Forthcoming Work by John A. Riley
in "Haunted Histories and Troubled Pasts: 21st Century Horror and the Historical Imagination", eds. Amanda Howell & Stephanie Green (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
Originally titled Northwest Passage and pre-sold as a televisual milestone long before its pilot ... more Originally titled Northwest Passage and pre-sold as a televisual milestone long before its pilot episode first aired, David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks (1990-91) remains perhaps the most revered cult TV artefact of the last thirtyfive years. Much to the frustration of viewers anticipating a sentimental reprise of the original series' memorably idiosyncratic pleasures, however, Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) taunted the show's morbidly devout fandom with yawning tonal and aesthetic divergences between the sprightly Twin Peaks of the early 1990s and the reflexively depressive longeurs of the 2017 (re)incarnation. A torpid and often bewilderingly capricious televisual phantasmagoria, Twin Peaks' belated third season provided an inimitably oneiric eighteen-hour meditation on historical recurrence, Gothic temporality and the closed futurity of nostalgia. Rejecting misty-eyed nostalgia for the era of Francis Fukayama's 'end of history' , The Return instead placed the uncanny spectre of mid-century American history at its epicentre. Most strikingly, The Return's pivotal eighth episode featured a protracted and disturbingly lysergic depiction of mid-1940s atomic testing, the nuclear sublime here reconfigured as the traumatic geopolitical double of the thematic cornerstone of Twin Peaks' dense mythologythe incestuous rape and murder of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). Beyond the series itself, commercial paratexts The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016) and Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier (2017) also recontextualized the already expansive mythology of Twin Peaks within over 200 years of US social, cultural and political history. Thus, even while each episode opened with the aural catnip of Angelo
Book Chapters by John A. Riley
in Amanda DiPaolo & Jamie Gillies (eds.),"The Politics of 'Twin Peaks" (Lexington Books, 2019), pp.69-92., 2019
discuss their mother's invjtation to Sunday dinner. ,,She hopls there,s no murders this weekend,"... more discuss their mother's invjtation to Sunday dinner. ,,She hopls there,s no murders this weekend," giggles Smiley. ,,Fat chance of thli haweninR!,, As the two detectives burst into laughter over the remote likelihood tf,at thejr week_ end will remain free of homicidal violence, off-screen voices are clearly audible. "Hey!" shouts a police officer, ,,she can,t piss on the floor! Get her out of here!" A woman screams. ,,Get her out of here, phil!,, An angry woman's voice can clearly be heard. ,,Cocksuckers: I,ll shit in your mouthl" "She's got a knife!', shouts another cop. ,,Fuck you, Twinkies!,, yells the womary "I'll cut your nuts off!,, Following an auiible scuffle, the woman screams and groans after being tasered. ,,We wanna report a cop!,, shouts a second, comically indignant fimale voice (3.i3).
'Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear', ed. Victoria McCollum (Routledge, 2019), pp.195-210.., 2019
Papers by John A. Riley
SLOVO, 2014
In the closing moments of Hard to be a God (2013), in the aftermath of a brutal massacre, Don Rum... more In the closing moments of Hard to be a God (2013), in the aftermath of a brutal massacre, Don Rumata mournfully plays his clarinet. A passing man and a young child trudge down a snow-covered path. 'Do you like this music?' the girl asks, 'It hurts my stomach.' The girl's response to the music could well serve as an initial reaction to this film, as it is a deeply beautiful work about the ugliest atrocities mankind is capable of. Initial reactions of confusion, queasiness of the stomach, and mutterings that the film is "impenetrable" merely demonstrate the public reluctance to deal with such an uncompromising work of art. The film depicts a planet that is still languishing in a medieval phase of development, unlike Earth where space travel and futuristic technologies fully flourish. Disorder reigns as local warlords vie for power. Intellectuals and artists are rounded up and brutalised, beaten and dunked headfirst into latrines. A scientist from Earth, disguised as local nobleman Don Rumata, observes all this, reporting to his superiors on the events and protecting the hounded wise men with a view to secure a future renaissance. Rumata is searching for one such key thinker, a doctor called Budakh. However his attempts to locate the man and to intervene in local politics result in a backlash from a local warlord, who instigates an eruption of pillage and mass murder (the original title of the film, 'The Chronicle of the Arkanar Massacre', unambiguously established this potential spoiler as a theme).The core dilemma this film grapples with is God's possible intervention in human affairs. For every positive intervention there is a potentially disastrous consequence. In discussion with Rumata later in the film, Budakh suggests that the best gift God can give his creations is self-determination, to leave them alone to make their own fate. Ultimately, Rumata must bear the consequences for this intervention and for his paternalistic meddling resulting in a landslide of unexpected chaos. Of course, any reworking of a Strugatskii brothers novel is bound to raise comparisons with other major adaptations: Andrei Tarkovskii's Stalker (1979) and Aleksandr Sokurov's Dni Zatmeniia ('Days of the Eclipse', 1988) in particular. Indeed, parts of Hard to be a God develop as a slow motion replay of the sack of the city of Vladimir from Tarkovskii's Andrei Rublev (1966). However, these comparisons should only be used to situate Hard to be a God within its context. In Russia and the former Soviet Union, there is a long tradition of taking science fiction seriously, including its cinematographic incarnations. Therescience fiction has long been a forum for debating metaphysical, sociological and ethical questions, rather than an occasion for action-packed spectacles. It is also worth speculating that Hard to be a God takes the films of Tarkovskii and Sokurov even further in its commitment to a new cinematic way of seeing. Unlike the earlier, more prosaic adaptation by Peter Fleischmann (which seems to This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share-alike 2.
The Journal of Film and Video, 2017
Dandelion: Birkbeck Postgraduate Arts Journal, 2012
Brevity is not a word that springs to mind when one thinks of Andrei Tarkovsky. His film Stalker ... more Brevity is not a word that springs to mind when one thinks of Andrei Tarkovsky. His film Stalker took two and a half hours to convey three men and a dog across a field. Tarkovsky's films, and his powerful creative personality, which often dominates the discourse around his work, have become part of the canon of world cinema. His films have become bywords for the lengthy, difficult, and wholly serious. But despite this reputation for sprawl, there was an undercurrent of concision in his thought and work. In this article, I will turn to a rarely discussed strand in Tarkovsky's art: his Polaroid photographs. 1 I will contrast Tarkovsky's approach to Polaroid photography with the long form narrative experiments he undertook in film, in order to argue that, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, Tarkovsky appreciated brevity, and that an understanding of Tarkovsky's art that focuses on his mobilization of extended duration tells only a partial story. I will construct this argument against the stereotypical understanding of Tarkovsky as propagated by his own (in fact coauthored) book Sculpting in Time (1986). Sculpting in Time outlines traditional aesthetic beliefs (art as expression of beauty, beauty as expression of truth) alongside personal reflections and reminiscences. The book argues that cinema's unique property is the ability to capture time. This, he claims, is why he uses the long take: to capture large, unbroken sections of time. Sculpting in Time is often seen as a work of film theory. The book does have many factors in common with some of the canonical works of classical film theory: chiefly a desire to interrogate the essence of cinema, which Tarkovsky designates as the ability to record time. I
Book Reviews by John A. Riley
Visual Studies, 2019
Owen Hatherley's widely-known books are polemical defences of popular modernism, while The Chapli... more Owen Hatherley's widely-known books are polemical defences of popular modernism, while The Chaplin Machine, drawn from one half of his PhD thesis, is a more conventionally-written academic project. Over two hundred plus pages, it covers far more than just Chaplin's relation to the avant-garde, touching on such subjects as Soviet architecture, performing arts, and graphic design.
East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, 2019
Journal of Popular Culture, 2018
Journal of British Cinema and Television, 2018
Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2016
The Journal of Popular Culture, 2015
Canadian Slavonic Papers
is one of the most revered directors in world cinema. His unique aesthetic
Scope, 2012
These two books confirm the suspicion that Russian cinema and its attendant scholarship are both ... more These two books confirm the suspicion that Russian cinema and its attendant scholarship are both thriving, as both widen their focus by considering Soviet cinema alongside contemporary post-Soviet films.
Conference Presentations by John A. Riley
Interviews by John A. Riley
Eastern European Film Bulletin, 2016
Atlantica: Journal of Art and Thought, 2016
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Book Reviews by John A. Riley
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