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"Sorfa, David"
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The Loves of a System
Miloš Forman began his career as a filmmaker at the Barrandov Studios in Prague with his first scripted film, Štěňata (Puppies, 1957), directed by Ivo Novák. Forman went on to direct his four most famous New Wave films at Barrandov: Konkurs (Audition, 1963), Černý Petr (Black Peter, 1963), Lásky jedné plavovlásky (Loves of a Blonde, 1965), and Hoří, má panenko (The Fireman’s Ball, 1967), before emigrating to the USA. Forman returned to Prague and to Barrandov to film Amadeus in the early 1980s, and the contrast between the high-budget historical spectacle of Amadeus and the gently ironic realism of his
Book Chapter
The Loves of a System: Miloš Forman and Barrandov
Miloš Forman began his career as a filmmaker at the Barrandov Studios in Prague in the 1960s and filmed Amadeus with Barrandov in the early 1980s. The contrast between the high-budget historical spectacle of Amadeus and the gently ironic realism of his 1960s films could not be more pronounced. During the 1960s, aside from its relationship with the young filmmakers of the New Wave, Barrandov supported an extraordinary range of films, from popular movies to historical epics. The situation at Barrandov after 1968 quickly changed and Forman decided not to return to Czechoslovakia. The films Forman made during the 1970s in the United States brought him a level of international fame and popularity that stands unrivaled in the history of Czech cinema but were a radical departure from the films he made in the 1960s. This change culminates with Amadeus and his return to Barrandov.Keywords: Miloš Forman; Barrandov Studios; existential revolution; realism; production historyMiloš Forman began his career as a filmmaker at the Barrandov Studios in Prague with his first scripted film, Štěňata (Puppies, 1957), directed by Ivo Novák. Forman went on to direct his four most famous New Wave films at Barrandov: Konkurs (Audition, 1963), Černy Petr (Black Peter, 1963), Lásky jedné plavovlásky (Loves of a Blonde, 1965), and Hoři, má panenko (The Fireman's Ball, 1967), before emigrating to the USA. Forman returned to Prague and to Barrandov to film Amadeus in the early 1980s, and the contrast between the high-budget historical spectacle of Amadeus and the gently ironic realism of his 1960s films could not be more pronounced. Here I will consider each of Forman's Barrandov films in turn to tease out developments in his filmmaking style. Since the films of the 1960s were mainly shot outside of the studios themselves, relying on small crews and largely amateur casts, my emphasis will be on the style and meaning of the films themselves rather than on production detail and history, but incorporating this when necessary.During the 1960s, aside from its relationship with the young filmmakers of the New Wave, Barrandov supported an extraordinary range of films from popular comedies like the pastiche Western Limonádový Joe aneb Koňská opera (Lemonade Joe, or The Horse Opera, 1964, dir. Oldřich Lipský) to historical epics such as Marketa Lazarová (1967, dir. František Vláčil).
Book Chapter
LAURA MULVEY
It would be difficult to argue that Laura Mulvey’s work over the past four decades presents a coherent philosophy in the sense of a developed and arguedWeltanschauung. Mulvey’s published work consists almost entirely of reviews and articles, many of which have been collected in the three books for which she is well known:Visual and Other Pleasures(1989),Fetishism and Curiosity(1996) andDeath 24x a Second(2006). The only single-topic book Mulvey has written is her shortCitizen Kanefor the BFI Film Classics series in 1992. Mulvey herself writes that she has “remained an ‘essayist’ and, …
Book Chapter
Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the director of a number of avant-garde films made in the 1970s and 1980s, made with Peter Wollen and Mark Lewis. Mulvey's interest in Hollywood cinema can be understood as part of a certain antagonistic approach that characterizes her relationship with popular culture. In an internal pamphlet on the history of the British Film Institute (BFI) Education Department, Mulvey writes that film criticism as practised in the BFI from the 1960s onwards moved away from \"concepts of value\" and \"turned to theories of semiotics and structuralism\" that validated the discussion of the low culture of Hollywood cinema through \"French ideas\". In \"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema\", Mulvey characterizes the viewer of cinema as being caught within the \"patriarchal order\" and, in accordance with a certain feminist identity politics, postulates an \"alienated subject\" that exists prior to the establishment of such an order.
Book Chapter
The Fetishism of Meaning: Disavowal in Kafka, Svankmajer and the Quay Brothers
According to Freud, fetishism is based on disavowal (Verleugnung): the possibility of believing two contradictory propositions to be true simultaneously. This thesis argues that the structure of the sign and of meaning more generally can be understood to function in exactly this way. The sign both is and is not that which it represents. Disavowal offers a theoretical explanation of the functioning of language, meaning and text based on a principle of the simultaneous existence of two contradictory propositions.The fetish is aligned with a series of concepts which, it is argued, have a similar contradictory structure: Sigmund Freud's unheimlich, Tzvetan Todorov's fantastic, Slavoj Žižek's real (incorporating Jacques Lacan's objet petit a and Alfred Hitchcock's McGuffin), Jacques Derrida's différance and Ferdinand de Saussure's sign. Theoretical underpinnings come from psychoanalysis, anthropology and Marxism. There is a consideration of the history of fetishism in philosophy and in film theory. Following the work of Derrida in Glas, an argument is made for the radical potential of the \"generalised fetish\", defined by disavowal.The thesis explores the action of fetishism in writing and film. Hair is used as one example of a symbolic object to show that an understanding of such a symbol is based on disavowal. The concept of fetishism is then used to explore the way in which the object is represented in the writings of Franz Kafka and the films of Jan Švankmajer and the Brothers Quay. These works provide complex representations of objects on a thematic level while the texts themselves function as just such fetish objects on a formal level. It is the self-reflexive interaction between these two levels that makes these texts exemplary.
Dissertation
