helmed are considered as a single text emanating from an individual author, generate an understanding of the Disney worldview, in which family values are prioritised and prompts attitudes toward this auteurial individual akin to meaning-seeking villagers genuflecting to a wise tribal elder as he offers advice for survival of the species in the evolutionary struggle for survival of the fittest. In addressing these three omissions, my paper aims to gain credibility for a more comprehensive evolutionary theory of film
Aborted Modernism: The Semantics of the Avant-Garde in Yamamura Bochō's 'Prismism'
No full textYamamura Bochō (1884-1924) is primarily known as the author of Seisanryōhari (The Sacred Prism, 1915), a collection of poetry in Western style (shi), which, for its defiant experiments in form and diction (partly reminiscent of Max Weber’s Cubist Poems and of Wassily Kandinsky’s Klänge) was widely criticized by the members of the Japanese bundan. The attacks left Bochō so in disarray that around 1917 he suddenly decided to switch to a more pastoral style of humanitarian and populist poetry, never to return to his former audacities. Today, Japanese scholars unanimously consider Seisanryōhari as a forerunner of the Japanese Modernism of the Taishō and Shōwa eras; its historical value as a stage in the formation of gendaishi (the so-called “contemporary poetry”) is far from being questioned.
In my paper I will focus on the way Bochō perceived and represented his own poetics of rupture against the established literary power. In particular, I will focus on his peculiar use of the neologism “purizumizumu” (prismism), which surfaces in some of his writings of 1915 as a tool to define his poetic “school”. Interestingly enough, that was the period when the achievements of the European avant-garde were abundantly being presented in Japan by way of translations, articles and so forth (there are many proofs that Bochō was directly acquainted with many of them). “Purizumizumu” meant to Bochō the particular configuration of his poetic method as well as a mot d’ordre to self-represent his own revolutionary action within the bundan. In fact, as a lexeme, “purizumizumu” reveals an unmistakable avant-garde flavor in its use of the suffix –ism as well as in the “cubist” allusions suggested by the purizum- (prism-) verbal root. Moreover, the choice of such a word can be inscribed in a (still immature, but nevertheless unprecedented in Japan) strategy of fashioning one’s own literary practice as something sharing the same disruptive “esprit nouveau” of the European avant-garde.
In my paper, I will begin by presenting a survey of Bochō’s statements regarding a number of specific European avant-garde movements (especially Cubism and Futurism). I will then confront his opinions on these movements with the ideological nuances gravitating around his own coinage and use of the word ‘prismism’ and of its derivates (such as purizumisuto, “prismist”). In doing so, I will try to ascertain if they appeared to him as different parts of the same international cultural upsurge against the artistic ancien régime.
I will then give an account of the actual consistence of the prismist group, claiming in the end that it was less an organized school than Bochō’s one-man-army, nearly fictional, self-narrative brainchild. In other words, I will try to demonstrate that ‘prismism’, as an organic school with disciples and official organs, never existed; it was just a verbal commodity to which Bochō gave circulation in order to claim and gain his part of symbolic capital within the literary field. (as you can infer from my terminology, I will use Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of art as a recurring theoretical reference).
The question is whether ‘prismism’ can be seen as an expression of Bochō’s compliance with and (re)production of a newer, antagonistic socio-literary habitus. Therefore, I will try to discover whether ‘prismism’, as a discursive device, still reproduces a relatively superficial Meiji paradigm where modernity corresponds to “the latest trends” in the "West" (no matter what they are), or if it is to be seen, on the contrary, as a critical and original appropriation of a particular segment of the European discourse of the avant-garde, and of European art as a whole
Enabling the Auteurial Voice in "Dance Me to My Song"
No full textThis paper reveals that while the feature film "Dance me To My Song" is listed in Rolf de Heer's oeuvre, its primary author is Heather Rose Slattery, a woman with cerebral palsy who wrote, co-directed and played Julia, the lead character. I assert that in the film Julia is not held up as an object of pity, rather is a fully embodied character, thus defying the "normality drama" (Darke 1998) of disability which aims to "reinforce the able-bodied audience's self image of normality and the notion of the disabled as the inferior Other". Director de Heer seems to be giving credit for authorship where credit is due, for as a result of Rose's tenacity and agency this film is, in two ways, her creative success. Firstly, it is a rare exception to the "normality drama" because in the film's diegesis, Julia is shown triumphing not simply over the limitations of her disability, but over her able-bodied rival in love as well: she 'dances' better than her carer, the 'normal' Madelaine. Secondly, in her gaining possession of the primary credits, and the mantle of the film's primary author, Rose is shown triumphing over other aspiring able-bodied film-makers in the notoriously competitive film-making industry. As with de Heer's other films in which marginalised peoples are given voice, he demonstrates a desire not to subjugate the Other, but to validate and empower him/her
Quidditch: J.K. Rowling's Leveler
No full textInterviewed regarding the first of the hugely successful series of magic and science fiction novels and screen adaptations about a rather unusual schoolboy named Harry Potter studying to be a wizard, author J.K. Rowling says she was intrigued by the possibility of “ … a sport for wizards, and I’d always wanted to see a game where there was more than one ball in play at the same time. The idea just amused me. The author continued to explain that she imagined Quidditch as being most like her favorite spectator sport, basketball (Amazon.co.uk interview, 2001). Except, of course, the players in Quidditch ride flying broomsticks and play with four bewitched balls. Apart from explaining in detail the bizarre rules and techniques of this supernatural game, this article examines some of the more significant sociological aspects of the sport that are far rarer (and, one might add, more ideologically desirable) in everyday human (or "Muggles") sports. Quidditch is a true leveler; matches are entirely non-segregated. They can have players of either gender and player’s ages in the same match can range from pre-teen to adult. As such, the game serves as a most ideal literary innovation in establishing early in the series of Harry Potter novels the eponymous hero as an ‘Every-adolescent’ who any young reader, male or female, can identify with. The game's popularity as such has seen it play an important role in each of the novel’s sequels and screen adaptation's inter-personal conflicts and has also spawned a successful - if short-lived - fan-base in the medium of the computer game
Aural auteur : sound in the films of Rolf de Heer
No full textAn interpretative methodology for understanding meaning in cinema since the 1950s, auteur analysis is an approach to film studies in which an individual, usually the director, is studied as the author of her or his films. The principal argument of this thesis is that proponents of auteurism have privileged examination of the visual components in a film-maker’s body of work, neglecting the potentially significant role played by sound. \ud
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The thesis seeks to address this problematic imbalance by interrogating the creative use of sound in the films written and directed by Rolf de Heer, asking the question, “Does his use of sound make Rolf de Heer an aural auteur?” In so far as the term ‘aural’ encompasses everything in the film that is heard by the audience, the analysis seeks to discover if de Heer has, as Peter Wollen suggests of the auteur and her or his directing of the visual components (1968, 1972 and 1998), unconsciously left a detectable aural signature on his films.\ud
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The thesis delivers an innovative outcome by demonstrating that auteur analysis that goes beyond the mise-en-scène (i.e. visuals) is productive and worthwhile as an interpretive response to film. De Heer’s use of the aural point of view and binaural sound recording, his interest in providing a ‘voice’ for marginalised people, his self-penned song lyrics, his close and early collaboration with composer Graham Tardif and sound designer Jim Currie, his ‘hands-on’ approach to sound recording and sound editing and his predilection for making films about sound are all shown to be examples of de Heer’s aural auteurism.\ud
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As well as the three published (or accepted for publication) interviews with de Heer, Tardif and Currie, the dissertation consists of seven papers refereed and published (or accepted for publication) in journals and international conference proceedings, a literature review and a unifying essay. The papers presented are close textual analyses of de Heer’s films which, when considered as a whole, support the thesis’ overall argument and serve as a comprehensive auteur analysis, the first such sustained study of his work, and the first with an emphasis on the aural
"Dance me to my song" (Rolf de Heer 1997): The story of a disabled dancer
No full textRolf de Heer’s "Dance Me To My Song" (1997) is a film with very little traditional dancing, being the story of a wheelchair-bound young lady who suffers from cerebral palsy. Two years before she died, real-life aphasic star and co-writer, Heather Rose, was the keynote speaker at the Pacific Rim Disability Conference in 2000 at which she said: "I wanted to create a screenplay, but not just another soppy disability film, I wanted to make a hot sexy film, which showed the real world." For Heather and other disabled persons, the real world does not necessarily preclude dancing. Thus, despite her twisted body and drooling visage, Heather’s story culminates in a joyous jig of triumph as the indomitable redhead dances in her wheelchair with the able-bodied Eddy, whose sexual affections she has won notwithstanding the best efforts of her emotionally stunted and jealous carer, Madelaine. In contrast to Paul Darke's 1998 conception of the "normality drama" genre of the disabled film, Heather has created a disabled character superior to her able-bodied antagonist. As de Heer has done in other films, he has given a voice to those who might otherwise not be heard: in Heather's case via her electric voice synthesizer. This paper argues that de Heer has found a second voice for Heather via Laban's language of dance, and in doing so has expanded understandings of quality of life for the disabled, as per the social model of disability rather than the medical model of disability. The film reinforces Petra Kupper’s notion that a new literacy in dance needs to be learned in which students "understand dance not only as a manipulation of the body in time and space, but also as a manipulation of the concept of 'the body' in its framework of 'normality', 'health', 'wholeness', 'intelligence', 'control' and 'art'." (2000: 128). Furthermore, Heather proves herself superior in the film-making industry by successfully assuming primary credit for the film. The ambivalent status regarding the screen-writing role for "Dance Me To My Song" creates a space in which authorship is contestable, although its other candidate, director de Heer, willingly concedes the credit to Rose, and this paper concludes that not only is Heather Rose the deserving author of this film, the film itself is deserving of a new genre label, that of "disability dance drama"
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