UDM Horror Cinema

This is the tumblr site for English 3750: Pyschological Horror Cinema at the University of Detroit Mercy

Post #28

“If I didn’t already know that the predatory smile in this still image belonged to Requiem’s Marion Silver, would I be able to place the close-up within its proper film? The facial expression, with its defiant glare, could suggest Sarah Williams from Waking the Dead. The dark makeup and neglected un-dyed roots could belong to troubled Kathy from House of Sand & Fog. Perhaps this image even betrays Jennifer Connelly herself, flashing an unflattering smile during some 1990’s restaurant interview. How do we isolate this still photograph within a sea of images that contains the fictional, the real, and the ubiquitous in-between? Or, to give the question a more interesting formulation, how can the single image reveal its ties and bonds to all the others?”

28. A remarkable video essay contribution by Alla Gadassik, a PhD student in the Screen Cultures Program at Northwestern University (Chicago).

Post #27

“Here I want to consider Thomas Elsaesser’s writings on fascism. Elsaesser asserts that the question that fascism raises today in our media reality, is its ability to create a public sphere based upon an overemphasis on visual extravaganza. Elsaesser explains that what made fascism more attractive was its alignment with mass entertainment and the introduction of a mise-en-scene aesthetics into politics… . In this way, fascism managed to transform totalitarian power into a spectacle to be consumed by the masses.”

27. Angelos Koutsourakis, of the University of Sussex, decodes Requiem’s suspicion of the fascist elements of television, as signified by a frame from minute # 27.

Post #25

“Requiem’s overnight and permanent absorption by mainstream culture—of which actual addicts form only a small part—suggests a kind of solubility with popular thought, a lack of real resistance or required effort. In fact, by reducing addiction to it effects (mirrored in the film by visual effects), Requiem actually makes the horrors of addiction easily digestible a and even safe.”

25. At the bell-rope, Dan Wang explores the myth of Requiem as an extreme film.

Post #23

“The sound itself is a character. There’s no 4/4 time in this movie. It comes and goes at irregular intervals  … the sound has a type of irregular symmetry that we’re not used to.”

23. The radically decentered sound of Requiem, as explored in an auditory essay by Adam Bradley of the University of Waterloo.

Post #22

“What we’re really seeing when we watch Requiem for a Dream is an iteration of Hell on Earth—a series of images that transform into the thing they represent.”

22. Anthony Aceti on how Requiem asks so much from us as viewers. And for what in return?

Post #21

“The still image contains binary information that is encoded in the computer. The processor interprets the flow of data and produces a pixel distribution that corresponds to the image. Through cognitive protocols, the computer translates the binary information into a matrix of pixels, which are precisely filtered depending on a voltage assigned to the pixel by a processor.”

21. The strange and true beauty of image sources at the binary level, by University of Waterloo PhD student Jessica Antonio Lomanowski.

Post #19

“My general feeling was that Requiem for a Dream, in accordance with its title, works very much like a piece of dramatic classical music, like an opera. Not only because its soundtrack is one of its best assets, but because it paints with such broad strokes, has such a clear-cut, symbol-laden three-act structure (Summer, Fall, Winter) and lets you expect early on that everyone will end up in a most tragic finale.”

19. Alex Gajic reassesses the film—and himself—ten years later.

Post #18

“This movie had such a lasting, profound impact on me that watching it now is like going through my adolescent love letters. It cuts too close, and brings me back to a time when I was a deeply unserious person who wanted desperately to be taken seriously.”

18. Writer John Lingan on the weird durability of Requiem and how its adolescent aspirations continue to be our own.

Post #17

“At age twenty-four, Ian Curtis finds his way out —ends it with the jolt of a rope—and Anton Corbjin makes ‘Atmosphere’ his requiem. In Requiem for a Dream Aronofsky trades punk culture for junk culture.”

#17 Constantine Verevis, of Film and Television Studies at Monash University in Australia, opens up an image from Requiem with a little help from Joy Division and Giles Deleuze. 

Post #15

“I would like to offer something more than to continue analyzing this frame. The philosopher Jacques Ranciere would contend that what counts is how we open up a space for one to construct their own poem, or their own film, in reaction to an image. After the creative process come the words. I aim to explore the springboard-like effect of this image by producing my own work in response to this frame.”

#15 Allister Gall, a PhD student in film at the University of Plymouth in the UK and founder of IMPERFECT CINEMA, offers an unexpected, compelling creative-critical response to the image in the form of a screenplay sequence and a critical framework.

Post #14

“This particular frame made curious—not so much by what’s missing as by what’s replaced it—a full third of the frame lost to nothing—obscured, negated by the back side, dark side, of a light—a frame INTERRUPTED—incomplete—unfinished …”

#14 Filmmaker and artist DOUG MAGNUSON of the PYRAMID BEACH ROADHOUSE offers a startling dark-dreamed re-framing of the film.

Post #12

“The innocence and freedom of the rooftop, where the lovers fly paper airplanes and talk like shy school children … gives way to the confined space of the elevator, where animal lust takes over and we spy on them through a security camera, a device intended to identify transgressors, trespassers and lawbreakers.”

#12 James McNally of Toronto Screen Shots, on the ever-darkening tone of Requeim.

Post #11

“Everything will change

toward the pale sea

no time no time new time

nothing will ever change

each time is a new time

everything will change”

#11 Poet, artist, and editor Rupert Loydell offers the first poem for the project, and cartwheels it into beauty.