Nitzan Ben-Shaul is the author of Cinema of Choice: Optional Thinking and Narrative Movies, which will be released by Berghahn this month. His book explores films such as Sliding Doors, Run Lola Run, Inglourious Basterds, and Rashomon that present alternate narrative paths and uses these films to examine how standard linear films close down thinking processes, while arguing that optional thinking in film can be stimulating and rewarding. Here, he answers questions about his research and topic.
1. What drew you to the topic of cinema that proposes alternate narrative paths?
I was initially drawn to these movies when working on my book on interactive cinema (Hypernarrative Interactive Cinema: Problems and Solutions, Rodopi, 2008). Being concerned there with drama-guided interaction I found movies like Run Lola Run, Sliding Doors, and Rashomon to be excellent models for devising engaging interactive movies given their bifurcating narrative paths. I also produced a feature length interactive movie entitled Turbulence (2009) based on my research into interactive movies. I then asked myself what is the added value of these films and realized that they encourage optional thinking, that is, they get you thinking about options in life, a process that most movies actually derail by their encouraging closed-mindedness in their one-track narrative trajectory leading in an apparent strict causality to a relieving closure. Continue reading “Interview with the Author- Nitzan Ben-Shaul, Author of Cinema of Choice: Optional Thinking and Narrative Movies”
Author: Berghahn Author
An Excerpt from Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination
Note: Berghahn recently published Katherine Swancutt’s Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination, an ethnographic study of the world of Buryat Mongol divination. An excerpt from the book follows a note from the author which places it in the context of her larger argument.
It’s common knowledge that, when under duress, many people turn to religion. Yet the human penchant for inventing new magical practices during this ‘turn to religion’ is rarely revealed.
When I first went to Mongolia, I wanted to uncover how a shamanic cosmology comes to be reinvented over time. My plan was to document the shamanic practices – and especially the divinations (aka ‘fortune-tellings’) – undertaken by Buryat Mongols at the northeastern fringes of the country. These shamans manage everything from major health and business crises to everyday fluctuations in a person’s fortune, which, I learned, is not just a kind of luck-filled prosperity that can rise or fall dramatically. Fortune is also a driving force behind Buryat innovation-making. Continue reading “An Excerpt from Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination”
Interview with the Editor- Gemma Blackshaw, Co-Editor of Journeys into Madness: Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire
Gemma Blackshaw, along with Sabine Wieber, is one of the editors of Journeys into Madness: Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In her own contribution to the volume, she discusses the work and life of Viennese author and poet and Peter Altenberg. Here, she answers questions about her research and herself.
1. What drew you to Peter Altenberg as a topic?
A caricature of Altenberg was chosen as the poster image for the Madness & Modernity exhibition I curated with Leslie Topp and Sabine Wieber, which looked at the relationship between mental illness and the visual arts in Vienna circa 1900 (Wellcome Collection, London and Wien Museum, Vienna, 2009-10). It was a last-minute addition to the exhibition, gratefully received from the Neue Galerie Museum for Austrian and German Art in New York, and I had little time to research its history. I touched upon Altenberg’s own experience of what was termed ‘nervous disorder’ in the accompanying catalogue in an essay on the artist Oskar Kokoschka, who painted Altenberg’s portrait in 1909, and made a mental note to follow up what seemed to me to be an intriguing set of questions: was Altenberg as ‘mad’ as he appeared in the caricature; did an answer to that question even matter; what were the circumstances of his being institutionalised; what was the value and the differences in being represented, and representing yourself, as ‘mad’? These questions formed the starting point of a long research journey which became so compelling a trail that I produced not only this essay but also a documentary film collaboration with artist and filmmaker David Bickerstaff titled Altenberg: The Little Pocket Mirror. Continue reading “Interview with the Editor- Gemma Blackshaw, Co-Editor of Journeys into Madness: Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire”
Susan Hogan on Revisiting Her Groundbreaking Work on Feminist Art Therapy
Berghahn recently published Revisiting Feminists Approaches to Art Therapy, edited by Susan Hogan. It is both an update and an expansion of the earlier work Feminist Approaches to Art Therapy, first published in 1994. Here, Hogan addresses her reasons for revisiting her seminal work and explains why the topic is just as relevant today.
“Why do we need a book about women’s issues?” I am often still asked. Feminism is the principle of advocating social, political, and other rights of women as equal to those of men. It is necessarily interested in the question of equality. Creating a deep understanding of women’s conditions and women’s experience is one rationale for a volume specifically addressing this subject.
Another raison d’être of all my work in the field of art therapy is to challenge the reductive, and potentially damaging use of psychological ideas in art therapy practice. Continue reading “Susan Hogan on Revisiting Her Groundbreaking Work on Feminist Art Therapy”