Derrida for Beginners (Powell, 2007)

Jim Powell. Derrida for Beginners. London and NY: Writers and Readers, 1997.

Discours, figure (Jean-François Lyotard, 1971)

Discourse, figure is Lyotard's second book of philosophy. The main thrust of this work is a critique of structuralism, particularly of Lacan's psychoanalysis. The book is divided into two parts:

1) Lyotard uses Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology to undermine structuralism.
2) He uses Freudian psychoanalysis to undermine Lacan and certain aspects of phenomenology.

Lyotard begins with an opposition between discourse (related to structuralism and written text) and figure (a visual image related to phenomenology and seeing). He suggests that structured, abstract conceptual thought has dominated philosophy since Plato, denigrating sensual experience. The text and the experience of reading are associated with the former, and figures, images and the experience of seeing with the latter. He proceeds to deconstruct this opposition and attempts to show that discourse and figure are mutually implicated.

Thesis: Discourse contains elements of the figural (poetry and illuminated texts are good examples), and visual space can be structured like discourse (when it is broken up into ordered elements in order for the world to be recognisable and navigable by the seeing subject).

Ultimately, the point is not to privilege the figural over the discursive, but to show how these elements must negotiate with each other. The mistake of structuralism is to interpret the figural in entirely discursive terms, ignoring the different ways in which these elements operate. In the second part of Discours, figure, Lyotard suggests that structure and transgression are related to Freudian libidinal forces ( libido's energy, forces not mediated by rationality), and so, he paves the way for the libidinal philosophy developed in Libidinal Economy.

Silent Films

The silent horror film is often regarded, if it is regarded at all, as a quaint legacy from a bygone age where the larger-than-life histrionics of its actors seem almost farcical and humorous. The horror film’s original intention of scaring its audience is lost as its flickering black and white images are passed by in favour of CGI enhanced spectacle and gore drenched violence. Yet those flickering images of monsters, villains and their screaming victims still cast a resonance that influences, whether directly or subconsciously, over what we watch today, be it in the dark streets and shadows of Sin City (2005) or in the blood and atmosphere of Coppola’s Dracula (1992). In hundreds of films made since the advent of sound the flickering images from our past continue to live on in our present.

Film evolved from a scientific novelty and fairground gimmick, where five minute reels were pitched alongside the bearded woman and the strongest man in the early years of the 20^th Century, to become one of the world’s most powerful entertainment mediums. It is perhaps difficult to imagine now in age where image and sound can be accessed from almost anywhere, and from everything from a phone to huge screens in city centres. No longer does the ability to see people and things move hold any magic for the viewer, rather we have become complacent and jaded by our constant exposure to the moving image and its accompanying sound. In the early days of cinema however people were still awed by this new form of mass entertainment, and despite its lack of sound they were ready to be thrilled, moved and scared by what they saw.

As film developed as an art form during the 1910s so the tastes of its audiences grew more sophisticated and they came increasingly to expect both spectacle and escapism in equal measure. Films like D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), and Intolerance (1916) and, to a lesser degree, the emergence of the screen ‘vamps’ where man-eating femme fatales like Theda Bara and Pola Negri were wowing audiences in films like Cleopatra (1917), Salomé (1918) and Carmen (1918) were all paving the way for a darker kind of cinema. The horror film was about to rear its head.

Although there had of course between forays into horror over the preceding years, particularly in Europe, with films like Frankenstein (1910, Der Golem aka The Golem (1914) and Alraune (1918) it was to be a highly theatrical expressionist German film about a murderous sleepwalker called Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari aka The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) that began the process of establishing horror as a legitimate films genre. The film is the story of an asylum director who gets a white faced somnambulist to murder on his orders, the murderer clambering across roof tops caring the unconscious bodies of his victims. However, it was really the insane concoction of styles and sets arrayed in varying and often extreme levels of black and white that were, in to a degree still are, revolutionary. The net effect was both to brick the shackles of convention that still hampered film makers at the time, and to show cinema audiences that horror could be a creative and worthwhile genre.

Subsequently a number of horror films were produced to prove the style was innovative (x, y, z). All these films set new standards and broke old rules as their directors and producers strove to adapt a horror format that previously only existed in book form or been portrayed on stage to a totally new cinematic medium.

Throughout the rest of the 20’s the horror film grew both in quality and popularity, dispelling along the way any criticisms that it might be in any way a poor relation to other film genres. These films laid the foundation for the explosion in the popularity of horror films that was to follow in the 30’s and 40’s.

The horror film of the 20’s may have been silent but de screams of its audiences were not, and with no previous films to guide them in terms of direction or style it was the work of theses pioneering men and women that was to set the ground rules for the horror film that directors are using in the years to nowadays. What is worth remembering is that regardless of whether a film is watched on a big screen or portable device if it works as entertainment it works, and the fact that the screams from the silent era are still echoing down the decades proves that the silence gave horror film a voice.

Comics & Sequential Art (Will Eisner, 1985)

Will Eisner. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac, Florida: Poorhouse Press, 1985.

The format of the comic book presents a montage of both word and image, and the reader is thus required to exercise both visual and verbal interpretive skills. The regimens of art (eg. perspective, symmetry, brush stroke) and the regimens of literature (eg. grammar, plot, syntax) become superimposed upon each other. The reading of the comic book is na act of both aesthetic perception and intellectual pursuit. (p.8)

The panel as a medium of control - The viewer of a film is prevented from seeing the next frame before the creator permits it is because these frames, printed on strips of transparent film, are shown one at the time. So film, which is an extension of comic strips, enjoys absolute control of its reading - an advantaged shared by live theater. In a close theater the proscenium arch and the wings of the stage can form but one single panel, while the audience sits in a fixed position from which their view is contained therein. (p.40)

Where the super-panel purports to be a page - that is, to make the reader concious it is a page - it serves as a containment withou perimeter. It is best employed for parallel narratives. This narrative for or device is not often explored in comics. The printed form lends itself to this because, unlike the transitory nature of the film medium, i can be referred to repeatedely through the reading. (making the panel that controls the total narrative the entire page itself). The result, a set of panels, attempts to control the reader's line of reading so that two storylines may be followed synchronously. (p.80)

The primary function of perspective should be to manipulate the reader's orientation for a purpose in accord with the author's narrative plan. For example, accurate perspective is most useful when the sense of the story requires that the reader know precisely where all the elements of a drama are in relation to each other. Another use of perspective is its employment to manipulate and produce various emotional states in the reader. I proceed from the theory that the viewer's response to a given scene is influenced by his position as a spectator. Looking at the scene from above it the viewer has a sense fo detachement - an observer rather than a participant. However, when the reader views the scene from below it, then this position evokes a sense of smallness which stimulates a sensation of fear. (p.89)

Expressive anatomy - the human body, and the stylization of its shape, and the codifying of its emotionally produced gestures and expressive postures are accumulated in the memory, forming a non-verbal vocabulary of gesture. They are part of the inventory of what the artist has retained from observation. (p.100) the language of the human body becomes one of the essential ingredients of the comic strip art. The skill with which they are employed is also a mesure of the author's ability to convey his idea.

A gesture, generally almost idiomatic to a region or culture, tends to be subtle and limited to a narrow range of movement. A posture is a movement selected out of a sequence of related moments in a single action. (p.105)

Writing and sequential art - the writer must be at the outset concerned with the interpretation of the story by the artist, and the artist must be allow himself to be a captive of the story or idea. Unlike theatre (including cinema), in which the tecnology of its creation demands by its very nature the coordinated contributions of many specialists, comics have a story of being the product of a single individual. (p.123)

The Biology of Horror (Jack Morgan, 2002)

Jack Morgan. The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film. Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. (pp.272)

Classic “high” literary gothicism, with its assertive physicalness, may then be viewed as a modality within the historical Romantic project, though grotesque imagining was alive of course well before the Romantic sensibility took it up and has continued to flourish well after Romanticism’s heyday. Through its particular narrative strategies, horror awakens thought shockingly to its intimate and inescapable connectedness to the flesh and to pain, to the kind of recognition Astrid, the narrator of Janet Fitch’s recent novel White Oleander, experiences while trying to comfort a friend in a maternity ward (p.5)



Symbols themselves are coming to be recognized as issuing from and circling back to physical embodiment—“meanings arise through body and brain” (Lakoff 495). While there are obviously other dimensions involved in horror, the present book proposes the primacy of this one, positing biomorphic imagination as critically underlying gothic fiction’s Dark Romantic project and of macabre literature in general, and to a degree and depth that goes beyond the conscious, thematic level. (p. 5-6)



Films such as The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Stand, ’Salem’s Lot, and Stigmata, for example, all imagine diabolical assertions upon the physical body of a young woman, suggesting an arch assault on the wellsprings of human life. In the film Seven (1995), the human monster’s obsession with souls stained by the seven deadly sins is enacted in grotesque torture dramas played out on his victims bodies, and significantly, his ultimate prey is a pregnant young woman. Our “psychological” fears are realized in very physical terms. What John Donne wrote in “The Ecstasy” of love might be said appropriately of horror as well: Its “mysteries in souls do grow / But yet the body is his book” (132). (p.6)



Most studies of horror do somewhere reference its bodily focus, of course; feminist criticism almost invariably remarks it, but the concern of most criticism is rarely principally that.4 The over-psychologizing of the horror mode in critical analysis may in part reflect the fallacy earlier noted in terms of which thinking is regarded as functioning “in some ghostly realm independent of the body.” (p.6) Rereading a book outside the gothic field at the same time, C. L. Barber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedies, I was struck by Barber’s reference to the fact that those late medieval factions opposed to the Dionysian spirit of spring holidaytended to emphasize “the mortality implicit in vitality” (10). The phrase seemed to situate a critical opposition, one that brought the horror sensibility and logic into focus over against the comic (p. 6-7)



What was referenced here was the body not in an individualistic sense but as part of the larger life schema—diurnal, seasonal, agricultural, all of which, as Barber shows, were bound up in traditional premodern and early modern holiday and festival. An ancient ritual synthesis seemed to suggest itself: the conjunction, as in the couplet quoted, of Thanatos and Eros, the implications of worms and morbidity on the one hand and of women walking delightfully alive and majestic on the other. They are the farthest apart images imaginable, and at the same time they are part of an intimate continuity (p.7)



The Biology of Horror seems to me now largely a gloss or attempted elaboration upon Barber’s phrase in terms of comedy and horror, fertility and its antagonist. His book, which in many respects anticipated the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, which was not to appear in translation until 1968, led me to return to others of a complementary perspective, notably Susanne Langer’s Feeling and Form (1953), which had appeared the same year as Barber’s study, as well as to Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World itself. I think that horror can be productively analyzed in terms of the kind of model Langer proposes for comedy; horror indeed embodies a dark foil for comic regeneration, subverting Eros and all it implies. If the quest romance, as Northrop Frye argues, represents ritually the victory of fertility over the Waste Land, horror situates dark romance’s inversion of those terms and the privileging of various sinister elements antagonistic to the quest project; Fryenotes, for instance, giants, ogres, witches, and magicians (Anatomy 193). Horror, despite its often obscene depravity, is driven by an antierotic, and fertility-adversarial perspective. Though the Dark Romantic impulse shares the broader Romantic concern with physicality, it is with the menacing aspects of physicality. Increasing freedom in publication has in fact drawn the gothic’s aversion to the organic out to the point of such over-the-top vileness that one hesitates to quote hard-core examples—the loathsome necromancy experiments in Brian Lumley’s Necroscope, for instance. …The scatological extravagance of this surpasses even Grand Guignol reach and is, to be sure, a long way from the restrained subtlety of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, say, but one is not deploring literary decline here; Barker’s writing, in this early novel at least, is of an exemplary elegance for that matter. His work is in a line distinct, however, from that of the genteel ghost story cultivated by writers such as James and Edith Wharton; the menace in Barker’s stories does not take the form of shadows on mansion walls and eerie revenant forms crossing aristocratic lawns in the moonlight. His novel is a contemporary Melmoth the Wanderer, Dracula, or The Monk—visceral, excessive, bloody, and obscene. The macabre author’s study is, like Frankenstein’s laboratory, “a workshop of filthy creation” (32) (p.9)



The chapters in The Biology of Horror discuss different thematic elements of the horror invention rubric—malevolent locale, pestilence, lethargy, infertility, and so forth—in terms of their broad biological implications. It is important to emphasize, however, that these elements intercontextualize and reinforce one another; horror categories bleed into one another as it were. The book’s concluding chapter considers the matter of horror’s possible therapeutic function, related to the question of what accounts for the esoteric pleasure we take in reading this species of literature and viewing the analogous cinematic works. (Though the traditional usage, “pleasure” may not be the best word—Emily Dickinson notes, I think more precisely, the tendency of horror to captivate [129]. The question might better be put in terms of why horror does captivate and fascinate, why it can be so hypnotic, seductive, and intriguing). What would lead Sir Walter Scott, for instance, to praise the beneficial qualities of Mrs. Radcliffe’s—for its time—morbid work? I would mention finally that this book casts a wide speculative net and ranges around and about a good deal in space and time; it is not intended to be a narrowly focused literary critical monograph. My main justification for that is the fact that, as Lovecraft notes, some of the most significant horror work is found outside what is usually viewed as the gothic or horror literature canon, in scattered fragments set in contexts not always definable as literary gothic (Supernatural 16).



The notorious Nazi documentary film The Eternal Jew, for example, makes use of the repulsion triggers perfected in landmarks of macabre German expressionism such as F. W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu and Fritz Lang’s 1931 M and manipulates the camera-technical horror savvy such films pioneered.7 It employs the defining gothic strategy discussed earlier— that of bypassing the rational and addressing the visceral instead—and points up the dangerous political and totalitarian possibilities of manipulated horror imagination. The film’s strategy is to go to the heart of elemental dread—the fear of contamination, the central theme of Lovecraft’s classic The Shadow over Innsmouth, for example. Images of healthy, outdoor German life—grazing lambs and so on—are juxtaposed to dreadful scenes of kosher animal slaughter by rabbis, images of cockroaches, and especially—shades of Nosferatu—of rats swarming and scavenging en masse. The Eternal Jew may even have been consciously conceived to be viewed in a mental montage with, and therebyto capitalize on, the lingering horror images the German public retained from Murnau’s film of almost twenty years earlier. That the producers of The Eternal Jew had such associational strategies in mind is suggested by their use of actual footage from M, a terribly disquieting film that, like Nosferatu, had made a deep impression on the public. The famous scene in which Peter Lori (“the Jew Peter Lori” the voice-over says) pleads grotesquely for understanding of the heinous child murders he has committed is included in The Eternal Jew. In the film, the Jew is a vampire, sucking the blood of Aryan Europe, and like the vampire of Murnau’s film, the “Jews” in the 1940 film are meant to evoke rodents and the medieval epidemic associations still vivid in the European imagination. The latter connection is in fact explicitly made in the voice-over. Like Nosferatu, the haunted “Jewish” figures are meant to suggest slippage to a lower order of life—they are drawn as stooped and skulking, sliding along the walls of sordid, sinister places, their eyes derelict and resentful. In fact, the following description of Murnau’s vampire Nosferatu by Gilberto Perez, if one didn’t know better, could be taken as descriptive of the “Jews” in the Nazi production: They are “loomingly thin” presenting a “skeletal aspect” and “monstrously suggest a cross between a human skeleton and a rat.” Their resemblance to rats “makes more pronounced [their] association with pestilence” (Perez 124). By cutting from the haggard “Jews” to teeming rats, and back, the Nazi film suggests their association in squalor—the two are equated with vile, contaminating conditions into which, it is implied, the film viewers, be they less than vigilant (read vigilantes), may slide. The insinuation in The Eternal Jew is that the Jew is like Nosferatu: “rats he carries with him.”8 The present book also references writing in nonfictional epidemic, martyrological (p.10-11)



The bricolage character of the modality itself leads to critical traveling as well. Maggie Kilgour, in The Rise of the Gothic Novel, notes that gothic fiction “feeds upon and mixes a wide range of literary sources out of which it emerges and from which it never fully disentangles itself. . . . The form is itself a Frankenstein’s monster, assembled out of bits and pieces of the past” (4). The emergence of an energetic film branch of horror invention has further complicated the genre’s profile so that by now discussion of salient horror tropics occasions a knitting together of many sundry strings, often from dissimilar historical locations, which may sometimes need to be discussed in close proximity. (p. 11)



Ezra Pound’s observation that all agesare contemporaneous is perhaps especially true of horror; he added that in terms of literature, “many dead men are our grandchildren’s contemporaries” (6). Recent movie history would seem to bear this out; thanks to the influence of film, exorcism and stigmata, for example, are arguably more a part of the American popular cultural imagination today than they were one hundred years ago, and the currently popular television “crossing over” genre, purporting to contact the dead, recapitulates Victorian theosophy. Recent movie history would seem to bear this out; thanks to the influence of film, exorcism and stigmata, for example, are arguably more a part of the American popular cultural imagination today than they were one hundred years ago, and the currently popular television “crossing over” genre, purporting to contact the dead, recapitulates Victorian theosophy.





CRITICISM ADDRESSING THE LITERATURE OF HORROR IS notoriously lacking in an established terminology. Efforts to elucidate its typological profile can become very nuanced and have tended to cause, as S. T. Joshi notes, “an irremediable confusion of terms such as horror, terror, the supernatural, fantasy, the fantastic, ghost story, Gothic fiction, and others” (2). Chris Baldick, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, having noted that his anthology attempts to set forth “a relatively pure line of shorter Gothic fiction,” adds the following reservation: “I am aware, however, that a broader definition of Gothic is possible and have at some points slackened the line to accommodate this view” (xxii). Noel Carroll writes that in terms of the theory propounded in his book, “most of Poe’s work does not fit into the genre of horror” (215n). Linda Badley calls The Silence of the Lambs a Gothic Romance (144). And so on.1 Early high Gothic literature tended toward a realist or quasi-realist expression, toward the natural supernatural. The supernatural as such was played down or, ultimately, as in Radcliffe, turned out to have been only apparently extra-natural. The uncanny was likely to work up from the grass roots; Count Dracula, for instance, a demon emergent from the central European folk-mind, is living-dead, not dead and returning from a supernatural realm. The character of Satan itself suggests a chthonic derivation and lends itself readily enough to representations such as Stephen King’s Randall Flagg, in The Stand, who is a devil if not the Devil manifested as a suave, or would-be suave, redneck. Frankenstein too is a natural phenomenon, a “creature made of clay,” as it were. The ability of horror to function in the physical without resort to the deus ex machina possibilities of the supernatural is evident as well in films such as The First Deadly Sin, Psycho, and Silence of the Lambs, with their human monsters—Daniel Blank, Norman Bates, and Hannibal Lecter. (p.40)

Heidegger for Beginners (LeMay, 1994)

Eric C. Lemay. Heidegger for Beginners. London: Writer and Reader, 1994.

"Technology will never allow itself to be overcome by man. That would mean, after all, that man was the master of Being".

According to Heidegger, philosophy's focus on humanity has helped cause the crisis of the modern world. Rather than recognising our place in the world, our status as one being among other beings, we have turned the world into something that exists for and because of us. Treating planet Earth as an expendable resource.

Heidegger says that many of the world's atrocities can be traced back to the supposedly harmless philosophical belief that we human beings are special, we give the world a 'frame of reference'. The connection between our technological world view and the concept of Being passed through Occidental philosophy.

Socrates - The unexamined life is not worth living
Parmenides - Can we come to know that which does not exist?
Pythagoras - Could Mathematics lie at the core of the universe?
Heraclitus - How do we comprehend a world that constantly changes?

Most relevant work comes from Plato and his 'Theory of Ideas' - each existing thing has a form - Anamnesis. Over the next two thousand years a list fo distinguished philosophers would refine, refute and transform Plato's ideas.

René Descates (1596-1650) and the absolute axiom 'Cogito, ergo sum' stems from a process he called 'radical doubt', his foundation for absolute knowledge. Jean-Jaques Rousseau (1712-1778) proposes the universal soul based on the Self and on Nature. In different ways, George Berkeley (1685-1753), John Locke (1632-1776) and David Hume (1711-1776) though Rousseau was a deluded idealist and stated that 'we know things from experiencing them, and then using this information as a base which to build more complex knowledge - not from going deep into the corridors of our own minds'. These Empiricist thinkers denied the grandiose of Rationalists thinkes such as Rousseau and Descartes (they argued the empiricists ignored the role of the mind in witnessing, recording and analysing sensory experience).

Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804) proclaimed that the Self had innate structures that is used to take in all sensory information. He agreed with the Empiricists' claim that sensory experience is where we derive our knowledge but, at the same time, he gave Rationalists credit for realising that the human mind filters every experience in its own unique way.Along with structure like Time and Space, Kant came up with categories such as Unity, Reality, Substance and Possibility, which all help us filter experience. Kant presumed that we all have the same filters and , thus, by examining the categories of his own mind, Kant believed, like Rousseau, that he could generate universal human knowledge. In the realm of Ethics, Kant believed that all moral behaviour could be generated from a principle he called the 'Categorical Imperative'. In attempting to develop a flawless, hemertic system to explain the world, Kant ignored everyday facts like, people not always tell the truth.

Friedrich Nietzsch (1844-1900) took this line of critique to the extreme purporting Kant's philosophy as the most far-reaching false assumption in the history of philosophy. He says claims of Truth are claims of Power. All the lwas, canons and doctrines of groups claiming truth, according to Nietzsch were ways of oppressing our higher instincts. For him, the most coercive and oppressive claim to absolute truth was Christianity and proclaimed God is dead. To follow such laws means to conform to a 'Slave Morality'. In his denial of truth, Nietzsch rejected conventional moral values. Ideas like Kant's universal categories are not truths but functions of what Nietzsch called 'Will to Power'. Every organism lives to increase its life force.

Even before Nietzsch, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard threw into doubt ideas of truth, knowledge and God. He said we cannot know anything universal, anything tha transcends time because we are finite beings. He did not say God was dead and believed that subjectivity of the truth is important, so we must make 'Leaps of Faith'.

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) contributes to debunk assumptions of all-encompassing philosophical systems, he believed that scientific knowledge was very useful but, did not help to understand 'Human Concerns'. To solve this discrepancy Husserl developed a philosophical method called Phenomenology, in order to describe 'experience' or 'awareness' of things in a manner which did not reduce them to scientific data.Husserl rescued everyday experience from the reductive limitations of science and developed a new, rigorous method od establishing knowledge. This method would inspire thinkers who felt the scientific approach to the world was impoverished.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was one of them. In 1927 he published Being and Time, the central focus of Heidegger's work brings us back to the fundamental mystery of existence. According to him, ever since philosophers began asking questions about the world, they overlooked the fact that the world exists. Since Plato Philosophers have been focusing on the things of the world but not on the world in itself.

The significance of this basic condition of existence he dubbed 'Being', while 'beings' are those entities which exist in the world. Opposite to the idea of Being there is 'The Nothing' or non-existence. In between these two possibilities there are temporal 'beings'. Previous approaches, such as Plato's and Descartes, ignored the everyday world and gone in serach of some extraordinary principle that would explain the world.

Heidegger decides to do a phenomenological investigation of humans in their average-everydayness which he calls 'Dasein' (translates as being there). The event of such existence is our 'Thrown-ness', no one is an autonomous individaul, free to choose their own way of existence. We belong to cultures and our behaviours derive from our social environment. Universal system do not account for different practices, thinking among various cultures. There can be no 'being there' if the world does not exist, Daisen and the world are the same. Rules for behaviours are all contingent elements of various cultures. Modes of existence are categorised by Heidegger as undifferentaited (does not question position in life), inauthentic (substitutes one type of life for another, anxiety, 'Fallen-ness') and the authentic mode of existence. That is, to take resposibility for the life you are living, realise that no-one is accountablefor it except you, you are a being-towards-death.

This recognition of meaninglessness has great consequences fo the individual. For Existentialists, we filter the world through language, in a manner similar to Kant's categories, which fosters a particular experience of the world. For Existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) 'existence preceeds essence', this is similar to Heidegger's insight that a person is first and foremost a product of the world. But for Sartre this means that humans have no 'pregiven nature'. While Heidegger thinks that the individual was merely a part of his environment. Satre draws an opposite conclusion, that the individual was an autonomous self. Heidegger thinks this is just another version of Descartes philosophy: a view which centres the world around the individual, he claims that his Daisen stands humble in relation to the world (which makes beings possible).

According to Heidegger it is incorrect to centre philosophy around one particular being and that this has caused the crisis of the modern world. Technology as a particular way of seeing the world and the entire world as 'stuff' for consumption. Heidergger's notion of 'Bestand' translates as 'stock' or 'standing reserve'. The abuses we commit against Nature arouse from this technological attitude and they derive from our self-centred world-view, the world exists to be used. Many of the world atrocities can be traced back to this supposedly harmless philosophy that we are individuals providing reference for the world.

Only by realising that humanity is one being among many and merely part of an all-encompassing Being ca we begin to live in harmony with the rest of the world. But technology keeps us from recognising Being. when we see the world with the lens of technology, we preclude the possibility of recognising the splendor of the world, of Being. How do we attaing such relationship with the world? How do we attain an attitude that is not technological? By recognising ourselves as Daisen and not the 'thinking thing'. We are all in a position to realise that certain social practices contrubute or not to that relationship. Language is a central preoccupation of Heidegger, specially Geeek. He criticiese the impoverishment of language when it should be the 'House of the Being', the living memory of our existence.

(my note: Heidegger's discourse seems very fruitful for an 'ecological' interpretation the world, and it can be used as argument to put restrains in the development of poor countries. The conservation of the Daisen can be used as an instrument of power, a reason to force developing countries to produce, for example, clean and expensive energy.)

A Haunt of Fears (Barker, 1992)

Martin Barker. A Haunt of Fears, The Strange Story of The British Horror Comics Campain. Jackson and London: University of Mississipi Press, 1992.

This book is about the campain between 1949 and 1955 which led to the passing of the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publication) Act of 1955. Two people had very important roles in the elaboration of the Act, George Pumphey (British school headmaster) and Frederic Wertham (American critic).

(1) Comics grab children. They have enticing pictures, colours, covers and titles.
(2) children are seduced into reading them without the proper intelectual defence to their 'messages' they identify with characters.
(3) It function as a direct message into the children's world, not just as an imaginary alternative.
(4) the comics invade all the parts of chidren's lives: police are stupid, women sex-objects, power is joy, natives sub-moronic, crime attractive, pain fun.

This conception pressuposes children approach comic books looking for adequate role-models for their behaviour, in order words, seeking figures to emulate. The main characters whose 'heroism' is a model for the reader always bypasse the law. The problem of typicality is central to breakdown this reading. There cannot be a single way in which children 'identify' with different comic strips - then we will become entitled to ask what different relations of reading the different categories of comics offer (crime, sci-fi, superhero, war, horror, space).

To challenge this view on 'effects' is necessarily to challenge the 'perceptions' of the content. Horror comic books contain motifs, formulaic most of the time. The formula can be used well or badly. The motifs can be mixed freely but the more they suceed in involving the readers, (and they agree to be involved), the less we are certain where we stand in relation to the strip.

1) Appearance v Reality
2) Human relatively stories
3) Object come to life stories
4) Parody stories
5) Subversion of stereotypes stories

This pressuposes that we can say how a child could identify with a character in a horror comic book. This fact is impossible unless we revise the notion of identification. Typically the horror comic puts us firmily in a situation. The concept of identification proves inadequate for understanding the process into whic comic strips invites us in. Horror comics are not an exercise in degradation but in doubt. They work on suggestibilities about the supernatural and the like. Of, course there are tremendous variations in what they leave us in doubt about. Not all of them achieve the effect operating only at the level of surprise at the workings of the narrative itself.

Foucault for Beginners (Lydia A. Fillingham, 1993)

Lydia A. Fillingham. Foucault for Beginners. London and New York: Writers and Readers,1993.


Intro
Madness and Civilization
The Birth of the Clinic
The Order of Things
Discipline and Punish
The History of Sexuality

Subsequent to Sartre, contemporary of Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Barthes. Interested in Power and Knowledge and how they work together. The construction of Truth in human sciences are deciding matters that define humanity.On a more specialised level, all the human sciences (psycology, sociology, economics, linguistics, even medicine) define human beings at the same time as they describe them, and work together with such institutions as mental hospitals, prisions factories, schools, and law courts to have secific and serious effects on people.

Foucault studies the categorisation of people into normality and abnormality: Madness, Criminality, Peverted Sexuality, Illness. And he challenges these historical assumptions. Behaviours that got people locked up in hospital at one time was glorified in another. 18th century social sciences tried to regulate behavious by defining normal and abnormal conduct. In earlier times madmen were an accepted part of the community, sick people were treatred at home, disabled or disfigured people were not expected to stay out of sight and criminals were punished as publicly as possible.

Normality is defined in contrast with abnormality. The study of abnormality is one of the main ways power relations are established in society. Institutional power is like a mental police deciding what should and what shouldn't be allowed in society.

Fascination with Madness, Erasmus (Moriae Encomium, 1509) and King Lear (1605) both focus on the dangerous insights a madman may have. Including unemployed people, who you might think were victims of an economic problem, were going to jail in the 17th century as creators of a moral problem.

After the French Revolution, Madness was started to be seen as your own fault, your responsibility, and because other people were watching you, you learned to watch yourself. What good can someonetrained in medicine do to those who are no physically ill? Dissecation of the body comes into play. Death and disease change from purely negative ideas to crucial elements in the process of life.

In The Order of Things (Les Mots et les Choses) Foulcault starts by quoting a passage from JL Borges " a certain Chinese encyclopaedia divides the animals into ..." . The impossible collection of kinds of animals is so funny that it violates the sense of order. By means of the fable the exotic charm of another system of thought points to the limitation of ours. Foucault claimed man was a recent invention and that he might die.

In Discipline and Punish he moves away from Archaeology of Knowledge's structuralism. His interest in prision becomes an inquiry into the origins of prision as a form of punishment. In general his focus will now be the power relations, and how the seeming abstractions of discourse have very concrete material effects on people's bodies. Discipline, spatialisation, Minute control activity, Repetitive Exercises, Detailed Hierarchies, Normalising Judgements. The PANOPTICON (Jeremy Bentham) - the idea is that every person is isolated in a smal room, where they all may be observed at all times by a single person in the centre tower.

Foucault's abstract idea of power is objected by many scholars, particularly some historians. They insist we have to look for a localised 'agency' of power, who is exercising the power? where is the system of power? why are they doing it? However, historian seem to boil down to individual people doing things.

Foucault is not interested in indvidual power ot indvidual will. He would say that our society became an nomalising society, and individual rights becomes the alibi of power. For him there is no resistence outside the system, individual efforts to complain are seem as 'uncooperative behaviour' rather than political resistance.

Critics of Foucault mantain that his analysis of power is simply a dead end that disallows any possibility of political action. But Foucault insisted that political resistance was just not possible, but a necessary part of the equation. "You see, if there was no resistance, there would be no power relations, because it would be simply a matter of obedience. So resistance comes first and resistance remains superior to the forces of the process, power relations are obliged to change with resistance."

Reinventing Film Studies (Gledhill & Williams, 2000)

Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (eds.). Reinventing Film Studies. London: Arnold, 2000.

Reinventing Film Studies engages with questions that are central to film studies, containing a diverse collection of essays which range from Noel Carroll's cognitivist approach to film evaluation to Linda Williams' Foucauldian analysis of Psycho's reception. This anthology does not seek to provide a survey of the field. Rather, it strives to rethink the field in light of recent technological, cultural, and social developments. Many of the essays re-examine the analytical frameworks which dominated film studies in the seventies, such as semiotics, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, seeking to cull knowledge which would be 'really useful' for the present and the future (1). The editors identify 'five key issues' which are crucial for contemporary film studies: the interdisciplinary location of film studies as a means of engaging with the 'massness' of cinema; film understood as a sensory as well as meaning producing medium; the conception of cinema as constituting an 'alternative public'; history and the postmodern; and, finally, the impending dissolution of cinema within globalised multimedia and of Western film studies in their transnational theorisation'. It is through an engagement with these issues that the anthology seeks to reinvent film studies.

In the Introduction the editors carefully unpack these issues, pointing to the ways in which the essays deal with them. As media converge it is possible to view a film on multiple screens such as theatre, television, and computer. Given these conditions, we can no longer simply analyse film with reference to cinema as an institution. Film studies needs to turn to other discipline such as media studies, cultural studies, and visual culture in order to offer more nuanced analyses. For the editors such analyses address questions related to film production and film reception, issues which were neglected by earlier film theorists. According to the editors, it is by grappling with the 'masses' and with the 'massness of modernity' that new readings can emerge, ones in which the analyst is 'situated within, rather than, outside, the mass' (1-2). Furthermore, by attending to the 'sensory experience of the cinematic mass medium' (2), scholars of film studies can understand the ways in which cinema both produced and structured audiences' pleasures.

Whereas seventies' film theory tended to classify the text as either progressive or reactionary, the essays in this collection seek to locate film in a wider social field. In doing so, they enable more complex readings. Some of the essays interrogate a linear model of the history of film, presenting a more fluid conception of film history. As new technologies compel film scholars to rethink the notion of the cinema in the present, film historians revisit the beginnings of cinema, offering new ways of writing and understanding the history of cinema. In rethinking the history of cinema, some of the essays attend to way in which cinema developed in China, India, Mexico, and Brazil. They address the ways in which Hollywood, the West, and the indigenous cultural as well as political circumstances informed the production of cinemas in these different national contexts. The Introduction offers a lucid account of these *reinventions*. It is followed by five sections; a thoughtful introduction by the editors accompanies each section. The editors not only summarize the pieces in each section, but place them in productive dialogue with one another.

The articles in the first section, 'Really Useful Theory', deal with film studies' relationship to theory. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith's piece, 'How Films Mean, or, From Aesthetics to Semiotics and Half-Way Back Again', carefully traces how the study of meaning became central to film analysis. He suggests that through the study of film meaning theorists sought to make visible the politics of representation. He provocatively argues that this political project has become redundant, and that film studies cannot simply focus on the question of meaning. Instead, film studies needs to expand its horizons by attending to questions of aesthetics. Steve Cohan's case study on 'Singin' in the Rain' also focuses on film meaning. Cohan's insightful analysis demonstrates how this canonical film generates different meanings depending upon the theoretical apparatus that one brings to bear upon it. This piece draws our attention to how a particular theoretical framework may highlight certain aspects of a film and leave others less illuminated. I think this piece would be extremely useful for teaching students about the process and limits of interpretation.

The second section of the anthology contains a diverse and engaging set of articles which address issues pertaining to cinema's status as a mass medium. Jane Gaines, in the opening essay, challenges the notion that Hollywood products are simply reactionary. Instead, she invites us to consider the ways in which the narratives of Hollywood offer hope to audiences. She suggests that by putting ''hope' back into the model of analysis, back into critical theory' (112), we can create theories *for* audiences and, perhaps, imagine a different future. Like Gaines, Ravi Vasudevan also culls hopeful possibilities from the narratives of popular cinema. Through close readings of Bombay films from the 1940s and 1950s, Vasudevan demonstrates that 'the pre-modern or the traditional' is not a regressive category, but one which can be 'a source of creativity, where traditions are reinvented in accord with the dynamics of social and political formation' (152-153). Vasudevan's and Gaines's articles demonstrate the importance of a critical and serious engagement with popular cinema. It is such engagement that creates possibilities for a progressive politics.

The third section of the anthology focuses on questions of aesthetics. Christine Gledhill seeks to reconceptualize genre. Through her analysis of melodrama, she shows that genres are neither ahistorical nor fixed. Rather, they are often fluid, often leaking into one another. Therefore, in conducting film analysis, scholars need to employ a more flexible notion of genre. Gledhill's article compels us to think about the ways in which genres are produced, how boundaries between genres are drawn, and what the stakes are in maintaining such boundaries. Focusing on a particular genre, namely the trial movie, Carol J. Clover demonstrates how, through cinematography, such films establish an equivalence between the film audience and the jury. Moreover, Clover points out that in popular culture the jury remains 'serenely untouchable' (257). For Clover, this ostensible lack of challenge and opposition to the jury suggests that in the American (imagi)nation, the citizen can and does secure justice. Clover's analysis is useful for understanding how Hollywood assists in generating and maintaining the democratic ideals of the US.

The last section of the anthology deals with questions regarding cinema's role in the age of global multimedia. Rey Chow shows us that Chinese cinema cannot simply be read in opposition to Hollywood. Rather, one needs to pay attention to how this cinema represents and contains differences brought about by the waning hold of communist rhetoric. While Chow's article underscores the importance of situating 'Third World Cinema' in a wider social and political field, Anne Friedberg urges us to reassess the status of film as a medium in light of new and rising technologies. She provides a useful historical account of cinema's relationship to new technologies. She argues that these technologies have not only altered our visual field, but also the disciplinary terrain of film studies. Friedberg's analysis compels us to consider television, videocassettes, DVDs, and computer screens in our analyses of films.

A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959 (Schaefer, 1999)

Eric Schaefer. "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!" A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1999 (474 pp).

Film Performance: from Achievement to Appreciation (Klevan, 2005)

Andrew Klevan. Film Performance: from Achievement to Appreciation. London and New York: Wallflower, 2005.

There is a field of commentary that examines performers as 'stars' and addresses their significance from a range of contexts and cultures -fandom, economics, technology, studio strategy and publicity. Another field, not quite as mined, places the emphasis on 'acting', exploring, for example, the influence of Melodramatic, Vaudeville

(or Music Hall), Continental Cabaret, Stanilavsky or Method techniques. Both these fields draw on external evidence to assess a performer's effect, but they tend not to pursue the complexity of a performers internal relationship with a film. This book places the emphasis differently, treating performance as an internal element of style in synthesis with other aspects of film style and explores the achievement of expressive rapport.

1. Position and perspective (the relationship of the performer to the camera, and their position within the shot).

2. Place (the relationship of the performer to location, decor, furniture and objects)

3. The plot (the relationship of the performer to narrative developments)

It demonstrates how films instruct us in ways of interpretation and ways of viewing. Because the films wish us to take responsibility for coming to moments and meanings in particular ways, they may hide their best view of themselves: the apparent simplicity or 'ordinariness' of Hollywood films that obscures their significance; films develop visual or aural patterns that open up alternative lines of viewing, but these alternatives are deliberately less salient than, for example, the straightforward dynamics of the plot; mundane elements of films (aspects of everyday) may remain undramatic and yet, because of their arrangement within a film, unexpectedly reveal a wealth of significance. Fresh aspects of even familiar films emerge when we attend to gestures, postures, expressions and voice - and how they are situated.

Interpreting performance - Astaire preferred wide-shots, rarely allowing the camera to separate the various parts of his body from each other.

Integration of performance and space - photographs are of the world, in which human beings are not ontologically favoured over the rest of the nature, in which objects are not props but allies(or enemies) of the human character. Camera sequence in Chaplin's City Lights explores 'construction of visibility' and his ontological equality with flowers, street corners and window. panes.

This book concentrates on individual scenes or sequences from films so that it may be responsive to their unfolding. Attending the moment-by-moment movement of the performers also enhances our understanding of film characterisation. It encourages us to attend to a character's physical and aural detail and reminds us, because we are prone to forget in our literary moods, of their ontological particularity in the medium of film. A living human being embodies a film character.

Attending to sequences is preferred to ranging across a performer's career, or simply extracting instances of performance from across a whole film. such extractions miss the presentness of the performance. Naremore points the way in this kind of study but according to Klevan he fails to exemplify the complexity of relationship between performer and object in the cinema.

"The shot is held somewhat longer than it is expected", Klevan suggests that "a viewer's engagement with a performer depends on him or her communicating aspects of their character's conciousness"(p.9), "appreciating the performer's capacities for revealing and withholding aspects of the character's sensibility", "the eloquence of the moment is achieved by the performer's bearing in conjunction with the position of the camera" (p.10).

Placement and relationship with the room and furniture around the performer. Performance may enhance the density of our interpretations because we are responsive to physicality and texture, "our intensity is no longer satisfied by thin interpretations based on general themes or summaries of narrative strands." (p.11). The moment exemplifies the performer's ability to keep alive the various options which have emerged from the world that the film has established.

Close-up: cut away from the surrounding environment it signifies the personal dimension. It tells us how a performer feels by defining the private thought against the public display. The cut into close-up carries a sense of special truth isolated by the camera's knowing eye. It clarifies by a sudden reduction of our space for though and wonder. The film's scenes are often constructed so that the viewer has a more privileged view than the other characters.

When the film asks too much of the apparatus and almost nothing of the performer we have a good example of aspects out of balance. The effort to maintain the various elements in productive tension and neither to push them into symmetrical alignment. Description is seen as something far from self-evident, or simple, but central to critical practice... description is a matter of how to bring into existence, how, in the course of analysis, to evoke for a reader that lost object.

Editing: the film then switches between closer shots and views over the shoulder. This technique of editing cuts them apart while they stand together and emphasises the separateness of their views of each other. A conventional technique of editing, over-the-shoulder shots, becomes very distinct, precisely conjoined to a particular moment (rather than being an inevitable continuation, or a requirement, say, of clear syntax.)

He plays his character with casual panache. We would not expect their movements to have specialist expertise, or virtuosity, but they achieve and enviable quality of simple improvisation, genial and convivial.

Voice without a body: dislocated from the performer in space and by tone, the voice seems celestial.

Many Hollywood films - especially heavily generic ones, such as westerns, thrillers or horror movies- base their drama on heavily-plotted scenarios and some may appear over-determined and contrived (Secret Beyond the Door, Fritz Lang, 1948). Beyond a standard needed for generic plot conventions, it looks to have an attachment to cliché that is without irony (and an earnestness that brings it close to comedy).

This study presents a method for sustaining attention to a performance, and has appreciated the achievement concentrating on a sequence or a succession of sequences from a film directing our attention to the moment-by-moment development of the performances. It enables an exploration of the tight-knit relationship of the performances to the surroundings aspects of film style. Continuous attention to sequences also brings out the realtionship between appreciating a performance and understanding a film's meaning as it develops - the unfolding of an interpretation- undermining our inclination to condense and compress meaning of films, often to the point of banality.

Horror, the Aurum Film Encyclopaedia (Phil Hardy, 1985)

Phil Hardy. Horror (Aurum Film Encyclopaedia). London: Aurum Press Ltd. 1985 (496 pp)













-------------------------------1966

Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadaver aka Tonight I Will Paint in Flesh Colour aka Tonight I Will Make Your Corpse Turn Red.

(IBERIA FILMES; BRAZIL) b/w and col 105 min

Based in São Paulo, Marins embarked on a controversial career as a director with the, as yet, unreleased Sentença de Deus in the early sixties. He organized his own studio in an abandoned synagogue and achieved notoriety with nightmarishly sadistic, brutally pathological horror movies featuring amateur performers often recruited from the city's sub-proletariat. at the heart of these fantasies stands Zé do Caizao [sic] (literally, Joseph the Grave), a megalomaniac master of ceremonies played by Marins himself. The character was established in the cheap, nasty and successful A Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma (1965) and in this picture, its follow-up.

The story simply provides an excuse to indulge in an endless orgy of gore and torture, which produces the occasional surreal scene but more often leaves an impression of a very sick man's home movies. In search of an ideal woman worthy of bearing his child, the mad Zé abducts a series of women and subjects them to hideous forms of suffering. Most of his victims fail to impress him and are killed, while the one who manages to survive the torture and the horrors dies in childbirth. Sinking into a psychotic delirium, he them goes totally berserk in a frenzy of barbarous carnage.

The film is barely watchable as its 'amateur' actors are subjected to attacks of live poisonous spiders, are thrown into real snakepits, have their heads crushed in a press, and so on. Nonetheless, the shoestring production exudes a genuine sense of madness both in his imaginings and in the treatment of its participants, with the eccentric, seemingly out-of-control staging veering from the pathological to the surreal. The climactic scenes offer bloodcurdling visions of hell: a cave filled with crucified, near-naked men and women, some upsidedown (sic), others arranged in irregularly angled diagonals, with the crudely fashioned white (plaster) walls and pillars while Zé attacks them with heinous savagery. Marins' next released picture (some were banned by the censors) extended the series with O Estranho Mundo de Zé do Caixao (sic) (1968) and his Delirios de um Amoral (sic) (1978) included scenes from these and earlier Zé do Caixao (sic) pictures.

d/p/co-s José Mojica Marins co-s Aldenora Sá Pôrto c Giorgio Attili lp José Mojica Marins, Tina Wohlers, Nadia Freitas, Tania Mendonça, Mina Monte, Esmeralda Ruchel, Roque Rodrigues, Lya Lagutte, Carmen Marins, Antonio Fracari. (página 179)


-------------------------------1968

O Estranho Mundo de Zé do Caixao aka The Strange World of Zé do Caixao (sic)

(IBERIA FILMES; BRAZIL) b/w 80min

After the disturbing Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadaver (1966) and his contribution to the omnibus movie Trilogia de Terror (sic) (1968), Marins here again features his megalomaniac alter ego, Zé do Caixao (sic). This time the brutally sadistic Zé merges with the image of the director as he presides over the framing of three different stories. One tells of a doll-maker (Cacador) (sic) who uses real human eyes. The second episode features a hunchbacked sex maniac (Michael) obsessed by a girl (Bruzzi) who ignores him but dies on her wedding day, giving the monstrous creature the opportunity to dig up her body (?) and consummate his passion. The last story reverts to Marins' usual terrain as he hideously tortures a couple (de Souza and Reis) to prove the triumph of instinct over reason. The production is amateurish, the narrative sloppy and disjointed and the acting unmentionable as the film wallows in rape, necrophilia and visceral savagery, predictably accompanied by the 'hero' (Marins) indulging in infantile posturing and routine blasphemy.

Marins also published a comic strip and his films have often been compared to horror comics, but such a reference overlooks the fact that comic-strip imagery requires a degree of stylization and attention to design. His films rarely betray any such concerns as cheapness and speed appear to win out over aesthetics and professionalism every time. Watching his work is distinctively disturbing, not simply because of the activities depicted, but because his films convey an overwhelming sense of looking at a genuine psychopath's private fantasies, pathetically proffered as a plea for help to which viewers are unable to respond. His next offering, the unreleased O Ritual dos Sadicos (1970), extended the quasi-documentary chronicling of mental illness and he regressed even further to a regime of infantile megalomania with Finis Hominis (1970) in which the director plays a mad but 'inspired' saviour of the world performing miracles, and its sequel with the same character, Quando os Deuses Adormecem (1971).

d/co-p/s José Mojica Marins co-p Jorge Michael Sakeis c Giorgio Attili lp José Mojica Marins, Luiz Sergio Person, Rosalvo Cacador (sic), Jorge Michael, Iris Bruzzi, Osvaldo de Souza, Nidi Reis. (páginas 195-196)



Trilogia do Terror aka Trilogy of Terror

(PRODUCTORA NACIONAL DE FILMES/ PRODUCOES CINEMATOGRAFICAS GALASY/FRANCOBRASILEIRA; BRAZIL)
scope 99min

Based, like the Brazilian Incrivel, Fantastico, Extraordinario (1969), on a radio series, this is an omnibus movie with three directors fashioning their own screenplays from stories supplied by Marins. The first, Pesadelo Macabro, tells of a man who fears being buried alive and resorts to macumba to cure himself. When one night he sees his girlfriend being raped, he suffers a cataleptic fit and is promptly buried alive. In O Acordo, a prostitute-mother makes a deal with the devil to force a marriage between her daughter and the village boss. In the last story, a boy finds a dead soldier in the bushes and eventually his father decides to confront those responsible for the killing: phantom guerillas. The picture ends with an ambiguous call to arms, implicitly acknowledging that the military regime in Brazil generated a veritable army of ghostly guerillas. Spanish-born Marins (?) made pornochanchadas (a peculiarly Brazilian form of sexploitation movie) under the pseudonym J. Avelar. Brazil's most prominent and prolific director of horror movies (O Estranho Mundo de Zé do Caixao, 1968; Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadaver, 1966), he also played something of a Roger Corman role in Brazil, supporting new directors.

Pesadelo Macabro: d/s José Mojica Marins c Giorgio Attili lp Vany Miller, Mario Lima, Ingrid Holt, Nelson Gasparini
O Acordo: d/s Ozualdo Candeias c Peter Overback lp Lucy Rangel, Regina Celia, Alex Ronay, Durvalino de Souza
Rocissao dos mortos (sic): d/s Luis Sergio Person c Osvaldo de Oliveira lp Lima duarte, Cacilda Lanuza, Waldir Guedes, Lenoir Bittencourt. (páginas 200-201)



Incrivel, Fantastico, Extraordinario aka Incredible, Fantastic, Extraordinary

(C. ADOLPHO CHADLER PRODUÇOES CINEMATOGRAFICAS; BRAZIL)
scope 90min

A spin-off from a popular Brazilian radio series, this pedestrian film contains four short stories. The first episode, A Ajuda, tells of a woman (Clara) who pleads with a motorist (Farney) to save her son after a bad car crash, in which she died. The next story, O Sonho, has a hooded schoolgirl predict the deaths of her classmates, but also foresee her own eminent death of a heart attack The third one, A Volta, tells of a widow (Rocha), who is haunted to death by a guilty knowledge of having killed her husband. The final episode, O Coveiro, shows a gravedigger (Sabag) who dies of fright as the corpse he is robbing appears to grab him. Da Costa is a minor director, producer, scenarist and actor who worked in Hollywood and in Europe. He also produced O Impossivel Acontece (1970) directing the episode based on a story by Richard Matheson (uncredited), Disappearing Act, which had been used for a Twilight Zone TV episode in 1959, entitled And When the Sky Was Opened.

d/p/co-s Adolpho Chadler (Cicero Adolpho Vitorio da Costa) co-s René Martin c Roberto Pace lp Cyll Farney, Sonia Clara, Glauce Rocha, Fabio Sabag, Wnada Oliver, Big Jones, Marcia Tania, Alzira Silva, Nira Clara. (páginas 206-207)

------------------------------- 1969

Um Sonho de Vampiros aka A Vampire's Dream

(SER-CINE; BRAZIL)
80 min

Cavalcanti's second feature tries to offer a carnivalesque equivalent of Roman Polanski's The Dance of the Vampires (1967). Dr Pan (Ankito), a nonentity, is visited by Death and given the choice between dying or becoming a vampire. Opting for a vampire's life which allows him to indulge all his dreams of power he proceeds to vampirize all the city's notables including the vicar, a soldier, a factory owner, and so on, and orgiastic pandemonium takes hold of the town. A young couple (Chermoni and Costa) provide the focus for audience identification as they try to escape the vampiric advances made to them. Played as a grotesque comedy, the picture loses whatever satiric thrust it may have had and disintegrates into a succession of exuberantly played, usually sexist and rarely funny gags. Direction and cinematography are equally inhibited, as is Carlos Prieto's makeup of the undead.

d/p/s Ibere Cavalcati c Renato Neumann lp Ankito, Irma alvarez, Janet Chemoni, Soneli Costa, Augusto Mala Filho, Robson Bob, Janira Santiago, Zuza Curi, Tuna Espinheira, Jorge Dias, Simon Khouri. (páginas 211-212)

--------------------------------1971

O Homem Lobo aka The Werewolf

(PINHEIRO FILMES; BRAZIL)
91 min

In this cheap film, Rossi blames paternal neglect of lycanthropy among the younger generation. The father in question, a professor (Braga), is provided with excuses: he has a terribly possessive wife (Cerine) and his son, Roberto (played by the director), was adopted -his mother died in childbirth- and sent to a boarding school where, with the onset of adolescence, the boy began to grow into a werewolf. Roberto indulges his cravings in such a way that suspicion always falls on his father, who accepts the blame until he is forced to face up to his responsibilities and sets out to discipline his son, armed with a gun and a silver bullet. This call for fathers to reassert their authority over wives and sons sells its macho message with long sequences showing scantily dressed women in the woods being attacked by the director-werewolf. A more interesting Brazilian werewolf picture was made by Elyseu Visconti Cavalleiro (sic), O Lobisomen (1974). São Paulo based Rossi returned to the them of paternal authority four years later with Seduzidas pelo Demonio (1975)

d/s Raffaele Rossi p José Pinheiro de Carvalho c Antonio Bonacin Thome lp Raffaele Rossi, Claudia Cerine, Lino Braga, Juliana Pitelli, Tony Cardi, Osmano Cardoso. (página 235)



O Macabro Dr Scivano

(NATUS PRODUÇOES CINEMATOGRAFICAS; BRAZIL)
b/w 72 min

Promoted as the first Brazilian science fiction film, this is in fact far closer to a horror cheapie. The plot tells of Dr Scivano (Calhado), a failed politician, who returns to his village where he becomes an object of ridicule. Dabbling in Macumba, he receives a piece of gold each night from a ghostly figure and thus becomes rich. One night he turns into a vampire and starts preying upon the local women until he is killed and reduced to ashes in front of a crucifix (echoing Terence Fisher's famous ending of Dracula (1958), which was also repeated in the Japanese Chi o Suu Me (1971) and numerous other pictures). Taking its cue from Psycho (1960), the film ends with a psychologist discussing the case of Dr Scivano and diagnosing him as paranoid. which, according to the experts in the film, is confirmed when they discover a shop-window mannequin in his bed. For publicity purposes, the co-director and star of the film adopted the name Scivano in the cast list, imitating José Mojica Marins gimmick of appearing in public as Zé do Caixao, the central character of many of his most unpalatable films.

co-d/co-p/co-s/co-c Raúl Calhado co-d Roasalvo Cacador (sic) co-p Faustino Correia Campos, Laercio Silva co-c Wanderley Silva se Josef Reindl lp Edmundo Scivano (Raúl Calhado), Luis Lema, Oswaldo Souza, Henricao (Henrique Filipe), Lauro Sawaya, Genesio Aladim, Ester Brasil, Cleber Holanda. (página 236)


Quando os Deuses Adormecem
(NELSON TEIXEIRA MENDES PRODUCTORA E DISTRIBUIDORA DE FILMS (sic); BRAZIL) 82 min

Marins' second exercise in mock-religious infantile megalomania stars himself as the admittedely insane but powerful, miracle performing messiah first featured in Finis Hominis (1971). The gods go to sleep and evil - manifested in the form of a sex epidemic and primetively occult practices in the cities~poor quarters - rules the world. Finis Hominis is sent to prevent human sacrifices and restore moral law and order, which he does before returning whence he came, an insane asylum. After gruesome torture and mutilation pictures in which he starred as Zé do Caixao, Marins two Finnis Hominis movies present blatant reparation fantasies with himself as the saviour of the world, revealing (and in a way pathetically designating) where he speaks from: the site of madness. In his next film, O Exorcismo Negro (1974), Marins dramatized the complementary of Zé and Finis by playing a double role: himself, using his real name, and his alter ego, Zé. (página 240)

d/co-s José Mojica Marins p Nelson Teixeira Mendes co-s Rubens Francisco Luchetti c Edward Freund lp JM Marins, Andrea Eryan, Amires Paranhos, Sabrina Marquezinha, Walter Portela, Rosalvo Cacador (sic), Nivaldo Lima, Alzinete Santana

------------------------------1972

Guru das Siete Cidades (sic)

(GURU PRODUÇOES CINEMATOGRAFICAS; BRAZIL)
85 min

The misogynist black-magic story proposes the hardly novel 'moral' that those who do evil will be destroyed by it. The wife (Medeiros) of a millionaire becomes involved with a group of hippies led by a Manson-type guru (Terceiro) who indulge in black-magic session and wander about in picturesque monk's garb with hoods. Since their rituals require human sacrifices, she proposes her husband as a victim. When he has been murdered, the group chose her as the next sacrificial victim. Peddling its moral lesson as a hypocritical cover for luridly sensational sexploitation movies, the picture proposes the usual gutter-press chichés of menacing dissolute 'youth'. Treacherously gold-digging women and other 'silent majority' stereotypes in order to make a quick profit out of the Tate murders. The cinematography by Silva is, as usual, excellent.

d/s Carlos Bini p José Pinheiro de Carvalho c Helio Silva lp Rejane Medeiros, Angelito Mello, Paulo Ramos, Otavio Bustamante, Antonio Severo Neta (sic). (página 255)

-------------------------------1974

Enigma para Demonios

(C.H. CHRISTENSEN PRODUÇOES; BRAZIL)
99 min

In this psycho-thriller in the style of Hammer's Taste of Fear (1960), Lafond is the heroine who, returning home after her child has died, learns of the death of her parents in mysterious circumstances. At her uncle's house, she encounters a friend of the family, the enigmatic Jurema (Barbosa). After a visit to the cemetery where she picks a rose, Lafond is persecuted by menacing phone calls which eventually drive her insane. The cause of the diabolic phenomena is revealed to be Barbosa, who is trying to get the family inheritance. The unimaginative script, which is derived from Carlos Drummond de Andrade's Flor, Telefone, Moça, is enhanced by excellent location photography in Belo Horizonte and Ouro Preto.

d/p/co-s Carlos Hugo Christensen co-s Origenes Lessa c Antonio Goncalves lp Monique Lafond, Luiz Fernado Ianelli, Barbosa, Licia Maggi, Rodolfo Arena, Mario Brasini, Daniel Carvalho, Jotta Barroso, Gerry Dias. (página 290)



O Exorcismo Negro

(CINEDISTRI; BRAZIL) b/w 100 min

The director's alter ego, Zé do Caixao, established as a psychopath in A Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma and Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadaver (both 1966) (sic), was changed to a mad messiah in 1971 with Finis Hominis and Quando os Deuses Adormecem (both 1971). With this black-magic picture, he dramatizes the conflict and the complementarity between these two figures by pitting himself, playing a film director called José Mojica Marins, against the evil Zé, his own fantastic creation (Marins again). The plot has the director go to a friend's house to write a script and his arrival trigger strange and violent happenings among his hosts. Lucia (Gomide), the wife of Alvaro (Stuart), makes a pact with a witch (Kosmo) while others behave as if possessed by the devil. In a torture chamber, a Black Mass is enacted to exorcize the evil influences. The ritual culminates in a savage duel between Marins and Zé. Although obviously seeking to cash in on the recent exorcism boom, Marins nevertheless continued to produce quasi-documentaries thinly disguised as fiction, chronicling the successive phases and crises of an insane person here explicitly designated as himself. The change from the sadistic psychopath (Zé) to Messiah (Finis Hominis) to split personality could be seen as evidence that this therapy-through-film-making was achieving positive results. Subsequent films would bear this out since Marins graduated to cheap, fairly unconventional horror movies no longer testifying to a relentless and uncontainable descent into psychosis such as A Estranha Hospedaria dos Prazeres (1976)

d/co-s José Mojica Marins p Antonio Massaini Neto co-s Adriano Stuart, Rubens Luchetti c Antonio Meliandre lp José Mojica Marins, Jofre Suares, Walter Stuart, Georgia Gomide, Adriano Stuart, Wanda Kosmo, Alcione Mazzeo. (página 291)

-------------------------------- 1975

Seduzidas pelo Demonio
(E.C. FILMES; BRAZIL) 108min

Like Rossi's previous horror movie, O Homem Lobo (1971), this picture warns against the moral corruption that befalls youngsters deprived of strong paternal authority. Roberto (Cesar) is rescued from devil worshippers as a boy and adopted by Mesquita and his wife. He appears normal until he causes the death of three youths at a party in his uncle's house. Judged to be possessed by the devil, he is incarnated in an asylum from which he escapes. Finding his distraught father is a church, he attacks him but the righteous old man assumes his responsibilities at last and rams a crucifix into his son's gut with the desired results: as the writhing boy dies the wound disappears and the child begins to look his decent pre-demonic self again. As usual in overt exploitation films preaching overtly authoritarian messages, much of the film is devoted to depicting the sinful ways of the wicked.

d/co-p/s Raffaele Rossi co-p Cassiano Esteves c Pedro Luiz Nobile lp Roberto Cesar, Cassiano Ricardo, Shirley Stech, José Mesquita, Alfonso Arrichielo, Ivete Bonfá, Lorenia Machado, Elen Salvador, Marcio Camargo. (página 308)

-------------------------------1976

A Estranha Hospedaria dos Prazeres aka The Strange Inn of Pleasures

(PRODUÇOES CINEMATOGRAFICAS ZÉ DO CAIXAO; BRAZIL)
81min

With this picture and the next one, Inferno Carnal (1976), Marins' films entered the horror mainstream, containing, for the time being, the chilling savage delirium of Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadaver (1966) and the other Zé do Caixao movies. Devised, produced and acted by Marins although directed by Motta, this film tries to combine the religious motif of sinners on their way to hell through purgatory with a more conventional iconography of death (the bowler-hatted skull) and a characteristically Brazilian carnivalesque exuberance. Indeed , the ritual of the carnival, when sacred time interrupts profane time to make way for the logic wishes and fantasy, provides the model for the scenario. During a stormy night, a collection of characters, all of whom are involved in some sort of transgression of the social order, gather in an inn presided over by an enigmatic man dressed black and wearing a bowler hat (Marins). The travellers are intended on indulging their desires, whether simply by making love as a couple or in an orgy, adultery or male prostitution, suicide or murder. In the morning, the nature of the place they have come to dawns upon them as the proprietor is revealed to be Death. Marins later returned to his earlier fantasies with Delirios de um Amoral(sic) (1978), a feature cobbling together buts from his previous films that had been censored, and O Estupro (1978), in which the savagery is even more directly sexual than in his earlier work. Having directed more than 30 features as well as about 130 films for TV, Marins can be regarded the most prolific Brazilian film-maker to date.

d Marcelo Motta p José Mojica Marins s Rubens Luchelli(sic) c Giorgio Atilli lp José Mojica Marins, Caçador Guerreiro, Maribeth Baumgartem, David Hyngaro, Vicenzo Colelia, Tomé Francisco, José Peres Ortega, José Nivaldo, Luiza Zaracausca. (página 312)

-------------------------------1977

A Virgem da Colina aka The Ring of Evil
(DRAGÃO FILMES; BRAZIL)
85 min

This weird variation on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray features a woman (Amaral) who receives an antique ring from her husband (Soares) on her wedding day. The ring causes her to develop a dual personality and while remaining the perfect lady in the evening, she becomes a prostitute by the day. Gradually, her inhibited side, manifested when her husband is at work, begins to leave an imprint of her face, forcing her to wear a mask to cover her luridly monstrous features. Soares eventually calls in an exorcist who reveals that the ring belonged to a prostitute witch. The evil thing in thrown into the water and peaceful domesticity is restored. The horror thus presented, in the form of physical corruption reflecting moral turpitude, is the woman's indulgence in all the desires which a marriage ring is supposed to stifle.

d/p/s Celso Falcão c Afonso Vianna lp Jofre Soares, Christina Amaral, Edson Seretti, Marcos Lyra, Joel Barcellos, Wagner Tadeu, Widemilson Arthur. (página 326)

------------------------------ 1978

Delirios de um Amoral (sic)

(PRODUÇOES CINEMATOGRAFICAS ZE DO CAIXAO; BRAZIL)
86 min

A rather repetition of a gimmick Marins used in O Exorcismo Negro (1974) in which he starred both as himself and as his creation, Zé do Caixao. Here, a psychiatrist, Dr Hamilton (Peres), becomes obsesses with the figure of Zé and as he studies the character his mind is taken over by Zé, plunging Peres into a delirium in which he hallucinates that Zé is about to take his wife, Tania (Miller). Peres's fellow doctors prove helpless and Miller is forced to call on Zé's creator, José Mojica Marins. Marins, fascinated by the effects of his creation on people's minds, resorts to hypnosis to cure Peres, whose psyche now becomes the terrain of a duel between Zé, the malignant creature trying to possess him and Marins, the creature's inventor. after an exhausting struggle, Marins manages to persuade Peres that Zé doesn't really exist.
The movie presents the fairly transparent fantasy that Marins doesn't need psychiatric help since he can still re-assert control, however great the difficulties, over his psychopathic 'other', Zé do Caixao, the central figure of his sickest and most successful movies as well as of a popular comic strip he devised. By having the doctor hallucinate Zé's exploits, Marins also manages to reduce the picture cost by inserting numerous scenes of his previous Zé do Caixao films, including A Meia Noite Levarei a Sua Alma (1965), Esta Noite encarnarei no Teu Cadaver (1966) and O Estranho Mundo de Ze do Caixao (1968). Marins went on to direct Perversão (1978) in which he mutilates a woman and is castrated by her very vengeful sister, as well as moral fable of sorts, Mundo Mercade do Sexo (sic) (1978), about a journalist who, having found his wife with his boss, kills the before committing suicide and thus, at last, provides a headline story. Subsequently, he returned to his Zé do Caixao world with Encarnacao de Demonio (sic) (1981).

d/p/co-s José Mojica Marins co-s Rubens F. Luchetti c Giorgio Attili lp José Mojica Marins, Magna Miller, Jorge Peres, Lirio Bertelli, Anadir Goe, Valter Setembro, João da Cruz, elza Pereira, Jaime Cortez, Andeia Bryan. (página 327)



A Deusa de Marmore - Escrava do Diabo
(PANORAMA DO BRASIL; BRASIL) 82 min

This mixture of horror e pornochachada - the Brazilian variety of sexploitation cinema - stars its director opposite Marins, the leading Brazilian horror practitioner. Maldonado plays a 2000 year-old woman, Deusa de Marmore, who has a pact with the devil and preserves her youthful appearance by extracting a life-essence from people by means of a fatal kiss during sexual intercourse. A demon, Seu Sete Encruzilhada (sic) (Marins), acting for the devil, requires her to supply ever greater number of victims while he also maintains Deusa's lover (Ramayan) in a state of suspended animation (thereby providing an opportunity for necrophilia scenes as she briefly visits her man after lethal lovemaking bouts). In the end, while Maldonado is seducing Henrique (Paulo), his religious wife (Nunes) intervenes branding a cross, and Deusa reverts to her real age - in a scene reminiscent of Terence Fisher's Dracula (1958) - and dies.

Besides directing, scripting, producing and starring, Maldonado also took care of costume and makeup, making her female counterpart of José Mojica Marins, the one-man production house in São Paulo. The interesting credits were designed by Akira Murayama, who also makes a brief appearance in the movie, as do other members of the production team, including the composer Isnard Simone.

d/p/s Rosangela Maldonado c Giorgio Attili lp Rosangela Maldonado, José Mojica Marins, João Paulo, Luandy Maldonado, Anadir Goe, Anita Nunes, Inaldo Ramayan, David Hungaro, Rubens de Souza, Adeluni Bonfim. (página 328)



As Filhas do Fogo aka Daughters of Fire

(LYNXFILM/EDITORA TRES; BRAZIL) 98 min

This is an interesting elaboration of the often used fantasy situation in which vegetation overwhelms a house, thereby returning it to 'nature' . The plot, set in Rio Grande do Sul, concerns two young women who come under the spell of a female necromancer and begin to experience strange events. Mysterious deaths occur and the women hear voices of dead people. One of the women is found dead and the other kill their tormentor, but she finds herself imprisioned in the house which has been totally enveloped in forest foliage. In the morning, the house and the remnants of the haunting life and death spectacle which occurred there, have all been incorporated by the green Brazilian forest, as if Brazil itself had re-asserted its enduring construction of its history (the necromancer's relation to the voices of the dead). The São Paulo based Khouri, a former critic, became one of the best-know figures in the early sixties with such films as Estranho Encontro (1958) and O Corpo Ardente (1966).

d/s Walter Hugo Khouri p Cesar Memolo Jnr (sic) c Geraldo Gabriel se Geraldo Jose lp Paolo Morra, Maria Rosa, Selma Egrei, Maria Huseman, Helmut Hosse, Karin Hass, Rudolph Machalowsky. (página 328)



Ninfas Diabolicas
(PRESENCA; BRAZIL) 85 min

While Rosangela Maldonado's A Deusa de Marmore - Escrava do Diabo (1978) presented a mixture of horror and pornochanchada, this picture combines the indigenously Brazilian sexploitation conventions with a ghost story. A man on a business trip (Hingst) offers a lift to two young women, apparently students (Mueller and Scalvi), and makes love to one of them. He turns to the other who appears to kill her friend before dragging the bewildered Hingst on to the ground with her in a wild embrace. As they drive back, the murdered woman appears on the back seat of the car and causes Hingst to crash. The two women, totally unscathed, are then seen walking away from the wreck and hitching a lift by the side of the road. The story has two morals: happily married man should stay away from loose women and female hitchhikers are sex-crazed predators, which makes it a fairly conventional story. Much of the film is devoted to the carnal encounters with the seductresses. The director, an immigrant from Shanghai, had co-directed a sexploitation film before, O Puritano da Rua Augusta (1966). This was his first solo effort.

d/p/co-s John Doo (Chien Lun Tu) co-s Ody Fraga c Ozualdo Candeias lp Seergio Hingst, Aldine Mueller, Patricia Scalvi, Dorothy Leiner, Misali Tanaka, Joseph Kang Doo, Andre Piacentini, Georgia Carolina. (página 331)

------------------------------ 1982

O Secredo da Mumia (sic) aka Lago Maldito
(MAPA FILMES/ SUPER 8 PRODUÇOES; BRAZIL) 85 min

Not to be confused with Il Secreto de la Momia (1972), this Brazilian picture offers an entertaining although amateurish parody of the traditional mummy, as well as Dr Moreau, motifs. Cardozo (sic) also takes the opportunity to insert spoofs of other genres: the music of Curtiz's The Egyptian (1954) counterpoints the flashbacks to antiquity; a cellar full of captive creatures echoes mad-scientist movies; the ending, as the anything but frightening mummy (Stambovsky) enters a swamp, recalls Terence Fisher's The Mummy (1959), The Robe (1953) and many other films. The best gag of the picture comes when a piece of gauze covers the camera's lens to signify a subjective shot from the mummy's point-of-view. Cardozo (sic) learnt his trade under the wing of Marins, about whom he made a documentary in 1978 and who makes a guest appearance in the picture.

d/p Ivan Cardozo (sic) s Rubem Luchetti c Renato Laclete se Sergio Farjala lp Wilson Grey, Anselm Vasconcellos, Ana Maria Miranda, Clarice Piovesan, Felipe Falcao, Tania Boscoli, José Mojica Marins, Daniel Stambovsky Regina Casé. (página 380)


As Sete Vampiros (sic) aka The Seven Vampires
(EMBRAFILMES/SUPEROITO PRODUCTIONS; BRAZIL) 100 min

This is a Brazilian fantasy-comedy-horror-detective-nudie-musical-nostalgia movie. A carnivorous plant is imported to Brazil in the fifties and gobbles the face of a dedicated botanist before infecting his wife with a mysterious malady. Soon after, Rio is terrorized by a masked killer who drains his victims of Blood, Meanwhile a Monroe-ish blonde poses in and out of dreamy fashion sequences that could stand as a working definition of gratuitous nudity, and bumbling hard-boiled dick ' Raimundo Marlou' is distracted from comic books by a need to bring in the murderer. In a cabaret, vampirettes flounce in lingerie and serve as a warm-up for the hilarious 'bob Rider and His Comets of Rhythm', an authentically pomaded Brazilian Rocker (Jaime) with four out-of-step backing vocalists. The horror is nostalgically reminiscent of continental mad-scientist shockers of the early sixties and the colours are pleasingly garish. The vampire turns out to be the white-faced femme fatale but the mad scientist, hideously deformed behind his cloak, who has been haunting night clubs in search of fresh blood for his experiments.

d/co-p Ivan Cardoso co-p Mauro Taubman, Claudio Klabin, Antonio Avilez, Flavio Holanda s R.F. Lucchetti c Carlos Egberto Silveira se Antonio Pacheco lp Alvamar Tadei, Andrea Beltrão, Ariel Coelho, Bené Nunes, Colé Carlo Mossi, Danielle Daumerri, Dedina Bernadelli, Felipe Falcão, Ivon Curi, John Herbert, Leo Jaime. (página 409-410)