Lorna's Silence and Levinas's ethical alternative: form and viewer in the Dardenne Brothers
This paper explores the possibilities of Emmanuel Levinas's philosophical description of the ethical life for understanding the experience of viewing a film, and this with two related goals in mind. The first is to provide a sustained Levinasian reading of the Dardenne Brothers' Lorna's Silence as an alternative to political or traditionally ethical approaches. This is necessary because the sensuous quality of Lorna's moral conversion is best understood through a set of metaphors used by Levinas to describe his ‘pre-ontological’ ethical philosophy: metaphors of the caress, the feminine and maternity. A second goal is to account for how this film's formal qualities create an encounter between viewer and film that echoes Lorna's encounters in the fictional world. To this end, the paper squares Levinasian ethics with André Bazin's realism by trimming from Bazin's work the notion of a gathered, individual subjectivity and emphasizing themes of encounter and dislocation. Lorna's Silence gives a fresh illustration of the cinema's power to encourage viewers to strive toward an altruistic notion of human relations.
To be or not to be is not the question — On Beckett's Film
I Samuel Beckett wrote just once for the cinema. Film was written in 1963 and first shown publicly in 1965, forty years ago (Beckett 1986, 321–334). Film was shot in New York in 1964, with the opening external shots in Lower Manhattan close to Brooklyn Bridge and the rest in Greenwich Village, and it was the occasion of Beckett’s one and only trip to the United States. The movie was the idea of Barney Rosset, Beckett’s New York publisher and legendary editor of the Grove Press in its long heyday from the 1950s to the 1970s. Film was the movie debut of Alan Schneider, Beckett’s most trusted, longserving and long-suffering theatre director in the United States. It stars Buster Keaton in one of his last movie appearances – he made several B-movie beach movies before his death in February 1966. Beckett said of Keaton that ‘he had a poker mind as well as a poker face’ and their relationship did not get off to a good start. Schneider tells a story of their first meeting in Keaton’s hotel room, where Beckett awkwardly tried to engage in conversation with Keaton while the latter replied in monosyllables, drank a beer and watched the baseball game on TV. Beckett was a huge sports fan and considerable sportsman himself – the only winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature to be mentioned in Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanack, playing first-class cricket for Trinity College Dublin – and went to see the New York Mets at Shea Stadium during his trip to New York and apparently thoroughly enjoyed the game. A little sadly perhaps, Keaton was the fourth
Snapshots of the Balkans through ethnographic investigation of the linguistic landscape
This paper investigates the linguistic landscape of Dubrovnik and Kotor on the Southeastern Adriatic coast, and Mytilene in the north Aegean attempting a theorization of its findings at the intersection of (socio)linguistics, ethnography, and semiotics, which has gained ground as the platform of choice in linguistic landscape (LL) research. I argue that the influx of both tourists and refugees, despite the obvious differences between the two groups, has had radical consequences for the LL which have so far attracted virtually no attention in the relevant literature. And yet, tourism and the arrival of new populations have considerable and lasting effects on the LL which can only be adequately investigated by systematic ethnographic studies of the semiotic means employed in inscribing it. Nevertheless, ethnography, as a methodological sociolinguistic tool, cannot substitute or supersede cognitive aspects of language. If doing LL research means doing semiotic landscape research, then we also have to consider semiosis and higher-order indexicality qua categorization. I understand ethnographic LL research as contributing to a better comprehension of the dynamic indexical relation between language and physical space (turned into place through human agency). Just as a certain accent and particular morphosyntactic choices may index the place of origin of a speaker, a specific LL may index populations and their socioeconomic relations at a certain historical moment. Focusing on these dynamic indexical relations may have far-reaching consequences for superdiversity as a way of making sense of language-in-society.