The Enigma of Russian Dada
If art is about the fostering and maintenance of traditions, then the Russians were proposing a kind of anti-art. An exploration of the exhibition catalog, Russian Dada 1914-1924.
Chadwick Jenkins
Chadwick lives in New York City and teaches Music History and Theory at The City College of New York. He earned his doctorate in Musicology at Columbia University. He has given papers on topics ranging from 12th Century lament to Duke Ellington and early radio to the use of Wagner's music in Bugs Bunny cartoons. He has published in scholarly journals on the music of John Cage, Richard Strauss, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He has taught courses on music history, the history of rock, and the history of jazz at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Columbia University.
Mangled Body and Depraved Soul: On the Corporeal and the Spiritual in the Works of Edgar Allan Poe
The soul projects meaning onto a world that resists it. This is the plight of existence for Edgar Allan Poe.
Engaging Flow: On Ruttmann’s ‘Berlin, Symphony of a Great City’
One way to understand the form of Walther Ruttmann's Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, is to see it as producing states of flow that reinforce a flat ontology among humans, animals, machines, buildings, bodies of water, etc.
Beneath Buñuel: On ‘A Woman without Love’
Where, in A Woman without Love is the imagination, wit, and brilliance one expects of Buñuel?
Chronicling the Non-Event: Anton Chekhov and the Short Story
Chekhov is engaging with an underlying, rumbling, non-event that pervades life and yet is nearly always blithely ignored. His stories move us in their ability to excavate this subterranean, haunting static that informs all experience.
The Improbability of Communication in ‘The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez’
The inability to communicate truthfully and accurately runs like a red thread through the course of Robert M. Young's western, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez.
Slouching Toward Redemption: Ernst Lubitsch’s ‘Heaven Can Wait’
There's a rotten core at the center of Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait. No matter how engaging I find Haskell and Sariss's enchantment with the film, I cannot accede to their critical adulation of it and of Henry.
At the Crossroads of Pity and Revolt: Intensity and Time in Lino Brocka’s ‘Manila in the Claws of Light’
Lino Brocka's Manila in the Claws of Light seethes with rage against colonial oppression without ever becoming overt agitprop.
The Dialectic of the Freak: On John Waters’ ‘Female Trouble’
In John Waters' work, poor taste is a manner of refinement that attains a strange air of considered sophistication and knowing advertency.
The Fog of the Interstitial: Existential Disaffection in Alea’s ‘Memories of Underdevelopment’
In Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment the protagonist is too estranged from his country to belong, doomed to existential disaffection
On Susan Seidelman’s Film of Aimless Desire, ‘Smithereens’
The experiences you have in NYC are not the best experiences to be had, the sex you have is not the best sex, the friends you make are not the best of all possible friends—but they ought to be.