Boris Cyrulnik is beyond doubt resilient. Despite a war racked childhood and the deportation of his parents to a concentration camp during world war II, he became a scholar and famous in France for his writing (get ref’s). He went on to study medicine and followed this into neuropsychiatry and psychoanalysis. He is director of Teaching at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Toulon, France. This is his first book to be published in the UK.
Talking of Love on the Edge of a Precipe is an analysis of the healing power of love and hope. Resilience relies on the same conditions in adults as it does in children: victims must have the capacity to articulate suffering and they must be able to “weave’ their rebirth around another, external, person. “A trauma casts a shadow, but the stories that are told about it bring princesses out of the darkness, as well as toads. That’s why fairy tales are so powerful. That is the difficult hope promised by resilience”. This made me think of the film ‘Pan’s Labrynth’, which perhaps partly articulates this angle, the resilience of the individuals subjective dimension in the face of fierce opposition from external reality. A wound inflicted in the past may become bearable if our representation of it can be modified: this is perhaps one of the foundation ideas that underpins William Gibsons’ ‘Pattern Recognition’, both with the main character Case Pollard and the Russian footage creator.
The book is filled with examples illustrating Cyrulnik’s thoughts, and I wanted to quote one. It concerns a boy who was fostered out to a farm, where he was placed in a barn with another boy and tasked with tending the sheep. After a few months of this he was filthy, and neglected by his foster ‘parents’.
“One Sunday, a….support worker came to treat Bruno to a day inside a real house…..she could not stop herself from showing her disgust. For the first time in his life, Bruno felt that he was filthy. He had a feeling of having a dirty self, and at the same time he was perceived as a model of an other who despised himself. It was as though he thought to himself: ‘The gaze of kind adults is teaching me that I am dirty.’ From that day onwards, the boy felt at ease only when he was in the company of marginal boys who did not make him feel dirty. He began to avoid kind adults, who soiled him by looking at him. By adapting in this way, Bruno was inserting himself into the world of socialisation that blocked his resilience’.
http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,1000071429,00.html
http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780713999136,00.html
http://www.unesco.org/courier/2001_11/uk/dires.htm
http://www.odilejacob.com/catalogue/index.php?op=par_auteur&auteur=70&cat=0204
Monday 4 June 2007
Vitamin Ph : New Perspectives in Photography, introduction by T J Demos ::: Phiadon Press 2006
A fascinating collection of fifty or so current photographers, such as Tacita Dean (opp.: 'Lord Byron Died'), Catherine Yass, who I have at least heard of. There are others featured who are also worthy of a mention – far too many – but I would like to reference a few in order to convey a glimpse of the scope of this book.
Tobias Zielony captures eastern European young people communing authentically in relatively non-place locations such as petrol stations and fields, burning wheely bins and hanging out around their cars. Liu Zheng’s pictures convey a little of his backround as a photojournalist, but go further into the mediums possibilities as both frozen theatre and sociology. Shizuka Yokomizo explores new directions in urban portraiture, writing letters to strangers asking them if they would agree to be photographed by her. Catherine Yass’s luminous multilayered transparencies explore memory, psychogeography and emotion. Bettina von Zwehl explores the provocations of form and content on multiple subjects.
And this is, apart from the individual strength of the contributions, the basic overall asset of the book – it takes in a great number of perspectives on contemporary photography, as the title suggests, and this is very nourishing for the mind.
Tobias Zielony captures eastern European young people communing authentically in relatively non-place locations such as petrol stations and fields, burning wheely bins and hanging out around their cars. Liu Zheng’s pictures convey a little of his backround as a photojournalist, but go further into the mediums possibilities as both frozen theatre and sociology. Shizuka Yokomizo explores new directions in urban portraiture, writing letters to strangers asking them if they would agree to be photographed by her. Catherine Yass’s luminous multilayered transparencies explore memory, psychogeography and emotion. Bettina von Zwehl explores the provocations of form and content on multiple subjects.
And this is, apart from the individual strength of the contributions, the basic overall asset of the book – it takes in a great number of perspectives on contemporary photography, as the title suggests, and this is very nourishing for the mind.
Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures 1998-2001
This book holds an interesting collation of a number of people’s lectures on sound, from different geographic locations: usually sound in film, although in Tom Paulin’s chapter, ‘The Despotism of the Eye’, he goes more open than this, focussing on how neglected acoustic imagery is in poetry.
There are chapters from Mike Figgis (the director of Leaving Las Vegas), David Lynch, Laura Mulvey, (a professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College London) and Michel Chion (a french composer and theorist), amongst others.
The main, though not the only quality of the book is the level of depth the various contributors go into: for example in Mike Figgis’ engaging account of his work in post production, he recounts a story where the sound from the scene was contaminated by the whooshing sound of the camera magazine: he wanted to use the live sound from the scene rather than overdub, and eventually found the only way to sort the whole thing out was to find out the frequency of the intrusive noise and then compose the scene music in key with that.
Michel Chions’ chapter in the evolution of sound in film, and Laura Mulveys’ chapter on the sociology of film, focussing particularly on the context of the emergence of ‘talkies’, are similarly engaging; as is the interview with David Lynch:
“Sound is 50 per cent of a film, at least. In some scenes it’s almost 100 per cent. It’s the thing that can add so much emotion to a film. It’s a thing that can add all the mood and create a larger world. It sets the tone and it moves things. Sound is a great ‘pull’ into a different world. And it has to work with the picture – but without it you’ve lost half the film.”
The book can be read in itself or as an excellent introduction – I am following it with Mike Figgis’s ‘Projections 10’, a series of transcribed interviews with directors, actors, writers, agents.
www.wallflowerpress.co.uk
There are chapters from Mike Figgis (the director of Leaving Las Vegas), David Lynch, Laura Mulvey, (a professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College London) and Michel Chion (a french composer and theorist), amongst others.
The main, though not the only quality of the book is the level of depth the various contributors go into: for example in Mike Figgis’ engaging account of his work in post production, he recounts a story where the sound from the scene was contaminated by the whooshing sound of the camera magazine: he wanted to use the live sound from the scene rather than overdub, and eventually found the only way to sort the whole thing out was to find out the frequency of the intrusive noise and then compose the scene music in key with that.
Michel Chions’ chapter in the evolution of sound in film, and Laura Mulveys’ chapter on the sociology of film, focussing particularly on the context of the emergence of ‘talkies’, are similarly engaging; as is the interview with David Lynch:
“Sound is 50 per cent of a film, at least. In some scenes it’s almost 100 per cent. It’s the thing that can add so much emotion to a film. It’s a thing that can add all the mood and create a larger world. It sets the tone and it moves things. Sound is a great ‘pull’ into a different world. And it has to work with the picture – but without it you’ve lost half the film.”
The book can be read in itself or as an excellent introduction – I am following it with Mike Figgis’s ‘Projections 10’, a series of transcribed interviews with directors, actors, writers, agents.
www.wallflowerpress.co.uk
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