Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried (original) (raw)
Related papers
Reframing Chicago's Memorial Day Massacre, May 30, 1937
American Quarterly, 2008
The picture stood again in his mind; two lines like two rows of. .. toy soldiers; move one line up into position, stand the other against it, then the first line goes bang, bang, bang and the second line is all knocked down. .. That was the simple picture. Out of that he had to find meaning. 1 | 130 American Quarterly | 131 Reframing Chicago's Memorial Day Massacre | 132 American Quarterly | 135 Reframing Chicago's Memorial Day Massacre
This article examines the political strategies of independent Spanish documentaries of the 2000s and 2010s in the context of debates about historical memory. The hypothesis of this research is that independent documentaries can operate as vehicles for practices and discourses that are free from the institutional domestication normally affecting film and television productions dealing with memory. It is thus argued that documentary film practices distanced from official political interests can challenge some of the common assumptions in discussions of historical memory and offer a bottom-up perspective, in parallel with a process that brings a grassroots element into public discussions of memory. First of all, the article examines some of the most prominent theoretical positions on memory. We then analyse the films Soldados Anónimos/Soldats Anònims (Pere Vilà and Isaki Lacuesta, 2009), Los materiales (Los Hijos, 2010) and Dime quién era Sanchicorrota (Jorge Tur, 2013) as examples that illustrate these ideas. Based on a study of these films, we question the use of testimony and the indexical value of the document as the foundations of the discourse of the film documentary, and propose a distancing from these practices as a way of avoiding the sentimental use of memory evident in official political positons on the Spanish Civil War.
Korea Journal, 2021
This paper explores the cinematic representations of the Gwangju massacre in three films: A Petal (1996), Peppermint Candy (2000), and May 18 (2007). Drawing on Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia, this paper examines and compares the different ways of commemorating the massacre in these films and the kinds of political and ethical implications produced by their different forms of commemoration. Since the mid-1990s, the national mourning of the Gwangju massacre has played a pivotal role in reconciling past antagonisms and legitimizing the hegemony of liberal democracy. As the sacred origin of the pro-democracy movement, the memory of Gwangju has been appropriated to construct a linear, teleological narrative of national development that represents the present as the culmination of national-democratic progress. In exploring in detail how the three films depict the massacre, this paper illuminates how the representations of Gwangju in these films reflect and correspond to the post-traumatic nation-building process in post-authoritarian South Korea, which can be encapsulated as a shift from melancholia to the mourning of its traumatic past. In so doing, this paper raises the question of what constitutes an ethico-political way of commemorating historical traumas.
The Demythologizing of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
2019
versed in Bruce Campbell-isms, 2 then you know that joke is genius-level. Jeff, as they say these days, saw what I did there, and noted his appreciation right below a large "B-." Thus began the first of several courses I took with Jeff, and our twenty-year friendship. Jeff was a fascinating man who lectured on Herman Melville and Herschell Gordon Lewis with equal enthusiasm, who meditated daily and played the accordion in an oom-pah band, who enjoyed a fine whiskey and the oddnumbered Nightmare on Elm Street films. He loved cinema in general, but horror films particularly, both for their confrontation of existential dread and for their gleeful camp. Jeff gave several memorable presentations in the Horror Area of the Popular Culture Association National Conferences, ranging in subject from the asceticism of the Saw series (2004-2010) to the apocalypticism of Hell Ride (Larry Bishop, 2008). 3 But he shared most of his erudition on cinema, horror films in particular, in conversation with his students, and sadly few of his insights on cinema ever saw print. My friend Jeff died on 23 January 2017, and I'm grateful to the editors of MONSTRUM that the following essay, full of his wit and intelligence, can reach the audience it deserves. 4 (Is it a coincidence that Jeff invokes O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find?" Perhaps my undergraduate essay impressed him more than he realized at the time … .) ____________________ Jeff Jeske was the Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Guilford College, where he taught American literature and American and global cinema, and advised Guilford's student newspaper, from 1986-2016. Will Dodson is the Ashby and Strong Residential College Coordinator and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Media Studies at UNC Greensboro. He teaches courses on rhetoric, literature, and film, with a focus on exploitation and alternative literature and cinema.
Luminous Ambush: Seizing the Historical Experience of Catastrophe Through Film
Culture Crossroads
There are wounds with which we should never cease to suffer, and, sometimes, in the life of a civilization, illness is better than health" [Ankersmit, "Remembering the Holocaust"]. My book, "Unspeakable Histories: Film and the Experience of Catastrophe" (2016), addresses films that depict 20 th century atrocities and focuses on historical experience, not historical truth, and the emotions that still adhere to unresolved traumatic events. Using key concepts and analysis from this book, my goal here is to dem onstrate, through the interpretation of three films, how such historical experiences can be represented. In Yaël Hersonski's "A Film Unfinished" (2010) the filmmaker deconstructs a Nazi propaganda film on the Warsaw Ghetto and brings us into direct contact with the experience of survivors. Rithy Panh in "S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine" (2003) and Joshua Oppenheimer in "The Act of Killing" (2012), use a technique I call psychodramatic miseenscène to incite perpetrators to reenact their genocidal acts. These films, among others, I argue, are capable of triggering moments of heightened awareness in which the reality of the past may be recovered in its material being.
Canadian Journal of Film Studies
In this English translation of a chapter of her 2009 book “J'haïs les féministes!” Le 6 décembre 1989 et ses suites, Mélissa Blais presents a radical feminist study of the 2009 film Polytechnique as an important event in the ongoing construction of the collective memory of the massacre. Beginning with an overview of how Quebec gender politics were marked by male domination in 2009, the article goes on to offer a critical analysis of the film's gendered characterization. Finally, Blais develops an analysis of the film's coverage by Montreal francophone daily newspapers Le Devoir and La Presse, arguing they develop a "negotiated" account of the film by juxtaposing elements of both a feminist and anti-feminist discourse. Of particular significance is a consistent construction of suffering masculinity in the film and in the mass media discourse surrounding it that occludes the misogynist and anti-feminist nature of the 1989 massacre.