Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Lucía (Motion picture : 1968)“

O Motion Picture Production Code, mais conhecido como “Código Hays”, surgiu nos Estados Unidos nos anos de 1930, prolongando-se até finais da década de 1960. Durante esse período, a produção cinematográfica precisou se adaptar a determinadas noções de moralidade que forçaram os profissionais de Hollywood a buscarem estratégias refrativas para mostrar, por meio de distorção, aquilo que não era possível visualizar de outra maneira. Paralelamente, a fixação de certos modelos de gênero na sociedade americana do período se mostra rastreável através de uma forma específica de narrativa cultural, a ficção cinematográfica, que permite identificar tanto os arquétipos que servem de base ideológica às representações de gênero quanto eventuais espaços de dissensão e contramodelos. Isso tudo transforma o cinema de ficção em uma fonte valiosa para a antropologia audiovisual.ABSTRACTMotion Picture Production Code, better known as the “Hays Code” was enhanced in the 1930s United States and lasted until the end of the 1960s. During those years, film production had to observe certain notions about morality that forced Hollywood professionals to use refractive strategies to show – through distortion – situations that could not be otherwise represented. Also, certain gender models among the American society at that time are nowadays traceable through a specific cultural narrative: film fiction. Fiction allows the researcher to identify basic ideological archetypes for gender representations as well as possible spaces for dissention or counter-models. All together turns fiction films into a highly valuable source for audiovisual anthropology.

It is widely acknowledged among film scholars that Lynch’s 2001 neo-noir Mulholland Drive is richly infused with intertextual references and homages — most notably to Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). What is less recognised is the extent to which J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 Gothic novella Carmilla has also influenced Mulholland Drive. This article focuses on the dynamics of the relationship between Carmilla and Mulholland Drive, particularly the formation of femme fatale Camilla Rhodes (played by Laura Elena Harring), with the aim of establishing how the Gothic shapes the viewing experience of the film. I argue that not only are there striking narrative similarities between the texts, but lying at the heart of both Carmilla and Mulholland Drive is the uncanny. By drawing on this elusive and eerie feeling, Lynch successfully introduces an archetypal quality both to Camilla and Mulholland Drive as a whole, which in turn contributes to powerful sensations of desire, dread, nostalgia, and “noirness” that are aroused by the film. As such Mulholland Drive emerges not only as a compelling work of art, but also a deeply evocative cinematic experience. I begin by providing a brief overview of Le Fanu’s Gothic tale and establish its formative influence on later cinematic texts. I then present a synopsis of Mulholland Drive before exploring the rich interrelationship the film has with Carmilla. Carmilla and the Lesbian Vampire Carmilla is narrated from the perspective of a sheltered nineteen-year-old girl called Laura, who lives in an isolated Styrian castle with her father. After a bizarre event involving a carriage accident, a young woman named Carmilla is left in the care of Laura’s father. Carmilla is beautiful and charming, but she is an enigma; her origins and even her surname remain a mystery. Though Laura identifies a number of peculiarities about her new friend’s behaviour (such as her strange, intense moods, languid body movements, and other irregular habits), the two women are captivated with each other, quickly falling in love. However, despite Carmilla’s harmless and fragile appearance, she is not what she seems. She is a one hundred and fifty year old vampire called Mircalla, Countess Karnstein (also known as Millarca — both anagrams of Carmilla), who preys on adolescent women, seducing them while feeding off their blood as they sleep. In spite of the deep affection she claims to have for Laura, Carmilla is compelled to slowly bleed her dry. This takes its physical toll on Laura who becomes progressively pallid and lethargic, before Carmilla’s true identity is revealed and she is slain. Le Fanu’s Carmilla is monumental, not only for popularising the female vampire, but for producing a sexually alluring creature that actively seeks out and seduces other women. Cinematically, the myth of the lesbian vampire has been drawn on extensively by film makers. One of the earliest female centred vampire movies to contain connotations of same-sex desire is Lambert Hilyer’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936). However, it was in the 1960s and 1970s that the spectre of the lesbian vampire exploded on screen. In part a response to the abolishment of Motion Picture Code strictures (Baker 554) and fuelled by latent anxieties about second wave feminist activism (Zimmerman 23–4), films of this cycle blended horror with erotica, reworking the lesbian vampire as a “male pornographic fantasy” (Weiss 87). These productions draw on Carmilla in varying degrees. In most, the resemblance is purely thematic; others draw on Le Fanu’s novella slightly more directly. In Roger Vadim’s Et Mourir de Plaisir (1960) an aristocratic woman called Carmilla becomes possessed by her vampire ancestor Millarca von Karnstein. In Roy Ward Baker’s The Vampire Lovers (1970) Carmilla kills Laura before seducing a girl named Emma whom she encounters after a mysterious carriage breakdown. However, the undead Gothic lady has not only made a transition from literature to screen. The figure also transcends the realm of horror, venturing into other cinematic styles and genres as a mortal vampire whose sexuality is a source of malevolence (Weiss 96–7). A well-known early example is Frank Powell’s A Fool There Was (1915), starring Theda Barra as “The Vampire,” an alluring seductress who targets wealthy men, draining them of both their money and dignity (as opposed to their blood), reducing them to madness, alcoholism, and suicide. Other famous “vamps,” as these deadly women came to be known, include the characters played by Marlene Dietrich such as Concha Pérez in Joseph von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman (1935). With the emergence of film noir in the early 1940s, the vamp metamorphosed into the femme fatale, who like her predecessors, takes the form of a human vampire who uses her sexuality to seduce her unwitting victims before destroying them. The deadly woman of this era functions as a prototype for neo-noir incarnations of the sexually alluring fatale figure, whose popularity resurged in the early 1980s with productions such as Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981), a film commonly regarded as a remake of Billy Wilder’s 1944 classic noir Double Indemnity (Bould et al. 4; Tasker 118). Like the lesbian vampires of 1960s–1970s horror, the neo-noir femme fatale is commonly aligned with themes of same-sex desire, as she is in Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive Like Sunset Boulevard before it, Mulholland Drive tells the tragic tale of Hollywood dreams turned to dust, jealousy, madness, escapist fantasy, and murder (Andrews 26). The narrative is played out from the perspective of failed aspiring actress Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts) and centres on her bitter sexual obsession with former lover Camilla. The film is divided into three sections, described by Lynch as: “Part one: She found herself inside a perfect mystery. Part two: A sad illusion. Part three: Love” (Rodley 54). The first and second segments of the movie are Diane’s wishful dream, which functions as an escape from the unbearable reality that, after being humiliated and spurned by Camilla, Diane hires a hit man to have her murdered. Part three reveals the events that have led up to Diane’s fateful action. In Diane’s dream she is sweet, naïve, Betty who arrives at her wealthy aunt’s Hollywood home to find a beautiful woman in the bathroom. Earlier we witness a scene where the woman survives a violent car crash and, suffering a head injury, stumbles unnoticed into the apartment. Initially the woman introduces herself as Rita (after seeing a Gilda poster on the wall), but later confesses that she doesn’t know who she is. Undeterred by the strange circumstances surrounding Rita’s presence, Betty takes the frightened, vulnerable woman (actually Camilla) under her wing, enthusiastically assuming the role of detective in trying to discover her real identity. As Rita, Camilla is passive, dependent, and grateful. Importantly, she also fondly reciprocates the love Betty feels for her. But in reality, from Diane’s perspective at least, Camilla is a narcissistic, manipulative femme fatale (like the character portrayed by the famous star whose name she adopts in Diane’s dream) who takes sadistic delight in toying with the emotions of others. Just as Rita is Diane’s ideal lover in her fantasy, pretty Betty is Diane’s ego ideal. She is vibrant, wholesome, and has a glowing future ahead of her. This is a far cry from reality where Diane is sullen, pathetic, and haggard with no prospects. Bitterly, she blames Camilla for her failings as an actress (Camilla wins a lead role that Diane badly wanted by sleeping with the director). Ultimately, Diane also blames Camilla for her own suicide. This is implied in the dream sequence when the two women disguise Rita’s appearance after the discovery of a bloated corpse in Diane Selwyn’s apartment. The parallels between Mulholland Drive and Carmilla are numerous to the extent that it could be argued that Lynch’s film is a contemporary noir infused re-telling of Le Fanu’s novella. Both stories take the point-of-view of the blonde haired, blue eyed “victim.” Both include a vehicle accident followed by the mysterious arrival of an elusive dark haired stranger, who appears vulnerable and helpless, but whose beauty masks the fact that she is really a monster. Both narratives hinge on same-sex desire and involve the gradual emotional and physical destruction of the quarry, as she suffers at the hands of her newly found love interest. Whereas Carmilla literally sucks her victims dry before moving on to another target, Camilla metaphorically drains the life out of Diane, callously taunting her with her other lovers before dumping her. While Camilla is not a vampire per se, she is framed in a distinctly vampirish manner, her pale skin contrasted by lavish red lipstick and fingernails, and though she is not literally the living dead, the latter part of the film indicates that the only place Camilla remains alive is in Diane’s fantasy. But in the Lynchian universe, where conventional forms of narrative coherence, with their demand for logic and legibility are of little interest (Rodley ix), intertextual alignment with Carmilla extends beyond plot structure to capture the “mood,” or “feel” of the novella that is best described in terms of the uncanny — something that also lies at the very core of Lynch’s work (Rodley xi). The Gothic and the Uncanny Though Gothic literature is grounded in horror, the type of fear elicited in the works of writers that form part of this movement, such as Le Fanu (along with Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelly, and Bram Stoker to name a few), aligns more with the uncanny than with outright terror. The uncanny is an elusive quality that is difficult to pinpoint yet distinct. First and foremost it is a sense, or emotion that is related to dread and horror, but it is more complex than simply a reaction to fear. Rather, feelings of trepidation are accompanied by a peculiar, dream-like quality of something fleetingly recognisable in what is evidently unknown, conjuring up a mysterious impression of déjà vu. The uncanny has to do with uncertainty, particularly in relation to names (including one’s own name), places and what is being experienced; that things are not as they have come to appear through habit and familiarity. Though it can be frightening, at the same time it can involve a sensation that is compelling and beautiful (Royle 1–2; Punter 131). The inventory of motifs, fantasies, and phenomena that have been attributed to the uncanny are extensive. These can extend from the sight of dead bodies, skeletons, severed heads, dismembered limbs, and female sex organs, to the thought of being buried alive; from conditions such as epilepsy and madness, to haunted houses/castles and ghostly apparitions. Themes of doubling, anthropomorphism, doubt over whether an apparently living object is really animate and conversely if a lifeless object, such as a doll or machinery, is in fact alive also fall under the broad range of what constitutes the uncanny (see Jentsch 221–7; Freud 232–45; Royle 1–2). Socio-culturally, the uncanny can be traced back to the historical epoch of Enlightenment. It is the transformations of this eighteenth century “age of reason,” with its rejection of transcendental explanations, valorisation of reason over superstition, aggressively rationalist imperatives, and compulsive quests for knowledge that are argued to have first caused human experiences associated with the uncanny (Castle 8–10). In this sense, as literary scholar Terry Castle argues, the eighteenth century “invented the uncanny” (8). In relation to the psychological underpinnings of this disquieting emotion, psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch was the first to explore the subject in his 1906 document “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” though Sigmund Freud and his 1919 paper “The Uncanny” is most popularly associated with the term. According to Jentsch, the uncanny, or the unheimlich in German (meaning “unhomely”), emerges when the “new/foreign/hostile” corresponds to the psychical association of “old/known/familiar.” The unheimlich, which sits in direct opposition to the heimlich (homely) equates to a situation where someone feels not quite “at home” or “at ease” (217–9). Jentsch attributes sensations of the unheimlich to psychical resistances that emerge in relation to the mistrust of the innovative and unusual — “to the intellectual mystery of a new thing” (218) — such as technological revolution for example. Freud builds on the concept of the unheimlich by focusing on the heimlich, arguing that the term incorporates two sets of ideas. It can refer to what is familiar and agreeable, or it can mean “what is concealed and kept out of sight” (234–5). In the context of the latter notion, the unheimlich connotes “that which ought to have remained secret or hidden but has come to light” (Freud 225). Hence for Freud, who was primarily concerned with the latent content of the psyche, feelings of uncanniness emerge when dark, disturbing truths that have been repressed and relegated to the realm of the unconscious resurface, making their way abstractly into the consciousness, creating an odd impression of the known in the unknown. Though it is the works of E.T.A. Hoffman that are most commonly associated with the unheimlich, Freud describing the author as the “unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature” (233), Carmilla is equally bound up in dialectics between the known and the unknown; the homely and the unhomely. Themes centring on doubles, the undead, haunted gardens, conflicting emotions fuelled by desire and disgust — of “adoration and also of abhorrence” (Le Fanu 264), and dream-like nocturnal encounters with sinister, shape-shifting creatures predominate. With Carmilla’s arrival the boundaries between the heimlich and the unheimlich become blurred. Though Carmilla is a stranger, her presence triggers buried childhood memories for Laura of a frightening and surreal experience where Carmilla appears in Laura’s nursery during the night, climbing into bed with her before seemingly vanishing into thin air. In this sense, Laura’s remote castle home has never been homely. Disturbing truths have always lurked in its dark recesses, the return of the dead bringing them to light. The Uncanny in Mulholland Drive The elusive qualities of the uncanny also weave their way extensively through Mulholland Drive, permeating all facets of the cinematic experience — cinematography, sound score, mise en scène, and narrative structure. As film maker and writer Chris Rodley argues, Lynch mobilises every aspect of the motion picture making process in seeking to express a sense of uncanniness in his productions: “His sensitivity to textures of sound and image, to the rhythms of speech and movement, to space, colour, and the intrinsic power of music mark him as unique in this respect.” (Rodley ix–xi). From the opening scenes of Mulholland Drive, the audience is plunged into the surreal, unheimlich realm of Diane’s dream world. The use of rich saturated colours, soft focus lenses, unconventional camera movements, stilted dialogue, and a hauntingly beautiful sound score composed by Angelo Badalamenti, generates a cumulative effect of heightened artifice. This in turn produces an impression of hyper-realism — a Baudrillardean simulacrum where the real is beyond real, taking on a form of its own that has an artificial relation to actuality (Baudrillard 6–7). Distorting the “real” in this manner produces an effect of defamiliarisation — a term first employed by critic Viktor Shklovsky (2–3) to describe the artistic process involved in making familiar objects seem strange and unfamiliar (or unheimlich). These techniques are something Lynch employs in other works. Film and literary scholar Greg Hainge (137) discusses the way colour intensification and slow motion camera tracking are used in the opening scene of Blue Velvet (1984) to destabilise the aesthetic realm of the homely, revealing it to be artifice concealing sinister truths that have so far been hidden, but that are about to come to light. Similar themes are central to Mulholland Drive; the simulacra of Diane’s fantasy creating a synthetic form of real that conceals the dark and terrible veracities of her waking life. However, the artificial dream place of Diane’s disturbed mind is disjointed and fractured, therefore, just as the uncanny gives rise to an elusive sense of mystery and uncertainty, offering a fleeting glimpse of the tangible in something otherwise inexplicable, so too is the full intelligibility of Mulholland Drive kept at an obscure distance. Though the film offers a succession of clues to meaning, the key to any form of complete understanding lingers just beyond the grasp of certainty. Names, places, and identities are infused with doubt. Not only in relation to Betty/Diane and Rita/Camilla, but regarding a succession of other strange, inexplicable characters and events, one example being the recurrent presence of a terrifying looking vagrant (Bonnie Aarons). Figures such as this are clearly poignant to the narrative, but they are also impossibly enigmatic, inviting the audience to play detective in deciphering what they signify. Themes of doubling and mirroring are also used extensively. While these motifs serve to denote the split between waking and dream states, they also destabilise the narrative in relation to what is familiar and what is unfamiliar, further grounding Mulholland Drive in the uncanny. Since its publication in 1872, Carmilla has had a significant formative influence on the construct of the seductive yet deadly woman in her various manifestations. However, rarely has the novella been paid homage to as intricately as it is in Mulholland Drive. Lynch draws on Le Fanu’s archetypal Gothic horror story, combining it with the aesthetic conventions of film noir, in order to create what is ostensibly a contemporary, poststructuralist critique of the Hollywood dream-factory. Narratively and thematically, the similarities between the two texts are numerous. However, intertextual configuration is considerably more complex, extending beyond the plot and character structure to capture the essence of the Gothic, which is grounded in the uncanny — an evocative emotion involving feelings of dread, accompanied by a dream-like impression of familiar and unfamiliar commingling. Carmilla and Mulholland Drive bypass the heimlich, delving directly into the unheimlich, where boundaries between waking and dream states are destabilised, any sense of certainty about what is real is undermined, and feelings of desire are paradoxically conjoined with loathing. Moreover, Lynch mobilises all fundamental elements of cinema in order to capture and express the elusive qualities of the Unheimlich. In this sense, the uncanny lies at the very heart of the film. What emerges as a result is an enigmatic work of art that is as profoundly alluring as it is disconcerting. References Andrews, David. “An Oneiric Fugue: The Various Logics of Mulholland Drive.” Journal of Film and Video 56 (2004): 25–40. Baker, David. “Seduced and Abandoned: Lesbian Vampires on Screen 1968–74.” Continuum 26 (2012): 553–63. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: U Michigan P, 1994. Bould, Mark, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck. Neo-Noir. New York: Wallflower, 2009. Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. London: Hogarth, 2001. 217–256. Le Fanu, J. Sheridan. Carmilla. In a Glass Darkly. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 243–319. Hainge, Greg. “Weird or Loopy? Spectacular Spaces, Feedback and Artifice in Lost Highway’s Aesthetics of Sensation.” The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions. Ed. Erica Sheen and Annette Davidson. London: Wallflower, 2004. 136–50. Jentsch, Ernst. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny.” Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. Ed. Jo Collins and John Jervis. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008. 216–28. Punter, David. “The Uncanny.” The Routledge Companion to the Gothic. Ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2007. 129–36. Rodley, Chris. Lynch on Lynch. London: Faber, 2005. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Theory of Prose. Illinois: Dalkey, 1991. Tasker, Yvonne. Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1998. Weiss, Andrea. Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Cinema. London: Jonathan Cape, 1992. Zimmerman, Bonnie. “Daughters of Darkness Lesbian Vampires.” Jump Cut 24.5 (2005): 23–4.

Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen argue that in “contemporary Western visualization central composition is relatively uncommon” (Reading Images 203). In fact, “most compositions polarise elements as Given and New and/or Ideal and Real” (Reading Images 203). This is the regular situation on the front pages of Australia’s national and capital city dailies; but not on May 28. Rather than the favoured front page structures of left (Given) and right (New) and/or top (Ideal) and bottom (Real), on this morning the layouts in the newspapers centralised the Schapelle Corby judgment. While this is not unprecedented, it is the type of coverage usually kept for major issues such as 9/11 or the Bali Bombing. Even the recent release of Douglas Wood, which was arguably as, if not more, important for the Australian public in terms of the issues it raised about Australia’s involvement in the war in Iraq, did not receive the same type of treatment. Although further study needs to be undertaken, I believe this centralising of issues, that is the running of one story only, on front pages is a growing trend, particularly among the tabloids. The effect of this centralising layout structure is to reduce the news choice for the reader on front pages that they would normally approach with an attitude of scanning and selecting. While this approach could still be taken across the whole paper, the front-page choices are minimised. This essay will examine the coverage of the Corby verdict in the tabloids The Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun, The Advertiser, The Mercury, and The West Australian, because it is here that the greatest impact of centralisation on the encoded reading paths can be found. Although the broadsheets The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Courier-Mail, and The Canberra Times also centralised the issue, there is not room here to cover them in detail. May 28 was the peak of the media frenzy in the Corby coverage, or at least one of the peaks. As the story is ongoing—turning into something of a soap opera in its call to readers and television news viewers to tune in and see the latest bizarre development, such as the chief lawyer admitting he’s a crook—it could peak again, particularly if on appeal a heavier sentence is handed down. On May 28, the focus moved from Corby’s guilt or innocence to the horror of the twenty-year sentence. In each category—broadsheet and tabloid—the layouts were remarkably similar. At a glance, three of the tabloids are so similar that side-by-side on a newsstand they could have been mistaken for the same. Apart from the fact that Corby’s beauty gave her cultural salience, it is not clear why the Australian media was so taken with her story in the first instance when there are and have been many Australians on drug charges in Asia. My interest here is not so much why or how she became news—that’s an issue for another time—but that once she had captured the attention of the Australian print media, how did they visually treat the material and what are the implications of that treatment. I will argue that the treatment elevated her story, giving it the same weight as the war on terror coverage since 9/11. One of the first elements that draws the eye on any newspaper page is the photograph. Tim Harrower suggests photographs “give a page motion and emotion” (28), arguing however that it is the headline “that leaps out, that grabs you” (37). In reality, it is most likely a combination of both that draws a reader’s attention. Both encode the importance of a story with a dominating photograph or a large headline signalling a story’s significance. The varying size of headlines and photographs and their placement signal the page designer’s order of importance. Six of the ten major Australian newspapers chose the same photograph for their front pages on May 28: a picture of Corby with her head held in her left hand and a look of despair on her face. Four of them—The Daily Telegraph, The Mercury, The Advertiser, and the Herald Sun—used the full photograph, while it was heavily cropped into a horizontal picture on the front pages of The West Australian and The Age. The Australian’s choice was similar but the photograph was taken from a slightly different angle. Only one of these newspapers, The West Australian, acknowledged that Corby did not just hang her head in her hand in despair but rather was slapping her head and sobbing as the verdict was read. The television footage gives a different impression of this moment than the still photograph run in the newspapers. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Courier-Mail, in contrast, chose a photograph of Corby struggling with the courtroom police. The Sydney Morning Herald more closely cropped their version so that the emphasis is on Corby. More of the struggle is depicted in The Courier-Mail. The only newspaper making a substantially different choice was The Canberra Times. In this publication, the central vertical photograph was a close up of Corby with tears in her eyes. Her mien is more composed than in the photographs on the other front pages. The source for the photographs, with the exception of The Australian’s choice from Associated Press, was Reuters. Given that the event was in Indonesia and in a crowded courtroom, the array of photographs may have been limited. Of interest was the use of the photograph. The Daily Telegraph, The Mercury, and the Herald Sun ran it full-page, like a poster shot, with the mastheads and headlines over the top. In contrast, The Advertiser maintained a white background for their masthead with the photograph underneath enclosed in a heavy frame and the headlines imposed on top. The other newspapers ran the photograph to the edge of the page without an added frame. The Advertiser, The Mercury, and the Herald Sun chose to forgo their normal front-page teasers. This restricted the scan and select for the reader. Normally readers would have at least two stories, sometimes three, as well as two to three teasers or pointers (usually across the top of the page under the masthead) to scan and select their reading matter. On May 28, however, Corby was centralised with a similar reading path encoded for each of these newspapers. The photograph is the most salient element and the eye moves from this to the main headline at the bottom of the page. As the masthead is known and familiar, unless the reader is selecting the newspaper from a newsstand rather than picking it up from their front yard, it is likely they would only subconsciously register it. These layouts, with a reading path from photograph to headlines down the page, are closer to linear in design, than the normal non-linear format and more interactive front pages. Therefore, the coding is for reading “left to right and from top to bottom, line by line” (Kress and van Leeuwen 218). Newspapers are not normally read in a linear way, but “selectively and partially . . . Their composition sets up particular hierarchies of the movement of the hypothetical reader within and across their different elements. Such reading paths begin with the most salient element, from there move to the next most salient element and so on.” (218) There is also sameness in the headlines and their implications. The Mercury, the most unadorned of the layouts, has “20 Years” in block capitals with a subhead and pointer reading “Corby’s Nightmare Sentence, pages 2-6”. The implication is clear, Corby’s sentence is 20 years in jail and it is pronounced a “nightmare”. The Herald Sun also chose “20 Years” with a subheading of “Shock and tears over jail sentence”. Consolidating this notion of “shock and tears” were three smaller photographs across the bottom of the page depicting crying and sobbing women. No male sympathy was depicted, thus tapping into and reinforcing Australian cultural stereotypes that it is the Australian women rather than the men who cry. The Advertiser’s main headline declared “20 Years in Hell”. Beside this was a smaller underlined headline and pointer “Guilty Corby, sent to jail, Australians react in anger Pages 8-15”. There are slight distinctions in these three pages but essentially the encoded reading path and message is the same. That is not to say that some people may read the pages in a different order. As Kress and van Leeuwen argue “newspaper pages can be read in more than one way” (“Front Page” 205), however, the choice on these pages is limited. The Daily Telegraph uses headlines with different emphasis and includes text from the main story imposed over the photograph. Pointers square-off the pages at the bottom. A kicker head at the top of the page, below the masthead, and set against a photograph of Abu Bakir Bashir, declares: “This terrorist planned the murder of 88 Australians and got two years. Yesterday Schapelle Corby got 20”. This comparison does not appear on the already examined pages. Towards the bottom of the page, the main headline set over two lines reads “Nation’s Fury”. To the right of the “Nation” is a smaller headline, which says “20 years in hell and prosecutor’s still demand life”. The story begins beside the second line “Fury”. The message on this page is more strident than the others and was analysed by the ABC TV show Media Watch on May 30. Media Watch declared the “spin on the verdict” used by The Daily Telegraph as “truly a disgrace”. The criticism was made because Bashir was not convicted in court of masterminding the bombing therefore the word “planned” is problematic and misleading. As the Media Watch report points out, the three Indonesians convicted of masterminding the bombing are on death row and will face the firing squad. The final tabloid, The West Australian, presented a similar message to The Daily Telegraph with a headline of “Bomb plotter: 2½ years / Dope smuggler: 20 years”. The visual impact of this page, however, is not as striking as the other pages. The visual designs of The Advertiser, The Daily Telegraph, The Mercury, and the Herald Sun make it immediately clear that the Corby verdict is the central issue in the news and that all other stories are so marginal they are off the page. In contrast, The West Australian ran its normal teasers just below the masthead, offering four choices for the reader as well as weather and home delivery details at the bottom. The heavily cropped central photograph of Corby leaves in only her wrist and central facial features; it is not even immediately apparent that the photograph is of Corby. The story runs in an L-shape around it. Although Corby is central, the reading path is not as clear. The reader’s eye will most likely be drawn from photograph to caption and to headline or headline, photograph, caption. Whatever the path, the story text is always read last, that is, if the reader chooses this story at all (Kress and van Leeuwen, “Front Pages” 205). The story opens by announcing that Corby’s lawyers want the Australian authorities to “launch an investigation” into the case and Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer has offered the help of two Australian QCs in preparing an appeal. This introduction does not support the headline. The comparison with Bashir comes in paragraph three. While Corby still has salience, the inclusion of teasers on the front of The West Australian brings back the choice for the reader, albeit in a small way. Kress and van Leeuwen argue that newspapers “are the first point of ‘address’ for the readers” presenting “the most significant events and issues of the day for the paper and its readers” (“Front Page” 229). In the Corby coverage on May 28, the newspapers presented the court verdict as the most important of all stories on offer and her image became the most salient element, the “nucleus” of the front pages. All newspapers make choices for their readers in their capacity as gatekeepers (see David Manning White and Glen Bleske), but not, I would argue, to the extent that it appeared in the Corby case. A centralising approach to news can be understood with stories such as 9/11 or the Bali Bombing but does one woman’s plight over drug charges in Bali truly deserve such coverage? As a single event maybe not, but the Corby verdict again raised the issue of Australia’s uneasiness about the laws and culture of its Asian neighbours, feelings amplified in the wake of the Bali Bombing. The rhetoric used in the front pages of The Daily Telegraph and The West Australian clearly state this when they compare Corby’s sentence to Bashir’s. They demonstrate a paranoia about the treatment of “our girl” in a foreign judicial system which appears to deal more leniently with terrorists. Thus, one girl’s story is transformed into part of a much larger issue, a fact reinforced through the visual treatment of the material. There remain some questions. What does it say about the newspaper’s attitude to their readers when they centralise issues so strongly that reader choice is removed? Is this part of the “dumbing down” of the Australian media, where news organisations move towards more clearly dictating views to their reading public? Is it attributable to media ownership, after all four of these tabloids belong to News Corporation? These questions and others about the trend towards the centralising of issues are for a bigger study. For now, we watch to see how much longer Corby remains in the nucleus of the news and for further indication of a growing trend towards centralising issues. References Bleske, Glen K. “Mrs Gates Takes Over: An Updated Version of a 1949 Case Study.” Social Meanings of News. Ed. Dan Berkowitz. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997. Harrower, Tim. The Newspaper Designer’s Handbook. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. “Front Page: (The Critical) Analysis of Newspaper Layout.” Approaches to Media Discourse. Ed. Allan Bell and Peter Garrett. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003. Media Watch. May 30, 2005. http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s1380398.htm>. Sellers, Leslie. The Simple Subs Book. Oxford: Permagon Press, 1968. White, David Manning. “The ‘Gate Keeper’: A Case Study in the Selection of News.” Social Meanings of News. Ed. Dan Berkowitz. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Delaney, Elizabeth. "Scanning the Front Pages: The Schapelle Corby Judgment." M/C Journal 8.4 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/08-delaney.php>. APA Style Delaney, E. (Aug. 2005) "Scanning the Front Pages: The Schapelle Corby Judgment," M/C Journal, 8(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/08-delaney.php>.

Aiming to make an intervention in critical theory, film-philosophy and British Cinema scholarship, this thesis investigates what a marriage of Lacanian and Badiouian theories of the subject can bring to the study of the radical British feature film of 1968: films which in differing ways represent the political and intellectual debates current in the culture. The question of what can be learnt through an analysis situated within theories of the subject has not been addressed within British Cinema studies. Psychoanalytic film theory in its previous incarnations utilised a section of Lacan's thought in order to focus on the ways in which the spectator was placed into a subject position by the unseen workings of the apparatus. Furthermore, the limited amount of Badiouian film scholarship is concerned with whether films can be thought philosophically. A fuller use of Lacan with Badiou as a hermeneutic model to address films from a specific period and context creates a new interpretive model on the porous boundary between critical theory and film-philosophy. This thesis utilises Lacan's categories of the Imaginary, Symbolic and, predominantly, the Real alongside the Badiouian Event to interrogate the ways in which Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (Karel Reisz, 1966), Privilege (Peter Watkins, 1967), Herostratus (Don Levy, 1967), Performance (Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg, 1970) and if ... (Lindsay Anderson, 1968) represent the radical subject of 1968, in order to argue for the efficacy of ideological critique, to think politically about cinema, and advocate the continuing resonance of the period in contemporary praxis.

This comparative study is an investigation into the changing concerns of feature film policy in Canada and Australia from 1968 to 1998. Its purpose is to determine how similar policy initiatives have produced divergent results in two economically, culturally and socially similar nations. The inquiry's aim is to establish what financial, political and geographic variables affect the application of feature film policy. While resemblances between these nations justify the contrasting of comparable feature film policy initiatives, differences in outcomes suggest that these nations are not entirely alike. Therefore, rather than following the leads of comparable national agencies, film policy makers in Canada and Australia need to concentrate on conditions specific to their own particular situation.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1995.
Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 151-168).