scholarly journals Fantastyka naukowa w polskim piśmiennictwie krytycznofilmowym przełomu lat pięćdziesiątych i sześćdziesiątych XX wieku

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (37) ◽  
pp. 99-125
Author(s):  
Robert Dudziński
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
The 1950S

The article is devoted to the Polish reception of science-fiction cinema; the statements of film critics from 1956–1965 were analysed. During this period, science fiction, previously absent from the screens of Polish cinemas for ideological and censorship reasons, returned to the repertoire and became the subject of press discussions and reviews. The analysis of articles devoted to this genre and published at the time allows reconstruction of the cultural context in which science-fiction productions operated. The article consists of three main parts. In the first of these, the author describes which science fiction films were present in Polish cinemas at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. In the second part, he analyses press statements devoted to the history and aesthetics of the genre. The subject under consideration in the third part is the reception of two productions, which at the time enjoyed the greatest interest from contemporary critics: Godzilla (Gojira, 1954, dir. Ishirō Honda) and The Silent Star (Der schweigende Stern 1960, dir. Kurt Maetzig).

Cristóbal Balenciaga. Explorations in Traditional Spanish Aesthetics

Costume ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-185
Author(s):  
Ana Balda Arana
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Country Of Origin ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Doctoral Thesis ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Religious Iconography

This article investigates how the traditional attire and religious iconography of Cristóbal Balenciaga's (1895–1972) country of origin inspired his designs. The arguments presented here build on what has already been established on the subject, provide new data regarding the cultural context that informed the couturier's creative process (with which the Anglo-Saxon world is less familiar) and conclude by investigating the reasons and timing of his exploration of these fields. They suggest why this Spanish influence is present in his innovations in the 1950s and 1960s and go beyond clichéd interpretations of the ruffles of flamenco dress and bullfighters’ jackets. The findings derive from research for the author's doctoral thesis and her curatorial contribution to the exhibition Coal and Velvet. Balenciaga and Ortiz Echagüe. Views on the Popular Costume (Balenciaga Museum, Getaria, Spain, 7 October 2016–7 May 2017).

Close Encounters: Genre and Context

2016 ◽  
pp. 17-24
Author(s):  
Jon Towlson
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Greek Mythology ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Star Wars ◽  
The Third ◽  
Close Encounters ◽  
Human Need ◽  
Science Fiction Films

This chapter discusses the genre and context of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). It begins by tracing the emergence of science fiction in literature and in cinema. The chapter then looks at how film serials popularised pulp science-fiction cinema in the form of rocketships, ray guns, alien invaders, evil intergalactic emperors, and damsels in distress. One can see them as the inspiration for the likes of Star Wars and the myriad superhero blockbuster movies that continue to dominate Hollywood today. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey returned science fiction to its origins in Greek mythology. It is perhaps the first example of ‘transcendent’ science-fiction cinema, exploring the human need to place trust in a force larger than ourselves. In the early 1970s, science-fiction films were more overtly concerned with identity and environment, and how both were increasingly shaped or misshapen by technology. Meanwhile, post-9/11 has seen a move towards intelligent science fiction as a bankable commodity within Hollywood. Part of the genre's continuing appeal is, of course, the showcasing of state-of-the-art cinema technology within the sci-fi narrative. Special-effects technology has evolved in line with cinema's own development.

Voicing the Soviet Experience

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine Hodgson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Personal Integrity ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Conflicting Discourses ◽  
Soviet Experience

This book is an examination of a poet whose career offers a case study in the complexities facing Soviet writers in the Stalin era. Ol′ga Berggol′ts (1910–1975) was a prominent Russian Soviet poet, whose accounts of heroism in wartime Leningrad brought her fame. This book addresses her position as a writer whose Party loyalties were frequently in conflict with the demands of artistic and personal integrity. Writers who pursued their careers under the restrictions of the Stalin era have been categorized as ‘official’ figures whose work is assumed to be drab, inept and opportunistic; but such assumptions impose a uniformity on the work of Soviet writers that the censors and the Writers Union could not achieve. An exploration of Berggol′ts's work shows that the borders between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ literature were in fact permeable and shifting. This book draws on unpublished sources such as diaries and notebooks to reveal the range and scope of her work, and to show how conflict and ambiguity functioned as a creative structuring principle. The text discusses how Berggol′ts's lyric poetry constructs the subject from multiple, conflicting discourses, and examines the poet's treatment of genres such as narrative verse, verse tragedy and prose in the changing cultural context of the 1950s. Berggol′ts's use of inter-textual, and especially intra-textual, reference is also investigated; the intensively self-referential nature of her work creates a web of allusion that connects texts of different genres, ‘official’ as well as ‘unofficial’ writing.

Monsters in the Machine

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steffen Hantke
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Social History ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the American film industry produced a distinct cycle of films situated on the boundary between horror and science fiction. Using the familiar imagery of science fiction, the vast majority of these films subscribed to the effects and aesthetics of horror film, anticipating the dystopian turn of many science fiction films to come. These films often evinced paranoia, unease, fear, shock, and disgust. Not only did these movies address technophobia and its psychological, social, and cultural corollaries, they also returned persistently to the military as a source of character, setting, and conflict. Commensurate with a state of perpetual mobilization, the US military comes across as an inescapable presence in American life. Regardless of their genre, this book argues that these films have long been understood as allegories of the Cold War. They register anxieties about two major issues of the time: atomic technologies, especially the testing and use of nuclear weapons, as well as communist aggression and/or subversion. Setting out to question, expand, and correct this critical argument, the book follows shifts and adjustments prompted by recent scholarly work into the technological, political, and social history of America in the 1950s. Based on this revised historical understanding, science fiction films appear in a new light as they reflect on the troubled memories of World War II, the emergence of the military-industrial complex, the postwar rewriting of the American landscape, and the relative insignificance of catastrophic nuclear war compared to America's involvement in postcolonial conflicts around the globe.

scholarly journals O-bi, o-ba: Koniec cywilizacji – postpiśmienny świat Piotra Szulkina

1970 ◽  
pp. 273-284
Author(s):  
Maciej Pietrzak
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Written Word ◽  
The Way ◽  
Adam Mickiewicz

Pietrzak Maciej, O-bi, o-ba: Koniec cywilizacji – postpiśmienny świat Piotra Szulkina [O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization – The Postliterate World of Piotr Szulkin]. „Przestrzenie Teorii” nr 32. Poznań 2019, Adam Mickiewicz University Press, pp. 273–284. ISSN 1644-6763. DOI 10.14746/pt.2019.32.14. Piotr Szulkin made his mark in the history of cinema primarily as the author of disturbing visions of the future. His four films made between 1979 and 1985 comprised the science-fiction tetralogy, which is still one of the greatest artistic achievements of this genre in Polish cinema. The subject of the article is the third production of Szulkin’s series – the post-apocalyptic film O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization from 1984. In the film, the director creates a suggestive vision of a world destroyed as a result of nuclear conflict, in which the original functions of literature and the written word are forgotten. The author article analyzes the way in which forsaken literary artifacts are used in the post-literary reality of the film. An important element of his considerations is also the post-apocalyptic reception of the biblical text, on whose elements the mythology of the film’s world is based.

A Bright New Future, With Monsters

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steffen Hantke
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
World War ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's key themes. This book focuses on American science fiction films of the 1950s, many of which are fondly remembered, yet critically dismissed. It argues that it is through the intersection of past and present, of unresolved trauma superimposed upon present anxieties, that 1950s science fiction films acquire topical relevance within their historical context. Science fiction films from the 1950s are a belated response to the national trauma of World War II and the Korean War projected onto the unsettling experience of the Cold War. With much of the critical work on the Cold War aspects of the films already delivered by other scholars, this book will weigh in on the side of the argument that has, as yet, remained critically neglected—the side of past trauma: on World War II and the Korean War, and their troubling legacy in the first decade of the American Century.

scholarly journals The High Priesthood of Memphis during the Old Kingdom and the First Intermediate Period. An Updating Study and a Prosopography

2018 ◽  
pp. 7-63
Author(s):  
Josep Cervelló Autuori ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
The Other ◽  
High Priest ◽  
Good Opportunity ◽  
Old Kingdom ◽  
Intermediate Period ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Subject ◽  
First Intermediate Period ◽  
The One

The inscriptions recovered from the looted necropolis of Kom el-Khamaseen, located in southwest Saqqara and dated between the end of the Old Kingdom and the beginning of the First Intermediate Period, document a hitherto unknown high priest of Memphis: Imephor Impy Nikauptah. This character must be incorporated into our prosopographical repertoires and placed in his historical and cultural context. This provides a good opportunity to return to the issue of the Memphite pontificate during the third millennium B.C. as a whole. The aim of this article is therefore to offer, on the one hand, a systematic and updated overview of the subject by integrating the new data from Kom el-Khamaseen, drawing upon the complete sources, and critically reviewing the literature on the matter. On the other hand, it is also about providing a new reasoned chronological list and a prosopography of the Memphite high priests of the Old Kingdom and the First Intermediate Period.

The Invention of a Hebrew Nation

2020 ◽  
pp. 139-212
Author(s):  
Lutz Fiedler
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Third ◽  
Hebrew Language ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Six Day War ◽  
Political Differences ◽  
Political Origins

The third chapter, ‘The Invention of a Hebrew Nation’, examines the enormous cultural foundation underpinning Matzpen’s political vision of a post-colonial existence for Israeli Jews. Matzpen built on a process of transformation that had worked to turn Diaspora Jews into new Hebrews, or Israelis. Drawing on the research of Yaacov Shavit and James Diamond into the movement of the Young Hebrews, or ‘Canaanites’, the chapter outlines an emerging Hebrew-language culture that blossomed in the young Israeli state of the 1950s and ’60s and defied the discourse of a unified Jewish people. This exposes a cultural context that had its roots in the Zionist Right, but grew far beyond its political origins. Culturally, it centred on the magazine Haolam Hazeh, which was published by Uri Avnery (1923–2018), and extended as far as Matzpen on its far-left fringe. This vibrant creative milieu included such figures as Shimon Tzabar, Amos Kenan, and Dan Ben-Amotz. Finally, the internal political differences within this milieu, gaps that the Six-Day War ultimately rendered unbridgeable, are highlighted.

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