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Tag: freud

Published October 14, 2011

Something for the Weekend

The Dark Room — Filmmaker Grant Gee talks to BookForum about his new film Patience, which explores the work of author W.G. Sebald and his book Rings of Saturn:

There is one reference in an essay he wrote about Kings of the Road by Wim Wenders. He opens the essay with an interesting recollection of watching the film. He’s that generation; he’s absolutely of Wenders’ generation. Once you know that, you can feel the similarities between Wenders and Sebald, but Sebald willfully took himself away from that culture. I think of Sebald more as a photographer. There’s a quote I read somewhere where says he wasn’t very interested in school and he spent most of his time in the darkroom of the school’s photography lab. And there is something—I’m not sure if I’ve made this up or imagined it—about the way images work in his book: it feels to me like a black-and-white print developed under a red light, like it comes up out of whiteness, and if you leave it there it will black out in the tray.

Baggage — David Cronenberg talks to FilmComment  about A Dangerous Method, his film on Freud, Jung and Sabina Spielrein:

I don’t care what baggage people think I will bring to the movie. I don’t have that baggage. Once I decide on a project, I am honorable about how I treat it. I am not trying to put some false Cronenbergian imprint on it. Let’s just do the movie. Part of the project was the resurrection of the people and the era. That means it has to be as accurate as possible. I want the people to be as alive as they can be. I want to be able to smell them and hear them in a way that we can’t. It’s a matter of affection. I would like to have known them. That’s the only agenda I have—to honor the accuracy of these people and what they said.

And on the subject of Freud… Comic book creators discuss how mainstream comics portray women and how things can be improved at Comics Alliance. An interesting read.

And finally…

SUPERTYPE! — A collection of vintage comic book mastheads from the man who brought you 4CP and Comic Book Cartography (via Subtraction).

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Published September 9, 2011

Something for the Weekend

The Technological Sublime — Rick Poyner on the science fiction artist Chris Foss and Hardware, a new book collecting his work, at Design Observer:

These visionary images have a stillness, a control of atmosphere and a mood of mystery and wonder, even when something huge, alien, imponderable and beyond our terrestrial grasp is taking place. Foss loves the paintings of J.M.W. Turner and his finest pictures, often from the 1970s, seem as much concerned with ambience and painterly effect — they are cosmic cousins of Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed, at least in spirit — as with the engineering of the vast structures they depict. They are also early visual encapsulations of what came to be known in the 1990s as the technological sublime. The vertiginous sense of awe, wonder, poetry and terror that people experienced in nature, when opening their senses to the sky, mountains, forests, rivers or oceans, could now be felt when contemplating the frightening immensity of a machine’s harnessed power, the magical effectiveness of electricity, or the boundless matrix of digital connection.

(Pictured above: Chris Foss, The Bloodstar Conspiracy by Stephen Goldin and E. E. “Doc” Smith, Panther, 1978)

Those Who Can… — Eric Olsen, journalist, editor and co-author of We Wanted To Be Writers, discusses writing and picks 5 books on the subject:

There are always ways that you can help a writer along. You’re not going to take a mediocre writer and turn him or her into a great writer, and there are also some things that can’t be taught, like the basic desire to be a writer. That seems to be a given. You’re not going to make someone want to be a writer. Sometimes what goes on in a writing workshop is that you convince the writer that he doesn’t want to be a writer. That is a kind of teaching too…

 The Source Code of Our Being — Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and C, on the influence of Freud:

As a writer, I’m in love with Freud. I can’t imagine any serious writer not being. Freud, ultimately, concerned himself not with the mind, nor with the individual, but with the question of meaning’s emergence in the world, and of the mechanisms through which this emergence takes place. What, according to him, are these mechanisms? Why, they’re substitution and elision, condensation and displacement, metaphor, metonymy — in short, the very mechanisms at work in a poem or a novel. For Freud, if you want to understand mental and social life you don’t take a biopsy of a murderer’s brain or observe groups of people in a room: you study Antigone and Hamlet. That’s why his case-histories read like Gothic novels. It’s why his best patients are fictional characters like Jensen’s Norbert and Goethe’s Werther. And it’s why his preferred model for memory is a mystic writing pad.

And finally…

A short film homage to author Jorge Luis Borges by Ian Ruschel:

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