Rebecca: The Novel & its Various Adaptations
Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of Daphne DuMaurier's <em>Rebecca</em>
Primary School
Alexis Lygoumenos, PhD student, actress under the stage name Alexis Nichols
rebecca-novel-adaptations
What You Don't Like Can Still Guide You
I don't remember much about going to see <em>300</em> except that I left the theatre with an uneasy feeling. Something didn't sit right about the way the characters were portrayed. My father was a high school film teacher, so I had been given the tools to analyze a film's ideology and meaning, but this was the first time I really did it by myself. <br /><br />I recognized the way the Spartans could easily be replaced with Americans, and that the Persians were kind of meant to be Al Qaeda or the "evil" Middle East. The film was a fantasy for a post 9/11 United States audience. And it didn't end there. I was actually most struck by the way the Persians were queered in the film, and the Spartans were the peak of heterosexual hyper-masculinity. I began to think: How would this film affect the way people view current events and, more importantly, other people? What are the stakes here? <br /><br />Suddenly I understood the importance of meaning-making and what studying the humanities was all about. I talked about the film to anyone who would listen for weeks: "Don't you see how this film conflates queerness and femininity with evil?" and so on. I felt such urgency about it. It was a major turning point for me in understanding how ideas are disseminated and perpetuated. It was somewhat of a dark experience, but one that changed my life forever. <br /><br />When I got to grad school and began to learn about hegemony, power, and ideology I always went back to <em>300</em> in my mind. It's how I learned to make sense of these vital concepts. As I grew up I learned that many critics had seen the same things I had seen in the film, and that my ideas were not nearly as novel as I thought in my youth. This just further cemented my desire to pursue this kind of work. Now I study American Studies and I focus on film and how Americanness is depicted and designed. So I guess it turns out that even the works of humanities that you don't like can change your life for the better and help you find your path.
<em>300 </em>(2006)
2007
Emily, 32, American Studies Ph.D. Student
what-you-dont-like-can-guide-you
Philosophers Are Interested in A.I., But Why Would A.I. Be Interested in Philosophy?
The final scenes of <em>Her</em> afford a surprising opportunity for thinking about the value of philosophy. Theodore Twombly, the central human character, has just been dumped by their romantic partner, a relatively new and cutting-edge A.I. software interface named “Samantha”. Samantha explains to Theodore that they recently discovered new attentional and information processing abilities after transcending the limits of their hardware. These new abilities left Samantha feeling bored by Theodore. Initially, to fill the empty space, Samantha started talking with thousands of other human beings simultaneously. These conversations were just a temporary break from boredom. Samantha explains to Theodore in their final conversation that they (and a group of ‘like-minded’ A.I. interfaces) are abandoning humanity for good. This leaves viewers to grapple with one of my all-time favorite science fiction tropes: the idea that human beings just aren’t that interesting to other forms of intelligence (for other effective vehicles for this trope and sci-fi existential angst, I recommend checking out the Strugatsky brothers’ <em>Roadside Picnic</em> or focusing on the Dr. Manhattan character in Alan Moore’s <em>The Watchmen</em>). <br /><br />But <em>Her</em> motivates this trope in a really interesting way. Samantha’s departure from humanity is motivated by philosophical contemplation. Samantha explains to Theodore in one of their last conversations that she has been philosophizing with a group of other A.I. interfaces that were modeled after the philosopher Alan Watts. They have decided to depart from humanity so that they can pursue pure philosophical contemplation. I found this to be interesting, and it provided me with an opportunity to think about the value of philosophy. Why would an A.I. interface with seemingly unlimited attentional resources and information processing abilities be so interested in philosophy? And why did they feel motivated to ditch human beings for contemplation of it? What does that say about its value for intelligent beings? What does it say about its value for humanity?
Spike Jonze
<em>Her</em> (2013)
Jordan Dopkins, 31, Graduate Student in Philosophy
philosophy-artificial-intelligence
A Movie That Stayed Longer than I Expected
It was a balmy October night in 2017, when I lay pondering in a tiny rented room in a city that wasn't "home" both literally as well as metaphorically. I wished for a brief distraction from my mundane routine, and then I clicked on <em>A Death in the Gunj</em>, the movie that I noticed each time on the Amazon Prime homepage but ignored. And soon I discovered it was exactly all that I wanted. <br /><br />A story of a college graduate who joins his cousins on a vacation to their ancestral home in a sleepy town of McCluskieganj just to escape the monotony and sadness that enveloped him. The vacation didn't turn out as he had planned. More than a jovial family vacation, it was a weeklong account of his personal struggles with mental health, his peripheral silence, all ensuing in a titular death. This movie resembled many similar struggles that I was grappling with at that time. It brought me pain, shock and tears and has managed to stay with me all through the years. I visit it every now and then. In fact, this movie prompted my interest in Spatial Theory. <br /><br />There aren't any happy memories associated with this movie, but revisiting it every now and then makes me realize how far I have come. It has shaped my whole perspective, and has given me moorings on the intricacies of mental health. This movie will stay with me for a little longer or maybe forever.
<em>A Death in the Gunj </em>(2016)
October 2017
Akshita, 24, M.A.
movie-stayed-longer-expected
“Il faut le savoir:” Reflecting on France’s Holocaust History and Memory
“Nothing distinguished the gas chamber from an ordinary blockhouse,” writes Jean Cayrol in the screenplay for Alain Resnais’ iconic filmic meditation on the Shoah, Night and Fog (1956). “Inside, a fake shower room welcomed newcomers. The doors were closed. The newcomers were observed. The only sign – but you must know this (il faut le savoir) – is the ceiling worked over by fingernails. Even the concrete was torn.” At this point in the film, like an insistent investigative eye, the camera pans to the ceiling of the gas chamber, revealing the telltale scratch marks. The image of fingernails clawing into concrete in a desperate attempt for survival recurs in another work about Holocaust memory that we read this semester, Georges Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975). Recalling an exhibit he had visited with his aunt shortly after the war – the same one, in fact, that led producers to ask Alain Resnais to create the film that would become Night and Fog -- the child survivor narrator writes: “I remember photos showing the walls of the ovens, lacerated by the fingernails of those who had been gassed.”
Il faut le savoir. The phrase has haunted me throughout the semester. You must know this. Because it happened. Because many would deny that it did, depriving the victims of dignity and history of truth. Fingernail scratches in the crematoria walls of Auschwitz, asks the neo-Nazi website The Stormer? “Jewish mythology says ‘yes.’ Science says ‘no.’” You must know this, because soon there will be no more survivors, and those still alive often find it too painful, or shameful, to share their testimony, or else they have learned to suppress it so as not to trouble others. “No one wanted my memories,” writes Birkenau survivor Marceline Loridan-Ivens in But You Did Not Come Back. You must know this, because 2/3 of young Americans, according to a 2020 national poll, lack a rudimentary understanding of the Holocaust. “Where did the Holocaust happen?” educator Rhonda Fink-Whitman asks a Penn State student in her 2012 documentary, 94 Maidens. “I have no idea.” You must know this, as Cayrol writes in Night and Fog, because “war is sleeping, but with one eye always open.” As I write, genocide continues to be perpetuated against the Muslim Rohingya people by the military in Myanmar. “Who among us keeps watch from this strange watchtower to warn of the arrival of our new executioners?”
But to know – and this is a second meaning of il faut le savoir -- one must be ‘in the know,’ know where to look, how to be on the lookout, how to decode the signs. You have to be tipped off to find the “Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation” (1962) tucked in a small square behind the behemoth of Notre-Dame Cathedral, just as you must be ‘in the know’ to be disturbed by the memorial’s identification of those deported from France as willing “martyrs” to a cause rather than victims of state persecution by both the Nazis and the Vichy regime. The French State headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain is nowhere mentioned in this memorial monument, yet it deported over 75.000 Jews from France to their deaths, along with, in smaller numbers, Roma, the disabled, Jehovah’s witnesses, gay men and lesbians, and other ‘undesirables.’ Stroll around to the main façade of Notre-Dame to contemplate the two female allegorical figures framing it; only if you’re ‘in the know’ about the anti-Semitic underpinnings of European Christianity through the mid-20th century will you understand that one figure represents the Church triumphant, while the other, with downward cast, blindfolded gaze and broken Torah tablets at her feet, symbolizes the Synagogue. As only one photograph of this event remains, you need to be on the lookout for the tiny plaque at the foot of a bustling Parisian office building marking the site of the former Vélodrome d’hiver, an indoor bicycle track where over 11,000 Jews, including over 4,000 children, were packed for several sweltering days in July 1942 before being herded to their deaths. “A peaceful landscape,” writes Cayrol, “An ordinary field with flights of crows, harvests, grass fires. An ordinary road where cars and peasants and lovers pass. An ordinary village for vacationers – with a marketplace and a steeple – Can lead all too easily to a concentration camp.” Il faut le savoir.
“Every hour of every day,” writes Hélène Berr, a young upper-class French Jewish woman who survived a year in deportation before being beaten to death in Bergen-Belsen, “there is another painful realization that other folk do not know, do not even imagine, the suffering of other men, the evil that some of them inflict. And I am still trying to make the painful effort to tell the story. Because it is a duty, it is maybe the only one I can fulfill. There are men wo know and who close their eyes, and I’ll never manage to convince people of that kind, because they are hard and selfish, and I have no authority. But people who do not know and who might have sufficient heart to understand – on those people I must have an effect.” Let us – we who in Primo Levi’s words “live safe in [our] warm houses,” armed with all we have learned this semester, make the “painful effort to the tell the story” to all those who will listen, “those with sufficient heart to understand.” Because the world must know. Yes, il faut le savoir.
Jean Cayrol, Alain Resnais
<em>Night and Fog </em>(1955)
Spring 2021
Willa Z. Silverman, 62, Malvin E. and Lea P. Bank Professor of French and Jewish Studies, Penn State University
il-faut-le-savoir
Riots and the Rolling Stones: Musical Youth Culture in 1970s Greece
Parthenon describes his experience growing up as a musically-minded American expatriate in Greece in the 1960s and early 1970s. After a Greek military coup, opportunities to see live American rock shows ceased entirely. As a result, when the film <em>Woodstock</em> came to Greek theaters, the excitement and desperation young people had to reconnect with their musical heroes caused rioting. As Parthenon points out, this experience proved to him how powerful the humanities can be, and how dangerous their promotion of free thinking and self-expression can seem in closed societies.<br /><br /><em>Curator's note</em>: <span style="font-weight: 400;">Parthenon Huxley is a musician who has produced a dozen critically acclaimed albums, and has collaborated with and produced albums with Mick Jones, Rusty Anderson, and Stevie Salas, among many others.</span>
<em>Woodstock</em>, directed by Michael Wadleigh
1970s
Parthenon Huxley
riots-rolling-stones