School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications

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Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    Carpaccio, Saint Stephen, and the topography of Jerusalem
    Marshall, David R. ( 1984)
    Those buildings and topographical motifs in Jerusalem represented by Carpaccio in his Saint Stephen cycle are discussed, as are the ways in which they were represented by artists before Carpaccio. It can be deduced that Carpaccio's sole source for his renderings was in the woodcuts by Reuwich in the 1486 book by Breydenbach on the Holy Land. Suggestions of other sources and of a visit by Carpaccio may be discarded. Conclusions can be drawn about Carpaccio's approach to the representation of real landscape.
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    Muscles, hybrids and new bad futures
    NDALIANIS, ANGELA ( 1994)
    Since Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone made their respective debuts onto the cinematic screen the muscle phenomenon has become a dominant factor in the cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. Muscle, in all its hard and sweaty glory, has found a market especially in the big budget extravaganzas whose narratives centre around the spectacle of the built bodies of male stars such as Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Lundgren, Van Damme, Snipes and Seagal, and the more padded forms of actors such as Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson. This new brand of cinema whilst harking back in part to an American tradition of genre cinema (the Western, Detective films, War Films etc.) appears to owe more to genres that emerged outside America: the Italian `gladiator' pictures of the 1950s and 1960s which retold the adventures of Hercules and other mythic heroes via the forms of bodybuilding stars such as Steve Reeves and Reg Park; and the martial arts action films popularized by Hong Kong Cinema and which found a very profitable market in the West ‐ and which also saw the migration of the genre into American cinema starring a series of martial arts experts including Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee and Jean‐Claude van Damme. Both genres revealed an unabashed display of the spectacle of action and the spectacle of the male body in action. The camera found any excuse to unapolegetically caress the bodies of the stars with pans, tracks and close‐ups of various fragmented body parts in ways that always denoted strength, agility and power.
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    Muscle, excess and rupture: female bodybuilding and gender construction
    NDALIANIS, ANGELA ( 1995-02)
    In recent years bodybuilding culture has provided the backdrop to a series of debates centering around issues surrounding representations of gender and in particular the potential inherent in bodybuilding bodies to rupture preconceived notions regarding 'norms' of masculinity and femininity; for the meticulously controlled, predetermined construction and definition of mass and muscle on the bodybuilding figure has shifted the body from an arena dominated by assumptions centering around the natural to a sphere which exposes the body itself - and with it the power structures that impose meaning onto it - as informed by culture. The bodybuilding physique reveals the body as a socially determined construct, or to cite Kuhn, with the willed construction of bodies in bodybuilding, 'nature becomes culture'. (Kuhn 1988, 5) The question of marketability has, over the years, emerged as a key concern in bodybuilding. Of all sports, due to its tendency towards things excessive, bodybuilding tends to stand outside the mainstream appealing primarily to a select, cult following. There have been some exceptions of bodybuilders who successfully escaped the margins and entered mainstream culture, the most successful being Arnold Schwarzenegger (seven time Mr. Olympia) who opened the doors to big-time muscle in action cinema. More recently, female muscle has also started to make itself felt in the popular sphere, with Cory Everson (six time winner of the Ms. Olympia) appearing in films such as Double Impact alongside Jean Claude van Damme, and professional bodybuilders Raye Hollitt, Shelley Beattie and Tonya Knight starring in the successful U.S. television show American Gladiators. Despite breaking through to mainstream culture, however, these bodybuilders have served as examples of 'freaks' in a world of 'norms'; they signal a moment of excess allowed to seep through into the dominant, but these moments are always about controlled forms of excess - they, in a sense, constitute an orderly disruption.
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    Pornography and pleasure: the female spectator
    CREED, BARBARA ( 1982)
    In this paper, I wish to make some comments on the pornographic film text and the question of pleasure for the female viewer. My starting point is The Story of O, a film which is ‘about’ sado-masochistic relationships but I shall also refer to Emmanuelle, The Anti-Virgin, which is part II of the Emmanuelle trilogy, a group of films which have been more widely viewed that any other recent soft-porn products.
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    Style, spectacle, excess and The bold and the beautiful
    NDALIANIS, ANGELA ( 1994)
    Much of the writing on daytime soap opera has focused on the genre's melodramatic form with particular emphasis being placed on the idea of excess: the excess of emotion, narrative form and style. John Fiske, among others, has argued that the hyperbolic excess that dominates the genre has the potential for opening up numerous and complex interpretative positions that reject the 'singular' meanings favoured by the classic realist text that has dominated Hollywood cinema. Among the American soap operas currently broadcast on Australian daytime television , 'The Bold and the Beautiful' epitomises the genre's capacity for producing a form that tests the boundaries, not only of the classical narrative, but of the soap form itself.
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    Makhzan and Siba in Morocco: an examination of early modern attitudes
    Pennell, C. R. (Middle East & North African Studies Press (MENAS), 1991)
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    Political loyalty and the Central Government in pre-colonial Libya
    Pennell, C. R. (Middle East & North African Studies Press (MENAS), 1982)
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    The devil (as I'me sure hee will) take 'um': a seventeenth century English consul and his views of Tripoli
    Pennell, Richard (Editions Du Centre National De La Recherche Scientlfiqu, 1991)
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    A country with a government and a flag: the Rif War in Morocco, 1921-1926
    Pennell, C. R. (Middle East & North African Studies Press Ltd., 1986)
    The Rif War, which took place in Northern Morocco between 1921 and 1926 and which almost shattered Spain's protectorate there, as well as threatening France's hold over the rest of Morocco, is, perhaps the most important anti-colonial struggle of the pre-World War II era. Not only did it lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of Spanish soldiers - 10,000 of them in one battle alone in 1921 - but it also led indirectly to the Spanish Civil War and spurred on the nascent nationalist cause in Morocco itself. Yet the events of the war and the personalities of its leading protagonists, at least on the Moroccan side, are curiously little known. nor is the innovative nature of their convictions fully understood.