Soft images of pubescent women scaling the dizzy heights of a massive phallic rock in turn-of-the-century rural Victoria, and young men matching physical prowess in the indomitable Western Australian desert as World War I rages in Europe, provide foci for two of Peter Weir's most successful early films, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Gallipoli (1981). In both these films the physical landscape is simultaneously integrated with and contrasted to the passions of young men and women. The result is an aesthetic that takes the viewer beyond the immediate narrative to a place where masculinity and femininity find expression. In this paper, transactional and psychoanalytic perspectives are used to interrogate the gender images which are portrayed in both these movies, linking them to some concepts which find currency in ecofeminism. The concern is with the individual struggle between the powerful, complex, and yet less-than-rational forces that are integral to the nature of our individual beings and the rational nature of prevailing societal values that supposedly provide us with guidance. A dynamic theory of contemporary film is implicit in our discussion of “images in motion over time through space with sequence”. These elements—along with an overlay of shape, size, scale, color, sound, and light—arc the cues that provide meaning for Weir's portrayal of wo/man-in-environmcnt relations. Suggested in this paper is a broader narrative which speaks to a postmodern sexual order and its representations in social theory and contemporary cinema. Crucial questions are raised regarding the ways that cultural identity is grounded in class and gender.
The purpose of this research is to construct a typology that characterizes the information‐acquisition process as it occurs in residential mobility and to use this structure in an analysis of information flows among black intra‐urban migrants. The model is comprised of the intent (intentional and unintentional) and mode (experiential and nonexperiential) of the household's information‐acquisition process. The resulting four‐celled typology is used as a basis for analyzing the residential search behavior of a sample of black migrants in Milwaukee. Wisconsin.
This essay explores the conceptual limitations within FredricJameson's notion of the geopolitical aesthetic through an analysis of Jameson's now classic reading of The Perfumed Nightmare; this film is central to his concept of the utopic character of film more generally and, moreover, to his argument on the embeddedness of Third World representations within a global, capitalist system. We suggest that, although Jameson acknowledges the underlying constructed and relational character of ontological categories such as film (despite their reification under capitalism), his theory of historical materialism demands that they also be understood as formed with regard to a socio-economic totality. And, because the recognition of a totality requires a master narrative within which all can be understood and framed within a logic of equivalence, Jameson must by default conceive of epistemology as fundamentally divided between a true and a false consciousness. Taking our own cue from recent developments in anti-essentialist thought, we conceive of such cultural forms as the temporarily fixed embodiment of broader-scale discourses that continually construct and deconstruct the world as we know it, including our understandings of the 'real' as well as the 'economic', the 'political' and the 'cultural'. In our own re-imagining of The Perfumed Nightmare, we provide a partial response to this, noting how these realms are constituted from the temporary 'fixing' of a series of people-and place-based identities, such as those constituted under the rubric
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