Fred Cooper is a PhD student at the University of Exeter researching the importance of the intersection between work and family life in post-1945 psychiatry and psychology. After attending our Screen Talks event on A Dangerous Method on Monday 21st October Fred has written a guest blog post for us, reflecting on his responses to the film:

On my way to see A Dangerous Method, I was fascinated to see what the film would be like – Freud, Jung, and the early days of psychoanalysis are not easy topics for mainstream cinema. I should probably be recording a generalised, impressionistic reaction, but as I know nothing whatsoever about film criticism I can warn you in advance that this is not what you’re getting.

What I intend to do, rather, is to think a bit about the part of the film which came as the biggest surprise – the character of Sabina Spielrein – and move forward to consider the dynamics of what I found to be one of the film’s most interesting motifs: the juxtaposition between patient and analyst.

I’m ashamed to admit that I’d never heard of Spielrein and, on first watching the trailer, assumed with a mystifyingly large dollop of arrogance – and a now-shattered association of Keira Knightley with vapid supporting roles – that I hadn’t heard of her because she wasn’t historically important. Certainly big-budget films aren’t above amplifying or manufacturing a sexual dynamic to inject an extra level of excitement (sex sells, as Freud probably understood). Jana’s opening remarks immediately disabused me of this idea, something confirmed throughout the film. Spielrein emerges not merely as a significant part of Carl Jung’s life but as a catalyst for his relationship with Sigmund Freud and, later, as an original psychoanalytic thinker. If anything, the film could have put greater emphasis on Spielrein’s intellectual contribution. An audience with no existing knowledge of psychoanalysis might have struggled to identify her characterisation of sexual and destructive forces as prefiguring a fairly substantial element of the Freudian canon. Freud acknowledged this debt, albeit ambiguously, in a single footnote in Beyond the Pleasure Principle:

“A considerable part of this speculation has been anticipated in a work which is full of valuable matter and ideas but is unfortunately not entirely clear to me: (Sabina Spielrein: ‘Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens’, Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyse, IV, 1912).”

Alongside her foray into formal academia, however, I want to consider the influence that Spielrein exercised from a position usually synonymous with passivity – the patient. This is a recurring device, present most overtly in the scenes between Jung and Otto Gross. Although Gross is ostensibly the patient, Jung has no influence at all on his behaviour, whilst Gross drives events with Spielrein forward with his admonition to ‘never repress anything’. When Jung describes Gross as seductive, he couples Gross’s unbridled sexuality with his telling Jung exactly what he wants to hear. Gross, however, is able to transcend the patient role by his qualification as an analyst – part of the criteria for which is submission to analysis oneself. The ability amongst practitioners to analyse and be analysed implies a form of intimacy and commonality – the most significant breakdown in Freud and Jung’s relationship occurs when Freud refuses to let Jung interpret his dreams. Freud, having read Jung’s dream as indicative of hostility towards himself, refuses to engage in a reciprocal acquiescence to Jung’s expertise.

Whilst both Jung and Freud and Jung and Gross inhabit dual roles in their association with each other, however, Spielrein as patient and Spielrein as analyst are temporally distinct entities. Spielrein during her patient phase clearly wields an abnormal amount of power on Jung as a man – he sleeps with her, confides in her, spanks her and claims to love her – but her affect on him as an analyst, on the development of his clinical knowledge, is not fully explored. Scientific understanding is being constructed and confirmed at Jung’s desk – with Jung himself as a receptacle of contemporary prejudices, anxieties, and theories about the mind – but also in the discourse between himself and Spielrein. Much like “Anna O”, Josef Breuer’s patient (and a prominent feminist), a fellow “hysteric” whose treatment has been argued to form the foundation stone of psychoanalysis, she was translating her visceral experience of illness into language comprehensible by the practitioner.

In many ways, this is understood to be the most authentic aspect of medicine. The doctor is in possession of a written expertise that draws on a long tradition and accumulation of knowledge and which is often mystifying to the patient. However, the patient also has an intrinsic physical and mental expertise that the doctor can only partially understand, and which he or she enters into their lexicon in adumbrated form. The clinical encounter is usually preoccupied with reconciling one to the other. In psychiatry, this has often been at the expense of the patient’s claims to truth.

What A Dangerous Method does is to encourage us to move beyond easy assumptions regarding agency, authorship and power in medicine. Spielrein is, admittedly, a remarkable example. An articulate, wilful and insightful woman being treated – and then writing – at the cutting-edge of psychoanalytic experimentation, her impact and influence are relatively straightforward to trace. Her story reminds us, however, that the accumulation of medical knowledge has always involved a dialogue, however limited. Medicine has usually been at its worst when the experience of the patient has been subsumed in the determinism of inflexible diagnoses, reductive disease models and off-the-peg treatment. It has also usually been at its best when the dialogue was democratic.

Jess O’Kane, who is studying English at Exeter, Editor of Exepose Screen, came to our Screen Talks events on Upstream Color on Monday 7th October. Jess has written a guest blog post for us, reflecting on her responses to the film:

I have a terrible habit of leaving things to the last minute, when I’m usually spurred on by a waning jar of peanut butter.  Since leaving the cinema a few hours ago, however, I’ve felt an overwhelming need to solidify some thoughts on Upstream Color, I think mostly for fear that it’ll vanish as quickly and vividly as it appeared.

I wish I could tell you that, like Matt, I can contextualise Upstream Color so far as to call it “posthuman” or “mythic”. It’s probably both those things, but for my part, I can only offer an instinctive reaction – which is, I think, precisely what Carruth intended.

For really, the film may as well have been silent. That’s not to disparage it; only to point out the uniqueness of its direction. Scenes meld into one, faces blur, time comes and goes in a swerving trajectory. It’s both stunningly beautiful and at times welcomingly mundane. It’s no surprise that Carruth’s style has been most often compared to Terrence Malick, with whom he shares a hypersensory palette.

Also like Malick, Carruth’s second feature is largely preoccupied with nature. Not nature in the German-bloke-on-misty-rock Romantic way, nor human nature, but “nature” meaning the endless relations and cycles that form and dissolve us and everything. At its heart is a story of disease and rebirth – a cycle that starts with a shady thief, peaks with parasitic madness, and ends with the harvesting of beautiful blue orchids. And yet for Carruth’s protagonists this proves a kind of paralysis, a state between knowing and self-knowledge. As the parasite begins to take over, self-identification becomes increasingly difficult, and their memories join and fragment. (Was it my childhood friend who tried to drown me in the indoor pool? Or yours?)

Most interestingly, this doubt affects a need for self-legislation. Kris and Jeff begin to fall back on the rituals that the thief taught them – Jeff creates paper chains absent-mindedly, Kris endlessly recites Thoreau’s Walden, a motif to which we’ll return later. These kinds of patterns are ones we’ve come to recognise as fearful, as signifying control and a loss of agency. Yet in Upstream Color, there is also a comfort in repetition, as if each action reaffirms a cycle of its own, and the ability of the protagonists to act at all.

This connective impulse is, I think, key to having the foggiest about the film. Why, after all, does the film centre on a romance? Take the enigmatic sampler, a man who seems omnipresent and irrelevant all at once, who’s pictured obsessively trying to measure a rhythm of life only he seems to understand. Stones drop, feet rub, wood chafes. All of these actions taken alone make little sense, but taken together, they seem closer to a dialect – a kind of mediation between nature and the self.

It’s perhaps unsurprising then, that Carruth’s emblem of choice is Thoreau. Thoreau’s Transcendentalism led him to immerse himself entirely in nature, living in a simple cabin on the edge of Walden Pond in Massachussetts. On the one hand, the significance of this seems fairly straightforward; here are two people whose ability to connect with the world around them has been compromised by exterior forces. Give them life, give them Thoreau, and surely they will restore.

And yet at the same time, the text is a third party; the text is not life. Literature acts as a stimulant insofar as it causes the protagonists to recall the world around them, a fact clearly displayed at the end of the film when Kris and Jeff send the book to other survivors in order to call them to arms. But it does so by cementing the relationship between self and mediator; text, parasite, orchid. In other words, Upstream Color is not quite transcendent, or at least it doesn’t appear to be. Though the cycle of parasite-pig-orchid is broken, the cycle between protagonist-mediator-reality is merely reformulated.

That said, it’s a hopeful film. It has faith in beauty and a humanistic heart unbecoming to an out-an-out sci-fi. Carruth, like Thoreau, seems to operate in that space between paralysis and salvation, never quite committing to one truth or even expecting it, but nonetheless knowing it’s there. His direction has something microscopic about it, as if he’s trying to tune into nature through colour, shape and sound. And his protagonists are willing, in the end, to bend to this new form – conscious, apparently, of something better round the corner.

Those were my instincts. All I can say is that you’d be a fool not to see for yourself.

Our first Screen Talks event of the Autumn Term will be on Monday 7th October at Exeter Picturehouse. Dr Matt Hayler (Lecturer, Dept of English) at the University of Exeter) will introduce Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, 2013)

Join the event on Facebook and find out more here.

Booking Information: Book online, call the Box Office 0871 902 5730 or buy tickets on the door (half price for students on Mondays).

Dr Matt Hayler has written a guest blog-post for us on the film and the ways in which it challenges us as viewers with a vision of life forms and cycles which does not put the human at the centre:

I can remember exactly where I was when I realized that Upstream Color was probably the most hauntingly beautiful science fiction film that I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t watching it on a TV in my front room, running an imported region 1 disc through an Xbox within weeks of its release because I loved Shane Caruth’s first movie, Primer, so goddamn much I couldn’t wait for a UK screening. It wasn’t in a cinema, with a decent screen and comfy seats and barely tasted popcorn as I focused, silently, intently, on the colours and the images and the few scant words of this posthuman fairytale – that’s a treat I’ll get for the first time on Monday at Exeter’s Picture House. Somewhat embarrassingly, I worked it out about thirty seconds into this trailer, which I watched maybe ten minutes after my first viewing as I devoured any and all information about what I’d just seen, and which basically amounts to a stream of fairly comprehensive spoilers, but only if you’ve watched the movie that it’s meant to advertise. That trailer tells you nearly everything about the story, or helps you work it through, but it does so by using words and images from the film in order to articulate things that that film just somehow made you feel.

And by now you’ve probably worked out that I don’t know how to talk about this thing. At least, not much anyway. If you haven’t seen it yet I’m guessing that you’ll probably come out of the cinema a bit baffled, hopefully impressed with some of the things that you’ve seen on screen, but wondering what’s gone on, what exactly happened in that last 90 minutes or so. I’d also guess that at that point you know, but maybe not in words yet. Upstream Color possesses the remarkable ability of telling you a story without words (nothing new) and making you comprehend it somewhere muscular, and visceral, and bloodied (something rare). After a couple of viewings and some reading I can pretty much tell you what goes on, but it’s that sense impression that lingers, is maybe stronger than what I’d try and articulate if you pressed me to discuss the plot. My body, and that bit at the back of my brain that connects me and some ancient lizard, remembers that Upstream Color is a movie about shared memories; knowledge passing across the barriers of species; the fears of reproducing; the fear of losing yourself, of losing your barriers, of schizophrenic openings up. And it remembers the colours and the pigs and the takings of places in cycles.

I’ve already used the word “posthuman” and that, alongside this bodily response, is what links this movie to my work, at least in some oblique way. I’m interested in how technologies affect us to such an extent that they interfere, often productively, with our pre-linguistic experience of the world – I wonder if the lifeforms in this movie could be considered to be technologies in some sense, extenders of agency, interruptions between actor and environment? And is that what makes it science fiction rather than fantasy (it certainly feels right to call it that)? This is certainly a film about unspeakable action and unsaid sensation.

Posthumanism, at least by one definition, is a philosophical outlook which doesn’t see humans as the centre of experience, or aesthetics, or meaning, and doesn’t see “humanity” as a fixed and coherent thing from which there might be deviation, but instead sees the human as always-already malleable, plastic. When I write about new technologies, and our intimate experience of becoming experts with new things, I start to think about posthuman ideas, about the changing status of humanity. The evolution of the biosciences promises to make the question more and more pressing over the course of this century – what will humans look like by its close? Upstream Color offers us a posthuman mythology, where characters dissolve into the world, everything can be as beautiful, or more, as love, and individuals are surpassed by cycles. The trajectories of parasites and viruses, their effects on behaviour, take on near religious significance here, but military interest in toxoplasmosis’ potential for mitigating human risk aversion lends another technological edge to the emergent behaviours of the film’s cast of flowers, grubs, pigs, and human vectors – we’ll probably be using nature’s natural hacks to intentionally change ourselves before long. Upstream Color offers, at times, a beatific vision of that work; at its heart it offers us the potential of communion in a whole host of forms.

Matt lectures in contemporary literature, theory and culture at the University of Exeter.  He researches the interactions of technologies and users, and the place of the body in processes of reading and understanding.  Find out more about Matt’s research here, and on his blog here.

Screen Talks is back with a great new season of films at Exeter Picturehouse.  Between now and Christmas we have some fantastic and thought provoking films chosen by experts in Film, Literature, History and Culture to share and discuss.  Each screening includes a brief introduction to the film and time for informal discussion afterwards in the Picturehouse bar.

Picturehouse are offering a year’s FREE membership for Freshers, and great deals on student membership too.  Click here to find out more

We are organising the films broadly under three themes: ‘Beyond the Page’ offering classic and new films drawn from the vibrant category of adaptation,  ‘European Cinema’s Hidden Classics’ bringing key films and filmmakers into the light, and ‘Sickness on the Screen’ highlighting the treatment of health and medicine in film.

Our first film will be the enigmatic Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, 2013), which will be introduced by Dr Matt Hayler (English), who researches technology, embodiment and questions of the human.  Check back here soon for Matt’s guest blog post on the film.

The film has been widely critically acclaimed since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2013.  The film stars Carruth and Amy Seimetz, and it is a film with complex themes and structure, prompting audiences to ask questions about forms and cycles of life, and it will give us great material to discuss.  As Jonathan Romney notes:  “Upstream Color works its spell on us in some ways that we may feel impelled to analyse, and also in other ways that we may never consciously ‘get’.”(Sight & Sound, Sept 2013, 52)

Also coming soon to Screen Talks:

Mon 21st October, A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011) introduced by Dr Jana Funke (Sickness on Screen theme)

Mon 4th November, Plein Soleil (Rene Clement, 1960), a renowned adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s crime novel The Talented Mr Ripley (European Cinema’s Hidden Classics theme)

Mon 18th November, Oliver Twist (David Lean, 1948) introduced by Prof John Plunkett (Beyond the Page theme)

Mon 2nd December, Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard, 2012) introduced by Ryan Sweet (Sickens on the Screen theme)

Mon 16th December, Blue is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013) introduced by Dr Will Higbee (European Cinema’s Hidden Classics theme)

Our next Screen Talks event will be the last before we take a break for the summer.  The Screen Talks programme will resume in early October with more great films and great debates.  In the meantime, keep in touch with us on Twitter: @ExeScreen_Talks, via our Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/screentalks/, or drop us an email () to join our mailing list.

On Monday 17th June at Exeter Picturehouse. Prof Sally Faulkner (Associate Professor in Hispanic Studies in the Dept of Modern Languages  at the University of Exeter) will introduce Volver (Pedro Almodovar, 2006)

Join the event on Facebook and find out more here.

Booking Information: Book online, call the Box Office 0871 902 5730 or buy tickets on the door (half price for students on Mondays).

Prof Sally Faulkner has written a guest blog post for us about the ways in which Pedro Almodovar’s film deals with issues of memory:

Pedro Almodóvar’s 16th film takes its title from a 1935 Argentine tango by Carlos Gardel and Alfredo de Pera, the performance of which occurs mid-way through the film to provide a narrative turning point. ‘Volver’ means to return, and many critics have focussed on the ‘returns’ staged by Almodóvar in this 2006 film. After the male-focussed Bad Education (2004), Volver is a return to the familiar terrain of a narrative about strong women, told through the genre that the director has made his own: melodrama. The film was also Almodóvar’s return to actress Carmen Maura – the memorable heroine of What Have I Done to Deserve This!? (1984) and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) – and to Penelope Cruz, who had played the sacrificial nun in the Oscar-winning All About My Mother (1999). Those three titles in fact tell us a great deal about Almodóvar’s concerns in Volver.  The question posed by the 1984 film title might be one asked by Cruz’s Raimunda – who has a lazy, abusive husband and a low-paid job as a cleaner at Madrid’s flashy Barajas airport – and the twists and turns of Almodóvar’s complex plot (he was sole scriptwriter) take her to the ‘verge of a nervous breakdown’. But Almodóvar’s vision in Volver is one of rescue and redemption; the film might be said to be all about her mother Irene, played by Maura, as she brings Raimunda back from this verge.

However, Volver, which achieved the holy grail of being a runaway success with both Spanish and international audiences, and a critical success with a fist of a prizes both inside and outside Spain, is so much more than these ‘returns’.  Made in the traumatic aftermath of Al-Qaeda’s bombing of commuter trains in Madrid in March 2004 (Almodóvar postponed the première of Bad Education out of respect for the almost 200 who lost their lives), Volver may also be seen as a response to the controversy over the memory of the traumas of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and dictatorship (1939-75), that culminated in Spain’s passing of the controversial Law of Historical Memory in 2007. During the years Volver was written and shot, the Spanish parliament and media exhaustively debated how to honour the trauma suffered by Spaniards during the war and its aftermath. Almodóvar’s brilliant response is not to make a ‘historical’ film (‘histórico’ is the adjective used in Spanish to describe both films with period settings as well as heritage films), with a Civil War or dictatorship setting, or a protagonist that explicitly remembers this period. Rather, he indirectly explores these current anxieties by staging trauma, recovery, loss and retribution in a film about the resilience of women and the support they give one another – as daughters, mothers, sisters, aunts and friends. As such, Volver also ‘returns’ to some of the masterpieces of Italian Neorealism, like Vittorio de Sica’s Two Women (1960), with Sophia Loren’s character and performance an explicit model for Cruz. Almodóvar thus recasts De Sica’s exploration of the trauma of World War Two for a 2006 audience and a post-Civil war Spain.

Sally Faulkner is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Film at the University of Exeter, where she teaches courses on Spanish and European film, Spanish literature and Spanish language. She has written on Almodóvar and melodrama in her most recent book, A History of Spanish Film: Cinema and Society 1910-2010 (2013)

The next Screen Talks event will be on Monday 20th May at Exeter Picturehouse. Dr Sinead Moynihan  (Lecturer in American Culture, Dept of English) at the University of Exeter) will introduce The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann, 2013)

Join the event on Facebook and find out more here.

Booking Information: Book online, call the Box Office 0871 902 5730 or buy tickets on the door (half price for students on Mondays).

Dr Sinead Moynihan has written a guest blog-post for us on Baz Luhrmann’s film version of Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, and how it deals with questions of identity:

On 20th May, I will be discussing the latest adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), one of the most widely-read and taught novels of the twentieth century.  I will be mainly concerned with three interrelated issues 1) the challenges of adaptation generally 2) the specific challenges of adapting Fitzgerald’s novel for the screen and 3) how we might think about this most recent adaptation in relation to earlier adaptations of the work, notably the 1974 version featuring Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby and Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan.

For this blog, I’d like to discuss briefly my own interests in the novel, which relate to the particular historical context in which it was written.  I have an article forthcoming in African American Review on the relationship of the novel to a subsequent novella, Passing (1929), by an African American writer, Nella Larsen.  As such, my article contributes to a relatively recent body of work which contextualises The Great Gatsby in relation to debates on immigration, race and ethnicity contemporaneous with the publication of the novel. Critics have pointed out, for example, the significance of the fact that the novel appeared just a year after the passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924.  As the U.S. State Department tells us, this Act “limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota.  The quota provided immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census. It completely excluded immigrants from Asia.”  In other words, Gatsby appeared at a historical moment during which the U.S. was battening down the hatches against immigrants and anxiously questioning the white credentials of some immigrants over others.

Also around this time, white supremacist writers Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard were producing works such as The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and The Rising Tide of Color Against White-World Supremacy (1920), in which they excoriated the encroachment of immigrants considered less-than-white in Anglo-America.  In Tom Buchanan, as several critics have noted, Fitzgerald creates a mouthpiece for the ideas of Lothrop Stoddard, especially those articulated in The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920), thinly disguised in The Great Gatsby as “The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard.”

What concerns me and these other critics is the idea that Gatsby is not a suitable partner for Daisy, a Southern belle who speaks nostalgically of her “beautiful white girlhood” because of a complex mixture of both class and race.  For Walter Benn Michaels, for example, “Gatsby (né Gatz, with his Wolfshiem ‘gonnegtion’) isn’t quite white, and Tom’s identification of him as in some sense black suggests the power of the expanded notion of the alien” (Michaels 25).  It is more or less accepted now that Jay Gatsby, born James Gatz, was probably Jewish and the combination of his working-class background and Jewish ancestry account for his cruel treatment by the East Egg elite.  In 2000, a scholar named Carlyle Van Thompson made national news in the United States when he delivered a paper at a conference in Charleston, South Carolina, entitled “The Tragic Black ‘Buck’: Jay Gatsby’s passing in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.”  In his subsequent full-length study of passing fiction, Van Thompson offers comprehensive, though not always persuasive, evidence that Gatsby may be a light-skinned African American passing as white.

In my introduction to Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013), I will talk a little about the casting of Gatsby across various adaptations, given these larger conversations about race and ethnicity in relation to the novel.  What does it mean, for example, to cast a very WASP-ish Robert Redford as Gatsby in Jack Clayton’s 1974 version? In the Baz Luhrmann version, the part is played by Leonardo diCaprio.  How might we think about these more famous adaptations in relation to the lesser-known film G (dir. Christopher Scott Cherot, 2002) which is loosely based on the novel and features an all-African American cast? I look forward to discussing these issues in a bit more detail on 20 May.

Sinead has written extensively about ‘passing’ and identity in American Literature.  Find out more about Sinead’s research here.
 

The next Screen Talks event will be on Monday 6th May at Exeter Picturehouse. Dr Will Higee (Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, Dept of Modern Languages) at the University of Exeter) will introduce A Self-Made Hero (Jacques Audiard, 1996)

Join the event on Facebook and find out more here.

Booking Information: Book online, call the Box Office 0871 902 5730 or buy tickets on the door (half price for students on Mondays).

 Dr Will Higbee has written a guest blog-post for us on Jacques Audiard’s film which explores the myths around the resistance in French culture:

The next installment of the hidden classics of European cinema focuses on Jacques Audiard’s Un héros très discret / A Self-Made Hero (1996). Audiard is now a well-established figure both in French cinema and internationally, with a range of awards, Oscar nomination and box-office success for films such as A Prophet (2009) and Rust and Bone (2012). However, at the time of the release of his second fearure, A Self-Made Hero, he was perhaps best known for being the son of the celebrated French screenwirter Michel Audiard. This screening at the Picture House offers a rare chance to see the film brought Audiard to the attention of a wider audience both in France and internationally on the big screen. A Self-Made Hero is also a notable film due to the casting of the enfant terrible of French cinema of the 1990s, director and actor Mathieu Kassovitz. To the surprise of many crticis and spectators, Kassovitz carried the starring role with aplomb. A Self-made hero confirmed Kassovitz’s status as an screen actor of considerbale subtlty and quality – a fact that continues to be overlooked in France today.

A Self-Made Hero tells the story of Albert Dehousse, a young man exempted from military service and oblivious to the resistance activities of his wife during the occupation. After the war has ended, Dehousse decides to leave his home and family for Paris in order to fabricate a heroic past for himself as a resistance activist – a past the strangers and authorities around him, desperate to invest in myth of national resistance under Nazi occupation, are only to keen to validate.  Audiard’s exploration of the ‘great lie’ of France as a war resister was hardly a new departure, having been dealt with by historians as well as filmmakers since at least the early-1970s. However, the film offers a significant commentary on the selective process of memorializing history and the construction of a collective past that continued to take place in France during the 1990s.  Moreover, A Self-Made Hero’s treatment of the myth of France as a nation united in its resistance to Nazi Occupation during the Second World War remained highly topical at the time of release given revelations im France during the 1990s relating to outgoing French President Mitterrand’s links to the Vichy government during the occupation, as well as the trial a year after the film’s release of former Paris police chief, Maurice Papon, for his involvement in the deportation of French Jews to Nazi concentration camps.

As interesting as the film’s exploration of French history past may be, A Self-Made hero offers, above all, a beautifully crafted screenplay (where heritage film meets melodrama and political thriller) combined with assured direction from Audiard that draws excellent performances from the film’s cast. A Self-made hero provides a subtle and engaging exploration of deception and myth-making: considering the extent that an individual will go to create a new life and heroic identity for himself and the extent to which, when it feels that it needs to, society is only too willing to accept the lie that it is being sold.

Dr Will Higbee has written about Matthieu Kassovitz, and about contemporary French cinema and identity.  Read more about Will’s research here.

The next Screen Talks event will be on Monday 8th April, 6.30 pm at Exeter Picturehouse. Dr Jennifer Barnes will introduce Richard III (Laurence Olivier, 1955). Join the event on Facebook and find out more here.

Booking Information:  Book online, call the Box Office 0871 902 5730 or buy tickets on the door (half price for students on Mondays).

Dr Jennifer Barnes has written a guest blog post for us, outlining Laurence Olivier’s contribution as director and star and the film’s place in British national culture of the 1950s:

 Richard III (1955) is the third and final Shakespearean feature film in which Laurence Olivier (1907-1989) both starred and directed. It follows the patriotic Henry V in 1944 and the internationally renowned Hamlet in 1948. There is much of interest in the film for those interested in Olivier as an actor-director, for those fascinated with Shakespeare on screen, and for those intrigued by the ways in which Shakespeare is adapted to speak to different cultural moments.

To watch Richard III is to be immersed in the national culture of 1950s Britain following the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. With its emphasis on colour, spectacle and monarchical imagery, Richard III continually looks back to the Coronation of 1953 and the film offers an extravagant celebration of Britain’s national past and present. Showcasing Richard as the ultimate hero-villain and a “legend of the crown of England,” Olivier’s screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s play revels in a glorification of the national image and of the high cultural values associated with Britain’s national poet. Remembering Britain’s theatrical past through the cinematic present, Richard III draws an explicit parallel between the so-called Golden Age of Elizabeth I and the new Elizabethan age, a parallel that is further cemented by the way in which Richard III continually cites the Technicolor documentary film of Elizabeth’s Coronation, A Queen is Crowned. As the distribution poster announces, the instantly recognisable voice of Laurence Olivier narrates A Queen is Crowned and the mood of national celebration and renewal that it captures is evoked throughout Richard III. Accordingly, the film begins not with Richard’s famous opening soliloquy (“Now is the winter of our discontent…”) but with a fantastic Technicolor Coronation.

My research into the background of the project reveals that Richard III was designed as a prestige production, one that was intended to shore up the reputation of the beleaguered British film industry at home and abroad. Conceived of as a project of both national and international importance, it became the first feature film to be premiered on US television simultaneously with its release in cinemas, reaching an audience of millions. With this in mind it is perhaps no surprise that Olivier’s performance as Richard III is so clearly embedded in cultural memory. The apparently indelible mark left on the role by Olivier has informed incarnations of Shakespeare’s Richard ever since. Anthony Sher, struggling to come to terms with the ghost of Olivier’s Richard whilst preparing to play the part himself, described Olivier’s delivery in the 1955 film as “imprinted on those words like teeth marks.”

Richard III certainly represented an important milestone in Olivier’s career. Six months before the film’s premiere in London, critic John Barber wrote a particularly vituperative article for the Daily Express that accused Olivier of preferring Hollywood to Britain and privileging the screen over the stage. Olivier, said Barber, had “lost his way.” Barber must have particularly enjoyed Richard III. The film presents Laurence Olivier at the helm of a British performance tradition that encompasses other famous actors celebrated for their performances as Shakespeare’s “bottled spider.” Indeed, Richard III includes, amongst others, references to Richard Burbage (1567-1619), Edmund Kean (1787-1833) and Henry Irving (1838-1905). When, in the opening scene, we watch Olivier’s Richard slowly lower a coronet onto his head, we are watching Olivier reassuming what the Financial Times described in 1955 as “that crown of heroic British acting which is his by rights.”

Find out more about Jennifer Barnes’s research here: http://exeter.academia.edu/JenniferBarnes

The next Screen Talks event will be on Monday 25th March, 6.30 pm. Dr Danielle Hipkins will introduce Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960). Join the event on Facebook and find out more here.

Booking Information book online, call the Box Office: 0871 902 5730 or buy tickets on the door (half price for students on Mondays).

Dr Danielle Hipkins has written a guest blog post for us, outlining the importance of Rocco and His Brothers as a key film exploring issues of migration and identity at a key moment in Italy’s post-war transformation:

Although contemporary Italy may be plagued by economic and political crisis, in the late 1950s the country saw the beginning of a period of development so dramatic that it was labelled an ‘economic miracle’. This era transformed Italy from a predominantly agricultural country into an industrialized one. One of the main motors of this transformation was the steady supply of low-wage labour from the impoverished, agricultural south; between 1958 and1963 more than 900,000 southerners moved to northern Italy. Those moving from this underdeveloped area, still bound by feudal and religious tradition, into a consumer-oriented, individualist, and rapidly modernizing urban environment felt as though they had moved to a foreign country, and were often treated dismissively.

Rocco and His Brothers is the epic story of one such family of migrants, five brothers and their mother, who seek their fortune in Milan after the death of their father. There is perhaps no Italian film that narrates more powerfully the personal costs of migration: the hardships of surviving in a hostile environment and adapting to an unfamiliar set of cultural codes. This family melodrama draws out engaging performances from Alain Delon, Annie Girardot, and Renato Salvatori, locked in a love triangle that comes to dominate the film, as two of the brothers fall for the same woman. The film’s strength lies in the powerful emotional response that change elicits in the stories of Rocco and Simone, who find it most difficult to adapt, to accept changing social codes, and to let go of family loyalties and nostalgia for a lost world.

In my research in the Visconti archive in Rome I discovered how Visconti’s directorial approach to an ‘anthropomorphic’ cinema – a cinema that puts the individual drama at its heart led to sympathetic role for a woman that he did not originally anticipate. Thanks also to input from a female scriptwriter, Suso Cecchi d’Amico, and the lead actress herself, the character of the prostitute Nadia, who seduces one brother, but falls for another, developed beyond her original sketchy symbolization as figure of urban evil. Central to the film’s final shape, she complicates the Marxist ambitions that structure the film and reminds us that changing roles for men and women lie at the heart of the brothers’ problems.

1960 was a boom year for Italian cinema, producing La dolce vita (Federico Fellini) and L’avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni). However, whilst those two films explore the lives of Italy’s rich elite and their ennui, Visconti blended his fascination with opera and Communism into a powerful, melodramatic exploration of what it means to be at the sharp end of the economic scale, to be caught between two radically different cultures. Visconti’s daring use of real locations to screen sex, violence, and unpalatable truths about the foundations of Italy’s boom invoked the wrath of the censors, but contributed to creating an emotional narrative for a forgotten class. Visconti tells an unforgettable tale of what and who gets lost in the need to adapt and to survive in the modern urban environment.

Dr Danielle Hipkins is a Senior Lecturer in Italian in the Dept of Modern Languages, College of Humanities, University of Exeter.  Read more about Danielle’s work here.

The next Screen Talks event will be on Monday 25th February, 6.30pm.  Dr Helen Hanson will introduce Alfred’s Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)

Booking Information Book online or call the Box Office: 0871 902 5730

When asked by the interviewers to outline the guiding principle in making his films, Alfred Hitchcock playfully quipped: ‘always make the audience suffer as much as possible’.  Hitchcock’s films are still renowned for their ability to grip an audience through their precisely controlled and suspenseful unfolding of events.  During his career Hitchcock fostered his public image as ‘Master of Suspense’, and he was adept in his performance and handling of his public persona. He was well known for appearing in brief on-screen cameos and his familiarity with audiences was further developed in his droll role introducing episodes of his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

In 1959, after making a series of high budget technicolour suspense thrillers, which typify ‘Hitchockian style’ in their balance of glamour and crime, such as Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955) The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959) Hitchcock shifted both his style and production strategy, adapting Robert Bloch’s sensational pulp horror novel, Psycho.  The shift, for Hitchcock, was to a more gritty aesthetic and the opportunity to experiment with shocking narrative material and a frank presentation of sex and violence.  Psycho was produced on a low budget with a tight production schedule, and the events surrounding the film’s production are dramatised in Sasha Gervasi’s film Hitchcock, on general release at the moment.  One of the key features of the film’s release was the careful control of its marketing. In posters and publicity (pitcured above) Hitchcock exhorted viewers ‘not to tell’ the secrets of the plot.

The release of Gervasi’s film, and the recent BBC/HBO film The Girl (broadcast on BBC in December) provides an opportunity to revisit Psycho to explore the ‘stories’ that have sprung up about its genesis as a Hitchcock project, to consider the ways in which filmmakers appear on screen, and to ask why this film continues to grip and unsettle audiences. 

Dr Helen Hanson will introduce the film, and there will be opportunities for informal discussion in the bar afterwards.

Helen has written about Psycho in Contemporary American Cinema.  Find out more about Helen’s research here.