Papers by patricia stefanovic
The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies
"It doesn't have anything to do with hypnotism, does it?", of course not." (Bergman). "Then it's ... more "It doesn't have anything to do with hypnotism, does it?", of course not." (Bergman). "Then it's a joke. A long, elaborate metaphor for the condition of the artist-I mean, any time, anywhere, all the time." (Baldwin) "Well, yes. He (the artist) is always on the very edge of disaster; he is always on the very edge of great things. Always. Isn't it so? It is his element, like water is the element for fish." (Bergman) In the dialogue above taken from Baldwin's interview with Ingmar Bergman about his film, The Musician, Baldwin expresses his fascination at the borderland artists often traverse, between reality and irreality, morality and immorality, between life and art itself. The artists' position is always an uncertain one. This is both the exhiliaration and despair of the untenable position within himself and the world outside along which he continually walks a thinly drawn line; the liminal space in which in one moment his status can change from hero to villain where the transgressive voice that both liberates and signals its own death knell can turn on itself. He is the iconic stand-in for all their dreams, desires and fears. The Bergman dialogue eloquently makes a statement about Baldwin's own struggle with his identity as an artist and man (Black? Gay? American?) in early 1950's America and his lifelong desire to portray the indignity and unrighteousness of black and white relations, especially its effect on black men and manhood, but especially the negative trajectory of artistthood that becomes the inevitable victim in the hierarchical rankings of politics and art. Black manhood in the context of post Beat, pre-civil rights comes always at the expense of someone else's prior claim. Black men don't want things done for them, Baldwin argued. They simply want to be allowed to be "a man". Baldwin's characters reflect this preoccupation as Rufus states in Another Country:
From bra-burning to baring our breasts-have we come a long way, baby? In the least, FEMEN’s rec... more From bra-burning to baring our breasts-have we come a long way, baby? In the least, FEMEN’s recent shock tactics might make early American feminist tactics seem fairly anachronistic. On the other hand, the idea that any contemporary feminist activist in an increasingly misogynist media culture would voluntarily position her naked body as central to her political platform might seem irreconcilable to the aims of the early women’s movement in the US, who purposely selected as their inaugurating platform a venue that could not have existed without the female body. What, if anything, do these movements have in common? Without sounding too Eurocentric, can we say the stakes may ultimately be higher for Eastern European feminist activists? Could FEMEN be the ideological descendants of the Ukraine Romantics?
I want to argue that the heritage text is an abject one, whose ideology is masked under the guise... more I want to argue that the heritage text is an abject one, whose ideology is masked under the guise of the aesthetic performance of the costume drama. Mike Budd has said that “classical narrative is not a neutral means or instrument of communication but a material, ideological activity designed to hide the work and technique that produces its pleasurable effects of omniscience and realism. Similarly, I believe, the heritage text can be seen as a containment text for colonial rhetoric. I want to focus my attention on a lesser known heritage film by the production team of Merchant Ivory Productions, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, because of its intentional foregrounding of an anticolonial discourse. Cotton Mary (1999), however problematic in its representation of the Anglo-Indian identity, nonetheless disrupts the successful ‘lineage’ of the heritage film by highlighting the problem of the contemporary Anglo-Indian identity.
Conference Presentations by patricia stefanovic
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Papers by patricia stefanovic
Conference Presentations by patricia stefanovic