Browse results
Abstract
The article discusses the first attempts of Soviet culture to produce a hybrid genre of film opera in the mid-1930s. It traces the artistic background of Ukrainian sculptor and filmmaker Ivan Kavaleridze who was chosen to pioneer the new genre, as well as the complex national dynamic between Russian and non-Russian Soviet republics amidst the stabilization of Socialist Realist conventions and the launch of the anti-formalist campaign in the ussr. Finally, it addresses the issues of russification, exoticization and alienation of Ukrainian film culture of the time.
Abstract
In the early phases of the modern study of Buddhism, it was widely assumed that the Buddhist canon preserved in the Pali language by the Theravāda tradition of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia represented the only original record of the “words of the Buddha” (buddha-vacana). But the notion of Pali primacy has been steadily eroded by discoveries of vast numbers of early Buddhist manuscripts in the formerly Buddhist regions of northwestern India and adjoining countries and in Central Asia. These discoveries have provided ample evidence of the existence in antiquity of voluminous bodies of Buddhist literature in Sanskrit and Gandhari that are parallel to and as historically valid as the Pali versions. They have shifted the perception of Buddhism away from a linear model and toward a wider understanding of the many Buddhisms that coexisted in antiquity. This article surveys some of the major discoveries of Buddhist manuscripts and summarizes the new perspectives that they have engendered.
Abstract
In the film history of the Ukrainian ssr, the Thaw is regarded as the era of the rebirth of a national Ukrainian cinema. Both films celebrating regional diversity and films merely drawing on local crews and infrastructure are said to have contributed to a national film culture. I look at three distinct approaches to the Soviet concept of multinationality to show that the rebirth of a national cinema was characterized by approaches that did not claim a distinct national identity for Ukraine. Instead, directors facing regional diversity either transcended Ukraine’s cultural environment (through internationalism), undercut it (through what I call regional culturalism), or ignored it altogether (through cosmopolitanism). With the help of this typology, I point to the complex cultural politics of the time. The Soviet Ukrainian films I discuss exemplarily were not part of a common national project at the time, though they may have contributed to it as time passed.
Abstract
Adopting as theoretical framework Edmund Husserl’s ideas on memory and phantasms and the Derridean notion of ‘hauntology’, this article focuses on the spectral protagonist of Samuel Beckett’s “The Calmative” and on the tangle of memories he recounts from his bed of frozen stone. Resembling Dante’s pilgrimage in the underworld and the excruciating experience of soldiers in trenches, this novella presents a ghostly narrator that, persecuted by the rotting of his corpse and by the trauma of memory, is condemned to an indefinable state of deathlessness-in-death, in which he can only ‘revive’ the everlasting reminiscence of his own demise.
Abstract
Many Jewish communities around the world have maintained a special site, known as a genizah, for discarding written materials. This article focuses on the genizah of the town of Safed in the Galilee. At the end of the sixteenth century, the Safed Genizah preserved Hebrew manuscripts written by Ḥayyim Vital (d. 1620), foremost student of the influential kabbalist Yitsḥaḳ Luria (d. 1572). These manuscripts were excavated and edited in the mid-seventeenth century and became authoritative texts in the history of Jewish esotericism. My study describes Vital’s burial of his manuscripts and the editorial efforts of the Jewish scholars who followed him, particularly Avraham Azulai (d. 1643) in Hebron and Ya‘akov Tsemaḥ (d. 1666) and his fellowship in Jerusalem. Through analysis of their rhetoric and scribal practices, I explore the ethical, philological, and material aspects of this chapter in the pre-history of Genizah research.
Abstract
Since the 2000s, various laws have sought to impose Ukrainian in film production. If until 2014, due to decades of Russification, it was not uncommon to see a Ukrainian film shot in Russian, the Ukrainian language has become increasingly dominant in national cinema. The law of 2017 demanding Ukrainian directors to shoot in the official state language has aroused questions and different positions among the film community: while some have tried to resist it, arguing a lack of realism and an artificial use of a standardized Ukrainian language in the context of a predominantly bilingual society, most filmmakers have been able to find creative solutions, by getting in tune with a society that is becoming more and more Ukrainian-speaking, or by resorting to surzhyk, a vernacular mixing Ukrainian and Russian. Apart from Slavic languages, minority languages such as Crimean Tatar have also found their place in contemporary Ukrainian cinema.