Journal articles on the topic 'Dramatists, biography'

The entry for Esmé Stuart, brother of Ludovic, Duke of Lennox, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography occupies a mere two paragraphs. But who was this person who served James I from 1603 until his death in 1624? This article argues for Esmé's importance and produces evidence to support the claim, beginning with his becoming a Gentleman of the Bedchamber and member of the Privy Council in 1603. Later that year the king granted Esmé a license to export 6,000 tons of “double beer.” This marks just the beginning of the king's exceptional largesse. More grants and privileges flowed Esmé's way, including the title of Earl of March in 1619. Esmé's involvement with the arts, especially drama, has largely been ignored; but he served as patron, performer, and protector of dramatists. He formed his own acting company, he danced in court masques, and he helped dramatists get out of prison. Esmé had a special relationship with Ben Jonson. For five years Jonson even lived in Esmé's household in Blackfriars. He gratefully acknowledged such generosity, claiming in Epigram 127 that Esmé had given him “new life.” In poetry and in the dedication to Sejanus (1616), Jonson cited Esmé's influence and hospitality. This article creates the first full portrait of Esmé: his personal and court life and his interest and participation in the theater.

This article investigates the cultural assumptions which underpin five twentieth and twenty-first century fictional depictions of Ben Jonson. Despite the wealth of documentary evidence for Jonson's dramatic and fractious biography, its particular richness has rarely captured the imagination of contemporary authors. To account for the much-reduced presence Jonson occupies in the ongoing fictionalization of the English Renaissance, the author outlines the development of a pseudo-biographical narrative of Jonson's life which evolved over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in relation to the emerging narrative of Shakespeare's. Jonson came to be presented as pedantic, ponderous, and ultimately outclassed by the dramatist who was his main contemporary rival, whose early reputation he was instrumental in creating. Furthermore, this gradual diminution of Jonson's own complexities was directly linked to his success within his lifetime. Outliving Shakespeare and offering an alternative model for theatrical achievement, Jonson presented a threat which had to be neutralized in the service of a protective impulse towards Shakespeare's reputation as a unique genius. The article offers some early instances of semi-fictional anecdotes about Jonson and Shakespeare which present the two dramatists as interchangeable subjects. It then assesses at length more recent Jonson-characters in Brahms and Simon's No Bed for Bacon, Roland Emmerich's Anonymous, Edward Bond's Bingo, Rudyard Kipling's “Proofs of Holy Writ”, and Jude Morgan's The Secret Life of William Shakespeare in the light of the historical reframing of Jonson's life and temperament. Finally, it makes the case for Jonson's story as one particularly suited to our current cultural landscape.

The aim of our paper is to analyse the treatment given by Zöe Akins (1886-1958), an American playwright from Humansville, Missouri, of the urban setting of New York in the second decade of the twentieth century in the play mentioned above. Akins, who follows a common pattern among successful American dramatists in her time, presents in Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1923) a plot that is perfectly integrated in New York area. The Fields progression from a low middle class settlement in Harlem to other scenes of the city informs the development of family life towards désintégration. Akins, whose biography links her to New York as a successful distinction presents in Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1923) a serious drama in which characters are very much influenced by New York’s cosmopolitanism that turns out to be a divisive element within the play, as Julien Fields pursues at all costs an artistic career. In our presentation we will explore this linkage between characters and setting within the context of Zöe Akins’ production and American Drama in the 1920’s.

The article sets out to explore two plays by contemporary playwrights, one American (Don Nigro, Loves Labours Wonne), the other Ukrainian (Neda Nezhdana, And Still I will Betray You), focusing on William Shakespeare and Lesia Ukrainka, respectively, within the framework of “the author as character” subgenre of fictional (imaginative) biography. Accordingly, the article considers the correlation between the factual and the fi ctional as one of its foci of attention. Drawing upon a variety of theoretical approaches (Paul Franssen, Ton Hoenselaars, Ira Nadel, Aleid Fokkema, Michael MacKeon, Ina Shabert and others), the article summarizes the principal characteristics of “the author as character” subgenre and proceeds to discuss how they operate in the dramas under scrutiny. The analysis makes it abundantly clear that in Nigro’s and Nezhdana’s plays the balance between fact and fi ction is defi nitively tipped in favor of the latter. By centering their (quasi) biographical plays on highly mythologized artists of national standing, both dramatists aimed at demythologizing these cult fi gures, inevitably placing them, however, within new mythical plots combining a Neo-Romantic vision of the artist as demiurge, with a Neo-Baroque as well as fin de siècle apology of death and a postmodern denial of one objective reality.

Résumé Les six pièces retenues pour cet article mettent en scène des figures d’écrivains montrées sous divers angles biographiques : Gustave Flaubert, Emily Dickinson, Laure Conan, Léon Tolstoï, Jean-Paul Sartre et Eugene O’Neill y deviennent des personnages qui rejouent un aspect ou l’autre de leur vie et de leur oeuvre. Sollicitant à la fois le factuel et l’imaginaire, ces productions déploient le matériau biographique à la faveur de transpositions stylistiques, génériques, temporelles, géographiques qui, loin de reconduire le mythe, convient plutôt à sa relecture. Si les tonalités peuvent varier — de la poétisation à la parodie, de la fantaisie à l’appropriation autobiographique, du festif au tragique —, la forme théâtrale est toujours garante d’une actualisation, et c’est là sa spécificité en regard d’autres biographies littéraires, qui donne à voir, au présent, la réalité et son interprétation.

“Ishi and the Wood Ducks, Part 2, or Ishi, The ‘Urban’” Indian” is the first play in a five-play cycle, which dramatizes the events surrounding the life and death of a tribal man named Ishi who was immortalized in Theodora Kroeber’s (1961/1989) best-selling Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America.

While mainly addressing the masses and the simpler tastes of his time, Shakespeare’s plays have long been considered emblematic for high culture, which calls into question whether their author should still be regarded as representative for the elites or whether his life and personality should be demystified and brought back to the people. An attempt in this respect, showcased by this paper, seems to be Kenneth Branagh’s biopic All Is True (2018), which portrays Shakespeare as an ordinary man rather than as an illustrious playwright, allowing the public to see the human being behind his almost god-like façade. The film, however, reasserts the Renaissance dramatist’s position as the greatest poet and playwright by interrogating some of the most persistent theories on his biography and authorship.

The given article deals with Klen’s research of the German dramatist George Kaiser. The main parameters of artistic universe of this author are presented in the article. There are also outlined the methodological strategies of research the German dramatist’s creativity by Yuri Klen – a well-known Ukrainian literary critic. Georg Kaiser is one of the brightest representatives of theatrical and literary expressionism. His plays are the unique phenomenon in the 20th century drama. His expressionism appeared to be the special one and the global and scope of plots allowed scientists to call G. Kaiser a «new myth creator». Among world scientists, who comprehended the features of author manner of this sign artist for history of world drama, a main place belongs to the Ukrainian literary critic – Yuri Klen. In his scientific work there is the article «George Kaiser», which an author compositionally divides into seven parts. Its pre-condition is an original metaphorical lineation (vivid registration of which is adopted from astronomy), structural-semiotics assertion that every writer creation has a basic idea or favourite main image, that can be found in many writings of the author. However, in the Ukrainian literary critic’s opinion, it is not impossible to say it on the first sight about George of Kaiser because every work of this author has a new incarnate idea, new and unexpected development of a plot, new and original interpretation of that problem which has been solved in his previous works. In the article “George Kaiser” by Yuri Klen the biographic approach can be highlighted while analyzing creative works of the German dramatist. The Ukrainian literary critic also outlines the secrets of psychology of the German artist creation in expressionism manner. Expressionism drama is always drama of ideas; therefore acting persons of this drama are not individuals, but types which helps writer to lead the general action of the characters. Yuri Klen asserts transformation of images in dramas by George of Kaiser, their original reduction up to separate characters and allegories: his characters lost the outlines of people and become symbols of idea, super individual creatures, typical samples, and logic of acting can be sacrificed for the sake of the higher logic – logic of composition and dramatic construction. Few times a researcher accents on closeness an artistic world view of the German dramatist to cubism: characters mainly don’t have the names, but appear on the stage under the names: a «father», «multimillionaire», «black», «yellow» – they are structural formulas. Summarizing these the structural-semiotics searches, Yuri Klen marks once again that in George Kayiser’s works can be found: 1) central idea of man renewing which is peculiar for all his creative work; 2) leading motive of escape-chasing and 3) element of contingency which manages events, that is a case-shove which suddenly gives dynamic of action and sets fire before a man as a distant lighthouse – dream about renewal. It is also possible to assert that researches of expressionism by some authors whose creation correlates with expressionism views demonstrates complete maturity of Yuri Klen to be a serious literary critic armed by the newest methodological approaches to study literature as theoretician and practician of literature studies.

John Millington Synge (1871–1909) is the fulcrum upon which Irish drama and theatre studies is balanced. Synge's nodal position is predicated upon the dramatist's rock ‘n’ roll recalcitrance towards the dramaturgical praxis of his contemporaries; his subject matter was as shocking as the Anglo-Irish idiom in which it was articulated. After Synge's premature death in 1909, W. B. Yeats's fundamental concern was that Synge scholars would attempt ‘to mould . . . some simple image of the man’. However, W. J. McCormack's concentric biography of Synge, The Fool of the Family: A Life of J. M. Synge, and Ann Saddlemyer's The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, have demonstrated that Synge's life was complex, multifaceted and in deep dialogue with Irish culture. But with respect to Synge's drama a simple image has surrounded critical discourse: the politics of Irish nationalism.

Abstract Best known today for his writings about the American West, which he visited over twenty-five times between 1885 and 1920, Owen Wister was remarkably versatile, a poet, dramatist, essayist, novelist of manners, journalist, book critic, biographer and historian, satirist, and author of children's books. This bibliography of his writings increases by over half, to over 250, the number of items Wister is known to have published, including several schoolboy exercises contributed to his prep school newspaper and the Harvard Crimson, many prefaces or introductions to books by his friends, and memoirs of his lifelong friend and Harvard classmate Theodore Roosevelt.

ABSTRACT As Shaw's authorized biographer Archibald Henderson put it in the second of three biographies: “While Shaw may have a dozen labels—art critic, music critic, drama critic, novelist, dramatist, rationalist, Socialist, publicist, harlequin, sage, statesman, prophet—he has only one profession: journalism.”1 Especially remembered now for his achievements as playwright, whether in the vanguard of the New Drama at the end of the nineteenth century or as the established dramatist of world fame throughout the first half of the twentieth, Shaw worked first and last as a journalist in a working life stretching seventy-five years. Dan H. Laurence devoted nearly three hundred pages of the second volume of Bernard Shaw: A Bibliography (1983) itemizing Shaw's contributions to newspapers and periodicals between 1875 and 1950, amounting to almost four thousand entries.2 For fourteen of those years, from 1885 to 1898, he led the career of a full-time journalist, mostly as a critic of the fine arts, but criticism was by no means the whole story of Bernard Shaw's fourteen-year career as a full-time journalist sketched out in what follows.

The text presents Jan Kasprowicz’s translation work during the First World War. It discusses the War’s contribution to the concentration on this form of literary activity and to the selection of the works by the most distinguished Greek tragic dramatist, Euripides. The author presents the view that the fact that Kasprowicz took up the ambitious project of translating all works by Euripides resulted from the Academy of Learning’s commission on the one hand and from the translator’s conscious decision on the other hand. By going back to antiquity, Kasprowicz endeavoured to answer the questions that were fundamental during the War: about its sense and price. Apart from presenting the timeline of Jan Kasprowicz’s translations in detail, the author mentions the key facts from his biography during the War. He also quotes the translator’s statements about the translation techniques and positions them in the context of contemporary theories of translation.

The article is devoted to highlighting little-known aspects of the creative biography of the outStanding Ukrainian artiSt, playwright, translator Mykhailo Zhuk and actor, director, chairman of the board of the Maria Zankovetska Theater Oleksandr Korolchuk. For the firSt time in the history of Ukrainian theater art, we introduce the correspondence of Mykhailo Zhuk and Oleksandr Zhuk into scientific circulation, we present the full texts of the letters, preserving the spelling and Style of their author. The publication is based on primary source materials Stored in the name fund of Oleksandr Korolchuk in the collection of the Museum of Theater, Music and Film Arts of Ukraine (Kyiv). Mykhailo Zhuk entered the hiStory of Ukrainian culture as an artiSt, dramatiSt, scenographer, poet, translator, teacher, public figure. However, apart from these definitions, we Still do not have a special Study devoted to the theatrical activity of M. Zhuk, although he is an artiSt, and his creative output, without a doubt, deserves it.

आचार्याश्वघोषः महान् दार्शनिकः, सङ्गीतज्ञः, नाटककारः, महाकविश्चासीत् । महाकवेरश्वघोषस्य जीवनवृत्तविषये चीनतिब्बतादिषु बौद्धदेशेषु पर्याप्तरूपेण सामग्र्यः प्राप्यन्ते । महाकवेरश्वघोषस्य जीवनवृत्तमाधारीकृत्य रचितस्य सौन्दरनन्दमित्यस्य ग्रन्थस्यावलोकनेन ज्ञायते यदयं महाकवि अश्वघोषः महापण्डित–महाराजेत्यादिभिः उपाधिभिरलङ्कृत इति । महाकवेरश्वघोषस्य नामकरणविषये प्रामाणिकरूपेण कुत्राप्य'ल्लेखो न प्राप्यते,तथापि अनेकैराचार्यैः इदं भवितुं शक्नोति वेति रूपेणैव नामकरणं कृतं दृश्यते । महाकवेरश्वघोषस्य कृतिषु मध्ये बुद्धचरित–सौन्दरनन्द–बज्रसूचीप्रभृतयः ग्रन्थाः मुख्याःमन्यन्ते आचार्याः । केषाञ्चन विदुषां मतं वर्तते यत् अयमश्वघोषः महायानसम्प्रदायस्य तत्सिद्धान्तस्य च प्रचारक आसीदिति । तिब्बतीपरम्परायामयं सर्वास्तिवादित्वेन स्वीक्रियते । एतेन अश्वघोषः हीनयानसम्प्रदायस्य वर्तत इति ज्ञायते । अयमालेख आगमनविधिमवलम्ब्य प्रस्तुतो विद्यते । बौद्धदर्शनविकासाय महाकवेरश्वघोषस्य योगदानं तत्कृतीनांच वैशिष्ट्यं प्रतिपाद्यान्त्ये निष्कर्षः प्रदत्तः वर्तते । अस्मान्निष्कर्षाद्बौद्धदर्शनक्षेत्रे अश्वघोषस्य योगदानविषयकचिन्तने सारल्यं भविष्यतीत्यपेक्ष्यते । [Acharya Ashwaghosh was a great philosopher, musician, dramatist and poet. There are many materials about the biography of Mahakavi Ashwaghosha in Buddhist countries like China and Tibet. Looking at the book called Soundarananda based on the biography of Mahakavi Ashwaghosha, it shows that Mahakavi Ashwaghosha was honored with titles like Mahapandit and Maharaja. There is no authenticity of the name of Mahakavi Ashwaghosha, however, many scholars seem to have named him on the basis of probability. Acharya considers Buddhacharita, Soundarananda, Bajrasuchi and other books to be the most important works of Mahakavi Ashwaghosha. Some scholars believe that Ashwaghosha was the propagator of the Mahayana sect and its doctrines. In the Tibetan tradition, he is accepted as a universalist. This shows that Ashwaghosha belonged to the Hinayana sect. The contribution of Mahakavi Ashwaghosha in the development of Buddhadarshan and the characteristics of his works are discussed in this article. This article makes it easier to know about Ashwaghosha's contribution in the field of Buddhist philosophy.]

This is an account of the early life of a widely regarded hero of resistance in South Africa who constantly betrayed the absurdity, the hypocrisy, and the staggering human frailty of the modern leader. In later years Potlako Kitchener Leballo also gained renown as a mesmerising orator who lived to dramatise, to command the centre of attention, to captivate listeners with impassioned stories. Having grown up in a world of oral culture it is not surprising that he expressed himself best in the spoken rather than the written word. Leballo's autobiographical sketches, which have been recorded piecemeal by numerous authors, are festooned with exaggerations, illusions, and ambiguities. However, he was an intelligent fabricator of information, with a talent for fitting a story into its appropriate context. This alone makes him an exciting subject for a biography, since the reconstruction of his life and its links to the social structure provide stiff tests for the sleuthing and analytical skills of the researcher.

This is an account of the early life of a widely regarded hero of resistance in South Africa who constantly betrayed the absurdity, the hypocrisy, and the staggering human frailty of the modern leader. In later years Potlako Kitchener Leballo also gained renown as a mesmerising orator who lived to dramatise, to command the centre of attention, to captivate listeners with impassioned stories. Having grown up in a world of oral culture it is not surprising that he expressed himself best in the spoken rather than the written word. Leballo's autobiographical sketches, which have been recorded piecemeal by numerous authors, are festooned with exaggerations, illusions, and ambiguities. However, he was an intelligent fabricator of information, with a talent for fitting a story into its appropriate context. This alone makes him an exciting subject for a biography, since the reconstruction of his life and its links to the social structure provide stiff tests for the sleuthing and analytical skills of the researcher.

Abstract Adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays has been part of his legacy from the beginning, as works by artists such as Nahum Tate, Henry Purcell, and John Dryden can attest. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, too, have been put to many uses over the years. They have been set to music, they have been quoted by politicians, they have been used as wedding vows, and they have appeared on greeting cards. For many, they represent the ultimate statement on love. In the four hundred years since Shakespeare’s death, they have found their way into a variety of media, including music, drama, books, television, and film. Whereas the plays have long been acknowledged as a rich source of inspiration—both serious and parodic—by artists and auteurs, ranging in kind from novelist James Joyce to dramatist Tom Stoppard to comedian Ben Elton, the poems have received less scrutiny in this regard. However, they represent a gold mine of untold riches, especially in terms of biography, which has yet to be sufficiently tapped. In this paper I take a look at the various uses the sonnets have been put to, primarily in books, television, and film, and come to some conclusions regarding their success in remediation.

This close reading of Claude Sautet’s music-film Un coeur en hiver / A Heart in Winter (1992) also reflects on issues raised by music-films generally. Films that take music as their central subject raise special questions about the role of music in cinematic representation. Un coeur en hiver’s musically saturated narrative explores people’s abilities to know themselves and others and to express themselves adequately in emotional contexts. At the same time, the film’s techniques interrogate both the role of music in the construction of cinematic subjectivity and the potential of cinema to engage with our understandings of musical subjectivity. On one level the music self-critically serves its classic role in cinematic narrative of encouraging – even coercing – us into filling in narrative gaps otherwise left open by plot and dialogue. On another level, however, Un coeur en hiver can be read as a species of cinematic meditation on Ravel’s music: traces of Ravelian biography are scattered throughout; on-screen performances of the Piano Trio provide a musical metaphor for the narrative love triangle; and the Trio’s first movement provides a formal skeleton for the film as a whole. Drawing on recent film-music theory as well as Naomi Cummings’ account of musical subjectivity, I suggest that the film reflects specifically upon the music by exploiting its cinematic resources – dramatis personae, narrative, and mise-en-scène– to position us as auditors of Ravel; it projects a sense that Ravel’s subjective presence inhabits his trio and sonatas. To shed light on the nature of this cinematic meditation on musical authorship, I draw on John Corbett’s account of recorded music as something that both promises pleasure and threatens lack. I also revisit Edward T. Cone’s understanding of ‘the composer’s voice’, proposing a reading of Un coeur en hiver as a cinematic reflection on our fetishism of composer biography in an era marked by the loss of human presence in mechanical musical reproduction.

In the years since his death, some of the most important new areas of enquiry in Pinter studies have centred on the artistic works inspired by this major dramatist. One such endeavour is a new theatre production entitled Truth to Power Café. Truth to Power Café has been written and devised by the artist and producer Jeremy Goldstein. Goldstein’s work is a blend of poetry, performance and storytelling – an exploration of his own hidden history, and an articulation of his own ambivalent feelings. Even though Pinter contended that art and politics were irreconcilable, the argument of this paper is that Truth to Power Café represents an attempt by Goldstein to generate a synthesis between the artistic and the political: to reconcile the subjective character of art with the public nature of political activism; to mobilize the power of the theatre to enable the oppressed to break through the ritualistic ‘habits of lying’ that protect the powerful, and to discover a form of theatre where the audience can articulate themselves with ‘honesty’ and ‘precision’. Goldstein reconceptualizes the theatre as a ‘safe space’, where audience members can speak out against oppressive forces. Goldstein’s performance is a ‘call to action’. Each life testimony mediates between Goldstein’s lyrical psycho-biography, and the audience’s reception of his presentation, situating each regional performance of Truth to Power Café in its social, historical, and economic context. Goldstein achieves his objective by interweaving the personal, the private and the artistic with the public, the political and the historical.

In October 2017, Luísa Costa Gomes, Portuguese dramatist, created for the stage what she called a ‘genre transformation’ or more accurately, she argues, a ‘transmigration’ of Woolf’s large-spectrum fictional (utopian, fantastical, parodic) biographic narrative, that spans three centuries of English history, while accompanying the extraordinary life trajectory of its protagonist, Orlando. The rich and manifold ambivalence of the text is explored in Luísa Costa Gomes’s ‘transformation’, first of all in terms of its rendering into a dramatic monologue which condenses the original narrative in about forty pages of what she calls a ‘programmatic reconstruction of the source text’, which, she offers, is but a ‘commented and seasoned active reading’, after all the ‘fundamental prerequisite of any reading’. The play aims to capture the essence of Orlando’s fluidity in between genders, in between cultures, and historical moments. It amplifies the inner dialogues of the text with the texts of history and those of the male and female protagonists that embody it, plus the implicit dialogue between the authorial voice and the voice of the dramaturg as that of yet another reader. The new text thus ‘transmigrated’ into Portuguese, resounds as a ‘haunted monologue’ that is, after all, deeply plurivocal and uncannily dialogical.

Abstract Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) is nowadays remembered as one of the most outspoken female writers and playwrights of the mid-seventeenth-century; one who openly promoted women’s right to education and public displays of creativity. Thus she paved the way for other female artists, such as her near contemporary, Aphra Behn. Although in her times seen as a harmless curiosity rather than a paragon to emulate, Cavendish managed to publish her plays along with more philosophical texts. Thanks to the re-discovery of female artists by feminist revisionism, her drama is now treated as a valuable source of knowledge on the values and norms of her class, gender, and, more generally, English society in the seventeenth century. Cavendish’s two-partite play Bell in Campo (1662) is a fantasy on the world where women can fight united not only against misogyny but also against an actual enemy. While the two plays seem to be focused on the valiant Lady Victoria and her female “Noble Heroicks”, Bell in Campo likewise offers an odd subplot featuring two widows and their lives without their beloved husbands. In the secular discourse of the seventeenth century, widowhood has been seen as either liberating – as when the woman became the sole owner of her husband’s estate and goods, or regained her own, and thus more independent – or degrading – when she became the not-so-welcomed burden on her children’s shoulders and pockets. Other studies on widowhood likewise state its symbolic function, showing women as the bearers of memory, predominantly of the husband and his virtues, and often attending to the spouse’s site of memory. While discussing the cultural history of properly performed widowhood, seen as the final (st)age of a woman’s life, and taking into account Cavendish’s remarkable biography, the present paper offers a close study of her propositions for appropriate widowhood and its positioning in contrast to other states of womankind as presented in Bell in Campo.1 It will likewise take into account the more or less sublimated evidence for gerontophobia, particularly in relation to women, as shown in Cavendish’s play and seventeenth-century culture.

This article examines the circulations and transformations of photographer Lennart Nilsson’s pregnancy advice book Ett barn blir till (A Child Is Born) through its five Swedish editions from 1965 to 2009 as well as some of the translations in English and other languages. Published by Bonnier, the leading media company in Sweden, the book combines images and texts to dramatise the story of conception, foetal development and pregnancy. In particular, the aim is to explore how various commercial, cultural and material processes have co-produced and changed the identity of A Child Is Born. Inspired by research on the biography of things, the article traces the life-course of the book and the photographic material it includes. Two principles of transformation are emphasised. In the first process, the book, although undergoing significant changes, preserved a material and discursive unity and moved in relatively fixed domains. This movement occurred in relation to an origin that can be understood in terms of creativity, authorship and copyright. The second process did not require the integrity of a creative work. Rather, it was the intense features of the book and its images, their affective and iconic power, which enabled the circulations and appropriations. It is argued that Nilsson’s book could be described as a thoroughfare for images and texts in constant motion, instead of a fixed and stable object. Entangled in a culture of circulation, it has taken on a dynamic of its own and has moved as much through accident as through design. In these changes, the book has become self-reflexive in its adjustments over a range of arenas and milieus. The life of (the images in) A Child Is Born encompasses many lives, each ensnared in the trajectories and transformations of others.

The article is aimed at comparing two dilogies: On the Way to Korinthos (1964) and The Zones (1971) by the Polish writer A. Kuśniewicz (1904–1993) at one side and The Swan Flock (1971) and Green Mills (1976) by the Ukrainian writer V. Zemliak (1923–1977) on the other. Both works look like the recollections and chronicles and deal with the same epoch (the first half of the 20th century) and the neighboring Ukrainian localities (Galicia and Podillia). Besides the form of personal recollections, the narration in the 1st person exactly reflects the authors’ attitude towards the epoch that imparts substantiation for the comparative discussion of the works. One detects obvious revelation of dramatic properties associated with myth-making intentions inherent for the narratives. Although an account on personal biography given in the form of recollections contains no pretext for developing actions’ lines. It is the mystery that imparts dramatic properties to the works. The issue of these properties is arisen as the problem of textual motivation in view of the absence of plot with its macroscopic predicative ties. In particular, the problem of motivation is depicted as the consequence of textual heterogeneity as the result of parcellation inherent to memory. Respectively mnemonic reasons of textual disjunction are still to be further traced in the spontaneity of events that makes their motivation problematic where wonder replaces reasonable ties of things. The narrator’s memory restores events of the past through their ritualistic meaning as the parts of some thorough actions, and in this sense it is approaching the myth. This procures productive field for the problem of motivation to be solved with the means of aspectology. Such approach enables discovering the priority of preponderantly static aspect in opposite to the aspect of transition from one situation to another as in realistic prose. The prevalence of details presupposes the aspect of singularity where events are given as partial and irretrievable. It entails the prevalence of spontaneous motivation with contingent determination so that the partiality of details turns into the contingency of the world’s image. There arise semantic vagueness and ambivalence, places of indefiniteness (the term of R. Ingarden) those refer to the latent contents as in the dramatic performance. Partiality and contingency result in the necessity of referring the details towards the presupposed entirety as in synecdoche. Accordingly, the problem of fatalism as the primeval source of dramatics is arisen.

Elizabeth B. Bentley’s edition of George Cumberland’s The Emigrants, or, A Trip to the Ohio makes available for the first time this previously unpublished and unperformed play by one of William Blake’s closest associates. Bentley painstakingly edited and transcribed this play, currently existing only in a single fair copy held in special collections at Victoria University (Toronto); the book provides a photographic reproduction of the manuscript following her transcription. Editorial apparatus includes “Characters in the Dramatis Personae,” “The Date of the Farce,” notes on the manuscript and its transcription, descriptions of scene designations and stage directions, and explanations of speech headings, punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and corrected misspellings, all of which are well supported by footnotes. To these Bentley adds an extensive bibliography and an index of names along with two appendices, one listing her addition of parentheses when necessary and the other listing further editorial interventions in Cumberland’s punctuation. Angus Whitehead’s preface locates Cumberland’s play in respect to its antecedents in British drama, while Bentley’s introductory biography contextualizes it within Cumberland’s relationship to the theater and his sources.

In spite of the long period of time that has elapsed since monster first appeared in English and Arabic literature, monsters still have both remarkable and effective roles in their literary texts. The roles of monster that have been created over the centuries by their writers are an indicative of the fears and the needs of societies for these monsters, thus they are modified and developed to reflect social anxieties. The aspects of onomastic meanings redo the roles of the monster in Frankenstein in Baghdad; they show entirely the exact roles and characteristics of the monster to the readers. The monster’s names that are given by other characters in the novel can be used as devices to indicate the variety of literary purposes: to emphasize a certain aspect of society which Saadawi is writing on, or even the more traditional method of naming with the express intent of identifying a certain trait or expectation of the monster’s personality. Saadawi names his monster several names in order to convey specific purposes. Each name has separately purpose, and simultaneously, all names have a common goal they have to achieve. The monster in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary Shelley (English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer) has mainly affecting on the monster in Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) (Arabic Fiction) by Ahmed Saadawi (Iraqi novelist, poet and screenwriter).

Film directors in American cinema have used the artist (painter, singer, thespian, writer, etc.) as a vehicle for auteurist identification in feature bio-pics for decades. The portrayal of the protagonists in these films usually falls victim to the "Van Gogh" syndrome, that is, the insistance on the creative inner turmoil, the solitary, misunderstood genius, and brave rebellion of its central character. This approach, however, breaks down completely when confronted with the void that is the historical figure known as "Andy Warhol." The popular image of Warhol, his studied superficiality, unapologetic commercialism, and outright catatonic demeanour, is completely disruptive to the traditional humanist artist biography. It is unsurprising, then, that recent film protagonists within the more traditional bio-pic framework found Warhol a figure that needed to be contained, neutralised, discredited, and even shot. Mainstream cinematic narrative has added little to the conventions of the artist biography since the Renaissance. Renaissance painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari appropriated the Petrarchian edifying "Great Lives" model to ennoble and sanitise the often problematic and distasteful personalities who populated the Italian art world. This approach prevailed over the next several hundred years, and was expanded upon by the intellectual figures of the Romantic period (who were very aware of Vasari's work). The Romantics contributed to the profile of a proper artist the following traits: misunderstood intellectual fury, dark psychological depths, and flouting of social convention. The bio-pic genre, especially as it relates to biographies of artists, also lauds humanistic "greatness" as its standard of significance. The bio-pic absolutely relies on a strong central figure, who can be shown in about two hours to have some substantial educational value, worthy of the expense of the film-makers and the attention of the viewer. In the mid-1990s, not long after his unexpected death in 1987, a character called "Andy Warhol" appeared in supporting roles in a number of feature films. The Doors (1991), Basquiat (1996), and I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) all feature an Andy Warhol character grounded squarely in various popular myths. All of the three 90s feature films which include Warhol in a substantial speaking role explicitly contrast him against another artist-figure. This other artist is presented as somehow preferable to Warhol, whether in conviction, authenticity, or validity of vision. The artist in question, Basquiat/Morrison/Solanas, predictably serves as the film-makers' lens through which the past is refracted (though more problematically in the case of Solanas). Warhol is outward sign of Basquiat's slide, the danger of fame-mongering for Morrison, and Valerie Solanas's misogynist nemesis. In each case, the more valorised figure is at first twinned with Warhol when drawn into his orbit. Eventually, the film's narrative contrasts the main subject against what the diegetic Warhol represents. In each case, Warhol becomes a metonymic representation of a larger organising factor: the economic/personality-driven entertainment industry, phallocentric hegemony, art's dead end, etc. The demonisation of Warhol in recent bio-pics is a good starting point for examining how his image is being interpreted by the mainstream media. It is clear that in this particular forum, Warhol's impact is understood only negatively. The purpose of this study will be to demonstrate how uncomfortable the creative arts world in general, and narrative film-making in particular, is with the "empty" legacy of Warhol and his Factory, and how the reactions against it illustrate a fear of Warhol's anti-humanist, subject-less project. It is fascinating that in the feature films, Warhol appears solely as a character in other people's stories rather than as the focus of biographical treatment. Warhol's very conscious emptying-out project has made nearly impossible any effort to deal with him and his legacy in any traditional narrative manner. Warhol's public persona -- simple, boring, derivative, and unheroic -- is directly at odds with the conventional "artist-hero" subjects necessary to the bio pic genre. This type is seen most typically in the old potboilers The Agony and the Extasy, about Michelangelo, and Lust for Life, about Van Gogh, as well as the more recent Artemisia about Artemisia Gentileschi. The very fact of Andy's posthumous film career fits neatly into his performative œuvre as a whole, and is easily interpreted as an extension of his life-long project. Warhol's entire self-imaging stratagem steadfastly affirmed that there is no center to illuminate -- no "real" Andy Warhol behind the persona. Warhol constantly disavowed any "meaning" beyond the surface of his art works, and ascribed it no value beyond market price. He preferred methods and forms (advertising, silk-screening, and film-making) that were easy for his Factory workers to execute and endlessly duplicate after his vague orders. Further, he ascribed no importance to his own bodily shell as "artist Andy Warhol". In an act of supreme self-branding, Warhol sent actors to impersonate him at lectures (most famously at University of Utah, who demanded he return the lecture fee), since he was only a packaged, reproducible product himself. In Warhol's art, there is no hand-made integrity, no originality, no agonised genius in a garret. He displays none of the traits that traditionally have allowed artists to be called geniuses. Warhol's studio's automation, the laying bare of the cheapest and slickest aspects of the culture industry, has long been the most feared facet of Warhol's artistic legacy. It is beside the point to argue that Warhol's meaninglessness is thematised to the degree that it has meaning. Warhol's erasure of all humanistic "aura" clearly remains threatening to a great number of artists, who rely heavily on such artistic stereotypes. Basquiat In 1996's Basquiat, painter/director Julian Schnabel used the dead painter as a proxy for telling his "I was there" version of the 80s New York art scene. In Schnabel's rather heavy-handed morality tale, young African-American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat's meteoric burn-out career is treated as a metaphor for the 80s art world as a whole. Schnabel clearly knows his Vasari. His film's scenario is a barely modified adaptation of humanist/romantic artist mythology. Traces of Vasari's tale of Cimabue's discovery of Giotto, as well as Van Gogh's various misunderstood artist scenarios are laboriously played out. In fact, the first words in the film invoke the Van Gogh cliché, foregrounding Schnabel's myth-making impulse. They are art critic Rene Ricard's, speaking over Basquiat waking up in a cardboard box in Central Park: "everyone wants to get on the Van Gogh boat. ... No one wants to be part of a generation that ignores another Van Gogh, ... When you first see a new picture, you have to be very careful. You might be staring at Van Gogh's ear." This quote sets the tone for Basquiat's art world experience narrative, trotting out every single Van Gogh-inspired legend (with heroin abuse standing in for the cut-off ear) to apply to Basquiat. In fact, the film veritably thematises Romantic cliché. The film's main project is the mythologisation of Jean-Michel and by extension Schnabel. However, by foregrounding the Van Gogh/Basquiat connection in such self-conscious terms, it seems the viewer is supposed to find it "ironic". (The irony is really that this po-mo window dressing is otherwise deeply at odds with the rest of the film's message.) The film suggests that Basquiat is both worthy of the allusion to the great humanistic tradition, and that his special case ("the first great black painter") changes all the rules and makes all clichés inapplicable. Schnabel's art, which is usually described as "Neo-Abstract Expressionist", and particularly his market value, relies heavily on the aura created by previous artists in the macho heroic mold. His paintings take up Pollock's "all over" effect but with de Kooning's jauntier color. He also fastens found objects, most famously broken plates, in a pastiche of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Like Warhol, Schnabel often borrows recognisable motifs. However, instead of advertising and popular culture, Schnabel's come from a more elevated tradition; Old Master paintings appropriated from "legitimate" art history. Needless to say, Julian Schnabel himself has much invested in reaffirming the artist-genius myth that is threatening to be deconstructed by a good number of art critics and historians. Schnabel's agenda is specifically art historical, though no less political. Schnabel, through Basquiat, restores the artist to his proper place as individual creator challenging the outmoded conventions of established art. Warhol, portrayed as the quintessential post-modern artist, represents all that has gone wrong in the art world: superficiality, mass production, commodification, popular culture influence, and the erasure of art history and deep significance. In spite of the film's self-consciousness about the phoniness of the gallery scene, Basquiat's lionisation by it validates a retrograde concept of "pure" artist's vision. Schnabel is attacking what he sees as the deadening effect of post-modernism that threatens Schnabel's own place in art history. Basquiat's escalating drug problem and alliance late in the film with Warhol signals that he has followed the wrong direction, that he is hitting a dead end. The character Milo (Gary Oldman), the Schnabel manqué, sets up the contrast to illustrate Basquiat's slide. Milo is aligned with all that is exemplary in establishment virtues of hearth and home (doting fatherhood, settled domesticity, good living). The wholesome hand-made integrity of Milo/Schnabel's art, in line with traditional definitions of artistic greatness, is deeply at odds with the affected commercialism of Warhol's work. Schnabel's artistic influences show up clearly in his very marked progressive view of art history and clearly named privileged pantheon. In the film, Schnabel is at pains to insert Basquiat and himself into this tradition. The very first scene of the film sees Jean-Michel as a child with his mother at the MOMA, where she is in tears in front of Picasso's Guernica. In the narrative, this is quickly followed by Ricard's Van Gogh quote above. As an adult, Jean-Michel enacts Rauschenberg's edict, to "narrow the gap between art and life". This is illustrated by Jean-Michel not restricting his artistic output to work on canvas in a studio. He graffitis walls, signs table tops à la Rauschenberg, and makes designs on a diner countertop in maple syrup. Later, Jean-Michel is shown painting in his studio walking around the canvas on the floor, in an all-over technique, mirroring the familiar Hans Namuth film of Jackson Pollock. Aligning Jean-Michel with the pre-Warhol, and especially Abstract Expressionist artists, positions Basquiat and Schnabel together against the "dead end" of Warhol's version of Pop. Basquiat and the director have inherited the "right" kind of art, and will be the progenitors of the next generation. Warhol as a "dead end" leads to a discussion of the relationship between artists' procreative sexuality and their art. In the film, Warhol is assumed to be asexual (rather than homosexual), and this lack of virility is clearly linked to the sterility, transitoriness, and barrenness of his art. Schnabel/Milo and Basquiat, in their marked heterosexuality, are the "fathers" of the next generation. In Basquiat's collaboration with Warhol, even Andy understands his own impotence. Warhol says, "I can't teach you anything, you're a natural, are you kidding me?", and most importantly, "you paint out everything I do, Jean-Michel". By privileging Jean-Michel's art (and his own) over Warhol's, Schnabel is clearly trying to paint out the mutation of the Warholisation of art, and paint in his own art historical eugenics. The Doors In a less substantial role but in a similar vein, Warhol also appears briefly in Oliver Stone's 1991 The Doors, as part of a brief "rising fame" montage of New York incidents. Like Schnabel, Stone has a lot to lose from investment in Warhol's spiritual and aesthetic emptiness. Though brief, Warhol's appearance in the film, like in Basquiat, serves as a cautionary tale for its hero. The contrast made between the vacuous Factory crowd and the "authentic" Doors presages the dominant trope for the Warhol character that Schnabel would expand upon later. The Factory sequence dramatises the glamour and seductiveness of the hollow side of fame that may lead Morrison off his spiritual-quest path. The Native American shaman who Jim sees at pivotal points in his life appears at the Factory, warning him not to take the wrong path represented by Warhol. The Doors are at a pivotal moment, the onset of fame, and must act carefully or risk ending up as meaningless as Warhol. Stone's chronicling of the 60s relies heavily on what could be called the humanist ideal of the power of the individual to effect change, raise consciousness, and open minds. Via Stone's simple reductiveness, Warhol represents here the wrong kind of counter-culture, the anti-hippie. By emulating Warhol, the Doors follow the wrong shaman. To Stone, Warhol's superficiality represents all that is dangerous about celebrity and entertainment: the empty, mind-destroying cocaine high of the masses. I Shot Andy Warhol The film I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) problematises the idea put forth in the other films of Warhol as artistic anti-Christ, simply because the film's subject is much more difficult to heroise, and like Warhol does not fit snugly into bio-pic conventions. Like Basquiat, the film also takes the point of view of a protagonist at the edge of Warhol's sphere of influence, here radical feminist and S.C.U.M. (the Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto scribe Valerie Solanas, in order to criticise what Warhol represents. Unlike the previous films, here Warhol's character is central to the narrative. Although Warhol clearly represents something very negative to the Solanas character, the film never fully endorses its subject's point of view. That Warhol deserved and needed to be shot for any reason beyond Solanas's personal demons is never established. Perhaps this ambivalence is a flaw of the film, but it is also telling about the problematic legacies of feminism and Pop, two movements that have led to challenges of the hero-artist ideal. In this film, the relationship between Warhol and the main protagonist is extremely complex. Andy and his crowd are presented as clearly odious. Though Valerie comes off as more interesting and sympathetic, she is also still clearly an unhinged oddball spewing specious ideology. Within the film, Valerie's attraction to the Factory scene seems to stem from something her friend, transvestite Candy Darling, says: "if anyone can make you a star, Andy Warhol can". Valerie desperately wants attention for her radicalism (and likely for other psychological reasons, which make radicalism attractive to her, as well), and sees Andy's power for "star-making", especially among the more marginal of society, as something from which she can profit. Valerie's mistake seems to be in confusing the artistic avant-garde with the politically radical. Valerie finds kinship in Warhol's androgyny and lack of enthusiasm for sex, but does not realise immediately that Andy is interested in her play Up Your Ass primarily for its titillation and shock value, and is entirely uninterested in it from a content standpoint. The content/emptiness conflict in Valerie and Andy's "artistic visions" becomes one of the major thematics in the film. Though like Solanas, he finds community with margin-dwellers, Andy is portrayed as far too implicated in and dependent on the so-called culture industry in order to be "Andy Warhol -- Superstar". Andy's interest in the low-life that Valerie represents is, of course, wholly superficial, which enrages her. She sees no worthy theoretical position in the banal contentlessness of Andy's circle. Valerie's manifesto and dramatic works have almost an excess of content. They work to kick people in the balls to get them to open their eyes and see the appalling conditions around them. The Warhol here, like in The Doors, wants people to see empty banality, but has no interest in effecting change. Valerie's play, as read simultaneously in the lesbian coffee shop and at Andy's studio, dramatises this divergence. When Warhol and crowd read the script with dull inflection, inert on the couch, one can imagine the very words being put to use in a Warhol film. When Valerie and friends perform those same words, the passionate engagement and deep meaningfulness -- at least to Valerie -- capture her urgent commitment to her ideas. As Valerie gets more desperate to disseminate her ideas, and thus begins to further alienate the Factory crowd, she starts to see Andy as in fact the bodily symbol of the "man" she wants cut up. Not only does he represent the patriarch of the art world who has dismissed her and has invalidated her vision, but also more broadly the hierarchy and deep structure of Andy's world parallels the consumeristic and image-driven society at large. If Valerie wants to live with integrity within her own code, the "man" must be deposed. On top of the personal gratification she would receive in this act, Solanas would also finally find a world-wide audience for her views. Now we can understand why, when asked by the press why she shot Andy, Valerie tells them "he had too much control over my life." Unhappily, instead of women rising up against their male oppressors to take up their rightful place of superiority, Solanas gets labeled a "lunatic" by the same media and larger establishment which (in this film) proclaim Warhol a genius. Solanas dissolves into a bit-player in the Andy Warhol story. One of the major interests of this film is that it excerpts a player from the limits of that "master narrative" story and allows them their own subjecthood. I Shot Andy Warhol, with its assertive quotational title, seems to want to reinscribe subjecthood to one of the most truly radical of Andy's superstars, reclaiming the value of Valerie's polemics from the emptiness of her anecdotal role in Warhol's biography. Though Valerie clearly sees Andy as her nemesis, the film constructs him as a boring, ineffectual, self-absorbed effete. The great weakness of the film is that their conflict begins to look like a midget wrestling contest. Since both are competing for higher freakdom, the broader implications of either of their projects are only rarely glimpsed. It should be clear by now that for so many, fictional Warhol is not just a problematic figure, but nearly a monstrous one. The film-makers clearly show what elements of Warhol's representative strategy they find so threatening. Schnabel and Stone have the most to lose in the replacement of their value systems (genius investment and 60s macho spirituality) by what they perceive as postmodern de-centredness, and therefore need to attack that threat the most forcefully. Less conservatively, for Harron, Warhol's Pop objectification of everyone, including women, seems to threaten women's hard-won subjectivity through feminism. Warhol, Morrison, Basquiat and Solanas were all artists who played heavily on their roles as outsiders to mainstream society. These films build the film-makers' soapbox on the "right" way to be alienated, bourgeois-hating, and rebellious, and the films assume a sympathetic viewing audience. Even though the interest in Warhol and his flashy milieu probably got at least two of these films made in the first place, it seems clear that even the more independently-minded film establishment would rather align themselves with the romanticised artist bio-pic subject than the black hole they fear Warhol personifies. Perhaps the character Andy Warhol is put to most appropriate use when he is only glimpsed, such as in the films Death Becomes Her, where he appears as one of the party guests for people who have taken the magic potion to live forever, and as part of the 70s glam wallpaper in 54. This kind of "product placement" use of Warhol most succinctly encapsulates the vacant banality he espoused. In these films, Warhol is unburdened by other artists' attempts to fill him up with meaning. Warhol is taken at his word. His easily recognisable and reproducible bodily shell is hollow and superficial, just as he said it was. Warhol, Morrison, Basquiat and Solanas were all artists who played heavily on their roles as outsiders to mainstream society. These films build the film-makers' soapbox on the "right" way to be alienated, bourgeois-hating, and rebellious, and the films assume a sympathetic viewing audience. Even though the interest in Warhol and his flashy milieu probably got at least two of these films made in the first place, it seems clear that even the more independently-minded film establishment would rather align themselves with the romanticised artist bio-pic subject than the black hole they fear Warhol personifies. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Julie Turnock. "Painting Out Pop: "Andy Warhol" as a Character in 90s Films." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/warhol.php>. Chicago style: Julie Turnock, "Painting Out Pop: "Andy Warhol" as a Character in 90s Films," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 4 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/warhol.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Julie Turnock. (1999) Painting out pop: "Andy Warhol" as a character in 90s films. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/warhol.php> ([your date of access]).

Despite numerous critics describing him as an auteur (i.e. a film-maker who ‘does’ everything and fulfils every production role [Bordwell and Thompson 37] and/or with a signature “world-view” detectable in his/her work [Caughie 10]), Rolf de Heer appears to have declined primary authorship of Dance Me to My Song (1997), his seventh in an oeuvre of twelve feature films. Indeed, the opening credits do not mention his name at all: it is only with the closing credits that the audience learns de Heer has directed the film. Rather, as the film commences, the viewer is informed by the titles that it is “A film by Heather Rose”, thus suggesting that the work is her singular creation. Direct and uncompromising, with its unflattering shots of the lead actor and writer (Heather Rose Slattery, a young woman born with cerebral palsy), the film may be read as a courageous self-portrait which finds the grace, humanity and humour trapped inside Rose’s twisted body. Alternatively, it may be read as yet another example of de Heer’s signature interest in foregrounding a world view which gives voice to marginalised characters such as the disabled or the disadvantaged. For example, the developmentally retarded eponyme of Bad Boy Bubby (1993) is eventually able to make art as a singer in a band and succeeds in creating a happy family with a wife and two kids. The ‘mute’ girl in The Quiet Room (1996) makes herself heard by her squabbling parents through her persistent activism. In Ten Canoes (2006) the Indigenous Australians cast themselves according to kinship ties, not according to the director’s choosing, and tell their story in their own uncolonised language. A cursory glance at the films of Rolf de Heer suggests he is overtly interested in conveying to the audience the often overlooked agency of his unlikely protagonists. In the ultra-competitive world of professional film-making it is rare to see primary authorship ceded by a director so generously. However, the allocation of authorship to a member of a marginalized population re-invigorates questions prompted by Andy Medhurst regarding a film’s “authorship test” (198) and its relationship to a subaltern community wherein he writes that “a biographical approach has more political justification if the project being undertaken is one concerned with the cultural history of a marginalized group” (202-3). Just as films by gay authors about gay characters may have greater credibility, as Medhurst posits, one might wonder would a film by a person with a disability about a character with the same disability be better received? Enabling authorship by an unknown, crippled woman such as Rose rather than a famous, able-bodied male such as de Heer may be cynically regarded as good (show) business in that it is politically correct. This essay therefore asks if the appellation “A film by Heather Rose” is appropriate for Dance Me to My Song. Whose agency in telling the story (or ‘doing’ the film-making), the able bodied Rolf de Heer or the disabled Heather Rose, is reflected in this cinematic production? In other words, whose voice is enabled when an audience receives this film? In attempting to answer these questions it is inevitable that Paul Darke’s concept of the “normality drama” (181) is referred to and questioned, as I argue that Dance Me to My Song makes groundbreaking departures from the conventions of the typical disability narrative. Heather Rose as Auteur Rose plays the film’s heroine, Julia, who like herself has cerebral palsy, a group of non-progressive, chronic disorders resulting from changes produced in the brain during the prenatal stages of life. Although severely affected physically, Rose suffered no intellectual impairment and had acted in Rolf de Heer’s cult hit Bad Boy Bubby five years before, a confidence-building experience that grew into an ongoing fascination with the filmmaking process. Subsequently, working with co-writer Frederick Stahl, she devised the scenario for this film, writing the lead role for herself and then proactively bringing it to de Heer’s attention. Rose wrote of de Heer’s deliberate lack of involvement in the script-writing process: “Rolf didn’t even want to read what we’d done so far, saying he didn’t want to interfere with our process” (de Heer, “Production Notes”). In 2002, aged 36, Rose died and Stahl reports in her obituary an excerpt from her diary: People see me as a person who has to be controlled. But let me tell you something, people. I am not! And I am going to make something real special of my life! I am going to go out there and grab life with both hands!!! I am going to make the most sexy and honest film about disability that has ever been made!! (Stahl, “Standing Room Only”) This proclamation of her ability and ambition in screen-writing is indicative of Rose’s desire to do. In a guest lecture Rose gave further insights into the active intent in writing Dance Me to My Song: I wanted to create a screenplay, but not just another soppy disability film, I wanted to make a hot sexy film, which showed the real world … The message I wanted to convey to an audience was “As people with disabilities, we have the same feelings and desires as others”. (Rose, “ISAAC 2000 Conference Presentation”) Rose went on to explain her strategy for winning over director de Heer: “Rolf was not sure about committing to the movie; I had to pester him really. I decided to invite him to my birthday party. It took a few drinks, but I got him to agree to be the director” (ibid) and with this revelation of her tactical approach her film-making agency is further evidenced. Rose’s proactive innovation is not just evident in her successfully approaching de Heer. Her screenplay serves as a radical exception to films featuring disabled persons, which, according to Paul Darke in 1998, typically involve the disabled protagonist struggling to triumph over the limitations imposed by their disability in their ‘admirable’ attempts to normalize. Such normality dramas are usually characterized by two generic themes: first, that the state of abnormality is nothing other than tragic because of its medical implications; and, second, that the struggle for normality, or some semblance of it in normalization – as represented in the film by the other characters – is unquestionably right owing to its axiomatic supremacy. (187) Darke argues that the so-called normality drama is “unambiguously a negation of ascribing any real social or individual value to the impaired or abnormal” (196), and that such dramas function to reinforce the able-bodied audience’s self image of normality and the notion of the disabled as the inferior Other. Able-bodied characters are typically portrayed positively in the normality drama: “A normality as represented in the decency and support of those characters who exist around, and for, the impaired central character. Thus many of the disabled characters in such narratives are bitter, frustrated and unfulfilled and either antisocial or asocial” (193). Darke then identifies The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980) and Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989) as archetypal films of this genre. Even in films in which seemingly positive images of the disabled are featured, the protagonist is still to be regarded as the abnormal Other, because in comparison to the other characters within that narrative the impaired character is still a comparatively second-class citizen in the world of the film. My Left Foot is, as always, a prime example: Christy Brown may well be a writer, relatively wealthy and happy, but he is not seen as sexual in any way (194). However, Dance Me to My Song defies such generic restrictions: Julia’s temperament is upbeat and cheerful and her disability, rather than appearing tragic, is made to look healthy, not “second class”, in comparison with her physically attractive, able-bodied but deeply unhappy carer, Madelaine (Joey Kennedy). Within the first few minutes of the film we see Madelaine dissatisfied as she stands, inspecting her healthy, toned and naked body in the bathroom mirror, contrasted with vision of Julia’s twisted form, prostrate, pale and naked on the bed. Yet, in due course, it is the able-bodied girl who is shown to be insecure and lacking in character. Madelaine steals Julia’s money and calls her “spastic”. Foul-mouthed and short-tempered, Madelaine perversely positions Julia in her wheelchair to force her to watch as she has perfunctory sex with her latest boyfriend. Madelaine even masquerades as Julia, commandeering her voice synthesizer to give a fraudulently positive account of her on-the-job performance to the employment agency she works for. Madelaine’s “axiomatic supremacy” is thoroughly undermined and in the most striking contrast to the typical normality drama, Julia is unashamedly sexual: she is no Christy Brown. The affective juxtaposition of these two different personalities stems from the internal nature of Madelaine’s problems compared to the external nature of Julia’s problems. Madelaine has an emotional disability rather than a physical disability and several scenes in the film show her reduced to helpless tears. Then one day when Madelaine has left her to her own devices, Julia defiantly wheels herself outside and bumps into - almost literally - handsome, able-bodied Eddie (John Brumpton). Cheerfully determined, Julia wins him over and a lasting friendship is formed. Having seen the joy that sex brings to Madelaine, Julia also wants carnal fulfilment so she telephones Eddie and arranges a date. When Eddie arrives, he reads the text on her voice machine’s screen containing the title line to the film ‘Dance me to my song’ and they share a tender moment. Eddie’s gentleness as he dances Julia to her song (“Kizugu” written by Bernard Huber and John Laidler, as performed by Okapi Guitars) is simultaneously contrasted with the near-date-rapes Madelaine endures in her casual relationships. The conflict between Madeline and Julia is such that it prompts Albert Moran and Errol Vieth to categorize the film as “women’s melodrama”: Dance Me to My Song clearly belongs to the genre of the romance. However, it is also important to recognize it under the mantle of the women’s melodrama … because it has to do with a woman’s feelings and suffering, not so much because of the flow of circumstance but rather because of the wickedness and malevolence of another woman who is her enemy and rival. (198-9) Melodrama is a genre that frequently resorts to depicting disability in which a person condemned by society as disabled struggles to succeed in love: some prime examples include An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey, 1957) involving a paraplegic woman, and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) in which a strong-spirited but mute woman achieves love. The more conventional Hollywood romances typically involve attractive, able-bodied characters. In Dance Me to My Song the melodramatic conflict between the two remarkably different women at first seems dominated by Madelaine, who states: “I know I’m good looking, good in bed ... better off than you, you poor thing” in a stream-of-consciousness delivery in which Julia is constructed as listener rather than converser. Julia is further reduced to the status of sub-human as Madelaine says: “I wish you could eat like a normal person instead of a bloody animal” and her erstwhile boyfriend Trevor says: “She looks like a fuckin’ insect.” Even the benevolent Eddie says: “I don’t like leaving you alone but I guess you’re used to it.” To this the defiant Julia replies; “Please don’t talk about me in front of me like I’m an animal or not there at all.” Eddie is suitably chastised and when he treats her to an over-priced ice-cream the shop assistant says “Poor little thing … She’ll enjoy this, won’t she?” Julia smiles, types the words “Fuck me!”, and promptly drops the ice-cream on the floor. Eddie laughs supportively. “I’ll just get her another one,” says the flustered shop assistant, “and then get her out of here, please!” With striking eloquence, Julia wheels herself out of the shop, her voice machine announcing “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me”, as she departs exultantly. With this bold statement of independence and defiance in the face of patronising condescension, the audience sees Rose’s burgeoning strength of character and agency reflected in the onscreen character she has created. Dance Me to My Song and the films mentioned above are, however, rare exceptions in the many that dare represent disability on the screen at all, compliant as the majority are with Darke’s expectations of the normality drama. Significantly, the usual medical-model nexus in many normality films is ignored in Rose’s screenplay: no medication, hospitals or white laboratory coats are to be seen in Julia’s world. Finally, as I have described elsewhere, Julia is shown joyfully dancing in her wheelchair with Eddie while Madelaine proves her physical inferiority with a ‘dance’ of frustration around her broken-down car (see Starrs, "Dance"). In Rose’s authorial vision, audience’s expectations of yet another film of the normality drama genre are subverted as the disabled protagonist proves superior to her ‘normal’ adversary in their melodramatic rivalry for the sexual favours of an able-bodied love-interest. Rolf de Heer as Auteur De Heer does not like to dwell on the topic of auteurism: in an interview in 2007 he somewhat impatiently states: I don’t go in much for that sort of analysis that in the end is terminology. … Look, I write the damn things, and direct them, and I don’t completely produce them anymore – there are other people. If that makes me an auteur in other people’s terminologies, then fine. (Starrs, "Sounds" 20) De Heer has been described as a “remarkably non-egotistical filmmaker” (Davis “Working together”) which is possibly why he handed ownership of this film to Rose. Of the writer/actor who plied him with drink so he would agree to back her script, de Heer states: It is impossible to overstate the courage of the performance that you see on the screen. … Heather somehow found the means to respond on cue, to maintain the concentration, to move in the desired direction, all the myriad of acting fundamentals that we take for granted as normal things to do in our normal lives. (“Production NHotes”) De Heer’s willingness to shift authorship from director to writer/actor is representative of this film’s groundbreaking promotion of the potential for agency within disability. Rather than being passive and suffering, Rose is able to ‘do.’ As the lead actor she is central to the narrative. As the principle writer she is central to the film’s production. And she does both. But in conflict with this auteurial intent is the temptation to describe Dance Me to My Song as an autobiographical documentary, since it is Rose herself, with her unique and obvious physical handicap, playing the film’s heroine, Julia. In interview, however, De Heer apparently disagrees with this interpretation: Rolf de Heer is quick to point out, though, that the film is not a biography.“Not at all; only in the sense that writers use material from their own lives.Madelaine is merely the collection of the worst qualities of the worst carers Heather’s ever had.” Dance Me to My Song could be seen as a dramatised documentary, since it is Rose herself playing Julia, and her physical or surface life is so intense and she is so obviously handicapped. While he understands that response, de Heer draws a comparison with the first films that used black actors instead of white actors in blackface. “I don’t know how it felt emotionally to an audience, I wasn’t there, but I think that is the equivalent”. (Urban) An example of an actor wearing “black-face” to portray a cerebral palsy victim might well be Gus Trikonis’s 1980 film Touched By Love. In this, the disabled girl is unconvincingly played by the pretty, able-bodied actress Diane Lane. The true nature of the character’s disability is hidden and cosmeticized to Hollywood expectations. Compared to that inauthentic film, Rose’s screenwriting and performance in Dance Me to My Song is a self-penned fiction couched in unmediated reality and certainly warrants authorial recognition. Despite his unselfish credit-giving, de Heer’s direction of this remarkable film is nevertheless detectable. His auteur signature is especially evident in his technological employment of sound as I have argued elsewhere (see Starrs, "Awoval"). The first distinctly de Heer influence is the use of a binaural recording device - similar to that used in Bad Boy Bubby (1993) - to convey to the audience the laboured nature of Julia’s breathing and to subjectively align the audience with her point of view. This apparatus provides a disturbing sound bed that is part wheezing, part grunting. There is no escaping Julia’s physically unusual life, from her reliance on others for food, toilet and showering, to the half-strangled sounds emanating from her ineffectual larynx. But de Heer insists that Julia does speak, like Stephen Hawkings, via her Epson RealVoice computerized voice synthesizer, and thus Julia manages to retain her dignity. De Heer has her play this machine like a musical instrument, its neatly modulated feminine tones immediately prompting empathy. Rose Capp notes de Heer’s preoccupation with finding a voice for those minority groups within the population who struggle to be heard, stating: de Heer has been equally consistent in exploring the communicative difficulties underpinning troubled relationships. From the mute young protagonist of The Quiet Room to the aphasic heroine of Dance Me to My Song, De Heer’s films are frequently preoccupied with the profound inadequacy or outright failure of language as a means of communication (21). Certainly, the importance to Julia of her only means of communication, her voice synthesizer, is stressed by de Heer throughout the film. Everybody around her has, to varying degrees, problems in hearing correctly or understanding both what and how Julia communicates with her alien mode of conversing, and she is frequently asked to repeat herself. Even the well-meaning Eddie says: “I don’t know what the machine is trying to say”. But it is ultimately via her voice synthesizer that Julia expresses her indomitable character. When first she meets Eddie, she types: “Please put my voice machine on my chair, STUPID.” She proudly declares ownership of a condom found in the bathroom with “It’s mine!” The callous Madelaine soon realizes Julia’s strength is in her voice machine and withholds access to the device as punishment for if she takes it away then Julia is less demanding for the self-centred carer. Indeed, the film which starts off portraying the physical superiority of Madelaine soon shows us that the carer’s life, for all her able-bodied, free-love ways, is far more miserable than Julia’s. As de Heer has done in many of his other films, a voice has been given to those who might otherwise not be heard through significant decision making in direction. In Rose’s case, this is achieved most obviously via her electric voice synthesizer. I have also suggested elsewhere (see Starrs, "Dance") that de Heer has helped find a second voice for Rose via the language of dance, and in doing so has expanded the audience’s understandings of quality of life for the disabled, as per Mike Oliver’s social model of disability, rather than the more usual medical model of disability. Empowered by her act of courage with Eddie, Julia sacks her uncaring ‘carer’ and the film ends optimistically with Julia and her new man dancing on the front porch. By picturing the couple in long shot and from above, Julia’s joyous dance of triumph is depicted as ordinary, normal and not deserving of close examination. This happy ending is intercut with a shot of Madeline and her broken down car, performing her own frustrated dance and this further emphasizes that she was unable to ‘dance’ (i.e. communicate and compete) with Julia. The disabled performer such as Rose, whether deliberately appropriating a role or passively accepting it, usually struggles to placate two contrasting realities: (s)he is at once invisible in the public world of interhuman relations and simultaneously hyper-visible due to physical Otherness and subsequent instantaneous typecasting. But by the end of Dance Me to My Song, Rose and de Heer have subverted this notion of the disabled performer grappling with the dual roles of invisible victim and hyper-visible victim by depicting Julia as socially and physically adept. She ‘wins the guy’ and dances her victory as de Heer’s inspirational camera looks down at her success like an omniscient and pleased god. Film academic Vivian Sobchack writes of the phenomenology of dance choreography for the disabled and her own experience of waltzing with the maker of her prosthetic leg, Steve, with the comment: “for the moment I did displace focus on my bodily immanence to the transcendent ensemble of our movement and I really began to waltz” (65). It is easy to imagine Rose’s own, similar feeling of bodily transcendence in the closing shot of Dance Me to My Song as she shows she can ‘dance’ better than her able-bodied rival, content as she is with her self-identity. Conclusion: Validation of the Auteurial OtherRolf de Heer was a well-known film-maker by the time he directed Dance Me to My Song. His films Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and The Quiet Room (1996) had both screened at the Cannes International Film Festival. He was rapidly developing a reputation for non-mainstream representations of marginalised, subaltern populations, a cinematic trajectory that was to be further consolidated by later films privileging the voice of Indigenous Peoples in The Tracker (2002) and Ten Canoes (2006), the latter winning the Special Jury prize at Cannes. His films often feature unlikely protagonists or as Liz Ferrier writes, are “characterised by vulnerable bodies … feminised … none of whom embody hegemonic masculinity” (65): they are the opposite of Hollywood’s hyper-masculine, hard-bodied, controlling heroes. With a nascent politically correct worldview proving popular, de Heer may have considered the assigning of authorship to Rose a marketable idea, her being representative of a marginalized group, which as Andy Medhurst might argue, may be more politically justifiable, as it apparently is with films of gay authorship. However, it must be emphasized that there is no evidence that de Heer’s reticence about claiming authorship of Dance Me to My Song is motivated by pecuniary interests, nor does he seem to have been trying to distance himself from the project through embarrassment or dissatisfaction with the film or its relatively unknown writer/actor. Rather, he seems to be giving credit for authorship where credit is due, for as a result of Rose’s tenacity and agency this film is, in two ways, her creative success. Firstly, it is a rare exception to the disability film genre defined by Paul Darke as the “normality drama” because in the film’s diegesis, Julia is shown triumphing not simply over the limitations of her disability, but over her able-bodied rival in love as well: she ‘dances’ better than the ‘normal’ Madelaine. Secondly, in her gaining possession of the primary credits, and the mantle of the film’s primary author, Rose is shown triumphing over other aspiring able-bodied film-makers in the notoriously competitive film-making industry. Despite being an unpublished and unknown author, the label “A film by Heather Rose” is, I believe, a deserved coup for the woman who set out to make “the most sexy and honest film about disability ever made”. As with de Heer’s other films in which marginalised peoples are given voice, he demonstrates a desire not to subjugate the Other, but to validate and empower him/her. He both acknowledges their authorial voices and credits them as essential beings, and in enabling such subaltern populations to be heard, willingly cedes his privileged position as a successful, white, male, able-bodied film-maker. In the credits of this film he seems to be saying ‘I may be an auteur, but Heather Rose is a no less able auteur’. References Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. 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London and Portland: Frank Cass and Co., 2001. 57-78. Medhurst, Andy. “That Special Thrill: Brief Encounter, Homosexuality and Authorship.” Screen 32.2 (1991): 197-208. Moran, Albert, and Errol Veith. Film in Australia: An Introduction. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 2006. Oliver, Mike. Social Work with Disabled People. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1983. Rose Slattery, Heather. “ISAAC 2000 Conference Presentation.” Words+ n.d. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.words-plus.com/website/stories/isaac2000.htm›. Sobchack, Vivian. “‘Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs’ (A Phenomenological Meditation in Movements).” Topoi 24.1 (2005): 55-66. Stahl, Frederick. “Standing Room Only for a Thunderbolt in a Wheelchair,” Sydney Morning Herald 31 Oct. 2002. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/10/30/1035683471529.html›. Starrs, D. Bruno. “Sounds of Silence: An Interview with Rolf de Heer.” Metro 152 (2007): 18-21. ———. “An avowal of male lack: Sound in Rolf de Heer’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2003).” Metro 156 (2008): 148-153. ———. “Dance Me to My Song (Rolf de Heer 1997): The Story of a Disabled Dancer.” Proceedings Scopic Bodies Dance Studies Research Seminar Series 2007. Ed. Mark Harvey. University of Auckland, 2008 (in press). Urban, Andrew L. “Dance Me to My Song, Rolf de Heer, Australia.” Film Festivals 1988. 6 June 2008. ‹http://www.filmfestivals.com/cannes98/selofus9.htm›.