Spring Film Focus
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Spring Film Focus Film Spring VOLUME 26 | NUMBER 2 | SPRING/SUMMER 2010 | $10.00 Deriving from the German weben—to weave—weber translates into the literal and figurative “weaver” of textiles and texts.Weber (the word is the same in singular and plural) are the artisans of textures and discourse, the artists of the beautiful fabricating the warp and weft of language into ever-changing pattterns. Weber, the journal, understands itself as a tapestry of verbal and visual texts, a weave made from the threads of words and images. Shaw on the Screen Few members of the turn-of-the-century literary intelligentsia were more interested in film than George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). As a playwright making a living with spoken words, and as a writer as voluble as the characters in his plays, it came naturally to him to have opinions about a new medium that would soon emancipate itself into a new art form, even as it took its first artistic prompts from the stage. Shaw was an original subscriber to the Film Society of 1925, a coterie of British and often left-leaning intellectuals that included Julian Huxley, John Maynard Keynes, and Roger Fry, among others. The group set itself the task of screening artistic films—frequently from the Soviet Union—which were not widely available in central Europe, with a view toward generating artistic and George Bernard Shaw political discussion. In 1928, one year before he would make his own first appearance in a sound film, after already having appeared in several silent short features, Shaw became outspoken on the subject of not-only-cinematic censorship. Against claims that films could undermine public morale or independent political thinking, he defended screenings of Sergei Eisenstein’s now-classic Battleship Potemkim (1925), about the 1905 mutiny of the crew of the battleship against their officers of the Czarist regime, and the British film Dawn (1928) by Herbert Wilcox, about the execution of nurse Edith Cavell, made martyr by German military authorities during World War I: All the censorships, including film censorships, are merely pretexts for retaining a legal or quasi-legal power to suppress works which the authorities dislike. No film or play is ever interfered with merely because it is vicious. Dozens of films which carry the art of stimulating crude passion of every kind to the utmost possible point—aphrodisiac films, films of hatred, violence, murder, and jingoism—appear every season and pass unchallenged under the censor’s certificates. Then suddenly a film is suppressed, and a fuss got up about its morals, or its effect on our foreign relations … One of the best films ever produced as a work of pictorial art has for its subject a naval mutiny in the Russian Fleet in 1904 … The War Office and the Admiralty immediately object to it because it does not represent the quarterdeck and G.H.Q. as peopled exclusively by popular and gallant angels in uniform. It is suppressed. Then comes the Edith Cavell film. It is an extraordinarily impressive demonstration of the peculiar horror of war as placing the rules of fighting above the doctrine of Christ, and geographical patriotism about humanity. No matter: the film is at once suppressed on the ridiculous pretext that it might offend Germany … The screen may wallow in ever extremity of vulgarity and villainy provided it whitewashes authority. But let it shew a single fleck on the whitewash, and no excellence, moral, pictorial, or histrionic, can save it from prompt suppression and defamation. That is what censorship means. Then, as now, it seems, art and politics sometimes make for uneasy bedfellows. Front Cover: Monte Dolack, Detail from Moonlight Rainbows, 2001, acrylic on panel, 36” x 40” VOLUME 26 | NUMBER 2 | SPRING/SUMMER 2010 | $10.00 GLOBAL SPOTLIGHT EDITOR Michael Wutz 3 Karen Marguerite Moloney, “Above the Battlefield”— ASSOCIATE EDITORS A Conversation with Michael Longley Kathryn L. MacKay Brad Roghaar Russell Burrows Victoria Ramirez 15 Michael Longley, Cygnus and The Holly Bush MANAGING EDITOR ART Elizabeth Dohrer EDITORIAL BOARD Susan Clark, Eastern Sierra Institute 109 Monte Dolack, Encounters Katharine Coles, U of Utah 124 Mary Beth Percival, Finding Beauty Gary Gildner, independent author Duncan Harris, U of Wyoming FILM FOCUS MichaelL ongley...................5 Diana Joseph, Minnesota State U Nancy Kline, independent author & translator James A. MacMahon, Utah State U 40 Susan Aronstein and Robert Torry, Magic Happens: Fred Marchant, Suffolk U Re-Enchanting Disney Adults Madonne Miner, Weber State U 55 Luis Guadaño, When Thesis Films Don’t Work: Felicia Mitchell, Emory & Henry College Julie Nichols, Utah Valley State College Representational Strategies and Immigrants in Tara Powell, U of South Carolina Contemporary Spanish Film Bill Ransom, Evergreen State College 69 Greg Lewis, Promethean Cinema in Mao’s China: Walter L. Reed, Emory U Scott P. Sanders, U of New Mexico Sun Daolin and Xie Jin in Shanghai, 1948-1987 Daniel R. Schwarz, Cornell U 82 Isabel Asensio-Sierra, Faith, Doubt and Religious Andreas Ströhl, Filmfestival Munich Ideology in Contemporary Spanish Cinema James Thomas, editor and writer Robert Torry, U of Wyoming ESSAY Robert Van Wagoner, independent author Melora Wolff, Skidmore College 17 Mark Osteen, In the Echo Chamber Monte Dolack.................109 EDITORIAL PLANNING BOARD 93 Kate Krautkramer, Chicken Bradley W. Carroll John R. Sillito Brenda M. Kowalewski Michael B. Vaughan FICTION Angelika Pagel 32 Pat Lynch, Hand-Me-Downs ADVISORY COMMITTEE Meri DeCaria Barry Gomberg 99 Nancy L. Graham, Along for the Ride Elaine Englehardt John E. Lowe 129 Diana Corbin, Sucker Punch DeAnn Evans Aden Ross 138 Joyce Yarrow, Desert Quest Shelley L. Felt Robert B. Smith G. Don Gale Mikel Vause POETRY LAYOUT CONSULTANTS 27 Toni Thomas, Who Says the Shattered House Can’t Live Mark Biddle Jason Francis Here Anymore and other poems EDITORS EMERITI 136 Doug Ramspeck, Vespers and Old Country Brad L. Roghaar LaVon Carroll 146 Richard Robbins, Kitchen and other poems Sherwin W. Howard Nikki Hansen Film Focus.........................40 Neila Seshachari 151 READING THE WEST EDITORIAL MATTER CONTINUED IN BACK ANNOUNCING the 2010 Dr. Sherwin W. Howard Poetry Award UT gden, O ©Hains, ©Hains, to Doug Ramspeck for “Ghost Child”and “After the Storm” in the 2009 Fall issue The Dr. Sherwin W. Howard Award of $500 is presented annually to the author of the “best” poetry published in Weber during the previous year. Funding for this award is generously provided by the Howard family. Dr. Howard (1936-2001) was former president of Deep Springs College, dean of the College of Arts & Humanities at Weber State University, editor of Weber Studies, and an accomplished playwright and poet. CNVERO S ATI O N Karen Marguerite Moloney Above the Battlefield A Conversation with Michael Longley oyles B elv K in CNVERO S ATI O N PRELUDE On the sunny afternoon of August I. Today I had some questions for this poet 1, 2008, Michael Longley and I met in whose verse defies easy classification. Nei- the library of the Faculty of Letters at the ther nature, love, nor war poet, he is instead Universidade do Porto in northern Portu- all three—and more. gal. We were in Porto to attend the annual Born to English parents in Belfast in conference of the International Association 1939, Longley read Classics at Trinity for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL), College Dublin and later taught second- where Longley and his wife, critic Edna ary school in Belfast, Dublin, and London. Longley, were featured speakers. This was From 1970 until early retirement in 1991, our final day of meetings. Longley had been he worked as Combined Arts Director for interviewed during the morning plenary the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He session, but he had graciously agreed to be published No Continuing City in 1969; interviewed again. We arranged our chairs in 1985 he published Poems 1963-1983, by an open window. Nearby, the river Dou- which gathered his first four collections. A ro emptied into the Atlantic, and seabirds twelve-year dry spell followed before pub- soared above the estuary and adjoining city. lication of The Echo Gate (1979), Gorse Our conversation would be punctuated Fires (1991), The Ghost Orchid (1995), with cries, caws, and squawks—perhaps the The Weather in Japan (2000), Snow Wa- birds’ tribute, even if awkward, to a poet ter (2004), and Collected Poems (2006). who memorializes their avian kin and other His edited volumes include Poems: W.R. fellow creatures with such a sympathetic Rodgers (1993) and Selected Poems: eye. Louis MacNeice (2007). Appointed Pro- I’d admired Longley’s poetry since I fessor of Poetry for Ireland in 2007, Longley first heard him read at the 1995 ACIS con- has won the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the ference in Belfast. I purchased The Ghost T.S. Eliot Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, Orchid, Longley signed it, and I quickly the Belfast Arts Award for Literature, and added the love poem “The Scissors Ceremo- the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He and ny” to my syllabi. More recently I’d taught Edna have three children. When not in Bel- Longley’s poetry in a graduate seminar on fast, the Longleys have access to a cottage war literature; my students responded to in Carrigskeewaun on the coast of County his nuanced subtlety as enthusiastically as Mayo, where seabirds also call. I’d taught Longley’s poetry in a graduate seminar on war literature; my students responded to his nuanced subtlety as enthusiastically as I. Today I had some questions for this poet whose verse defies easy classification. Neither nature, love, nor war poet, he is instead all three—and more. 4 WE B E R THCN E O T E M P O R A R Y W E S T CONVERSATION A great deal has been written about the notated edition of Edward Thomas’s Collected Belfast Group, the writers’ group hosted by Poems, and none of that Alec-Reid-inspired Philip Hobsbaum from 1963–1966, yet you stuff is ever mentioned.