Recently added articles from symploke:

Editor's note.(Editorial)

Jan 01, 2007; Di Leo, Jeffrey R. ... The focus of this issue is the interplay between borders and cinema. While the concept of borders (and borderlessness) has been a recurring topos of many articles published in this journal over the years, and a good number of our contributors have done fine work on cinema, this is our ...

Walter Benjamin and the dispersion of cinema.(Critical essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Rutsky, R.L. ... Cinematic Movement Cinema, by definition, moves. But what is this movement written into cinematography? In what space--or time, for that matter--does cinematic movement occur? Where are its boundaries, its borders? These questions take on added urgency as cinema ...

Boundaries in Beloved.(Critical essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Miller, J. Hillis ... D'un part, il y a donc le dehors; d'autre part, le dedans; entre les deux, le caverneux. --Jacques Derrida, "Tympan" What is a boundary? A cascade of words related to "boundary" springs to mind, inundating it, in pell-mell disorder: zone, edge, margin, frontier, ...

The white screen circa 1900--on the moving image as potentiality of thought.(Critical essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Valiaho, Pasi ... Leonce Perret's 1912 film Le mystere des Roches de Kador presents one of the most beautiful shots in the early history of cinema: the female protagonist, Suzanne, shrinks away from a white screen filled with light in front of her and eventually faints (see Figure 1). In the film's story, ...

The divided self and the dark city: film noir and liminality.(Critical essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Palmer, R. Barton ... Borders and Borderers The American film noir is a cinematic tradition whose representations are thoroughly liminal. What I mean is that the protagonists of these films characteristically find themselves straddling the border between competing forms of identity, as they often ...

Bordersploitation: Hollywood border crossers and buddy cops.(Critical essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Fojas, Camilla ... Hollywood 1980s films are so distinctive that we can identify them immediately, partly for their aesthetic but mostly for their mood, for the reassuring tone of family-centered stories with clear moral lessons. These kinds of films provided reassuring dramas in the midst of cultural unrest ...

Border incidence.(Critical essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Conley, Tom ... In his informative Frontieres de France, true to a Gallic tradition that draws universal facts from local fields of inquiry, Daniel Nordman offers four or five reflections about the nature of a border. Once drawn, a border distinguishes extension--understood in the Cartesian tradition of ...

Satire as magnifying glass: crossing the us border in Bruce McDonald's Highway 61.(Critical essay)

Jan 01, 2007; McEwan, Paul ... For Canadians, the US border has always been a problematic one because, culturally at least, we haven't always been entirely sure where it is. To be fair, it has become much clearer in the past fifteen years or so, as Canadian social policy has taken a fairly abrupt turn toward the ...

Leaving home in three films by Walter Salles.('Foreign Land', 'Central Station', 'The Motorcycle Diaries')(Critical essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Sadlier, Darlene J. ... When Walter Salles began making feature films in the early 1990s, Brazilian cinema was atone of its lowest ebbs, occupying at one point less than 1% of the domestic marketplace. (1) Struggling in the 1980s, the industry was completely derailed by newly-elected President Fernando Collor de ...

Roads to nowhere: borders and belonging in Le Salaire de la peur.(Critical essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Nogueira, Claudia Barbosa ... Just as film (in its non-digital format) is literally a composite of separate and distinct cells which, through movement, take on the illusion of connectivity and sequence, the Americas are a conglomeration of differentiated, and differentiating, nation-cells which, through an imposition ...

Gendered border crossings: the films of division in divided Germany.(Critical essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Wolfgram, Mark A. ... This article uses the respective national cinemas of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the east and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the west to access the national discussion of Germany's division. I use cinema as a location for constructing a national narrative within which ...

Affirmation of the lost object: Peppermint Candy and the end of progress.(Critical essay)

Jan 01, 2007; McGowan, Todd ... Nation without History The interconnection of individual development with the evolution of a nation has served as a subject for cinema since the birth of the feature film. From D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Sergei Eisenstein's The Old and the New (1929) to ...

Romancing the Tao: how Ang Lee globalized ancient Chinese wisdom.(Critical essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Fairlamb, Horace L. ... <Pre> ... a kind of a dream of China, a China that probably neverexisted, except in my boyhood fantasies in Taiwan. --Ang Lee on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon </Pre> Can a traditional culture survive the modern world? Some sociologists and anthropologists have concluded ...

Death star, or how I learned to stop worrying and love globalization.(Critical essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Jorgensen, Darren ... In the original Star Wars series (1977-1983), the destruction of the Death Star takes place twice. (1) This battle station, made of metal and as big as a moon, is blown up by rebels in Star Wars (1977) only to be rebuilt in Return of the Jedi (1983), before being destroyed once again. It ...

The question of community in Deleuze and Guattari (II): after friendship (1).(general articles)(Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari)(Critical essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Goh, Irving ... The question of friendship is perhaps irresistible, if not inevitable, in any thinking of community. It is always tempting to understand friendship as the most amicable imminence or irreducible structure of community. It could be said that there is no denying the force of thinking which ...

Zoophilpsychosis: why animals are what's wrong with sentimentality.(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Menely, Tobias ... <Pre>Only the mind and thought of a sentimentalist could have foundexpression in such emotion-laden expressions as those about thefowl of the air which neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns. --Leo Baeck (1958) </Pre> There are few emotional imperatives in ...

The nightmare of health: metaphysics and ethics in the signification of disability.(Essay)

Jan 01, 2007; DeShong, Scott ... Signification and Possibility Snyder, Brueggeman, and Garland-Thompson consider disability "a fundamental human experience" as well as "the ubiquitous unspoken topic of contemporary culture" (2). This is accurately stated but oblique, as it is ability, more precisely, that is ...

Melancholic loss: reading Bedouin women's elegiac poetry.(Critical essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Al-Ghadeer, Moneera ... Melancholy from Europe to Arabia and Back Arabic poetry scholarship in English has always acknowledged and examined elegiac poetry but failed to give not only Bedouin poetry from the Arabian Peninsula but also Arab women's writing the recognition it deserves for contributing to ...

Frames and mirrors in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.(Critical essay)

Jan 01, 2007; Elahi, Babak ... Marjane Satrapi explains ill an interview in Bitch magazine that <Pre>Today, it's important more than ever that people know: what isthis "axis of evil"? You are completely reduced to a veryabstract notion. But the 70 million people [of Iran] are humanbeings, they ...

Edward W. Said's Legacy (1).(Conversations with Edward Said)(Book review)

Jan 01, 2007; Spanos, William V. ... In June 1994, Tariq Ali, the well-known British-Pakistani writer, filmmaker, and member of the New Left Review editorial board, recorded a number of conversations with Edward W. Said in Said's Riverside Drive apartment near Columbia University. Reprinted in this little book, they were ...