Journal articles on the topic 'Actresses, fiction'

INTEREST IN ACTORS who play female roles and actresses who play male roles is periodically rekindled. At such times, one might almost suspect that behind these disguises, these contrasts between reality and fiction, lie hidden one of the theatre's secret potentialities. One also often speaks of the actor's female side and the actress's male side, and attempts to develop these forthwith by means of apposite exercises.

This essay provides a new approach to reading actress memoirs in light of the influence of environmental thinking on Victorian culture more broadly and acting theory in particular. By demonstrating that actress autobiographies were written within a discursive domain that understood human temperaments and biographical trajectories to be fundamentally shaped by social and physical surroundings, I examine how renowned actresses narrate the conditions within which their temperament developed. In order to do so, I first examine the entanglement of environment and character in novels about actress protagonists in order to develop a framework for analysing the narrative qualities of actress memoirs. This essay focuses specifically on the trope of the ‘wild’ girl who, undisciplined by parents or teachers, develops a sensitive yet wilful and even anti-social temperament that enables her to become an actress praised for her authentic displays of spontaneous emotion.

AbstractBetween 1930 and 1937, the Lianhua Film Company was one of the major studios in China, and in many ways was a symbol of modernity. The policy of the Company towards its actors was quite new and contributed to the creation of a new social status for this group, especially for the women. This paper focuses on three female stars (Wang Renmei, Chen Yanyan and Li Lili,) who worked for the Lianhua Film Company. Through a detailed analysis of the photos published in its magazine, Lianhua Huabao, as well as feature films produced by the Company, we will study Lianhua's strategies to transform these women into professional actresses. Their image was created by the entanglement of three spheres: their private lives, their public lives and their fiction lives played on screen. We will consider the sometimes conflicting relationships between these spheres by looking at the visual sources (photos and feature films) in conjunction with the actresses' biographies and movie roles. This will underline the complexity and ambiguity of a process understood by the Lianhua Film Company not only as the making of professional actresses but also as the creation of a new, modern Chinese woman.

The article presents an attempt to conduct a systematical study of the typology of female images in the works of Naki Isanbet, the Tatar scholar-encyclopedist, folklorist, critic, and classic of Tatar literature (1899–1992). Published and unpublished sources were used as the research material. Fiction, journalistic, and scientific texts of N. Isanbet have been analysed using the method of semantic analysis, historical and cultural, comparative methods. The author proves that the ideal of a woman of the Enlightenment epoch, i.e. the “mother of the nation”, dominates in the legacy of the scholar who was the classic of the Tatar literature as well. The images of a devoted spouse, a wise mother, a “mother of the nation” can be encountered in his works. The writer defends the ideas of equality of women and men, women’s active participation in public life, etc. in his works of fiction written in various genres throughout the twentieth century. The poetics of female images depends on the requirements of the genre. When developing the images, the writer relies on the traditions of the Tatar folklore and oriental poetry. In his creative legacy, the encyclopedic scholar immortalised dozens of names of the female contemporaries who made a significant contribution to the history of the Tatar people – teachers, actresses, writers, translators, public figures, etc.

AbstractPrecious Mirror of Boy Actresses is the most serious piece of fiction about male love since the late Ming and the lengthiest of all in Chinese literary history. It is remarkable in its extension of the egalitarian implications of the qing aesthetic that it inherits from the late Ming and from earlier Qing literature such as Dream of the Red Chamber. In the homoerotic relationship it idealizes, lovers who are rigidly separated in terms of status nevertheless experience a sublime love which necessarily results in the liberation of the man of lower status. The novel makes unique use of the qing aesthetic's idealization of the feminine to arrive at this ethically pragmatic conclusion whereby liberation is achieved. The foregrounding of this sublime love and the qing-perfected characters who embody it, moreover, link the novel with other works of the period which portray a China that is ultimately a stable and invulnerable entity. Thus Precious Mirror's interpretation of qing carries a historical significance in spite of the novel's obliviousness of the social and political turmoil of China in the mid-nineteenth century.

This quantitative-qualitative study ascertained the extent of influence of the Korean Drama Fad on the Filipino Millennials’cultural practices and beliefs. A researcher-madeSelf-Assessment Checklist was used to gather the quantitative data among 356 randomly selected respondents, while the qualitative data were drawn from an Interview among 8 participants. Results revealed that overall, the Korean drama fad was moderately influential. However, this was very influential, moderately influential, and slightly influential when respondents were categorized according to sex, college, campus, and degree of exposure, respectively. Significant differences existed in the extent of influence of the Korean drama fad when respondents were categorized according to sex, campus, and degree of exposure, but no significant differences were noted when classified according to college. Reasons for watching K-dramas include relaxation and entertainment, stress reliever, a form of escape from their problems, exciting stories, and unpredictable plot, characters are easy to relate and identify with, and the presence of fascinating actors and actresses. Further, the K-dramas was appealing because the stories are true-to-life with the varying genre--love story, modern romance, comedy, historical fiction, and action-drama. Insights and lessons cited were being prepared to face the future; being strong and more positive in facing life's challenges; loving unconditionally; learning to be more careful before totally trusting others; having knowledge and awareness of what is trending when it comes to fashion styles, beauty standards, verbal and non-verbal expressions, behavior, and lifestyle of Koreans in general.

This article examines Lynn Nottage's 2011 satirical play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, which stages the life and legacy of the fictional Vera Stark, a Black maid and struggling actress during Hollywood's golden age. Nottage's play is inspired, in part, by the career of African American actress, singer, and dancer Theresa Harris. A tale of Black women's cinematic representation and social erasure, Nottage's fabrication of film history extends beyond the staged plot to also include a digital archive documenting Vera's celebrity and career. This article explores how Nottage's play and paratexts fabulate a speculative fiction and archive about Black women's media histories, staging what I call a phantom cinema, an amalgam of real and imagined film histories that haunt, trouble, and work with and against cinema histories to creatively illuminate archival gaps in visual culture and the public imagination.

In earlier issues, New Theatre Quarterly has followed through several lines of enquiry into the processes of acting and the construction of critical methods appropriate to the analysis of contemporary performance. Articles on the work of Tilda Swinton (NTQ23) and Harriet Walters (NTQ34) for example, focused on the consciousness and techniques of those actresses. But the work of Odin Teatret, complemented (as in this issue) by the theoretical writings of its director, Eugenio Barba, has been a recurrent concern – most recently in the exploration in NTQ26 by Roberta Carreri of the technical means through which her role in Judith was articulated. Here, Janne Risum pulls together several related lines of enquiry by considering the performance of Julia Varley in the Castle of Holstebro, her vocal demonstration workshop The Echo of Silence, and her written piece, A Candle Lit amongst the Pages of Books, as related aspects of perception through which the female spectator engages with the actress and her fictive personae. Janne Risum teaches in the Institut for Dramaturgi at Aarhus University, Denmark, and is also active in the International School for Theatre Anthropology. She has published books and essays on acting, theatre history, and women in the theatre. A version of the present paper has also appeared, in Danish, in Nordic Theatre Studies, VI, No. 3 (1993).

In an influential essay on the place of autobiography in theatre history, Thomas Postlewait puts Fanny Kemble's memoirs at the crux of a historiographical problem. The literary sensibility of Kemble's work appears to Postlewait an instance of both the theatrical memoir's cultural richness and its limitations as biographical evidence: although Kemble's “epistolary mode of self-representation” gives her autobiography Records of a Girlhood “a documentary quality,” for example, even her “earliest letters reveal a calculated literary style” that signals her awareness of the “traits and conventions” of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. In her consciousness of narrative trends, Kemble stands out as a particularly clear example of a general tendency in theatrical autobiographies of the period. As the nineteenth century's booming print market expanded the audience for stories about theatregoing, it also drew readers who were increasingly familiar with novelistic experiments in plotting, characterization, and point of view. This shared audience encouraged an exchange of discursive conventions across fictional and historical narratives, which makes memoirs a compelling but complicated source of historical data about nineteenth-century theatre. Indeed, the two-way influence between genres is so strong that Postlewait argues scholars “need to ask to what extent these autobiographies exist not only as historical records but as epistolary fictions.”

This paper looks at the actresses who portrayed Darna and how they are presented as spectacles in the entertainment articles that promote the film and television adaptations. This frame of inquiry comes from the notion that the visual aesthetics of Darna in komiks is largely informed by the superhero genre’s dependence on spectacle as shown in the superhero’s feats of greatness and in her actions and movements which are all larger than life and extraordinary. If this is the case for Darna in print, then how about the actresses tasked with performing her in the movies and television series? How are their bodies being turned into a spectacle in promotional materials in order to conform to the needs of the capital (entertainment industry)? In using the spectacle of the body as framework, the paper also draws on the star system and the role of producers of text in the creation of Darna as we know her today. The aim is to reveal how female bodies were made part of the construction of Darna’s image outside of its fictional universe which results in a discourse that highlights the body of the celebrities rather than Darna’s continuing relevance as a Filipino icon. This sets aside her representational power to embody the struggle and demand of Filipinos for justice and a better life as audience’s attention is diverted towards how these actresses prepared their bodies to perform Darna.

Abstract Discussions of the conception of that exemplar of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth century urban modernity, the flâneur, have focused on both critique of the figure’s masculinity and more radical and nuanced conceptions of women’s flânerie. This article considers both the re-gendering and ungendering of flânerie in the character of three flâneuses in fiction published in the 1870s, 1880s and 1910s: Madame Sidonie, Henrietta Stackpole, and Elsie Bengough, and related dissonances and synergies in the career and work of London actress and cartoonist Marie Duval, active 1869–1885. It will argue that changes in types of reading supervened upon the boom in the production and distribution of serial publications during this period, resulting in the embodiment of new female professional identities, relative to both changing experiences of urban life and changing experiences of reading. The article makes a distinction between new ideas of these types of urban professional woman and the development of the identity of the New Woman after 1894. It examines the historic comprehensibility of the fictional flâneuses to readers of Zola, James, and Onions, according to the new opportunities and prohibitions that constituted the lived experiences of the developing urban entertainments industry of the period, in Duval’s comic strips and vignettes in the weekly London magazine Judy, or The London Serio-Comic Journal.

E.M. Cioran’s ideas about disappointment illuminate the role of deception in the aesthetics of Marcel Proust. With reference to the narrator’s experience watching the actress la Berma, I show that the desire to know is at the heart of deception in both writers, and that disappointment is not a failure but rather a necessary step on the way to lucidity. This initial despair-laden lucidity then yields, in both writers, to a second kind of lucidity that, in the pessimist tradition, seeks passion in life within a fiction that can modify our expectations so that a non-deceptive and undespairing lucidity arises within the domain of the aesthetic.

ABSTRACT: In the summer of 1900, at the height of the Nome gold rush, actress and soon-to-be suffragist Elizabeth Robins traveled to Alaska. Following her return, Robins published two novels and several stories set in the region. Yet even as she capitalized on the popularity of gold rush settings and tropes, Robins's Alaskan fiction consistently undermines the romantic mythology that typically characterizes gold rush narratives, highlighting instead the environmental and human degradation that gold mining entailed. Focusing primarily on her novel The Magnetic North (1904) and the connected story "Monica's Village" (1905), this essay explores how Robins's Alaskan fiction recycles US Southern plantation mythology in order to imagine an alternative form of Alaskan development, one that would transform Alaska's Indigenous population into a racialized labor force to be exploited in ways comparable to African Americans under Jim Crow. Though the environmental conditions of Alaska foreclosed the possibility of traditional plantation agriculture, Robins's fiction maps plantation dynamics onto the forms of mineral extraction transforming the region. In doing so, these texts reveal the pliability of the plantation imaginary as well as the global scope of plantation modernity. This essay argues that the Plantationocene offers a useful framework for reconsidering the intertwined histories of plantation agriculture and mineral extraction. Robins's vision of Alaska as a New South ultimately highlights the ways in which mineral extraction in the Far North follows a pattern established by plantation agriculture throughout the Global South.

ABSTRACT: In the summer of 1900, at the height of the Nome gold rush, actress and soon-to-be suffragist Elizabeth Robins traveled to Alaska. Following her return, Robins published two novels and several stories set in the region. Yet even as she capitalized on the popularity of gold rush settings and tropes, Robins's Alaskan fiction consistently undermines the romantic mythology that typically characterizes gold rush narratives, highlighting instead the environmental and human degradation that gold mining entailed. Focusing primarily on her novel The Magnetic North (1904) and the connected story "Monica's Village" (1905), this essay explores how Robins's Alaskan fiction recycles US Southern plantation mythology in order to imagine an alternative form of Alaskan development, one that would transform Alaska's Indigenous population into a racialized labor force to be exploited in ways comparable to African Americans under Jim Crow. Though the environmental conditions of Alaska foreclosed the possibility of traditional plantation agriculture, Robins's fiction maps plantation dynamics onto the forms of mineral extraction transforming the region. In doing so, these texts reveal the pliability of the plantation imaginary as well as the global scope of plantation modernity. This essay argues that the Plantationocene offers a useful framework for reconsidering the intertwined histories of plantation agriculture and mineral extraction. Robins's vision of Alaska as a New South ultimately highlights the ways in which mineral extraction in the Far North follows a pattern established by plantation agriculture throughout the Global South.

The present multidisciplinary theoretical article develops its focal line of argument gradually. At first, feminist and narrative theory are consulted; after that, some treatments in the philosophy of mind are discussed. The latter’s correlative relationship with the recent “materialist turn” in philosophy affords to propose a tentative alternative to the current and universally accepted approaches to the (fictional) character much indebted to philosophical idealism. This latter observation also determines the broad – some might argue seemingly overtly complicated – theoretical reach of the article. However, its timely point of departure – the online misogynistic abuse in fan discussions directed at Breaking Bad’s Skyler White and the actress Anna Gunn –, enables to cast the issue of character engagement in necessarily broad terms, disciplinarily speaking. Be it in the context of different scientific disciplines or as the crucial vertebra connecting them, whilst also suggesting far-reaching philosophical implications. This kind of engagement, and especially its expression in online discourse, provides an impetus to inquire about the peculiarities of the human mind and the operation of human thought. Therefore, the present article zooms in on the conventionally understood binary relationship between “fiction” and “reality”, sketching appropriate terminology (continuance, narrative person, realitization) and theoretical framework (inspired, in part, by the Soviet school of philosophical Activity Theory) to help explain the human proclivity to treat characters in naïve realist terms, i.e., as real people. The central research question is as follows: what kind of ramifications can be detected for the conceptualization of character (and narrative) engagement from a particular kind of value-laden reception (like the forms of digital misogyny that emerged in the context of Breaking Bad’s reception)?

While Ellen Terry's Shakespearean roles are commonly discussed in considerations of her work, the actress's involvement with the comic play Nance Oldfield is glossed over if not entirely overlooked. However, Terry bought the rights to this play, revised the script with Bram Stoker, performed the leading role, and invoked this semi-fictional figure across the latter part of her career. This essay examines public theatrical ephemera in conjunction with personal photographs of Terry dressed up as Oldfield at home and the extensive marginalia on Terry's copy of the script to argue that Terry's assumption of ‘Nance Oldfield’ was a rhetorical performance. Terry's alliance with this character, as an on-stage character and an off-stage alter ego, led her to speak with greater confidence about her own professional life and about women's public role in nineteenth-century England.

The writer-reader relationship in drama, with stage directions as part of the dramatic language, is much more complicated than that in other types of literature. The complication mainly comes from the fact that 'the reader' is a kind of collective term covering various types of individuals with different pragmatic roles, including the director, the stage producer, the setting designer, actors/actresses, the audience outside the theatre and ordinary readers. Thus, instead of a one-to-one process of communication between the writer and the reader, there are multiple parallel processes between the writer and various types of readers, with the same play text conveying different pragmatic meanings to different addressees. For instance, a play text is utilitarian in the theatrical circle but fictional in the literary circle, and what is imperative for one type of reader is purely descriptive and narrative for another. For various reasons, this area has so far received little critical attention. This article, from a pragmatic-stylistic perspective and with special reference to Eugène Ionesco's The Lesson, attempts to examine how the playwright's discourse strategies produce different effects on different types of readers.

The feeling of being caught between immersion in cinematic fictions and having one’s attention pulled away from them by a range of distractions has shaped the experience of cinema for many decades. In the 1910s, several developments emerged in tandem with each other: the promotion of films and their stars/directors, narrative becoming the dominant form of cinema production, and the materialization of tension between immersion and distraction for audiences. The environment in which 1910s promotional and narrational strategies thrived set the stage for how we have thought about the bodies of women on screen, behind the camera, and in the seats of the theater. This essay focuses on the example of Cleo Madison as a filmmaker, actress, and a site of discursive energy to explore these issues.

The Watermelon Woman (1996), Cheryl Dunye, é um modelo híbrido de ficção/documentário. A dupla encenação vai da busca de uma atriz negra do cinema mudo ao cotidiano da própria diretora/personagem. Uma associação entre forma e conteúdo permite igualar-se à representação da personagem o deslocamento dos gêneros cinematográficos, tornando o filme uma performance queer, em que a história sobre a vida da mulher-melancia e a realidade de Cheryl se mesclam, dando visibilidade à mulher negra e lésbica./The Watermelon Woman (1996), Cheryl Dunye, is a hybrid movie that is between fiction and documentary model. The double performance goes from the search of a black actress of the silent cinema period to the daily life of the director / character. An association between form and content allows the representation of the character to be equated with the displacement of the cinematographic genres, making the film a queer performance, in which the story about the life of the watermelon woman and the reality of Cheryl merge, giving visibility to the woman black and lesbian.

Although long slighted by critics, Lovel the Widower should be recognized as the most overtly theatrical work we have from one of the nineteenth century's most theatrical writers. Adapted for the Cornhill Magazine from Thackeray's failed drama, The Wolves and the Lamb, Lovel is narrated by a character who calls himself the “Chorus of the Play” and tells the story of a governess who must hide the fact that she was once an actress. Thackeray published the story to keep the Cornhill's readers entertained while he began work on his last completed novel, The Adventures of Philip. As a piece of occasional journalism, Lovel therefore shares a closer kinship with Thackeray's other periodical writings and Christmas books than it does with his mature novels. Not destined to be the newly-launched Cornhill's chief fictional attraction (that honor went to Trollope's Framley Parsonage), Lovel actually functioned in the magazine as the literary equivalent of a theatrical comic afterpiece.

Goddess’s or Satan’s Intervention? A Palimpsest Reading of Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur (2013) The text concerns Roman Polanski’s film Venus in Fur (2013), a multi-layer psychodrama written for two characters, taking place on several levels of human relations: actress vs. director, literary character vs. performing artist, man vs. woman. Venus in Fur has been defined as a kind of palimpsest, i.e. a film story based on the fictional skeleton of other works. Referring to the concept developed by Gérard Genette, who categorized the ways in which different texts interact with each other, the article investigates the film’s hypertextuality, i.e. the “grafting” of Venus in Fur (as a hypertext) upon earlier works (hypotexts). When discussing Venus in Fur as a text of culture constituting a hypertext superimposed on other literary pieces, such as David Ives’ dramas, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novels, mythological and biblical stories, it was necessary to identify their mutual relations by deciphering all the interconnections, reworkings, reinterpretations, and revisions. Due to the relationships existing between the various cultural texts in the film, the analysis was treated as a palimpsest reading. Attention was also paid to the director-actress relationship and the role of the female character in connection with the reinterpretation of the myth of the goddess Venus.

Abstract Although of the approximately 120 fictional documents and letters composing Wilder’s epistolary historical novel The Ides of March slightly less than half are ostensibly written by female characters, the author had to defend his work from at least one accusation of being unfair to women. The aim of this article is to investigate how Wilder gives voice to four famous women of ancient Rome—Clodia Metelli (supposedly Catullus’s model for the Lesbia addressed in his poetry); Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt; Julius Caesar’s aunt Julia Marcia; and the actress and courtesan Cytheris—by subverting traditional stereotypes and rewriting their personalities according to modern issues. Wilder’s Roman women are multilayered, ambivalent characters struggling to overcome gender stereotypes and discriminatory attitudes toward them through a strong connection with art and literature.

Founded in Paris in October 1973, the feminist collective “Musidora,” which was named for the actress, director, screenwriter, and film critic Jeanne Roques, also known as Musidora, was instrumental in generating new interest in women’s film history. This essay examines the collective Musidora’s speculative approaches to the first woman filmmaker, Alice Guy Blaché, by way of Nicole-Lise Bernheim’s short film Qui est Alice Guy? (Who Is Alice Guy?, 1976). Its focus lies in particular in how the members of the Musidora collective, which often represented Guy Blaché in their image, as a strong independent woman struggling to be recognized as a filmmaker in France, transformed Guy Blaché into a feminist figure of French film history through speculative means. In doing so, the collective Musidora reveals not our limited knowledge of the past, but rather the possibilities of changing the present through both historiographical and fictional means.

The article is an attempt to describe the actress Stina Ekb1ads's artistry in the role of Renée in Madame de Sade by Yukio Mishima. The play was produced at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm 1989. In her appearance on stage Stina Ekblad gives the impression of considerable strength and at the same time of great frailty. These features seem to be intimately connected. They exist in the fictious character of the play and are also integral parts of Ekblad's personality. A particular shimmer is revealed as they coalesce. In Ekblad's acting there is also a point of resistance against "the male gaze". When she occasionally turns on a traditional womanly submissive charm it becomes part of a strategy towards her companions and adversaries on stage. As il becomes a performative gesture she manages to keep a subject position. The same thing is true for her gestures connected to the rich poetical imagery in the text. Interpreting strong poetical texts can be regarded as a speciality for Ekblad. By letting her movements follow the images she extends the part and slips out of the mimetic trap of depicting a fictious woman taken to be real and nothing else. Ekblad takes command by making extensive use of the male naming privilege the role of Renée offers. Through her interpretation the character is never victimized, in spite of her sufferings.

This research analyzes the use of deixis in the Wonder Woman script. It describes the types and the deixis in the Wonder Woman script performed by both the actors and the actresses. A qualitative method employing a descriptive analysis design was utilized. The data source of this research was collected by downloading the movie script from YouTube. The data were observed, transcribed, and categorized into some types of deixis. The result showed five kinds of deixis performed in the Wonder Woman movie: first person, second person, third person, temporal, and discourse. The research concluded that the most performed deixis to the least one in the Wonder Woman movie is the first-person deixis, followed by second-person deixis, discourse deixis, third-person deixis, and temporal deixis. Substantially, this research had shown that film also used deixis as its speech type related to the communication done in the real world, although the film used in this study, Wonder Woman movie, was a fictional one. Penelitian ini menganalisis penggunaan deiksis dalam naskah film Wonder Woman. Penelitian bertujuan mendeskripsikan tipe dan deiksis dalam naskah film Wonder Woman yang diujarkan oleh aktor maupun aktris. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kualitatif dengan desain analisis deskriptif. Sumber data dalam penelitian ini dikumpulkan dengan mengunduh naskah film dari YouTube. Data diamati, ditranskrip, dan dikategorikan ke dalam beberapa jenis deiksis. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa ada lima macam deiksis yang terdapat dalam film Wonder Woman: orang pertama, orang kedua, orang ketiga, temporal, dan wacana. Kesimpulan dari penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa deiksis yang paling banyak muncul dalam film Wonder Woman adalah deiksis orang pertama, diikuti oleh deiksis orang kedua, deiksis wacana, deiksis orang ketiga, dan deiksis temporal. Secara substansial, penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa film ini juga menggunakan deiksis sebagai jenis tuturannya terkait dengan komunikasi yang dilakukan di dunia nyata meskipun film yang digunakan dalam penelitian adalah film fiksi.

This essay develops a new approach to print narratives about theatregoing during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Immensely popular with contemporary readers, theatrical memoirs and diaries have been a boon to theatre historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; but these texts have more often been studied in spite of their subjective perspectives than because of them. Building on work in theatre historiography and audience studies, this essay seeks to transform the spectator’s discursive acts of shaping, framing, and stressing from an obstacle into an opportunity. In order to resituate historical spectator narratives in a wider narrative context, I read diaries and essays by Henry Crabb Robinson and Lady Maud Tree in conversation with Charlotte Brontë’s fictional scenes of spectatorship in Villette. This intertextual approach, I suggest, yields a more complete understanding of how different points of view facilitated claims about performance. In particular, I explore how gender affected point of view. While male reviewers and diarists often employ a disinterested narrative persona that de-emphasises their own bodies, I argue that many actress autobiographies craft an alternative form of narrative authority that makes use of the limitations of embodiment – qualities like immobility, bodily sensation, and circumscribed vision.

The article is dedicated to the one of the most famous Afro-British writers — Bernardine Evaristo. In 2021, her book “Girl, Woman, Other” was translated and published in the Russian language. Earlier (in 2019), it had become a winner of the Booker Prize. The authors of the article focus on the problems that primarily concern the writer herself. These include feminism and gender equality, professional motivation and the texture of success, crisis and the search for identity, otherness and dissent, cross-cultural dialogue and existence on the verge of tradition, as well as the theme of the House (with a capital letter), within which, ideally, it is quite possible for representatives of different races, ethnicities and cultures to coexist.Bernardine Evaristo tried herself as an actress, screenwriter, director, radio and TV presenter and uses the experience gained in her literary works. Their genre is difficult to define. The novel “Girl, Woman, Other” is a kind of anthology of women’s experience. Foreign criticism defines it as fusion prose (a combination of the incompatible). It contains the authenticity of non-fiction and the miracles of magic, unobtrusive notes of maternal instructions and mesmerizing rhythms of blues poetry. The author avoids capital letters in her text; there are no main or secondary characters in the book. The author gives her protagonists (there are twelve of them as the number of Christian apostles) the opportunity to recognize their selfness, expand the horizons of their own identity. Together with them — her messengers — she tries to comprehend the meaning of her own existence as a woman, as a person, as another.

The problem of the national is among the main ones in works by English writer John Fowles. This can be seen both in his fiction works and essays. This article discusses the role of the image of the ‘internal’ Other in the process of building his concept of ‘Englishness’. In his essay On Being English but Not British, the writer analyzes the relations between Englishmen and the inhabitants of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, and puts the latter on a par with Australians and Americans, however, pointing out their interdependence with the English. The Welshmen Henry Breasley and David Jones act as the ‘internal’ Other in The Ebony Tower and A Maggot. They are endowed with typical Welsh characteristics such as a penchant for drinking, greed, and cunning. Both characters are presented through the perception of English characters, which allows the author to play with the stereotypes about the Welsh circulating among the English. There is an Irishman Dr. Grogan in the novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The protagonist Charles Smithson also attributes to him traits of the Irish national character such as talkativeness, foolishness, frivolity. At the same time, Grogan acts as a kind of arbiter, trying to explain the behavior of the characters from a scientific point of view. In Daniel Martin, actress Jenny appeals to her Scottish roots, but she does not take it seriously. That is why the main character also endows her with stereotypical features. However, she subsequently abandons them for the sake of ‘Americanness’, thus losing her identity. ‘Internal’ Others do not play a significant role in the writer’s conception of national identity. The writer focuses on the English characters, making the internal ‘others’ a kind of backdrop for them.

“Your corrections are biting, maternal, just. Your example is luminous.” These words float on the page in susan sontag's last novel, In America, near the end of the book (349). The reader isn't surprised by the indirection of the address, the fused “you” of the narrator's voice looped through the character's. Sontag has been present from the first pages, in which she finds herself traveling through time to nineteenth-century Poland, into a drawing room at a party. She moves about pleasantly dislocated, examining her statuesque characters caught in a tableau vivant as she is about to set them free. They will be freer than Sontag's four grandparents likely were when coming from Poland to America, yet this small group of fictional friends will be swept up in the centripetal power of a charismatic personality with exceptional talent, the historical actress Maryna Z. Now, as the novel is about to close, Maryna is poised to be the inspiring, compelling director of her own small repertory company in America. We have come to trust her completely. The praise for her efforts, those words about correction and example, comes from somewhere over the stage lights out of the depths of some metaphysical, darkened theater but also from inner admonishment and fair-minded assessment. This is how she must be, our Sontag-Maryna; this is what art requires, this is what is needed.

ResumoTenho denominado de Máquina Curupirá o processo criativo que desenvolvo como pesquisa poética acerca das comicidades indígenas da Amazônia, que tem a imagem do lendário Curupira com os pés virados para trás como atitude poética e política de um corpo que se quer deformado, fora da forma, do comportamento e do pensamento colonizado. Neste artigo, cartografo três intensidades do acontecimento cênico em processo, a saber, a multiplicidade do corpo por economia da alteridade; a adoção da atitude de atriz-xamã; e a negação do acontecimento como espetáculo, aproximando-o da noção de Máquina. Em cada intensidade, atravesso a criação pelo meio, reconhecendo os dispositivos com os quais opero, em cena, o transver, o riso entre indígenas amazônicos em ficções e fabulações contaminadas de trapaças, malinagens e epistemologias xamânicas da floresta profunda, que questionam o caminhar com os pés virados para frente.AbstractI have named as Curupirá Machine the creative process that I develop as poetic research about indigenous comicalities from the Amazon, which has the image of the legendary Curupira with his feet facing back as poetic and political attitude of a body that recognizes itself as deformed, out of colonized shape, behavior and thought. In this article, I map three intensities of the scenic happening in process: the multiplicity of the body by economy of otherness; the adoption of the attitude of actress-shaman; and the denial of the happening as a spectacle, bringing it closer to the notion of Machine. On each intensity, I cross the creation from the middle of it, recognizing the devices with which I run, on the scene, the act of transver the laughter among Amazonian indigenous into fictions and fabulations contaminated with cheating, tricks and shamanistic epistemologies of the deep forest, that question the walking with the feet facing forward.

Abstract Thin Skin (2002) and Cherries in the Snow (2005) are coming-of-age novels set in reverse. This is to be expected when considered in conjunction with the “needy and attention seeking” narratives so typical of Emma Forrest’s oeuvre (Forrest, Thin Skin 123). Alighting on a deliberate confusion of girlhood and womanhood, both novels anticipate a contemporary (and postfeminist) rhetoric that, as Stephanie Harzewski identifies, is “uncomfortable with female adulthood itself, casting all women as girls to some extent” (9). As Forrest’s protagonists all carry an unease about being grown-up, despite the fact that they are grown-up, her work makes a timely intervention that both celebrates (and problematizes) the postfeminist trend and cultural phenomenon of girling women in the twenty-first century. Thin Skin, even down to its title, alludes to the simultaneous and often volatile encounters of girlish and grown-up, ugly and beautiful feminine identities through its twenty-something failed actress and self-proclaimed fucked-up girl, Ruby. In Cherries in the Snow, grown women are resold their former grrrlishness through the ugly makeup central to the fictional cosmetic company, Grrrl Cosmetics. In both novels, the girl/grrrl is instrumentalized by Forrest to tinker with established structures of feminine identity. I examine the extent to which the grrrling of women is politically, socially, or culturally progressive: does it really change anything or suggest a pathway to change? Or is it evidence not of resistance or rebellion but of a predictable tinkering with interpretations of femininity that have gained traction in contemporary consumer culture.

The osmosis between Iranian exile, Oriental repertoires, and the commodification of nostalgia in film and contemporary1 culture alludes to the Disney reproduction of the East that is capitalized by Hollywood’s invisible hand. The commodification of Orientalist logic via nostalgia of old civilization and Achaemenid grandeur is conveyed by Hamid Naficy’s (1991) reference to Edward Said’s (1978) ‘imaginary2 geography’—the inventive tool of narration that augments tales and anecdotes of exilic narratives, while heightening essentialism of the East. The European modeling of coronation, bejeweled scepters of royalty under the Pahlavi period (1941-1979), and cinematic repertoires of Iranians in film are perpetuated for viewers via fetishization, lust, and enchantment. The televised 1967 coronation of Queen Farah (b. 1938) solidified the trope of the Persian ‘Empress’ through picturesque markers of Achaemenid rulership (550-330 BCE). Media3 propagations of nostalgia in the paradisiacal Pahlavi coronation can be paralleled to current illusions of the Orient presented in the film Paterson (Jarmusch, 2016), starring exiled Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani. I refer to the Pahlavi coronation to expand on the spectacle of ‘nostalgia’, and the desire for a distant homeland. Naficy’s (1991) interpretation of ‘nostalgia’—a factor of exile, expounds how relics and objects induce a longing for the distant and ahistorical. Objects of nostalgia are inexplicably weaponized in Hollywood inventions of Near Eastern characters and serve as palpable symbols of the East via skewed representations of women, sexuality, and the exotic4 (Ahmed, 2006). Poetry, nostalgia, and fictional tales of the Orient in Paterson (Jarmusch, 2016) allude to Said’s (1978) vision of the imperialist project in Orientalism. The inventive and imaginary power of color media in the televised Pahlavi coronation and the fashioning of a politically permanent subject of interest—Iranians and the East, augured a pertinent era of media post-coloniality5 via the preservation of orientalism, rather than the Orient.

Boris Sushkevich and Nadezhda Bromley (Sushkevich-Bromley) are remarkable theatrical figures, actors and directors whose lot was connected with the bright and dramatic periods of our country’s theatrical life from the beginning to the middle of the 20th century. They devoted a part of their professional life to the 1st Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre (from 1919 — Moscow Art Academic Theatre), which later became a separate theater (Moscow Art Academic Theatre II, 1924—1936). Since the middle of the 1930s, they worked in leading Leningrad theaters — the Leningrad State Academic Drama Theater (Alexandrinsky Theatre) and the New Theater (1933—1953, now the Saint Petersburg Lensoviet Theatre). This article introduces little-studied archival sources of biographical nature related to the work of these outstanding cultural figures.Nadezhda Nikolayevna Bromley was a heiress of the Bromley — Sherwood creative dynasties, which had made a significant contribution to Russian culture. She joined the troupe of the Moscow Art Theater in 1908, performed on the stage of the 1st Studio (1918—1924), was one of the leading actresses of the Moscow Art Academic Theatre II after its separation, participated in its Directing Department being in charge of the literary part. Generously gifted by nature, N. Bromley wrote poems, short stories, novels; her fictional works “From the Notes of the Last God” (1927) and “Gargantua’s Descendant” (1930) earned critical acclaim. Two plays by N. Bromley were staged in the Moscow Art Academic Theatre II. One of them — the full of hyperbole and grotesque “Archangel Michael” — was passionately accepted by E.B. Vakhtangov and A.V. Lunacharsky, though never shown to a wide audience. At the Leningrad State Academic Drama Theater and the New Theater, N. Bromley not only successfully played, but also staged performances based on the works by A.P. Chekhov, A. Tolstoy, M. Gorky, F. Schiller, and W. Shakespeare.Boris Mikhailovich Sushkevich, brought up by the Theater School of the Moscow Art Academic Theatre and in the Vakhtangov tradition of the playing grotesque, is one of the most interesting and original theater directors of his time. His directorial work in the play “The Cricket on the Hearth” based on a Christmas fairy tale by Charles Dickens became the hallmark of the 1st Studio (and later of the Moscow Art Academic Theatre II as well). This play remained in the theatre’s repertoire until January 1936. B. Sushkevich was a recognized theatre teacher — with his help, the Leningrad Theater Institute (now the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts) was established in 1939. Together with N. Bromley, he managed to fill the New Theater with bright creative content and make it a favorite of the Leningrad audience.This research expands the understanding of a number of yet unexplored aspects of the history of theater in our country and recreates the event context of the era.

The pictures featuring Mimì Aguglia and Marinella Bragaglia, actresses from the Sicilian dialect theatre, blur the boundaries between stage and life, fiction and reality. The interior and poetic space of the theatrical action is identified with the physical space, discovering, in the geography of a face, in the arcane outline of an expression, the traces of a submerged landscape. Photos that also allow us to explore the way in which the island (and national) theatre was visually narrated from the second half of the 19th century to the very early years of the 20th century. Starting from photographic documents of the time, the contribution will attempt to outline – taking into account a few, but essential, biographical elements – the portrait of these two significant figures of a more general dramaturgy of actresses. Inhabiting the stories of these actresses means attempting to tune «voices and souls, bodies and writings», in a fertile interweaving, according to the indications left by Claudio Meldolesi, between «intimate images», the «level of techniques» and the «level of the given conditions». We will see, going beyond the image of the actress, how the photos become a model of femininity, success or more generally of life (the performer becomes the object of attention far beyond the stage, as an example of woman, wife and mother), among the female spectators.

Gönül Dönmez-Colin's book, Women, Islam and Cinema, comes not a day too soon. At a time when controversies rage over the wearing of the veil in school, reality seems to be catching up with fiction. Dönmez-Colin speaks of the insidious and conservative ways in which cinema in many Islamic countries has portrayed women. Her sweep is large: she covers India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Iran, Turkey, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and draws careful analogies and contradictions that exist within and among these countries. Inevitably, cinema's depiction of women as actresses, directors and spectators grows out of the prevailing social and political atmosphere: stifling patriarchy and female subordination....

As the study of nineteenth-century theatre has expanded over the decades, the extent and popularity of cross-dressing and cross-gender casting on the Victorian stage is being revealed. Yet there is an enduring tendency in Victorian theatre criticism to situate transvestite performances within broad-brush assumptions of binary attitudes towards gender amongst theatre audiences. Universalised gender norms and assumptions of binary thinking have long been discarded in critical analysis of Victorian fiction, and their lingering influence on Victorian theatre studies has arguably been unhelpful. Building on the vital pioneering work of Jacky Bratton, this article will focus on the careers of Louisa Cranstoun Nisbett and Mary Anne Keeley, two prominent and acclaimed mid-century actresses, drawing on reviews, memoirs, and commentaries on their performances to attempt to construct alternative theories for how they were viewed and understood. The critical and popular success of their performances and the language and ideas employed by reviewers and commentators to record and explain them reveal far more flexible, multiple, fluid, complex, and imaginative attitudes to gender roles and identities than allowed for in established critical narratives.

Herman Bang’s reputation as one of our greatest impressionist fiction writers is now undisputed. The assessment of his work as a playwright, on the other hand, is more complicated. This might seem surprising considering that Bang in particular, more than so many other writers, was a master at describing and “delineating” his fellow human beings by means of what they said and how they expressed themselves. Over the years Bang wrote a total of 14 plays and lesser theatrical works plus three translations of plays, all of which, with two exceptions, were performed at the leading Danish and Scandinavian theatres of the day, with a single work also being staged in Paris. None of these works was a conclusive success with either the public or the critics, however. The exception may be the recently discovered monologue entitled “Efter Ballet” (After the Ball), which Bang wrote in the summer of 1880. It represents one of his earliest public appearances as a playwright and was written for Betty Borchsenius (1850-90), one of the leading actresses of the day, who was very close to him at this time and whom he directed in both his own and other people’s dramatic works on several occasions. Bang referred to this monologue as one of his best and happiest pieces of work for the theatre in a number of contexts. The manuscript for “Efter Ballet” that has now been rediscovered in all probability represents the author’s own personal director’s copy, as it contains underlinings of the monologue’s many interesting stage directions and a number of linguistic corrections made by Bang himself. The manuscript’s highly significant directions regarding the principal character’s movements on stage are characteristic of Herman Bang the director. Even in this early work it is possible, for example, to trace the striving towards a theatrical naturalism that Bang worked so tirelessly to achieve in his lifelong activities as a director. The article introduces this hitherto unpublished piece of drama and also reprints an extended biographical essay he wrote about the monologue’s interpreter.

In 2001, Mia Kirshner, actress and writer turned journalist, embarks on a seven year quest to compile stories (read experiences) from areas of conflict. I Live Here, a 2008 publication, is an anthology of little narratives, some fiction, others non-fiction. Following the cultural poetic approach, this article illustrates that the nature of anthology I Live Here asks for an analysis that puts the personal in the foreground, as each segment – be it fiction or non-fiction – was inspired by a direct contact with the issue discussed. The project is capturing a glimpse of the Western mentality mirrored in the stories told in the anthology. The arrays of voices, those that belong to the Western world, are extracted as a result.

While narratives of gender politics and female identity in Western visual culture have become more dynamic with the passage of time, one of the most contentious spheres of discussion in mass media surrounds that of Ian Fleming’s ultimate fictional creation, James Bond. Female sexuality and gender politics in the Bond universe has been robustly, and rightfully, scrutinised by academic and casual spectators for at least 50 of the 70 years since his inception. Yet, one of the most enduring characters in the cinematic canon has not yet been given this discerning treatment, in earnest. Originally called "Fiona Kelly" by screenwriters Richard Maibaum and John Hopkins, Fiona Volpe was portrayed by Italian actress Luciana Paluzzi-Solomon in Terence Young’s 1965 film adaptation of Thunderball. In November 2017, I had the opportunity to interview Mrs. Paluzzi-Solomon for a now-abandoned book concept. As one of the few actresses from the Sean Connery-era who are still living, she was remarkably forthcoming regarding her professional and personal experiences on set. Without pride or prejudice, Mrs. Paluzzi-Solomon’s account proved to be not only to be illuminating in and of itself as an interview, but also served as a foundation to better understand the origins, development, and public reception of the gold standard femme fatale of the Bond films. This article will explore the character of Fiona Volpe, her origins, plot function, and legacy, from the unique perspective of the woman who brought her to life.

The article studiesthe work of film actress Michelle Yeoh, in particular, the evolution of the images of female warriors created by her. It is shown that the various stages of the actress' creativity reflect the global processes of reinterpretation of female characters in adventure, fantasy, spy movies, wuxia and kungfu movies. It has been proven that the dramatic talent of Michelle Yeoh is fully revealed in adulthood and complements the images of female warriors with Taoist-Buddhist values.The subject of the article is the images of female warriors in the works of film actress Michelle Yeoh.The research methodology is based on search, system-historical, analytical and comparative methods, which allowed to carry out a comprehensive artistic analysis of Michelle Yeoh's creativity at various stages of her film career.It was concluded that several types of warriors can be distinguished in Michelle Yeoh's work: "a girl with a gun"; master of martial arts; protector - sorceress - mentor; superheroine from science fiction films; a multifaceted dramatic character focused on universal existential questions. It is emphasized that the creative path of M. Yeoh is consistent with the general process of feminization of world cinema, the transfer of emphasis from the patriarchal understanding of the role of women in society to the issue of gender equality and the study of the deep nature of femininity.Key words: Chinese cinema, Michelle Yeoh, wuxia action films, kung fu films, feature film.

In a 1999 interview with the online magazine The AV Club, a subsidiary of satirical news website, The Onion, Bret Easton Ellis claimed: “I’ve never written a single scene that I can say took place, I’ve never written a line of dialogue that I’ve heard someone say or that I have said” (qtd. in Klein). Ten years later, in the same magazine, Ellis was reminded of this quote and asked why most of his novels have been perceived as veiled autobiographies. Ellis responded:Well, they are autobiographical in the sense that they reflect who I was at a particular moment in my life. There was talk of a memoir, and I realized why I couldn’t write a memoir, because the books are the memoir—they completely sum up how I was feeling, what I was thinking about, what my obsessions were, what I was fantasizing about, who I was, in a fictional context over the last 25 years or so (qtd. in Tobias).Despite any protestations to the contrary, Bret Easton Ellis’s novels have included various intentional and unintentional disclosures which reflect the author’s personal experiences. This pattern of self-disclosure became most overt in his most recent novel, Lunar Park (2005), in which the narrator shares a name, vocation and many aspects of his personal history with Ellis himself. After two decades and many assumptions made about Ellis’s personal life in the public media, it seems on the surface as if this novel uses disclosure as the site of closure for several rumours and relationships which have haunted his career. It is possible to see how this fictional text transgresses the boundaries between fiction and fact in an attempt to sever the feedback loop between the media’s representation of Ellis and the interpretation of his fictional texts. Yet it is important to note that with Ellis, there is always more beneath the surface. This is evident after only one chapter of Lunar Park when the novel changes form from an autobiography into a fictional ghost story, both of which are told by Bret Easton Ellis, a man who simultaneously reflects and refracts aspects of the real life author.Before analysing Lunar Park, it is helpful to consider the career trajectory which led to its creation. Bret Easton Ellis made his early fame writing semi-fictional accounts of rich, beautiful, young, yet ambitionless members of generation-X, growing up in the 1980s in America. His first novel, Less Than Zero (1985), chronicled the exploits of his protagonists as they drifted from party to party, from one meaningless sexual encounter to another; all while anesthetised on a cocktail of Valium, Prozac, Percocet and various illegal drugs. The brutal realism of his narrative, coupled with the structure—short vignettes like snapshots and short chapters told in simplistic style—led the text to be hailed as the first “MTV Novel” (Annesley 90; see also: Freese).It is not difficult to discover the many similarities that exist between the creator of Less Than Zero and his fictional creation, Clay, the novel’s narrator-protagonist. Both grew up in Los Angeles and headed east to attend a small liberal-arts college. Both Ellis’s and Clay’s parents were divorced and both young men grew up living in a house with their mother and their two sisters. Ellis’s relationship with his father was, by all accounts, as strained as what is represented in the few meetings Clay has with his own father in Less Than Zero. In these scenes, Clay describes a brief, perfunctory lunch meeting in an expensive restaurant in which Clay’s father is too preoccupied by work to acknowledge his son’s presence.Ellis’s second novel, The Rules of Attraction (1987), is set at Camden College, the same college that Clay attends in Less Than Zero. At one point, Clay even guest-narrates a chapter of The Rules of Attraction; the phrase, “people are afraid to walk across campus after midnight” (205) recalls the opening line of Less Than Zero, “people are afraid to merge on highways in Los Angeles” (5). Camden bears quite a few similarities with Bennington College, the college which Ellis himself was attending when Less Than Zero was published and Ellis was catapulted into the limelight. Even Ellis himself has admitted that the book is, “a completely fictionalized portrait of a group of people, all summations of friends I knew” (qtd. in Tobias).The authenticity of Ellis’s narrative voice was considered as an insight which came from participation (A Conversation with Bret Easton Ellis). The depiction of disenfranchised youth in the Reagan era in America was so compelling because Ellis seemed to personify and even embody the malaise and listlessness of his narrators in his public performances and interviews. In the minds of many readers and critics, Ellis’s narrators were a fictional extrapolation of Ellis himself. The association of Ellis to his fictional narrators backfired when Ellis’s third novel, American Psycho (1991), was published. The novel was criticised for its detached depiction of Patrick Bateman, who narrates in minute detail his daily routine which includes an extensive beauty regime, lunchtimes and dinnertimes spent in extravagant New York restaurants, a relationship with a fiancée and a mistress, a job on Wall Street in which he seems to do no real “work,” and his night-time hobby where brutally murders women, homeless men, gay men and even a small child. Bateman’s choice of victims can be interpreted as unconsciously aimed at anyone why may threaten his dominant position as a wealthy, white, heterosexual male. While Bateman kills as many men as he does women, his male victims are killed quickly in sudden bursts of violence. Bateman’s female victims are the subject of brutal torture, prolonged violent sexualized attacks, and in many cases inhumane post-mortem disfigurement and dismemberment.The public reception of American Psycho has been analysed as much as the text itself, (see: Murphet; Brien). Because American Psycho is narrated in the first-person voice of Bateman, there is no escape from his subjectivity. Many, including the National Organization of Women, interpreted this lack of authorial comment as Ellis’s tacit agreement and acceptance of Bateman’s behaviour. Another similar interpretation was made by Roger Rosenblatt in his pre-publication review of American Psycho in which he forthrightly encourages readers to “Snuff this Book” (Rosenblatt). Rosenblatt finds no ironic critique in Ellis’s representation of Bateman, instead finding himself at a loss to understand Ellis’s intention in writing American Psycho, saying “one only assumes, Mr. Ellis disapproves. It's a bit hard to tell what Mr. Ellis intends exactly, because he languishes so comfortably in the swamp he purports to condemn” (n.p.).In much the same way as Ellis’s previous narrators had reflected his experience and opinions, Ellis was considered as accepting and even glorifying the actions of a misogynistic serial killer. Ellis himself has commented on the popularised “misreading” of his novel: “Because I never step in anywhere and say, ‘Hey, this is all wrong,’ people get upset. That’s outrageous to me! Who’s going to say that serial killing is wrong?! Isn’t that a given? There’s no need to say that” (qtd. in. Klein)Ellis himself was treated as if he had committed the actual crimes that Patrick Bateman describes. The irony being that, as I have argued elsewhere (Phillips), there are numerous signs within the text which point to the possibility that Patrick Bateman did not commit the crimes as he claims: he can be interpreted as an unreliable narrator. Although the unreliability is Bateman’s narration doesn’t remove the effect which the reader experiences, it does indicate a distance between the author and the narrator. This distance was overlooked by many critics who interpreted Ellis as agreeing and condoning Bateman’s views and actions.When Ellis’s fourth novel, Glamorama was published, the decadent lifestyle represented in the text was again considered to be a reflection of Ellis’s personal experience. The star-studded parties and glamorous night clubs seemed to be lifted straight out of Ellis’s experience (although, no-one would ever claim that Ellis was a fashion-model-turned-international-terrorist like his narrator, Victor). One reviewer notes that “even when Bret Easton Ellis writes about killer yuppies and terrorist fashion models, a lot of people still think he's writing about himself” (Waldren).With the critical tendency to read an autobiographical confession out of Ellis’s fictional works firmly in place, it is not hard to see why Ellis decided to make the narrator of his fifth novel, Lunar Park, none other than Bret Easton Ellis himself. It is my contention that Lunar Park is the site of disclosures based on the real life of Bret Easton Ellis. I believe that Ellis chose the form of a mock-autobiography-turned-ghost-story as the site of exorcism for the many ghosts which have haunted his career, namely, his public persona and the publication of American Psycho. Ultimately, it is the exorcism of a more personal ghost, namely his father Robert Martin Ellis which provides the most private disclosure in the text and therefore the most touching, truthful and abiding site of closure for the entire novel and for Ellis himself. For ease, I will refer to the narrator of Lunar Park as Bret and the author of Lunar Park as Ellis.On the surface, it appears that Lunar Park is an autobiographical memoir. In one of the many mixed reviews of the novel (see: Murray; "Behind Bret's Mask"; Hand), Steve Almond’s title describes how Ellis masquerading as Ellis “is not a pretty sight” (Almond). The opening chapter is told in autobiographical style and charts Bret’s meteoric rise from college student to member of the literary brat pack (alongside Jay McInerney and Tama Jancowitz), to reviled author of American Psycho (1991) reaching his washed-up, drug-addled and near-death nadir during the Glamorama (1998) book tour. However, careful reading of this chapter reveals that the real-life Ellis is obscuring as much about himself as he appears to be revealing. Although it takes the form of a candid disclosure of his personal life, there are elements of the narrator’s story which do not agree with the public record of the author Ellis.The fictional Bret claims to have attended Camden College, and that his manuscript for Less Than Zero was a college project, discovered by his professor. While the plot of this story does reflect Ellis’s actual experience, he has set Bret’s story at Camden College, the fictional setting of The Rules of Attraction. By adding an element of fiction into the autobiographical account, Ellis is indicating that he is not identical to his narrating counterpart. It also signifies the Bret that exists in the fictional space whereas Ellis resides in the “real world.”In Lunar Park, Bret also talks about his relationship with Jayne Dennis. Jayne is described as a model-turned-actress, an up and coming Hollywood superstar who in the 1980s performed in films alongside Keanu Reeves. Jayne is one of the truly fictional characters in Lunar Park. She doesn’t exist outside of the text, except in two websites which were established to promote the publication of Lunar Park in 2005 (www.jaynedennis.com and www.jayne-dennis.com). While Bret and Jayne are dating, Jayne falls pregnant. Bret begs her to have an abortion. When Jayne decides to keep the child, her relationship with Bret falls apart. Bret meets his son Robby only twice from birth until the age of 10. The relationship between the fictional Bret and the fictional Jayne creates Robby, a fictional offspring who shares a name with Robert Martin Ellis (Bret and Ellis’s father).Many have been tempted to participate in Ellis’s game, to sift fact from fiction in the opening chapter of Lunar Park. Holt and Abbot published a two page point-by-point analysis of where the real-life Ellis diverged from the fictional Bret. The promotional website established by Ellis’s publisher was named www.twobrets.com to invite such a comparison. Although this game is invited by Ellis, he has also publicly stated that there is more to Lunar Park than the comparison between himself and his fictional counterpart:My worry is that people will want to know what’s true and what’s not […] All the things that are in the book—my quote-unquote autobiography—I just don’t want to answer any of those questions. I don’t like demystifying the text (qtd. in Wyatt n.p.)Although Ellis refuses to demystify the text, one of the purposes of inserting himself into the text is to trap readers in this very game, and to confuse fact with fiction. Although the text opens with a chapter which reads like Ellis’s autobiography, careful reading of the textual Bret against the extra-textual Ellis reveals that this chapter contains almost as much fiction as the “ghost story” which fills the remaining 400-odd pages. This ghost story could have been told by any first-person narrator. By writing himself into the text, Ellis is writing his public persona into the fictional character of Bret. One of the effects of blurring the lines between public and private, reality and fiction is that Ellis’s real-life disclosures invite the reader to read the fictional text against their extra-textual knowledge of Ellis himself. In this way, Ellis is able to address the many ghosts which have haunted his career—most importantly the public reception of American Psycho and his public persona. A more personal ghost is the ghost of Ellis’s father who has been written into the text, literally haunting Bret’s home with messages from beyond the grave. Closure occurs when these ghosts have been exorcised. The question is: is Lunar Park Ellis’s attempt to close down the public debates, or to add more fuel to the fire?One of the areas in which Ellis seeks to find closure is in the controversy surrounding American Psycho. Ellis uses his fictional voice to re-write the discourse surrounding the creation and reception of the text. There are deliberate contradictions in Bret’s version of writing American Psycho. In Lunar Park, Bret describes the writing process of American Psycho. In an oddly ornate passage for Ellis (who seldom uses adverbs), Bret describes how he would “fearfully watch my hands as the pen swept across the yellow legal pads” (19) blaming the “spirit” of Patrick Bateman for visiting and causing the book to be written. When it was finished, the “spirit” was “disgustingly satisfied” and stopped “gleefully haunting” Bret’s dreams. This shift in writing style may be an indication of a shift from reality into a fictionalised account of the writing of American Psycho. Much of the plot of Lunar Park is taken up with the consequences of American Psycho, when a madman starts replicating crimes exactly as they appear in the novel. It is almost as if Patrick Bateman is haunting Bret and his family. When informed that his fictional violence has disrupted his quiet suburban existence, Bret laments, “this was the moment that detractors of the book had warned me about: if anything happened to anyone as a result of the publication of this novel, Bret Easton Ellis was to blame” (181-2). By the end of Lunar Park Bret decides to “kill” Patrick Bateman once and for all, by writing an epilogue in which Bateman is burnt alive.On the surface, it appears that Lunar Park is the site of an apology about American Psycho. However, this is not entirely the case. Much of Bret’s description of writing American Psycho is contradictory to Ellis’s personal accounts where he consciously researched the gruesome details of Bateman’s crimes using an FBI training manual (Rose). Although Patrick Bateman is destroyed by the end of Lunar Park, extra-textually, neither Bret nor Ellis is not entirely apologetic for his creation. Bret argues that American Psycho was “about society and manners and mores, and not about cutting up women. How could anyone who read the book not see this?” (182). Extra-textually, in an interview Ellis admitted that when he re-read “the violence sequences I was incredibly upset and shocked […] I can't believe that I wrote that. Looking back, I realize, God, you really sort of stepped over a line there” (qtd. in Wyatt n.p.). However, in that same interview, Ellis admits to lying to reporters if he feels that the reporter is “out to get” him. Therefore, Ellis’s apology may not actually be an apology at all.Lunar Park presents an explanation about how and why American Psycho was written. This explanation is much akin to claiming that “the devil made me do it”, by arguing that Bret was possessed by “the spirit of this madman” (18). While it may seem that this explanation is an attempt to close the vast amount of discussion surrounding why American Psycho was written, Ellis is actually using his fictional persona to address the public outcry about his most controversial novel, providing an apology for a text, which is really no apology at all. Ultimately, the reliability of Bret’s account depends on the reader’s knowledge of Ellis’s public persona. This interplay between the fictional Bret and the real-life Ellis can be seen in Lunar Park’s account of the Glamorama publicity tour. In Lunar Park, Bret describes his own version of the Glamorama book tour. For Bret, this tour functions as his personal nadir, the point in his life where he hits rock bottom and looks to Jayne Dennis as his saviour. Throughout the tour, Bret describes taking all manner of drugs. At one point, threatened by his erratic behaviour, Bret’s publishers asked a personal minder to join the book tour, reporting back on Bret’s actions which include picking at nonexistent scabs, sobbing at his appearance in a hotel mirror and locking himself in a bookstore bathroom for over an hour before emerging and claiming that he had a snake living in his mouth (32-33).The reality of the Glamorama book tour is not anywhere near as wild as that described by Bret in Lunar Park. In reviews and articles addressing the real-life Glamorama book tour, there are no descriptions of these events. One article, from the The Observer (Macdonald), does describe a meeting over lunch where Ellis admits to drinking way too much the night before and then having to deal with phone calls from fans he can’t remember giving his phone-number to. However, as previously mentioned, in that same article a friend of Ellis’s is quoted as saying that Ellis frequently lies to reporters. Bret’s fictional actions seem to confirm Ellis’s real life “party boy” persona. For Moran, “the name of the author [him]self can become merely an image, either used to market a literary product directly or as a kind of free floating signifier within contemporary culture” (61). Lunar Park is about all of the connotations of the name Bret Easton Ellis. It is also a subversion of those expectations. The fictional Glamorama book tour shows Ellis’s media persona taken to an extreme until it becomes a self-embodying parody. In Lunar Park, Ellis is deliberately amplifying his public persona, accepting that no amount of truthful disclosure will erase the image of Bret-the-party-boy. However, the remainder of the novel turns this image on its head by removing Bret from New York and placing him in middle-American suburbia, married, and with two children in tow.Ultimately, although the novel appears as a transgression of fact and fiction, Bret may be the most fictional of all of Ellis’s narrators (with the exception of Patrick Bateman). Bret is married where Ellis is single. Bret is heterosexual whereas Ellis is homosexual, and used the site of Lunar Park to confirm his homosexuality. Bret has children whereas Ellis is childless. Bret has settled down into the heartland of American suburbia, a wife and two children in tow whereas Ellis has made it clear that this lifestyle is not one he is seeking. The novel is presented as the site of Ellis’s personal disclosure, and yet only creates more fictional fodder for the public image of Ellis, there are elements of true and personal disclosures from Ellis life, which he is using the text as the site for his own brand of closure. The most genuine and heartfelt closure is achieved through Ellis’s disclosure of his relationship with his father.The death of Ellis’s father, Robert Martin Ellis has an impact on both the textual and extra-textual levels of Lunar Park. Textually, the novel takes the form of a ghost story, and it is Robert himself who is haunting Bret. These spectral disturbances manifest themselves in Bret’s house which slowly transforms into a representation of his childhood home. Bret also receives nightly e-mails from the bank in which his father’s ashes have been stored in a safe-deposit box. These e-mails contain an attached video file showing the last few moments of Robert Martin Ellis’s life. Bret never finds out who filmed the video. Extra-textually, the death of Robert Martin Ellis is clearly signified in the fact that Lunar Park is dedicated to him as well as Michael Wade Kaplan, two men close to Ellis who have died. The trope of fathers haunting their sons is further highlighted by Ellis’s inter-textual references to Shakespeare’s Hamlet including a quote in the epigraph: “From the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, / all saws of books, all forms, all pressures past / that youth and observation copied there” (1.5.98-101). The names of various geographical locations in Bret’s neighbourhood: Bret and Jayne live on Elsinore Lane, named for Elsinore castle, Bret also visits Fortinbras Mall, Osric hotel and Ophelia Boulevard. In Hamlet, the son is called upon by the ghost of his father to avenge his death. In Lunar Park, Bret is called upon to avenge himself against the wrongs inflicted upon him by his own father.The ambiguity of the relationships between fathers and sons is summarised in the closing passage of the novel. So, if you should see my son, tell him I say hello, be good, that I am thinking of him and that I know he’s watching over me somewhere, and not to worry: that he can always find me here, whenever he wants, right here, my arms held out and waiting, in the pages, behind the covers, at the end of Lunar Park (453).Although Bret earlier signals the reader to interpret this passage as a message from Bret to his son Robby (45), it is also possible to interpret is as a message from the fictional Robert Martin Ellis to the fictional Bret. In this reading, Lunar Park is not just a novel, a game or a post-modern deconstruction of the fact and fiction binary, it instead becomes an exorcism for the author. The process of writing Lunar Park to casts the spectre of the real-life Robert Martin Ellis out of his life to a place where Bret (and Ellis) can always find him. This relationship is the site not only of disclosure – reflecting Ellis’s own personal angst with his late father – but of closure, where Ellis has channelled his relationship and indeed exorcised his father into the text.Lunar Park contains several forms of disclosures, most of which transgress the line between fiction and fact. Lunar Park does not provide a closure from the tendency to read autobiography into Ellis’s texts, instead, chapter one provides as much fiction as fact, as evident in the discussions of American Psycho and the Glamorama book tour. Although chapter one presents in an autobiographical form, the remainder of the text reveals how fictional “Bret Easton Ellis” really is. Much of Lunar Park can be interpreted as a puzzle whose answer depends on the reader’s knowledge and understanding of the public perception, persona and profile of Bret Easton Ellis himself. Although seeming to provide closure on the surface, by playing with fiction and fact, Lunar Park only opens up more ground for discussion of Ellis, his novels, his persona and his fictional worlds. These are discussions I look forward to participating in, particularly as 2010 will see the publication of Ellis’s sixth novel (and sequel to Less Than Zero), Imperial Bedrooms.Although much of Ellis’s game in Lunar Park is to tease the reader by failing to provide true disclosures or meaningful and finite closure, the ending of the Lunar Park indicates the most honest, heartfelt and abiding closure for the text and for Ellis himself. Devoid of games and extra-textual riddles, the end of the novel is a message from a father to his son. By disclosing details of his troubled relationship with his father, both Ellis and his fictional counterpart Bret are able to exorcise the ghost of Robert Martin Ellis. As the novel closes, the ghost who haunts the text has indeed been exorcised and is now standing, with “arms held out and waiting, in the pages, behind the covers, at the end of Lunar Park” (453). ReferencesAlmond, Steve. "Ellis Masquerades as Ellis, and It Is Not a Pretty Sight." Boston Globe 14 Aug. 2005.Annesley, James. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto Press, 1998."Behind Bret's Mask." Manchester Evening News 10 Oct. 2005.Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). 30 Nov. 2009 < http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php >.Ellis, Bret Easton. Less than Zero. London: Vintage, 1985.–––. The Rules of Attraction. London: Vintage, 1987.–––. American Psycho. London: Picador, 1991.–––. Glamorama. New York: Knopf, 1998.–––. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005.Freese, Peter. "Bret Easton Ellis, Less than Zero; Entropy in the 'Mtv Novel'?" Modes of Narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian and British Fiction. Eds. Reingard Nishik and Barbara Korts. Wurzburg: Konighausen and Naumann, 1990. 68–87. Hand, Elizabeth. "House of Horrors; Bret Easton Ellis, the Author of 'American Psycho,' Rips into His Most Frightening Subject Yet—Himself." The Washington Post 21 Aug. 2005.Klein, Joshua. "Interview with Bret Easton Ellis." The Onion AV Club 17 Mar.(1999). 5 Sep. 2009 < http://www.avclub.com/articles/bret-easton-ellis,13586/ >.Macdonald, Marianna. “Interview—Bret Easton Ellis—All Cut Up.” The Observer 28 June 1998.Moran, Joe. Star Authors. London: Pluto Press, 2000.Murphet, Julian. Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho: A Reader's Guide. New York: Continuum, 2002.Murray, Noel. "Lunar Park [Review]." The Onion AV Club 2 Aug. 2005. 1 Nov. 2009 < http://www.avclub.com/articles/lunar-park,4393/ >.Phillips, Jennifer. "Unreliable Narration in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho: Interaction between Narrative Form and Thematic Content." Current Narratives 1.1 (2009): 60–68.Rose, Charlie. “A Conversation with Bret Easton Ellis”. The Charlie Rose Show. Prod. Charlie Rose and Yvette Vega. PBS. 7 Sep. 1994. Rosenblatt, Roger. "Snuff This Book! Will Bret Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?" The New York Times 16 Dec. 1990: Arts.Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.Tobias, Scott. "Bret Easton Ellis (Interview)". The Onion AV Club 22 Apr. 2009. 31 Aug. 2009 < http://www.avclub.com/articles/bret-easton-ellis%2C26988/1/ >.Wyatt, Edward. "Bret Easton Ellis: The Man in the Mirror." The New York Times 7 Aug. 2005: Arts.

The film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Sydney Pollack: 1969) based on the 1935 novel of the same title written by Horace McCoy describes the life of two young adults seeking for an artistic career. Gloria (played by Jane Fonda) dreams of being an actress in the emerging Hollywood industry. Robert (played by Michael Sarrazin) aims to be a director in Hollywood’s competitive world. Gloria and Robert meet and decide to participate in a Dance Marathon longing to win and, consequently, to accomplish their artistic dream. In effect, during the Great Depression, Dance Marathons that had emerged in the 1920s as a merit dance competition gained popularity as a “show” due to the duration of the performance (could last from a few hours to several weeks) and the physical and psychological endurance required to participate in the event. For those who battled (the dancers) meant the possibility of acquiring artistic and public visibility along with the pursuit of celebrity. For those who were audience it opened the opportunity to be voyeur of the human life, witnessing daily existence as an extraordinary experience. Hence, it can be argued that Dance Marathons puzzling the boundary between fiction and reality, can be understood as an emergent form of reality shows. Based on the analysis of the film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? we aim to make a critical counterpoint between the phenomenon of Dance Marathons and the contemporary structure of talent shows within reality shows setup.

This article reveals the life of biography of Russian poet and translator Natalia Nikolaevna Sokolova, who made her debut in poetry under the pseudonym “Tea Es”. The reliable dates of her life (1888–1968), based on archival documents, are revealed for the first time. The daughter of high-ranking pedagogical officials, niece of the well known Russian and then British medievalist-legist Sir Paul Vinogradov (1854–1925), Sokolova completed higher education as an actress in Moscow and as a philologist at the University of Zurich. Having entered the literary life during the First World War as the author of poems about Italy (written in the traditionalist manner yet) and translations from Giacomo Leopardi, Sokolova then joined the Moscow literary group “Zhatva” (“The Harvest”). However, her new poems, already announced, could not be published then due to the paper and printing crisis caused by the war and revolution. In the first Soviet years Sokolova served as a secretary of famous theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. At the same time she began working as a fiction translator, she made the first complete Russian translation of William Morris’s novel “News from Nowhere” (1923). At the beginning of 1924, Sokolova managed to publish several new poems (demonstrating the evolution of her poetics) in the ephemeral typewritten magazine “Hermes” (the complete set is reproduced here). By the end of the 1920s Sokolova had prepared a book containing her 120 original poems (meanwhile, no more than a dozen of them are known now), but this publication was not allowed by the Soviet censorship and, highly likely, these texts were irrevocably lost. Since the early 1930s Sokolova completely switched to translation works, which successfully continued for almost four more decades. Some significant details are also contained in the correspondence between Sokolova and the poet and novelist Boris Sadovskoy, also presented in this publication (including a few poems by Sadovskoy).

Charleyboy, Lisa, and Mary Leatherdale, editors. Dreaming in Indian: Contemporary Native American Voices. Annick Press, 2016.This magazine-like anthology for young adults presents a plurality of contemporary Native American voices, using beautiful design and high quality photographic layouts. The forms of expression these voices take are varied, and include poetry, art, memoir, hip-hop lyrics, question and answer interviews, fiction pieces, and fashion photography, among others. Over fifty pieces are featured, from well-known Native American artists from across North America, such as throat singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis, author Joseph Boyden, and actress Michelle Thrush, although many other voices are represented too, including those of chefs, youths, fashion designers, journalists, and more. Native American Nations from all over North America are represented, including Blackfoot, Cree, Blood, Metis, and mixed race. Short biographies on each contributor are featured at the end of the book. Although Dreaming in Indian is meant for young adults, it will appeal to a broad spectrum of the population, including children and adults.Dreaming in Indian is presented in four different sections: ‘Roots,’ ‘Battles,’ ‘Medicines,’ and ‘Dreamcatchers’. ‘Roots’ covers pieces related to ideas of home and the past, ‘Battles’ examines issues such as racism, gender identity, abuse, addiction, and poverty, ‘Medicines’ shows the innovative ways youth have found healing in music, art, sports, and cultural traditions such as jingle dancing and hoop dancing, and ‘Dreamcatcher’ looks towards how Native people are currently shaping the future for Native youth. Topics covered within these sections also include bullying, the effects of residential schools, and suicide, but also extend to feeling like an outsider both within and outside of your culture, career advice, how culture must grow, and reactions to stereotypical portrayals of Native Americans in popular culture. In addressing these issues, Dreaming in Indian offers glimpses and directions for how to move forward without patronizing or becoming removed from the topic. Even more powerful are the multiple viewpoints that are brought to the same issue. Different Native voices often offer differing thoughts on the same topic, illustrating how myriad and complex the people and these issues are.Ultimately, Dreaming in Indian is a powerful book that provides a well realized portrayal of Native people by Native people. As a non-fiction work, it fills a niche not often addressed, and showcases the talent and passion of the people it engages. The book can be read in a couple of hours, but due to its rich content and the fantastically detailed visuals, it is the kind of work that one returns to multiple times, and that stays with the reader long after it is finished. This book will appeal not only to those of Native descent, but to anyone who has sought to connect to their own identity, and to other human beings.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4Reviewer: Colette LeungColette Leung is a graduate student at the University of Alberta, working in the fields of Library and Information science and Humanities Computing who loves reading, cats, and tea. Her research interests focus around how digital tools can be used to explore fields such as literature, language, and history in new and innovative ways.

Hitler and Blondi: A Musicalised, Postdramatic Theatre Performance This article examines how music explores the central concepts of the postdramatic theatre work Hitler ja Blondi: kolmetoista laulua diktaattorille, saksanpaimenkoiralle ja pianolle (“Hitler and Blondi: Thirteen Songs for a Dictator, a German Shepherd and one Piano”), a co-production of the TTT-theatre in Tampere (premiered 19 Feb, 2020) and the Finnish National Theatre in Helsinki (fall season 2021). Due to COVID-19 restrictions several performances were postponed, and the commercial live recording was released for private use. Michael Baran’s non-linear script consists of both documentary and fictional texts throughout 13 scenes (called “songs”), a prologue and an epilogue. Some periods of the dictator’s life are narrated as monologues. Hitler’s role is especially written for a blond, elderly Finnish actress, Seela Sella, who is Jewish herself. The music is designed and composed by Juhani Nuorvala and Juhani Liimatainen with Kyösti Kallio as sound engineer. Since the cornerstones of the performance’s structure, aesthetics and theatrical means are transcoded from musical sign system, Hitler ja Blondi is approached as a musicalised theatre work. The fundamental poetic idea of Hitler ja Blondi is the dialectic counterpoint between fascism and its opposing ideologies and aesthetics – represented musically through the opposed aesthetics of Richard Wagner and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Furthermore, the structure of the script resembles German Lied cycles, and the chained occurrences of Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke correspond to the recurrent refrain in rondo form. In general, the music and its large intertextual network is one of the performance’s central narrative means, and it opens up the potential for interpretation. Drawing from the recent theories and methodologies of music analysis and theatre studies, this article focuses on discussing 1) how popular songs and Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke extend the performance’s temporalities, thereby expressing the timelessness of fascism; 2) how the music presents Hannah Arendt’s view of the banality of evilness in Nuorvala’s Puolueohjelmalaulu (“The Song of Nazy Party’s Program”); and 3) how the author of this article experiences the dialectic counterpoint differently through life performance, and through the video recording.

An event occurred recently in the world of professional sports in North America which may have set a precedent for superstar (celebrity) retirement and celebrity/fan interaction in the future. The event was hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky's last National Hockey League game, played between the New York Rangers and Pittsburgh Penguins (with Gretzky a member of the former), a Sunday 'matinee' contest at the famous Madison Square Garden in New York City. An event occurred recently in the world of professional sports in North America which may have set a precedent for superstar (celebrity) retirement and celebrity/fan interaction in the future. The event was hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky's last National Hockey League game, played between the New York Rangers and Pittsburgh Penguins (with Gretzky a member of the former), a Sunday 'matinee' contest at the famous Madison Square Garden in New York City. What makes this particular event unique is that the game itself (which, if not for Gretzky's retirement, would have been of little interest, since the Rangers were long since eliminated from the playoffs) was virtually 'staged' as a component of Gretzky's retirement ceremony, and indeed resembled a television entertainment special, musical and/or theatrical program in every way. So, every facet of this, one of the last regular season games, was focussed on "The Great One", as he is known to his adoring fans. This is where the pivotal part comes: Gretzky announced his long- speculated retirement, that his last game would be this match, just several days beforehand (in most cases of note, for obvious reasons, this announcement comes after the season ends). This of course sent the media into a frenzy to prepare for what Gretzky himself referred to as a final "celebration", which would honour not only himself, but also involve in an 'intimate' setting those players, coaches, etc. (professional hockey and other sports figures alike; Mario Lemieux, former leader of the Pittsburgh team and former team-mate Mark Messier as the "greatest players he has played against and with"), celebrities from the world of music (Bryan Adams sang the Canadian national anthem) and screen (Christopher Reeve) whom Gretzky considers friends and influences in his life -- and of course his wife, actress Janet Jones, their three children, and parents. And let's not forget the devoted fans and audience, providing the necessary backdrop for it all. What was to be, then, your run-of-the-mill, pre-play-off regular season meaningless hockey game was transformed into an entertainment spectacle, complete with pre-game ceremonies of presentations by his buddies, former and present team-mates, gifts (the usual icons of North-American status excess) of a Jaguar (or Mercedes?), and a massive "high- definition" television set. The network television lead-in confirmed that this was to be "Wayne's day", with highlight reels of his 20-year career in the NHL and his earlier days on the backyard pond. These snippets were even interspersed throughout the breaks in the action during the game, along with short interviews with Wayne's friends in the audience, which by the way inevitably offered the same synopsis: "he was great for the game, but he was also great off the ice." It is this 'off the ice' congeniality/patience with the fans (and media) which has added immensely to his popularity, and has guaranteed that many "billions more will be served" at McDonald's. Perhaps what made this whole spectacle most interesting, however, was the hockey game itself, which seemed something of an afterthought lost in all the hoopla surrounding it. Colour commentator Harry Neal remarked after a period and a half or so of play that it was a "no-hitter", but stopped short of using 'boring' as an adjective. This of course was no accident given the circumstances: Gretzky was a gifted player who relied on skating and playmaking rather than hitting, and who was against fighting in the NHL -- it was obvious that the players on both teams were catering to Gretzky's wishes in honour of this, his last game. They were not going to spoil his 'party', and no-one laid a hand on him, much less each other, during the course of the action. Even Matthew Barnaby, Pittsburgh's noted 'dirty' player was uncharacteristically polite throughout. Indeed, how could they not be on their best behaviour, given that they were as much a part of the pre-game ceremonies as everyone else (the whole Pittsburgh team was seen to 'clap' their sticks against the ice in appreciation after each presentation to Gretzky). The net effect of it all was that everyone could not help but be in awe of "The Great One", who was characteristically humble and gracious throughout it all. By extension this also had the effect of making the play of the game much more 'tentative', where normally aggressive players were seen to compromise their styles in order to 'accommodate' Wayne. In a game which is normally brutally physical and sometimes downright violent (concussions are not uncommon) this particular contest was definitely out of place, more akin to an all-star game where players are careful to avoid bodychecking and injury. But unlike an all-star game because of this tentativeness, it was also low-scoring; short of capping off a 'scripted' ending with Wayne scoring the winner, it was the captain of Pittsburgh who decided the contest into overtime (which was probably appropriate lest the drama seem a little too 'given'). Playing the devil's advocate, I couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if one of the opposing players had really 'had it in' for Gretzky, and realising that this was his last chance to make a little history of his own had taken the liberty to 'take Wayne out'. But then that sort of behaviour simply wouldn't have been tolerated on either side, and it was likely no coincidence that there were no grudges between these two teams (for this game at least). Closing ceremonies were appropriately tearful and long, with Wayne making repeated return appearances/encores to skate around the ice acknowledging the fans and players alike, the highlight reels again, and finally the last intimate interview and press conference. To me, the upshot of it all is this: to my knowledge, no other sports figure has demonstrated the power to 'tailor', if you will, a regularly scheduled contest such that the arena was utilised as a 'stage', with players from both teams willing 'actors', including the audience, of course, in order to provide Wayne with the type of send-off that he would (as 'director') have wished for. And what Wayne wanted was a "celebration" for everyone, hence it was no accident that his retirement announcement came before the season ended. The timing in the 'lull' between the regular season and the playoffs was also perfect. Here I believe we have a case of that 'blurring' or "slipping" between reality and fiction, or fantasy which Marshall refers to in a previous M/C article (b. 8). For what was created in fact was a 'staging', involving an altering of normal player/player and fan/player interaction, such that in the player/player interaction, the staging consisted of an oscillation between how the game is normally played in the minds of the players and an 'acted' version of this in order to accommodate "Wayne's World". The result was a rather unique version of the fastest and arguably the most dangerous of team sports -- truly, a celebrity version. In terms of the fan/player interaction, that 'oscillation' was present here as well, whereby cheering for a team inevitably was dominated by cheering for a single player (thus how the game is normally watched versus watching Wayne's game). The game itself had indeed become meaningless and was transformed into a Gretzky entertainment special; thus it was that the chant "Gretzky, Gretzky" which came up regularly, in order to spur "The Great One" on to his last goal at MSG (as it turned out, he managed an assist). The "slippage" was occurring at this level also, as fan participation reached new heights such that the collective consciousness of encouragement for Wayne provided an idyllic setting for the feature; they had become a part of the film, along with the Gretzky family in the stands, cheering him after every shift, and the distance between hero/player and audience was lessened by Gretzky's acknowledgments (something that simply wouldn't happen, at least to this degree, in a normal game). Fans always like to think that they have some influence on the players and the outcome of the game; in this case that influence was magnified as a sharing of a part of Wayne Gretzky's life. They had become a part of Wayne's movie. The 'slippage' had occurred on a grand scale. To be sure, a sporting contest is entertainment, but this event had 'slipped' into a theatrical contest for all, player and fan included. Everyone was in the picture; the normally fiercely competitive player interaction was tempered, and the fan involvement moved a notch closer to the ice surface. To conclude, I believe that these 'virtual movies' will become more commonplace as both fan/player interaction demand and player as celebrity status increase. For the player/celebrity, it's a way to go out with a 'bang' and satisfy a number of demands in one convenient package. For the fan, it's a step closer to that craved intimacy with their hero, another escape from the confines of the reality of the mundane, only closer yet to that elusive illusory ideal. Thus we will have willing 'actors' in these retirement dramas, where a sports contest is fundamentally altered to an emphasis on sentiment value, an opportunity for a collective 'feel-good' experience where everyone wins -- except for those who come to watch a good hockey game, or whatever the sports 'feature' of the future may be. References P. David Marshall. "The Fiction of Public Life." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.1 (1999). 13 June 1999 <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/life.php>. Citation reference for this article MLA style: David Riddell. "Wayne's World: The Making of a Hockey Movie." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/wayne.php>. Chicago style: David Riddell, "Wayne's World: The Making of a Hockey Movie," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 4 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/wayne.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: David Riddell. (1999) Wayne's world: the making of a hockey movie. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/wayne.php> ([your date of access]).

After grossing more than $80 million at the international box office and winning the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the international success of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 film The Lives of Others has popularised the word “Stasi” as a “default global synonym” for the terrors associated with surveillance (Garton Ash). Just as representations of Nazism have become inextricably entwined with a specific kind of authoritarian, murderous dictatorship, Garton Ash argues that so too the Stasi and its agents have come to stand in for a certain kind of authoritarian dictatorship in the popular imagination, whose consequences aren’t necessarily as physically harmful as those of National Socialism, but are, instead, dependent on strategies encompassing surveillance, control, and coercion to achieve their objectives.Surveillance societies, such as the former German Democratic Republic, have long been settings for both influential and popular fictions. Social theory has also been illuminated by some of these fictions, with theorists such as Haggerty and Ericson claiming that surveillance models originating in the work of Jeremy Bentham and George Orwell are central to conceptualising and understanding surveillance practices, as well as social attitudes towards them. Orwell’s terminology in particular and his ideas relating to “Thought Police,” “Big Brother,” “Room 101,” “Newspeak,” and others, have entered into popular discourse and, to a large extent, have become synonymous with the idea of surveillance itself. Even the adjective “Orwellian” has come to be associated with totalitarian regimes of absolute control, so much so that “when a totalitarian setup, whether in fact or in fantasy ... is called ‘Orwellian,’ it is as if George Orwell had helped to create it instead of helping to dispel its euphemistic thrall” (James 72).As sociologist David Lyon notes: “much surveillance theory is dystopian” (201). And while the fear, helplessness, and emotional experiences of living under the suspicion and scrutiny of security services such as Von Donnersmarck’s Stasi or Orwell’s Party are necessarily muted by theory, it is often through fictions such as The Lives of Others and Nineteen Eighty-Four that these can be fully expressed. In the case of The Lives of Others and Nineteen Eighty-Four, both use central love stories to express the affective experiences associated with constant surveillance and use these as a way of contrasting and critiquing the way in which surveillance, power, and control operate in both settings. Like many other texts which represent surveillance societies, both fictions present a bleak picture, with the surveillance undertaken by the Party or Stasi being framed as a deindividualising or depersonifying social force which eliminates privacy, compromises trust, and blurs the distinction between the self and the state, the personal and the social, the individual and the ideology. This brings me to the purpose of this paper, which is concerned with two things: firstly, it will discuss these oppositions alongside the role of social surveillance and private lives in Von Donnersmarck’s film. The existing scholarly work on The Lives of Others tends to focus on its historical setting—the former East Germany—and, consequently, emphasises its generic status as a “political thriller,” “fierce and gloomy historical drama” full of “psychological terror,” and so on. Nevertheless, this overstates the film’s social milieu at the expense of the personal drama which drives the narrative—the film is underpinned by multiple overlapping love stories—so my focus is more concerned with highlighting the latter, rather than the former. I am not going to attempt to provide any sort of a comparative case study between the film’s representation of the Stasi and the historical realities upon which it is based, for example. Secondly, much has been made of the transformation of the character Gerd Wiesler, who shifts from “a loyal Stasi officer with an unswervingly grim demeanour” into “a good man” with a conscience—to borrow from Von Donnersmarck’s commentary. I will conclude by briefly addressing this transformation with reference to surveillance and its place within the film’s narrative.The Lives of Others is a film which, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, carries the signifiers of a very specific kind of surveillance. Set in the former German Democratic Republic in the year 1984—perhaps a self-conscious reference to Orwell—the film is concerned with the playwright Georg Dreyman (played by Sebastian Koch), “the only nonsubversive writer who is still read in the West”; his girlfriend, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland (played by Martina Gedeck); and the Stasi Captain Wiesler (played by Ulrich Mühe). In his capacity as expert interrogator and security agent, Wiesler is assigned to spy on Dreyman and Sieland because they are suspected of being disloyal, and as a playwright and actress—and thus, persons of social, intellectual, and cultural influence—this will never do. Accordingly, Dreyman and Sieland’s apartment is bugged and the pair is constantly surveilled. Their home, previously a space of relative privacy, becomes the prime site for this surveillance, forcing their “private or ‘personal life’”—which is understood as “the special preserve of intimacy, affection, trust and elective affinity”—into “the larger world of impersonal and instrumental [social] relations” governed by the East German state (Weintraub and Kumar xiii). The surveillance in the film is a “creature of its social context,” to borrow James Rule’s terminology (300). Rule argued that all systems of surveillance are “distinctive of certain social orders” and that their “continued growth is closely tied to other changes in their social structural contexts” (300). This is certainly true of the surveillance in The Lives of Others, which is characterised by effectiveness through totality, rather than technological sophistication. Broadly speaking, surveillance in the former East Germany was top-down and hierarchical and connected with the maintenance of the ruling party’s power. Metaphors abound when describing the Stasi’s surveillance network—it was an “octopus,” a “multi-headed hydra,” a beast of gargantuan size at the very heart of the East German Party-State (Childs and Popplewell xiii). Needless to say, the Stasi was big. Since Die Wende, especially, much has been made of the enormity of the Stasi’s bureaucracy and its capacity to “intrude.” Between 1950 and 1989 it employed 274,000 people in an official capacity and, after the collapse of the East German regime anywhere up to 500,000 East German Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter—Unofficial Collaborators: ordinary citizens from the East German state who had been coerced into spying on friends or family members, or had volunteered their services—had been identified (Koehler 8). This equated to approximately one Stasi officer, informer or collaborator per 6.5 East German citizens (Koehler 9). Put in perspective, there was one KGB agent per 5,800 citizens in the Soviet Union, while the Gestapo—often held up as the ultimate example of the abuses and evils inherent in many secret police forces—had one officer for every 2,000 Germans (Koehler 9).And it is this hydra, this octopus that Dreyman and Sieland encounter in The Lives of Others. Led by Wiesler and driven by suspicion, the Stasi listens in on their conversations, follows the couple clandestinely, and gathers information which may reveal “politically incorrect behaviour” (Rainer and Siedler 251). The reach of the Stasi’s surveillance network and its capacity to collect information is demonstrated through a variety of means—beginning with the interrogation scene during the film’s opening where the scent of a dissident is stored in a jar for later use, to the final coercion in which Sieland becomes an IM. The Stasi in the film consistently demonstrates an uncanny ability to know: to gather information through surveillance, and to use this surveillance to demonstrate and secure its power. As Rule points out: “the ability of any system of surveillance to control and shape the behaviour of ... [those under surveillance] depends very much on the certainty with which it manages to bring information generated in one social and temporal setting to bear elsewhere” (302). Intense “surveillance and potent mechanisms of control are useless” if those under surveillance can simply hide behind closed doors or escape over a wall—so the “system must arrange its boundaries so that both its surveillance and control activities cover a sufficiently broad area” to prevent escape through movement (Rule 303–304). In a total surveillance society such as the one seen in The Lives of Others, there is no “escape” from the Stasi other than death—suicide—which defines many of the film’s key turning points. The surveillance undertaken by the Stasi may be stored in jars in some cases; however, it can also be retrieved to confirm suspicions, to coerce and control, and, ultimately, to further the objectives of the Party State.Despite the Stasi’s best attempts, however, Dreyman is consistently loyal—he believes in the principles of socialism and, to quote Wiesler’s superior Grubitz (played by Ulrich Tukur), he “thinks East Germany is the fairest land of them all.” Eventually it is revealed that the real reason for the surveillance is not about suspected disloyalty to the state, but a personal vendetta by the Party’s Minister for Culture, Bruno Hempf (played by Thomas Thieme), who wants Sieland for himself and is using his influence within the Stasi to bring Dreyman down. The use of surveillance for personal gain, rather than for social “good” proves too much for Wiesler who undergoes a “psychological and political transformation” and begins to empathise with the subjects of his investigation (Diamond 811). Dreyman undergoes a similar transformation after the suicide of his mentor and friend Albert Jerska (played by Volkmar Kleinert)—a theatre director whose life was made meaningless after he was blacklisted by the Stasi. This brings me back to the question of the personal and the social, which forms the fundamental tension within the film and is the basis of this paper. Historically, notions of “public” and “private,” “social” and “personal”—as understood in state-socialist societies such as the former East Germany—revolved around “the victimised ‘us’ and the newly powerful ‘them’ who ruled the state” (Gal 87). Nevertheless, the distinction between the personal and the social—or public and private—has long been a social organising principle and, as a result, has acted as a springboard into “many key issues of social and political analysis, of moral and political debate, and of ordering everyday life” (Weintraub and Kumar 1). The idea of “privacy”—which is often conceptualised simplistically as a “uni-dimensional, rigidly dichotomous and absolute, fixed and universal concept” (Marx 157)—is used as a shield against any number of perceived political, social, or moral infringements, including surveillance, and can be said to be organised around the idea of visibility, where “private” encompasses that which is “able and / or entitled to be kept hidden, sheltered or withdrawn from others” (Weintraub and Kumar 6). The private is thus connected with a life free of surveillance and scrutiny, where people have a reprieve from monitored social relations and the collective self. Privacy is “fundamentally rooted” in a personal life “delineated by private space” without surveillance, and is interlinked with the idea of a “society of strangers,” where strangers are, by definition, individuals who have been denied access to our personal lives and private spaces (Lyon 21). The act of disclosure and the provision of access to our personal affairs is thus regarded as a voluntary gesture of faith and trust—an invitation into the private, which makes our lives—the lives of strangers, the lives of “others”—familiar and knowable. In The Lives of Others it is Dreyman and Sieland who, because of the personal relationship they have maintained in the relative privacy of their apartment, are the “strangers” or “others” the Stasi wants to make knowable. When Wiesler first encounters the couple at the premiere of Dreyman’s play—the tellingly named The Faces of Love—he seems disturbed by the affection they share for one another and for their fellow artists. Later, it is a brief moment of intimacy between Dreyman and Sieland that motivates Wiesler into overseeing the surveillance himself—a decision that contributes to his eventual transformation. Wiesler is disturbed by Dreyman and Sieland’s relationship because it demonstrates personal loyalties born out of private emotions which exist beyond the gaze of the Stasi and, thus, beyond the control of the state. In Wiesler’s world the only true love is social love—the impersonal love of the state—and anything resembling the romantic or the personal is not only unfamiliar, but suspicious and potentially subversive. In Von Donnersmarck’s words, Wiesler has shut out his humanity to adhere to a principle, which he values above and beyond all else. His suspicion of Dreyman and Sieland thus exemplifies how the experience and interpretation of personal emotions is dependent, in part, on social and cultural circumstances. For Wiesler, private emotions are dangerous, unknowable, and unfamiliar. They belong to a realm “which places extraordinary emphasis on the concept of individuality and individual self-identity” in “a society which distinguishes more or less plainly between public positions and personal roles; ... and, perhaps most importantly, [they belong to] a society that grants a high degree of mobility and flexibility in relationships in general, [and] places personal choice at the core of mating and marriage rituals ...” (Solomon xxviii). A society, in other words, quite unlike the one in The Lives of Others. By monitoring the personal lives of Dreyman and Sieland, the Stasi thus collapses the distinction between the personal and the social, the private and the public. Surveillance transforms personal emotions into public information, and it is this information which is later manipulated for the social “good” and at the expense of Dreyman and Sieland’s personal lives. In The Lives of Others there is no separation between the personal and the social, the public and the private—there is only the Party and there is only the Stasi. I want to conclude by briefly discussing the transformation of Wiesler, which is emblematic of the film’s central message about the “capacity of human beings for goodness, [love], compassion and change” (Diamond 812–13). Von Donnersmarck makes this message clear in one of the film’s early scenes, where, at the opening of his play The Faces of Love, Dreyman appeals to Minister Hempf about Jerska’s blacklisting, suggesting that Jerska is remorseful and has changed. Hempf tells Dreyman: “That’s what we all love about your plays ... the idea that people can change. People don’t change.” Hempf is suggesting, of course, that there is no “normalising gaze” in the East German state; that there is only suspicion, discrimination and exclusion. Once you have been identified as “abnormal,” “subversive” or “an enemy” by the Stasi’s surveillance, you can never remove yourself from the category of suspicion—change is impossible. But Wiesler and Dreyman do change, however unlikely Wiesler’s transformation may be. While the film’s style suggest the men are opposites—Dreyman dresses like a chic (West) German intellectual in tweed jackets and horn-rimmed glasses, while Wiesler gets around in stiff Stasi uniforms and grey nylon tracksuits; Dreyman’s home reflects his status as a man of culture and taste, with literature, art, and music dominating the bohemian aesthetic, while Wiesler’s home is cold, empty, characterless, and generic; Dreyman shares a personal life with Sieland, while Wiesler is visited by a prostitute who services all the Stasi men in his building “on a tight schedule” and so on—they share a fundamental similarity: they both believe in socialism, in the East German state, and the utopian ideals that are now obscured under layers of bureaucracy, surveillance, corruption, and suspicion (Diamond 815). Nevertheless, after discovering that Sieland is being forced into sexual encounters with party Minister Hempf, the instigator of the surveillance, Wiesler begins to identify with the couple, and, for the first time, breaches the boundary between surveillance and interference, between social observation and personal intervention. After seeing the Minister’s car pull up with Sieland inside, Wiesler uses his surveillance technologies to alert Dreyman to her return—he rings the couple’s doorbell whilst muttering, “Time for some bitter truths.” Later, after Sieland showers and collapses “in mute despair,” Dreyman cradles her in his arms, after which the film cuts to a shot of Wiesler still listening, but mirroring their body language (Diamond 817). This is the moment at which the film makes clear that Wiesler’s role has shifted from social monitoring to something more personal—he has developed an emotional investment in the surveillance he is conducting and is identifying and empathising with the subjects of his surveillance. Eventually this goes further—he steals a copy of Brecht’s poems from their apartment and reads “Memory of Marie A.” a poem which “expresses poignant longings for a love that is both enticing and elusive” (Diamond 822). By breaching the boundary between the social and the personal, Wiesler undergoes a complete transformation, and his continued interventions drive the narrative and dictate outcomes not only for himself, but also for Dreyman and Sieland. In shifting his role from surveillance to engagement, from observation to intervention, and from state suspicion to personal investment, Wiesler eventually, and in his own way, falls in love. Surveillance is the defining characteristic of The Lives of Others—it is both oppressive and redemptive, sinister and salvational, an obstacle and an opening. It defines both the film’s social setting and enables and impacts on the personal relationships between characters. The Lives of Others brings home the horrors of East Germany under the Stasi—albeit in a stylised and technically accomplished fashion—by emphasising the personal and social costs associated with the corrupt, petty, and spiteful regime through human drama. The ultimate result is a film with a surveillance network that swings between care and control, observation and engagement, with Wiesler exemplifying all of these traits. And while the end result of the Stasi’s surveillance is destructive and despairing, in the words of Von Donnersmarck, it also gives characters “the ability to do the right thing, even in social conditions that seem to eradicate the very possibility of personal goodness.”ReferencesChilds, David and Richard Popplewell. The Stasi: The East German Intelligence and Security Service. New York: New York U P, 1996.Diamond, Diana. “Empathy and Identification in Von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 56.3 (2008): 811–32.Gal, Susan. “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction.” Differences 13.1 (2002): 77–95.Garton Ash, Timothy. “The Stasi on Our Minds.” The New York Review of Books 31 May 2007. 7 November 2010. ‹http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/may/31/the-stasi-on-our-minds/›. Haggerty, Kevin D. and Richard V. Ericson. “The Surveillant Assemblage.” The British Journal of Sociology 51.4 (2000): 605–22.James, Clive. “The Truthteller.” The New Yorker 18 Jan 1999: 72–78.Koehler, John O. Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police. Boulder: Westview P, 1999. Lives of Others, The. Dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Perf. Martina Gedeck, Ulrich Mühe, and Sebastian Koch. Arte, 2006.Lyon, David. The Electronic Eye. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.Marx, Gary T. “Murky Conceptual Waters: The Public and the Private.” Ethics and Information Technology 3.3 (2001): 157–69.Nineteen Eighty-Four. Dir. Michael Radford. Perf. John Hurt, Richard Burton, and Suzanna Hamilton. Virgin Films, 1984.Rainer, Helmut and Thomas Siedler. “Does Democracy Foster Trust?” Journal of Comparative Economics 37 (2009): 251–69.Rule, James B. Private Lives and Public Surveillance: Social Control in the Computer Age. London: Allen Lane, 1973.Solomon, Robert C. Love: Emotion, Myth and Metaphor. Buffalo: Prometheus, 1990.Weintraub, Jeff Alan and Krishan Kumar, eds. Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.

Technique and creativity Having been called upon to provide a contribution to a publication dedicated to “Techne”, I feel it is fitting to start from the theme of technique, given that for too many years now, we have fruitlessly attempted to understand the inner workings of cinema whilst disregarding the element of technique. And this has posed a significant problem in our field of study, as it would be impossible to gain a true understanding of what cinema is without immersing ourselves in the technical and industrial culture of the 19th century. It was within this culture that a desire was born: to mould the imaginary through the new techniques of reproduction and transfiguration of reality through images. Studying the development of the so-called “pre-cinema” – i.e. the period up to the conventional birth of cinema on 28 December 1895 with the presentation of the Cinématographe Lumière – we discover that the technical history of cinema is not only almost more enthralling than its artistic and cultural history, but that it contains all the great theoretical, philosophical and scientific insights that we need to help us understand the social, economic and cultural impact that cinema had on the culture of the 20th century. At the 1900 Paris Exposition, when cinema had already existed in some form for a few years, when the first few short films of narrative fiction also already existed, the cinematograph was placed in the Pavilion of Technical Discoveries, to emphasise the fact that the first wonder, this element of unparalleled novelty and modernity, was still there, in technique, in this marvel of innovation and creativity. I would like to express my idea through the words of Franco Moretti, who claims in one of his most recent works that it is only possible to understand form through the forces that pulsate through it and press on it from beneath, finally allowing the form itself to come to the surface and make itself visible and comprehensible to our senses. As such, the cinematic form – that which appears on the screen, that which is now so familiar to us, that which each of us has now internalised, that has even somehow become capable of configuring our way of thinking, imagining, dreaming – that form is underpinned by forces that allow it to eventually make its way onto the screen and become artistic and narrative substance. And those forces are the forces of technique, the forces of industry, the economic, political and social forces without which we could never hope to understand cinema. One of the issues that I always make a point of addressing in the first few lessons with my students is that if they think that the history of cinema is made up of films, directors, narrative plots to be understood, perhaps even retold in some way, then they are entirely on the wrong track; if, on the other hand, they understand that it is the story of an institution with economic, political and social drivers within it that can, in some way, allow us to come to the great creators, the great titles, but that without a firm grasp of those drivers, there is no point in even attempting to explore it, then they are on the right track. As I see it, cinema in the twentieth century was a great democratic, interclassist laboratory such as no other art has ever been, and this occurred thanks to the fact that what underpinned it was an industrial reasoning: it had to respond to the capital invested in it, it had to make money, and as such, it had to reach the largest possible number of people, immersing it into a wholly unprecedented relational situation. The aim was to be as inclusive as possible, ultimately giving rise to the idea that cinema could not be autonomous, as other forms of art could be, but that it must instead be able to negotiate all the various forces acting upon it, pushing it in every direction. This concept of negotiation is one which has been explored in great detail by one of the greatest film theorists of our modern age, Francesco Casetti. In a 2005 book entitled “Eye of the Century”, which I consider to be a very important work, Casetti actually argues that cinema has proven itself to be the art form most capable of adhering to the complexity and fast pace of the short century, and that it is for this very reason that its golden age (in the broadest sense) can be contained within the span of just a hundred years. The fact that cinema was the true epistemological driving force of 20th-century modernity – a position now usurped by the Internet – is not, in my opinion, something that diminishes the strength of cinema, but rather an element of even greater interest. Casetti posits that cinema was the great negotiator of new cultural needs, of the need to look at art in a different way, of the willingness to adapt to technique and technology: indeed, the form of cinema has always changed according to the techniques and technologies that it has brought to the table or established a dialogue with on a number of occasions. Barry Salt, whose background is in physics, wrote an important book – publishing it at his own expense, as a mark of how difficult it is to work in certain fields – entitled “Film Style and Technology”, in which he calls upon us stop writing the history of cinema starting from the creators, from the spirit of the time, from the great cultural and historical questions, and instead to start afresh by following the techniques available over the course of its development. Throughout the history of cinema, the creation of certain films has been the result of a particular set of technical conditions: having a certain type of film, a certain type of camera, only being able to move in a certain way, needing a certain level of lighting, having an entire arsenal of equipment that was very difficult to move and handle; and as the equipment, medium and techniques changed and evolved over the years, so too did the type of cinema that we were able to make. This means framing the history of cinema and film theory in terms of the techniques that were available, and starting from there: of course, whilst Barry Salt’s somewhat provocative suggestion by no means cancels out the entire cultural, artistic and aesthetic discourse in cinema – which remains fundamental – it nonetheless raises an interesting point, as if we fail to consider the methods and techniques of production, we will probably never truly grasp what cinema is. These considerations also help us to understand just how vast the “construction site” of cinema is – the sort of “factory” that lies behind the production of any given film. Erwin Panofsky wrote a single essay on cinema in the 1930s entitled “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” – a very intelligent piece, as one would expect from Panofsky – in which at a certain point, he compares the construction site of the cinema to those of Gothic cathedrals, which were also under an immense amount of pressure from different forces, namely religious ones, but also socio-political and economic forces which ultimately shaped – in the case of the Gothic cathedral and its development – an idea of the relationship between the earth and the otherworldly. The same could be said for cinema, because it also involves starting with something very earthly, very grounded, which is then capable of unleashing an idea of imaginary metamorphosis. Some scholars, such as Edgar Morin, will say that cinema is increasingly becoming the new supernatural, the world of contemporary gods, as religion gradually gives way to other forms of deification. Panofsky’s image is a very focused one: by making film production into a construction site, which to all intents and purposes it is, he leads us to understand that there are different forces at work, represented by a producer, a scriptwriter, a director, but also a workforce, the simple labourers, as is always the case in large construction sites, calling into question the idea of who the “creator” truly is. So much so that cinema, now more than ever before, is reconsidering the question of authorship, moving towards a “history of cinema without names” in an attempt to combat the “policy of the author” which, in the 1950s, especially in France, identified the director as the de facto author of the film. Today, we are still in that position, with the director still considered the author of the film, but that was not always so: back in the 1910s, in the United States, the author of the film was the scriptwriter, the person who wrote it (as is now the case for TV series, where they have once again taken pride of place as the showrunner, the creator, the true author of the series, and nobody remembers the names of the directors of the individual episodes); or at times, it can be the producer, as was the case for a long time when the Oscar for Best Picture, for example, was accepted by the producer in their capacity as the commissioner, as the “owner” of the work. As such, the theme of authorship is a very controversial one indeed, but one which helps us to understand the great meeting of minds that goes into the production of a film, starting with the technicians, of course, but also including the actors. Occasionally, a film is even attributed to the name of a star, almost as if to declare that that film is theirs, in that it is their body and their talent as an actor lending it a signature that provides far more of a draw to audiences than the name of the director does. In light of this, the theme of authorship, which Panofsky raised in the 1930s through the example of the Gothic cathedral, which ultimately does not have a single creator, is one which uses the image of the construction site to also help us to better understand what kind of development a film production can go through and to what extent this affects its critical and historical reception; as such, grouping films together based on their director means doing something that, whilst certainly not incorrect in itself, precludes other avenues of interpretation and analysis which could have favoured or could still favour a different reading of the “cinematographic construction site”. Design and execution The great classic Hollywood film industry was a model that, although it no longer exists in the same form today, unquestionably made an indelible mark at a global level on the history not only of cinema, but more broadly, of the culture of the 20th century. The industry involved a very strong vertical system resembling an assembly line, revolving around producers, who had a high level of decision-making autonomy and a great deal of expertise, often inclined towards a certain genre of film and therefore capable of bringing together the exact kinds of skills and visions required to make that particular film. The history of classic American cinema is one that can also be reconstructed around the units that these producers would form. The “majors”, along with the so-called “minors”, were put together like football teams, with a chairman flanked by figures whom we would nowadays refer to as a sporting director and a managing director, who built the team based on specific ideas, “buying” directors, scriptwriters, scenographers, directors of photography, and even actors and actresses who generally worked almost exclusively for their major – although they could occasionally be “loaned out” to other studios. This system led to a very marked characterisation and allowed for the film to be designed in a highly consistent, recognisable way in an age when genres reigned supreme and there was the idea that in order to keep the audience coming back, it was important to provide certain reassurances about what they would see: anyone going to see a Western knew what sorts of characters and storylines to expect, with the same applying to a musical, a crime film, a comedy, a melodrama, and so on. The star system served to fuel this working method, with these major actors also representing both forces and materials in the hands of an approach to the filmmaking which had the ultimate objective of constructing the perfect film, in which everything had to function according to a rule rooted in both the aesthetic and the economic. Gore Vidal wrote that from 1939 onwards, Hollywood did not produce a single “wrong” film: indeed, whilst certainly hyperbolic, this claim confirms that that system produced films that were never wrong, never off-key, but instead always perfectly in tune with what the studios wished to achieve. Whilst this long-entrenched system of yesteryear ultimately imploded due to certain historical phenomena that determined it to be outdated, the way of thinking about production has not changed all that much, with film design remaining tied to a professional approach that is still rooted within it. The overwhelming majority of productions still start from a system which analyses the market and the possible economic impact of the film, before even starting to tackle the various steps that lead up to the creation of the film itself. Following production systems and the ways in which they have changed, in terms of both the technology and the cultural contexts, also involves taking stock of the still considerable differences that exist between approaches to filmmaking in different countries, or indeed the similarities linking highly disparate economic systems (consider, for example, India’s “Bollywood” or Nigeria’s “Nollywood”: two incredibly strong film industries that we are not generally familiar with as they lack global distribution, although they are built very solidly). In other words, any attempt to study Italian cinema and American cinema – to stay within this double field – with the same yardstick is unthinkable, precisely because the context of their production and design is completely different. Composition and innovation Studying the publications on cinema in the United States in the early 1900s – which, from about 1911 to 1923, offers us a revealing insight into the attempts made to garner an in-depth understanding of how this new storytelling machine worked and the development of the first real cultural industry of the modern age – casts light on the centrality of the issues of design and composition. I remain convinced that without reading and understanding that debate, it is very difficult to understand why cinema is as we have come to be familiar with it today. Many educational works investigated the inner workings of cinema, and some, having understood them, suggested that they were capable of teaching others to do so. These publications have almost never been translated into Italian and remain seldom studied even in the US, and yet they are absolutely crucial for understanding how cinema established itself on an industrial and aesthetic level. There are two key words that crop up time and time again in these books, the first being “action”, one of the first words uttered when a film starts rolling: “lights, camera, action”. This collection of terms is interesting in that “motore” highlights the presence of a machine that has to be started up, followed by “action”, which expresses that something must happen at that moment in front of that machine, otherwise the film will not exist. As such, “action” – a term to which I have devoted some of my studies – is a fundamental word here in that it represents a sort of moment of birth of the film that is very clear – tangible, even. The other word is “composition”, and this is an even more interesting word with a history that deserves a closer look: the first professor of cinema in history, Victor Oscar Freeburg (I edited the Italian translation of his textbook “The Art of Photoplay Making”, published in 1918), took up his position at Columbia University in 1915 and, in doing so, took on the task of teaching the first ever university course in cinema. Whilst Freeburg was, for his time, a very well-educated and highly-qualified person, having studied at Yale and then obtained his doctorate in theatre at Columbia, cinema was not entirely his field of expertise. He was asked to teach a course entitled “Photoplay Writing”. At the time, a film was known as a “photoplay”, in that it was a photographed play of sorts, and the fact that the central topic of the course was photoplay writing makes it clear that back then, the scriptwriter was considered the main author of the work. From this point of view, it made sense to entrust the teaching of cinema to an expert in theatre, based on the idea that it was useful to first and foremost teach a sort of photographable dramaturgy. However, upon arriving at Columbia, Freeburg soon realised whilst preparing his course that “photoplay writing” risked misleading the students, as it is not enough to simply write a story in order to make a film; as such, he decided to change the title of his course to “photoplay composition”. This apparently minor alteration, from “writing” to “composition”, in fact marked a decisive conceptual shift in that it highlighted that it was no longer enough to merely write: one had to “compose”. So it was that the author of a film became, according to Freeburg, not the scriptwriter or director, but the “cinema composer” (a term of his own coinage), thus directing and broadening the concept of composition towards music, on the one hand, and architecture, on the other. We are often inclined to think that cinema has inherited expressive modules that come partly from literature, partly from theatre and partly from painting, but in actual fact, what Freeburg helps us to understand is that there are strong elements of music and architecture in a film, emphasising the lofty theme of the project. In his book, he explores at great length the relationship between static and dynamic forms in cinema, a topic that few have ever addressed in that way and that again, does not immediately spring to mind as applicable to a film. I believe that those initial intuitions were the result of a reflection unhindered by all the prejudices and preconceived notions that subsequently began to condition film studies as a discipline, and I feel that they are of great use to use today because they guide us, on the one hand, towards a symphonic idea of filmmaking, and on the other, towards an idea that preserves the fairly clear imprint of architecture. Space-Time In cinema as in architecture, the relationship between space and time is a crucial theme: in every textbook, space and time are amongst the first chapters to be studied precisely because in cinema, they undergo a process of metamorphosis – as Edgar Morin would say – which is vital to constructing the intermediate world of film. Indeed, from both a temporal and a spatial point of view, cinema provides a kind of ubiquitous opportunity to overlap different temporalities and spatialities, to move freely from one space to another, but above all, to construct new systems of time. The rules of film editing – especially so-called “invisible editing”, i.e. classical editing that conceals its own presence – are rules built upon specific and precise connections that hold together different spaces – even distant ones – whilst nonetheless giving the impression of unity, of contiguity, of everything that cinema never is in reality, because cinema is constantly fragmented and interrupted, even though we very often perceive it in continuity. As such, from both a spatial and a temporal perspective, there are technical studies that explain the rules of how to edit so as to give the idea of spatial continuity, as well as theoretical studies that explain how cinema has transformed our sense of space and time. To mark the beginning of Parma’s run as Italy’s Capital of Culture, an exhibition was organised entitled “Time Machine. Seeing and Experiencing Time”, curated by Antonio Somaini, with the challenge of demonstrating how cinema, from its earliest experiments to the digital age, has managed to manipulate and transform time, profoundly affecting our way of engaging with it. The themes of time and space are vital to understanding cinema, including from a philosophical point of view: in two of Gilles Deleuze’s seminal volumes, “The Movement Image” and “The Time Image”, the issues of space and time become the two great paradigms not only for explaining cinema, but also – as Deleuze himself says – for explaining a certain 20th-century philosophy. Deleuze succeeds in a truly impressive endeavour, namely linking cinema to philosophical reflection – indeed, making cinema into an instrument of philosophical thought; this heteronomy of filmmaking is then also transferred to its ability to become an instrument that goes beyond its own existence to become a reflection on the century that saw it as a protagonist of sorts. Don Ihde argues that every era has a technical discovery that somehow becomes what he calls an “epistemological engine”: a tool that opens up a system of thought that would never have been possible without that discovery. One of the many examples of this over the centuries is the camera obscura, but we could also name cinema as the defining discovery for 20th-century thought: indeed, cinema is indispensable for understanding the 20th century, just as the Internet is for understanding our way of thinking in the 21st century. Real-virtual Nowadays, the film industry is facing the crisis of cinema closures, ultimately caused by ever-spreading media platforms and the power of the economic competition that they are exerting by aggressively entering the field of production and distribution, albeit with a different angle on the age-old desire to garner audiences. Just a few days ago, Martin Scorsese was lamenting the fact that on these platforms, the artistic project is in danger of foundering, as excellent projects are placed in a catalogue alongside a series of products of varying quality, thus confusing the viewer. A few years ago, during the opening ceremony of the academic year at the University of Southern California, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas expressed the same concept about the future of cinema in a different way. Lucas argued that cinemas would soon have to become incredibly high-tech places where people can have an experience that is impossible to reproduce elsewhere, with a ticket price that takes into account the expanded and increased experiential value on offer thanks to the new technologies used. Spielberg, meanwhile, observed that cinemas will manage to survive if they manage to transform the cinemagoer from a simple viewer into a player, an actor of sorts. The history of cinema has always been marked by continuous adaptation to technological evolutions. I do not believe that cinema will ever end. Jean-Luc Godard, one of the great masters of the Nouvelle Vague, once said in an interview: «I am very sorry not to have witnessed the birth of cinema, but I am sure that I will witness its death». Godard, who was born in 1930, is still alive. Since its origins, cinema has always transformed rather than dying. Raymond Bellour says that cinema is an art that never finishes finishing, a phrase that encapsulates the beauty and the secret of cinema: an art that never quite finishes finishing is an art that is always on the very edge of the precipice but never falls off, although it leans farther and farther over that edge. This is undoubtedly down to cinema’s ability to continually keep up with technique and technology, and in doing so to move – even to a different medium – to relocate, as contemporary theorists say, even finally moving out of cinemas themselves to shift onto platforms and tablets, yet all without ever ceasing to be cinema. That said, we should give everything we’ve got to ensure that cinemas survive.

The doppelgänger (literally ‘double-goer’) of 18th and 19th century European literature and lore is a sinister likeness that dogs and shadows a protagonist heralding their death or descent into madness – a ‘spectral presentiment of disaster’ (Schwartz 84). Recently the term ‘digital doppelgänger’ has been adopted by the English-speaking entertainment and technology press to refer to a digital image of an actor or performer; whether that image is a computer-generated wire-frame model, an amalgamation of old film footage and artistry, or a three dimensional laser scan of the face and body’s topography. (Magid, Chimielewski) This paper examines some of the implications of this term and its linkage to a set of anxieties about the relationship between the self and its image. According to Friedrich Kittler, media of recording and storing bodily data are central to how many of us imagine identity today. Technologies such as photography and film ushered in a ‘technological rechristening of the soul’ (149). Kittler contends that these image technologies have had an impact on identity by creating ‘mechanised likenesses [that] roam the databanks that store bodies’ (96). In this context the use of the term ‘digital doppelgänger’ suggests some kind of perceived disruption to the way identity and image, or original and copy, relate. For example, a short article in Variety, ‘Garner finds viewing her digital doppelgänger surreal’, promotes the release of the videogame version of the television show Alias. But instead of the usual emphasis on the entertainment value of the game and its potential to extend the pleasures of the televisual text, this blurb focuses on the uncanniness of an encounter between the show’s lead, Jennifer Garner, and the digitally animated game character modelled from her features (Fritz 2003). An actor’s digital likeness can be made to perform actions that are beyond the will or physicality of the actor themselves. Such images have a variety of uses. In action cinema the digital likeness often replaces the actor’s stunt double, removing much of the risk previously borne by the human body in filming explosions, car chases and acrobatic leaps. Through its multiplication or manipulation the digital doppelgänger can expand the performative limits of the actor’s body and face. These figures also have an important role in video game versions of popular action or science fiction films such as the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy. The digital doppelgänger therefore extends the capabilities of the human performer’s image, bestowing ‘superhuman’ qualities and granting it entry to interactive media forms. The most serendipitous use of these images, however, is in the completion of films where an actor has died in mid-production, as when, for instance, Oliver Reed famously passed on during the filming of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. In such cases the image literally substitutes for the once-living; its digitally animated gestures and expressions filling in for an inanimate body that can express and gesture no longer and never will again. The history of doppelgängers and doubles, you see, is intimately bound up with human mortality and the origins of image making. According to Otto Rank, the earliest connotations of the double in Indo-European lore were benign, entailing the immortality of the self. This incarnation stems from animistic beliefs in the manifestation of the soul in shadows, reflections and images (49-77) and is intimately connected to the magical origins of figurative representation. Andre Bazin argues that the most enduring form of image magic has been that concerned with rendering the subject immortal. In his essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, he emphasises that the basic psychological impulse beneath the origins of the plastic arts was a desire to snatch mortal things from the indifferent flow of time – to cheat death through the creation of a substitute, a double, for the living body (9). However, by the post-Enlightenment era, Western belief in the preservative powers of the double had eroded, and subsequently, the meaning of this figure in folktales and literature came to be inverted. The double or doppelgänger became a spectral projection of the self, an ‘uncanny harbinger of death’ (Freud 324-5). Meanwhile, even as the haunted image persists as a motif in short stories, novels and film, rationally: No one believes any longer in the ontological identity of model and image, but all are agreed that the image helps us to remember the subject and to preserve him from a second spiritual death (Bazin 9). Photographic and filmic images have aided Western cultures in keeping the dead in view, saving them from being totally forgotten. These images are filled in or animated by the subjective memory of the viewer. The digital likeness, however, is birthed in a computer and made to gesture in the performer’s stead, promising not just a ‘technological rechristening of the soul’, but the possibility of future career resurrection. Ron Magid reports: Cyberware president David Addleman is hopeful that all stars will eventually stockpile their data, like the suspended bodies in Coma, just waiting for the day when technology will resurrect them for as yet undreamed-of projects. (Magid) This reference to the 1970s horror film, Coma, with its connotations of lifeless bodies and sinister scientific procedures, brings to mind unconscious forms, zombies awaiting resurrection, an actor’s image as puppet, a mindless figure forced to gesture at the control of another. These are fears of decorporealised detachment from one’s own likeness. It is a fear of the image being in exile from its referent, being endowed with the semblance of life though digital processes. In this fear we can hear the echoes of earlier anxieties about the double. But these fears also revisit earlier responses to the cinematic recording of the human image, ones that now may seem quaint to us in a culture where people fantasise of becoming media celebrities and indeed queue in their thousands for the chance. To put this into some historical perspective, it is worth noting how the figure of the double played a part in some responses to then new cinema technologies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yuri Tsivian writes of the unease expressed in the early 1900s by Russian performers when encountering their own moving image on screen. For some the root of their discomfort was a belief that encountering their projected moving image would play havoc with their own internal self-image. For others, their unease was compounded by non-standardised projection speeds. Until the mid to late 1910s both camera and projector were cranked by hand. It was common for a projectionist to lend some haste to the action on the screen in order to finish work at the auditorium early. Early Russian writers on film were well aware of the projectionist’s role in transforming ‘calm fluent gesture’ into a ‘jerky convulsive twitch’, and making the ‘actors gesture like puppets’ (cited in Tsivian 53-54). Luigi Pirandello’s novel Shoot! from 1916 dealt with a cinema actress traumatised by the sight of her own ‘altered and disordered’ screen image (59-60). A playwright, Pirandello condemned the new media as reducing the craft of the living, breathing stage-actor to an insubstantial flickering phantom, a ‘dumb image’ subtracted from a moment of live action before the camera (105-6). Walter Benjamin refers to Pirandello’s novel in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, recognising it as one of the first discourses on the relationship between the actor and their screen image. For Benjamin the screen actor is in exile from their image. He or she sends out his or her shadow to face the public and this decorporealised shadow heralds a diminishment of presence and aura for the audience (222). Benjamin suggests that in compensation for this diminishment of presence, the film industry ‘responds to the shrivelling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio’ (224). The development of star-image discourse and celebrity works to collapse the split between person and decorporealised shadow, enveloping the two in the electrified glow of interconnected texts such as roles, studio publicity, glamour photography, interviews, and gossip. Star personality, celebrity scandal and gossip discourse have smoothed over this early unease, as have (importantly) the sheer ubiquity and democracy of mediated self-images. The mundane culture of home video has banished this sense of dark magic at work from the appearance of our own faces on screens. In the context of these arguments it remains to be seen what impact the ‘digital doppelgänger’ will have on notions of public identity and stardom, concepts of cinematic performance and media immortality. Further research is also required in order to uncover the implications of the digital double for the image cultures of indigenous peoples or for cinema industries such as Bollywood. As for the term ‘digital doppelgänger’ itself, perhaps with ubiquity and overuse, its older and more sinister connotations will be gradually papered over and forgotten. The term ‘doppelgänger’ suggests a copy that threatens its original with usurpation, but it may be that the digital doppelgänger functions in a not dissimilar way to the waxwork models at Madame Tussauds – as a confirmation of a celebrity’s place in the media galaxy, wholly reliant on the original star for its meaning and very existence. References Bazin, A. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” What is Cinema? Ed./Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley & London: U of California P, 1967. 9-16. Benjamin, W. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fonatan, 1992. 211-44. Chimielewski, D. “Meet Sunny’s Digital Doppelganger.” The Age (5 January 2005). http://www.theage.com.au/news/Film/Meet-Sunnys-digital-doppelganger/2005/01/04/1104601340883.html>. Freud, S. “The ‘Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud et al. Vol. xvii (1917-19). London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955. 219-52. Fritz, B. “Garner Finds Viewing Her Digital Doppelganger Surreal.” Variety (27 August 2003). http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=upsell_article&articleID=VR1117891622&cs=1>. Kittler, F. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. and intro. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 1999. Magid, R. “New Media: Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Wired News (March 1998). http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,10645,00.html>. Parisi, P. “Silicon Stars: The New Hollywood.” Wired (December 1995): 144-5, 202-10. http:www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,10645,00.html>. Pirandello, L. Shoot! (Si Gira) The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematographer Operator. Trans. C.F. Scott Moncrieff. New York: E.P. Dutton and Co.,1926. Rank, O. The Double: A Psychoanalytical Study. Trans./ed. Harry Tucker, Jr. North Carolina: U of North Carolina P, 1971. Schwartz, H. The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles. New York: Zone, 1996. Tsivian, Y. Early Russian Cinema and Its Cultural Reception. Trans. A. Bodger. Ed. R. Taylor. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bode, Lisa. "Digital Doppelgängers." M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/07-bode.php>. APA Style Bode, L. (Jul. 2005) "Digital Doppelgängers," M/C Journal, 8(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/07-bode.php>.

In 2019, Netflix released the first season of its highly anticipated show The Witcher. Based on the books of Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, the fantasy show tells the intersecting stories of the Witcher Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill), the princess of Cintra Ciri (Freya Allan), and sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra), who is commonly referred to as a ‘mage’. Although not as popular among critics as its original book incarnations and adapted game counterparts, the show went on to achieve an 89% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and was subsequently renewed for more seasons. Although the general success of the show is clear among viewers, The Witcher was not without its detractors, who accused creator Lauren Hissrich of developing a woke series with a feminist agenda (Worrall), especially because of her desire to emphasise strong female characters (Crow). The latter is, of course, a direction that the Netflix series inherited from the video game version of The Witcher – especially The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – even if the portrayal is often considered to be biased and “problematic” (Heritage). Supporting the view that the show focusses on the character trajectories of independent and capable women is the analysis offered by Worrow (61), who attests that “the female representations in season one of The Witcher offer prominent female characters who are imbued with agency, institutional power and well-developed narrative arcs”. Although Worrow’s analysis offers a clear critical account of Yennefer’s story arc – among the other female characters – what it does not consider is the relationship between women and magic, which has historically seen the mistreatment and ostracising of women as practitioners, and which tacitly informs representation in The Witcher by providing a gendered view of magical power. In response to this, the purpose of our article is to consider how Yennefer’s pursuit of magic both maintains and challenges gender stereotypes, particularly as they pertain to sorceresses and witches. The analysis will focus primarily on the episodes of Season One. Through the course of Season One, audiences are introduced to the character of Yennefer as she transitions from a deformed woman into a ‘beautiful’ sorceress. Alienated by her community because of a hunched back and cleft palate, Yennefer remains mistreated until she exhibits magical tendencies – or “the ability to conduct Chaos” (Guimarães). This is an aptitude that will later be revealed to be a direct outcome of her Elvin heritage (Worrow). Having gained the attention of Tissaia (MyAnna Buring), the Rectress of the magical school Aretuza, Yennefer is purchased from her family and relocated to Aretuza to train as a mage. Initially, Yennefer struggles with the magic training, where magic itself is referred to as “chaos”. In particular, she specifically finds it hard to “control [her] chaos”, as the series puts it, because of her emotional tendencies. After a short period of time, however, Yennefer develops into a strong, talented sorceress who is later instrumental in the final battle of Season One against the Nilfgaardian forces that are at war with the city-state of Cintra (Chitwood); the conflict with the kingdom of Nilfgaard is a central plot development in The Witcher, running across multiple seasons of the series. Throughout Season One, audiences view Yennefer’s character development, as she sheds her kind, naïve personality in favour of becoming an agent of chaos, who is fully immersed in the political intrigue that influences the Continent – the broader geographical land where the events of The Witcher take place. What It Means to Be a Sorceress For the purpose of this article, we will be using the terms “sorceress” and “witch” interchangeably (Stratton). It is important to mention here that several strands of anthropological research contend that the two terms are not synonymous, with “sorcery” referring to the ability to “manipulate supernatural forces for malicious or deviant purposes” (Moro, 2); the term “witch”, on the other hand, would preferably be used for “people suspected of practising, either deliberately or unconsciously, socially prohibited forms of magic“ (Moro, 1). Nonetheless, historians and sociologists have long equated the two because of their prepotency to describe magic users who channel power for productive and nefarious purposes (Godsend; Lipscomb). We cite our understanding of these important terminologies in the latter critical area, seeing the important social, cultural, and political interconnections concomitantly held by the terms “sorceress” and “witch” in the context of magical practices within The Witcher series. ‘Mage’, for its part, seems to be used in the series as a gender-neutral term, openly recalling a well-known narrative trajectory from both fantasy novels and games. Regardless of whether they were deemed witches, sorceresses, mages, or enchantresses, and despite historical records that prove the contrary, practitioners of magic, as such, have predominantly been gendered as female (Godwin; Stratton). Such a misconception has meant that stereotypes and representations of magic and witchcraft in popular culture have continued to show a penchant for depicting witches not only as female but also as powerful and intimidating beings that continuously challenge hegemonic power structures (Burger & Mix; Stratton). Historically, and especially so in the Western context, individuals labelled as witches and sorceresses have been ostracised, in some instances eradicated through mass killings, to ostensibly contain their power and remove the threat of the evil they inevitably embodied and represented (Johnson). This established historical framework is tacitly embedded in the narrative structure of The Witcher, with examples such as Yennefer often being portrayed as out of control because of her magical powers. The series, however, acknowledges unspoken historical truths and reinforces its own canon, as it is made clear throughout that men can also be magic users; indeed, the show includes a variety of male druids, sorcerers, and mages. Where a potential gender divide exists, however, is in reference to the Brotherhood of Sorcerers, who seemingly control the activities and powers of magical practitioners. Although there is a female equivalent in Sapkowski’s novels, called the Lodge of Sorceresses, the first season of The Witcher does not openly engage with it. Such an omission could be construed as a gender concern in the Netflix show, as a patriarchal group seemingly oversees the activities of mages. As Worrow argues, the show implies that “The Brotherhood controls and legitimizes the use of magic” (66), and by being referred to as a ‘brotherhood’, creates a gender imbalance within the series. This interpretation is not unexpected, bearing in mind that gender studies scholars have consistently pointed out how structural inequalities exist, even in fictitious offerings. In social, cultural, and media contexts alike, these offerings subordinate women in favour of maintaining ideologies that advantage hegemonic masculinity (Connell; Butler). Where the stereotypes of women diverge in The Witcher, however, is in the general characterisation of these powerful witches and sorceresses as empathetic and compassionate individuals. Across the history of representation, witches have been portrayed as cruel, evil, manipulative, and devious, making witches one of the most recognisable tropes of evil women in storytelling, from fairy tales to film, TV, novels, and games (Zipes). While a number of notable exceptions exist – one should only think here of Practical Magic, both in its book and film adaptations (1995/1998), as examples of texts exploring the notion of the good witch – the representational stereotype of witches as wicked and malevolent creatures has held centrally true. A witch’s activities are generally focussed on controlling and bringing misfortune upon others, in favour of their own gain (Moro). As Schimmelpfennig puts it, the recurrent image of the witch is that of someone who is “envious” of others: “nobody loves, likes, or pities her. She seems to have brought disaster upon herself and lives on the margins of society, [often] visualised by her residence in the woods” (31). The common perception, as cemented in fictional contexts, has been that witches have nefarious and villainous intents, and their magical actions (especially) are perpetually motivated by this. Although she was initially alienated by both her magical and non-magical communities, Yennefer’s character development does not adhere exactly to the broadly established characterisation of witches. Admittedly, she does act in morally ambiguous ways. For example, in the episode “Bottled Appetites”, her desire to have children leads her to attempt to control a jinn regardless of the dangerous costs to herself and others. And yet, in the following episode, "Rare Species", Yennefer changes her mind about trying to slay a dragon whose magical properties could help her, and instead works with Geralt to defend the Dragon and its family from Reavers. She also confronts injustices by helping to defend the territory of Sodden Hill which is threatened by Nilfgaardian forces ("Much More"). Rather than being purely evil, as witches have long been considered to be, Yennefer offers a more nuanced and relatable depiction, as both a witch and, arguably, a woman character. The moral complexity of Yennefer as a magical figure, then, not only makes for compelling viewing – with such magical characters often being an expected presence in mainstream programming (Greene) – but her continued growth, and the attention given to her identity development by showrunners, challenge gender stereotypes. On screen, female characters have often been treated as auxiliaries to their male counterparts (Taber et al.); they have fulfilled roles as mother, lover, or damsel in distress, reducing any potential for growth (Nairn). The Witcher Season One gives Yennefer her own arc and, in doing so, becomes a series that elevates the status of women rather than treating them as, to borrow Simone de Bauvoir’s famous words, ‘the second sex’. Power & Empowerment Differentiating Yennefer from the stereotypes of female characters, and witches/sorceresses more specifically within the broader popular media and culture landscape, is her obvious agency within The Witcher series. Gammage et al. argue that agency can be understood as “the capacity for purposive action, the ability to make decisions and pursue goals free from violence, retribution, and fear, but it also includes a cognitive dimension” (6). Throughout The Witcher, Yennefer does not act subserviently and will even oppose the will of those around her. For example, in the episode “Before the Fall”, she gives advice to young girls training to be mages to ignore the instructions of their tutors and "to think for themselves" (26:19-26:20). She follows up by later telling the young mages about how Aretuza takes away their opportunity to bear children, to ensure the mages stay loyal to the cause. As she puts it: "Even if you do everything right, follow their rules, that's still no guarantee you will get what you want" (29:42-29:51). This exposes her character as not tied to traditional patriarchal notions of subservience. And while personal motivations may laterally aid the conception of witches as egotistical, her actions still stand out as being propelled by individual agency. Female characters on screen have often been portrayed as submissive and passive, and this includes iconic on-screen witches from Samantha in Bewitched to the titular character in Sabrina the Teenage Witch. It is not uncommon to see good witches in popular media and culture, in particular, as still defined by male relationships in terms of cultural and social value (for instance, Sally Owens in Practical Magic, and Wanda Maximoff in the Marvel Cinematic Universe). As Godwin puts it, these characters embody the expected gender roles of a patriarchal society, with storylines, for example, that favour love potions or keeping house. As far as The Witcher is concerned, being submissive and passive is often in direct contrast with Yennefer’s preferences. For example, in “Betrayer Moon”, she intentionally ignores the decision of the Brotherhood to act as the mage in Nilfgaard by intentionally catching the eye of the King of Aedirn: the King then asks for Yennefer to be his mage. Fringilla (Mimi Ndiweni), who was supposed to be the mage in Aedirn, is forced to go to Nilfgaard instead. Yennefer's behaviour not only defies The Brotherhood in favour of her own interests but also demonstrates her unwillingness to conform to the expectations placed on her. Such depictions of Yennefer acting with agency make her, arguably, relatable to audiences. Female characters and witches such as Yennefer become emblematic of independent, competent women who use magic to take control of their own destiny (Burger and Mix) and can be praised for opposing “oppressive societal norms” and instead advocating for “independent thought” (Godwin 92). It is possible to argue here that what drives Yennefer appears to be her sense of Otherness, as an intrinsic difference that is central to her being, both physically and emotionally. Although initially her othered nature is seemingly the product of her deformities and ethnic background (with elves being socially, culturally, and politically ostracised on the Continent), she openly admits to feeling othered throughout the series, even after her physical disfigurement is cured by magic. Her individualised agency makes her inevitably stand out and becomes a marker of difference. This representation is not dissimilar to the feelings expressed by women across First, Second, and Third-wave Feminism (Butler; Connell). Indeed, Worrow observes that “The Witcher encodes female characters with power as ‘other’, enhancing this otherness through magical abilities” (61). It would seem that, in essence, the show surreptitiously gives voice to the plight of minority groups through the hard work, dedication, and determination of Yennefer as an Othered character, as she struggles and defies expectations in pursuit of her goal of becoming a powerful sorceress. Her independence and agency tell a story of empowerment because, like other fictional witches of the last decade in the twenty-first century, Yennefer “refuses to pretend to be someone or something they are not, eschewing the lie to instead embody the truth of themselves, their identity's, and their unapologetic strength” (Burger and Mix 14). This profoundly diverges from other representations where being the ‘other’ was seen as a justification for punishment, marginalisation, or mistreatment, and amply seen across the historicised media spectrum, from Disney films to horror narratives and beyond. Nonetheless, although it appears as if Yennefer has agency and is empowered, there is the argument that she is a conduit of magic, and as such, lacks real power and influence without a capacity to control the chaos. As Godwin contends, witches are often limited in their capacity to be influential and to have true autonomy by the fact that they do not possess magic but are often seemingly controlled by it. At various times in Season One, Yennefer struggles to control the chaos magic. For example, while being beaten up, she inadvertently portals for the first time. During her magical training, she can't manage a number of magical tasks ("Four Marks"). Here, the suggestion is that she is not completely free to act as she chooses because it can produce unintentional consequences or no consequences at all; this conceptual enslavement to magic as the source of her power and individuality seemingly dilutes some of her agency. Furthermore, instances of her trying to control the chaos within the show also conform to stereotypes of women being ruled by emotions and prone to hysterical outbursts (Johnson). Aesthetics & Sexuality Stereotypically, and in keeping with fictional tropes in literature, media, and film, witches have been described as “mature” women, “with bad skin, crooked teeth, foul breath, a cackling laugh, and a big nose with a wart at the end of it” (Henderson 66). Classic examples include the witches depicted in the works of the Brothers Grimm, Disney’s instances of Madam Mim in The Sword in the Stone and the transformed Evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the witches of Roald Dahl’s eponymous novel (1983), and (even more traditionally and iconically) the hags of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1623). Yet, more recently the witch aesthetic has altered significantly in the media spectrum with an increased focus on young, alluring, and enchanting women, such as Rowan Fielding in Mayfair Witches (2023 –), Sabrina Spellman of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–2020), Freya Mikealson of The Originals (2013–2018), and of course, Yennefer in The Witcher. These examples emphasise that female magic users, much like a significant ratio of female characters in popular culture, are sexualised, with the seductive nature of the witch taking precedence and, in some cases, detracting from the character's agency as she becomes objectified for the male gaze (Mulvey). The hiring of actress Chaltora as Yennefer, although designed to challenge racialised beauty standards (Kain), does not dispel the treatment of women as sex objects as she is filmed nude during some magic rituals and in intimate scenes. Importantly, and as briefly mentioned above, when Yennefer’s back story is told, she is introduced as a young woman with physical deformities. As part of her ascension to a sorceress, she is required to undergo a physical transformation to make her beautiful, as conventional beauty and allure appear to be requirements for mages. As Worrow (66) attests, she is seen “undergoing an invasive, painful, magical metamorphosis which remakes her in the image of classical feminine beauty”. Unsurprisingly, the makeover received backlash for being ableist (Calder), but the magical change also enforced stereotypical views of women needing to be “manicured and coiffed” (Eckert, 530) to have relevancy and value. Yennefer’s beautifying procedure could also be interpreted as paralleling current cultural currents in contemporary society, where cosmetic interventions and physical transformations, often in the form of plastic surgery, are encouraged for women to be accepted. Indeed, Yennefer is shown as being much more accepted by human and mage communities alike after her transformation, as both her political and magical influence grows. In these terms, the portrayal of Yennefer maintains rather than challenges gender norms, making for a disappointing turn in the plotline of The Witcher. The decision to submit to the transformation also came at a cost to Yennefer. She was forced to forfeit her uterus and by extension her potential to become a mother. Such a storyline conforms to Creed’s long-standing perspective that “when a woman is represented as monstrous it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions” (118). Here, even after achieving the expected beauty standards, Yennefer is still treated as abject because she can no longer “fulfil the function dictated by patriarchal and phallocentric hegemony” (Worrow 68), which further contributes to the widespread ideological perspective that women’s roles are to be nurturing and child-rearing (Bueskens). Of course, motherhood remains a contentious topic for Yennefer as, although she made the decision to forgo her uterus in pursuit of power and beauty, she later comes to regret that decision. In the episode “Rare Specifies”, Yennefer admits to Geralt that she feels loss and sadness over her inability to reproduce, which contributes to the complexity and inner turmoil of her character, while equally reinforcing the perception that women should be mothers. Her initial independence and choice are undermined by her attempts to regain her uterus and later, in Season 3, by her adopting the role of mother figure to Ciri. Conclusion In many respects, the story arc of sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg conforms to what McRobbie describes as female individualism, and Gill considers post-feminist. That is, Yennefer has choice and agency. She makes decisions out of a sense of entitlement, and privileges her desire for power, beauty, and freedom, sometimes above all else. Much like other post-feminist icons, Yennefer is empowered and challenges gender stereotypes that charge women with being passive and submissive. Yet, despite the fact that 60% of the writing credits are held by women on The Witcher (Worrow), Yennefer’s character is still objectified. Although the male gaze might not always be privileged, there are examples where her sexuality is exploited; by being portrayed as physically attractive, desirable, and promiscuous, she still conforms to gender norms about ideal beauty standards. The sexuality of her character maintains perceptions of witches and sorceresses as seducers, and while she is not cavorting with Satan, as many witches have historically claimed to be (Stratton), her depiction maintains the adage that sex sells – at least as far as media production goes. Ultimately, the character of Yennefer in The Witcher appears to be an attempt to respond to a tacit cultural desire for strong female characters with relatable storylines, without ostracising male fans. 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