UNBURIED COFFIN

2003

Sekans Journal of Cinema Culture, 2023

This article is the English translation of the film review of Killers of the Flower Moon, published in the 23rd issue of Sekans Journal of Cinema Culture.

Aether: Journal of Media Geography, 2011

In the 2005 film Corpse Bride, director Tim Burton and composer Danny Elfman collaborate using both musical and visual signifiers to create two very different realms that the main characters must traverse: the land of the living, and the land of the dead. The characterizations of these places appear in the reverse of what a viewer might expect. Visually, grey skies and determinedly downtrodden city streets and citizens rendered entirely in traditional Victorian mourning colors-black, grey, mauve and purple-transport the viewer to a popular, if incorrect, vision of late-nineteenth century England: one of strict conventions and repression, manifested here in everything including the foul weather. The afterlife is situated in direct contrast with this sorry state of affairs: new arrivals find themselves in a rollicking bar complete with singing and joking patrons in various states of decay. Bright and bold colors-not least of which the bright blue faces of the deceased-indicate that the afterlife is a place of merriment and fun not allowed in the more reserved world "upstairs." In writing the music for this cabaret-style afterlife, Elfman deliberately conjures up the world of a 1930s nightclub through the use of torch songs and percussive novelty numbers. In death, existence is more casual and open than it is in life; the social structure appears to lack the classism-a major plot factor-and pettiness of the living. The use of music-and the characters who make and appreciate it-directly contributes to the creation of the two worlds, and creates an extra twist in the plot. This article will examine the musical creation of the living world and the afterlife in Corpse Bride, as well as explore the use of music in both locations as a method of creating narrative tension.

Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2015

Egypt: Ancient Histories, Modern Archaeologies, 2013

In contemporary popular culture, Egyptian mummies tend to be portrayed as villains or clowns. This has developed from Hollywood's presentation of these characters as dragon-like figures - evil and wasteful hoarders of maidens and treasure. In contrast, nineteenth century poems, romance fiction and even non-fiction travelogues interpreted mummies as romantic female figures all too willing to yield their treasures to male unwrappers. Elaborating upon my earlier discussion of fictional mummies (Day 2006), I will show that a European folkloric archetype that Joseph Campbell called the 'Dragon Principle' was first applied to both real and fictional mummies long before Hollywood's horror classics, albeit differently: the Victorian mummy was not a waster of treasure, but a wasted treasure herself, awaiting (symbolic sexual) liberation by an archaeologist. She was not a dragon, but the prisoner of a dragon - hidden in a tomb, neglected by a collector (Lynch, "The Lady Isis in Bohemia") or denied marriage to the hero of a narrative by her jealous father, the pharaoh (as in Gautier's "The Mummy's Foot" and Haggard's "Smith and the Pharaohs"). Ultimately, time is the dragon imprisoning the mummy; a contradictory figure who is ages old yet perpetually youthful, she cannot abide forever with her lover from the modern world, and disappears like a ghost or crumbles into dust. In contrast to cursed mummies who carried deadly flower seeds to avenge the figurative rape of themselves and their tombs by intruders (Alcott's "Lost in a Pyramid, or The Mummy's Curse"), imprisoned mummies advertised their scientific, aesthetic and implied sexual availability with an inviting array of flowers that alluded to virginity ("The Lady Isis in Bohemia"). Unlike male mummies (Smith's poem "Address to the Mummy at Belzoni's Exhibition"), they even obligingly responded to interrogations about their past lives (Copland's 1834 poems "The Mummy Awaked" and "The Mummy's Reply", analysed here for the first time). The method by which cinema abjected mummies and privileged "the mummy's curse" over romance as the predominant mummy genre of the twentieth century can now be understood in terms of Hollywood's reattribution (not unprecedented application) of the dragon role in mummy lore: its conversion of mummies from damsels in distress into damsel-destroying monsters.

African Studies Review

Acuity : Journal of English Language Pedagogy, Literature and Culture, 2019

Even every work of arts especially in literature has their own unique story style yet its also has similarities in the idea or problems of human being. The similarities appear on their works because they share some common aspects of life which is also called as the intertextuality. Themes and motives in work of arts are similar because of the universal consciousness among the authors. And by these works Diary of a Mad Old Man by Junichiro Tanizaki, Aku by Chairil Anwar, The Jilting of Granny Weatherall by Kathrene Anne Porter and The Tinkers by Paul Harding deal with the same theme about life and death. Moreover, three main characters also in the same age, they are old people who fought their life before the death toke it away. The analysis is using qualitative method to evaluate the similarities and the differences concept of life and death and also to able to found out any correlation of each work related with the intertextuality among them