Love it or hate it, you can’t deny that the Eurovision Song Contest has a unique appeal. Although often seen as tacky, extravagant and occasionally politically controversial, that doesn’t stop around 125 million people around the world watching it each year! It has helped to launch careers, in the cases of ABBA and Bucks Fizz, as well as destroy them (cast your memories back to Jemini, aka ‘nul points’).

To celebrate the 58^th contest which takes place tomorrow night, we’ve put together a playlist of the best and worst entries in Eurovision history as well as some interesting (as well as bizarre) facts about the competition.

Fun facts about Eurovision

• The first Eurovision Song Contest took place in Switzerland, with only 7 countries competing.
• This year’s competition takes place in Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city. Did you know that Malmö’s football team, Malmö FF, is where footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović began his professional career?
• Ireland is the most successful country in the Contest, winning 7 times, 3 of which were in consecutive years (1992, 1993 and 1994).
• Portugal has competed since 1964 and is yet to finish in the top 5. The highest they have placed is 6^th, which was in 1996.
• Norway’s Alexander Rybak is the record-holder for the highest amount of points, scoring 387 in 2009. Closely followed by last year’s winner, Loreen from Sweden, who won with 372 points.
• The maximum duration of each performance is 3 minutes.
• A Eurovision song must always have vocals; purely instrumental music is not permitted.
• No live animals are allowed on stage during a performance.
• However, the costume options are pretty much limitless . . . . .

Annie Leyman is Marketing Executive for Music books at Oxford University Press.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Image credits: (1) Photo of ABBA. By AVRO (FTA001019454_012 from Beeld & Geluid wiki) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons (2) Photo of Lordi performing at ESC 2007. By Indrek Galetin (http://nagi.ee/photos/sAgApO/824612/in-set/17031/) [see page for license], via Wikimedia Commons (3) Photo of Verka Serduchka performing at ESC 2007. By Indrek Galetin [see page for license], via Wikimedia Commons (4) Photo of Jedward at ESC 2011. By Frédéric de Villamil (Flickr: DSC_9298) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The post Dust off your flags … it’s Eurovision time! appeared first on OUPblog.

When the first Eurovision Song Contest was broadcast in 1956, the BBC was so late in entering that it missed the competition deadline, so it was first shown in my native England in 1957. Nonetheless, it seems as if this curious example of pan-European co-operation, which started with seven countries and is now up to 40, has been around forever. Certainly as the 1950s gave way to the ’60s, the contest created a degree of national fervour in Britain, and I suspect in most other parts of Europe. At its peak, it’s estimated to have drawn in around 600 million viewers worldwide.

The competition’s only seldom been part of the pop mainstream, and at the time when the Beatles and Rolling Stones were becoming world famous in the 1960s, Britain entered the bland sounds of Kathy Kirby and Matt Monroe instead. It took Britain’s first two wins, by Sandie Shaw in 1967 and Lulu in 1969 to bring about a convergence of pop culture and the more mainstream vocal entertainment of the contest. Meanwhile 1950s heart-throb and subsequent film-star Cliff Richard was controversially beaten into second place in 1968 with “Congratulations” — a song that has stood the test of time rather better than Spain’s winning “La La La,” (sung in Spanish by Massiel after the original Catalan entry by Joan Manuel Serrat was withdrawn by the Franco regime). Abba’s success with “Waterloo” in 1974 marks one of the few genuine moments when the contest reflected wider international taste. They aimed squarely at winning and did so, bringing their distinctive sound and utter professionalism to a vastly greater audience through their success in the competition. Some other acts were successfully launched on the world stage as a result of first being seen by an international audience during the finals, including early appearances by Julio Iglesias and Céline Dion.

Yet that is one of the reasons the contest is so fascinating. At a time when European monetary and political convergence is a burning question for governments, the Eurovision contest demonstrates just how varied approaches are to popular songs and entertainment across the continent, from Portugal to Azerbaijan, and from Norway to Israel. Dance moves, costumes, gestures, lyrics, and language convey insights into how other European countries go about the business of entertainment in a far more insightful way than almost any other television spectacular. Ukranian drag queen Verka Serduchka’s antics and lyrics upset Russia in 2007, but in 2006 Finnish heavy metal band Lordi took the world by storm in an over-the-top performance with latex masks, prosthetic beards and horns. Amazingly, they managed to convey rock and roll as a religion without alienating too many special interest groups.

Even back in the 1960s as we crouched round the flickering image of our black and white televisions, the voting system seemed arcane. It still does. The results can sometimes be skewed by blocs of countries who vote together for, one suspects, not entirely artistic reasons. Announced first in French and then English, the underdogs who only score “nil points” often become popular with the viewing audience for that very reason. Poor old Jemini gave the UK its first “nil points” in 2003, but in 1997 Portugal and Norway shared the ignominy of no votes at all, and in 1983 the same fate befell Turkey and Spain. Norway still holds the record for the greatest number of “nil points”. The term has entered the European vernacular, in many countries, describing a competitor who tries hard but with no hope of winning.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So now this year’s contest is under way in Malmö, Sweden, what can we expect? The sheer number of competing countries now means two nights of semis before the final, which takes place this Saturday, 18 May 2013. The bookies are backing Denmark and Norway to triumph in this very Nordic contest, but I have a hunch that after Engelbert Humperdinck’s not entirely satisfactory entry last year, the Scandinavians will be given a run for their money by British entry Bonnie Tyler. A legend of 80s pop with her great hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” Tyler is a Welsh singer who has the rare distinction of also topping the charts in France. She has also had hit records in Norway, Austria, Switzerland and Germany. When it comes to tactical voting, she’s potentially got a lot of different countries on her side! At least the title of her entry is a little more modest than Cliff Richard’s from 1968: it’s called “Believe In Me”.

Alyn Shipton is the author of Nilsson: The Life of a Singer Songwriter, to be published on July 18. He is also a critic for The Times in London and presents jazz programmes on BBC Radio.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Musings on the Eurovision Song Contest appeared first on OUPblog.

The build-up to the release of Baz Luhrmann’s frenetic, chromatic interpretation of The Great Gatsby was a wild ride for several of us who live and breathe F. Scott Fitzgerald daily. One minute you’re grading end-of-the semester papers, fighting the losing battle against the extinction of the apostrophe, the next you’re fielding phone calls from NPR or the Associated Press. The experience has been a whirlwind introduction to media relations. I’ve learned, for example, never to declare, “I’m a homer!” when asked my feelings about Fitzgerald over a static-crackling phone line. Mishearing will confuse even the best of reporters.

I’ll say unabashedly that the movie delighted me, as it did many scholars I admire, including such leading Fitzgerald folks as Jackson R. Bryer, James L. W. West III, and Anne Margaret Daniel, as well as my writer pal Therese Anne Fowler, author of the current bestseller Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald. Frankly, any flick that can make Rex Reed’s pacemaker misfire is aces by me. And while I appreciate the objections of The New Yorker and Salon, I honestly think a razzle-dazzle, Adderall-induced Gatsby is what we need at this moment in time—or maybe what I need after so many years now of struggling to persuade students and other resisting readers that Fitzgerald’s lapidary prose isn’t “boring.” For whatever credibility it might cost me, I’m genuinely less interested in what David Denby or Peter Travers think than in watching general audiences dress up as flappers, slip on 3D glasses, and “fangirl” on Tumblr and Facebook. After all, I’ve been “fanboying” since long before I ever presumed to understand the novel.

Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan Baker and Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.

That said, I was struck that, for all the familiar lines and symbols incorporated into Luhrmann and Craig Pearce’s screenplay, how many of my personal moments didn’t end up on the screen. After returning from a late-night sneak preview, I sat out by my pool (which, unlike Gatsby’s, has no monogram at the bottom) and reread the book for the zillionth time. If nothing else, the resulting list shows how inexhaustibly intricate The Great Gatsby is.

10. The Dedication. By 1925, Fitzgerald had already dedicated his first short-story collection, Flappers and Philosophers (1920), to his wife/muse, Zelda Sayre. Rather than simply repeat himself he crafted an elegantly metrical acknowledgment of her inspiration that has since become a poignant proclamation of how all roads in life led back to her: “Once Again to Zelda.” Gertrude Stein famously complimented the melody of the phrase, telling Fitzgerald, “[I]t shows that you have a background of beauty and tenderness and that is a comfort.” It’s since become one of the most quoted dedications in literature, providing Marlene Wagman-Geller a wonderful title for her 2008 study of “The Stories Behind Literature’s Most Intriguing Dedications.” I even borrowed the line for a recent reminiscence in The Southern Review on reading Nancy Milford’s biography Zelda in college.

9.  The “frosted wedding cake of the ceiling.” When we first see Carey Mulligan as Daisy it’s amid the whip-cracking flutter of curtains at the Buchanans’ East Egg estate. These “pale flags” nearly suffocate Nick Carraway and viewers alike for a few seconds, giving us a sense of what it’s like to be swathed suddenly in opulence. Yet I’ve always been struck more by Fitzgerald’s clever description of the trim and plaster in this “rosy-colored room” as a decorated cake, a metaphor that glides by as smoothly and effortlessly as a spatula stroke of icing. It’s indicative of how finely detailed and sculpted even passing details are. Weirdly enough, Ernest Hemingway would rip off this line in his least graceful novel, To Have and Have Not (1937).

8. Myrtle Wilson’s change, in a single chapter, from crêpe-de-chine to muslin to chiffon. In a book in which stacks of custom-made shirts can bring a woman to tears, every mention of fabric is a significant index of character texture. In Chapter II, Tom Buchanan’s mistress changes clothes three times in rapid succession as Fitzgerald dramatizes her hopelessly vulgar pretensions to style. From what I remember, Isla Fisher only sports two different outfits in her initial sequence with the adulterous Tom Buchanan, but the clothes are emphasized less than her Cupid’s bow lips and boop-boop-de-doop delivery (a slightly anachronistic nod to Betty Boop, who wasn’t born until 1930).

Isla Fisher as Myrtle Wilson, Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan, Adelaide Clemens as Catherine, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway and Kate Mulvany as Mrs. McKee in The Great Gatsby.

7. Mr. McKee’s underwear. I burst out laughing when Eden Falk came on-screen with the silliest mustache this side of Matt Damon in True Grit. But the parvenu photographer Chester McKee is barely more than an extra in the movie and his most famous scene in the book is nowhere to be found. At the end of Chapter II, after an inebriated ellipsis, Nick discovers himself next to a bed where McKee is described as “sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.” And while “great portfolio” is not a euphemism, the sudden appearance of underoos has launched a thousand seminar and book-club debates about Nick’s sexual leanings.

6. That tear. The first Gatsby party Nick attends is a stylistic tour-de-force of style and technique, with Fitzgerald employing synesthesia and tense shifts to dramatize the sensory dissociation of a wild time. My absolute favorite passage in the “blue gardens” interlude concerns the drunken chorus girl who sings as the revelry gives way to sleepy exhaustion. The singer brings herself to tears, causing her mascara run in rivulets. “A humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her face,” Nick reports. Going into the movie, I was sure that staves and staffs would float off the 3D screen at me and that I would bathe in that tear. Alas.…

5. Gatsby’s guest list. Whole academic careers have been spent chasing down potential Long Island analogues for the social register Nick recites of “those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him.” Luhrmann does give us a Clarence Endive, but I missed Dr. Webster Civet, Willie Voltaire, the Smirkes, the Scullys, and Edgar Beaver, for whom I’ve always felt a pang of empathy: “[His] hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no reason at all.”

4. The bad driver motif/Myrtle’s “left breast … swinging loose like a flap.” Cars abound in the movie; the driving-into-Manhattan scenes are so fast and furious I kept expecting Vin Diesel to squeal into the frame. But while Luhrmann includes the drunken fender bender at the end of Gatsby’s first party, we don’t get the motif of bad driving as a symbol for moral irresponsibility. This is largely because in the book it’s staged between Nick and Jordan Baker, whose romance is excised from the movie. (As Jordan says, “It takes two to make an accident,” so as long as she sticks around careful people her own carelessness isn’t dangerous.)

Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway and Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby.

Myrtle Wilson’s hit-and-run demise, meanwhile, has always posed a potential tonal turn into Pure Corn. Neither Shelly Winters in 1949 nor Karen Black in 1974 pulled it off. (Winters mainly because of a risible special effect). While in recent years YouTube has hosted a bizarre string of dangerous reenactment videos—made, one assumes as high-school English class projects—no director is likely to visualize the most gruesome image in Gatsby. Myrtle’s nearly severed breast, which dangles like the amputated car wheel in the fender bender scene. The disfigurement is indicative of the Jazz Age’s morbid fascination with the damage automobiles and new machine technologies in general could inflict on a human body.

3. Wolfsheim (or Wolfshiem, depending on your preference) skipping Gatsby’s funeral. Among the most inventive of Luhrmann’s decisions is his casting of Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan as the man who fixed the 1919 World Series, a gangster based on Arnold Rothstein (newly rediscovered thanks to Boardwalk Empire). The casting is a clever way to sidestep the charges of anti-Semitism that dog the character. But the new Gatsby leaves out the gangster’s weaselly explanation for missing his protégé/front’s funeral (“When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it”). The movie also avoids one of the strangest literary coincidences ever by not showing the name of Wolfsheim’s business, “The Swastika Holding Company.” Fitzgerald apparently chose this ancient symbol without knowing Adolf Hitler had adopted it for the Nazi Party in 1920.

2. The unnamed obscenity. In the final two pages, as Fitzgerald builds up to his “boats against the current” climax, he shows Nick erasing a dirty word scrawled by a trespasser on Gatsby’s immaculate white steps. Had Hemingway written Gatsby we’d have known exactly what that word was. At the very least, we’d have had the f—ks and c—s—rs he was forced to put in their place. (And Scribner’s wouldn’t even let him get away with c—s—r.) In his worst alcoholic stupors Fitzgerald reportedly rained down F- and C-bombs like artillery shells. Part of his charm, however, is that in his writing he was averse even to “violent innuendo,” much less the “obstetrical conversation” of the meretricious young men at Gatsby’s parties. Erasing the word is Nick’s way of keeping even the detritus of Gatsby’s dream in the polished state of his naiveté.

1. Taking Ravenously, Taking Unscrupulously. In the novel, Fitzgerald breaks up the backstory of Daisy Fay and Jay Gatsby’s 1917 romance into at least three separate flashbacks. The middle one concerns the apotheosizing kiss by which the penniless soldier “wed[s] his unutterable visions to her perishable breath”—a long, intricate passage full of stars and flowers that I’ve seen grown men weep over when read aloud. Later, however, we discover a description of Gatsby first “taking” Daisy out of less noble intentions (“He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously—eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand”), implying the intriguing possibility that the transformative kiss occurs after their first sexual encounter.

“I wish we could just run away…” – Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan)

The chronology is vague, but the ambiguity reinforces a critical truism: The Great Gatsby isn’t a love story—it’s the story of American self-making. Yet Luhrmann depicts Gatsby as such a romantic naïf in his flashback scenes that true love seems his compelling motivation. Instead, for Fitzgerald, the romance merely validates his hero’s “Platonic conception of himself,” with Daisy a means to an end.

Luhrmann’s insistence that Gatsby is a “great, tragic love story”—a melodrama on the order of Gone With the Wind—is partly why he’s taking such a critical drubbing. But the paradoxes of Gatsby’s “colossal” delusion are probably too complex for a splashy movie, and I found the love story surprisingly affecting, especially the added moment when Daisy attempts to telephone Gatsby just as Wilson arrives to avenge Myrtle’s death. The scene made me empathize with Daisy emotionally rather than intellectualizing her predicament as the book leaves me to do. Maybe that’s the greatest benefit of pushing the romance angle: if a reinterpretation spares me from having to explain one more time why Jay Gatsby would fall for a ditzy “bitch goddess,” I’m down.

In the end, I’m glad we have a version that is controversial and divisive as opposed to the suffocating reverence of the 1974 Robert Redford/Mia Farrow snoozefest, which makes the Jazz Age seems about as fun and dangerous as a dinner with one’s parents. Perhaps I have low expectations for literature and reading at this point, but any version that stops audiences from using “dull” and The Great Gatsby in the same sentence is performing a public service for me. On my way out of the sneak preview I overheard an excited teenage girl declare, “I didn’t cry this much at the end of Titanic.”

Mission accomplished, Luhrmann. Mission accomplished.

Kirk Curnutt is professor and chair of English at Troy University’s Montgomery, Alabama, campus, where Scott Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre in 1918. His publications include A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald (2004), the novels Breathing Out the Ghost (2008) and Dixie Noir (2009), and Brian Wilson (2012). He is currently at work on a reader’s guide to Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: All images from thegreatgatsby.warnerbros.com. © 2013 Warner Bros. Ent. Used for the purposes of illustration.

The post 10 moments I love in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby that aren’t in Baz Luhrmann’s film appeared first on OUPblog.

The Great Gatsby is one of the best-known American novels, but weirdly, and strangely reflective of Gatsby himself, one of the least understood. The much-awaited Baz Lurhmann version of The Great Gatsby opens in the United States tomorrow, and like Gatsby himself — as a new trailer reminds us — the novel is “guarding secrets.”

In the course of the novel, and no doubt the new film version, we find out what Gatsby is hiding: not only his criminal bootlegging, but also his family name, Gatz, and his poor, ethnic-American roots, which in the end exclude him from the upper-class Anglo-American social circles he hoped to enter. We understand his frustrated American dream, and we understand too why he felt the need to fabricate for himself the pedigree of a patrician family with the Anglo-sounding surname Gatsby.

We’ve all been taught the novel is about the disappearing American dream, but that’s only part of the story, the postwar part. The other part, the “back story” set during World War I, is about the American dream suddenly and dramatically on the rise: how Gatsby, this “Nobody from Nowhere,” as Daisy’s husband Tom calls him, gets to meet Anglo-American princess Daisy on equal terms, so she can fall in love with him. Tom will be “damned” if he sees how Gatsby “got within a mile of [Daisy] unless [he] brought groceries to the back door.”

Of course, what got Gatsby in the front door of her house during the war was his officer status: “he went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor.” The novel makes clear how the war gave Gatsby a new social status when it made him an officer. He crossed the “indiscernible barbed wire” between classes when he put on the “invisible cloak of his uniform.”

What the novel doesn’t answer is how Gatsby, a poor farm boy from North Dakota and apparently a German-American to boot, got to be an officer in the US Army when Germany was the enemy. The novel definitely “guards secrets” on this point. Did Gatsby fool the army the way he fools most of the people in the novel about himself, with his polished manner, his false name, and his invented family background? The novel’s narrator Nick Carraway naturally comes to doubt Gatsby’s account of a military commission that was supposed to have been issued out of a made-up upper-class background.

Then how does Gatsby make officer? The novel gives two hints on the subject, which most critics have ignored and most readers, informed by the criticism, read right past. In fact, as a college professor, I’ve taught many students who think they remember the novel pretty well from high school but have forgotten that Gatsby was even a soldier.

Nick eventually corrects Gatsby’s romantic saga of his promotion in the American Army, from lieutenant to major at the front as a result of his combat heroics, and notes, “He was a captain before he went to the front.” That’s the first hint. The second is that Fitzgerald put Gatsby at Camp Taylor though it was at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama that he met his future wife Zelda — for many critics, the obvious inspiration for Daisy.

Photograph of F. Scott Fitzgerald c. 1921, appearing in “The World’s Work” (June 1921 issue)

Take these tiny, seemingly meaningless hints to the library and the archive, and here’s what you discover. The World War I American army, which had to build an officers’ corps of 200,000 rapidly and almost from scratch, needed some quick methods for identifying men who might be officer material, and specifically those who might make good captains. It developed a couple of unprecedented programs to do so: a rating system for identifying captains, and an intelligence test that identified potential officers and superior officers. The even more radical move that the army made — shocking to privileged young men, such as Fitzgerald, who expected traditional class and ethnic discrimination — was not to exclude immigrants and ethnic Americans from consideration for officer. (Indeed, the army’s initial plan was to have no racial prejudice and to open up such promotions to blacks as well, but the government under pressure from Southern civilian officials nixed the original idea of a complete meritocracy.) The army designated four training camps at which to pioneer the intelligence tests in late 1917 and Camp Taylor was one of them.

Fitzgerald would have known about this because he was at Camp Taylor in 1917, which is when, in the novel, he has Gatsby pass through. Someone like Gatsby — that is, someone born in America and a high-school graduate in an era when the average white man completed less than seven years of schooling — would have aced the intelligence tests, which, as we know, tested for education and cultural literacy, not native intelligence.

The other thing to know about Camp Taylor is that there were a large number of men of German descent there; by end of the war, they numbered nearly 1500. There is no doubt that the American army, though it was fighting Germany, had plenty of German-American officers. A French soldier reported with shock in 1917: “You could not imagine a more extraordinary gathering than this american [sic] army, there is a bit of everything, Greeks, Italians, Turks, Indians, Spanish, also a sizable number of boches [Germans]. Truthfully, almost half of the officers have German origins.”

Why would Fitzgerald have cared about how Gatsby made captain — and more to the point — why would he have been secretive about this information? Here it helps to know that Fitzgerald was frustrated in his own military ambitions and his army record was an embarrassment to him. Though he made it into officer training by taking an entrance exam open to college students, he never got sent to Europe, and captain was precisely the rank he desired and had fantasies about, but never achieved. He stalled at first lieutenant, the rank below. And this was at a charged wartime moment when masculinity was being equated with combat service and army rank. To make matters worse for him, he watched men who he considered his social inferiors make that rank of captain and pass him by.

It is unlikely that Fitzgerald imagined Gatsby making it into officers’ training on the basis of fabrications because fabrications were irrelevant to the army’s personnel processes. One of the reasons the army liked the intelligence tests so much, flawed though they were, was because they got around the problem of relying on soldiers’ possibly false accounts of their own education and skills. As the wartime Committee on Psychology put it in a memorandum, they eliminated “the danger of charletans” (sic).

In short, the particular American mobilization for the World War I, with its new and very particular methods for selecting officers meant that a nobody like Gatsby could be chosen for officer training and specifically promoted to captain while still at camp. The novel reflects this moment — the moment Gatsby wants to recover, in his desperate effort to “repeat the past.” 

It also reflects the backlash of the WASP establishment against upstart “war heroes” like Gatsby after the war. And, unfamiliar with obscure US Army history and taking our current world of meritocratic promotion for granted, that’s all that strikes us about the novel.

Will the new movie reveal Gatsby’s secret? Probably not. But I was happy at least to see that one of the official trailers put emphasis on the mystery of Gatsby’s rise as well as his soldiering in World War I.

Keith Gandal is the author of the 2010 Oxford paperback, The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization. He is currently working on a comic memoir on the subject of researching Fitzgerald and the other Lost Generation writers, titled Moments of Clarity, Years of Delusion: A Scholarly Detective Story.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only film and television articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Images one and three from The Great Gatsby movie copyright Warner Brothers Entertainment. Used for purposes of illustration. Image two from The World’s Work (The World’s Work (June 1921), p. 192) Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The post The real secret behind Gatsby appeared first on OUPblog.

Gooey chocolate and scoops of mouth-watering chocolate ice cream. Steaming hot golden French fries. Children see thousands of commercials each year designed to increase their desire for foods high in sugar, fat, and salt like those mentioned above. Yet, we know almost nothing about how this advertising onslaught might be affecting the brain.

A recent study in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience conducted by researchers from the University of Michigan, Oregon Research Institute, and Yale University starts to uncover how the brain responds to food commercials in teens. Thirty adolescents visited a lab to watch a typical television show that included commercial breaks composed of frequently advertised food (e.g., McDonald’s, Wendy’s) and non-food commercials (e.g., AT&T, Ford). But unlike a typical TV viewing experience, these participants had their brain response measured in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.

While watching the food commercials, regions of the brain linked with reward, attention, and cognition were more active for all participants. After completing the fMRI scan, teens also remembered the food commercials better than the non-food commercials. Why does this matter? It appears that food advertisements (by far the most frequently marketed product to this age group) are better at getting into the mind and memory of kids. This makes sense because our brains are hard-wired to get excited in response to delicious foods. When these calorie-laden products are combined with $1 billion dollars’ worth of marketing by the food and beverage industry, it creates a potent combination.

Surprisingly, healthy-weight teens had greater brain activity in regions associated with reward and attention than obese adolescents. Why might this be? The study suggests that obese adolescents may have been trying to control their response to the food commercials, which might have altered the way their brain responded.

Yet, what happens after obese teens come into contact with more and more food cues later that day? Their self-control might decline in the face of an environment that pushes consumption of high-calorie foods. If a teen is stressed, hungry, or depressed, his or her willpower might be even more likely to falter. The healthy-weight adolescents might also be impacted by how their brain responds to food commercials, but the consequences might not be apparent immediately. A number of brain regions that were more responsive in the lean adolescents during the food commercials have been linked with future weight gain. It will be important to explore how brain responses to food marketing might be related to increased risk of obesity in the future.

This research highlights the possible ways that food advertising may affect younger generations. How do we prevent food advertisers from being the major driver of what our kids eat? We can rely solely on parents to police what teenagers buy or attempt to educate children about how advertising might impact them. We also may need to set guidelines that prevent marketers from aggressively targeting kids with commercials for unhealthy foods. The road ahead is not without challenges, but action must be taken to turn back the tide of childhood obesity.

Dr. Ashley N. Gearhardt is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. Her work focuses on the overlap between addictive and eating behaviors, as well as the role of the environment in obesity. Gearhardt is a co-author of the study ‘Relation of Obesity to Neural Activation in Response to Food Commercials‘, which is published by the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN) provides a home for the best human and animal research that uses neuroscience techniques to understand the social and emotional aspects of the human mind and human behavior.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only health and medicine articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: French fries. By dja65, via iStockphoto

The post This is your brain on food commercials… appeared first on OUPblog.

The new television show Hannibal resurrects Thomas Harris’s famous serial killer and offers a few new surprises bound to shock both newcomers and longtime fans of Dr. Lecter. So while you’re catching up on the latest incarnation of the series, why not brush up on criminology facts or learn something new about cannibalism?

CRIMINAL PROFILING

How does Will Graham get inside the minds of serial killers?

Criminal Law: The Essentials
By Sue Titus Reid
This brief text will introduce you to the main issues and developments within the field.

Crime Profiles: The Anatomy of Dangerous Persons, Places, and Situations
By Terance D. Miethe, Richard C. McCorkle and Shelley J. Listwan
Learn more about the motivation and design of criminal acts.

Forensic Psychology: A Very Short Introduction
By David Canter
A thorough overview of the field of forensic psychology including a chapter dedicated to how to track down a criminal.

CRIMINAL LAW AND JUSTICE

Jack Crawford’s FBI team doesn’t have the best record for bringing in criminals alive, but what can they expect when brought to justice?

Criminal Law: The Essentials
By Sue Titus Reid
This brief text will introduce you to the main issues and developments within the field.

Minds on Trial: Great Cases in Law and Psychology
By Charles Patrick Ewing and Joseph T. McCann
A behind-the-scenes look into high profile cases with an emphasis on the testimonies of mental health professionals.

Criminal Law
By Sue Titus Reid
A broader overview of criminal law and justice through a modified case by case approach.

The Oxford Handbook of Crime and Criminal Justice
Edited by Michael Tonry
A guide to the American criminal justice system and essential to learn what happens next to the killers caught on the show.

Criminal Law
By Nicola Padfield
Review this concise volume on criminal law before the next big case.

PSYCHIATRY

Do you need to stay ahead of Dr. Lecter’s mind games with the latest developments in psychiatry?

Psychiatry: A Very Short Introduction
By Tom Burns
Test your knowledge on this field and see if you can keep up with Dr. Lecter.

Psychiatry’s contract with society: Concepts, controversies, and consequences
Edited by Dinesh Bhugra, Amit Malik and George Ikkos
Read this to get a better handle on the complicated relationship between doctor and patient (luckily not as complicated as Graham and Lecter’s will be).

SERIAL KILLERS

Where did Thomas Harris get his inspiration from?

Gangsters, Swindlers, Killers, and Thieves: The Lives and Crimes of Fifty American Villains
Edited by Lawrence Block
Learn about the real villains that could have been the inspiration behind some of the characters on the show.

The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing
Edited by Rosemary Herbert
Review the entry on serial killers and mass murderers by Marion Swan to see how real life killers inspire our writers.

ANTHROPOPHAGY

How does human flesh taste?

The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy
By William Arens
No book list on Hannibal Lecter would be complete without a few reference books on cannibalism.

The Oxford Companion to the Body
Edited by Colin Blakemore and Sheila Jennett
The entry on cannibalism by W. Arens provides a historical perspective on the anthropophagic nature of ‘others’.

Now that you’re prepared, use your newfound knowledge to solve the next case before Will does!

Kimberly Hernandez is a social media intern at Oxford University Press.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Image credit: All images from the Hannibal television series copyright NBC. Used for purposes of illustration.

The post An Oxford Companion to NBC’s Hannibal appeared first on OUPblog.

On 3 May 1913, Raja Harishchandra, the first Indian feature-length film, premiered. Since then, India’s film industry, mostly known as Bollywood but operating outside of Bollywood’s Mumbai base as well, has become the world’s most prolific film industry: 1,325 films were produced in 2008. Salman Rushdie recently said on The Daily Show with John Stewart, “I always thought it was unfair on the Bombay film industry to call it Bollywood. Because it’s actually much bigger than Hollywood. Hollywood should be called ‘Hombay’.”

For many, Indian cinema will call to mind elaborate melodramatic musicals and Shah Rukh Khan, but it is, like India, far more diverse. To celebrate the 100^th birthday of India’s remarkable cinematic world, take this quiz and test your knowledge!

All answers can be found in Oxford Reference, the home of Oxford’s reference publishing.

Alana Podolsky is a publicity assistant at Oxford University Press. She graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in South Asian Languages and Civilizations in 2011.

Oxford Reference is the home of Oxford’s quality reference publishing, bringing together over 2 million entries, many of which are illustrated, into a single cross-searchable resource. With a fresh and modern look and feel, and specifically designed to meet the needs and expectations of reference users, Oxford Reference provides quality, up-to-date reference content at the click of a button. Made up of two main collections, both fully integrated and cross-searchable, Oxford Reference couples Oxford’s trusted A-Z reference material with an intuitive design to deliver a discoverable, up-to-date, and expanding reference resource.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only television and film articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Celebrating 100 years of Indian Cinema: a quiz appeared first on OUPblog.

Annette Funicello

The MMC premiered on 3 October 1955 on the ABC television network to coincide with the opening of Disneyland. MMC was Disney’s second venture in network television, the first being an anthology series, the short-lived Disneyland that later became Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.

MMC was essentially a variety show for children, complete with a newsreel, a cartoon, a serial, musical numbers performed by the Mouseketeers, and talent and comedy segments. The show aired five days a week in the afternoons and each day of the week had a different theme:

• Monday: Fun with Music.
• Tuesday: Guest Star.
• Wednesday: Anything Can Happen.
• Thursday: Circus.
• Friday: Talent Round-up.

One unique feature of the show was the Mouseketeer Roll Call, in which many (but not all) of that day’s line-up of regular performers would introduce themselves rhythmically by name to the television audience. In the serials, teens faced challenges in everyday situations, often overcome by their common sense or through recourse to the advice of respected elders.

Cast

Originally, Disney wanted “ordinary” kids on the show, but his idea was abandoned as the audition process began for the show in March 1955. Thirty-nine children were hired to become “Mouseketeers,” with nine becoming the “Red Team” which consisted of Funicello, Tommy Cole, Darlene Gillespie, Bobby Burgess, Doreen Tracey, Cubby O’Brien, Karen Pendleton, Lonnie Burr, and Sharon Baird. Cheryl Holdridge joined the team during the second season.

MMC was hosted by Jimmie Dodd, a songwriter and the “Head Mouseketeer”, who provided leadership both on and off screen. In addition to his other contributions, he often provided short segments encouraging young viewers to make the right moral choices. These little homilies became known as “Doddisms”.

Dodd composed and performed much of the music for the show, including the “Mickey Mouse March” that opened the show, as well as the slow “alma mater” version that closed each episode.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Roy Williams, a staff artist at Disney, also appeared in the show as the “Big Mouseketeer”. It was Williams who suggested that all characters on the show wear the Mickey Mouse ears (“Mouseke-ears”), which he helped create.

Annette Funicello

The “Mouseketeers” performed in a variety of musical and dance numbers on the show as well as some informational segments, but it was Annette Funicello who was Walt Disney’s favorite. Born on 22 October 1942 in Utica, New York, the family had moved to California when she was still young. Disney himself saw her performing the lead role in “Swan Lake” at her ballet school’s year-end recital in Burbank and decided to have her audition along with two hundred other children. Annette became the last Mouseketeer of the twenty-four that was picked.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Annette was the only Mouseketeer that Disney kept under exclusive contract. He personally managed aspects of her career, and created one of the show’s serials especially for her, a serial called “Annette.” Disney had plans for a film career for her and fashioned the serial to see if she was ready for film. The other popular serials on MMC, such as “The Adventures of Spin and Marty,” “Adventure in Dairyland,” and the “Hardy Boys Mysteries,” gave way to “Annette” which aired during the third season of the MMC and was the last serial broadcast on the show.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Through Disney’s supervision, Annette appeared on other TV shows, notably, Danny Thomas’ Make Room for Daddy in 1958. Disney also featured her in several of his own productions like the TV series Zorro, and the films The Shaggy Dog and Babes in Toyland.

In the 1960s, Funicello went on to co-star with Frankie Avalon in many Bikini Beach movies through the American International studios. Disney gave his permission for her to appear in these movies as long as she wore a bathing suit that didn’t show her navel. She also made some popular records, notably the hit “Tall Paul” in 1959.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the 1980s, she became the celebrity spokesperson for Skippy Peanut Butter, appearing on many TV commercials.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A MMC “Reunion Special” aired on NBC in 1980:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The original MMC aired from 1955 until it was cancelled in 1959. Other versions of the show aired later, like The New Mickey Mouse Club (1977-79), The All New Mickey Mouse Club (1989-1996) and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (2006 and current).

Dodd died in 1964 of cancer in Hawaii. Funicello died on 8 April 2013 after a long battle with multiple sclerosis.

Now it’s time to say goodbye….
Why? Because we LIKE YOU!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ron Rodman is Dye Family Professor of Music at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is the author of Tuning In: American Television Music, published by Oxford University Press in 2010. Read his previous blog posts on music and television.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image Credit: Photographs provided by author.

The post “Forever Let Us Hold Our Banner High!” appeared first on OUPblog.

Journalists want to report the news not be the news. But in the case of Ann Curry, the former Today show co-host who was pushed into stepping down from the co-anchor slot last June, she has become the news. New York Times reporter Brian Stelter’s recent feature article about morning television and the toxic culture at NBC’s Today show provides more than enough information to conclude that Ann Curry was a target of workplace mobbing.

Whatever your personal opinions of Curry and her work, she was clearly mobbed out of her Today show job. Workplace mobbing is a process of humiliation and degradation of a targeted worker with the purpose of removing that worker from the workplace or at least from a particular unit of it. It is a dark side of organizational life, involves co-workers ganging up on the target, and includes management’s involvement through active participation in the mobbing or through failure to stop it once it becomes known to them. Mobbing in the workplace includes a characteristic course of events that were first described by Heinz Leymann, the psychiatrist who conceptualized the problem in the 1980s. Let’s look at what Stelter reports as having happened to Ann Curry through the framework of this pattern of events representative of workplace mobbing.

• Today was losing market share, critics were saying the show was stale and that there was no chemistry between the co-hosts Ann Curry and Matt Lauer. Understandably, management was concerned. Their solution, however, is a classic error of logical type. Blame an individual — in this case, Ann Curry — for what was obviously a much more systemic problem. (Precipitating event or situation)
• Once “the problem,” had been identified as Ann Curry, management’s next step, according to Stelter, was to mount a campaign to get rid of her and they even had a name for it, “Operation Bambi.” (Targeting of a worker for elimination and involvement of management or administration)
• Curry was subjected to a series of hostile, negative acts that by most people’s standards would be humiliating and hurtful. Stelter reports the making of a blooper reel that showed Curry’s worst on-air moments and blunders, the gathering of staff to watch a particular on-air gaffe and presumably to talk about it, the collection of boxes of Curry’s belongings in a closet as if she had already left, control room staff making fun of Curry’s clothing choices and “generally messing with her,” and the comparison of a yellow dress that she wore to Big Bird and photo shopping her head on to Big Bird’s image and then asking staff to vote on which one wore the yellow outfit best. (Unethical communication about the target and series of negative acts)
• Such negative acts, tailored to the particular work environment, are characteristic of workplace mobbing and serve several functions. They separate and exclude the target from the rest of the workplace, telegraph to other workers that the target is “damaged goods,” and encourage a general ganging up on the target. Once the target in a workplace mobbing has been cast as “other,” and as “less than” it’s much easier to further objectify that person and treat him or her callously. The negative acts can go on for months, as seems to be the case for Ann Curry, or even years as has been the case for others who have been mobbed in the workplace. It doesn’t take much imagination to appreciate the human toll of psychological and physical suffering that such ongoing hostility and abuse causes. (Isolation and exclusion of the target, more ganging up, and resulting escalation of mobbing)
• On 28 June 2012, Ann Curry emotionally announced her departure from the Today show. It was clear to anyone watching her announcement that she was in pain and that she was not happy about leaving. The mobbing of Ann Curry was entirely successful. She was now gone from the Today show. Stelter notes that the executive producer led a group of Curry’s co-workers in a toast to her departure at a nearby restaurant only hours after her announcement that she was stepping down. Such cheering and celebrating after a successful workplace mobbing is common and fairly predictable. (Elimination from the workplace)

For most people who are victims of workplace mobbing, an unfortunate and common workplace event, the aftermath is difficult at best and disabling at worst. Income is lost, health and retirement benefits can be lost, reputation is damaged, professional identity is compromised as is the victim’s career trajectory, family and friendship relationships are strained, and the lingering traumatic effects of the interpersonal abuse and social exclusion at the heart of workplace mobbing can persist for a very long time. It is no surprise at all that Stelter reports Ann Curry as having described her experience as “professional torture.” Heinz Leymann called workplace mobbing “psychological terrorism.”

Ann Curry’s multi-million dollar salary may make the financial side of being a victim of workplace mobbing a lot easier for her than it is for most victims. I would assume, though, that her salary doesn’t ease the psychological and emotional pain she has had to endure and that is most likely her legacy from having been mobbed. While Ann Curry may not like the position of being the news, the story of how she was a victim of workplace mobbing is important. The stories of many others who have been victims of workplace mobbing but who are not public figures might more fully be understood through hers.

Maureen Duffy is a family therapist, educator, and consultant about workplace and school issues, including mobbing and bullying, and is the co-author of Mobbing: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions and the forthcoming book, Overcoming Mobbing: A Recovery Guide for Workplace Aggression and Bullying. Read her previous blog posts “Seven ways schools and parents can mishandle reports of bullying” and “Excluded, suspended, required to withdraw.”

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only psychology articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Workplace mobbing: add Ann Curry to its slate of victims appeared first on OUPblog.

Every year, around mid-April, music lovers await the news that the BBC proms schedule has been announced. We look forward to the old favourites, the new commissions, the excited atmosphere, and some of the best performers in the world. When summer arrives, scores of people—young and old alike—travel to London to visit the Royal Albert Hall and be part of this great British tradition.

Since 1895 the Proms have been running once a year with around 70 concerts per season. One of the great aspects of the Proms is the perfect juxtaposition of old and new repertoire; you could go to a baroque vocal recital, followed by a Wagner opera, and then end with some jazz. This is the magic of the Proms; it is this variety that keeps a loyal audience returning year after year.

As always, a selection of Oxford University Press titles will be performed, and the pieces selected are a microcosm of the Proms calendar as a whole. Prom 16 will include William Walton’s Death of Falstaff and Touch her soft lips, and part from his Henry V suite while excerpts from his Battle of Britain suite will be performed at Prom 65, the ‘Film Music Prom’.

By contrast, there is Gerald Barry’s No other people in the late night Prom 50. Originally performed in 2009 in Dublin, this will be its UK premiere, a contemporary work for a twenty-first century audience.

At this quintessentially British festival, Vaughan Williams is always a popular choice. Prom 71 includes the premiere of a new arrangement by Anthony Payne of Vaughan Williams’ Four Last Songs, a BBC commission, breathing new life into already established repertoire. The Last Night of the Proms, one of the most exciting evenings in classical music, will feature Nigel Kennedy playing the sublime Lark Ascending, arguably one of the most loved pieces of repertoire in Britain.

To get you in the mood, here’s a playlist of some of the pieces that we’re looking forward to hearing:

Lucy Allen is the Print and Web Marketing Assistant in Sheet Music at Oxford University Press.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Oxford Sheet Music is distributed in the USA by Peters Edition

The post Oxford University Press at the BBC Proms 2013 appeared first on OUPblog.

The legendary film critic Roger Ebert passed away last Thursday at the age of 70, after a recurrence of cancer.

Ebert’s career in journalism spanned almost six decades, beginning when he was named the first movie reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1967. By 1975 he was a nationally recognized critic and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He also co-hosted a long-running television program–known first, in 1975, as Opening Soon at a Theater Near You, then Sneak Previews, then Siskel and Ebert At the Movies–that introduced him to a much broader audience and confirmed his status as one of the most celebrated American film critics, a distinction he shared with his on-air partner, Gene Siskel, Pauline Kael, and a handful of others. Much as he adapted the craft of criticism to television, Ebert later embraced Internet publishing, blogs, Twitter, and the younger generation of readers who encountered his reviews through digital and social media. Although his health had deteriorated in recent years, Ebert’s final blog post emphasized he had published more articles in 2012 than in any previous year (a total of 306 reviews, along with multiple blog posts and other essays each week).

Ebert was famous (and infamous) for subjecting trashy movies to the trash talk they deserved, and he later published a collection of his most negative reviews with the telling title (a quote from Ebert himself): I Hated, Hated, Hated this Movie. Ebert adopted an elevated tone when the film warranted a more complex analysis, though his persona and taste were usually more populist. In the best of his exchanges with Siskel, the critics alternated between one mode of talking about cinema (as entertainment, as popular culture, as commercial exploitation) and the other (as art, as an engagement with profound ideas and social problems visible on the screen). That flexibility is rare in critics focused on any medium and especially cinema, and Ebert’s success was due in large part to his ability and willingness to approach films with a seriousness commensurate with their ambition.

One explanation for the success of his television programs, a success that no show with a similar format has come close to matching, was their combination of entertaining and opinionated film reviews with a glimpse at the odd-couple friendship between Siskel and Ebert.

Anticipating the reality TV craze that began in the 1990s, At the Movies displayed the frequent clashes of cinematic taste and sensibility between two otherwise close friends, and in retrospect it reveals the limitations of subsequent programs that have foregrounded either personalities or content without finding an ideal balance between the two. Siskel and Ebert managed to highlight the best and worst qualities of the films they reviewed while also making the audience care about and identify with the critics (or, perhaps, to identify with one or the other and cherish their rivalry and the thrill of the debate). While some lamented the program’s reduction of criticism to a simple verdict–”thumbs up” or “thumbs down”–the program was not a direct translation of long-form journalism into television but a unique combination of personality-driven reality TV and informed observations about art and culture. That genre has been difficult to revive after Ebert’s retirement from the small screen.

One other legacy worth emphasizing is the dignity Ebert displayed during his struggle against cancer. When surgery on his jaw made it impossible to speak, eat, or drink, Ebert continued to participate in the fullest range of professional activities that his condition would permit. Aside from the frequent reviews and other writing, he founded a film festival and maintained a vigorous schedule of public appearances. Ebert wrote frequently about his battle with cancer and managed the deterioration of his health with a grace that one encounters only in the most profound movies, the films whose images never quite fade away and whose lessons remain with us long after the end.

James Tweedie is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and a member of the Cinema Studies faculty at the University of Washington. He is the author of the upcoming The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization.

Image credit: PARK CITY, UT – JANUARY 17: (FILE PHOTO) Film critic Roger Ebert is photographed on Main Street during the 2003 Sundance Film Festival on January 17, 2003 in Park City, Utah. Film critic Roger Ebert, 61, will undergo radiation treatment for cancer later this month for a cancerous tumor in Ebert’s salivary gland reported August 6, 2003. (Photo by Frazer Harrison) EdStock, iStockphoto

The post Remembering Roger Ebert appeared first on OUPblog.

The dangerous dames, fall-guy private eyes, and psychologically unstable heroes and villains who roam the streets of the 1940s crime film have often been linked with anxieties surrounding changing roles for men and women in the years around World War II. Although appearing less regularly, the evolution of the ‘working-girl’ detective character can also be connected with these shifts in gendered identity. Amateur investigators who take on a ‘case’ to get the man they love out of trouble, these women are usually white-collar office workers whose professional skills and urban familiarity prove invaluable aids to sleuthing. Their activity justified as a means of ensuring conventional romantic happiness, these leading ladies are allowed to occupy the privileged space of the detective — a role that drives the narrative forward and which, despite literary forebears such as Miss Marple, Nancy Drew and the like, remained primarily a male domain.

These agent female detectives therefore pose a challenge to the crime film’s traditional gender politics, and (like other elements of story, mood, and characterisation) music and sound play a crucial role in their construction. The classical Hollywood score consistently draws upon various cultural stereotypes to forge an expressive and easily understood set of musical signifiers of identity. From the jazz, blues, and ‘exotic’ cues associated with the femme fatale, to the strident, brass-driven sound of the hero, and the soaring strings, harps, and flutes of the ‘good wife’, film music encourages us to hear characters as Hollywood wishes. Music therefore provides a significant means through which female characters can be moved between various positions in relation to issues of crime, criminality, and romance. They may be romantic leads, femmes fatales, victims, or detectives — or take on several roles within the same film.

Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), Deadline at Dawn (1946), and The Big Steal (1949) demonstrate some of the dramatic and musical approaches to the characterisation of the working-girl detective. All three are cheaply produced ‘B’ pictures released by RKO Radio Pictures — the smallest of the major studios and a company noted for its relatively experimental approach to commercial filmmaking, as well as its crime and noir films. As the slideshow below indicates, the soundtrack of these films is used to support the activity of the female detective — giving women credibility as sleuths and highlighting the suspenseful nature of the situations they find themselves in — but music is also used to reposition these same women into the more conventional and socially acceptable roles of the love interest or the victim of crime.


• Figure 1

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-1-e1365085798434.png

  Whenever Mike in Stranger on the Third Floor thinks of his girlfriend Jane, we hear a romantic musical theme full of the signifiers of the 'good wife'. We see and hear Jane through Mike, helping to diminish her agency as an independent working woman.

• Figure 2

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-2-e1365085791244.png

  Music and voiceover narration privilege Mike's experience, working alongside striking Expressionist cinematography to depict Mike's nightmarish vision of his trial and imprisonment for a murder he didn't commit.

• Figure 3

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-3-e1365085785677.png

  After Mike's real-life arrest, only Jane will believe his story about the mysterious stranger he suspects of the crime. Accompanied now by taut and suspenseful music, she tracks down and confronts her quarry.

• Figure 4

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-4-e1365085778346.png

  Once Mike is freed, Jane's agency as detective is short-lived. The status quo is reaffirmed: the film finishes with a reprise of the 'good wife' material as the couple head to the registry office.

• Figure 5

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-5-e1365085771588.png

  Deadline at Dawn opens with sailor Alex suffering amnesia. He buys time with June, a cynical and weary dancehall worker and tells her about his troubles. 'Exotic' music and styling characterise June's profession as seedy and demeaning, emphasising her lack of agency at work.

• Figure 6

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-6-e1365085764136.png

  After the duo retrace Alex's steps and discover a murder victim, June immediately takes charge of the case. Sparse, angular, and chromatic 'detective music' accompanies June eavesdropping on a potential suspect, and emphasises Alex's comparative weakness.

• Figure 7

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-7-e1365085757310.png

  But June is soon repositioned as Alex's love interest, when paternal taxi driver Gus gets involved. Slow and romantic descending string lines accompany the revelation of her true feelings, cementing the shift in

• Figure 8

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-8-e1365085750529.png

  When Gus is revealed as the murderer and Alex's memory is restored, he is able to occupy a more conventionally masculine role. The previously feisty, independent June swaps her past lives as a cynical showgirl and cunning detective for a future role as a military wife.

• Figure 9

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-9-e1365085744728.png

  Filmed on location in Mexico, the soundtrack to the The Big Steal heavily features 'Latin'-style music.

• Figure 10

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-10-e1365085736137.png

  Joan's association with Latin sounds initially seems to cement her characterisation as the film's femme fatale.

• Figure 11

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-11-e1365085730736.png

  But as the narrative develops, it becomes increasingly clear that Joan's knowledge of Mexican culture and language empowers her to act as detective, helping Halliday to clear his name and evade his pursuers.

• Figure 12

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-12-e1365085720381.png

  Joan's familiarity and affinity with Mexico, which result from her secretarial work for the head of an international company, mean that the film's Latin soundtrack functions to support and extend her agency.

• Figure 13

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Fig.-13-e1365085711163.png

  Joan and Halliday's integration into Mexican culture is complete by the end of the story. They speculate about how big their family will be as the locals dance in the background.

Despite their low budgets, these films demonstrate the complex ways in which music contributes to the classical-era crime film, making use of a range of styles and approaches to both articulate and curtail the agency of the female detective. Music interacts with storyline and structure, image construction, and other elements of the soundtrack as an interlinked and mutually dependent aspect of multimedia narrative. These soundtracks include cues ranging from generic, easily reusable ‘library’ music to expansive themes in the leitmotif tradition — but all are shaped by their interaction with other elements of narrative, and go on to shape the film in turn. What we might ordinarily think of as ‘Jane’s theme’ in Stranger on the Third Floor actually functions to reflect Mike’s possessive paternalism. The Latin rhythms that accompany Joan’s Mexican adventures in The Big Steal serve to highlight the cultural competence that helps her crack the case, rather than passing her off as a typically exoticised and expendable femme fatale.

All three films feature saccharine (and occasionally unconvincing) ‘happy endings’, where the female lead’s agency as detective is exchanged for a less threatening, more conventional positioning as an eager bride-to-be. But this typical 1940s shift in register from the criminal to the romantic cannot entirely negate the pleasurable ways in which these women challenge and extend the more usual characterisations of the classical crime film. Their role as detective may not be as clearly defined as later incarnations of the female cop, for example, but these working-girl investigators play a crucial part in unravelling mysteries, seeking justice, and keeping their men safe from harm. A crucial contributor to the gendered discourse of 1940s Hollywood, the soundtrack mediates between the positioning of women as detectives and archetypal good wives; these city sleuths not only reflect the evolution of the urban workforce, but also articulate the anxiety that surrounded it.

Catherine Haworth is a Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield. A member of the Centre for the Study of Music, Gender and Identity, she is interested in issues of representation and identity across various media, with a particular focus upon music for film and television. You can read her Music & Letters article, ‘Detective agency? Scoring the amateur female investigator in 1940s Hollywood’ for free online for a limited time. Follow her on Twitter @CathreeneH.

Music & Letters is a leading international journal of musical scholarship, publishing articles on topics ranging from antiquity to the present day and embracing musics from classical, popular, and world traditions. Since its foundation in the 1920s, Music & Letters has especially encouraged fruitful dialogue between musicology and other disciplines. It is renowned for its long and lively reviews section, the most comprehensive and thought-provoking in any musicological journal.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Musical scores and female detectives of the 1940s appeared first on OUPblog.

The long-awaited third season of Game of Thrones premiers on HBO 31 March 2013 and Oxford University Press has everything you need to get ready, whether you’re looking to brush up on your dragon lore, forge your own Valyrian steel, or learn about some of the most dramatic real-life succession fights culled from our archives.

For the aspiring Daenerys Targaryen:

Dragons, Serpents, and Slayers in the Classical and Early Christian Worlds: A Sourcebook
By Daniel Ogden
This comprehensive collection of dragon myths from Greek, Roman, and early Christian sources is perfect for any would-be Mother of Dragons.

Boats of the World: From the Stone Age to Medieval Times
By Seán McGrail
Having trouble finding boats to take you to Westeros? This collection of ancient vessels is all you need to build your own.

Goddess: Myths of the Female Divine
By David Leeming and Jake Page
A history of divine women, from Hera and Pandora to The Holy Mother.

History’s greatest “real life” Game of Thrones:

Poisoned Legacy: The Fall of the Nineteenth Egyptian Dynasty
By Aidan Dodson
Aidan Dodson explores the mysteries of the origins of the Egyptian usurper-king Amenmeses and the career of the ‘king-maker’ of the period, the chancellor Bay (sort of an Egyptian Petyr Baelish). Having helped to install at least one pharaoh on the throne, Bay’s life was ended by his abrupt execution, ordered by the woman with whom he had shared the regency of Egypt for the young and disabled King Siptah.

The Children of Henry VIII
By John Guy
Henry VIII fathered four children who survived childhood, each by a different mother. Their lives were consumed by jealously, mutual distrust, bitter rivalry, hatred…sound familiar?

“John Snow (1813–1858)” in the Oxford DNB
By Stephanie J. Snow
OK, so he only shares the same name as the member of the Night’s Watch, but still…he discovered that cholera was a waterborne infection! That’s pretty heroic.

For the student of the Common Tongue:

 
From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages
Edited by Michael Adams
Think Dothraki is a cool language? You may be interested in some other made-up languages.
 
The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, First Edition
By Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner
No study of invented languages is complete without the father of them all, J.R.R. Tolkien.

“Words are wind – the language of Game of Thrones” on the OxfordWords Blog
By Adam Pulford
Pulford examines Martin’s language, some truly archaic and some only archaic-sounding.

For those looking to besiege King’s Landing:

Masters of the Battlefield: Great Commanders From the Classical Age to the Napoleonic Era
By Paul K. Davis
Vivid portraits of fifteen legendary military leaders on and off the battlefield. Tywin Lannister would fit right in.

The Illustrated Art of War: The Definitive English Translation by Samuel B. Griffith
By Sun Tzu
Translated with an Introduction by Samuel B. Griffith
Robb Stark could take a lesson or two from this masterpiece of battle tactics and strategy.

How to trade like you’re the richest man in Qarth:

“The Medieval Spice Trade” in The Oxford Handbook of Food History
By Paul Freedman
If you’re applying for a spot in the Ancient Guild of Spicers, this article is a must-read.
 
The Silk Road: A New History
By Valerie Hansen
Xaro Xhoan Daxos would have a whole chapter in this book if he were, you know, real.

Some of George R.R. Martin’s literary inspirations:

 
Oxford Book of British Ghost Stories
By Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert
George R.R. Martin has his own list of recommended authors, a good many of whom are collected here.
 
The Classic Horror Stories
By H. P. Lovecraft
Edited by Roger Luckhurst
While note exactly fantasy, there are enough ghouls and monsters here to frighten a White Walker.
 
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Edited by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon
Revised by Norman Davis
Knights, castles, and magic. A classic.

That’s it! So crack open some of these books (and some Iron Throne Ale) and enjoy Season Three!

Jonathan Kroberger is an Associate Publicist in the New York office of Oxford University Press. Special thanks to Kimberly Hernandez for research assistance.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Image credit: All images from the Game of Thrones television series copyright HBO. Used for purposes of illustration.

The post An Oxford Companion to Game of Thrones appeared first on OUPblog.

For Black History Month, I wrote about an American Television pioneer: Nat “King” Cole, who was the first African American to host a television show. Since many have dubbed March as “National Women’s Month,” I focus on another pioneer of early television, Dinah Shore.

American television of the 1950s was a haven for white male artists and hosts. African Americans were scarce on TV, appearing only as guest artists on musical variety shows. Women television artists fared no better. Of the many female singers active at the time (Lena Horne, Rosemary Clooney, Judy Garland, and numerous others), the only woman singer to host her own TV show was Dinah Shore.

Frances “Fanny” Rose Shore was born on 29 February 1916, in Winchester, Tennessee. After graduating from Vanderbilt University, she moved to New York City to pursue a singing career. Her first job was as a singer at WNEW, a radio station in New York, where she sang with Frank Sinatra who was hired around the same time. During one show, she sang “Dinah,” and a DJ who couldn’t remember her name called her the “Dinah girl.” The name stuck, and she used it for the rest of her life. She sang and recorded with Xavier Cugat’s band, and recorded her first big solo hit, “Yes, My Darling Daughter” in 1941.

Click here to view the embedded video.

With her radio and recording successes, she was signed to host her own radio show, “Call to Music” in 1943. That same year she appeared in her first movie, “Thank Your Lucky Stars” starring Eddie Cantor. She became immensely popular, touring to entertain US troops during World War II and recording several hit records. Shore also appeared in musical films throughout the 1940s, including Belle of the Yukon (1944) and Till the Clouds Roll By (1946).

Like many radio stars, Dinah Shore made the move to television. In 1951, she made her television debut on The Ed Wynn Show, and also made a guest appearance on Bob Hope’s first NBC television special. These appearances resulted in NBC assigning her own regular TV show, The Dinah Shore Show in November 1951. Like many programs at the time, the show was given two 15-minute time slots during the week. In 1956, Chevrolet sponsored Dinah to host two one-hour specials, and their success led to Dinah Shore’s Chevy Show, a regular musical variety show that ran from 1956 until 1961, running in a Sunday evening time slot on NBC.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Shore’s success on the show can be attributed to her conservative vocal choices and middlebrow sensibilities. She, like many TV stars of the decade, was content to sing “standards” and “Tin Pan Alley” songs that were familiar to the TV audience. In particular, she was noted for her famed signature theme song, the catchy Chevrolet jingle, “See the USA in your Chevrolet,” accompanied by her closing gesture of a sweeping smooch to the audience.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The song was helped by the fact that its sponsor was an “all American” car, and the lyric: “America’s the greatest land of all,” also affirmed the conservative TV audience’s sensibilities. After the Chevy Show, Shore went on host three daytime television programs: Dinah’s Place (1970 to 1974), the 90-minute talk show Dinah! (1974 to 1980), and Dinah and Friends (1979 to 1984).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Her TV career ended in 1991 after a two-year run on cable TV’s The Nashville Network with the talk show, A Conversation with Dinah.

Dinah Shore achieved much success in her television career, winning the Emmy Awards for Best Female Singer (1954-55), Best Female Personality (1956-57), and Best Actress in a Musical or Variety Series (1959). However, The Dinah Shore Chevy Show rarely entered the top 20 ratings during its run, as it ran against CBS’s General Electric Theater hosted by Ronald Reagan, which regularly won the time slot (Reagan also had a better lead-in with The Ed Sullivan Show).

Besides TV, Dinah Shore was an avid golfer, and supporter of women’s golf. She founded the Colgate (and now Nabisco) Dinah Shore Tournament on the LPGA tour. Dinah Shore passed away on 24 February 1994 in Beverly Hills, California, after a brief battle with ovarian cancer.

Ron Rodman is Dye Family Professor of Music at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is the author of Tuning In: American Television Music, published by Oxford University Press in 2010. Read his previous blog posts on music and television.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image Credit: Photograph provided by author.

The post Dinah Shore’s TV legacy appeared first on OUPblog.

Like the great and powerful Oz, filmmakers conceal themselves behind a screen and offer a mesmerizing experience that engages our sights, thoughts, and emotions. They have developed an assortment of magical “tricks” of acting, staging, sound, camera movement, and editing that create a sort of sleight of mind. These techniques have been discovered largely through trial and error, and thus we have very little understanding of how they actually work on our psyche. Scholars of “film studies” have thought deeply about the nature of movies, yet few scientists have considered empirical analyses of our movie experience—or what I have coined psychocinematics. Yet more than any other artistic expression or form of entertainment, we are captured by movies and involve ourselves with the characters portrayed, almost as if are in the scenes themselves.

How do filmmakers draw us into the drama and keep us riveted to the screen? How does film editing link events in an often seamless manner? How do movies drive our emotions, instilling suspense, laughter, horror, sadness, and surprise along the way? Why are movies so compelling? One’s first response might be: “It’s the story, stupid!” If the plot isn’t interesting or if we cannot identify with the characters portrayed, interest soon diminishes. Of course, how a filmmaker engages us into the plot is determined by a variety of factors: the acting may be superb, the visuals stunning, the editing seamless or interestingly quirky, the drama gripping, or the suspense overwhelming. For a scientific understanding, one needs evaluate these rather subjective features by developing a theoretical framework for empirical research.

Toward a scientific analysis of movies, I’ve come up with a simple scheme that captures the psychological features of our movie experience, which I call the I-SKE model. The name is an acronym for what I believe are four essential components of our aesthetic response to movies: the intention (I) of the filmmaker and three psychological components of the viewer: sensation, knowledge, and emotion. The I-SKE model was initially developed to describe our aesthetic response to visual art (see Experiencing Art: In the Brain of the Beholder). When we experience art, indeed when we experience anything, we don’t start from a “blank slate” as we are always applying our knowledge to new experiences, drawing on world knowledge, cultural experiences, and personal memories. Ernst Gombrich, the noted art historian called this influence “the beholder’s share.” With respect to movies, filmmakers play on our prior knowledge (of life and of movies) by offering an audiovisual experience that is part storytelling and part a simulation of how we naturally experience the world. The I-SKE model can be used to breakdown the beholder’s share into the sensory, conceptual (knowledge), and emotional features of film. Indeed, when these three components are running at maximum intensities we experience that satisfied feeling as the movie credits roll and exclaim, “that was fantastic!” Psychocinematics considers the impact of these I-SKE components and how they interact.

With the advent of brain imaging techniques, particularly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), psychological science can now link mental events with brain processes. Indeed, it is now possible to have individuals watch a movie in a fMRI scanner and record the brain regions that are active during the experience (something that was considered science fiction fantasy only 20 years ago). In this way, one can map psychological experience with brain activity. We must not, however, fall into a modern-day version of phrenology where bumps on the head are replaced by bright spots on a brain scan. We need to go further and develop theories that describe the functional dynamics of neural activity and how brain regions interact to enable us to see, think, and feel. Thus, psychocinematics offers an opportunity to consider our movie experience from a scientific perspective that connects minds, brains, and experience at the movies. In the end, we’ll need more than psychology and biology, as sociology, history, anthropology, and other relevant disciplines are needed to gain a broad understanding of the magic of movies.

Arthur P. Shimamura is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and faculty member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. He studies the psychological and biological underpinnings of memory and movies. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 to study links between art, mind, and brain. He is co-editor of Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience (Shimamura & Palmer, ed., OUP, 2012), editor of the forthcoming Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies(ed., OUP, March 2013), and author of the forthcoming book, Experiencing Art: In the Brain of the Beholder (May 2013). Further musings can be found on his blog, Psychocinematics: Cognition at the Movies.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only television and film articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Psychocinematics: discovering the magic of movies appeared first on OUPblog.

Most adults won’t be familiar with the music video You Make Me Feel by Cobra Starship, as it has much greater appeal to young people. There is little doubt however that the overwhelming majority of adults would quickly identify the product placement in the video, as seen in screenshot below. The commercial intent of the product placement in this example is self-evident. Despite this, it is not considered to be an “alcohol beverage advertisement” by the Australian Alcohol Beverages Advertising Code (ABAC). There are a number of concerns with the current self-regulation scheme in Australia, but most equivalent international codes do not cover product placement either, as detailed by ABAC.

This rather obvious example serves two purposes: it highlights the shortcomings in current regulations, not just in Australia; and it provides insight into how easily and often young people are exposed to product placement.

To be clear, product placement is advertising. The European Union define product placement as “…any form of audio-visual commercial communication consisting of the inclusion of or reference to a product, a service or the trade mark thereof so that it is featured within a programme, in return for payment or for similar consideration”. Like all other types of advertising, product placement has a number of purposes. The most explicit of these is to encourage consumers to buy more of the product. But product placement has a more subtle capacity to change community attitudes and norms. It is not just paid product placement that has the potential to influence though, unpaid incidental product placement is just as concerning and harder to regulate.

Endorsement of alcohol use by celebrities, like the musicians and actors who feature in music videos, has a substantial influence on the attitudes and behaviours of young people. Similarly, tobacco promotion in popular media is a significant contributor to the uptake of smoking by the young. For example, teenagers whose favourite stars smoke on screen are up to 16 times more likely to think favourably of smoking, and are more likely to smoke than those whose favourite stars do not smoke.

Young people need protection from advertising. It has long been known that children and adolescents are more vulnerable to advertising than adults. Many countries recognise this vulnerability and have regulations that restrict advertising to children in addition to any restrictions on alcohol and tobacco advertising that may exist. But regulations can easily be circumvented.

In Australia, Saturday morning is a time when children often watch television and there are broadcasting restrictions to ensure that the content is suitable. Two (Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice and Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Code of Practice) of the three (Australian Subscription Television and Radio Association (ASTRA) Codes of Practice is the exception) television codes of practice for Australia make explicit reference to weekend mornings between 0600 and 1000 being reserved for “general” viewing, in other words suitable for children. All of these codes require discretion or care when portraying legal drug use during programs with a “General” classification.

There is cause for concern then, when almost one-third of the videos shown on television on Saturday morning, during a designated children’s viewing time, contain a reference to alcohol or tobacco and the vast majority of those references were pro-use. Alcohol references are more common (by about four times) than tobacco references, most likely reflecting the declining popularity of smoking among young people.

Our young people deserve better than this. It is clear that product placement is an effective and pervasive advertising technique, but is currently unregulated in Australia. There is an urgent and acknowledged need to expand the definition of advertising to include all promotional and marketing activities, not just product placement. On the other hand, parents should also be able to trust the classification of television programs, and that their children aren’t being encouraged to drink and smoke every time they watch programs deemed suitable for a general audience.

Steve (Iain) Pratt is Nutrition and Physical Activity Manager at Cancer Council Western Australia and Adjunct Research Fellow at Curtin University. He is an Accredited Practising Dietitian (APD) and Accredited Exercise Physiologist (AEP) with more than ten years’ experience in public health. You can follow him on Twitter @Pratt_Steve. Dr Emma Croager is Education & Research Services Manager at Cancer Council Western Australia; and Senior Adjunct Research Fellow at Curtin University, Western Australia. Since returning to Australia in 2006, she has worked in chronic disease prevention and public health, with a specific focus on lifestyle risk factors for chronic disease, and rural and remote health. You can follow her on Twitter @emmacroager. They are the co-authors, along with Rebecca Johnson and Natalie Khoo, of the paper ‘Legal drug content in music video programs shown on Australian television on Saturday mornings‘, which is available to read for free on the Alcohol and Alcoholism journal website.

Alcohol and Alcoholism publishes papers on biomedical, psychological and sociological aspects of alcoholism and alcohol research, provided that they make a new and significant contribution to knowledge in the field.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only health and medicine articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Still taken from the official video for You Make Me Feel by Cobra Starship.

The post Alcohol advertising, by any other name… appeared first on OUPblog.

By Chloe Foster

We’re very pleased to annouce the winner of the Very Short Film competition 2013. The Very Short Film competition was launched in partnership with The Guardian in October 2012. Students were asked to make a creative and inspiring one minute film about a subject they feel passionately about. After hundreds of entries, we chose 12 longlisted films to go to the public vote. The vote then produced four finalists. After a live final on Wednesday, the winner was chosen and will receive £9000 towards their university education. And the winner is…Sally Le Page with her film on Evolution. Congratulations Sally!

Winner of the Very Short Film competition, Evolution.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There were four brilliant finalists and all the judges agreed it was a very close contest. The other films were Superconductivity by Christian Foss, Gay Marriage by Hannah Witton, and Geology by Maia Krall Fry.

• The audience take a quick break whilst the judges deliberate

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/audience.jpg

• Sally being presented with the winning cheque

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/CHEQUE.jpg

• OUP publisher, Luciana, announcing the winner

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/JUDGES-1.jpg

• Finalists Maia and Hannah awaiting the result

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/MAIA-AND-HANNAH-1.jpg

• Finalist Christian being interviewed by a student journalist

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/CHRISTIAN.jpg

• Our judges! Judy Freidberg, Maggie O'Kane, Paul Boyd, John Mitchinson, and Luciana O'Flaherty

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/judges-side-on.jpg

• Winner Sally talking to VSI author Nigel Warburton and VSI editor Andrea Keegan

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/SALLY-WITH-NIGEL-AND-ANDREA.jpg

• Sally being interviewed by judge, John Mitchinson

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/SALLY.jpg

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only VSI articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Image credit: All images supplied by Monia Antonioli. Do not use without express permission.

The post Very Short Film competition: we have a winner! appeared first on OUPblog.

During my childhood, there were only two “award” shows that I watched religiously. One was the Miss America Pageant (I am, after all, “of a certain age”) and the other was the Oscars. I abandoned the former long before its demise (as a card-carrying feminist) but the latter has remained on my viewing schedule.  In fact, it is often one of the few programs I still watch “live” given that my TV viewing is entirely DVR-dependent. (I no longer have any idea what day, time, or channel on which shows are broadcast.) If truth be told, this year I was out to dinner as the Oscars began, using a Groupon that would have expired. (Oscar devotion has its limitations after all.)

First, I should admit that I was not enthralled by the news that Seth McFarlane was chosen for host. I have never watched his off-color cartoon show Family Guy (and knowing that it was popular with my son and his friends in college did nothing to encourage me to do so). I should note, here, that I am a huge Simpsons fan and have laughed hysterically at episodes of South Park that I have happened upon accidentally, so I am no cartoon prude. McFarlane is also known for creating the first R-rated animated feature, Ted — another dubious distinction. Clearly, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (which, for the Twitter generation, has officially shortened the name of its show to The Oscars) is trying to attract a younger (male?) audience — precisely the people who make movies profitable. It should be clear that I am not in this demographic (falling somewhere in between the age of Quenzhane Walis and Emmanuelle Riva, but sharing their gender).

In reality, however, McFarlane did a pretty good job.  He was relaxed, affable, and unlike Ricky Gervais (who hosted the Golden Globes in 2012), not mean-spirited. He actually seemed to be having a good time rather than looking awkward, shell-shocked, or ventriloquized — a frequent stance for Oscar hosts who bomb. He opened with the usual jokes about some nominees. Playing on Argo’s narrative of undercover operations, he claimed that the movie was so “top secret” that even its director was unknown (Affleck hadn’t gotten a Best Director bid). McFarlane also joked about how last year’s Best Actor winner for The Artist (an ersatz silent film) couldn’t make it in the talkies. Some of McFarlane’s jibes were harsher, as when he claimed that Django Unchained used the N-word so many times that it sounded like Mel Gibson’s voicemail. To prove his off-color creds he sang a song entitled “We Saw Your Boobs” that enumerated a list of actresses and the films in which they appeared nude or wearing décolleté. In another nod to “hipness” (and an admission of a contemporary Hollywood stereotype) McFarlane was accompanied by the Gay Men’s Chorus. The opening concluded with a long bit (starring William Shatner as Captain Kirk in Star Trek) in which McFarlane’s “future” was told as a series of headlines knocking his performance as Oscar host. In one he was chastised for re-enacting the narrative of Flight with sock puppets; in another he was panned for mocking Sally Field for her early role as The Flying Nun.

Curiously, McFarlane is also known for being a passable singer and has recorded an album of “standards” — “Music is Better than Words” — not the kind of lyric one would expect from the author of Family Guy. (He actually sings “The Night They Invented Champagne”!) So, with the Oscar theme being “Music in Film” (à propos Les Misérables?) he followed “We Saw Your Boobs” with a rendition of “The Way You Look Tonight” (where are you Fred Astaire?) as Charlize Theron and Channing Tatum (who is he?) executed a ballroom dance. For the rest of the show, McFarlane popped up with witticisms each time he announced the A-list award presenters. To maintain his shock-jock bona fides he even told a sick joke that while Daniel Day Lewis and Raymond Massey portrayed Lincoln in the 1940 and 2012 biopics, the only actor to really get inside the president’s head was John Wilkes Booth.

As we all know, the least interesting part of the Oscars is the awards themselves, choreographed in reverse-order of “importance” (from Live Action Short to Best Picture). We are often more intrigued by the dress of the presenters and whether they can actually read their lines correctly than by the name hidden within the envelope, and we secretly wish for someone to trip on the way up to the podium (this year Jennifer Lawrence fulfilled our desires; though much to her credit, she didn’t seem to give much of a damn about it). I of course fast-forwarded through the acceptance speeches of everyone who wasn’t “famous” (the real filmmakers: editors, cinematographers, costumers, make-up artists) but listened to the stars. The best acceptance speech was unexpectedly from Daniel Day Lewis (who I had assumed would be humorless and pretentious). He claimed that at the time the role of Lincoln was being cast, he was already committed to playing Margaret Thatcher, while Meryl Streep (who actually was cast as the Iron Lady) was originally being considered for the role of President. (She handed him the Oscar.)

As for my view of some of the major awardees, I agree with the choice of Christoph Waltz for Django Unchained — he did a masterful job playing Dr. King Shultz (though I’m puzzled that Jamie Foxx wasn’t nominated for the film as well). Ditto for Daniel Day Lewis (though I found Lincoln a bit of a bore). While I understand why Emmanuelle Riva didn’t win for Best Actress (we couldn’t have a second year with top awards going to the French), I have loved her since seeing Hiroshima mon amour (1959), one of the films that led me into Film Studies. While Ang Lee’s Life of Pi was gorgeous and a directorial feat (given its total dependence on special effects), I found both the book and the movie rather vapid. And though Argo was a competent thriller, I have no idea why it was nominated for Best Picture — aside from its inclusion of a self-referential parody of Hollywood filmmaking (as a guise for an undercover operation). If truth be told (and eat your heart out Spike Lee), I thought that the only substantive and original film of the year was Django Unchained, clearly too controversial and violent to get the Oscar. But I was pleased that Quentin Tarantino won for Best Original Screenplay and went up to the podium in sartorial disarray, sounding spaced out.

For the most bizarre moment of the evening, I would have to choose Michelle Obama’s virtual presence from the White House to praise Hollywood creativity and read the winner of the Best Picture Award. It was not she who was strange (she was poised and classy as usual), but her entourage of soldiers (both unexplained and unacknowledged) which seemed out of place at the Academy Awards (oops…the Oscars).

Lucy Fischer is Distinguished Professor of English and Film Studies and former director of the Film Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a member of the editorial board for Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies. She is the author or editor of nine books: Jacques Tati, Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women’s Cinema, Imitation of Life, Cinematernity: Film, Motherhood, Genre, Sunrise, Designing Women: Art Deco, Cinema and the Female Form, Stars: The Film Reader (co-edited with Marcia Landy), Teaching Film (co-edited with Patrice Petro) and Body Double: The Author Incarnate in the Cinema.

Developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians worldwide, Oxford Bibliographiesoffers exclusive, authoritative research guides. Combining the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, this cutting-edge resource guides researchers to the best available scholarship across a wide variety of subjects.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only television and film articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: CHICAGO – JANUARY 23: Oscar statuettes are displayed during an unveiling of the 50 Oscar statuettes to be awarded at the 76th Academy Awards ceremony January 23, 2004 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Illinois. The statuettes are made in Chicago by R.S. Owens and Company. (Photo by Tim Boyle) EdStock via iStockphoto.

The post The Academy Awards (as seen from the other Academy) appeared first on OUPblog.

By Max Saunders

One definition of a classic book is a work which inspires repeated metamorphoses. Romeo and Juliet, Gulliver’s Travels, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Great Gatsby don’t just wait in their original forms to be watched or read, but continually migrate from one medium to another: painting, opera, melodrama, dramatization, film, comic-strip. New technologies inspire further reincarnations. Sometimes it’s a matter of transferring a version from one medium to another — audio recordings to digital files, say. More often, different technologies and different markets encourage new realisations: Hitchcock’s Psycho re-shot in colour; French or German films remade for American audiences; widescreen or 3D remakes of classic movies or stories.

Cinema is notoriously hungry for adaptations of literary works. The adaptation that’s been preoccupying me lately is the BBC/HBO version of Parade’s End, the series of four novels about the Edwardian era and the First World War, written by Ford Madox Ford. Ford was British, but an unusually cosmopolitan and bohemian kind of Brit. His father was a German émigré, a musicologist who ended up as music critic for the London Times. His mother was an artist, the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. Ford was educated trilingually, in French and German as well as English. When he was introduced to Joseph Conrad at the turn of the century, they decided to collaborate on a novel, and went on over a decade to produce three collaborative books. He also got to know Henry James and Stephen Crane at this time — the two Americans were also living nearby, on the Southeast coast of England. Americans were to prove increasingly important in Ford’s life. He moved to London in 1907, and soon set up the literary magazine that helped define pre-war modernism: the English Review. He had a gift for discovering new talent, and was soon publishing D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis alongside James and Conrad. But it was Ezra Pound, who he also met and published at this time, who was to become his most important literary friend after Conrad.

Ford served in the First World War, getting injured and suffering from shell shock in the Battle of the Somme. He moved to France after the war, where he soon joined forces with Pound again, to form another influential modernist magazine, the transatlantic review, which published Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Rhys. Ford took on another young American, Ernest Hemingway, as his sub-editor. Ford held regular soirees, either in a working class dance-hall with a bar that he’d commandeered, or in the studio he lived in with his partner, the Australian painter Stella Bowen. He found himself at the centre of the (largely American) expatriate artist community in the Paris of the 20s. And it was there, and in Provence in the winters, and partly in New York, that he wrote the four novels of Parade’s End, that made him a celebrity in the US. He spent an increasing amount of time in the US through the 20s and 30s, based on Fifth Avenue in New York, becoming a writer in residence in the small liberal arts Olivet College in Michigan, spending time with writer-friends like Theodore Dreiser and William Carlos Williams, and among the younger generation, Robert Lowell and e. e. cummings.

Parade’s End (1924-28) has been dramatized for TV by Sir Tom Stoppard. It has to be one of the most challenging books to film; but Stoppard has the theatrical ingenuity, and experience, to bring it off. It’s a classic work of Modernism: with a non-linear time-scheme that can jump around in disconcerting ways; dense experimental writing that plays with styles and techniques. Though it includes some of the most brilliant conversations in the British novel, and its characters have a strong dramatic presence, much of it is inherently un-dramatic and, you might have thought, unfilmable: long interior monologues, descriptions of what characters see and feel; and — perhaps hardest of all to convey in drama — moments when they don’t say what they feel, or do what we might expect of them. Imagine T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, populated by Chekhovian characters, but set on the Western Front.

I’ve worked on Ford for some years, yet still find him engaging, tantalising, often incomprehensibly rewarding, so I was watching Parade’s End with fascination. [Warning: Spoilers ahead.]

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stoppard and the director, Susanna White, have done an extraordinary job in transforming this rich and complex text into a dramatic line that is at once lucid and moving. Sometimes where Ford just mentions an event in passing, the adaptation dramatizes the scene for us. The protagonist is Christopher Tietjens, a man of high-Tory principle — a paradoxical mix of extreme formality and unconventional intelligence – is played outstandingly by Benedict Cumberbatch, with a rare gift to convey thought behind Tietjens’ taciturn exterior. In the novel’s backstory, Christopher has been seduced in a railway carriage by Sylvia, who thinks she’s pregnant by another man. The TV version adds a conversation as they meet in the train; then cuts rapidly to a sex scene. It’s more than just a hook for viewers unconcerned about textual fidelity, though. What it establishes is what Ford only hints at through the novel, and what would be missed without Tietjen’s brooding thoughts about Sylvia: that her outrageousness turns him on as much as it torments him. In another example, where the novelist can describe the gossip circulating like wildfire in this select upper-class social world, the dramatist needs to give it a location; so Stoppard invents a scene at an Eton cricket match for several of the characters to meet, and insult Valentine Wannop, while she and Tietjens are trying not to have the affair that everyone assumes they are already having. Valentine is an ardent suffragette. In the novel, she and Tietjens argue about women and politics and education. Stoppard introduces a real historical event from the period — a Suffragette slashing Velasquez’s ‘Rokeby Venus’ in the National Gallery — as a way of saying it visually; and then complicating it beautifully with another intensely visual interpolated moment. In the book Ford has Valentine unconcsciously rearranging the cushions on her sofa as she waits to see Tietjens the evening before he’s posted back to the war. When she becomes aware that she’s fiddling with the cushions because she’s anticipating a love-scene with him, the adaptation disconcertingly places Valentine nude on her sofa in the same position as the ‘Rokeby Venus’ — in a flash both sexualizing her politics and politicizing her sexuality.

Such changes cause a double-take in viewers who know the novels. But they’re never gratuitous, and always respond to something genuine in the writing.

Perhaps the most striking transformation comes during one of the most amazing moments in the second volume, No More Parades. Tietjens is back in France, stationed at a Base Camp in Rouen, struggling against the military bureaucracy to get drafts of troops ready to be sent to the Front Line. Sylvia, who can’t help loving Tietjens though he drives her mad, has somehow managed to get across the Channel and pursue him to his Regiment. She has been unfaithful, and he is determined not to sleep with her; but because his principles won’t let a man divorce a woman, he feels obliged to share her hotel room so as not to humiliate her publicly. She is determined to seduce him once more; but has been flirting with other officers in the hotel, two of whom also end up in their bedroom in a drunken brawl. It’s an extraordinary moment of frustration, hysteria, terror (there has been a bombardment that evening), confusion, and farce. In the book we sense Sylvia’s seductive power, and that Tietjens isn’t immune to it, even though by then in love with Valentine. He resists. But in the film version, they kiss passionately before being interrupted.

Valentine and Christopher. Adelaide Clemens and Benedict Cumberbatch in Parade’s End. (c) BBC/HBO.

The scene may have been changed to emphasize the power she still has over Tietjens: as if, paradoxically, he needs to be seen to succumb for a moment to make his resistance to her the more heroic. The change that’s going to exercise enthusiasts of the novels, though, is the way three of the five episodes were devoted to the first novel, Some Do Not…; and roughly one each to the second and third; with very little of the fourth volume, Last Post, being included at all. The third volume, A Man Could Stand Up — ends where the adaptation does, with Christopher and Valentine finally being united on Armistice night, a suitably dramatic and symbolic as well as romantic climax. Last Post is set in the 1920s and deals with post-war reconstruction. One can see why it would have been the hardest to film: much of it is interior monologue, and though Tietjens is often the subject of it he is absent for most of the book. Some crucial scenes from the action of the earlier books is only supplied as characters remember them in Last Post, such as when Syliva turns up after the Armistice night party lying to Christopher and Valentine that  she has cancer in an attempt to frustrate their union. Stoppard incorporates this into the last episode, but he writes new dialogue for it to give it a kind of closure the novels studiedly resist. Valentine challenges her as a liar, and from Tietjens’ reaction, Sylvia appears to recognize the reality of his love for her and gives her their blessing.

Rebecca Hall, playing Sylvia, has been so brilliantly and scathingly sarcastic all the way through that this change of heart — moving though it is — might seem out of character: even the character the film gives her, which is arguably more sympathetic than the one most readers find in the novel. Yet her reversal is in Last Post. But what triggers it there, much later on, is when she confronts Valentine but finds her pregnant. Even the genius of Tom Stoppard couldn’t make that happen before Valentine and Christopher have been able to make love. But there are two other factors, which he was able to shift from the post-war time of Last Post into the war’s endgame of the last episode. One is that Sylvia has focused her plotting on a new object. Refusing the role of the abandoned wife of Tietjens, she has now set her sights on General Campion, and begun scheming to get him made Viceroy of India. The other is that she feels she has already dealt Tietjens a devastating blow, in getting the ‘Great Tree’ at his ancestral stately home of Groby cut down. In the book she does this after the war by encouraging the American who’s leasing it to get it felled. In the film she’s done it before the Armistice; she’s at Groby; Tietjens visits there; has a Stoppard scene with Sylvia arranged in her bed like a Pre-Raphaelite vision in a last attempt to re-seduce him, which fails partly because of his anger over the tree. In the books the Great Tree represents the Tietjens family, continuity, even history itself. Ford writes a sentence about how the villagers “would ask permission to hang rags and things from the boughs,” but Stoppard and White make that image of the tree, all decorated with trinkets and charms, a much more prominent motif, returning to it throughout the series, and turning it into a symbol of superstition and magic. But then Stoppard characteristically plays on the motif, and has Christopher take a couple of blocks of wood from the felled tree back to London. One he gives to his brother, in a wonderfully tangible and taciturn gesture of renouncing the whole estate and the history it stands for. The other he uses in his flat, throwing whisky over it in the fireplace to light a fire to keep himself and Valentine warm. That gesture shows how it isn’t just Sylvia who is saying ‘Goodbye to All That’, but all the major characters are anticipating the life that, though the series doesn’t show it, Ford presents in the beautifully elegiac Last Post.

Max Saunders is author of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (OUP, 1996/2012), and editor of Some Do Not . . ., the first volume of Ford’s Parade’s End (Manchester: Carcanet, 2010) and Ford’s The Good Soldier (Oxford: OUP, 2012). He was interviewed by Alan Yentob for the Culture Show’s ‘Who on Earth was Ford Madox Ford’ (BBC 2; 1 September 2012), and his blog on Ford’s life and work can be read on the OUPblog and New Statesman.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credits: (1) Portrait of Ford Madox Ford (Source: Wikimedia Commons); (2) Still from BBC2 adaption of Parade’s End. (Source: bbc.co.uk).

The post Ford Madox Ford and unfilmable Modernism appeared first on OUPblog.

Last night at the Oscars, the Academy awarded a golden statuette to a film about a flawed hero who we the audience empathize with, who departs their normal life, enters a strange world, but returns triumphantly. Did I just describe Best Picture Winner Argo?

Yes, but also best animated short winner, Paperman, best animated feature winner, Brave, and best live action short winner, Curfew.

So whether the hero is a CIA operative, an besotted office worker, an Scottish princess or a suicidal man, and whether the journey is to revolutionary Iran, to a world of sentient paper airplanes, to a dark forest, or to a magical bowling alley, these films, and it’s safe to say, most of their fellow nominees, have spiritually uplifting themes, and generally follow a pattern of a mythic journey to redemption. (Indeed as my colleague’s S. Brent Plate pointed out, religion permeates all nine best picture nominees and the ceremonies themselves.)

Academy members, and audiences in general, like and expect movies to be heroic journeys of redemption. One 2012 film, Cosmopolis, is about a journey that’s anything but heroic and redemptive. Indeed, the film, based on a short novel by Don DeLillo, charts a billionaire’s limo ride across Manhattan to get a haircut as ironic, pointless and even destructive. Unsurprisingly, Cosmopolis received precisely zero Oscar nominations. Now, I’m not here to argue that this film was better than any of the nine nominated films.

One reason that the film’s director and screenwriter, David Cronenberg, despite being widely regarded as one of the world’s best living filmmakers, has never been nominated for, let alone won, an Academy Award, is because all his films explicitly reject themes of “redemption” and “spiritual uplift.”

Cronenberg is known not only an originator of the body horror subgenre (Shivers, Rabid, The Brood), and for adapting difficult works of literature (Naked Lunch, Crash, Cosmopolis), but for being one of the few filmmakers who explicitly identifies as atheist, and whose work ignores all religious themes. Cronenberg’s public atheism is all the more notable considering his association with horror, a genre often analyzed as fundamentally religious. Think about all the horror films that include one of more of the following: the dead displaced, satanic cults, covens, possession, exorcism, ghosts, and curses. Or think how often religious symbols a church or a crucifix, become sites of terror. So it is significant that none of Cronenberg’s films have any religious or supernatural elements. And this is not coincidence, but his conscious choice. More succinctly, he told me when I interviewed him at his home in Toronto, he does not “want to promote supernatural thinking.”

More significantly, both his earlier horror films and his later more literary films eschew the thematic underpinning virtually every Hollywood film ever: the battle between good and evil. Cronenberg’s films do not provide the visual and aural clues that conventional Hollywood cinema uses to denote good and evil. His heroes are not particularly altruistic or, indeed, heroic. The protagonists of several of his films [SPOILER ALERT], including Videodrome, The Fly and Dead Ringers die—but their deaths are neither redemptive nor sacrificial, nor do they result in any kind of triumphant return, symbolic or otherwise.

Many of his films do not have traditional villains. Even his seemingly conventional antagonists, from the sex parasites in Shivers to the multinational corporation Spectacular Optical in Videodrome to Naked Lunch’s Dr. Benway, are sinister and scary, but function as necessary agents of change.

When Cronenberg does use religious imagery to suggest evil, it is neither supernatural nor transcendent. Rather, his religious imagery evokes authoritarian institutions. Dead Ringers, based on a true story of twin gynecologists’ descent into madness and addiction, includes examination scenes set in the Mantle Clinic, their medical practice. The clinic functions as a kind of quasi-religious institution and the scenes are terrifying (even though this is not at all a traditional horror film), inasmuch as they show the power that doctors have over patients, and that men have over women (see Image).

In both his personal philosophy and his films, David Cronenberg sees no need for transcendence, or for the fulfillment of the hero’s quest, or for cosmic reward and punishment. And yet his films wrestle with the same questions of meaning that our favorite “religious” films do (questions of sex and death, power and desire, family and society, identity and transformation) but that do so in a uniquely nonreligious way. The Oscars may never give Cronenberg his due, but anyone interested in religion, film and their relationship, needs to.

Elijah Siegler is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston. His article “David Cronenberg: The secular auteur as critic of religion” was recently published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

The Journal of the American Academy of Religion is generally considered to be the top academic journal in the field of religious studies. This international quarterly journal publishes top scholarly articles that cover the full range of world religious traditions together with provocative studies of the methodologies by which these traditions are explored.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only television and film articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Do the Oscars snub films without redemptive messages? appeared first on OUPblog.

True love in opposition: Levin and Kitty’s match set against the triangle of Anna, her husband Karenin, and her lover Vronsky. How can Tolstoy’s crushing rejection scene (drawn from his own life) be portrayed on screen? The film adaptation of Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightly and directed by Joe Wright, is contending for four Oscars tonight (Production Design, Cinematography, Costume Design, and Original Score). Let’s see how they do compared to the Oxford World Classic edition before the cinematic contest this evening.

DURING the interval between dinner and the beginning of the evening party, Kitty experienced something resembling a young man’s feelings before a battle. Her heart was beating violently and she could not fix her thoughts on anything.

She felt that this evening, when those two men were to meet for the first time, would decide her fate; and she kept picturing them to herself, now individually and now together. When she thought of the past, she dwelt with pleasure and tenderness on her former relations with Levin. Memories of childhood and of Levin’s friendship with her dead brother lent a peculiar poetic charm to her relations with him. His love for her, of which she felt sure, flattered and rejoiced her, and she could think of him with a light heart. With her thought of Vronsky was mingled some uneasiness, though he was an extremely well-bred and quiet-mannered man; a sense of something false, not in him, for he was very simple and kindly, but in herself; whereas in relation to Levin she felt herself quite simple and clear. On the other hand when she pictured to herself a future with Vronsky a brilliant vision of happiness rose up before her, while a future with Levin appeared wrapped in mist.

On going upstairs to dress for the evening and looking in the glass, she noticed with pleasure that this was one of her best days, and that she was in full possession of all her forces, which would be so much wanted for what lay before her. She was conscious of external calmness and of freedom and grace in her movements.

At half-past seven, as soon as she had come down into the drawing-room, the footman announced ‘Constantine Dmitrich Levin!’ The Princess was still in her bedroom, nor had the Prince yet come down.

‘So it’s to be!’ thought Kitty and the blood rushed to her heart. Glancing at the mirror she was horrified at her pallor.

She felt sure that he had come so early on purpose to see her alone and to propose to her. And now for the first time the matter presented itself to her in a different and entirely new light. Only now did she realize that this matter (with whom she would be happy, who was the man she loved) did not concern herself alone, but that in a moment she would have to wound a man she cared for, and to wound him cruelly…. Why? Because the dear fellow was in love with her. But it could not be helped, it was necessary and had to be done.

‘Oh God, must I tell him so myself?’ she thought. ‘Must I really tell him that I don’t care for him? That would not be true. What then shall I say? Shall I say that I love another? No, that’s impossible! I’ll go away. Yes, I will.’

She was already approaching the door when she heard his step. ‘No, it would be dishonest! What have I to fear? I have done nothing wrong. I’ll tell the truth, come what may! Besides, it’s impossible to feel awkward with him. Here he is!’ she thought, as she saw his powerful diffident figure before her and his shining eyes gazing at her. She looked straight into his face as if entreating him to spare her, and gave him her hand.

Click here to view the embedded video.

‘I don’t think I’ve come at the right time, I’m too early,’ he said gazing round the empty drawing-room. When he saw that his expectation was fulfilled and that nothing prevented his speaking to her, his face clouded over.

‘Not at all,’ said Kitty and sat down at the table.

‘But all I wanted was to find you alone,’ he began, still standing and avoiding her face so as not to lose courage.

‘Mama will be down in a minute. She was so tired yesterday …’ She spoke without knowing what she was saying, her eyes fixed on him with a caressing look full of entreaty.

He glanced at her; she blushed and was silent.

‘I told you that I did not know how long I should stay … that it depends on you.’

Her head dropped lower and lower, knowing the answer she would give to what was coming.

‘That it would depend on you,’ he repeated. ‘I want to say … I want to say … I came on purpose … that … to be my wife !’ he uttered hardly knowing what he said; but feeling that the worst was out he stopped and looked at her.

She was breathing heavily and not looking at him. She was filled with rapture. Her soul was overflowing with happiness. She had not at all expected that his declaration of love would make so strong an impression on her. But that lasted only for an instant. She remembered Vronsky, lifted her clear, truthful eyes to Levin’s face, and noticing his despair she replied quickly:

‘It cannot be … forgive me.’

How near to him she had been a minute ago, how important in his life! And how estranged and distant she seemed now!

‘Nothing else was possible,’ he said, without looking at her, and bowing he turned to go …

One of the greatest novels ever written, Anna Karenina illuminates the questions that face humanity. A classic of Russian literature, this new edition of Anna Karenina uses the acclaimed Louise and Alymer Maude translation, and offers a new introduction and notes which provide completely up-to-date perspectives on Tolstoy’s classic work.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Levin’s proposal appeared first on OUPblog.

But looking at all British Oscar winners — since the first Academy Awards in 1929 — presents a different story. Less the ‘British are coming!’, more the ‘British have been!’ A full list of Oscar winners with entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (currently 79 individuals) lists 70 recipients between 1929 (Charlie Chaplin, The Circus) and 1980 (Alec Guinness, honorary award), and just 9 winners since Colin Welland’s rousing prediction. The Oxford DNB’s selection criteria — that all people included are deceased in or before 2009 — means this imbalance isn’t really a revelation, nor should it come as a surprise. Quite simply, and happily, most post-1981 British winners remain in good, creative health.

But the ODNB’s Oscar list is nonetheless an interesting reminder of outstanding talent, and outstanding films, from the history of British cinema. Here, of course, you’ll find the great names: Vivien Leigh (twice best actress for Gone with the Wind, 1940, and A Street Car Named Desire, 1952), Laurence Olivier (special award for Henry V, 1947 and best actor, Hamlet, 1949), or the lovely Audrey Hepburn (best actress, Roman Holiday, 1954). Also notable is that some of the most successful figures in British cinema have worked behind the camera, including the directors Carol Reed and David Lean who were both double winners.

The Oxford DNB’s list also reminds us of the perhaps forgotten successes: Jack Clayton whose The Bespoke Overcoat won ‘best short (two-reel) film’ in 1957 or Elizabeth Haffenden, winner, in 1960, of the best costume (colour) Oscar for the often scantily-clad Ben-Hur. Then there are the surprises: did you know that George Bernard Shaw won a statuette in 1939 for his adapted screenplay of Pygmalion, or that the dramatist John Osborne collected the same award for Tom Jones in 1964?

Finally, there are the ones who almost got away. It seems extraordinary that Stanley Kubrick (he lived in Britain, so he’s in the ODNB) won only once — and this for ‘best special effects’ in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or that Cary Grant (born in Bristol) had to make do with an ‘honorary award’ in 1970. Perhaps most surprising is that the giant of twentieth-century film, both in the UK and US, only reached the stage once, to receive the Irving G. Thalberg memorial award in 1968. He, of course, is Alfred Hitchcock whose life is recreated in an eponymous film out this month — and possibly on next year’s Oscar shortlist.

In addition to the Oxford DNB biographies above, the life stories of Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant are also available as episodes in the ODNB’s free biography podcast.

Now, from podcast to a pop quiz from Who’s Who, we’ll test you not only on what you know about the BAFTAs and Oscars, but who you know.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography  is the national record of men and women who have shaped British history and culture, worldwide, from the Romans to the 21st century. In addition to 58,500 life stories, the ODNB offers a free, twice monthly biography podcastwith over 175 life stories now available. You can also sign up for Life of the Day, a topical biography delivered to your inbox, or follow @odnb on Twitter for people in the news. The Oxford DNB is freely available via public libraries across the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to log-on to the complete dictionary, for free, from home (or any other computer) twenty-four hours a day.

Who’s Who is the essential directory of the noteworthy and influential in every area of public life, published worldwide, and written by the entrants themselves. Who’s Who 2013  includes autobiographical information on over 33,000 influential people from all walks of life. The 165th edition includes a foreword by Arianna Huffington on ways technology is rapidly transforming the media.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only television and film articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: CHICAGO – JANUARY 23: Oscar statuettes are displayed during an unveiling of the 50 Oscar statuettes to be awarded at the 76th Academy Awards ceremony January 23, 2004 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Illinois. The statuettes are made in Chicago by R.S. Owens and Company. (Photo by Tim Boyle) EdStock via iStockphoto.

The post ‘And the Oscar went to …’ appeared first on OUPblog.

It’s Valentine’s Day on Thursday, so let us celebrate the happiness of brief, all-encompassing love. We’ve paired a scene from the recent film adaptation of Anna Karenina, currently nominated for fours Oscars, with an excerpt of the novel below. In it, Anna and Vronsky discuss the happiness of their newfound love.

IT was already past five, and in order not to be late and not to use his own horses, which were known to everybody, Vronsky took Yashvin’s hired carriage and told the coachman to drive as fast as possible. The old four-seated hired vehicle was very roomy; he sat down in a corner, put his legs on the opposite seat, and began to think. A vague sense of the accomplished cleaning up of his affairs, a vague memory of Serpukhovskoy’s friendship for him, and the flattering thought that the latter considered him a necessary man, and above all the anticipation of the coming meeting, merged into one general feeling of joyful vitality. This feeling was so strong that he could not help smiling. He put down his legs, threw one of them over the other, and placing his arm across it felt its firm calf, where he had hurt it in the fall the day before, and then, throwing himself back, sighed deeply several times.

‘Delightful! O delightful!’ he thought. He had often before been joyfully conscious of his body, but had never loved himself, his own body, as he did now. It gave him pleasure to feel the slight pain in his strong leg, to be conscious of the muscles of his chest moving as he breathed. That clear, cool August day which made Anna feel so hopeless seemed exhilarating and invigorating to him and refreshed his face and neck, which were glowing after their washing and rubbing. The scent of brilliantine given off by his moustache seemed peculiarly pleasant in the fresh air. All that he saw from the carriage window through the cold pure air in the pale light of the evening sky seemed as fresh, bright and vigorous as he was himself. The roofs of the houses glittered in the evening sun; the sharp outlines of the fences and the corners of buildings, the figures of people and vehicles they occasionally met, the motionless verdure of the grass and trees, the fields of potatoes with their clear-cut ridges, the slanting shadows of the houses and trees, the bushes and even the potato ridges—it was all pleasant and like a landscape newly painted and varnished.

‘Get on, get on!’ he shouted to the coachman, thrusting himself out of the window; and taking a three-rouble note from his pocket he put it into the man’s hand as the latter turned round. The coachman felt something in his hand, the whip cracked, and the carriage rolled quickly along the smooth macadamized high road.

‘I want nothing, nothing but that happiness,’ he thought, staring at the ivory knob of the bell between the front windows of the carriage, his mind full of Anna as he had last seen her.

‘And the longer it continues the more I love her! And here is the garden of Vrede’s country house. Where is she? Where? Why? Why has she given me an appointment here, in a letter from Betsy?’ he thought; but there was no longer any time for thinking. Before reaching the avenue he ordered the coachman to stop, opened the carriage door, jumped out while the carriage was still moving, and went up the avenue leading to the house. There was no one in the avenue, but turning to the right he saw her. Her face was veiled, but his joyous glance took in that special manner of walking peculiar to her alone: the droop of her shoulders, the poise of her head; and immediately a thrill passed like an electric current through his body, and with renewed force he became conscious of himself from the elastic movement of his firm legs to the motion of his lungs as he breathed, and of something tickling his lips. On reaching him she clasped his hand firmly.

‘You are not angry that I told you to come? It was absolutely necessary for me to see you,’ she said; and at sight of the serious and severe expression of her mouth under her veil his mood changed at once.

‘I angry? But how did you get here?’

‘Never mind!’ she said, putting her hand on his arm. ‘Come, I must speak to you.’

He felt that something had happened, and that this interview would not be a happy one. In her presence he had no will of his own: without knowing the cause of her agitation he became infected by it.

‘What is it? What?’ he asked, pressing her hand against his side with his elbow and trying to read her face.

She took a few steps in silence to gather courage, and then suddenly stopped.

‘I did not tell you last night,’ she began, breathing quickly and heavily, ‘that on my way back with Alexis Alexandrovich I told him everything … said I could not be his wife, and … I told him all.’

He listened, involuntarily leaning forward with his whole body as if trying to ease her burden. But as soon as she had spoken he straightened himself and his face assumed a proud and stern expression.

‘Yes, yes, that is better! A thousand times better! I understand how hard it must have been for you’ he said, but she was not listening to his words—only trying to read his thoughts from his face. She could not guess that it expressed the first idea that had entered Vronsky’s mind: the thought of an inevitable duel; therefore she explained that momentary look of severity in another way. After reading her husband’s letter she knew in the depths of her heart that all would remain as it was, that she would not have the courage to disregard her position and give up her son in order to be united with her lover. The afternoon spent at the Princess Tverskaya’s house had confirmed that thought. Yet this interview was still of extreme importance to her. She hoped that the meeting might bring about a change in her position and save her. If at this news he would firmly, passionately, and without a moment’s hesitation say to her: ‘Give up everything and fly with me!’ she would abandon her son and go with him. But the news had not the effect on him that she had desired: he only looked as if he had been offended by something. ‘It was not at all hard for me — it all came about of itself,’ she said, irritably. ‘And here …’ she pulled her husband’s note from under her glove.

Click here to view the embedded video.

‘I understand, I understand,’ he interrupted, taking the note but not reading it, and trying to soothe her. ‘I only want one thing, I only ask for one thing: to destroy this situation in order to devote my life to your happiness.’

‘Why do you tell me this?’ she said. ‘Do you think I could doubt it? If I doubted it …’

‘Who’s that coming?’ said Vronsky, pointing to two ladies who were coming toward them. ‘They may know us!’ and he moved quickly in the direction of a sidewalk, drawing her along with him.

‘Oh, I don’t care!’ she said. Her lips trembled and her eyes seemed to him to be looking at him with strange malevolence from under the veil. ‘As I was saying, that’s not the point! I cannot doubt that, but see what he writes to me. Read—’ she stopped again.

Again, as at the first moment when he heard the news of her having spoken to her husband, Vronsky yielded to the natural feeling produced by the thoughts of his relation to the injured husband. Now that he held his letter he could not help imagining to himself the challenge that he would no doubt find waiting for him that evening or next day, and the duel, when he would be standing with the same cold proud look as his face bore that moment, and having fired into the air would be awaiting the shot from the injured husband. And at that instant the thought of what Serpukhovskoy had just been saying to him and of what had occurred to him that morning (that it was better not to bind himself) flashed through his mind, and he knew that he could not pass on the thought to her.

After he had read the letter he looked up at her, but his look was not firm. She understood at once that he had already considered this by himself, knew that whatever he might say he would not tell her all that he was thinking, and knew that her last hopes had been deceived. This was not what she had expected.

‘You see what a man he is!’ she said in a trembling voice. ‘He …’

‘Forgive, me, but I am glad of it!’ Vronsky interrupted. ‘For God’s sake hear me out!’ he added, with an air of entreaty that she would let him explain his words. ‘I am glad because I know that it is impossible, quite impossible for things to remain as they are, as he imagines.’

‘Why impossible?’ said Anna, forcing back her tears and clearly no longer attaching any importance to what he would say. She felt that her fate was decided.

Vronsky wanted to say that after what he considered to be the inevitable duel it could not continue; but he said something else.

‘It cannot continue. I hope that you will now leave him. I hope …’ he became confused and blushed, ‘that you will allow me to arrange, and to think out a life for ourselves. To-morrow …’ he began, but she did not let him finish.

‘And my son?’ she exclaimed. ‘You see what he writes? I must leave him, and I cannot do that and do not want to.’

‘But for heaven’s sake, which is better? To leave your son, or to continue in this degrading situation?’

‘Degrading for whom?’

‘For everybody, and especially for you.’

‘You call it degrading! do not call it that; such words have no meaning for me,’ she replied tremulously. She did not wish him to tell untruths now. She had only his love left, and she wanted to love him. ‘Try to understand that since I loved you everything has changed for me. There is only one single thing in the world for me: your love ! If I have it, I feel so high and firm that nothing can be degrading for me. I am proud of my position because … proud of … proud …’ she could not say what she was proud of. Tears of shame and despair choked her. She stopped and burst into sobs. He also felt something rising in his throat, and for the first time in his life he felt ready to cry. He could not explain what it was that had so moved him; he was sorry for her and felt that he could not help her, because he knew that he was the cause of her trouble, that he had done wrong.

‘Would divorce be impossible?’ he asked weakly. She silently shook her head. ‘Would it not be possible to take your son away with you and go away all the same?’

‘Yes, but all that depends on him. Now I go back to him,’ she said dryly. Her foreboding that everything would remain as it was had not deceived her.

‘On Tuesday I shall go back to Petersburg and everything will be decided. Yes,’ she said, ‘but don’t let us talk about it.’

Anna’s carriage, which she had sent away and ordered to return to the gate of the Vrede Garden, drove up. Anna took leave of Vronsky and went home.

A classic of Russian literature, this new edition of Anna Karenina uses the acclaimed Louise and Alymer Maude translation, and offers a new introduction and notes which provide completely up-to-date perspectives on Tolstoy’s classic work.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Anna Karenina’s happiness appeared first on OUPblog.

Today represents a red letter day — and a black mark – for US cultural history. Exactly 98 years ago, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation premiered in Los Angeles. American cinema has been decisively shaped, and shadowed, by the massive legacy of this film.

D.W. Griffith (1875-1948) was one of the more contradictory artists the United States has produced. Deeply Victorian in his social outlook, he was nevertheless on the leading edge of modernity in his aesthetics. A committed moralist in his cinematic ideology, he was also a shameless huckster in promoting his movies. And a self-avowed pacifist, he produced a piece of work that incited violence and celebrated the most damaging insurrection in American history.

The source material for Birth of a Nation came from two novels, The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden (1902) and The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), both written by Griffith’s Johns Hopkins classmate, Thomas Dixon. Dixon drew on the common-sense version of history he imbibed from his unreconstructed Confederate forebears. According to this master narrative, the Civil War was as a gallant but failed bid for independence, followed by vindictive Yankee occupation and eventual redemption secured with the help of organizations like the Klan.

But Dixon’s fiction, and the subsequent screenplay (by Griffith and Frank E. Woods), was a literal and figurative romance of reconciliation. The movie dramatizes the relationships between two (related) families, the Camerons of South Carolina and the Stonemans of Pennsylvania. The evil patriarch of the latter is Austin Stoneman, a Congressman with a limp very obviously patterned on the real-life Thaddeus Stevens. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Stevens comes, Carpetbagger-style, and uses a brutish black minion, Silas Lynch(!), whose horrifying sexual machinations focused, ironically and naturally, on Stoneman’s own daughter are only arrested by at the last minute, thanks to the arrival of the Klan in a dramatic finale that has lost none of its excitement even in an age of computer-generated imagery.

Historians agree that Griffith, a former actor who directed hundreds of short films in the years preceding Birth of a Nation, was not a cinematic pioneer along the lines of Edwin S. Porter, whose 1903 proto-Western The Great Train Robbery virtually invented modern visual grammar. Instead, Griffith’s genius was three-fold. First, he absorbed and codified a series of techniques, among them close-ups, fadeouts, and long shots, into a distinctive visual signature. Second, he boldly made Birth of a Nation on an unprecedented scale in terms of length, the size of the production, and his ambition to re-create past events (“history with lightning,” in the words of another classmate, Woodrow Wilson, who screened the film at the White House). Finally, in the way the movie was financed, released and promoted, Griffith transformed what had been a disreputable working-class medium and staked its power as a source of genuine artistic achievement. Even now, it’s hard not to be awed by the intensity of Griffith’s recreation of Civil War battles or his re-enactments of events like the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

But Birth of a Nation was a source of instant controversy. Griffith may have thought he was simply projecting common sense, but a broad national audience, some of which had lived through the Civil War, did not necessarily agree. The film’s release also coincided with the beginnings of African American political mobilization. As Melvyn Stokes shows in his elegant 2009 book D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the film’s promoters and its critics alike found the controversy surrounding it curiously symbiotic, as moviegoers flocked to see what the fuss was about and the fledgling National Association for the Advancement of Colored People used the film’s notoriety to build its membership ranks.

Birth of a Nation never escaped from the original shadows that clouded its reception. Later films like Gone with the Wind (1939), which shared much of its political outlook, nevertheless went to great lengths to sidestep controversy. (The Klan is only alluded to as “a political meeting” rather than depicted the way it was in Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel.) Today Birth is largely an academic curio, typically viewed in settings where its racism looms over any aesthetic or other assessment.

In a number of respects, Steven Spielberg’s new film Lincoln is a repudiation of Griffith. In Birth, Lincoln is a martyr whose gentle approach to his adversaries is tragically severed with his death. But in Lincoln he’s the determined champion of emancipation, willing to prosecute the war fully until freedom is secure. The Stevens character of Lincoln, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is not quite the hero. But his radical abolitionism is at least respected, and the very thing that tarred him in Birth — having a secret black mistress — here becomes a badge of honor. Rarely do the rhythms of history oscillate so sharply. Griffith would no doubt be bemused. But he could take such satisfaction in the way his work has reverberated across time.

For Jim Cullen’s selection of films all history and film buffs should see, watch his video syllabus.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jim Cullen teaches history at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City. He is the author of  Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions (December 2012), The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, and other books. Cullen is also a book review editor at the History News Network. Read his previous OUPblog posts.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only TV and film articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Birth of a Nation film poster, 1915, public domain in Wikimedia Commons.

The post The strange career of Birth of a Nation appeared first on OUPblog.

This year’s academy award nominations of Argo, Lincoln, and Zero Dark Thirty, attest to our fascination of watching “true stories” depicted on the screen. We adopt a special set of expectations when we believe a movie is based on actual events, a sentiment the Coen Brothers parodied when they stated at the beginning of Fargo that “this is a true story,” even though it wasn’t. In the science fiction spoof, Galaxy Quest, aliens have intercepted a Star Trek-like TV show and believe the program to be a documentary of actual human warfare. As a result, they come to Earth to enlist Cmdr. Peter Quincy Taggart (Tim Allen), star of the TV show, to help fight the evil warlord Sarris (named after the film critic, Andrew Sarris), as they believe Taggart to be a true war hero rather than merely playing one on TV.

Ben Affleck in Argo. (c) 2012 Warner Bros.

One psychological point is clear: our emotional involvement with a movie depends on the degree to which we expect or “appraise” the events to be real. Studies by Richard Lazarus and others have shown that physiological markers of emotion, such as skin conductance (i.e. sweaty palms), increase when subjects believe a film to depict an actual event. In one study, subjects watched a film clip depicting an industrial accident involving a power saw. Those who were told that they were watching footage of an actual accident (rather than actors re-enacting the event) exhibited heightened emotional responses. Thus, people watching the same movie may engage themselves differently depending on the degree to which they construe the events as realistic portrayals.

Even when we know we are watching a re-enactment, as with Argo, Lincoln, and Zero Dark Thirty, I suspect we become more emotionally attached when we believe we are witnessing actual events. We more readily empathize with characters and buy into the story. Of course, the authenticity of a movie depends not only on us having prior knowledge that a movie is based on actual events but also on how realistic the characters appear in their actions and predicaments. As wonderfully realistic and engaging as Argo, Lincoln, and Zero Dark Thirty were, in my opinion the most “realistic” movie among this year’s Academy Award nominees is the entirely fictitious Amour, in which the elderly Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) must care for his wife (Emmanuelle Riva), whose mental abilities are deteriorating from strokes. The superb acting and unusual editing (e.g. exceedingly long takes) amplify emotions and engage us as if we are watching a true and heart-wrenching story.

Arthur P. Shimamura is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and faculty member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. He studies the psychological and biological underpinnings of memory and movies. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 to study links between art, mind, and brain. He is co-editor of Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience (Shimamura & Palmer, ed., OUP, 2012), editor of the forthcoming Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies(ed., OUP, March 2013), and author of the forthcoming book, Experiencing Art: In the Brain of the Beholder (May 2013). Further musings can be found on his blog, Psychocinematics: Cognition at the Movies.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only television and film articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Image used for the purpose of illustrating the work in question.

The post Based on a “true” story: expecting reality in movies appeared first on OUPblog.