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Woman as alien: Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains.

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"Woman as an alien, the non-patriarchal alien in a patriarchal society, the patriarchal alien in a non-patriarchal society, the non-patriarchal alien experiencing the stress of positioning as a patriarchal subject - all are strategies used by feminist science fiction writers to deconstruct patriarchal ideology and its practice." (1) This quote taken from an essay by Anne Cranny-Francis is for me a very suitable starting point for a discussion of Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains (1969). Written from within the counter-culture of the 1960s, this novel is Carter's excursion into the disaster story convention, a literary sub-genre which was very popular during the period of the Cold War. (2)

Heroes and Villains is a very interesting and unsettling early book, and yet, surprisingly, one that has received "far less critical attention than one might expect." (3) Apart from a few interesting essays, (4) the existing studies of the book (primarily sub-chapters of monographs devoted to Carter) focus almost exclusively on the way the novel reverses gender stereotypes and undermines cultural codings of female sexuality as passive and masochistic. My point is different: I would like to show how, by having a female protagonist (and focalizer) who revolts against cultural stereotypes, Carter revitalizes the disaster story convention that in the late sixties seemed an exhausted and repetitive sub-genre of pulp fiction.

In order to do this I am going to briefly present the British disaster story tradition, place Carter within its context, and then discuss Heroes and Villains as an atypical disaster story that, thanks to a woman-alien who disrupts mythical frameworks that people are confined by, points to new ways of constructing narratives. I will show how the female protagonist of the novel matures and gradually learns that her post-holocaust society is based on a set of false binary oppositions it has inherited from pre-holocaust Western patriarchal society, and that her world is slowly giving way to entropy. I will then prove that Heroes and Villains indulges in descriptions of chaos and decay in order to show the deterioration of once potent symbols and thus of the mythical order which they represent. Only then, once the old order disappears, can the female mythmaker create a totally new civilization, one that does not repeat old and static social paradigms, but is dynamic and mutable. Similarly, Heroes and Villains shows that, in order not to degenerate into pulp disaster, the story should refrain from recreating already known historical epochs (for example, a new post-holocaust Middle Ages), opting instead to create radically new societies ruled by women-aliens.

Though it is rather difficult to state exactly what disaster stories are, a fair working definition of the genre seems to be the one given in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: "stories of vast biospheric change which drastically affect human life." (5) According to John Clute and Peter Nicholls, the British disaster story was born at the end of the nineteenth century when the first anti-civilization sentiments were being felt, and people began to mistrust the idea of the white man's Empire standing for reason, progress and science. In 1884 Richard Jefferies, a Victorian naturalist and journalist, published After London, a novel describing the ruins of the greatest city on Earth; in a post-cataclysmic future our civilization inevitably succumbs to nature, savagery and non-reason. In the following years such writers as H.G. Wells, Conan Doyle and Alun Llewellyn published numerous fantastic ac counts of natural- or human-provoked disasters, the retrogression of humankind, new ice ages, barbarian raids, the destruction of Europe, etc. (6)

Though dating from the nineteenth century the genre did not flourish until the 1950s and early 1960s during the Cold War, when young British writers revived the old tradition by incorporating a new influence: that of American pulp magazines. American stories of the time were very pessimistic, as the recent war left many with a feeling of despair and fear of the nuclear bomb, political systems based on unlimited power and culture's imminent doom. In England there was a strong native tradition of gloomy fiction concerning authoritarian societies (George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess), and thus the young authors of disaster stories belonging to the so-called "New Wave" of British speculative fiction (J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss and others) had examples to follow. (7) Their older colleagues Walter Miller (in the United States) and John Wyndham (in Britain) were writing their post-holocaust bestsellers at that very time.

Heroes and Villains seems to belong to the same tradition as the disaster story classics: Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibovitz or John Wyndham's The Chrysalides. (8) Miller and Wyndham describe the beginnings of a new civilization; their prose demonstrates how the deadly heritage of our times (pollution, mutations, decline and chaos) serve as the basis for another better world. In A Canticle monks of a second Middle Ages try to gather and preserve the records of our knowledge by rewriting all kinds of texts (just like the caste of Professors). Though they no longer understand what they copy, still there is hope that one day civilization will be regained. Wyndham's post-catastrophic society, in turn, is obsessed with the idea of purity and the norm. His characters want to recreate civilization in such a way as to make it immune to self-destruction. In its fear of deviations and mutants (bringing to mind the Out People) Wyndham's society is cruel and fanatical, but his novel is, just like Miller's story, full of hope for the future. Human folly and cruelty evoke terror and pity in order to improve the reader's mind. Carter's procedure in composing Heroes and Villains is to allude to Wyndham and Miller's tradition. Both Heroes and Villains and her other post-holocaust novel The Passion of the New Eve show to what extant literature today is repeating already known tales. Yet disaster fiction, a very commercial genre, enables Carter to reuse the stock motifs and to create her own often times shocking pieces. Her disaster novels may therefore be read as modern Menippea: a mixture of heterogeneous literary material. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, Menippea was the genre which broke the demands of realism and probability: it conflated the past, present and future, states of hallucination, dream worlds, insanity, eccentric behaviour and speech and transformation. (9)

Heroes and Villains juxtaposes overt allusions to nuclear fallout and mutations caused by the self-annihilation of technological society with counter-cultural poetics: subversion of the social order, new hippie-like aesthetics, alternate lifestyles, and concentration on entropy, decay and death. Carter is no longer interested in the bomb--she does not warn against the impending holocaust; but instead describes in detail the gradual dissolution of social, sexual and cultural groupings which follows the inevitable disaster and which makes room for a new female-governed future. Thus, she deconstructs the markedly masculine tradition of after-the-end-of-the-world fantasies which deal with the creation of a new order, strong leaders and outbursts of violence (as is the case in the above-mentioned novels by Miller and Wyndham). In stock disaster stories women are either commodities or breeders who are fought for and whose reproductive abilities are to amend r the drastic decrease of population.

In Heroes and Villains the Cold War motif of a post-holocaust civilization allows Carter to create an exuberant world of ruin, lush vegetation and barbarism. Three groups of people live among the crumbling ruins of a pre-nuclear explosion past: the Professors, who live in concrete fortified villages and cultivate old science and ideology; the Barbarians, who attack them and lead nomadic lives in the forests; and the Out People, radiation mutants cast out by all communities.

The Professors are the guardians of this order, and they try to uphold standards and attend to appearances such as dress and accent. Marianne, the novel's focalizer, is the daughter of a professor of history brought up to live in an ordered patriarchal society and to study old books in trying to preserve knowledge. The futility of the Professors' work - abstract research done in white concrete towers, editing what nobody would ever read - demonstrates the arbitrariness of post-apocalyptic social roles. The caste of Professors, in wanting to be different than the irrational Barbarians, must devise artificial attributes of its individuality.

Unable to cope with an existence devoted to cultivation of the past and attracted by the colourful and seemingly romantic Barbarians, Marianne helps one of them--an attractive young Barbarian leader named Jewel. He is very beautiful and he wears an exuberant savage costume, making him look like a Hollywood film star who plays in a wilderness film. For Marianne he embodies her desire and fantasies --on one occasion she even calls him the "furious invention of my virgin nights." (10) Moreover, his name might be considered an allusion to the beautiful savage girl whom Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim made the queen of his little kingdom. (11) Marianne's name might well be read as an allusion to Jane Austen's too-romantic heroine of Sense and Sensibility. (12) This canonical echo is contrasted with the association with pulp fiction: Marianne, a professor's daughter lost in the wilderness, evokes the character of Jane in the Tarzan stories. (13) It is by such literary allusions that Carter constructs her self-conscious pastiche, thus demonstrating the whole range of possibilities offered to a female character by romance and, at the same time, she points out the exhaustion of these conventions. John Barth in his Literature of Exhaustion postulates that "exhausted" literature might be saved by coming back to well-known classics and by echoing their extracts in new shocking contexts. (14) In this way Carter mingles her generically heterogeneous "prior texts".

Wounded in an attack, Jewel escapes from the village and is followed by Marianne. He then takes her to his tribe and, despite her protests, proclaims her his hostage. Marianne is a total stranger among the Barbarians; they find her repulsive and unbearably alien; like a creature from outer space in a B-grade science fiction movie she provokes fear and hostility. An educated and self-assured woman in a tribe "caught in the moment of transition from the needs of sheer survival to a myth-ruled society," (15) she is thus a woman-alien. Interestingly, as early as the 1960s Carter used a science fiction stock character to talk about women in a society that is undergoing changes: in the 1990s Donna Haraway, in her famous "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", in a similar way makes use of the science fiction concept of a cyborg. (16) Haraway follows Carter's footsteps, and indeed makes her point even stronger, as her "cyborg" comes from the social outside and is alien to traditional gender structures. As Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger explain:

Haraway develops her "Manifesto" around the cyborg--product of both science fiction and the military-industrial complex--as an imaginative figure generated outside the framework of the Judeo-Christian history of fall and redemption, a history that unfolds between the twin absolutes of Edenic origin and apocalyptic Last Judgment. Like Derrida, Haraway warns that (nuclear) apocalypse might, in fact, be the all-too-possible outcome of our desire for the resolution of historical time. Haraway too is wary of cultural discourses that privilege resolution, completion, and totality. (17)

Marianne is alien to the tribe as she refuses to adopt traditional female roles. Thus, Carter uses science fiction literary conventions to talk about gender as performance much in the same manner Judith Butler will some twenty years later. (18) Elisabeth Mahoney in her above-mentioned study of Heroes and Villains reads the novel in the context of Butler's thesis, that "fantasy is the terrain to be privileged in any contestation of conventional configurations of identity, gender and the representation of desire." (19) This is a very good starting point and an interesting comparison but, as Elaine Jordan notices, "Carter did this sort of thing before Butler, so her work could just as well be used to explicate Butler." (20) The same is true for Haraway, Gordon, Hollinger and a number of other feminist critics often referred to nowadays in order to validate Carter's argument. But Carter turning to science fiction for her metaphors predates them.

The tribe (whose descriptions bring to mind a 1960s hippie commune) is apparently governed by Jewel and his brothers, but Marianne soon realizes that the real source of power is Donally, an escapee professor of sociology, Jewel's tutor, and the self-proclaimed shaman of the tribe. For Donally the tribe is a social laboratory where he tries to perform an experiment: to wit, to introduce a new mythology designed to be the founding stone of new type of post-holocaust society. (21)

It seemed to me that the collapse of civilisation in the form that intellectuals such as ourselves understood it might be as good a time as any for crafting a new religion' he said modestly. 'Religion is a device for instituting the sense of a privileged group; many are called but few are chosen and, coaxed from incoherence, we shall leave the indecent condition of barbarism and aspire towards that of the honest savage. (22)

When Marianne meets Donally she immediately recognizes his professorial descent: "his voice was perfectly cultured, thin, high and soft ... He had a thin, mean and cultured face. Marianne had grown up among such voices and faces." (23) Seeing in his study books which she remembered from her childhood (Teilhard de Chardin, Levi-Strauss, Weber, Durkheim) Marianne discovers Donally's attempts to rule the Barbarians according to the outdated formulas written down by pre-apocalyptic sociologists.

Disappointed by the tribe, Marianne runs away only to be recaptured by Jewel, who rapes her, brings her back, and then ceremoniously marries her according to a ritual devised by Donally. With the tribe again on the move, Donally quarrels with Jewel and has to leave. Marianne gradually learns how to manipulate Jewel, her quasi-royal power grows, especially once she becomes pregnant and is to be the mother of Jewel's heir. When Donally sends a message that he has been caught by the Professors, Jewel goes to rescue him and both are killed. In the novel's finale Marianne decides to become the new female leader of a new society.

This brief summary reveals that, in parallel with the action-adventure narrative, the novel also depicts Marianne's gradual psychological change. She learns how to articulate her own fantasies and to objectify the man she desires: Jewel. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that when her romantic illusions disappear she discovers her own deeper motivating desire in her relationship with Jewel: it is her newly awakened sexuality that counts, not the male himself. Though a tribal leader and a future patriarch, Jewel is in fact a passive object both Marianne and Donally struggle to possess. Linden Peach writes:

In the relationship between Marianne and Jewel, Carter also rewrites a further traditional story, that of a demon-lover, of whom Jewel has many characteristics--he is powerful, mysterious, supernatural; and he can be cruel, vindictive and hostile. However, in her description of him, Carter challenges the male-female binarism which ascribes so-called masculine qualities to men and feminine characteristics to women. In discovering the nature of her own desire, Marianne finds that male-female attributes exist within each individual. The demon-lover is also reconfigured as part of her own eroticisation of the male other. (24)

New ways of looking at herself and others set Marianne free and empower her. Towards the end of the book she feels ready to construct a new narrative for herself and make the world around believe in it. A woman-alien dissolves the tribe's patriarchal structure and commences a new phase in its history. The old order based on binary oppositions (hero/villain, passive/active, natural/civilized) and a number of taboos that originated in pre-holocaust times are abandoned. Carter does not do what a standard disaster story author does: she does not establish a rigid binarism between the Professors and the Barbarians, i.e., the civilized and the savage. The post-holocaust narrative is for her a space where she "explores the blurring of conventional boundaries and binarisms and the way in which such artificial boundaries are maintained." (25) She re-uses existing narrative patterns of disaster fiction in order to break the "Wyndhamesque" formula and instead create a new and radical vision of the end of the world.

Moreover, these post-holocaust times are shown to be not a new version of the old order, but an unknown epoch typified not by stability but by creative chaos. Step by step, Marianne realizes that the entire distinction Professors\Barbarians is as false and naive as the children's role-playing game called "Soldiers and Villains". As a female child growing up in a Professors' village she always had to play the part of the Barbarian, the villain, the other, while the boy she played with, the son of a professor of mathematics, always wanted to be a male civilized hero who shoots her dead. As a small girl she was brave enough to refuse to play such a game; now as a young woman she realizes that in the real world the basis of the division between the Professors and the Barbarians is a set of myths and superstitions. (26)

The stay in the Barbarians' camp proves to Marianne that there is no other difference but old wives' tales: to her surprise (and in opposition to what she was told in the Professors' village) the Barbarians do not represent instinct, folklore and savagery alone. They do have a lot of superstitions; they do sport ridiculous tattoos, hairdos and costumes and they do believe in folk cures--but at the same time they are very far from unreflective "nature". When Marianne first sees Jewel he seems the embodiment of the wilderness: a man fighting to survive among hostile wildlife. But he immediately destroys this impression by quoting to her a relevant bit of poetry: Tennyson's poem about Darwinism. (27) Jewel is very well-educated by Donally and likes to boast of his knowledge of philosophical theories and the Latin names of beasts, which seems as irrelevant in the dirty Barbarians' camps as the Professors' lore in their concrete towers.

The Professors and the Barbarians need each other to define themselves. Both tribes work hard to impress the opponent (the Barbarians wear tattoos and facepaint, the Professors organize armies of specially-equipped soldiers to defend their villages). They also blame each other for the hardships of post-holocaust life. Marianne's father, in explaining to her the reasons of the war between the tribes, asks at one point: "if the Barbarians are destroyed who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?" (28) Aidan Day remarks:

The Professors, failing to recognise their own repressions, have sought to hound that which is not gentle and ordered outside themselves. They have committed the crime of finding external scapegoats for realities within their own hearts and minds that they find problematical. (29)

In a world where the Barbarians discuss philosophy and shamans comment on being shamans, even the seemingly biological distinction human\inhuman is not stable and fails to structure reality. While roaming the jungle Marianne encounters mutants whose bodies and minds transgress the human norm. What is worth noting is the origin of the Out People motif: mutants and deviations often populate the worlds of post-apocalyptic stories, the above-mentioned example of Wyndham's The Chrysalides being the best known; but the way they are described is usually quite different. By transgressing the norm Wyndham's mutants reinforce the notion of being human, of possessing some mysterious human factor along with all the rights and duties, while Carter's Out People are just strange, speechless bodies:

Amongst the Out People, the human form has acquired fantastic shapes. One man has furled ears like pale and delicate Arum Lilies. Another was scaled all over, with webbed hands and feet. Few had the conventional complement of limbs and features. (30)

Their appearance shows that overwhelming entropy is not external scenery the human race has to live in, but that it touches and alters the very essence of humanness: what humans are and what humans create is falling apart. Carter is re-writing an iconic disaster story motif (that of humans genetically altered by radiation), but she gives it a new ideological meaning. In classic male post-holocaust narratives mutants are disfigured humans who suffer for the sins of the fathers: civilization should start anew, albeit preserving its essential features (humanism, liberalism, traditional family values and consequently, patriarchy). Carter's Marianne, in watching the Out People, does not believe in re-establishing the old social order with its norms and values. Heroes and Villains is not about the rebirth of humankind, but about apocalypse itself.

In this chaotic world--where there are no more essential differences between phenomena, and the randomness of things does not allow for any conventional divisions--race, species, gender and even time cease to exist objectively. David Punter comments:

The conflict ... is a multivalent parody: of class relations, of relations between the sexes, of the battle between rational control and desire.... There are, obviously, no heroes and no villains; only a set of silly games which men play. (31)

Each entity possesses its own characteristic features; but on their basis no classification can be made as, gradually, all the points of reference are destroyed. Such a process is particularly striking as far as temporality is concerned--in the world of the novel there is no objective measure of time; everybody lives in the temporal dimension of his biological rhythm without calendars or chronometers. In Heroes and Villains the flow of time is stopped forever, as shown by the beautiful though useless chronometers that for Marianne are merely souvenirs from the past, elements of pure decoration. The book starts with a description of her father's favourite heirloom:

[A] clock which he wound every morning and kept in the family dining room upon a sideboard full of heirlooms.... She concluded the clock must be immortal but this did not impress her ... she watched dispassionately as the hands of the clock went round but she never felt the time was passing, for time was frozen around her in this secluded place. (32)

Time itself has become an heirloom, a peculiar reminder of bygone days. For Marianne the ticking of the clock has no relation to the rhythm of life. Its ticking proved to be the sound of her childhood and her father's old age. She left it behind without regret as it had never served for her any purpose. The next chronometers she saw (dead watches worn by the Barbarian women for decoration) were signs of an even greater degree of timelessness as nobody remembered their initial function. The last clock in the book, a gigantic and dead apparatus, welcomes Marianne in the ruins of the old city: (33)

Prominent among the minarets, spires and helmets of wrought iron which protruded from the waters was an enormous clock whose hands stood still at the hour of ten, though it was, of course, no longer possible to tell whether this signified ten in the morning or ten at night. (34)

The gigantic size of this clock and its absolute deadness create the image of the total arbitrariness of any measure of time. Exhaustion and entropy know no time but the vague "now" which for a fraction of a second can at best turn into "a totally durationless present, a moment of time sharply dividing past from future and utterly distinct from both." (35) The post-holocaust landscape of ruined cities near the seaside adorned with dead clocks brings to mind a visual intertext: Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory. (36) In this surreal painting, influenced by psychoanalysis, gigantic dead clocks are melting down, showing that clock time is no longer valid. Dali and Carter (who adored the Surrealists and often wrote about them in both her fiction and non-fiction) are both trying to recreate inner landscapes: their critique of the contemporary world takes forms of fantastic neverlands.

Carter's great admiration for the Surrealist movement results from the fact that, as she holds, theirs was the art of celebration and recreation. Their techniques haphazard and idiosyncratic, the Surrealists attempted to create combinations of words and images which by analogy and inspiration were supposed to evoke amazement; such art was based on a strong belief in humankind's ability to recreate itself. The world shown in their works is "deja vue", as in a nightmare we recognize separate elements which we have already seen as they date back to diverse moments of the past. It is a world deprived of time experienced in the mind. In surrealist art: "It is this world, there is no other but a world transformed by imagination and desire. You could say it is a dream made flesh." (37) In Heroes and Villains Carter attempts to use a similar technique to depict the post-apocalyptic world in which past, present and future intermingle.

For Carter's characters the future offers no escape: they are doomed to inhabit the ruins and repeat social scenarios from the past. Living in such a world has the haunting quality of a nightmare: the self-conscious characters feel oppressed by the same surroundings, similar activities and repeated words. What is the worst is the fact that there is no escape in space either, as there cannot be anywhere to go: "There's nowhere to go, dear,' said the Doctor. 'If there was I would have found it". (38)

Madness, drunkenness and paranoia seem to be the only ways out of the grotesque post-apocalyptic wilderness where everything is falling apart; indeed, the wild world Marianne enters (and finally renews) is entropy-ridden. The story's characters can hide only inside their troubled egos, as the outside reality is nothing but an everlasting nightmare. A stifling atmosphere of exhaustion and oppression is created by numerous images of overgrown vegetation, desolate ruins, half-destroyed houses full of fungi and rotting furniture, detailed descriptions of dirt and disease all in the atmosphere of sexual fantasy and paranoid visions. These images are too vivid and drastic to be mere scenery; it is the power of death and the different faces of decay that constitute Carter's style.

Carter treats bits and pieces of old discourses (the above-mentioned allusions to Conrad and Austen, as well as to Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Wyndham) in the way the Barbarians use old garments and broken down pieces of machinery found in the ruins: apparently to adorn but, at the same time, to take delight in dissolution, destruction and death. Metatextually, Heroes and Villains depicts the de-composition of traditional modes of writing; Carter follows the example of such New Wave authors as Pamela Zoline (39) for whom the key narrative term is entropy. In the short story "The heat death of the universe" Zoline defines the entropy of a system as "a measure of its degree of disorder." (40) The "system" is post-capitalist affluent society, and in order to capture the experience of living within the contemporary mediascape she both depicts the chaos of her character's life and introduces chaos to her narrative.

Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe" ends with the scene when the protagonist methodically smashes all pieces of equipment in her kitchen, thereby creating an irreversible mess of destruction; all forms give way to chaos. Carter's novel has a totally different post-apocalyptic setting, yet chaos and entropy are equally important. The narration of Heroes and Villains describes decay almost with pleasure and most certainly with great precision. The text changes into a study in decomposition, the anatomy of both our civilization and the disaster story genre: they both are killed in order to be examined. "For I am every dead thing"; (41) this quotation from John Donne would best summarize the world of the novel, which does not allow for any hope. The only emotion left is curiosity: Marianne the focalizer takes some pleasure in scientific observations of decay.

Among the ruins and scattered heirlooms of the past a prominent place is given to old symbols, which at the moment of the world's death, change in significance. Deprived of their contextual power the symbols die, creating ephemeral constellations and gaining for a moment a certain new meaning. The anatomy of signification becomes a favourite pastime of Donally and, later, Marianne; but the way the two of them interpret signs differs. Donally seeks to maintain patriarchal mythical frameworks: the sharp unequal antagonism between male and female; civilized and uncivilized; reasonable and wild. Marianne tries to dismantle these oppositions: for her signs are reduced to aesthetics and the old signifying system dies. The moment she starts to observe signs for their own sake marks her growing understanding of the world around: she lives surrounded by the debris of a bygone civilization which one may study--but only for scientific purposes. New myths are yet to be created. The last conversation between her and Jewel best shows the difference between them. Jewel is still naive enough to believe in symbols, while Marianne analyzes them:

But when he was near enough for her to see the blurred colours of his face, she also saw he was making the gesture against the Evil Eye. Suddenly she recognised it. "They used to call that the sign of the Cross,' she said. 'It must be handed down among the Old Believers." "Did you call me back just to give me this piece of useless information?" (42)

The anatomy of symbolic meanings and their changes is best seen in the example of clothes. Both the dress and decoration worn by the Barbarians come either from the ruins (and thus from the past) or are stolen from the Professors' villages. Worn in new and shocking combinations, old garments gain new meanings. A similar process was described in one of Carter's fashion essays from the Nothing Sacred collection. The essay entitled "Notes for a Theory of the Sixties Style" analyzes the nature of apparel. According to Carter clothes are the best example of the decadent fashion of the sixties, as in those years they "become arbitrary and bizarre ... reveal a kind of logic of whizzing entropy. Mutability is having a field day." (43)

The term mutability is the key notion for this essay, one written two years before the publication of Heroes and Villains. In this text Carter defines style as the presentation of the self as a three-dimensional object. Wearing eclectic fragments of different vestments "robbed of their symbolic content" (44) is a way of creating a new whole whose items are not in any imposed harmony. The theory formulated in the essay seems to be the key to understanding the symbolic meaning of clothes in Heroes and Villains, where mutability is not a matter of individual choice, but the condition of the whole dying civilization.

In broader terms, symbols have meaning only in reference to the mythical structures behind them--and clothes are a perfect example of this process. In a patriarchal society, where the law of inheritance makes men value female chastity and pre-nuptial virginity, the wedding ritual has a deep mythical sense and the white wedding dress becomes a potent symbol. Donally makes Marianne wear an old deteriorating white robe during her marriage ceremony in a vain attempt to reestablish patriarchy in the tribe. For Marianne the dress is just an ugly relic of bygone epochs. Lost in the exhausted reality of dead symbols she feels she has to create their own future: first to escape the old symbolic order and then to devise a new mythology herself.

Thus, paradoxically, the novel combines the symbols of entropy and mutability; it shows the world in the moment of its disintegration, and yet the disintegrating elements are constantly being re-used to create changeable structures. In one moment we read a "Wyndhamesque" end-of-the-world-fantasy, in another Carter deconstructs this tradition. Roz Kaveney writes:

The formalist aspects of Carter's work--the extent to which she combined stock motifs and made of them a collage that was entirely her own--was bound to appeal; sections of the SF readership discovered in the course of the 1970s and 1980s that they had been talking postmodernism all their lives and not noticing it, and Carter was part of that moment. (45)

Kaveney reads Heroes and Villains in the context of the science fiction readership in the late 20th century, and discovers how Carter makes use of SF conventions. Eva Karpinski in her essay "Signifying Passion: Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains as a Dystopian Romance" refers in her reading of the book to the utopian tradition:

The dystopian romance proves to be a suitable vehicle for Carter's didactic allegory of the relationship between the sexes, an allegory, one might add, that uses the utopian ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in order to re-write the myth of the Fall as it structures Western representations of the social and sexual difference. (46)

Other critics, for example Elaine Jordan (47) use the label "speculative fiction," (48) and Carter herself in the famous interview given to John Haffenden calls her fiction "magic mannerism." (49) Thus, one can think of diverse generic formulas to describe the novel, although none of the labels is final, as the narrative itself is unstable and mutable.

The novel also celebrates new feminist myths in order to playfully laugh at them on the next page. Having got rid of Donally and having won her mental struggle with Jewel, Marianne decides on a scenario that suits her best. She has found her identity and now wants to take control over the tribe and to become a post-apocalyptic leader, which she declares by paraphrasing the Bible: "I will be the tiger-lady and I will rule them with a rod of iron." (50) In this sentence she alludes to Donally's attempt to tattoo one of the tribe's children into a tiger-girl, something which ended tragically, as the baby died in the process. But the idea of the artificial creation of a "natural" tiger-human had some appeal to the Barbarians and thus Jewel wanted to get the tiger tattoo himself.

When Jewel learned that at his age it was impossible, he planned to tattoo his and Marianne's baby. And now it is Marianne who is going to symbolically possess the tiger's strength and beauty: not by getting a tattoo, but by ruling "with a rod of iron" over the tribe. Her "rod" is probably going to be her knowledge and education, the love of reason her father taught her, combined with her ability to reconcile binary oppositions and blend nature with nurture, reason with instinct, the Barbarians and the Professors. Only a woman-alien can do this by creating a third, reconciliatory way between the two patriarchal societies. Marianne is aware that she is not yet living in the post-apocalyptic order, but still within the Apocalypse itself, that is, amidst the bits and pieces of the old world which is falling apart. Thus her declaration "I will rule them with a rod of iron" echoes Saint John's Revelation:

and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born. And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness. (51)

Marianne misquotes St John for a purpose: she aims to give old patriarchal texts a new meaning for new times. At the end of the book Marianne is, physically speaking, "ready to deliver", as her baby is to be born very soon. But here the similarities with St John end: who can be identified with the devouring dragon? Perhaps patriarchal attempts to remodel the child so that it serves a purpose? After all, Donally and Jewel wanted him tattooed and ruling the tribe according to the old pattern of power. Moreover, Marianne (in contrast to Donally and Jewel) is not so sure the baby is going to be "a man child", and so she plans the future regardless of its sex. Finally, her flight into the wilderness is in fact an act of usurping political power herself: it is she who is going to become a tiger-lady and to rule the new "wilderness", the world outside the villages of the Professors and the camps of the Barbarians.

"People kept wild beasts such as lions and tigers in cages and looked at them for information. Who would have thought they would take to our climate so kindly, when the fire came and let them out?" (52) which is how Marianne's father once explained to her why the exotic beasts roam the countryside devouring smaller creatures. After the apocalypse carnivorous cats once again become the king of beasts; they are the only ones that gained power instead of losing it. Predators could survive and rule. As this is true of tigers, perhaps it can also be true of people?

Tigers and lions are very prominent in the novel; we very soon learn that Jewel is attracted to wild cats, which is perhaps the effect of his own weakness. One of his most vivid memories is the scene when, as a teenager, he met a lion face to face and survived only because the beast ignored him. This story (which he told to Marianne) anticipates the end of the novel: when Jewel gives up and goes to seek his death he encounters another lion and again fails to attract its attention. Marianne sees the animal and cannot but admire its fearsome beauty:

She had never seen a lion before. It looked exactly like pictures of itself; though darkness washed its colours off, she saw its mane and tasseled tail which flicked about as it moved out of the edge of shadow on to the dune. (53)

Marianne is not disappointed; the lion looks "like pictures of itself": the thing and its representation for once go together. The mythical meaning of wild cats is going to survive the end of civilization and shall remain a handy metaphor. Marianne decides to rule over the tribe as its tiger-lady not in an act of imitating a queen of the wilderness fairytale motif, but in an attempt to start a new epoch with its new myths. (54) As Margaret Atwood puts it in her essay on Carter's stories "Running with the Tigers", as the tiger will never lie down with the lamb, it is the lamb the powerless female--which should learn the tigers' ways. (55) By the same token, Marianne wants to create a new definition for a power system in which the oppositions male/female, intellect/desire or civilized/wild are of no importance. (56)

When Marianne gets to the Barbarian camp for the first time she finds herself imprisoned by the patriarchal myth of a new Creation. Both Donally and Jewel want her to act out a new Eve role in order to secure a re-enactment of history which would result in a repetition of the old social and political order. Jewel advises her at the time of her trouble in adapting to the tribe to pretend to be Eve at the end of the world. The original patriarchal myth of Eden is re-enforced by a tattoo Jewel has on his back whereby Eve offers Adam an apple, and by a number of metaphors and allusions. This myth is thus very prominent in the novel and suggests the strength of patriarchal ideology--parallel to the strength of the tribe's male leaders (and also of the Professors' village: both societies are exclusively male-governed). The rival mythical intertext--the Revelation of Saint John--appears not until the end of Heroes and Villains and marks the beginning of a genuinely new epoch when Marianne, a woman-alien, takes power.

A woman-alien sets out to create a genuinely new social order and the question is whether she is going to recreate the hegemonic power-relations of patriarchal order in both the Professors' villages and the Barbarians' camps. In science fiction narratives aliens often perceive human civilization in a new way, one that enables us to see "normal" social order in a defamiliarized manner; Marianne is a stranger to her own world, she is not interested in the reversal of binaries, but in their liquidation. Carter does not celebrate her political victory as a birth of a genuinely feminist paradise: the very concept of "tiger-lady" cannot be taken too seriously. Marianne the Queen is demythologized from the very start of a reign which is going to prefer mutability to stiff order.

Marianne the tiger-lady has a long road to power behind her. Heroes and Villains tells a story of her maturation in a world full of bits and pieces of old symbols and power structures. Marianne learns to see that these binding discourses are giving way to entropy, and that in her world of total chaos new myths have to be created --and that a new, post-patriarchal epoch is yet to be commenced. Moreover, a similar procedure might well be applied to the old literary genre Heroes and Villains pertains to: the British disaster story. By having an atypical protagonist, a female-alien strong enough to destroy patriarchal social structure, Carter manages to revive the exhausted convention and to create a genuinely new story.

(1.) Anne Cranny-Francis, "Feminist Futures: A Generic Study," in Alien Zone. Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 219-228, p. 223.

(2.) To call Carter a "feminist science fiction writer" would perhaps be an exaggeration (though the most influential science fiction lexicon, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by Clute and Nicholls, does have an entry "Angela Carter"). Nonetheless, in some of her novels she purposefully uses fantastic literary conventions.

(3.) Elisabeth Mahoney, "'But Elsewhere?' The future of fantasy in Heroes and Villains," in The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter, ed. Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (London and New York: Longman, 1997), 73-87, p. 73.

(4.) One has to mention Eva C. Karpinski, "Signifying Passion: Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains as a Dystopian Romance," Utopian Studies 11.2 (2000) 137-51; and Roz Kaveney, "New New World Dreams: Angela Carter and Science Fiction," in Flesh and the Mirror. Essays on the Art of Angela Carter, ed. Lorna Sage (London: Virago, 1994), 171-88.

(5.) John Clute and Peter Nicholls, ed., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (London: Orbit, 1999), p. 338.

(6.) Clute and Nicholls, pp. 337-339.

(7.) For details concerning the New Wave of British speculative fiction, see Judith Merril, England Swings SF, Stories of Speculative Fiction (New York: Ace Books, 1968). The most important disaster novels written by the New Wave writers are J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (Harmondsworth and Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1974) and J.G. Ballard The Wind from Nowhere (Harmondsworth and Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1974).

(8.) Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibovitz (Philadelphia, Lippincott and London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960) and John Wyndham, The Chrysalides (London: Joseph, 1955).

(9.) Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, tr. by R.W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973), p. 96.

(10.) Angela Carter, Heroes and Villains (London: Virago, 1992), p. 137.

(11.) Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

(12.) Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (Harmondsworth, New York, Ringwood and Auckland: Penguin Classics, 2007).

(13.) Tarzan's adventures were originally created by Edgar Rice Burroughs and published in the years 1914-1950.

(14.) John Barth, The Literature of Exhaustion and the Literature of Replenishment (Northridge: Lord John Press, 1982).

(15.) Karpinski, p. 138.

(16.) Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149-181.

(17.) Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon, ed., Edging into the Future. Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 162.

(18.) Butler talks about gender in terms of ritual practices, a role one adopts thus excluding other modes of behaviour. What is excluded forms the "constitutive outside" the zone of the suppressed from which gender roles can be challenged, much in the same way Marianne challenges social norms in the tribe. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 23.

(19.) Mahoney, p. 75.

(20.) Elanie Jordan, "Afterword," in The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter, ed. Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (London and New York: Longman, 1997), 216-219, p. 219.

(21.) Carter's numerous shamans, for example the character from Nights at the Circus, are usually totally different. They are given a role similar to that of a writer: they believe in the magic they perform, therefore what they do has the mystical quality of a true primary text. In their context the comments and analysis by Donally seem artificial and exhausted.

(22.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 63.

(23.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 49.

(24.) Linden Peach, Angela Carter (Oxford: Macmillan, 1998), p. 96.

(25.) Peach, p. 87.

(26.) For example, according to these beliefs, the Barbarians sew up cats in the bellies of the Professors' women, while the Professors in turn bake Barbarians alive "like hedgehogs".

(27.) Alfred Lord Tennyson, "In Memoriam A. H. H.," in Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1992), Canto 56.

(28.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 11.

(29.) Aidan Day, Angela Carter: The Rational Glass (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 45.

(30.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 110.

(31.) David Punter, The Literature of Terror--A History of Gothic Fiction from 1795 to the Present Day vol. II The Modern Gothic (London: Longman, 1996), p. 140.

(32.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 1.

(33.) The city is probably London and the clock Big Ben; the tribe is traveling south to spend the winter at the seaside and finally reach the gigantic ruin. Descriptions of London after various cataclysms are very common in disaster stories; examples are: Jefferies' After London, J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World and The Wind from Nowhere and Wyndham's The Day of the Triffid. Once again Carter rewrites a canonical disaster fiction motif in a new way.

(34.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 138.

(35.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 148.

(36.) Painting by Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931.

(37.) Angela Carter, "The Alchemy of the Word," in Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), p. 70.

(38.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 95.

(39.) Pamela Zoline, "The heat death of the universe," in England Swings SF, Stories of Speculative Fiction, ed. Judith Merril (New York: Ace Books, 1968), 313-328.

(40.) Zoline, p. 316.

(41.) John Donne, "A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day," in The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C. A. Patrides (London and Melbourne: Dent, 1985), p. 90.

(42.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 148.

(43.) Angela Carter, "Notes for a Theory of the Sixties Style," in Nothing Sacred (London: Virago, 1988), 85-89, p. 86.

(44.) Carter, "Notes for a Theory of the Sixties Style," p. 86.

(45.) Kaveney, 175.

(46.) Karpinsky, 137.

(47.) Elaine Jordan, "Enthrallment: Angela Carter's Speculative Fictions," in Plotting Change: Contemporary Women's Fiction, ed. Linda Anderson (London: Edward Arnold, 1990), 19-40.

(48.) "A kind of sociological SF which concentrates on social change without necessarily any great emphasis on science or technology" (Clute and Nicholls, p. 1144).

(49.) John Haffenden, "Angela Carter," in Novelists in Interview, (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 80.

(50.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 150. This is uttered in a conversation when Marianne describes her plans for the future of the tribe: " 'they'll do every single thing I say.' 'What, will you be Queen?' 'I'll be the tiger-lady and rule them with a rod of iron.'"

(51.) St. John's Revelation 12:4-6 in The Holy Bible: Old and New Testament in the King James Version (Hazelwood: World Aflame Press, 1973).

(52.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 9.

(53.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 140.

(54.) Sarah Gamble suggests that the moment Marianne becomes a tiger-lady symbolically "implies that Marianne has now broken free of the stereotyped roles--daughter, victim, wife and whore--in which she has been complicit from the text's beginning." Sarah Gamble, Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 79.

(55.) Margaret Atwood, "Running with the Tigers," in Flesh and the Mirror, ed. Lorna Sage (London: Virago, 1994), 117-136, p. 358.

(56.) A. Day elaborates upon Marianne's future reign: "But while, as tiger-lady, she is going to draw on primordial Barbarian energy, Marianne, it must be noted, does not give up her purchase on reason. It is this emphasis on maintaining reason that separates her from the Donally-inspired Barbarian cult of the irrational. At the same time as Marianne stops being a stranger to her own id during her sojourn amongst the Barbarians, reason emerges as a cardinal feature of her discovery of herself.... In Marianne's case reason may order, like an iron rod, the inchoate energies of the id, while the energies of the id--the energies of the tiger-lady--may enrich reason. This synthetic model is identified as specifically feminine, in contrast with the masculine insistence on self-definition through opposition to an other" (Day, pp. 51-53). COPYRIGHT 2010 Eotvos Lorand Tudomanyegyetem, Department of English Studies

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k-s-morgan · 5 years ago

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What would you tell someone who keeps hearing that shipping as a concept is stupid.. whether canon or not. That fan-fiction is dumb and romance is bad and fantasising unrealistic things is stupid.. I feel somehow media also wants to portray it that way, attaching negative connotations. Why do I have to love so many things in extreme privacy, like some shameful secret..

Hi! I’m very sorry to hear you’re going through this - the fact that anyone should feel ashamed of having a harmless hobby is outrageous as hell, my blood boils at the mere thought of it. Since I don’t know your specific circumstances, I’ll give a more general type of advice and I hope it’ll be able to help at least a little bit. I know it helped me in a similar situation.

Our society is shitty, there is no question there. Many people are hypocritical as hell, and whatever you say, they are unlikely to change their minds. So the most important thing is to understand that the hobbies/genres/types of fiction you love are valid and try to emanate this confidence when challenged. It can be displayed in different ways - you could provide objective facts to educate specific assholes, simply state your opinion in cold and condescending voice, or even stare someone down as if what they’ve said is so pathetic that you aren’t going to bother with replying. In RL, I used the second and the third methods, and they were always efficient. But let’s start with facts.

1) Fanfiction is a completely valid type of literature that existed for more than a hundred of years. Pastiche, for example, is treated seriously by the majority, yet it can be easily viewed as a type of fanfiction that’s being published officially. Writing is writing, skills are skills. World-famous writers like Neil Gaiman write fanfiction; more than that, fanfiction is a much more honest and lively kind of fiction.

When you publish a book, unless you have editors, a stable base of readers, and money for marketing, you have no idea how you are doing as you’re writing. You don’t hear the readers’ opinion on each chapter, you don’t interact with them, you don’t see their theories. You are writing in void, and when you are done, chances are, you’ll be met with nit-picking, hostility, a few short generic reviews, or more silence. Many writers try to correspond to market standards: for many of them, a beloved creation turns into a business product that must have this and that element to have a better selling potential. With fanfiction, people are writing simply because they love writing. They care about the characters first and foremost, they write what feels right emotionally, and they receive feedback that encourages them and helps them grow. Fanfiction gives so many opportunities that its value just cannot be overestimated.

2) Romance is a genre. A genre can’t be bad, you either are interested in it or you aren’t. Every genre has masterpieces and its group of fans, and shitting on it is the same as shitting on a chocolate ice-cream if you don’t like it and prefer a strawberry one instead. So really, if someone tries to say that romance is dumb or bad, this isn’t even worthy of a reply.

3) If someone told me that fantasizing about unrealistic things is stupid, I’d just snort and laugh out loud. Just direct such person to the closest bookshop or cinema. If someone isn’t aware of what fiction is and what it’s for, they lack some basic life education and you shouldn’t be the one to provide them with it.

4) If someone tells you that shipping is dumb, ask whether they think football, baseball, box, etc. are dumb. Like, it’s literally people watching other people play with the ball, punching each other, or trying to outrun each other. If that classifies as an acceptable hobby, why shouldn’t shipping be? Most people can relate to the idea of wanting to love and to be loved, to overcome all obstacles, and as such. Watching characters do it is fascinating. Rooting for a couple to get together is the same as rooting for a character to conquer the throne. Different plot elements, the same nature of interest.

But in my case, I never bothered to explain all this to anyone. There were times when I felt ashamed of admitting I’m reading and writing fanfiction, so I lied when asked about it. I was one of those girls who loved Twilight even before the series got popular, and then I started to feel so ashamed that I pretended I hated it and began to ridicule it. Fortunately, my family helped me get back on track, which is when I got angry. My confidence returned, and I became fiercely protective of my hobbies - Twilight included, btw.

I just started using the ice-look on anyone promoting any kind of ignorant nonsense. Now, if anyone tells me how dumb fanfiction is, I just raise my eyebrow and drawl, “Right...” in the most condescending and derisive tone. Most people feel wrong-footed and try to offer some weak arguments. I may reply with a few mentioned facts, but usually, I just end the conversation by saying, “Maybe you should learn more about this before you embarrass yourself even more. You clearly have no idea what you are talking about and I’m not in the mood to educate you, so let’s finish this discussion.” It works every time.

I understand it might not apply to you - maybe you are surrounded by hostility that can get physical if you voice your real thoughts. If so, then I just hope that one day, you’ll move away from this toxic circle of people and surround yourself with someone worthier. Most importantly, remember that there is nothing to be ashamed of here. Love what you love, be proud of it, discuss it with like-minded people, and try to ignore the assholes. They are not worth your time.

#fanfiction

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davidaccampo · 6 years ago

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Breaking Down Comics

A friend of Amanda Donahue, one of my co-creators on THE MARGINS, asked me some questions, and they were so good I felt it was worth dusting off Tumblr to answer. Thanks, Nick, and I hope these rambles give you something worth your while!

Below are Nick’s two questions and my VERY long answers.

Sooo, my first question would just be how you got into it. Is it your primary form of writing?

Great question. So, is it my primary form of writing? Hmmm. I just finished a commitment to a set of 4 interactive mobile game scripts that took up quite a chunk of the last few months. In that time frame I also released a one-shot licensed 22-page comic and a 12-page digital creator-owned comic. So, on balance, I don’t think it’s currently my primary form of writing, but it’s definitely my favorite form, and it’s a medium and industry that I’m both very familiar with and passionate about, so whenever I’m given the chance to write comics, I take it.

However, comics as an industry is a difficult one to navigate. With the two biggest publishers owning incredibly popular franchises, the prime means for writers to make a living on comics is to essentially write super-heroes that you don’t own. And that, in itself, is neither good nor bad. It’s just worth noting that if you want to make comics your primary form of income, then DC and Marvel are going to come into your orbit in some shape. And that type of writing will come with its own set of thrills and challenges.

On the flip side, creator-owned comics and graphic novels can be an extremely fulfilling creative experience, if financially tricky to produce and sell. But the comics industry is still intimate enough that you can find ways to make and sell your comics. There’s a lot more to talk about there with regards to distribution and comics retail, but that’s another conversation.

It’s also worth noting that while the prevailing understanding is that digital comics sell only a fraction of the numbers of printed comics, it’s also a very accessible platform. With time and effort, you can put a comic book out to a global audience.

I may have veered slightly off topic here, but I think the point I’m trying to make is: if you want comics to be your primary form of writing, they most certainly can be. And you can and will make comics passionately and whole-heartedly, and you’ll put them into the world.

But making a living off of them is much more complicated scenario and every creator out there will have different advice for you, but be prepared for an equation that’s pretty familiar to any who has ever freelanced: less control = more money. Generally speaking, of course. There’s always a Walking Dead situation, if all the stars align.

Oh, and I never answered the first part of that question — how did I get into it? I’ll try to bullet point my personal path, which is super wonky, but probably not much stranger than most writers.

It kinda went like this:

Dave’s Writing Career: A Timeline

I always loved comics. In high school, I even wrote and drew 80 pages of a comic that was a horrible pastiche of Marvel/Epic’s Elektra: Assassin by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz and DC’s The Question by Denny O’Neil, Denys Cowan, and Rick Magyar. However, in my 20s, I’d attend conventions and discover that I had no idea how to move from fandom into professional writing.

I went on to study English and Creative Writing, thinking I’d write prose novels.

Then I moved to LA and fell in with a crowd of Hollywood screenwriter types. I wrote a few screenplays with a writing partner, Jeremy Rogers, but when nothing really came from it, we decided to make our own short films.

We made 3 short films that went into film festivals. At this point, I was tired of spending so much time and money making 10-30 minute films that didn’t result in much. We hatched a new plan: what if we availed ourselves of the iTunes platform and released an audio drama as a podcast?

Wormwood: A Serialized Mystery was the result. It allowed us to tell long, serialized stories, much like my first love: comic books.

Toward the end of the Wormwood run, an illustrator named Jared Souza contacted us. He’d adapted scenes from Wormwood into sequential art, and was curious if we ever thought about turning it into a comic book. We jumped at the chance, and with Jared we wrote and drew an 12-page mini-comic that we printed and took to the San Diego Comic-Con. Hermes Press was interested in our book, and they offered us a deal shortly after the show was over.

From there, I kept thinking about what else I could do with comics. I partnered with Chris Anderson for Lost Angels, and we made another 12-page mini-comic as a sales pitch, and we were offered a digital-first deal with a new publisher, Comicker.

And it keeps going from there, but that is the long and windy road telling stories in a LOT of different formats, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Learning the strengths of one format does help you to understand the strengths of another. For example, for Wormwood we could really lean into long, twisty passages of monologue because it was all about the actors’ voices. However, as soon as you bring that to comics, you realize the amount of word balloons those monologues would take would utterly cover up any artwork on the page. And so you adjust.

Which is a nice segue to your other question…

Secondly, I'd love to hear how you work things out. As far as layout in regards to story. The most challenging aspect for me is to convert my thinking from imagining in film to now these static images. Do you put a lot of thought into that area, or do you focus mostly on the story and then sort of work that out as you are getting it down?

My initial thought is: “I do both.” But let’s break those up.

In terms of static images: think about the key moments. The perfect still frame of film that sums up the core of a moment of story in your mind. You want to build out from there.

But almost more importantly: think about the gutters. The space between panels. The gutters are actually where all the magic in comics reside. I recommend reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. McCloud is great for understanding how a reader processes the information when we’re as absorbing art in a sequence. And the key is the gutters: The narrative “time” between panels can last a millisecond or a millennium. And the reader understands that from the context. So you’ve got to figure out how much you can get away with in between panels.

A panel exists in one moment in time. One action can occur. Imagine a father and son playing catch. What’s the most important part of that scene? The father throwing? The son catching? That’s two panels. Or, it could be a wide shot of the two, the ball in mid-air, but that wide shot probably should take up as much space on the page as two close angle shots of throwing and catching.

So, you ask yourself: what’s the emotional context of the scene? Is it important to show the father about to throw the ball (perhaps metaphorically teaching his son)? Is it important to show the son catching that ball (perhaps showing the son absorbing the lesson)? Is the activity itself the most important part (the wider shot might work best). It really depends upon the what you want to get out of the scene.

Another example: A man sits in his living room. There’s a knock at the door. He answers. It’s his landlord.

How many panels is that? The only concrete answer I can give you is that it’s ”more than one” — because the of multiple actions involved.

It could be two panels: 1) the man sits reading a newspaper, but his head is cocked because he’s JUST heard the SFX of knocking on his door. 2) he’s standing at the open door and the landlord is asking him for a rent check.

It could be five panels: 1) the main sits reading a newspaper. 2) We show the front door, with knocking SFX. 3) The man opens the door, but we don’t show who it is, building suspense. The man is nervous. 4) we reveal it’s the landlord, standing there, arms crossed and angry. 5) The landlord asks for the rent check.

How important is that scene to your overall story? Five panels is roughly a whole page. Do you want to spend a whole page to show that the man is late with his rent?

That’s brings us to the next part of your question, and the other aspect that’s really important to comics: page count.

Page count is crucial because of the amount of time it takes an artist to draw a page, and also because of the printing costs. A standard issue of a comic is roughly 20-22 pages. So you’ve got to start by knowing how much space you’ve got (some writers will refer to this as “real estate”).

As a general standard, I’m going to assume that you’re looking at a mini-series or story arc that’s probably 5-6 issues, at 20-22 pages per issue. That works for comic book issue publishing, and it collects nicely into a graphic novel.

Even if I know I’m writing a graphic novel (as we did with The Margins), I tend to think in those general terms because it helps me break the story down.

So, I might start by assuming I have 5 chapters that are each 20 pages. Then I figure out — where is the best place to end Chapter One? It shouldn’t just be a moment of pivot — a cliffhanger, something that pushes the reader to start the next chapter as quickly as they can.

I’ll use the film THE MATRIX for this example, but I’m doing this from memory, so this may not be the best story breakdown.

At first thought, knowing I have 5 chapters of 20 pages each, it seems to me a great end to the first chapter might be Neo waking up in his pod in the real world. I mean, you have to read Issue #2 if that’s where Issue #1 ends, right?

If that’s page 20, you now have 19 pages to get there. And you have to get through: Trinity and the agents, Neo following the white rabbit, Neo meeting Trinity, Neo getting a call phone from Morpheus, Neo taken by the agents and getting the tracker put in him. Neo getting the tracker removed. Neo taking the red pill.

That’s a LOT! (It’s probably more than 20 pages, but please bear in my I’m just using this as an example.)

Next I’d think about: how much real estate do I give to Trinity vs. The Agents. Maybe four pages. The first two are the fighting and running across the rooftops. The second two could be a DOUBLE-PAGE SPLASH (two pages that make up one giant image) of Agent Smith ramming his truck into the phone booth. That’d also make for a good title/credits page.

I can probably script that, but I first have to think if I can get though the rest of it with 15 more pages. Ack!

Luckily, the next bits contain a lot of conversations, so we can probably get away with 5-9 panels per page, lots of back and forth conversation, condensed onto fewer pages. And that’s key because we’re going to have to go to larger panels for key action sequences like Neo climbing out on the building ledge. Neo getting the tracker put into his belly.

To be honest, at this point, I’d probably have to rethink some of this — this feels like too much for 20 pages. But hopefully that example shows you how I approach the process. It’s basically taking the whole story and then breaking it into issue-sized chunks, then pages, then finally panels.

And as you think about panels, you do want to make sure you have a mix. Some kind of big splash page is important — it allows you to focus on the biggest moments, and it also gives the reader a bit of a chance to relax, slow down and take in the art. A sequential page can have more panels, but it becomes denser, and each panel can contain less information — one or two dialogue balloons, limited backgrounds, etc. The more panels, the less room and detail each panel can contain.

Personally, I like to think about most of my sequential pages being about 4-8 panels, peppered with one or two splash pages. I can bump up or lower the panel count as needed. If you start by thinking about 3-4 panels for big cinematic action and 5-9 panels for dense conversation or smaller actions, then you’ll probably find yourself with a decent balance through your comic.

Those are my long-winded answers. I hope this helps. There’s much more to talk about in terms of craft, but this covers most of what I think about when breaking down a comic book story.

#makecomics #writingprocess #writing #comics

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stephmturpin · 3 years ago

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Week 12 Rumination

The chapter Postmodernism: Irony, Parody, and Pastiche talks about postmodernism and critiques surrounding the idea of postmodernism. The chapter dives into the idea of postmodern design and one of the kay aspects of postmodernism “is the turn from the copy and representation to simulation” (Sturken, 2018, p.307). The explanation of Disneyland and other theme parks helped me to understand this aspect. The chapter also explains how “irony is a crucial aspect of postmodernism’s knowing address” (Sturken, 2018, p.321), this is explained by many modern artists referring to the idea of ‘self-knowing’. Sturken also explains the idea of remixes and how remixes occur only because the audience knows the original text and references. One area of the text I am having a harder time understanding is the idea of Pastiche. From what I can understand from the book and the lecture is it is just reusing other things? Similar to irony?

For my attendance on Wednesday, I noted how the television series Fleabag was a comment on postmodernity, after doing more research about modernity and postmodernity I found a few articles that further commented on Fleabag specifically as an example of modernity. The show fleabag focuses of reflexivity and distant knowing. The way Fleabag address the audience throughout the series provides great examples of this. In his article Fleabag, Modernism, and New Television, Martin Shuster writes:

“Fleabag is the first piece of new television to address in a sophisticated way the technique of direct address, thereby shifting the focus from thereby shifting the focus from direct address as a technique towards us, the audience, and thereby locating this technique as an element of the world Fleabag, no more explicitly or exclusively addressed to us than anything else in that world” (Shuster, 2021, p. 330).

The video link I’ve provided is a scene in season 2, episode 3 where there is an interaction between Fleabag and the Priest that addresses the constant comments and looks made towards the audience.

youtube

Adreon. (2020). Fleabag - Where did you just go? [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJBksdTtn00

Shuster, M. (2021). Fleabag, Modernism, and New Television. Canadian Review of American Studies, 51(3), 324–336. https://doi.org/10.3138/cras-2020-013

Sturken, M., & Cartwright, L. (2018). Practices of looking : an introduction to visual culture (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press.

#Youtube

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Star Wars Victory’s Price Review: Alphabet Squadron 3

https://ift.tt/3uHtkPz

The Alphabet Squadron series has always been about secrets. Since it began in June 2019, the three-book series has essentially filled the role of the old X-Wing novels, following a mismatched group of pilots in the years after Return of the Jedi. Alongside the dogfights were the people hiding histories and motives from one another and from themselves. It’s some of the most complex and interesting work in Star Wars right now. What does a book ostensibly about heroism have to say about people governed by misunderstandings, anxieties, and happenstance? Quite a bit. The third book wraps up the series with a multi-layered, mostly satisfying finale.

Former Imperial pilot Yrica Quell has switched sides several times. Now she’s undercover with her former Imperial squad, and so deep under that her New Republic teammates think she’s betrayed them. Her old mentor Soran Keize has become even more bloodthirsty than the rest of the Imperial remnant in his effort to continue the Emperor’s Operation Cinder — planetary destruction, but make it slower and messier than a Death Star laser. Alphabet Squadron chases Keize’s Shadow Wing across the galaxy to a confrontation that will determine how the New Republic handles ex-Imperials going forward.

Stream your Star Wars favorites right here!

Those stakes — not only Quell’s loyalty, but what to do about anyone who served the Empire — are a brilliant way to make Quell’s story relevant to the whole galaxy. Author Alexander Freed brings video game writing experience to creating the best kind of science fiction adventure ending: one that depends on character growth and themes as much as on laser blasts. It’s a grueling but entertaining look at the complexities of war.

Book three does break some of the perfect immersion of the first two books, with some secrets withheld when the characters know them full well. After the close perspectives in the first two installments, it was jarring and felt artificial to have some key information — for example, about what exactly Quell was trying to do in the finale of Shadow Fall and the beginning of Victory’s Price — left out. But overall the character work remains strong.

Precision and specificity mesh well with broad metaphor. Pilot Wyl Lark’s efforts to reach across enemy lines to form an alliance never really result in a miraculous change of heart, but they do provide entertainment for his own side. Wyl’s arc always felt to me indicative of parasocial relationships, of trying to get to know someone you never really will. And he doesn’t. But along the way, his efforts make real connections between him and the people already on his own side.

While the second book created a strong friendship between the pilots Nath and Wyl, book three focuses on everyone else. Quell, Chaos, Kairos, and Hera all get their due. An adventure to a strange jungle world becomes an odyssey with three women bubbling with possibility for either connection or ruin.

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Fans looking for more of Star Wars Rebels‘ Hera Syndulla will find a lot of her here. The multi-talented and soft-hearted general doesn’t exactly have an arc in this book; she’s a supporting character. But she’s deftly drawn in a way that both captures her other appearances and feels like she’s been carrying even more of the weight of the war.

While I found Soran Keize, the Imperial commander, to be a weak point in Shadow Fall, his perspective and motivation are much clearer now. The ideological clashes between him and Quell are effectively load-bearing, as is their affection; Keize doesn’t stop being Quell’s mentor even as they move further and further to opposite sides of the war.

It’s not all delicate character interactions, though. Action scenes feel pleasantly suited to either the Star Wars films or video games. The author creates vivid starfighter scenes in part by drawing directly on famous film shots like the opening of the climactic battle in Return of the Jedi. But it doesn’t feel like pastiche or repetition. Instead, it’s alchemy. Sound, physicality, and banter all come together to create a vivid battle worthy of the movies. (Sound is also used in a fun way with the chapter and section titles, all of which are in-universe song titles.)

Books

Star Wars Books: A Guide to Canon Novels in Chronological Order

By Megan Crouse

Books

What Star Wars: The High Republic Reveals About the Galaxy Before the Movies

By Megan Crouse

So, how does Victory’s Price work as the conclusion to a trilogy? The final act is a careful balance between personal and political. Quell and the rest of the Empire have done terrible things: what does a just government do with them? What about a group of people who are trying blindly to make a just government that we know will fall to the First Order in a matter of decades? Victory’s Price even has characters dramatize a common thread in Star Wars discourse, that of whether Luke was right to mourn Darth Vader after all the evil he had committed. Where Luke found Anakin worth saving, this pilot finds the idea of mourning Vader grotesque.

The whole finale is a balancing act: between action and character, between the personal and the political, between epic redemption and damnation, and the more mundane reality in between. In the back half of the book, a rhythm starts on both sides of the war: we have to fight for our people. Be true to one another. An echo: The Rise of Skywalker‘s ideologically empty there are more of us. After Wyl’s arc argued in favor of the morale of the group, Freed doesn’t stop with the simple platitude of we’re right because we’re together. After all, that’s Keize’s argument, too. The conversations between the characters are also conversations about Star Wars‘ morality as a whole, and while sometimes the conclusions feel uncertain, we’ve had three books to explore what exactly is the content of Quell’s uncertainty.

In a book about people searching for unspeakable catharsis, the finale offers mercy that comes in unexpected ways. The book seems sometimes not to deliver on what was promised, to swerve at the last minute like a pilot who seemed to be on a collision course. That perfect tone wavers. But I’ll be fascinated to see what the rest of the fandom thinks. Entertaining, fascinating, at times slow but always thoughtful, Victory’s Price is one of the best Star Wars books to date.

The post Star Wars Victory’s Price Review: Alphabet Squadron 3 appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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trancemeghan-blog · 7 years ago

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Final Annotated Bibliography

My (eventual) chosen topic for research was animated horror, and my sources covered a wide range of topics from case studies of specific film and TV examples of horror animation to general ruminations on the value of animated horror film as a whole. I chose this topic because horror is the genre that I feel most at home in as a filmmaker and I’m always trying to stay on top of what's new in the world of horror filmmaking.

My Sources:

Wells, P. (2000). ‘Animated Alternatives’, in Wells, P. The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch. New York: Wallflower, pp. 101-103.

This book as a whole is one of my favourites regarding the subject of horror, as Wells goes in depth into the history of the genre and spans a broad range of aspects in a way that serves as a great starting point for anyone interested in a study of the genre. In the chapter 'Animated Alternatives', Wells makes the case that animation is the perfect medium for horror storytelling as it is the only type of filmmaking that allows for pure imaginative expression free from the physical restraints of reality. However, as this is an older source, the horror-adjacent films that have been made since its publication are not discussed and therefore its relevance to my practice in the year 2018 is somewhat limited.

Troutman, M.E. (2015) (Re)Animating the Horror Genre: Explorations in Children's Animated Horror Films . B.A. Thesis. University of Arkansas. Available at: http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/1090 (Accessed: 4 December 2018).

This source discusses how horror conventions are used in children's animation by examining a number of scary animated films for children from the past two decades. Troutman discusses the value of scary imagery in children's media and how certain concepts are portrayed for a young audience. Of particular interest to me was the section on how different animated horror films repurpose the themes and conventions of horror films aimed at adults in order to make them more palatable for and resonant with younger audiences. This was a very useful source for me after revisting Wells' thoughts on animated horror because as a more recent source, it featured more specific case studies that I was familiar with. This gave me a greater understanding of the context of each argument as well as a framework to build on in my own work.

Floquet, P. (2015), 'The Haunted World of El Superbeasto (Rob Zombie, 2009): An Animated Exploitation of Exploitation Cinema',Transatlantica American Studies Journal, vol. 2. Available online at https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/7648

This source explores Rob Zombie's The Haunted World of El Superbeasto and how through animation, Rob Zombie has endeavoured to elevate the genre conventions of exploitation cinema by framing them through a new artistic lens. This source is interesting as it shows how the film that it discusses takes two types of film (exploitation horror and adult animation) that are quite niche and often maligned, and in combining them tries to elevate the perceived artistic merits of both as well as question why mainstream critics tend to ignore these sorts of movies. I chose this source because of my personal interest in Rob Zombie as a creator (being a fan of his music if not necessarily one of his films) and my interest in using pastiche and genre hybridity in my own work. It was also valuable, I think, to include a French writer's perspective in my research because of the general difference in how animation is viewed in French-speaking and English-speaking countries.

Fu, X. (2016) HORROR MOVIE AESTHETICS How color, time, space and sound elicit fear in an audience. M.A. Thesis. Northeastern University. Available at: https://repository.library.northeastern.edu (Accessed: 4 December 2018).

This source delves into the aesthetic choices that directors utilise in horror filmmaking and the mechanics of why these aesthetic choices are effective. The author delves into semiotics, colour theory, music theory, psychology and much more to demonstrate the effectiveness of the particular aesthetic conventions that we associate with horror films. While this isn't an animation-specific source it's still very useful and outlines a lot of things I find echoed in my own practice as an animator. For any animator interested in narrative storytelling I think it's imperative to have a solid grounding in general film theory to better inform their use of film language.

Jones, S. (2010) ‘Implied...or implode? The Simpsons' carnivalesque Treehouse of Horror’. Animation Journal, vol. 18. pp. 56-79.

This source focuses in specifically on The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror episodes which air around Halloween every year. Jones explores the subversive nature of animation and how the use of horror tropes in the Halloween specials further pushes the show's tone into what he refers to as 'carnival grotesque' as opposed to the more subdued and realistic by comparison episodes that make up the show's main canon. This source is a good example of the nature of horror as a playground for writers and artists wanting to explore taboo topics that they and their audience may not otherwise be comfortable with. The subversive and disruptive aspect of horror as a genre is part of the reason why I'm so drawn to it as a creator and that's why I found this article so valuable as a source.

Flaig, P. (2013), 'Life driven by death: animation aesthetics and the comic uncanny', Screen, vol. 54, no. 1. pp. 1-19.

This source discusses another aspect that I find myself exploring frequently in my own work and which I see explored in a lot of work that influences me- the relationship between comedy and fear. Comparing animated scenes of comedic terror and comparing them to live-action horror directors like Sam Raimi, Flaig defines the 'comic uncanny' as a type of humour driven by fear and/or disorientation in the audience, in the same way that the Freud's notion of the uncanny originally referred to the subtle anxiety brought about by confusing, dissonant or disorienting stimuli. This notion of the comic uncanny in animation was useful to me for the purpose of contextualising and identifying a large part of my practice- many of my animations use horrific and confusing imagery for comedic effect, because my own natural response to being sufficiently confused or horrified is to start laughing. Therefore this source is useful for self-reflection and understanding the context of my work in the larger world of animation.

Smail, C. 1 November 2013. Colour in Horror Films. [Online]. [3 December 2018]. Available from: https://scene360.com/movies/49400/colour-in-horror-films/

This article provides a variety of examples throughout film history of horror movies that have made extremely effective use of colour. While this is, again, not an animation-specific source I think the use of bright and stylistic colour choices is a natural link between horror and animation and I think this source does a lot to outline how vibrant aesthetic decisions don't necessarily take away from the atmosphere in a film designed to terrify their audiences.

Allen, S. 2010. ‘Bringing the Dead to Life: Animation and the Horrific’. In: Hessel, S & Huppert, M eds. Fear Itself: Reasoning the Unreasonable. New York: Rodopi, pp. 87-102

This essay explores the gothic themes present in animation, in particular the films Corpse Bride and Monster House. Allen discusses the repurposing of horror conventions and the use of aesthetics to heighten the atmosphere in both films, as well as how each film approaches and portrays death and loss. This source narrows down and solidifies ideas brought up in some of the other sources I found in my research and goes more in depth with specific film case studies.

Hutchings, P. 2012. ‘Resident Evil? The Limits of European Horror: Resident Evil vs Suspiria’. In: Allmer, P, Brick, E & Huxley, D eds. European Nightmares: Horror Cinema in Europe Since 1945. New York: Wallflower, pp. 13-22

The section I focused on in this book compares Resident Evil and Suspiria in an attempt to define the conventions of European Horror as opposed to American horror. The author outlines the things about Suspiria that, in their opinion, define it as European, including unconventional narrative structure, and the film's artistic and unusual use of both colour and sound design. This is contrasted with Resident Evil, a film that was made by Europeans for an international audience, which they define as being divorced from its geographic roots by use of more 'Hollywood' style filmmaking. Hutchings also touches on the 'video nasty' phenomenon later in his essay and posits that the harsh film censorship laws in many European countries in the 20th century contributed to the development of the distinct 'eurohorror' aesthetic. I included this source because it both touches on the aesthetic identity of different types of horror, which is useful to me as an animator, and touches on the subversive and counterculture elements of horror fandom, which I just find fascinating in general.

Hawley, E. (2015), 'Re-imagining Horror in Children's Animated Film', M/C Journal, vol. 18. no. 6. Available online at http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1033

This article explores horror tropes in children's animation and how the use of these tropes challenge the prevalent cultural ideas of childhood and innocence. The author raises the question of whether or not films like Frankenweenie or Paranorman need to be thought of as 'for' either children or adults, as well as the question of why, as a society, we tend to consider horror to be just for adults and animation to be just for children. The question of who a particular film is 'for' is a complex one that most filmmakers feel they need to answer in order to find their audience, but in the world of western (particularly english-speaking) animation, the answers that question can become more complicated because inevitably any animation risks being viewed as 'for children'. This is why I included this source in my bibliography, since it addresses an issue that will inevitably be relevant for me in the future.

#annotated bibliography #Research And Enquiry

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s0022871a2film-blog · 8 years ago

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References List

HYPOTHESIS: Is Tarantino a post-modern contemporary auteur?

SUB-TOPICS:

Influences/ homage/ pastiche

Style

Genre

THREE FOCAL FILMS:

Pulp Fiction (1994)- As well as being my all-time favourite Tarantino film, I chose to study this 1994 Crime Drama for a number of reasons; one being the iconic non-linear sequence and the many different inside narratives that occur throughout the film. In addition, I will focus on the role of Uma Thurman (an actor that is iconic to Tarantino) as a lead female role. The iconic Mia Wallace is central to the film despite not having an extensive amount of screen time in relation to the entirety of the film- she is the strong-willed, mysterious wife of notorious gang leader Marsellus Wallace, whose only role is his wife yet she is portrayed as so much more. Apart from Mia, the general pop culture references in Pulp Fiction is something I find interesting, and is a common trait of Tarantino’s. There is also the typical relations to violence and gangs.

Jackie Brown (1997)- Featuring a lead female role, Jackie Brown is a key focal text to study female representation in Tarantino films. The 1997 Crime Drama follows Jackie as a flight attendant that smuggles money into Mexico and thus ends up in a lethal situation with gang members. She is represented as an independent strong-willed woman who isn’t afraid to pull a gun up to someone. The violence and gang-related crime is iconic of Tarantino and thus Jackie Brown is a great example of a focal text that will help me a lot in my study. The main reason I chose to study this text was because it was an adaption of Elmore Leonard’s novel ‘Rum Punch’ (1992). This means that it can be used as a key argument regarding auteur theory, and also it means I can focus more on how Tarantino has used his style to produce the film.

Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003)- Uma Thurman is the lead role in this 2003 Thriller/Action, as a revenge-fuelled female assassin that seeks vengeance after the attempt on her life and the murder of her fiancé and unborn baby. I chose to study this focal text because it too has a non-linear complex narrative, and I think it is especially interesting how the film has clear western references while being dedicated to Kung Fu and a Chinese/Japanese theme. I also wanted to study it because of the clear female dominance and the very interesting female representation. My short film is going to use Kill Bill as a main influence since I plan on including a female protagonist who has recently escaped an assassin squad, run by a male antagonist such as ‘Bill’.

Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004)- I chose to study this film later on in my work, to add a bit extra to my ‘Genre’ subtopic for my essay. I chose this film in particular to add because I knew that it was jam packed full of both western and samurai cinema genre references, so it will add much more substance to ‘Genre’.

SECONDARY SOURCES:

1. The Telegraph, Benjamin Secher (2010) Quentin Tarantino interview: 'All my films are achingly personal'. [Online]. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/7165045/Quentin-Tarantino-interview-All-my-movies-are-achingly-personal.html (Accessed: 18th September 2017).

2. The Guardian, Luke Buckmaster (2016) Quentin Tarantino: 'Australian films had a big influence on my career'. [Online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/15/quentin-tarantino-australian-films-had-a-big-influence-on-my-career (Accessed: 19th September 2017).

3. Jami Bernard (1995) 'The Big Faint, Little Q', in (ed.) Quentin Tarantino, the man and his movies. : HarperCollins Publishers, pp. 18-40.

4. The Guardian, John Patterson (2016) Quentin Tarantino: what drives the director, by the stars who know him best. [Online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/04/kurt-russell-walton-goggins-tim-roth-on-tarantinos-hateful-eight (Accessed: 2nd October 2017).

5. Channel 4, Krishnan Guru-Murthy (2013) Quentin Tarantino: Tarantino Uncut: When Quentin met Krishnan. [Online]. Available at: https://www.channel4.com/news/tarantino-uncut-when-quentin-met-krishnan-transcript (Accessed: 2nd October 2017).

6. Sky Cinema (2013) Django Unchained - Quentin Tarantino interview. [Online]. Available at: http://www.sky.com/tv/movie/django-unchained-2012/video/django-unchained-new-featurette (Accessed: 2nd October 2017).

7. The Guardian, Phil Hoad (2013) Is Quentin Tarantino the world's most influential director?. [Online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/jan/15/quentin-tarantino-most-influential-director (Accessed: 2nd October 2017).

8. Erik Bauer (1998) 'The mouth and the method ', in (ed.) Sight and Sound. : British Film Institute , pp. 7-9.

9. Edwin Page (2005) 'Chapter 1, 'Quentin Tarantino The Man and his Movies'; Chapter 5. 'Pulp Fiction'; Chapter 9. 'Kill Bill Vol 1'', in (ed.) Quintessential Tarantino. : Marion Boyars, pp. 10-266.

10. Nick James (2008) Sight and Sound: Iraq, The War On Film: Tarantino Bites Back. [Online]. Available at: http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49432 (Accessed: 16th October 2017).

11. The Huffington Post, Kim Morgan (2016/2017) Talking With Tarantino: The Sight and Sound Excerpt . [Online]. Available at: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kim-morgan/talking-with-tarantino-th_b_8942126.html (Accessed: 16th October 2017).

12. BBC Films, Michaela Latham (2014) Quentin Tarantino Kill Bill: Volume 1 Interview. [Online]. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2003/10/06/quentin_tarantino_kill_bill_volume1_interview.shtml (Accessed: 16th October 2017).

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s0021845a2film-blog · 8 years ago

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Section 1: Creative Investigation A. Summer Work on Creative Investigation Topic

Cinema Du Look

Cinema Du Look has a very interesting aesthetic and the artistic style and cinematography behind films has always been of interest to me. I intend to look deeper into the recurring themes and patterns in Cinema Du Look films and the study of original Cinema Du look directors verses directors that are dabbling in the movement. Luc Besson is one of the fathers of the movement and so I will be comparing and contrasting his techniques with that of Jean-Pierre Jeunet modern interpretation of cinema du look. I hope to find out how they edit the footage and achieve the complementary colour palette.

Primary Film References

Beineix, Jean-Jacques, 1986, Betty Blue, Gaumont.

Jeunet, Jean-Pierre, 2001. Amélie, Claudie Ossard Productions.

Besson, Luc, 1994. Léon: The Professional, Gaumont.

Betty Blue showcases the best and worst of Cinema Du Look in which a powerful female protagonist falls to madness while her partner tries to save her.

key features of Betty Blue:

maniacal love affairs

violent shoot-outs (link to Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless)

deranged road trips

psychedelic colour palettes

astute fashion consciousness.

Amelie is modern day Cinema Du Look film with a consistent colour palette and female lead too. All three films have this in common and could be a convention of the movement.

key features of Amelie:

Dramatic Grades and Colour Filters (greens, reds, yellows, blues)

Idyllic Version of Paris (no graffiti, no traffic, no crowds)

Direct address to camera

Sudden Camera movement

CGI elements ( Amelie melting)

‘ Perfect Paris’well-known locations (Notre Dame, Montemarte, Sacre Couer)

Alienated Characters

Leon the Professional is brilliant example of Cinema Du look with Luc Besson being one of the movement’s founding directors. The young protagonists are also the specific feature of cinema du look in this film, as the young audience (this films target audience) have a better relationship with these types characters.

Key features of Leon the professional:

sound design seems quite metallic and unnatural - reflect dark nature and subject of the film. The sound design is very specific to the aesthetics of the film, matching with the harsh lighting and downtrodden settings as well.

thematic ideas of alienation, Mathilda is an outcast, she has no friends or family but instead it taken under a hitman’s wing.

misery - Mathilda essentially loses everyone she cares about by the end of the film.

doomed love - Mathilda holds a gun to her head while asking Leon to prove his love for her, a representation of dark thematic undertones.

Academic Sources

source 1:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0bBVY-mIwnEC&pg=PA78&lpg=PA78&dq=cinema+du+look+French+Cinema+in+the+1980s:+Nostalgia+and+the+Crisis+of+Masculinity+By+Phil+Powrie&source=bl&ots=sWViaTK9P-&sig=LZdvp6oRttfAM55qO_bU47oAxE8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi5heea-9HWAhWrAcAKHf9PBYkQ6AEIOzAD#v=onepage&q=cinema%20du%20look%20French%20Cinema%20in%20the%201980s%3A%20Nostalgia%20and%20the%20Crisis%20of%20Masculinity%20By%20Phil%20Powrie&f=false

author: Phil Powrie

Title of book/chapter/article: French Cinema in the 1980s: Nostalgia and the Crisis of Masculinity, The Polar chapter

publisher, place of publication and date: Clarendon Press, 1997

brief overview of what the article/chapter/book is about: Powrie discusses the Polar otherwise known as police thriller, many Cinema Du Look filmmakers started their careers in the 80s which was the highpoint for polar films. He draws comparisons and similarities between polar films of the 80s and cinema du look film. He also suggests that cinema du look films use intersexuality more productively than that might have been the case for for disaffected french critics of the 1980s.

Key Quotes:

“The films of cinema du look are predicated on nostalgia, their narratives and the films they gesture

“The cinema du look articulates a change in film language which focuses in particular on the status of the film image, inscribing it within the trajectory of postmodern culture, as defined by writers such as Jameson and Baudrillard: the image as a simulacrum, the image without origin, endlessly reproduced and recognised as already present in the culture, and therefore aways already a pastiche, steeped in the irony of the loss of origins.”

the key word is “irony”, because such films inscribe images or narratives from previous films in ways which are playfully ironic.

“the films of cinema du look are fundamentally films for the young: neo-romantic heroes stricken by amour fou in a fairytale world of stereotypical gangsters and heroines.”

source 2:

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/scope/documents/2004/february-2004/allmer.pdf

author: Patricia Allmer

publisher, place of publication and date: Loughborough University, UK.

title of chapter/article: “Window Shopping”? - Aesthetics of the Spectacular and Cinema du Look

brief overview of what the article/chapter/book is about: The author discusses the views on cinema du look as a movement and the key contributors to the movement.

Key Quotes:

“The genre has been extensively attacked and blamed for celebrating and propagating consumer fetishism and commodity capitalism.”

“Cinéma du Look characters are placed in hostile spaces, which are dominated by commodities. The characters are alienated, sexual relationships are not shown (unless in terms of amour fou and a sexuality which is penetrated by madness as in Betty Blue or sickness as in Les Amants du Pont Neuf), they are divorced from any past or future and devoid of social contact, living in an eternal present of the commodity.”

“Throughout these films the question is asked: How can I establish meaningful relationships in a world where meaning ceases to exist and is replaced by empty mediation, and more accurately in a circumstance where the word "social" is emptied out of signification?”

Allmer says that the obsession with the mise en scene is what ends up celebrating art by paying it the attention it deserves. She also argues against the perceived superficiality of Cinema du Look characters, saying that they are made the way they are to show the negative effects of the “spectacle”.

source 3:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/mar/22/french-cinema-short-history

Publisher, place of publication and date:

Title of chapter / article: A short history of French cinema

Author: Andrew Pulver

Brief overview of what the article / chapter / book is about:

The article explores how French directors have shaped film-making around the world.

Key Quotes

“After leaving its mark on a myriad of European national cinemas, and finally Hollywood by the end of 1960s, the French New Wave began to finally peter out; but coming up behind were a group of surface-obsessed style merchants who established the glossy 1980s "cinema du look". Jean-Jacques Beneix, with Diva(1981) and Betty Blue (1986), Luc Besson with Subway (1985), and Leos Carax with Mauvais Sang (1986) were the key figures here, much given to the speeding motorbike, the studied gesture and the highly coloured set-piece.”

“Realism made a comeback in the 1990s, primarily through the Mathieu Kassovitz-directed La Haine, but the leading influence of the subsequent generation has undoubtedly been Jean-Pierre Jeunet who, with Delicatessen (1991) and Amélie(2001) perfected a Gallic answer to the comic-book-influenced style of Sam Raimi, Terry Gilliam and Barry Sonnenfeld.”

source 4:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/dec/06/jacques-audiard-interview-a-prophet

author: Jason Solomons

Social alienation served up in slickly stylised fashion was the key ingredient of Cinéma du look, the movement in 1980s French cinema which encompassed films by Jean-Jacques Beineix (Diva, Betty Blue) and Leos Carax (Les amants du Pont-Neuf), as well as Besson's The Big Blue and Nikita.

source 5:

Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction By Guy Austin

Key Quotes:

“ it is catergorised not by any collective ideaology but rather by the technical mastery of the medium, a cinephile tendency to cite from other films, and a spectacular visual style (le look).”

source 6:

Facing Postmodernity: Contemporary French Thought By Max Silverman

source 7:

http://foxyfilm.mozello.co.uk/params/post/121450/

Key Quotes:

“The most specific feature of cinema du look films is the privilege visual spectacle they have over narrative substances. Most of these films show absence of social, political concerns and psychological realism. However, they manifest themselves through highly stylish mise-en-scene and strong visual context.”

“Even before cinema du look films had a name, this film style was recognised by people such as David Russell in the Sight and Sound magazine, which talks about Beineix films reaching a wide audience with his idiosyncratic approaches to style character and narrative. Beineix believed that his films are defined as a style not technique and it is not a matter of fashion but metaphysics, which makes his films so different.”

“According to ‘Cinema of France’ book the film surrounds race and multiculturalism presenting a ‘Liberal utopian vision of a world’. This could be considered a French debate that involves a positive view on multi-racial society and being against the traditional republican traditions.”

“The most popular time of this film style was the 80's and the 90's. However, that doesn't mean that there were no cinema du look films after that era. 'Amelie' (2001) directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet is considered one of the most iconic cinema du look films made, because of its extremely strong visual aspects and mise en scene that play a huge role in the film. This film is a great example when talking about the evolution of this genre as it was made in 2001. This film also clearly shows how one director's work influenced and inspired another.Amelie is a shy cafÃ waitress who thinks of schemes which could make other people's lives better. She is an alienated young character who falls in love with a man she has never met, which follows the constant pattern of romance in cinema du look.Amelie's postmodern style of filmmaking was also recycles from popular pop cultures, films and literature. This film has realistic elements; however it is 'more surreal in the way it plays with received expectations' . The film is considered to be both a heritage and a cinema du look film as they both share the context of visual images being more dominant over the narrative.”

“You could say cinema du look was influenced by Méliès, who played a huge role in the history of French cinema. He was the first film maker who made films as an art form rather than a documentary. He created first sparks of surreal cinema, filmed in specific ways to create first ever special effects and also used vibrant colures by hand painting each frame of the film. Cinema du look films such as Diva, Amelie and Le Grande Bleu deploy veritable arsenals of motifs and techniques like Méliès. They also share visual images that create great metaphors throughout. Cinema du look created dynamic films such as ‘Nikita’ directed by Besson. This film was manifested into many other films and even Hollywood created a TV series based on this character. This unique film movement evolved rapidly in the 80′s and 90′s but still inspires artists all over the world, till this day.”

source 8:

http://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/cinema-du-look-movie-era/

authors: Phil De Semlyen, Ian Freer, Ally Wybrew

Key Quotes:

“Its trinity of directors, Jean-Jacques Beineix, Luc Besson, Leos Carax, turned out punky visions of a French underground (literally, in the case of Besson’s Subway) filled with pop promo visuals, skittish electro scores by Eric Serra and others, and a lovelorn fatalism strangely reminiscent of Marcel Carné and Jean Vigo.

“It is up to industry to adapt to art, and not art to adapt to industry.” (Jean-Jacques Beineix)”

source 9:

https://katiesvedmancinemadulook.wordpress.com/

Key Quotes:

“It is said to have developed slightly from French Poetic Realism, a genre that was popular during the 1930’s.”

“In some places the sound is harsher like in Leon, but other times it is softer and more operatic, depending on what is happening at that point in the film. This shows the idea of pop culture mixing with higher class culture that is prominent in this film and in Cinema du Look as a whole.”

“This still from Besson’s Léon: The Professional is very visually interesting to me, as the angle from which it was shot adds depth to the frame. This seems like a very stylistic choice, as style is very important in Cinema du Look films. The rundown setting of the hotel shows the underground and alternative societies apparent in many Cinema du Look films. Mathilda and Léon clearly live a very alternative lifestyle as hitmen, jumping from hotel to hotel to stay unnoticed. The harsh and fluorescent lighting portrays the characters as very tough, yet closed off and alienated due to the shadowing.”

“Popular culture is commonly used in Cinema du Look next to the upper class to create exotic and underground settings for the films. Corruption and a general distrust of the police is also a commonality. Scores in Cinema du Look films are typically electronic.”

“Cinema du Look was a relatively short lived movement, once the key directors moved on to other things. However, several other films since the 80’s have been reflective of the Cinema du Look style.” (link to Amelie)

d) Outline a rough idea for a 3 – 5 minute film based on your research.

Hitman is intrigued by the female target he is set to kill. However his hesitation to kill her will cost him dearly.

Write short paragraph (approx. 5 sentences) about:

it links to my topic as it revolves around a strong and independent female who also has a dark side involved with gangsters and hit-men - which is similar to the films I have chosen. It’ll also give me reason to experiment with colour palettes and opposing themes, contrasting dark undertones with romanticized and hyper-sexualised femininity.

As cinema du look is fairly artistic, I may try to experiment with some form of animation as part of my film, which is inspired specifically by animation use in Amelie.

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