Disaster Mon Amour

Download or read book Disaster Mon Amour written by David Thomson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deep--and darkly comic--dive into the nature of disasters, and the ways they shape how we think about ourselves in the world "In this brilliant book, David Thomson tells the story of how we came to make disaster and catastrophe our best friends--how we let terror cocoon and take over our imaginations to avoid seeing the things that really frighten us. Riveting and totally original."--Adam Curtis, BBC filmmaker and political journalist "Erudite. . . . Engaging. . . . A cri de coeur about art's struggle to keep up with reality."--Kirkus Reviews Audiences swell with the scale of disaster; humans have always been drawn to the rumors of our own demise. In this searching treatment, noted film historian David Thomson examines iconic disasters, both real and fictional, exposing the slippage between what occurs and what we observe. With reportage, film commentary, speculation, and a liberating sense of humor, Thomson shows how digital culture commodifies disaster and sates our desire to witness chaos while suffering none of its aftereffects. Ranging from Laurel and Hardy and Battleship Potemkin to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and from the epic San Andreas to the intimate Don't Look Now, Thomson pulls back the curtain to reveal why we love watching disaster unfold--but only if it happens to others.

Download or read book New Orleans, Mon Amour written by Andrei Codrescu and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2004-01-04 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “lovely collection” of essays by the NPR commentator about his beloved adopted city, both before and after Hurricane Katrina (Publishers Weekly). NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu has long written about the unique city he calls home. How apt that a refugee born in Transylvania found his place where vampires roam the streets and voodoo queens live around the corner; where cemeteries are the most popular picnic spots; the ghosts of poets, prostitutes, and pirates are palpable; and in the French Quarter, no one ever sleeps. Codrescu’s essays have been called “satirical gems,” “subversive,” “funny,” “gonzo,” and “wittily poignant”—here is a writer who perfectly mirrors the wild, voluptuous character of New Orleans itself. This retrospective follows him from newcomer to near native: first seduced by the lush banana trees in his backyard and the sensual aroma of coffee at the café down the block, Codrescu soon becomes a Window Gang regular at the infamous bar Molly’s on Decatur; does a stint as King of Krewe de Vieux Carré at Mardi Gras; befriends artists, musicians, and eccentrics; and exposes the city’s underbelly of corruption, warning presciently about the lack of planning for floods in a city high on its own insouciance. Alas, as we all now know, Paradise is lost, but here Codrescu also writes about how the city’s heart still beats even after 2005’s devastating hurricane. New Orleans, Mon Amour is a portrait of an incomparable place, from a writer who “manages to be brilliant and insightful, tough and seductive about American culture” (The New York Times Book Review). “Finely honed portraits of a fabled city and its equally fabled inhabitants. The author, who has called the Big Easy home for two decades, shows how, like some gigantic bohemian magnet, New Orleans attracts some of the world’s most talented, self-indulgent freaks. Codrescu finds himself quite at home there. He expertly weaves pages of New Orleans history through his stories of personal discovery and debauchery. . . . Readers can’t help coming away from reading it without an abiding hope in the ability of ordinary people, under the worst circumstances, rising to whatever challenges they face.” —Publishers Weekly

Download or read book Fukushima Mon Amour written by Daniel de Roulet and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four literary-political essays documenting the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of March 2011, following the earthquake and tsunami of that date in Japan.

Download or read book Alina Rudya written by and published by Distanz Editions. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Alina Rudya (b. Ukraine, 1985; lives and works in Berlin) was one year old, she and fifty thousand others were evacuated from the city of Prypyat after the nuclear disaster that occurred in the nearby Chernobyl power plant on April 26, 1986. Her father, an engineer, was on duty in the power station that night, when reactor no. 4 exploded during a systems test. The worst accident in the history of nuclear energy to date released an enormous highly radioactive cloud into the atmosphere, necessitating the hurried resettlement of all local residents. After studying journalism and political science and training as a photographer, Rudya returned to Chernobyl for the thirtieth anniversary of the disaster. In the photographic project Prypyat Mon Amour, the artist tells stories of people like herself whose lives were fundamentally changed when they had to leave Prypyat in 1986. She joined them on a tour of their former homes--a journey into their past--and compiled new as well as historic photographs to document the history of a city that has ceased to exist.

Download or read book Through a Nuclear Lens written by Hannah Holtzman and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2024-05-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Franco-Japanese coproduction Hiroshima mon amour (1959) is one of the most important films for global art cinema and for the French New Wave. In Through a Nuclear Lens, Hannah Holtzman examines this film and the transnational cycle it has inspired, as well as its legacy after the 2011 nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. In a study that includes formal and theoretical analysis, archival research, and interviews, Holtzman shows the emergence of a new kind of nuclear film, one that attends to the everyday effects of nuclear disaster and its impact on our experience of space and time. The focus on Franco-Japanese exchange in cinema since the postwar period reveals a reorientation of the primarily aesthetic preoccupations in the tradition of Japonisme to center around technological and environmental concerns. The book demonstrates how French filmmakers, ever since Hiroshima mon amour, have looked to Japan in part to better understand nuclear uncertainty in France.

Download or read book Heart Like Water written by Joshua Clark and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-07-10 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Try it. Right now. Picture the lights going off in the room you're sitting in. The computer, the air conditioning, phones, everything. Then the people, every last person in your building, on the street outside, the entire neighborhood, vanished. With them go all noises: chitchat, coughs, cars, and that wordless, almost impalpable hum of a city. And animals: no dogs, no birds, not even a cricket's legs rubbing together, not even a smell. Now bump it up to 95 degrees. Turn your radio on and listen to 80 percent of your city drowning. You're almost there. Only twenty-eight days to go. Joshua Clark never left New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, choosing instead to band together with fellow holdouts in the French Quarter, pooling resources and volunteering energy in an effort to save the city they loved. When Katrina hit, Clark, a key correspondent for National Public Radio during the storm, immediately began to record hundreds of hours of conversations with its victims, not only in the city but throughout the Gulf: the devastated poor and rich alike; rescue workers from around the country; reporters; local characters who could exist nowhere else but New Orleans; politicians; the woman Clark loved, in a relationship ravaged by the storm. Their voices resound throughout this memoir of a unique and little-known moment of anarchy and chaos, of heartbreaking kindness and incomprehensible anguish, of mercy and madness as only America could deliver it. Paying homage to the emotional power of Joan Didion, the journalistic authority of Norman Mailer, and the gonzo irreverence of Tom Wolfe, Joshua Clark takes us through the experiences of loss and renewal, resilience and hope, in a city unlike any other. With lyrical sympathy, humility, and humor, Heart Like Water marks an astonishing and important national debut. A portion of the author's royalties from this book will go to the Katrina Arts Relief and Emergency Support (KARES) fund, which supports New Orleans-area writers affected by the storm.Visit www.NewOrleansLiteraryInstitute.com to find out how to make a direct and positive impact on the region.

Download or read book The Disaster Film as Social Practice written by Joseph Zornado and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-26 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveying disaster films from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, this book explores the disaster film genre from its initial appearance in 1933 (The Grapes of Wrath, 1933) to its present-day form (Don’t Look Up!, 2021), laying bare the ideological unconscious at work within the genre. The Disaster Film as Social Practice examines environmental science, history, film and literature in its interdisciplinary analysis of the disaster film genre. It explores the interplay, and the dichotomy, of “restorative” and “reflective” disaster narratives. An analysis of cinema's role in symbolizing and managing collective anxiety around disaster and death narratives examines how disaster films, through their narrative structures and symbolic elements, contribute to the public's understanding and emotional processing of real-world threats, and how cinematic narratives shape and are shaped by public and private ideological discourses, reflecting deeper psychological and environmental truths. Finally, the book offers an overview of how the transformation of the disaster film genre over time tells a history through imagining the worst. Providing a nuanced understanding of the disaster film genre and its significance in contemporary culture and thought, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of film studies, cultural studies, media studies, and environmental studies.