October 2007 Archives

Reviewed by Ken Hopson, Media and Reserves Manager

Chris Marker’s 1962 28-minute La Jetée is a masterpiece in unconventional delivery. It's a post-apocalyptic story of memory, love and time travel told in bleak narration through a series of grainy monochromatic stills, giving the film a surreal effect appropriate to the subject. Trevor Duncan's haunting score employs appropriately placed ambient noises, reverberations, voice and sound effects.

The story follows a man chosen to be a lab-rat in time-travel experiments devised by scientists living underground below a post-World War III radioactive Paris. Most interestingly, the vehicle for traversing time is not a machine, but the use of hypnosis, memories and drugs. The man is repeatedly sent to the past in an attempt to secure aid for the present, and eventually to the future, where he finds it. The heart of the plot revolves around a memory of a shooting that the man witnessed as a young boy, his obsession with the distraught woman who was present at the scene and the man's efforts reconcile his memories with reality. To sum it up, if Ingmar Bergman had directed an episode of The Twilight Zone with a broken camera... Incidentally, and almost always noted, La Jetée was the inspiration behind Terry Gilliam's monumental time-travel feature, Twelve Monkeys.

Shorts 2: Dreams (DVD)
Cabell Media and Reserves DVDs PN1995.9.E96 S4242 2000

La Jetee and Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (VHS)
Cabell Media and Reserves Film and Videos PN1995.9 .S26 J47 1993

Twelve Monkeys (VHS)
Cabell Media and Reserves Film and Videos PN1997 .T84 1996

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Long before the movie version of Wonder Boys catapulted Tobey Maguire into the public eye, way before he published his Pulitzer-winning The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, back when he was only 25, Michael Chabon published his first novel, a slim coming-of-age story called The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. It brought him fame and a good reputation at an age when most writers are still diligently laboring in the vineyards of the literary and little magazines. It is a funny, moving book set during the summer when newly graduated college student Art Bechstein tries to figure out who he is and what to do with his life. In the process he winds up with a boyfriend and a girlfriend, gets involved with the Pittsburgh underworld at levels high and low, and has a series of pleasantly picaresque adventures.

This novel will appeal to readers who enjoyed The Secret History or The Catcher in the Rye, or really any good novel about what it means to be young and in love with the world. Chabon's prose is both exuberant and smooth in this book, telling the story with a minimum of fuss. Pittsburgh is on display in every chapter, a real presence and not just a generic setting, making this the kind of novel that inhabitants might point to if asked "what's it like to live here?" It's also a fun novel to read if you've only read Chabon's later work, partly for the pleasure of the book itself, partly for the pleasure of anticipating how he came to grow in later years.

Cabell Library PS3553.H15 M97 1989

Reviewed by John Glover, Reference Librarian for the Humanities

Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is an engaging analysis of comics that delights while it intrigues. Written in comics format itself, the book analyzes comics throughout history, discussing their evolution and the conventions and methods that make them work, and it explores the possibilities of what they can do. First published in 1993, this book has justifiably received much praise and become one of the primary books read by people who want to know about comics.

Perhaps the best thing about this book is that it provides a solid defense of the worth of comics, showing the traditions comics came from, how most reader tend to confuse the medium (words & pictures) with the content (brainless superheroes, impossible musculature, etc.). McCloud packs a lot of information into each chapter, and if you take the time to think about what he's saying, you'll find yourself thinking hard about things you might never have considered, from the ingredients that combine to form complex emotions on a person's face to the ways we are indoctrinated into consuming texts to the effect created by putting a frame around something.

Cabell Library PN6710 .M335 1994