(Download) "From the Black Death to AIDS: Cinematic Visions and Community in Book of Days (Critical Essay)" by Extrapolation " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: From the Black Death to AIDS: Cinematic Visions and Community in Book of Days (Critical Essay)
- Author : Extrapolation
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 189 KB
Description
Conceived and directed by Meredith Monk, Book of Days (1988: Tatge/Lasseur Productions and The House Foundation for the Arts) represents "a film about time" (Exploration), notably a cinematic depiction of "today [as] seen through the Middle Ages" (Interview). Filmed both in New York City and in Cordes, a French town reflecting its rich medieval coloring and heritage, Days is set in the 1348-50 age of the Black Death, "a time of upheaval, plague,... and premonitions of spiritual apocalypse" (Exploration). (1) Such a period is juxtaposed in Days with contemporary anxieties--"the possibility of nuclear destruction,... the alienation ... of the individual within the community" (Exploration) (2) as well as "the AIDS pandemic ... and modern genocide" (Harty, Reel 37). Since Monk believes that black and white imagery evokes "a more haunting quality ... a newsreel kind of quality" (Interview), the medieval town sequences are shot in black and white, thereby shaping the idea of the past's alterity. (3) Contemporary settings (usually color photos of New York City residents and streets), however, highlight at once the links and "chasms between the past and the present" (Sheehan 53). At times, the separation between the medieval and the twentieth-century worlds is so tenuous that "words and objects ... drop from one to the other [era], and repetitions or the occasional slight dislocation between what we see and what we hear impart a surreal shimmer to everything" (Jowitt 83). Furthermore, such planes of time always "overlap as a modern-day (offscreen) voice" (Menell 18) poses questions to the medieval townsfolk "as if the Middle Ages were being recorded by a television-oriented society" (Exploration). (4) Although the twentieth-century interviewers clearly probe the psyches of both "modern inquisitors" (Lynch 43) and medieval figures, the contemporary reporters often pose queries or employ language that bewilders the townspeople (Jowitt 83).