The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan

Here the author develops a psychoanalytic theory of the movie, which took the movie as a starting point. Avoids telling about historical context of film production as well as it`s reception.

When McGowan says about the audience he doesn’t mean the empirical spectator, but the one which is expected by movie text himself. Of course none of the movies ignores its historical context as well as context of those who watch it, but neither the context nor the spectator don`t exist out of the movie text.

Every movie, developed esthetically, brings with itself its own context, builds up it`s own spectators, turns to them in specific way. It`s worth to get to know how, by McGowan, Kubrik`s, Spike Lee`s, Michael Mann`s or Fellini`s movies turn to us.

Summarised by Fusinha

All the happy families – Carlos Fuentes

Master of Spanish literature who will celebrate this year 80^th birthday, finally decided to do this, what every decent writer thinks of – pertain to the first sentence from Lew Tolstoy`s “Anna Karenina” and develop it on his own way. Tolstoy starts with the statement that: “All the happy families are similar, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This sentence opens for the writer many new doors and gives plenty of possibilities.

Fuentes did realize it very well, that`s why he wrote sixteen different stories of different families and divided them with choirs which sound and look like poems written by American representatives of Big-Beat generation.

After lecture, putting all the plots and pieces together – it requires from the reader plenty of attention and it`s not so easy – we are given a picture of Mexican society torn apart. A society convincingly different from the one we already know from other charming novel “Summer with Laura Diaz”.

“Violence, violence” are last words of the book, dangerously coexisting with Tolstoy`s sentence. When family falls apart, everything falls apart.

 Summarized by Fusinha

Third World, Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes, one of the most famous Spanish-American writers, today almost 80 years old, dislikes George W. Bush, takes part in political debates and promises that when American presidency campaign will rich the hottest phase, he will start writing political essays against Republicans. Reason? They are bad for the world. Bush’s time has to be finished. “I’ve started to criticize him already when he was a presidential candidate. And I’m doing it till now – said the writer. I’ve always known that his tenure as president will end up as huge disaster.”

Fuentes is castigating Americans for the reason that they don’t respect their neighbors, suffer from lack of empathy and conquer the entire world. The writer also takes part in Mexican debates – the most recently is for drugs legalization. Says: “When drugs become legal, won’t be so attractive and a spate of crimes will be declined”.

Everybody recons with his word. Worldly newspapers seek for his essays, like “El Pais” where he regularly publishes his comments. Few years earlier we were reading his “Eagle’s Armchair”, a political fiction about fights for authority in Mexico in 2020,his essay “Contra Bush/against Bush” published in 2004, when George W. Bush was fighting in presidential election, his novel “The Years With Laura Diaz” and essay “I believe in it”, where Fuentes included his political and existential credo. Last year’s “All happy families” is about today’s Mexico.

On the Road, Jack Kerouac

The first person who reviewed Jack Kerouac’s novel was Gilbert Millstein – his review appeared in New York Times 4^th September 1957 and he had written: “On the Road” is the second novel by Kerouac and its publication is a historic occasion insofar as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in any age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlative of fashion.

On the Road is a novel of experience; it tells tales of madness played out by all kinds of strange characters, in settings as diverse as a Virginia small-town diner, a New York jazz-joint, and a Mexican whore-house. What connects these adventures is the characters’ refusal to miss out on life, and their determination to get the most out of now.

The novel is the most executed, the clearest and the most important utterance made by the generation of Kerouac, named years ago as “beat” and whose principal avatar he is.

It seems that the “beat generation” had an one and only ideology, and that was life. Kerouac himself sums it up as “everything belongs to me because I am poor”.

Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, a crazy youth “tremendously excited with life” are racing around America, testing the limits of the American Dream. It seems like both of them seize the day, live their life cause death might come too early – before they will be able to finish what they have started. The desperation and the lack of fulfillment made these youths feel that “the only thing to do was go”, searching for their personal freedom, and finding pleasure in sex, drugs, and jazz.

Summarized by Fushinha