A list from the Kermode Uncut Blog
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
20.7.12
20.12.09
Disjecta: This week's links
Dan O'Bannon 1946-2009
Image: The theatrical poster for Ridley Scott's Alien (1979)
Image: The theatrical poster for Ridley Scott's Alien (1979)
Literature:
Samuel Beckett: HTML Giant on 'A Return to Beckett'Will Self: The New Yorker reviews Liver
Will Self: Upcoming January 2010 lecture on W. G. Sebald
George Steiner: Maya Jaggi interview with Steiner, first published in 2001
Patricia Highsmith: Jeanette Winterson on Highsmith in The New York Times
Music:
Jazz: A new website, One Down, One Up.Jazz: Blue Note at 70: Behind the Label.
Jazz: US House of Representatives honours Miles Davis' Kind of Blue
Jazz: My Top Five at 3:AM Magazine
Jazz: Critic Gary Giddins on 101 Ways to Get Into Jazz
Film:
Grace Kelly: Hitchcock star included among Philip French's Screen LegendsMichael Haneke: BFI Live: Michael Haneke in conversation
Dan O'Bannon 1946-2009: The Guardian on the late Alien screenwriter
Dan O'Bannon 1946-2009: Feuilleton pays tribute
Television:
The Simpsons: A perceptive critique of the successful animated series on its twentieth anniversaryOrson Welles: Revolutionary ideas for television to be realized?
William Shakespeare: David Tennant's performance in Hamlet to air in the UK on Boxing Day
Etc.
The Guardian: We Made This on the new Guardian iPhone applicationWill Self: On Christmas dinner
11.11.09
Gothic tradition in Alien and Blade Runner
Excerpts from Fred Botting's critical introduction
Fred Botting explores the gothic conventions in Ridley Scott's Alien:
In Alien (1979) other Gothic associations are brought to the fore. The wrecked alien spaceship and the bleak planet suggest the gloom, ruin and awful desolation of Gothic architecture and landscape. The coded message the spaceship transmits is not a distress signal, but a warning which goes unheeded by the human cargo ship that attends the call. Unaware of the dangers that their employers, another sinister and powerful corporation, have put them in, the crew are unwitting victims of their attempt to secure the power and profit of possessing such an efficient and utterly inhuman killing machine. The horror of the alien lies not only in its lethal power: its parasitical mode of procreation, using human bodies as hosts, means that it is a threat that emerges from within. Indeed, brought aboard inside a member of crew, the alien runs amok. In the cavernous and labyrinthine cargo ship the atmosphere of terror and suspense sustained by the reversible dynamic of hunters and hunted follows Gothic patterns. This is reinforced by the film's focus on a woman, Ripley, who becomes a science fiction Gothic heroine. The strength and self-possession of the heroine, however, distinguishes her from earlier figures, whose faintings and flight signalled the powerlessness of persecuted femininity. Sexual differences, moreover, are presented in the maternal images suggested by the design of the alien 'mother' ship. The vessel is a giant womb, the repository of the eggs that turn into monstrous and destructive progeny. Associations with the conflicting emotions evoked by the mother in 'female Gothic', however, are complicated by the irony of the corporate computer's name, 'Mother': it suggests that the matrix of technology and artificial intelligence has supplanted human figures.Botting also remarks on Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, another science fiction work that exhibits some of the hallmark conventions of the Gothic genre:
Fred Botting, Gothic
In Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, the undertones of nineteenth-century Gothic are never far from the surface of the futuristic dark detective film. Set in a gloomy, ruinous and alienating Los Angeles of the future, the film follows the fortunes of a group of renegade 'replicants', artificial creations virtually indistinguishable from humans, as they try, like Frankenstein's monster, to make their creator, the scientist controlling the Tyrell corporation, accede to their demands for a more human lifespan. The disaffected blade runner, Deckard, whose task is to identify and terminate the replicants, is the parallel subject of the film as it divides sympathies between pursuer and pursued. Caught between blade runner and replicant, human and android, the narrative gradually erodes the differences distinguishing one from the other, leaving doubts that haunt the properly simulated romantic ending of the first version of the film [the original theatrical release].More at A Piece of Monologue:
Fred Botting, Gothic
RIBA celebrates architecture in film
A retrospective
As the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) celebrates its 175th anniversary, a season of films explores the most distinctive and influential examples of architecture in film. Jonathan Glancey names his top five, which include Fritz Lang's German masterpiece Metropolis and Stanley Kubrick's Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove. Perhaps inevitably, Ridley Scott's dark and dystopian science fiction film, Blade Runner, also receives a worthy mention:
Metropolis translated into another futuristic dystopia, this time a vision of LA in 2019. The opening shots, as the camera pans over a 700-storey skyscraper and the sky glows with industrial smoke, fire and acid rain, is as magnificent as it is disturbing. It's another interpretation of the Tower of Babel, of course; this time the headquarters of the company that makes the humanoid "replicants" that do the dirty work for human beings.More:
Scott says that the sets were conjured from a variety of haunting images: Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks, the skyline of Hong Kong at night, the fiery industrial landscape of Tyneside and Teesside of Scott's childhood, the French comicbook Métal Hurlant [Heavy Metal], and, quite clearly, Metropolis. Scott places these nightmarish exteriors in architectural contrast to the theatrical, spooky inside of LA's real-life Bradbury Building, designed by George Wyman in 1893, which is cast as the headquarters' interiors. Significantly, the original architect claimed that his style was influenced by Edward Bellamy's book, Looking Backward (1887) – itself a work of utopian sci-fi. Wyman admired the passage in which Bellamy describes a typical commercial building of the future as a "vast hall full of light, received not alone from the windows on all sides, but from the dome, the point of which was a hundred feet above". [Read More]
20.7.09
Slavoj Žižek on Ridley Scott's Alien
Lacanian critical theorist assesses landmark Hollywood blockbuster
Slavoj Žižek speculates that psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's concept of the lamella resembles the monstrous creature of Ridley Scott's horror masterpiece, Alien:
Lacan’s description not only reminds one of the nightmare creatures in horror movies; more specifically, it can be read, point by point, as describing a movie shot more than a decade after he wrote those words, Ridley Scott’s Alien. The monstrous “alien” in the film so closely resembles Lacan’s lamella that it cannot but evoke the impression that Lacan somehow saw the film before it was even made. Everything Lacan talks about is there: the monster appears indestructible; if one cuts it into pieces, it merely multiplies; it is something extra-flat that all of a sudden flies off and envelops your face; with infinite plasticity, it can morph itself into a multitude of shapes; in it, pure evil animality overlaps with machinic blind insistence. The “alien” is effectively libido as pure life, indestructible and immortal.
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