Month: December 2012

Discover the films of Michael Haneke

 

Michael Haneke’s latest film, Amour, premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and went on win the Palme d’Or, making it his second win of the award in four years (The White Ribbon won in 2009). At the 25th European Film Awards, Amour was nominated in six categories and won in four, including Best Film and Best Director. The acclaim for the film further confirms Haneke’s position as one of the most significant living filmmakers.

Catherine Wheatley’s detailed study of his work, Michael Haneke’s Cinema, was published by Berghahn in 2009.  Screen magazine described it as “a bold, lucid, fiercely intelligent book, a vital addition to the study of contemporary cinema by one of the UK’s brightest young film critics.” It was also Sight & Sound Magazine Book of the Month, September 2009.

“Wheatley provides excellent close readings of a number of films and crucial film scenes. The book as a whole could be used in conjunction with a film course on Haneke, or its various chapters would lend themselves to discussions in graduate and even undergraduate courses on contemporary European film…The writing style is clear and while it pursues a critical theoretical analysis, it remains free from jargon. “  ·  Monatshefte

 
 

 

Here’s the trailer for Amour, which can be seen in the United States starting December 21st.

Meet the Editors – Rex Clark and Oliver Lubrich

Rex Clark and Oliver Lubrich are the editors of Cosmos and Colonialism and Transatlantic Echoes, two volumes that collect writings by and about Alexander von Humboldt – the first collection of its kind.  Below, the editors discuss their enthusiasm for von Humboldt’s life and work, and its continued relevance in the 21st century.

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What drew you to the study of Alexander von Humboldt?

Humboldt was a fascinating character—explorer of South American tropics, extreme mountain climber in the Andes, darling of the salon society in Paris and Berlin, and a celebrity intellectual known around the world in his time. His vision of society and knowledge discovery was truly intercultural and multidisciplinary and throughout his long life he sparked controversy and attracted attention.

In our original discussions about the project we were struck by how scholarship and conference presentations seemed very isolated and split between English, Spanish, and German language topics and traditions of Humboldt research. We planned to bridge this with a volume of representative essays from around the world. In researching the background contexts we discovered a rich history of literary and critical responses to Humboldt. So then the project morphed and grew to become a cultural history of those responses. We were drawn to how Humboldt appeared in poetry and fiction from his day to the present and we collected the literary responses which became the 100 texts in Transatlantic Echoes. The philosophical discussions and critical works inspired by Humboldt became the 50 essays of Cosmos and Colonialism.

So our two volumes are not really focused on Humboldt per se, but rather on the works of authors who created their own stories and myths, their own theories and propaganda. A mash up of Humboldt’s life and works, if you will, imagined by other writers, crossing two centuries and mixing up genres and nationalities. Other media are there as well, films, plays, comics. And since many of these were originally published in other languages, we had those texts translated so we can present everything in English to our readers. For us it was a big adventure of discovery—to find texts, research authors and their context, and then make the selections. And then we had to get the translations done and deal with all the issues of editing and copyright permissions, that was the part of the journey where we could identify with some of the hardships of Humboldt’s travels.

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Donald C. Wood on Ogata-mura, Japan

As should any item or idea in which its creator has invested more than fifteen years, this book very strongly reflects my own life course and concerns. Having cut my teeth on the canon of English language anthropological studies of Japanese farming villages as an undergraduate student, but then having trouble reconciling what I experienced in Ogata-mura in 1995–1996 with what I had previously encountered in this body of literature, I came to want to make my own contribution to the study of Japanese farming villages in the twentieth (and twenty-first) century, but in my own way. As an anthropologist who earned post–graduate degrees in both the USA and Japan, I have attempted to marry the respective ethnological traditions of these two countries, while aiming for a broad audience of social scientists and students of Japan and its society.

 

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