Publicaties

Preposterous Revelations. Visions of Apocalypse and Martyrdom in Hollywood Cinema 1980-2000
Laura Copier, Amsterdam, uitgave in eigen beheer, 2008.

My project focuses on the recycling of Biblical images and narrative structures regarding the Apocalypse and its conceptions of martyrdom and self-sacrifice in contemporary Hollywood cinema. I examine to what extent representations of martyrs and self-sacrifice are informed by traditional religious notions of Apocalyptic martyrs and self-sacrifice, and how these notions are reproduced, but also transformed and redirected in the process of transmission. Hollywood cinema can be regarded as a site of re-use and re-interpretation of Christian and non-Christian visual and linguistic traditions. However, these adaptations and interpretations are performed by a secular, not (explicitly) religious system. In her book Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History Mieke Bal provides a methodological framework for integrating visual and linguistic traditions of interpretation. She proposes the term “ quotation”, which consists of both iconography and intertextuality. Taking my cue from Bal’s theory of quotation, Hollywood may recycle certain elements of the original texts; the discourse of the historically precedent text still exerts its power in the new text. Therefore I examine the influence of the precedent text. Once the historical source is traced, I analyse in what ways the new text is an active intervention in the earlier material. And finally, I attempt to define the transfer of meaning from past to present and from present to past. This implies a radical rethinking of Hollywood as a mere duplicator or recycler of “original” images and narrative structures. Here, one could perceive the original to be functioning as an aftereffect caused by the images of Hollywood cinema.