Le chinoise.Most serious writing about Jean-Luc Godard tends to be both high-flown and forbidding, rather like the films it’s discussing. Translations from French to English or vice versa can make things even dicier. But according to the literary scholar Fredric Jameson, who contributes an enthusiastic preface and afterword, Reading with Jean-Luc Godard—a compendium of 109 three-page essays by 50 writers from a dozen countries, announced as the first in a series—launches “a new form” and “a new genre.”The brevity of each entry tends to confirm Jameson’s claim. The book can be described as an audience-friendly volume designed to occupy the same space between academia and journalism staked out by Notebook while proposing routes into Godard’s work provided by his eclectic reading—a batch of writers ranged alphabetically and intellectually from Louis Aragon, Robert Ardrey, Hannah Arendt, and Honoré de Balzac to François Truffaut, Paul Valéry,...
- 1/30/2024
- MUBI
“I want my MTV.” 35 years ago, MTV launched, at 12:01 a.m. Et, with the words “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll,” paired with footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Three years later, that opening image inspired the statuette handed out at the first VMAs, the MTV moonman. MTV has morphed a lot in the past 35 years, from the line-up of music videos popularizing a whole new element of the music industry that “killed the radio star,” to today’s programming of reality shows and teen-aimed scripted series like Teen Wolf and Awkward. Other notable August 1 happenings in pop culture history: • 1944: Wilson, about President Woodrow Wilson, premiered in New York. It went on to earn five Oscars. • 1960: Aretha Franklin recorded her first non-gospel songs, “Today I Sing The Blues,” “Over The Rainbow,” “Love Is The Only Thing,” and “Right Now” at Columbia Recording Studios in New York City.
- 8/1/2016
- by Emily Rome
- Hitfix
Otherness is the inevitable theme of films dealing with extraterrestrials. They are the ultimate foreigners, organisms who inhabit planets unlike our own. The problem for artists who tackle such stories is how to portray this Otherness. A common recourse is to humanize it, as in everything from The Day the Earth Stood Still to Star Wars. Another solution, however, is to accept what Fredric Jameson terms the “unknowability thesis,” which he ascribes to Stanislaw Lem (1). As the latter wrote in his novel Solaris: “Where there are no men, there cannot be motives accessible to men.” The truly alien, then, recedes into the shadows or the margins. It can hardly be portrayed if it cannot be grasped by the imagination, so it becomes a vague intangible presence, as in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, or a sheer force of malignancy and death, as in the two examples we will be covering, 1979’s...
- 7/3/2014
- by Guido Pellegrini
- SoundOnSight
FamousMonsters.com is pleased and honored to re-present Steve Vertlieb’s touching tribute to our dear departed Forrest J Ackerman. We’re also very happy to report that Steve’s story is a finalist in this year’s Rondo Awards! Please visit the official Rondo Awards site for the chance to cast your ballot for this and many other outstanding nominees. Also, be sure to check out The Thunder Child, where Steve’s story originally ran.
The Most “Famous Monster” Of Them All
A Personal Remembrance of Forrest J Ackerman
by Steve Vertlieb
In a child-like land of dreams and dragons dwelt a Pied Piper of imagination, a Santa Claus of fantasy and horror, who lived in the mythical kingdom of Horrorweird, Karloffornia. His name was Forrest J Ackerman but, to his friends and colleagues, he was simply “Forry.”
A generation of wide- eyed children grew up under the spell...
The Most “Famous Monster” Of Them All
A Personal Remembrance of Forrest J Ackerman
by Steve Vertlieb
In a child-like land of dreams and dragons dwelt a Pied Piper of imagination, a Santa Claus of fantasy and horror, who lived in the mythical kingdom of Horrorweird, Karloffornia. His name was Forrest J Ackerman but, to his friends and colleagues, he was simply “Forry.”
A generation of wide- eyed children grew up under the spell...
- 4/2/2010
- by Michael
- FamousMonsters of Filmland
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