Dates: July 30th and 31st 2024, Kingston University, Town house Building (Penrhyn Rd Campus)
Self portrait 1946
Antonin Artaud: New Critical Reflections
We are extremely pleased to present a call for papers for our forthcoming conference and performance event celebrating the life and work of the writer, poet, dissident surrealist and founder of the Theatre of Cruelty, Antonin Artaud.
Since 2018 the publishers Infinity Land Press and Diaphanes have been publishing translations of Artaud’s final and previously unpublished works, and his letters from Ireland. These publications have been exposing Artaud to a new readership as well as extending and completing the most extraordinary and troubling corpus of work of the 20th century.
This international conference aims to bring together scholars of Artaud’s work, of experimental and transgressive theatre, film, performance, music and literature, as well as performers, artists, filmmakers and musicians in a major two day event.
The event will encompass two days of conference presentations from across many disciplines and consider and consist of academic conference papers with new research about Artaud, his work and legacy. It will take place in Kingston University’s RIBA award winning Town House Building / Library (Penrhyn Rd Campus), in south-west London.
We invite you to submit either abstracts (one-page maximum, please). Papers should last NO MORE than 20 mins max. We especially invite female researchers, as well as new and early researchers, scholars and practitioners to submit proposals.
You are invited (but not limited) to submit abstracts on the follow topics
‘The Theatre and its Double’ – Artaud’s theatrical writings around the Theatre of Cruelty
Artaud and the Surrealist movement
Artaud’s travels to Mexico and Ireland
The Fragmented Body and the Fragmented text
Artaud, conspiracy and the Occult
Artaud’s Cultural legacy in film, sound and performance
Artaud and Addiction
Artaud, Collaboration and Friendship: Roger Blin, Paule Thevenin, Marthe Robert etc
Artaud’s final performance at the Vieux-Colombier Theatre, Paris
Final works for Radio
Lost and unpublished works
Contemporary and current translations of poetry and other writing
Artaud and Punk
Artaud and contemporary discussions around mental health and the body
Artaud and The Plague – Re-reading Artaud in the Covid era
Dissolving borders and boundaries.
Artaud’s film experiments and film theory.
Unmade film projects and scenarious
Artaud as an actor (Napoleon [Gance, 1927]; The Passion of Joan of Arc [Dreyer, 1928])
Work on The Seashell and the Clergyman (Dulac, 1928).
Asylum internment and final years
Drawings from Ivry-Sur-Seine and Rodez
Violence, Cruelty and Transgression in Artaud’s work (interest in works such as The Cenci and Heliogabalus)
Contemporary (re)appraisals and interpretations of Artaud and his work, and its worldwide inspiration in countries such as Japan, etc.
There will be a nominal charge, £10, for attendance at the entire conference.
Archive Research Community talk: Archival materiality as connective tissue – 17th January
Dear all
Short notice of a talk tomorrow afternoon that some of you may be interested in attending.
Please find below details of the next Archive Research Community talk, which will take place online next Wednesday 17th January at 1.30pm. The speakers are Sue Breakell (University of Brighton Design Archives) and Wendy Russell (British Film Institute) who are the co-editors of the recent collection The Materiality of the Archive: Creative Practice in Context (2023). The Zoom link for the talk is here: https://shu.zoom.us/my/jf1788 We look forward to seeing you!
Archival materiality as connective tissue
Sue Breakell, University of Brighton Design Archives and Wendy Russell, BFI
In this session we will discuss our newly-published co-edited volume The Materiality of the Archive: Creative Practice in Context (Routledge). Through this volume the editors foster collaborative approaches to archives of creative practice, harnessing the potential of materiality as connective tissue across a range of disciplines and practices. Taking a broad view of the archive’s agency, its focus on archives of creative practice emphasises their generative possibilities, foregrounding the fluidity, blurred boundaries and expanded notions of the archive that are characteristic of creative practices and their complex materialities and immaterialities.
In our conversation, we will contextualise ideas of archival materiality including its articulation in the curation of the volume’s contents, which move outwards from archive studies through an interdisciplinary frame in four sections: ‘In the Archive: Practices and Encounters’; ‘With the Archive: Energy’; ‘About the Archive: Technologies’; and ‘Beyond the Archives: Expanding the Frame’. Through this sequence the book moves outwards from the archive, yet is always held in relation to it, in a ‘diagram of active forces’ (Yaneva 2020). Breakell will also reference her own chapter in the volume, which uses the archival fonds as itself an object of material analysis. Lastly, Russell will highlight some of her recent work on the material engagement with archives at the BFI, specifically with the continuity script for Kes.
Since the late 1990s the British gangster film (whose popularity peaked during the 1970s and again in the early 1980s with films such as Get Carter (1971) and The Long Good Friday (1980)) has undergone a series of re-inventions and re-appraisals. Two films are largely responsible for the cultural renaissance of the genre: Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (Ritchie, 1998) which turned 25 in 2023 and Sexy Beast, which turns 25 in 2025. These films established two parallel trends along which the genre would travel over the next quarter of a century. Lock Stock… very much product of the so called ‘lad culture’ of the 1990s, with its nostalgia for the classics of British gangster cinema, paved the way for contemporary gangster and crime films by the likes of Nick Love (The Football Factory (2004); The Business (2005)) and the Rise of the Footsoldier franchise (2007 – ). Sexy Beast, combined the tenets of the genre with a new art house sensibility, opening the way for directors such as Gerard Johnson (Hyena, 2014), Paul McGuigan (Gangster No.1, 2000) and Nicolas Winding Refn (Bronson, 2008). As opposed to British horror cinema, which over the last 10 to 15 years has been the subject of an upswing in academic scrutiny, popular appeal and critical reappraisal, the British gangster film has evaded such scholarly attention, remaining instead an outlier of British cinema and the subject of cult interest and critical disdain. Criticisms of problematic sexual and racial politics, misogyny, and gratuitous violence (The Footsoldier franchise mainly bearing the brunt of this criticism) sidelined new films to limited, often straight to DVD/streaming, release. Nevertheless, with the Acting Hard season at the BFI exploring the often-problematic representations of working-class masculinity in British cinema, the genre looks to be again about to enter a phase of renewed popularity. This collection, which aims to coincide with the anniversaries of both Lock Stock…and Sexy Beast, considers the legacies of these films on the current British gangster film, along with a broader address of this British cinematic tradition. It aims to reposition the genre into a place of cultural importance and examine the ways it engages with contemporary politics of class, race, and gender.
Abstracts considered to include (but not be limited to):
– Lock, Stock… and the cultural politics of the 1990s
– Sexy Beast as a transitional gangster film
– Gangster films and the Arthouse tradition
– Lad culture and maleness in the British Gangster film
– Representations of Spain in the gangster film
– The politics of nostalgia
– Whiteness and the cinematic perception of the white working class
– Gangster films, globalisation, and Brexit
– Star power and performance: Ian McShane, Vinnie Jones, John Hurt, Danny Dyer, Craig Fairbrass, Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley
– New directions in the British Gangster film
– the work of Gerard Johnson – Space and place
– Distribution, production, and reception
– Contemporary cult British gangster cinema
– The politics of sex, class, race, gender, and ethnicity
– Harold Pinter and the British Gangster film
– Representations of real life British gangsters
– Folklore/Mythology in film (e.g. The Krays or the Rettendon Range Rover Murders)
– British gangster films and the UK film establishment
– Regionality and representations of the East End
– Spectacle, Violence and crime
– Genre hybridity
Abstracts should be emailed to the editors Matthew Melia ( m.melia@kingston.ac.uk) and Katerina Flint-Nicol ( kat.flintnicol@falmouth.ac.uk ) no later than January 19th 2024
Paper given at conference Heritage, Community, Archives: Methods, Case Studies, Collaboration (June 2023) – Dr Matt Melia
Introduction – what is Media Archaeology?
The field of media archaeology really began to emerge from the early 1990s, co-incidental with the rise of the fledgling digital and internet age (an era in which the concept of the archive itself was radically challenged) and increasing and alleged redundancy of pre-digital tech. The birth of the internet represents a sort of digital and technological Anno Domini consigning what went before to “history”. However it is only more recently that it has established itself as an emergent area of academic interest in the field of media studies and as a point of pedagogical classroom discussion , drawing on the work of theorists such as Thomas Elsasser and Friedrich Kittler (who ‘addresses the question of modern media as a crisis for the human senses, brought about by the change from print dominance to the audio-visual and the shift from mechanical to electronic transmission) – a key influence on Lori Emerson, the founder of the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado and the later subject of this discussion (and it is with thanks to her for giving her time to be interviewed for this paper).
Certainly also the work of Finnish media scholar Jussi Parrikka and his 2012 book What is Media Archaeology? has also opened up this field of learning (Finland has in some ways established itself as national centre for such research with Erkki Huhtamo also leading the way in the field). In an interview with Garnet Hertz, Parikka observed that
Media archaeology exists somewhere between materialist media theories and the insistence on the value of the obsolete and forgotten through new cultural histories that have emerged since the 1980s.
To put it simply media archaeology is the collision of old or obsolete media and the new through a process of creative/artistic/experimental re-invention and repurposing (for instance the Media Archaeology labs experiments with old cathode ray televisions used to display Twitter feeds). However, we may also broaden the definition with recent critical archival investigations into the phenomena of unmade and abandoned cinema falling under this category through the uncovering of the obsolete and forgotten item – certainly James Fenwick’s recent archaeology of the ephemeral contents of the Stanley Kubrick archive would also fall under this category.
Hertz defines Media Archaeology as
an approach to media studies that has emerged over the last two decades. It borrows from Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and Friedrich Kittler, but also diverges from all of these theorists to form a unique set of tools and practices. Media archaeology is not a school of thought or a specific technique, but is as an emerging attitude and cluster of tactics in contemporary media theory that is characterized by a desire to uncover and circulate repressed or neglected media approaches and technologies
Parrikka continues, however, that
I see media archaeology as a theoretically refined analysis of the historical layers of media in their singularity—a conceptual and practical exercise in carving out the aesthetic, cultural, and political singularities of media. And it’s much more than paying theoretical attention to the intensive relations between new and old media mediated through concrete and conceptual archives; increasingly, media archaeology is a method for doing media design and art
One example of this convergence between technology and design and creative practice might be in the Tate Modern installation Babel Tower (2001) by Cildo Mireles. This is a ‘ large-scale sculptural installation that takes the form of a circular tower made from hundreds of second-hand analogue radios that the artist has stacked in layers. The radios are tuned to a multitude of different stations and are adjusted to the minimum volume at which they are audible. Nevertheless, they compete with each other and create a cacophony of low, continuous sound, resulting in inaccessible information, voices or music’. The radios at the bottom of the tower, at its foundations are old cylinder radios, as it rise the technology becomes newer and newer. As described on the Tate website
‘The installation manifests, quite literally, a Tower of Babel, relating it to the biblical story of a tower tall enough to reach the heavens, which, offending God, caused him to make the builders speak in different tongues. Their inability to communicate with one another caused them to become divided and scatter across the earth and, moreover, became the source of all of mankind’s conflicts. The room in which the tower is installed is bathed in an indigo blue light that, together with the sound, gives the whole structure an eerie effect and adds to the sense of phenomenological and perceptual confusion. The radios are all of different dates, the lower layers nearest the floor being composed of older radios, larger in scale and closer in kind to pieces of furniture, while the upper layers are assembled from more recent, mass-produced and smaller radios. This arrangement emphasises the sense of perspectival foreshortening and thus the impression of the tower’s height, which, like its biblical counterpart, might continue into the heavens.’
Meireles states that
Babel began in 1990 on Canal Street, in New York. There were eleven years of notes before I finally realised the work in 2001, in Helsinki, at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. Upon observing the quantity and diversity of radios and all the different types of sound objects that were sold around Canal Street, I thought of making a work with radios. Radios are interesting because they are physically similar and at the same time each radio is unique. (Quoted in Tate Modern 2008, p.168.)’
Interestingly Emerson’s current research out of the media archaeology lab centres on radio technology and around pre-digital communications networks – and the use and repurposing of old radios in the creation of new networks. Her project ‘Other Networks’ is interested in excavating and documenting as many pre-internet networks as possible (including one which made use of bike couriers) and has led to her and her research assistant Libby getting Ham radio licences, learning and working with morse code etc..
For Parikka, the media archive is an active space, one of practice and creative re-invention where the past and the present are set in both opposition and synchronicity – and it is Emerson’s Media Archaeology Lab (or MAL ) that has been leading the way in this creative repurposing of the material and technological past. The MAL, as I shall presently discuss, has a dual purpose as both lab and archive – with a community driven agenda.
We exist in an era of disposability, of built in technological obsolescence, and of digital immateriality. In the face of this as media archaeologists we are preoccupied with the concept of materiality in an age of digital immateriality and E-waste. It asks the question – why should ‘dead’ technology not be recognised for its historical value with displays at, for instance, the London Design Museum, present narratives of historical evolution through the filter of developing and obsolete tech (computers, consoles. Televisions, radios etc). These are items of capitalist mass production – designed with a short shelf life, designed to be replaced. The very act of displaying them in such a way, is a challenge to this, it is itself an act of repurposing and conferring upon the object a permanence which is anti-thetical to their design. Parrikka asks
“Where do you start when you begin thinking about media? Archaeologically? Do you start with past media? Like a ‘proper’ historian? Or from our own current world of media devices, software, platforms, networks, social media, , plasma screens and such, , like a ‘proper’ analyst of digital culture would? […] You start in the middle – from the entanglement of the past and the present and accept the complexity this decision brings with it to an analyst of modern media culture’
For Emerson, the media archaeological aim of the MAL is to ‘undo or demystify entrenched narratives of technological progress. She tells Jay Kirby that ‘I’ve found a recursiveness to media archaeology that allows me to continually cycle back and forth between the past and the present as a way to imagine how things could have been otherwise and still could be otherwise’ Challenging these ‘entrenched’ technological and historical narratives in unconventional and create ways enable a critique the present
The ‘entanglement’ of past and present is at the heart of the work carried out by the Media Archaeology Lab, but buts it has also resonated with earlier historical and cultural archaeological approaches – evidenced in the work of Jacquetta Hawks for instance. Hawkes had been archaeological advisor to the Festival of Britain – the great post-war celebration of Britain’s ancient historical past and technological future. Hawkes’s interest was in understanding the past through its material objects and was a pioneer of using broadcasting, film and television as a mode of creatively engaging with this historical past. In1962 for instance, she wrote the script for Ken Russell’s BBC film Lonely Shore, which depicts the consumer items of the 20th century left as archaeological detritus on a beach with which (future) alien archaeologists make sense of contemporary society. As I have noted elsewhere,
‘Production files at the BBC Written Archives Centre contain a large body of correspondence between Huw Wheldon [editor of the BBC arts showcase Monitor, in which the film was shown] and Hawkes. Wheldon had been impressed by a lecture given by Hawkes for the society of industrial artists in 1960 on the archaeology of the future entitled ‘Patterns and future’ – the film would incorporate the talk’s ideas.
2. The Media Archaeology Lab (University of Colorado)
Lori Emerson’s Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado has been at the fulcrum of creative media archaeological research since 2009. Emerson opened the MAL as the Archaeological Media Lab after having been given $20,000 in funding from the university of Boulder, she had been one of the only researchers in digital media and the university had hoped to develop and support research in this area. The emergence and evolution of the MAL seems to have been a very organic. The original idea had been to start a conventional computer lab, but as Emerson notes with students starting to use their own laptops, this opened the way for a more creative, innovative and experimental space. Emerson reveals that she began with a limited number of 12-15 Apple IIe computers from 1983 and built out from there, sourcing unwanted, obsolete tech from sites such as eBay or craigslist where Emerson would cultivate a network of online contacts, excited about what she was doing and who would donate their technology (quite often parents wanting to offload their children’s unwanted old tech). One of the major sources of funding for the lab has been from a venture capitalist, who through his funding of various tech start-ups has also been able to acquire for the lab/archive a large number of experimental and unique tech items unavailable on the market (or which never made it to market). She noters how he ‘funds these little companies and when they go under , he takes that material which isn’t going into retail and it eventually becomes part of the collection’
Emerson emerged out of literary studies and had purchased the Apple 2Es in order for students to engage with the digital kinetic poetry of the Canadian poet B.P Nichols and his work ‘First Screening’ from 1983 which had only been available on a 5 ¼ inch floppy disc or posthumous translation version circulated on 3 ½ inch floppy disc – the poem was then, documented digitally by a group of Vancouver poets and made accessible accessed on YouTube in the 2000s. The aim for the students in getting them to engage with ‘First Screening’ on the apple 2e (as it was intended) and for them to experience and report back on the material experience of interfacing with the discs, and the computers, their physical experience of insertion, the sounds of the machine etc. Emerson here is also introducing a materialist approach to literary studies beyond just the close reading of the text. Embedded in the transition from the pre-digital to the digital is the entanglement of past and future and the work became a catalyst for the evolution of the MAL and Emerson’s own research (she refers to herself as the ‘Forest Gump’ of academia – due to her tendency to stumble into things she previously was unaware of and then take an idea and just run with it’). From here she explains, she expanded into buying a series of Commodore 64 computers and other technology. The early work with the lab and ‘first screening’ led to her exit from literary studies to focus on the lab as a project in and of itself.’ In her interview with Kirkby, she notes that the ‘MAL’ has expanded and matured, I’ve found that undertaking hands-on-experiments in the lab with obsolete but still functioning media from the past is perhaps even more of a direct technique for breaking through the seductive veneer of the new and the resulting pull we feel to quickly discard our devices for something that only apparently better’’.
I asked Emerson about how she views the identity of the Mal – as lab or archive? She situates it somewhere between the two noting that “as long as the lab has existed its been an emergent project’ whose identity changes according to the people coming and going, the research being carried out, the equipment being acquired etc. She refers to the space as a ‘working archive’ (i.e. one which is also a creative space) and remains sceptical about what she perceives as an overriding conservatism and lack of transparency in archivism (what she refers to a black box effect) which she aims to distance herself from.
However, if she is happy to recognise the ways in which her project problematises the notion of the archive, she is also happy to note how it similarly problematises the notion of the lab. She writes
Since 2009, when I founded the MAL, the lab has become known as one that undoes many assumptions about what labs should be or do. Unlike labs that are structured hierarchically and driven by a single person with a single vision, the MAL takes many shapes: it is an archive for original works of early digital art/ literature along with their original platforms; it is an apparatus through which we come to understand a complex history of media and the consequences of that history; it is a site for artistic interventions, experiments, and projects; it is a flexible, fluid space for students and faculty from a range of disciplines to undertake practice-based research; it is a means by which graduate students come for hands on training in fields ranging from digital humanities, literary studies, media studies, and curatorial studies to community outreach and education.
It is an
intervention in ‘labness’ insofar as it is a place where, depending on your approach, you will find opportunities for research and teaching in myriad configurations as well as a host of other, less clearly defined activities made possible by a collection that is both object and tool. My hope is that the MAL can stand as a unique humanities lab that is not interested in scientificity but that is instead interested in experiments with temporality, with a see-saw and even disruptive relationship between past, present, and future, and in experiments with lab infrastructure in general.
The Archive / Lab Space as Community driven hub
The lab began life in a small room at the University of Colorado and now exists in a 11,00 square ft labyrinthine Basement of a 1920s house. Emerson notes that she has ‘spent a lot of time thinking about how the quirks of the space’ have shaped the approach to the kinds of equipment archived within and the interactions possible within it. Interestingly, when I asked about the Lab’s approach to preservation, Emerson revealed that its less of an interest for her and that it’s not a major part of the agenda – as long as people can have access to and make use of the tech within (an Edison phonograph, for instance). On its website, the Lab markets itself as a Community driven hub. I asked Emerson about the labs relationship to the idea of community and especially to local communities. She lists several ways different community approaches. Firstly the lab works with a local state school with 40,000 students where she recognises that students of colour or queer students can get lost in the mix, hence the MAL has a commitment to accessibility and inclusivity. Students are given the opportunity to work closely with the lab and to work on open house hours, give tours, take on repair projects (usually on the collection of mechanical calculators). The lab presents itself as a outward facing and inclusive open community space (with video game nights and other events for young people).. She notes how that a major part of the lab’s agenda is to think about alternate technologies – ‘we’ve got people working on queer computing and queer video game design. I’ve had students do projects to reimagine consoles for left handed people – enabling the lab to exist beyond simply an archival purpose.
Furthermore, while the lab may be a pedagogic space, Emerson is keen for it to retain its own autonomy and not be absorbed into the formalised structure of the academic institution. She noted that ‘the lab is involved in literally every single class I teach..but its not formalised…I’ve been careful that the lab doesn’t get designated as a classroom space because as soon as that happens the I lose control over the lab space and then just any old person can schedule their class their’. For Emerson it’s a very personal space, which she has developed as part of but also beyond the University, a place of media archaeological research, creative practice and innovation but also a project in an of itself
Emerson also reveals how the lab also draws in people from outside academia, e.g. from tech companies – who she describes as ‘looking for a sense of purpose beyond their job’ and who come to volunteer at the lab three days a week. The lab itself is run on a voluntary basis (‘its just me and my spare time and a rag tag army of volunteers and the occasional research assistant’). She notes that they engage with Media archaeological creative projects – one for instance hooking up an Apple IIE to the internet via a raspberry pi. Another working, in cyber security uses the lab to carry our research on malware and viruses.
Conclusion: Legacy
Elsewhere Emerson has she noted the proliferation of ‘Labs’ since about 2004. In her chapter ‘The Media Archaeology Lab as a Place for Undoing and Reimagining Media History’ observing that
It is hard not to notice the rapid proliferation of labs in the arts and humanities over the last ten years or so – labs that now number in the thousands in North America alone and that are anything from physical spaces for hands on learning and research to nothing more than a name for an idea or a group of people with similar research interests, or perhaps a group of people who share only a reading list and have no need for physical space and no interest in taking on infrastructural thinking through shared physical space.
In the course of discussion Emerson noted the role that the MAL had played in the emergence of these ‘labs’ in where archive meets collaborative and creative space. These she notes, ‘reflects a sea-change in how the humanities are trying to move away from the nineteenth-century model of academic work typified by the single scholar who works in the boundaries of a self-contained office… and within the confines of their discipline to produce a single-authored book that promotes a clearly defined set of ideas. ’The word ‘Lab’ she notes has connotative implications of interdisciplinarity and collaboration…..’
To conclude the work of Emerson and the MAL extends beyond simply the archiving of technology, the MAL provides an open and inclusive community space for the re-engagement with technology that has driven our evolution as well as technology which has never existed or been forgotten. It is a fluid, hybrid and alchemical space which is reconceptualising the archive as an interactive, experimental and inclusive space.
Paper given at BAFTSS Conference 2023, Dr Matthew Melia
Opening The Zappa Vault.
BAFTSS Conference 2023
Matt Melia
The American Musician Frank Zappa died of cancer in 1993, leaving behind him not onlyu one of the most extensive, diverse and complex of musical legacies but also vast multi-
media archive of material spanning the entirety of his career in its many forms (including musician, composer, film maker and anti-censorship campaigner, and even the Czech Republic’s Ambassador to the West). The archived material within included not only unreleased session recording and live recordings but also a vast library of Zappa’s film experiments (including the surreal Claymation films he made in collaboration with animator Bruce Bickford) and a large collection of recording and preservation technology (discussed below).
Archival self-preservation was of crucial importance to Zappa in terms of both sustaining a cultural legacy and in the years leading up to his death the financial surety of his family. As an assiduous self-archivist he may be compared to another influential and pioneering 20th century musician and self-archiving cultural icon, Prince – whose Paisley Park estate stored over 7000 archived items from across his career as well as doubling as a home and recording studio. The Zappa Archive was stored in what was informally known as ‘the vault’ – a labyrinthine, high ceilinged, climate controlled, subterranean storage facility beneath the Zappa family home, in Laurel Canyon, Hollywood. While the material was owned and controlled (after his death) by the Zappa Trust – his children Moon, Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva and his widow Gail (a financial arrangement that would end acrimoniously in 2016) the Vault itself was managed by musician and Zappa associate Joe Travers (aka ‘The Vaultmeister’).
While Prince’s Paisley Park opened to the public as a museum after Prince’s death in 2016, the Zappa Vault remained a private and domestic space, closed to the public. However, last year and in the wake of the Zappa family fall out (over an unequal split of shares) its contents have been made public in another way – sold to the Universal Music Group. Universal purchased the entire contents of the archive and is currently restoring and drip releasing the previously unheard recordings within, as well as restoring versions of existing recordings. Towards the end of this paper I would like to return to Universal’s role in preserving, restoring and releasing the archived material within and the ethical concerns it perhaps raises.
The aim of this paper, however, is to offer a discussion of the Zappa vault and its presence within Alex Winter’s 2018 documentary Zappa, and to consider the ways in which the material, and moreover the archive itself, has been preserved and presented within. The paper contends that Winter’s documentary serves multiple roles in terms of preservation and restoration, adopting an archival position itself and as part of the afterlife of an archive which for all intents and purposes no longer exists, at least not in the way that it did, The Vault was never been open to the public, hence Winter’s film provides public access, a portal, not only to the material within in but the archive space and setting itself – and also provides a space for proxy fan agency and involvement in the archival preservation and restoration process.
I will presently argue for the intersectionality of film and archive in Zappa, and that the archives/vault offer a structural framework for the film. In his essay ‘Archives and Invention: the Archives structuring presence in documentary film practice’ Reece Auguiste oberserves how ‘The use of indexical archival materials such as strips of sound, photographs and film footage has had a prolonged history of inscription into the construction of the documentary form’ and that . ‘Today, indexical audio and visual documents are standard methodological and narrative devices in documentary film practice.’ He also notes that
The standard view that archival materials exist to serve a utilitarian function in the documentary form, as in providing historical information or evidence, is profoundly problematic because it raises additional questions about spectatorship and in particular the interpreter’s activities within the structures of the hermeneutic circle in relation to the audio-visual object viewed.
So while it is not unusual for archival material to feature predominantly in biographical documentary there is growing and more recent trend to foreground the archives and archival spaces of the subject in such films – particularly those belonging to figures who were industrious self-archivists. Furthermore there is a growing recognition of the role of the archive in posthumously preserving, sustaining, re-creating (and challenging) the held narrative around a variety of esoteric cultural figures. A more recent example might be the publication Excavate! Which brought together material from the personal archive of Mark E Smith, lead singer of the Fall as well as material and ephemera collected from Fall Fans. A current exhibition at Kingston Museum, Bowie and Beyond, celebrates David Bowie’s relationship to the area and invited fans to open and donate their own personal archives of memorabilia. Both of these examples therefore look to the fan as archivist.
Archives and Music docs
What role has documentary film making played in archival restoration and preservation? Since 2015 a variety of posthumous documentary films have been released – focused around singular/ esoteric performers and self-archivists. These films centralise and foreground the material and indeed the archival spaces and locations of their subjects themselves, while the filmic space is itself composed of material from the archive. There is a clear turn towards the archive and the process of archival self-preservation and posthumous restoration. The recent, and experiental, Moonage Daydream, for instance, incorporates previously unseen footage from the David Bowie Archive into a dreamlike immersive audiovisual collage and experience) which (as noted on the review site Movieweb ‘ broke the mold’ in terms of archival documentary – eschewing narrative convention in favour of letting the archival footage alone ‘tell the story’ (‘as much as it has one’).
Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story (2018) draws on a wealth of material from Sievey’s (aka the Paper Mache headed North west icon Frank Sidebottom) personal archive – which now housed in Manchester Central Library. This film was edited together from footage from the archive by Steve Sullivan who had spent 5 years with Professor Chris Morris from Falmouth University working with the contents in order to produce the film. After Sievey died, Morris noted in an interview,
His belongings, his entire archive and even his ‘heads’ were rescued from a skip. […] Thousands of hours of VHS and Super8 footage was found, countless images, handwritten books, drawings, clothes and heads were painstakingly reassembled, viewed and catalogued.
This then became the raw material for the ‘Being Frank’ documentary itself.
Opening The Vault
Returning to the Zappa vault. In 2016, prior to beginning work on Zappa documentary director Alex Winter (Slide…) set up a crowdfunding appeal to digitally restore the Zappa archive and its deteriorating contents. Uploading both a website and video for the appeal: ‘Who the fuck is Frank Zappa?’ Winter established the centrality of the archives to the film and the need for preservation and restoration (in producing the film) ahead of the film’s release release. He revealed that the material was starting to decay and that money was needed for digital reprocessing. The Kickstarter appeal therefore incorporated and drew fans and contributors into the process of archival restoration [Show clip]. During a q and after a screening of the film at the Prince Charles Cinema in London in 2022, Winter revealed to me that on entering the vault for the first time he been confronted by the smell of vinegar – a sign that the recording acetates within where degrading. This was therefore an archive in crisis, and at stake the life and work of one the most idiosyncratic and innovative of musicians. The financial appeal for the Zappa documentary provided over $1 million towards the making of the film, almost all of which of which had to be spent digitally restoring and preserving the material within (this option was put to the financial contributors who voted unanimously to spend the money in this way). As reported also in The New Yorker,
The filmmakers launched a Kickstarter campaign, which raised $1.2 million, a record amount for a documentary. “We said to the fans, ‘We could take some of the money we raised for the doc, or we could take all of it and put it toward preserving the stuff in the vault,’ ” Winter explained. “And they said, ‘Look, we love you, but we’re here for Frank. Please preserve the media in the vault.’ ”
In fact the process of digital restoration had already begun – by Zappa himself during his final years right up to his death and continued by Joe Travers, working and collaborating closely with Zappa’s widow, the late Gail Zappa (who, herself, passed during the making of the film). Prior to the film and the sale of the contents to Universal, the Zappa Vault had garnered something of a mythic and enigmatic reputation: a cavernous labyrinthine space closed off to public and fans who could only speculate on its contents. Its privacy re-enforced by its domestic setting. Vaultmeister Travers however has established himself as something as a spokesman for the Zappa family and indeed the Vault itself contributing to the mythos of ‘the vault’, ensuring awareness of this space across various online media.
In an interview carried out by UCLA ethnomusicologist Maureen Russell, Joe Travers revealed that prior to his death in 1993 Zappa was already in the process of beginning to digitize its contents. This, to me, raises an interesting issue in terms of understanding Zappa’s need for self -archiving and preservation, here was a man aware the end was near and aware of the importance of safeguarding his legacy through digital archival restoration. In a 1990 interview (quoted also in the biography Electric Don Quixote), when asked about the seemingly bottomless nature of the Vault Zappa commented that “I’m trying to get the best of the archival stuff into some kind of release form move in to concentrating on the new stuff”. For Zappa therefore the vault also had a commercial value – although its commercial nature was to be entirely on his terms. The Vault owes its existence in part to Zappa’s refusal to cede any creative control to the music industry. Zappa had attempted to liberate himself from the corporate shackles of the industry in both 1977 when he established Zappa Records and in 1981 with the establishment of Barking Pumpkin records in order to produce, as he put it in an interview (captured in Winter’s documentary) to make the music he wanted to hear. The archive also provided his own base from which to release and distribute his own work (see MTV Clip)
It is also possible to The Vault as an archive of audio-visual technology – and as a site of media archaeological interest!. Travers revealed to Russell that the Vault contained
Probably something of every format throughout the years, starting from 1955 on. Every kind of audio recording tape in every format, from small quarter-inch mono reel-to-reels all the way up to the digital technology that was taking place before Frank passed.
This is also interesting as we may note how Zappa was starting to engage with the ‘digital turn’ in the early 1990s. Zappa, he notes, made use of ‘extinct’ mediums such as PCM-Sony format and 16–30 (3/4 inch digital) formats to ‘do digital mastering on. Furthermore the Vault contained
every kind of film you can imagine, 8 mm, 16 mm, 35 mm. … There are lots of video formats, there’s one-inch video, there’s two-inch quad videotapes in the Vault from the 1970s, there’s IVC – a video format from the 1970s], video reels, etc., etc. So, the Archive holds film, video, and audio, in every format, both digital and analogue (Russell interview)
From a media archaeological perspective then, the Zappa archive contained a rich resource of ‘dead’ media and ‘extinct’ technology (possibly rivalling the more public Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado) and providing evidence of the evolution of the audio visual media technologies and modes of recording, digitisation and preservation. In the same interview when asked about the identity of the archive (research or commercial), Travers confirms its commercial value but also that
The history of recording formats is in this vault. Frank was a pioneer in every field. He was doing surround mixing before there was surround mixing, he was doing 16-track recording on a prototype machine. In 1967 and early 1968, he was doing 12-track recording on a machine in New York City. He was always embracing technology as it was coming, and all of the tapes that were made are sitting in the Vault, so they’re all examples of recorded sound formats throughout his lifetime.
Furthermore, the Vault stands also as a film archive – it contains not only recordings of interviews and concert footage but also Zappa’s early home made, amateur and experimental films including the Claymation films made with Bickford. Footage from these films are woven into the filmic tapestry of Winter’s documentary. In the Russell- Travers interview, Travers notes that while he and Gail Zappa had been tasked with restoring the archive
“if someone wanted to come forward and contribute financially or if there was a film preservationist or a film preservation society that was interested in helping to preserve some of the contents of this Vault—which is so special and so unique— that would be wonderful”
Zappa (2018, Winter)
In the New Yorker Alex Winter describes his first experience of the Vault as ‘like the end of ‘Citizen Kane.’ Filled floor to ceiling with media from his birth all the way till, like, yesterday.” and notes how he was immediately confronted with the problem and enormity of the task at hand –
How to portray a man who began as the Dionysian leader of a Dada-esque band, the Mothers of Invention, and became a First Amendment advocate with a suit and tie and a haircut (at least he kept the mustache), testifying in Washington against Tipper Gore’s call for warning labels on albums and arguing with John Lofton on CNN’s “Crossfire
The answer seems to have been to make the archive itself the (unspoken) focus. Winter’s documentary has a key structural presence. The film is bookended by footage of The Vault: at the start of the film we are given a guided tour of the space by Frank himself (via archival footage) as he leads us through its darkened aisles, and showing the material within. AND In a haunting and melancholic final sequence we return to this same space at the end of the film, now minus our original tourguide. In shaping the film in this way, Winter positions the Vault as the alpha and omega, with the digitally restored and preserved (and previously unseen) material sandwiched between these two poles. This is a film as much about the Vault and its contets as it is Zappa himself! The viewer is, for the first time, invited into this private space and given access to Zappa’s life and career through the arrangement of its contents. The documentary becomes an extension of the archive taking on an archival role by arranging and organising this unseen material and music – with the film-making process also necessitating and hastening the restoration of the material. Here is where film and archive intersect with the film itself taking on an archival position acting in the place of an actual physical space. Furthermore, the film becomes part of an archival afterlife, not only is the material preserved within the filmic tapestry but so is the archive space itself – which is now a negative space. in the wake of Universal’s acquisition of the archive contents, the selling off of the Zappa house and the emptying of the vault itself – now simply an empty room beneath a house. It calls into being broader questions around the relationship between the archive space and its material contents – the physical Vault itself beneath the Zappa home was part of the indexical identity of the Zappa archive, now that has been removed. Furthermore Winter’s film played a key role in sustaining the material within the Vault, the film making process itself becoming an act of preservation.
So finally – what about the Vault’s contents now in the hands of UMG. – this would seem to be the antithesis of what Zappa would have wanted – commerciality with no control. He did however, tell Gail in 1993 prior to his death to sell everything and get out of the music industry. We might ask what has Universal’s role in sustaining the archived material – they are intending to release everything. In which case we are presented with a catch 22 situation – the material will be restored and preserved but it will cease to be an archive, all its secrets will be revealed.
Almost immediately after Stanley Kubrick’s death, in the years after 9/11 there emerged a global culture of conspiracy that reached its apex with the rise of Qanon and the storming of the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. in 2021. It is therefore, perhaps, timely to recognise that Kubrick and the films he produced have, themselves, long inspired, been connected to, and continue to arouse suspicions of conspiracy: it has been suggested and theorised that his films contain hidden meanings and secret, coded messages; that Kubrick himself participated in deep state conspiracies, not least by conspiring to fake the Apollo 11 moon landing (a popular and unsubstantiated conspiracy theory suggests he filmed the moon landing); that his films secretly synchronise with music of counter cultural rock groups like Pink Floyd; that Kubrick worked for in some way the CIA or FBI; or that his films contain references to the Illuminati (in particular Eyes Wide Shut, 1999). Some of Kubrick’s most known and critically acclaimed films have been objects of cult fan scrutiny, such as 2001 (1968)and The Shining (1980). These films are repeatedly interpreted, dissected, and investigated in order to understand their “true” meaning. Indeed, films like The Shining are ‘Puzzle films’ – constructed in a way that deliberately invite repeated viewing and investigation. The ambiguity of many of Kubrick’s films, combined with Kubrick’s persona and reclusiveness have arguably contributed to a fan culture desperately seeking evidence to the true meaning of his films and to unlock Kubrick’s “genius”.
Given this context, this collection aims to be the first serious academic study of the conspiracy culture surrounding Kubrick and to use Kubrick and his films as a springboard to consider contemporary conspiracy culture in relation to film, celebrity, and film fandom. Chapters are invited that examine Kubrick or his films with reference to wider conspiracy culture. This collection aims to consider the different and conflicting ways a text can be approached and interpreted, used and understood. It will ask what is the point where unsubstantiated speculation merges with document and fact based research and ask what value these conspiracy theories hold. Furthermore it aims to consider the position of Kubrick’s world in a new era of conspiratorial anxiety,
Suggested topics include, but are by no means limited to:
Kubrick and the “puzzle film”
Film interpretations and hidden meanings
Conspiracy and The Shining
Kubrick and the Apollo 11 moon landing
Synchronicity and 2001: A Space Odyssey (Pink Floyd etc.)
Apocryphal stories
Conspiracy and Eyes Wide Shut
Kubrick and the FBI, CIA, Illuminati etc.
Kubrick and the Nazis
Kubrick and paranoia
Fandom and conspiracy culture
Kubrick and aliens
Kubrick and nuclear war
Kubrick and surveillance
The Kubrick ‘myth’
Confirming, uncovering and debunking conspiracies in the Stanley Kubrick Archive
Kubrick in a post 9/11 world
Reading Kubrick in the era of Trump
Kubrick’s death
Kubrick’s fanbase vs academic research
Mythologised production histories
Kubrick, conspiracy and the media
Kubrick and the early internet
In the first instance, please submit abstracts of between 300 to 500 words, along with a 100 word biography, to James Fenwick (j.fenwick@shu.ac.uk) and Matthew Melia (m.melia@kingston.ac.uk) by 24th February 2024. First draft chapters will be due by 30 July 2024
Chapters will be a maximum of 7000 words inclusive of all references / bibliography.
Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) was not a blockbuster in the sense of Jaws, E.T or Jurassic Park (the other films covered in this book series) – it did however make a heavy return on its near $100 million budget and received critical praise in the media. The film is the product of several authors: science fiction writer Brian Aldiss on whose short story ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ (1969) the film was based; Stanley Kubrick, whose project it had been initially before passing it over to Spielberg in the wake of Jurassic park, Spielberg made and released the film two years after Kubrick’s death. Over the course of its development the story passed through the hands of several script writers including Aldiss, science fiction writer Ian Watson and author Sara Maitland. Its distinctive production design was the work of the artist Fangorn a.k.a. Chris Baker – who had initial worked with Kubrick on the film’s design (his hundreds of design sketches are archived at the Stanley Kubrick Archive, University of the Arts: London College of Communication).
Despite its long, sustained and often problematic gestation. A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which updates Carlo Colldi’s Pinocchio story, divided fans and critics of both Spielberg AND Kubrick alike who have found it difficult to align or balance its dual authorial voices (and misplaced criticism over its alleged Spielbergian saccharine). Nevertheless, Spielberg’s film begins a new, post millennial chapter, post-Kubrick period for the director and, like E.T, it combines his pre-occupying interest with childhood, with aspects of real horror, trauma tragedy and post millennial anxiety. A.I Artificial Intelligence is also sci-fi fairy tale and such imagery is embedded across the film.
Given the recent rise of Artificial Intelligence in our everyday lives and its prospective impact on contemporary culture, it feels like it is timely to engage critically with this often overlooked and misunderstood film. Furthermore, this book will form a companion edition to The E.T Book which is also calling for papers.
This will be the first in-depth collection of critical and academic thought devoted to A.I. and this call for papers invites abstracts on all aspects of the film but especially on the films Kubrick/Spielberg dynamic. It particularly invites papers which draw on research carried out at the Stanley Kubrick Archive and the Brian Aldiss and Ian Watson Archives at the University of Liverpool.
Topics welcomed will include but are not limited to
The films evolution and development / production history
Critical and public reception
Marketing
The Kubrick / Spielberg relationship
The post-Kubrickian in Spielberg’s post 2000 work
A.I and Pinocchio
Chris Baker’s production design
Child stardom and the casting of Haley Joel Osment
A.I. in the Archives
Artificial Intelligence and Robots across Spielberg’s work
E.T and A.I – critical comparisons
A.I and the (post) millennium
Conflicting authorial voices in A.I.
A.I. in post millennial cinema
A.I, Jewishness and Holocaust Imagery
Technology and Anxiety
The nuclear family and parenthood
Adoption, childhood and lostness
Simulation and Simulacra
Motherhood
The Flesh Farm / Horror in A.I
Fairytales and the Gothic
Spatial design and cityspaces
the Unmade screenplays
Globalisation and eco-anxiety in A.I
Please return abstracts to Matthew Melia at m.melia@kingston.ac.uk by Feb 1st 2023
The first performance of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, in the USA, took place at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in South Florida, 1956 – one year after the first production of Jean Genet’s play The Maids at the Tempo playhouse in New York. It was was directed by Alan Schneider, the pioneer of Beckett’s work in the US. He would go on to become the writers trusted interpreter there.i These two productions marked the arrival of the Theatre of the Absurd in America, opening the door to the experimental, existential (post) modernist theatre of the European post war avant garde and to a set of distinct theatrical ‘absurdist’ visions.
US audiences, however, where unprepared for the play’s impact, Rocio Paola Yaffar reflects on how the play was billed as ‘the laugh hit of two continents’ with the result that the first performance saw a large number of number of walkouts – demonstrating a set of conflicting cultural attitudes to comedy, one of which had been informed by the experience of war, resistance and occupation.ii While most Theatre of the Absurd productions in the US ran off-Broadway, playing to niche audiences they had limited success. Jean Genet’s 1958 play The Blacks,iiihowever, was a notable success opening at the St Mark’s Theatre in New York 1961 and becoming the longest running off-Broadway production of the decade (and chiming with the cultural climate of the emerging Civil rights movement) closing in 1964 – the exception that proves the rule. It was the second of Genet’s plays to be performed in Manhattan after The Balcony ran (in a truncated form) at the Circle in the Square Theatre (directed by Jose Quintero) from March 1960 to December 1961.
The title ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’ was coined by the writer and critic Martin Esslin in 1960, four years after its introduction in America. Esslin wrote in the Tulane Drama Review that
“The Theatre of the Absurd shows the world as an incomprehensible place. The spectators see the happenings on the stage entirely from the outside, without ever understanding the full meaning of these strange patterns of events, as newly arrived visitors might watch life in a country of which they have not yet mastered the language […] If the dialogue in these plays consists of meaningless cliches and the mechanical, circular repetition of stereotyped phrases-how many meaningless cliches and stereotyped phrases do we use in our day-to-day conversation? If the characters change their personality halfway through the action, how consistent and truly integrated are the people we meet in our real life? And if people in these plays appear as mere marionettes, helpless puppets without any will of their own, passively at the mercy of blind fate and meaningless circumstance, do we, in fact, in our overorganized world, still possess any genuine initiative or power to decide our own destiny? The spectators of the Theatre of the Absurd are thus confronted with a grotesquely heightened picture of their own world: a world without faith, meaning, and genuine freedom of will. In this sense, the Theatre of the Absurd is the true theatre of our time”.iv
His 1961 book, The Theatre of the Absurd, was the first critical text to engage fully with a new theatrical post war European zeitgeist: a form of theatre that responded to the conditions, traumas and lived experiences of the Second World War, a ‘Total war’; and which emerged out of a leftist, post war Parisian intellectual milieu. Esslin’s text was the first to canonise a set of writers who included Genet, Harold Pinter, Antonin Artaud, the American playwright Edward Albee, the Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco and, leading the charge, the Francophile Irish writer and dramatist Samuel Beckett (who had spent part of the war working for a French resistance cell and the remainder in hiding in the South during which time he began work on Waiting for Godot). Esslin is careful to stipulate however that this was not a ‘movement’ unified by a shared aesthetic or philosophical vision but a set of writers responding to the collective and individual experience of war and its aftermath (as I have explored elsewhere, the violent catharsis of the liberation of France underscores the work of writers like Beckett, Genet and Artaud).v
The Theatre of the Absurd challenged bourgeois pre-conceptions of narrative theatre in favour of abstraction, anti-narrative and existential isolation – the term absurd extending out-with its original definition to encompass the total breakdown of reason, and Enlightenment values in the 20th Century, negotiating its historical traumas.
However, in his 2006 thesis, Christopher Hilton asserts that the European Theatre of the Absurd ultimately never really “caught hold” in the US because of “cultural difference”. American post war theatre was increasingly attached to a left wing, realist agenda exemplified most prominently by the work of the playwright Arthur Miller rather, than to European surrealist and existential abstraction. He notes,
“While the European and American theatres represent two distinct schools of drama, their intentions after World War II are essentially the same, namely the recognition of the structures that imprison the individual. While Europe produced well known absurdist playwrights like Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, Jean Genet and Eugene Ionesco, critics believed that America wrestled with dramatic, realist theatre, producing playwrights like Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O’Neill.”
One key reason that it failed to take hold was, of course, that the Theatre of the Absurd spoke directly to the traumatic ‘total’ European experience of the second world war and its political, cultural and lived reality and legacy. But that is not to say that American audiences did not find any meaning in these dramatic works, indeed certain demographics found their own meaning and absurd conditions of existence reflected back at them – particularly as from the late 1950s through to the 1970s American society became politically, philosophically and culturally divided around both Vietnam and the issue of Civil Rights.
It was through differing approaches to the representation of the imprisoned individual, imprisoning social systemsvi and the experience of imprisonment that these two distinct modes of theatre overlap. They overlap directly in the 1957 production of Waiting for Godot, by the San Francisco Actors Workshop, which took place in San Quentin Prison and was directed by Herbert Blau. The performance took place in front of 1400 prisoners whose own experience of incarceration resonated with that of Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon and their interminable wait for the elusive Godot on a barren heath, unable to ever leave, and the absurd, cruel and ultimately inverted master and servant relationship of Pozzo and Lucky; as well as in the play’s own rumination on the Sisyphean and existential task of waiting and of the circularity of time.vii The play was also staged in the prison dining room, a space once used for executing prisoners by hanging:
“Those who were not allowed out of their cells listened to it over loudspeakers, or heard about it from their fellow cellmates […] In the words of Rick Cluchey, one of the inmates who heard the play from his cell, it ‘caused [a] stirring’; ‘My cellmate returned [and] told glowing stories’. He has said that, ‘The thing that everyone in San Quentin understood about Beckett, while the rest of the world had trouble catching up, was what it meant to be in the face of it’.viii
In a 1962 article for the New York Times, ‘Which Theatre is the Absurd One?’ Edward Albee, author of Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the US playwright most associated with the Theatre of the Absurd (thanks largely to Martin Esslin’s inclusion of him in his seminal study) wrote
“A theatre person of my acquaintance–a man whose judgement must be respected, though more for the infallibility of his intuition than for his reasoning–remarked just the other week, “The Theatre of the Absurd has had it; it’s on its way out; it’s through.” […] Now this, on the surface of it, seems to be a pretty funny attitude to be taking toward a theatre movement which has, only in the past couple of years, been impressing itself on the American public consciousness. Or is it? Must we judge that a theatre of such plays as Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape,” Jean Genet’s “The Balcony” (both long, long runners off-Broadway) and Eugene Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros”–which, albeit in a hoked-up production, had a substantial season on Broadway–has been judged by the theatre public and found wanting?”
He continues
“And shall we have to assume that The Theatre of the Absurd Repertory Company, currently playing at New York’s off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre–presenting works by Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Arrabal, Jack Richardson, Kenneth Koch and myself–being the first such collective representation of the movement in the United States, is also a kind of farewell to the movement? “
Albee therefore challenges the accepted narrative that the Theatre of the Absurd’s American experiment had failed and was over before it had really begun and that by 1962 it was running out of steam. Rather it was thriving off-Broadway and in fact was permeating the cultural consciousness of the era.
So to what extent then did the philosophical conditions and mechanics of the absurd seep into into wider American culture and, especially, into cinema? In this chapter I will consider how Hal Ashby’s 1971 film comedy Harold and Maude, it may be argued, may not only to be seen to be an absurdist text, overlap thematically and philosophically with The Theatre of the absurd – especially with the work of Samuel Beckett but perhaps the film text that is most demonstrative of the wider cultural influence of the absurd. I will argue, as well, that in Ashby’s depiction of the eponymous Harold (Bud Cort) and Maude (Ruth Gordon) that the film anticipates modern and contemporary critical debate around the philosophy of the Theatre of the absurd.
The Theatre of the Absurd and American Film Culture
In literature, American writers and poets of the 1950s had already begun to express and articulate similar post war existential angst and absurdist experience. JD Salinger’s novel Catcher in the Rye (1951) offers, perhaps, the pre-eminent depiction of post war dissolute and affluent youth in Holden Caulfield’s picaresque and existential journey through the urban landscape of Manhattan. He Wei filters a discussion of Salinger’s novel through the lens of Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, an existential ur-Text and framework for understanding this mode of theatre ( an argument and critical and philosophical framework developed by Esslin).ix Furthermore Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl (1956) manifests as an Artaudian (a la the founder of the Theatre of Cruelty, Antonin Artaud) scream for the post war, counterculture generation.x Both are indicative of a move into a new era of American modernism, already signalled in painting by Abstract expressionists like Mark Rothko (himself an Eastern European immigrant from Latvia). Salinger’s Catcher In the Rye offers useful thematic comparison with Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971), the subject of this discussion, in their mutual presentation of the characters Holden Caudfield and Harold Parker Chasen – two young white men who are isolated and adrift at least in part via their lived economic and social privilege and inability to connect with it.
Turning now to film, as I have discussed elsewhere, Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s existential ‘Acid Western’ El Topo (1971), also indicates a seepage of the European absurd into American film culture. It was informed by his own theatrical experience in Europe after World War II on the fringes of the Theatre of the Absurd and by his experience of working with the (Spanish) absurdist playwright Fernando Arrabal but also by his time spent on the fringes of the ‘movement’ amongst the post war Parisian left wing intellectual and cultural milieu of the early 1950s. El Topo collapses together the countercultural world of the post war European Avant Garde with modes of American and European Genre cinema (specifically the Western) incorporating within its iconography a range of directly quoted Beckettian imagery. The film, which opened at the Elgin theatre in New York in 1971, went on to define the terms ‘cult film’ and ‘midnight movie , running from December 1970 to June 1971.
This was however a cinema on the fringes or as Jeffrey Sconce termed it ‘Paracinema’: a cinema on the margins (and comparable to the off-Broadway position of the Theatre of the Absurd in the US). So what of the presence of the absurd in the newly emerging post-studio mainstream? The mid to late 1950s saw a drawing to an end of the dominance of the studios and the ‘genius of the system’ (to quote Andrew Bazin), and the emergence of a new realist ‘auteur’ driven cinema. This was a period in film history which was in part defined by the emergence of left leaning film makers and screenwriters writers like Nicholas Ray and Dalton Trumbo whose work and historical lived experience is bound to the threat of McCarthyism, HUAC and the Hollywood blacklist. This was to be a new cinematic world of existentially isolated characters, out of time and out of place such as that of Kirk Douglas’s tragic cowboy, Jack Burns, in the revisionist Western, Lonely Are The Brave [David Miller, 1962].
This cinematic milieu would intersect with the milieu of the world of absurdist theatre perhaps most directly in the collaboration between director-in-exile Joseph Losey (who had fled the blacklist to work in the UK) and British playwright Harold Pinter. It is important to note here that both Ray and Losey made the transition from radical left-wing radical theatre to film and Losey’s working partnership with Pinter (Losey had come to work in the UK to escape the communist witch hunts) on films such as The Servant (1963); Accident (1967) and The Go Between (1971) provide a both meeting between these two apparently distinct (transatlantic) theatrical and cinematic worlds as well as a shared political vision and pre-occupation with leftist class politics.xi
The New Hollywood or American New Wave would evolve from the end of the 1950s over the next decade, providing a cinematic landscape of isolated, existential figures. The American New Wave cinema, or as Robert Kolker has described it, the ‘Cinema of Loneliness’xii nevertheless offered a range of iconic and sometimes comic ‘absurdist’ images and iconography: Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) in The Graduate (Nichols, 1967) finding isolated solace at the bottom of a swimming pool dressed in his graduation present: a set of scuba gear from his overbearing parents, or (less comically) ‘God’s lonely man’ – the isolated and traumatised Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) in Taxi Driver (Scorcese, 1976) . Films such as these shared similar thematic and philosophical concerns despite the disparity in their aesthetics. Just as Martin Esslin notes of the Theatre of the Absurd, the Hollywood New Wave cannot be considered a single ‘movement’ unified by a shared aesthetic vision, rather differently authored (or ‘auteur’d’) and individual filmic expressions all engaging with a contemporary era of isolating historical change and experience.
Kolker’s reference to a cinema of loneliness is, of course, not simply a reference to films which deal with existentially isolated characters but to a range of directors (e.g. Robert Altman or Stanley Kubrick) or “Film makers of imagination” who due to the collapse of the studio system no longer had “a centralized community of administrators and craftsmen who can be drawn upon to support them from production to production” (REF) and who “were able to take brief advantage of the transitional state of the studios, using their talents in critical, self conscious ways, examining the assumptions and forms of commercial and narrative cinema” (IBID). It was of coursed the milieu out of which Hal Ashby emerged, as well as the director most associated with the New Wave comedy, Woody Allen whose own work is outwardly informed my the writing and art of European modernism and post modernism as well as demonstrating a compulsion towards the early 20th century Mittel-European milieu of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. In his discussion of the new wave of ‘Dark’ American film comedy from the early 1960s Wes D. Gehring has noted the pervasive presence of Samuel Beckett in the work of his chosen directors, not least in both Arthur Penn and Mike Nicols. He notes that ‘Penn, like Nicols was a fan of Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Absurd and recognised that life is a bittersweet blend of buffoonery and gallows humour’.xiii However, it is not my intention to suggest that Ashby’s film Harold and Maude was a direct response to Beckett’s work or that it was directly inspired by its directors experience of viewing the work of the playwright (research, as yet, has not uncovered such a direct connection). Beckett’s name does not crop up in any contemporary critical review of the film, nor is he mentioned by Ashby (or screenwriter Colin Higgins) in any interview surrounding the film.
Beckett however was, himself, making in-roads into American film during the period. Anthony Paraskeva has written in detail in his book Samuel Beckett and Cinema about Beckett’s overlooked relationship with film, his
“Complex, informed, ambivalent relations with both first and second wave modernist cinema” and his “own dramaturgical and cinematic methods […] show […] Beckett’s engagement with silent cinema including German expressionism, Hollywood comedy, Soviet cinema and French Impressionism” as well as later figures of the European post war avant garde like “Alain Resnais, Jean Luc Godard, Marguerite Duras and Robert Bresson.”xiv
The point at which Beckett most urgently intersects with the American post-Studio film industry is with his own experimental film, Film (1965) commissioned by publisher Barney Rossett, and featuring the final performance the foremost star of early silent comedy Buster Keaton. Sidhartha Mahanta noted in 2016 in the New Yorker that this was to be part of a triptych of films – the other two based on works by both Pinter and Romanian ‘absurd’ dramatist Ionesco never came to fruition:
“Beckett, by the mid-nineteen-sixties, had cemented his global reputation with the successes of “Waiting for Godot” and “Endgame,” and he and Rosset marshalled a remarkable collection of talent for their movie: celebrated theater director Alan Schneider; cinematographer Boris Kaufman, who had worked on “12 Angry Men” and “On the Waterfront,” among other films; and, most notably, the silent-screen legend Buster Keaton.”xv
Early Hollywood comedy and Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardyxvi in particular had been a direct influence on Beckett’s dramatic writing, as Paraskeva has noted, as it was on the Theatre of Cruelty writings of Antonin Artaudxvii. It’s worth noting here that early Hollywood comedy was as in touch with the philosophical foundations of existentialism as The Theatre of the Absurd was nearly 20 years later as demonstrated by Laurel and Hardy’s The Music Box (1932) in which the pair attempt the Sisyphean task of pushing a piano up a flight of stairs only for it to clatter inevitably and repeatedly down them again.
Harold, Maude…and Samuel Beckett
All this, however, is a rather extended way of demonstrating how the European Theatre of the Absurd had, despite its peripheral status in American theatreland, nevertheless permeated and occupied part of the American zeitgeist and cultural consciousness of the era. In this section I will turn to a more in depth reading and critical examination of Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude.
Ashby’s film anticipates, expresses and articulates a more recent tension in critical thinking around the absurd: in the challenge to Martin Esslin’s canonised (and canonising) text The Theatre of the Absurd (1961) by the more contemporary critical writing of Michael Bennet in his 2011 book Re-Assessing the Theatre of the Absurd. These two distinct and opposing sets of critical voices which are, perhaps, reconciled in Ashby’s film through the two lead characters of Harold Chasen and Dame Marjorie ‘Maude’ Chardin (whose name and history I will presently return to). Bennet notes that
“In 1961, a landmark book—Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd—codified this avant-garde movement and demystified the structure and subject matter of these plays by arguing that the reader or audience member must judge these plays not by the standards of traditional theatre, but by the standards Esslin set forth for what he called the Theatre of the Absurd.“xviii
Bennet offers a stringent critique of Esslin’s approach, and proposes a re-definition of the term ‘absurd’ itself. Going back to Esslin’s anchor point of Camus’s take on the Sisyphus myth , Bennet argues that Esslin’s ‘codification’ of the absurd is a misinterpretation of Camus that undermines his understanding of the work of his chosen writers. Esslin, as Bennet notes, espouses the idea that the writers of the absurd sought to dramatize and embrace the meaningless of existence (Esslin’s understanding of Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill for eternity is based on this principle) . Benett notes
“Now it is exactly 50 years after the publication of Esslin’s book and it is time for the Theatre of the Absurd to receive a thorough re-working […] Since 1960, with Esslin’s introduction of the term in an article by the same name—the Theatre of the Absurd—the prominent idea of absurdity expressed in these plays has been largely accepted as a given when understanding these plays […] I argue that Esslin based his understanding of the plays he characterized as absurd on two significant misreadings: 1) Esslin mistranslates and miscontextualizes a quote by Eugene Ionesco, which Esslin uses to define the absurd and 2) Esslin misread Albert Camus as an existentialist. As such, Esslin posits that the Theatre of the Absurd contemplates the “metaphysical anguish of the absurdity of the human condition.” I will suggest, instead, that these texts, rather, revolt against existentialism and are ethical parables that force the audience to make life meaningful. Ultimately, I argue that the limiting thematic label of Theatre of the Absurd can be replaced with an alternative, more structural term, “parabolic drama.”“xix
Bennet views the Theatre of the Absurd as a ‘Parabolic theatre’ and in his challenge to Esslin sees in this collection of writers an effort to encourage the viewer to find meaning in existence rather than embrace its emptiness. These are conflicting world views which are apposite to those of both the characters of Harold and Maude respectively – exemplified in the way that Ashby first establishes their relationship – via their mutual hobby of attending funerals of which there are three throughout the film (including the one in which 21 year old Harold first meets the septuagenarian Maude). Christopher Beach proposes that these ceremonies are part of the parabolic structure of the narrative: ‘there are three dates (each corresponding with a fake suicide), three funerals that Harold and Maude attend and three authority figures (Priest, General and psychiatrist) who attempt to advise Harold about his relations with Maude in three successive scenes’.xx We may also note here a particular similarity to Jean Genet’s dramatic writing, notably The Balcony, in which representatives of authoritarian and establishment structures, a Bishop, General, Judge and Police chief are satirised and turned into performative grotesques.xxi As Gehring notes in relation to Harold and Maude, the film
“Systematically skewers societies’ monstrosities. This methodical approach involves Harold’s periodic forced interactions with high profile branches of the establishment: General Victor Hall (Charles Tyner), a priest (Eric Christmas, a psychiatrist (George Wood) and most damning a luxuriously wealthy mother, Mrs Chasen (Vivian Pickles) […] By pummelling the military, the church, the medical complex, and family, Harold and Maude arguably remains the most comprehensive investigation of dark comedy in the canon”xxii
For Harold these funerals re-enforce a world view of existential meaninglessness (he is a young man, who would rather drive a hearse than the sportster bought for him by his mother). For Maude, these funerals have the opposite affect – they re-enforce and encourage a belief that life is for living and filling with meaning – she is a Sisyphus giving meaning to the meaninglessness of his uphill task. She tells Harold at one point, “A lot of people enjoy being dead. But they are not dead really. They’re just backing away from life. Reach out. Take a chance. Get hurt even. But play as well as you can’.
As Beach notes,
“The film uses parallels and oppositions as a primary structuring principle. Harold is obsessed with death and destruction and spends his time attending funerals, faking suicides and watching buildings be demolished. Like Harold, Maude enjoys funerals; however she is drawn to them no for their evocation of death but as part of the “great circle of life”.
There is of course a stark irony here, despite their initial oppositional positions, it is Maude who has the most reason to embrace the meaninglessness of existence. She is a Holocaust survivor (although never explicitly mentioned we know this from her numerical tattoo and from hints given in her dialogue), her full name (Dame Marjorie Chardin) hints perhaps at old European aristocracy. Maude has experienced the wartime trauma of Europe that catalysed the writers of the Theatre of the Absurd yet she is also an embodiment of 1960s counter-cultural liberal attitudes (Gehring points out that ‘Maude never plans to be the anti-heros lover […] she is his lifestyle mistress’ – a sort of guru) Broadly speaking we can connect Harold and Maude’s to Beckett through their mordantly comic world views where repetition, inevitability, resistance and suicide form key components in the textual structure. As Gehring notes, upon its release Harold and Maude was savaged by the critics (notably by industry bible Variety) for similar reasons to those with which Godot had initially been received in the US (and in fact on its European debut as well where it was famously described in the press as a ‘Play where nothing happens – twice’). They share a commonality of theme through their mutual concern with performance, suicide, ageing, death and evanescence. Beckett’s two tramps Vladimir and Estragon spend the play by marking time as they wait for the never-to-appear Godot, suicide is one of the ways in which the pair pass the time – for them as for Harold, suicide is performative, it is way of filling their time/ existence with meaning:
Vladimir: What do we do now? Estragon: Wait. Vladimir: Yes, but while waiting. Estragon: What about hanging ourselves? Vladimir: Hmm. It’d give us an erection. Estragon: (highly excited). An erection! Vladimir: With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That’s why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that? Estragon: Let’s hang ourselves immediately!
Harold’s own attempts at performed suicide provide a similar function: they are provocatively staged for his domineering, socially climbing mother Mrs Chasen and are, potentially, a way of disrupting the ennui of his existence. Gehring observes that unlike other contemporary films such as Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H whose own ‘gallows’ humour was ameliorated by its genre framework, Ashby’s film immediately confronts the viewer with the apparent death-by-hanging suicide of the film’s protagonist, Harold Chasen. The film opens with Harold’s performing (rather than committing) suicide, to the sound of Cat Stevens, in the gothic and evanescing space of the mansion where he lives with his mother
Its worth here commenting on the dialectic between the two(at one point around a formal meal at their mansion, she ‘chastens’ Harold for not eating his beets and accuses him of being ‘absurd’ – throughout the film is self-referentially absurd). This dominant/subservient relationship echoes a set of Beckettian relationships: both Pozzo and Lucky in Godot, and most particularly, the blind domineering Hamm and the subservient Clov in Endgame. Hamm is a blind, wheelchair bound tyrant whose aged parents Nagg and Nell are consigned to dustbins at the back of the stage, and who exists with Clov, his servant within a ‘Shelter’ .The play takes place after a potentially apocalyptic event (for Beckett ,read the Second World War). While this seems, aesthetically very different to Ashby’s mise-en-scene Harold’s isolated existence with a tyrannical figure, alone together in their gothic mansion allows some superficial similarities. However, Harold’s ‘suicides’ are also mini acts of resistance, such acts are central to understanding Beckett’s characters who perform mini acts of resistance against the conditions of the conditions of their own existence – Clov’s final abandonment of Hamm and the breaking of their interdependence, the reversal of the power dynamics between Pozzo and the servile Lucky in act 2 of Godot; the final raise of the head in the later shorter play Catastrophe , a show of bodily and psychological autonomy on behalf of ‘The Protagonist’ whose body has been under the control of ‘The Director’ and ‘The Assistant’. As I have previously noted these actions may be small but their implications are enourmous. Harold’s suicides are similar acts of resistance and when the psychiatrist suggests these are for the benefit of his mother, a way of seeking her maternal attention, Harold responds ‘I would not say benefit.’ Gehring (briefly) also views Harold’s ‘suicides’ through a Beckettian lens, noting that
Another initial response to suicide-staging Harold is to return the viewer to the absurdist world of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play Waiting for Godot. Like Vladimir and Estragon, Harold is essentially playing a waiting game. But because his existentialistic figure has anticipated that God/Godot is never coming, and that the only inevitable given is death, Harold quite literally “kills time” by producing mini sketches of self destruction. He is a walking metaphor for the disillusionment of the late 1960s
Aaron Hunter notes that the marginalised outsider is a trope of Ashby’s auteurist style and that the suicides which Harold stages throughout the film also “seem to have an element of marginality […] Whether he really wants to die but lacks the nerve or where it is solely for the attention that Harold acts out his suicidal fantasies is never made completely clear”xxiii. Hence this ambiguity allows us more freedom for interpretation and elucidation. Hunter describes the first sequence:
“The first action the viewer encounters is Harold, alone and wordless, putting on a Cat Stevens record, standing on a chair in an elegant old fashioned room and hanging himself. It is a shocking opening moment until, moments later, Harold is revealed to be still alive (if somewhat disappointed that his mother has not fallen for his gag).”xxiv
These suicides are theatrical, performative staged events, and as the film progresses become more so as he slashes his wrists in the bath, drowns himself in the pool his mother is swimming in, self immolates when his mother brings home a young lady of his own age with whom she hopes to match him (he subsequently stages cutting of his own arm in front her) . As Hunter notes
“Regardless of his direct motivation [..] the suicides represent another marginal experiential space for Harold. In addition to being somewhat dangerous, they also constitute a space where, to the unfamiliar, Harold is neither dead nor alive.”xxv
This limbo space is one which again we find in Beckett – whether waiting on blasted heath by a dead tree in Godot, the enclosed shelter in Endgame, or the void of the stage space where the disembodied ‘Mouth’ hangs in the darkness in Not I (1973). Characters, like Schrodinger’s Cat are neither dead nor alive, they exist within the limits of their condition either acquiescing to it and evanescing into nothingness or resisting and attempting the break these limits.
Here we may draw contrasts with Maude, if Harold’s attempts at suicide are ambiguously either acts of resistance or acquiescence then Maude’s plan to kill herself on her 80th birthday firmly falls into the former category. Beckett’s work obsesses around the bodily processes of ageing, and of the decay of memory. Both Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) and Rockaby (for instance) foreground these issues. In the former, the old man Krapp, alone and approaching death listen’s to the spools of recorded memories he has recorded each year on his birthday; in the latter an old (?) woman ‘W’ (‘”Prematurely old. Unkempt grey hair. Huge eyes in white expressionless face.’) rock’s her self gently towards death in a chair. The play concludes with the lines (spoken by a disembodied voice)
saying to herself no done with that the rocker those arms at last saying to the rocker rock her off stop her eyes fuck life stop her eyes rock her off rock her off
The ageing body itself becomes a prison and as Pedro Querido notes
Old age can hardly be dissociated from the body – ‘Ageing is – if nothing else – an embodied experience’ (Barry, 2015, 136) – and the ageing person’s increasing awareness of this fact is described by Drew Leder as the ‘dys-appearance’ of the body, that is, its salience through what is commonly perceived to be mere dysfunction (1990, 89–90). However, reactions to the ‘dys-appearing’ body tend to be defined by rejection, which materialises into perceptions of the body as ‘other’, as a ‘bad self’, or as a ‘betrayer of the self’ (Gilleard and Higgs, 2018, 7–8)
Maude’s plan to commit suicide stems from her attachment to want to live, to find meaning. At one point in the film she hijacks a care and rescues a tree from certain doom – being placed in the concrete of a side walk. A Tree plays a significant and similar role in Godot too. Waiting on the lonely road, by the tree. At the start of act 1 Vladimir describes the scene ‘It’s like nothing. There’s nothing. There’s a tree’. The tree, however is both dead and alive, in act 1 it is seemingly dead (they also consider hanging themselves from it) and in act 2 it has started to sprout leaves – it demonstrates the potential for life, for meaning. As Linda Buckley observes
In Act 2, the tree has drawn Didi’s attention by miraculously sprouting leaves. In Act 1, Didi spends little time thinking about the tree; in the second Act it drives him into frenzied activity. In the opening scene of Act 2, we realize that Didi’s actual role is to defend and protect Gogo. This recognition of his interconnectedness with both Gogo and the tree makes Didi happy […] For Gogo, the tree is the way out of his life. For Didi, in contrast, the tree is the mirror that forces him to face his life; he knows that suicide will not bring them what they desire..xxvi
For Maude the claiming of her tree is an acknowledgement of life, and the potential for rebirth and renewal. Furthermore Krapp’s Last Tape ends with Krapp’s final recording and the lines ‘Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back’ This feels also like an apt epitaph for Maude, whose decision to take her own life is an act of revolution against her ageing body, a rejection of it and is predicated on retaining her youthful, resistant spirit. The film ends with Harold, alone after Maude’s death, playing the banjo (that she has taught him) in a deserted landscape. however despite the Beckettian nature of this image it is now imbued with hopefulness and meaning
Refocus: The Films of Ken Russell (Edinburgh University Press)
Book Launch / Symposium (Call for Papers)
July 6th2023, Kingston University Town House
The past few years have a seen a renaissance of critical interest in the work of British film and television director Ken Russell. Beside a major conference held at Kingston University in 2017 about Russell, there have been several PhD studies and numerous publications dealing with aspects of his film and television work.
To commemorate the publication of The Films of Ken Russell as part of Edinburgh University Press’s ReFocus: International Director’s Series earlier this year, Kingston University will be hosting its second event about Ken Russell on 6th July 2023: a one-day symposium about Russell’s work and his collaborative relationships. The symposium will culminate in the evening with the book launch for ReFocus: The Films of Ken Russell.
ReFocus: The Films of Ken Russell considered both Ken Russell’s legacy and emphasised his collaborative practices and relationships. Therefore, we are inviting papers which deal with all aspects of Russell’s work, and especially his working relationships
We are especially inviting papers which deal Russell’s collaborations with the actor Murray Melvin – who passed away on 14th April 2023. Melvin emerged out of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, finding fame as the role Geoffrey in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, and was a stalwart of Russell’s informal repertory company between The Diary of a Nobody in 1964 and Prisoner of Honor in 1991. In later years, Melvin advocated for the legacies of both Joan Littlewood and the Theatre Workshop, and Ken Russell. He was a major part of the Ken Russell conference held at Kingston University in 2017 and this event aims to bring the importance of his work with Russell into focus.
We are inviting abstracts which deal with but are not limited to the following:
Russell’s collaborative relationships
Russel’s contemporary legacy in film and television
Russell’s work at the BBC and relationship with Huw Wheldon
Russell’s later work at ITV and relationship with Melvyn Bragg
Russell’s composer and artist biopics
Russell’s and his actors
Russell and the critics
Russell’s work in the US during the 1980s
Russell’s Amateur filmmaking and ‘Garagiste’ films
Set design, space and architecture in Russell’s work
The ET Book: New Perspectives on The Classic 1980s Blockbuster
Editor: Dr Matthew Melia (Kingston University)
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Released in 1982 and grossing over $792 million, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial stands as Spielberg’s second highest grossing film after Jurassic Park (1993). The film, which deals with the friendship between two young boys – one a lost alien, accidentally left behind on Earth and the other a human child named Eliot, went on to become a cultural milestone and opened the way for a wide range of child friendly science fiction films (or films that were at least marketed as such) throughout the 1980s (e.g. Gremlins [1986], The Goonies [1985], Ghostbusters [1984]) to the present where its influence may be felt in the hugely popular Netflix drama Stranger Things (amongst other things)
In a recent interview Spielberg stated that he considers E.T to be his most “perfect” film. So what is it about the film that has come to embody Spielberg’s work as a director? Is it the universality of its appeal? Its themes of childhood and family? Is it in the way that the film balances an outwardly sentimental exterior with a much darker interior – engaging themes of the breakdown of the American family, divorce, loss, abandonment, imperilled children and Reaganite cold war paranoia? This book, the first edited collection of critical scholarship dedicated to the film, follows in the wake of its Bloomsbury predecessors, The Jaws Book (2020) and The Jurassic Park Book (forthcoming 2023) and invites fresh and contemporary scholarship around Spielberg’s film in the wake of its 40th anniversary in 2022. You are invited to submit chapter proposals dealing with all aspects of E.T’s production, development and reception history; its cultural and cinematic legacy; its influence and influences; historical and cultural contexts and fandom and fan engagement. Furthermore the book not only invites chapters on E.T but also aims to critically and comparatively consider the presence of extra terrestrials elsewhere across Spielberg’s filmography (either as director or producer) – not least in his 1977 science fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Subjects considered for proposal will include (but not be limited to)
E.Ts production and release history
Merchandising and promotion
E.T and its place in Spielberg’s filmography
Cultural and cinematic legacy of E.T.
Critical responses and audience reception
Novelisations
Michael Jackson and E.T – The soundtrack album
Music and E.T – John William’s Score
E.T. Reagan and the Cold War
E.T and politics
E.T. suburbia and the American landscape
Family, Divorce and Childhood
Youth and Adolescence
E.T. and the Gothic
Is E.T. a children’s film?
Science fiction and horror in E.T
The influence of E.T on Spielberg’s other Aliens
Science and Scientists in E.T
Home and the domestic space in E.T.
Unmade E.T: early incarnations and abandoned sequels
Story development: Melissa Mathison and the script.
E.T and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Lostness, alienation and friendship
‘E.T Phone Home’ – communication and language in E.T
E.T and animatronics
E.T and A.I: Artificial Intelligence (2001)– critical overlaps
E.T and space (terrestrial and outer)
Environmental issues in E.T
E.T, nostalgia and fandom
E.T and Alien conspiracy theories.
E.T.-sploitation movies
Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to m.melia@kingston.ac.uk by September 1st 2023.
Art TV Film 