Mcelhaney, J., Ed.: a Companion to Fritz Lang

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MCELHANEY, J., ED.: A COMPANION TO FRITZ LANG 1 Introduction Joe McElhaney Part One Looking, Power, Interpretation 2 Why Lang Could Become Preferable to Hitchcock Raymond Bellour 3 While Not Looking: The Failure to See and Know in Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse Frances Guerin 4 Symptom, Exhibition, Fear: Representations of Terror in the German Work of Fritz Lang Nicole Brenez 5 Spies: Postwar Paranoia Goes to the Movies Paul Dobryden 6 Identifying the Suspect: Lang’s M and the Trajectories of Film Criticism Olga Solovieva 7 The Medium’s Re-Vision: (Or the Doctor as Disease, Diagnostic, and Cure) David Phelps Part Two Myths, Legends, and Tragic Visions 8 Metaphysics of Finitude: Der müde Tod and the Crisis of Historicism Nicholas Baer 9 Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and the Caesura Chris Fujiwara 10 Lang contra Wagner: Die Nibelungen as Anti-Adaptation Thomas Leitch 11 Redemption of Revenge: Die Nibelungen Steve Choe 12 Furious Union: Fritz Lang and the American West Phil Wagner 13 “It Was a Horserace Sorta”: Fortunes of Rancho Notorious Tom Conley Part Three Matters of Form 14 Beyond Destiny and Design: Camera Movement in Fritz Lang’s German Films Daniel Morgan 15 Fritz Lang: Object and Thing in the German Films Brigitte Peucker 16 A Stranger in the House: Fritz Lang’s Fury and the Cinema of Exile Anton Kaes 17 Fritz Lang’s Modern Character: You Only Live Once and the Depth of Surface Will Scheibel 18 Joan Bennett, Fritz Lang, and the Frame of Performance Steven Rybin 19 “I’d Like to Own That Painting”: Lang, Cézanne, and the Art of Omission Vinzenz Hediger 20 Tumbling Blocks and Queer Ladders: Notions of Home in The Big Heat Pamela Robertson Wojcik 21 Metropolis and the Figuration of Eidos Paolo Bertetto Part Four Rediscoveries and Returns 22 Not the End: Fritz Lang’s War Lutz Koepnick 23 Classic(al) Lang: Conflicting Impulses in Ministry of Fear Jakob Isak Nielsen 24 Multiple Reflections: The Woman in the Mirror in Fritz Lang’s Cloak and Dagger Doug Dibbern 25 Suspended Modernity: On the Last Five Films of Fritz Lang Carlos Losilla 26 The Limit: House by the River Adrian Martin 27 Looking for a Path: Fritz Lang and Clash by Night Joe McElhaney 28 Notes on Human Desire (Lang, Renoir, Zola) Sam Ishii-Gonzales 29 Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever: Rediscovering Woman in the Moon Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew.

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Xx:2 Dr. Mabuse 1933
January 19, 2010: XX:2 DAS TESTAMENT DES DR. MABUSE/THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE 1933 (122 minutes) Directed by Fritz Lang Written by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou Produced by Fritz Lanz and Seymour Nebenzal Original music by Hans Erdmann Cinematography by Karl Vash and Fritz Arno Wagner Edited by Conrad von Molo and Lothar Wolff Art direction by Emil Hasler and Karll Vollbrecht Rudolf Klein-Rogge...Dr. Mabuse Gustav Diessl...Thomas Kent Rudolf Schündler...Hardy Oskar Höcker...Bredow Theo Lingen...Karetzky Camilla Spira...Juwelen-Anna Paul Henckels...Lithographraoger Otto Wernicke...Kriminalkomissar Lohmann / Commissioner Lohmann Theodor Loos...Dr. Kramm Hadrian Maria Netto...Nicolai Griforiew Paul Bernd...Erpresser / Blackmailer Henry Pleß...Bulle Adolf E. Licho...Dr. Hauser Oscar Beregi Sr....Prof. Dr. Baum (as Oscar Beregi) Wera Liessem...Lilli FRITZ LANG (5 December 1890, Vienna, Austria—2 August 1976,Beverly Hills, Los Angeles) directed 47 films, from Halbblut (Half-caste) in 1919 to Die Tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse (The Thousand Eye of Dr. Mabuse) in 1960. Some of the others were Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), The Big Heat (1953), Clash by Night (1952), Rancho Notorious (1952), Cloak and Dagger (1946), Scarlet Street (1945). The Woman in the Window (1944), Ministry of Fear (1944), Western Union (1941), The Return of Frank James (1940), Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Crimes of Dr. Mabuse, Dr. Mabuse's Testament, There's a good deal of Lang material on line at the British Film The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse, 1933), M (1931), Metropolis Institute web site: http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/lang/.
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Page 1 of 3 Moma | Press | Releases | 1998 | Gallery Exhibition of Rare
MoMA | press | Releases | 1998 | Gallery Exhibition of Rare and Original Film Posters at ... Page 1 of 3 GALLERY EXHIBITION OF RARE AND ORIGINAL FILM POSTERS AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART SPOTLIGHTS LEGENDARY GERMAN MOVIE STUDIO Ufa Film Posters, 1918-1943 September 17, 1998-January 5, 1999 The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1 Lobby Exhibition Accompanied by Series of Eight Films from Golden Age of German Cinema From the Archives: Some Ufa Weimar Classics September 17-29, 1998 The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1 Fifty posters for films produced or distributed by Ufa, Germany's legendary movie studio, will be on display in The Museum of Modern Art's Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1 Lobby starting September 17, 1998. Running through January 5, 1999, Ufa Film Posters, 1918-1943 will feature rare and original works, many exhibited for the first time in the United States, created to promote films from Germany's golden age of moviemaking. In conjunction with the opening of the gallery exhibition, the Museum will also present From the Archives: Some Ufa Weimar Classics, an eight-film series that includes some of the studio's more celebrated productions, September 17-29, 1998. Ufa (Universumfilm Aktien Gesellschaft), a consortium of film companies, was established in the waning days of World War I by order of the German High Command, but was privatized with the postwar establishment of the Weimar republic in 1918. Pursuing a program of aggressive expansion in Germany and throughout Europe, Ufa quickly became one of the greatest film companies in the world, with a large and spectacularly equipped studio in Babelsberg, just outside Berlin, and with foreign sales that globalized the market for German film.
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The Broken Ideals of Love and Family in Film Noir
1 Murder, Mugs, Molls, Marriage: The Broken Ideals of Love and Family in Film Noir Noir is a conversation rather than a single genre or style, though it does have a history, a complex of overlapping styles and typical plots, and more central directors and films. It is also a conversation about its more common philosophies, socio-economic and sexual concerns, and more expansively its social imaginaries. MacIntyre's three rival versions suggest the different ways noir can be studied. Tradition's approach explains better the failure of the other two, as will as their more limited successes. Something like the Thomist understanding of people pursuing perceived (but faulty) goods better explains the neo- Marxist (or other power/conflict) model and the self-construction model. Each is dependent upon the materials of an earlier tradition to advance its claims/interpretations. [Styles-studio versus on location; expressionist versus classical three-point lighting; low-key versus high lighting; whites/blacks versus grays; depth versus flat; theatrical versus pseudo-documentary; variety of felt threat levels—investigative; detective, procedural, etc.; basic trust in ability to restore safety and order versus various pictures of unopposable corruption to a more systemic nihilism; melodramatic vs. colder, more distant; dialogue—more or less wordy, more or less contrived, more or less realistic; musical score—how much it guides and dictates emotions; presence or absence of humor, sentiment, romance, healthy family life; narrator, narratival flashback; motives for criminality and violence-- socio- economic (expressed by criminal with or without irony), moral corruption (greed, desire for power), psychological pathology; cinematography—classical vs.
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Berkeley Art Museum·Pacific Film Archive W Inte R 2 0 18 – 19
WINTER 2018–19 BERKELEY ART MUSEUM · PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PROGRAM GUIDE 100 YEARS OF COLLECTING JAPANESE ART ARTHUR JAFA MASAKO MIKI HANS HOFMANN FRITZ LANG & GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM INGMAR BERGMAN JIŘÍ TRNKA MIA HANSEN-LØVE JIA ZHANGKE JAMES IVORY JAPANESE FILM CLASSICS DOCUMENTARY VOICES OUT OF THE VAULT IN FOCUS: WRITING FOR CINEMA 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 CALENDAR DEC 9/SUN 21/FRI JAN 2:00 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 4:00 The Price of Everything P. 15 Introduction by Jan Pinkava 7:00 Fanny and Alexander BERGMAN P. 15 1/SAT TRNKA P. 12 3/THU 7:00 Full: Home Again—Tapestry 1:00 Making a Performance 1:15 Exhibition Highlights Tour P. 6 4:30 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari P. 5 WORKSHOP P. 6 Reimagined Judith Rosenberg on piano 4–7 Five Tables of the Sea P. 4 5:30 The Good Soldier Švejk TRNKA P. 12 LANG & EXPRESSIONISM P. 16 22/SAT Free First Thursday: Galleries Free All Day 7:30 Persona BERGMAN P. 14 7:00 The Price of Everything P. 15 6:00 The Firemen’s Ball P. 29 5/SAT 2/SUN 12/WED 8:00 The Apartment P. 19 6:00 Future Landscapes WORKSHOP P. 6 12:30 Scenes from a 6:00 Arthur Jafa & Stephen Best 23/SUN Marriage BERGMAN P. 14 CONVERSATION P. 6 9/WED 2:00 Boom for Real: The Late Teenage 2:00 Guided Tour: Old Masters P. 6 7:00 Ugetsu JAPANESE CLASSICS P. 20 Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat P. 15 12:15 Exhibition Highlights Tour P.
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38 Eve Wersocki Morris, Q33606, Pp. 359-67
‘He had a Horse Called Bill’ (Yellow Sky): The Appropriation of Shakespeare in the Western. Eve Wersocki Morris Studying film from the perspective of genre theory requires analysis of cinematic techniques and contextual culture (filmic and social). Christine Gledhill claims that genre provides ‘a framework of structuring rules […] which act as a form of ‘supervision’ over the work of film-makers and the work of reading by an audience’.1 This definition indicates that each genre adheres to a fixed hierarchal form. Alternatively, Anthony Easthope argues that genre should be understood as an abstract, theoretical structure, which is transformed by each new production so ‘any instance of a genre will be necessarily different’.2 Easthope implies that the ‘structuring rules’ are not fixed but allow filmmakers ideological concerns and social and cultural environments to influence their individual films and aid in developing the genre framework itself. My essay shall adhere to this latter argument. In agreement with Easthope, Mary Bandy and Kevin Stoehr have argued that, post- World War Two, the Western experienced a ‘gradual transformation of genre’3 towards more ‘psychologically expressive Westerns’4 which was due to the public’s desire for darker subject matter. Alan Lovell specifies that these new Westerns did not alter the genre but simply imposed ‘a new sensibility on the old forms’,5 retaining the classic wild west scenery of the 19th Century American frontier. Andre Bazin has called these new Westerns ‘superwesterns’6 and Lovell refers to them as ‘adult westerns’.7 However, for the purposes of this essay, I shall be adopting Bandy’s term ‘psychological western’ because of its explicit allusions to the increased interest in exploring characters’ inner struggles.
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Fritz Lang © 2008 AGI-Information Management Consultants May Be Used for Personal Purporses Only Or by Reihe Filmlibraries 7 Associated to Dandelon.Com Network
Fritz Lang © 2008 AGI-Information Management Consultants May be used for personal purporses only or by Reihe Filmlibraries 7 associated to dandelon.com network. Mit Beiträgen von Frieda Grafe Enno Patalas Hans Helmut Prinzler Peter Syr (Fotos) Carl Hanser Verlag Inhalt Für Fritz Lang Einen Platz, kein Denkmal Von Frieda Grafe 7 Kommentierte Filmografie Von Enno Patalas 83 Halbblut 83 Der Herr der Liebe 83 Der goldene See. (Die Spinnen, Teil 1) 83 Harakiri 84 Das Brillantenschiff. (Die Spinnen, Teil 2) 84 Das wandernde Bild 86 Kämpfende Herzen (Die Vier um die Frau) 86 Der müde Tod 87 Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler 88 Die Nibelungen 91 Metropolis 94 Spione 96 Frau im Mond 98 M 100 Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse 102 Liliom 104 Fury 105 You Only Live Once. Gehetzt 106 You and Me [Du und ich] 108 The Return of Frank James. Rache für Jesse James 110 Western Union. Überfall der Ogalalla 111 Man Hunt. Menschenjagd 112 Hangmen Also Die. Auch Henker sterben 113 Ministry of Fear. Ministerium der Angst 115 The Woman in the Window. Gefährliche Begegnung 117 Scarlet Street. Straße der Versuchung 118 Cloak and Dagger. Im Geheimdienst 120 Secret Beyond the Door. Geheimnis hinter der Tür 121 House by the River [Haus am Fluß] 123 American Guerrilla in the Philippines. Der Held von Mindanao 124 Rancho Notorious. Engel der Gejagten 125 Clash by Night. Vor dem neuen Tag 126 The Blue Gardenia. Gardenia - Eine Frau will vergessen 128 The Big Heat. Heißes Eisen 130 Human Desire. Lebensgier 133 Moonfleet. Das Schloß im Schatten 134 While the City Sleeps.
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Case Study: Fritz Lang and Scarlet Street*
Studia Filmoznawcze 31 Wroc³aw 2010 Barry Keith Grant Brock University (Canada) CASE STUDY: FRITZ LANG AND SCARLET STREET* Fritz Lang’s work in film spans the silent era almost from its beginnings through the golden era of German Expressionism in the 1920s and the classic studio sys- tem in Hollywood to the rise of the international co-production. In the course of his career Lang directed more acknowledged classics of the German silent cinema than any other director, made the first important German sound film (M, 1932), and dir ected some of the most important crime films and film noirs of the American studio era, including You Only Live Once (1937), The Big Heat (1953), and Scarlet Street (1945). Critics have commonly divided Lang’s extensive filmography into two major periods, the silent German films and the American studio movies. In the former he had considerable artistic freedom, while in Hollywood he worked against the greater constraints of the studio system and B-picture budgets; yet the thematic and stylistic consistency in Lang’s work across decades, countries, and different production contexts is truly remarkable. Consistently Lang’s films depict an entrapping, claustrophobic, deterministic world in which the characters are controlled by larger forces and internal desires beyond their understanding. In this cruelly indifferent world, people struggle vainly against fate and their own repressed inclinations toward violence. As in Hitchcock’s films, Lang’s often deal with the violent potential lurking within the respectable citizen and suggest that social order requires controlling the beast within. M (1932), Lang’s first sound film, is about a serial child killer (Peter Lorre) who explains to the kangaroo court of criminals about to execute him that he is possessed by a murder- * The text is taken, with the agreement of its author, from his book Film Genre: From Iconog- raphy to Ideology, London 2007, pp.
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From Iron Age Myth to Idealized National Landscape: Human-Nature Relationships and Environmental Racism in Fritz Lang’S Die Nibelungen
FROM IRON AGE MYTH TO IDEALIZED NATIONAL LANDSCAPE: HUMAN-NATURE RELATIONSHIPS AND ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM IN FRITZ LANG’S DIE NIBELUNGEN Susan Power Bratton Whitworth College Abstract From the Iron Age to the modern period, authors have repeatedly restructured the ecomythology of the Siegfried saga. Fritz Lang’s Weimar lm production (released in 1924-1925) of Die Nibelungen presents an ascendant humanist Siegfried, who dom- inates over nature in his dragon slaying. Lang removes the strong family relation- ships typical of earlier versions, and portrays Siegfried as a son of the German landscape rather than of an aristocratic, human lineage. Unlike The Saga of the Volsungs, which casts the dwarf Andvari as a shape-shifting sh, and thereby indis- tinguishable from productive, living nature, both Richard Wagner and Lang create dwarves who live in subterranean or inorganic habitats, and use environmental ideals to convey anti-Semitic images, including negative contrasts between Jewish stereo- types and healthy or organic nature. Lang’s Siegfried is a technocrat, who, rather than receiving a magic sword from mystic sources, begins the lm by fashioning his own. Admired by Adolf Hitler, Die Nibelungen idealizes the material and the organic in a way that allows the modern “hero” to romanticize himself and, with- out the aid of deities, to become superhuman. Introduction As one of the great gures of Weimar German cinema, Fritz Lang directed an astonishing variety of lms, ranging from the thriller, M, to the urban critique, Metropolis. 1 Of all Lang’s silent lms, his two part interpretation of Das Nibelungenlied: Siegfried’s Tod, lmed in 1922, and Kriemhilds Rache, lmed in 1923,2 had the greatest impression on National Socialist leaders, including Adolf Hitler.
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Complete Film Noir
COMPLETE FILM NOIR (1940 thru 1965) Page 1 of 18 CONSENSUS FILM NOIR (1940 thru 1959) (1960-1965) dThe idea for a COMPLETE FILM NOIR LIST came to me when I realized that I was “wearing out” a then recently purchased copy of the Film Noir Encyclopedia, 3rd edition. My initial plan was to make just a list of the titles listed in this reference so I could better plan my film noir viewing on AMC (American Movie Classics). Realizing that this plan was going to take some keyboard time, I thought of doing a search on the Internet Movie DataBase (here after referred to as the IMDB). By using the extended search with selected criteria, I could produce a list for importing to a text editor. Since that initial list was compiled almost twenty years ago, I have added additional reference sources, marked titles released on NTSC laserdisc and NTSC Region 1 DVD formats. When a close friend complained about the length of the list as it passed 600 titles, the idea of producing a subset list of CONSENSUS FILM NOIR was born. Several years ago, a DVD producer wrote me as follows: “I'd caution you not to put too much faith in the film noir guides, since it's not as if there's some Film Noir Licensing Board that reviews films and hands out Certificates of Authenticity. The authors of those books are just people, limited by their own knowledge of and access to films for review, so guidebooks on noir are naturally weighted towards the more readily available studio pictures, like Double Indemnity or Kiss Me Deadly or The Big Sleep, since the many low-budget B noirs from indie producers or overseas have mostly fallen into obscurity.” There is truth in what the producer says, but if writers of (film noir) guides haven’t seen the films, what chance does an ordinary enthusiast have.
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Le Mépris and Its Story of Cinema: a Fabric of Quotations*
Laura Mulvey LE MÉPRIS AND ITS STORY OF CINEMA: A FABRIC OF QUOTATIONS* In Le Mépris (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) and quotation the world of cinéphilia the cinema has a central presence on seeps into Le Mépris mediating bet- various different levels. The making ween past and present. As quotation of a film has brought the central cha- necessarily refers backwards in time, racters together and the dramatic pro- Godard evokes a now ended era with cesses of film-making are often shown an aesthetic device that always comes on screen, as a backdrop to the hu- out of the past. Thus, in Le Mépris, man drama. But woven into this overt form (quotation) is appropriate to its presence is another story about the content (history). cinema: its histories and its contem- But, on the other hand, quotation is a porary crises. Only occasionally expli- key modernist formal device, fragmen- citly reaching the surface of the film, ting a text’s cohesion, disrupting tradi- this story is concealed in signs, images tional forms of reading by introducing and allusions. The unifying thread that other layers to a linear structure. As ties these oblique references together Peter Wollen puts it in his discussion is the world of cinéphilia, Godard’s of quotation in Godard’s Le Vent d’Est formative years as a critic for the Ca- (1970): hiers du Cinéma and the films and di- One of the main characteristics of moder- rectors he had written about and loved nism […] was the play of allusion within during the 1950s. That world had, by and between texts… The effects to break 1963, moved into a past tense: the Ho- up the heterogeneity of the work, to open llywood studio system that had produ- up spaces between different texts and ty- ced the politique des auteurs had aged pes of discourses… The space between the and had been overtaken by industrial texts is not only semantic but historical changes; Godard was no longer a ci- too, the different textual strata being re- néphile critic but a successful New sidues of different epochs and different Wave director.
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A Tragic View
VICENTE SANCHEZ-BIOSCA A TRAGIC VIEW Fritz Lang's American films start off as if they had no beginning, as if something had been decided on and launched inexorably, in our absence, and we were astonished witnesses to its final explosion. In medias res, the expression used in narrative theory to describe the entrance of the reader or spectator in fictions that are underway is, to all intents and purposes, insufficie~ and imprecise since the point here is not that actions are activated, but rather that the end is imminent. Thus, the furious pace, the climax, the intensity that the first Langian scenes often have. As if we were at the same time expelled from comprehending and plunged into the maelstrom of events. The content of these actions is, in addition, terminal: violent murders, accidental deaths, hdpeless traumas and, as a result, their staccato pace has little to do with the gtadual, calm introits in the American films of the classical period. Some random 0\)xamples illustrate such comments. Rancho Notorious (1952) starts off as the harmonious finale of a classical film, with the kiss between a couple in love - an illusion that will barely put off the ephemeral nature of the farewell between these two young people. The lethal chain is immediately unleashed: some bank robbers enter the shop that 298 THE SCULPTURE IN FRITZ LANG VICENTE SANCHEZ-SIOSCA the young girl is looking after, they rape and kill her: "Nothing has been saved from her'', the doctor chastely tells her premature widower. Incredulity becomes a rictus, a grimace of violence flashes across the needy lover's face, and from such a beartrending gesture the urge to wreak vengeance will arise, enough to string together the entire film around a tragic rage.
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Fritz Lang, Allegory, and the Holocaust Walter C
Southern Illinois University Carbondale OpenSIUC Articles Department of Cinema and Photography Summer 2001 A Very Notorious Ranch, Indeed: Fritz Lang, Allegory, and the Holocaust Walter C. Metz Southern Illinois University Carbondale, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cp_articles Recommended Citation Metz, Walter C. "A Very Notorious Ranch, Indeed: Fritz Lang, Allegory, and the Holocaust." The Journal of Contemporary Thought 13 (Summer 2001): 71-86. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Cinema and Photography at OpenSIUC. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by an authorized administrator of OpenSIUC. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A Very Notorious Ranch, Indeed: Fritz Lang, Allegory, and the Holocaust By Walter Metz Published in: Journal of Contemporary Thought. Vol. 13 [Summer 2001]. 71-86. Introduction In a recent review of the Stephen Spielberg blockbuster, Jurassic Park: The Lost World (1997), critic Stuart Klawans of The Nation presents the film as an allegory for the Holocaust.i Feigning to merely be repeating the interpretation of his “spiritual adviser,” Rabbi Simcha Fefferman, Klawans argues that the film continues the story of Schindler’s List (Stephen Spielberg, 1993) as much as it does Jurassic Park (Stephen Spielberg, 1993). Engaging in a bravura reading, Klawans argues, for instance, that the dinosaurs represented are stand-ins for the Jews, and that those who hunt them down are coded as Nazis: “There
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