Tag Archives: Social critique

Ruggero Deodato, Cannibal Holocaust

By Steen | March 21, 2007

Deodato’s much-maligned Cannibal Holocaust is in many ways the ultimate exploitation film, and yet also much more. While the acting is at times rather stilted, and the violence seems gratuitous like most other exploitation films, this film rather enacts the desire of the spectator to see the unseen.
Cannibal Holocaust thus enacts and stages itself - [...]

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Mel Gibson, Apocalypto

By Steen | January 27, 2007

Mel Gibson is clearly fascinated by violence and blood. Just as, even if implicitly, The Passion of the Christ showed how civilization was born in blood, so does Apocalypto show how civilization dies in blood.
The film opens with a quote: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” [...]

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Hal Hartley, The Girl From Monday

By Steen | November 29, 2005

I’ve just seen Hal Hartley’s The Girl From Monday which is an excellent film, so far only available through Netflix but can be purchased through Possible Films January 10, 2006. In many ways it reminds me of Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel in the way that the world which is presented is the future but [...]

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Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

By Steen | October 9, 2005

No wonder that Heinlein is regarded as one of the premiere sf writers and why practically all who discuss sf poetics have to at least mention Heinlein briefly. His ability to create other worlds through language is quite impressive, especially since it always seems so easy and logical. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is [...]

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The Truth of the Word, the Falsity of the Image: Transmetropolitan’s critique of the society of the spectacle

By Steen | September 19, 2005

In this paper, I investigate the binary opposition, which is instated between words as true and images as false in Warren Ellis and Darick Roberts’ Transmetropolitan series, which deals heavily with the notion of truth in a dystopic future. The series’ protagonist Spider Jerusalem is a journalist trying to show a world that doesn’t care [...]

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