Books I Love

1. Narnia
2. How To Train Your Dragon
3. To Kill A Mockingbird
4. Bible
5. Catch 22
6. The Book Thief
7. The Great Gatsby
8. The Princess Bride
9. Jane Eyre
10. The Old Man and the Sea
11. The Lion an the Unicorn
12. Gone With the Wind
13. A Room of One's Own
14. Tintin
15. Brambly Hedge
16. Mortal instruments
17. Michael McIntyre's autobiography
18. Harry Potter
19. Laura Ingalls Wilder
20. Adrian Plass
21. Asterix
22. The Hobbit
23. Life of Pi
24. A series of unfortunate events
25. Anne of Green Gables
26. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
27. Emma
28. Pride and Prejudice
29. Persuasion
30. Mansfield Park
31. David Copperfield
32. Geisha of Gion

TV Shows I love

1. Gilmore Girls
2. Community
3. Being Human
4. Parks and Recreation
5. Horrible Histories
6. Doctor Who
7. Anne of Green Gables
8. Sherlock
9. Miranda
10. Jeeves and Wooster
11. The Two of Us
12. Richard II
13. The Mentalist
14. Morecambe and Wise
15. Blackadder
16. Yes Minister
17. The Fresh Prince of Bel Air
18. Emma
19. The IT Crowd
20. QI
21. Merlin
22. New Girl
23. The Graham Norton Show
24. The Great British Bake off
25. We'll Take Manhattan
26. Toast
27. Burton and Taylor
28. Death Comes to Pemberly
29. Zach Stone is gonna be famous

Films I love

1. Pride and Prejudice
2. Dirty Dancing
3. Bright Star
4. Star Wars
5. Lord of the Rings
6. Music and Lyrics
7. Mulan
8. The Lion King
9. Howl's Moving Castle
10. Sabrina
11. Les Miserables
12. Wayne's World
13. Calamity Jane
14. His Girl Friday
15. Shakespeare in Love
16. Juno
17. Singin' in the Rain'
18. Les Chroistes
19. Amelie
20. Some Like it Hot
21. Billy Elliot
22. Tangled
23. Hard Day's Night
24. Easy A
25. The Graduate
26. Priceless
27. Zoolander
28. Anna Karenina
29. The Leap Year
30. Chocolat
31. Benny and Joon
32. She's the Man
33. Annie Hall
34. Breakfast at Tiffany's
35. Clueless
36. Romeo + Juliet
37. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
38. Roman Holiday
39. Fiddler on the roof
40. Fantastic Mr Fox
41. Labrynth
42. In The Mood For Love
43. Casablanca
44. 10 things I hate about you
45. My neighbour Totoro
46. Ferris Bueller's Day Off
47. Midnight in Paris

From 'Feminist Film Studies'

• 'Acentral imaging' understanding character and situation represented and reacting to the thought of it
• 'Central imaging' adopting view and mental state of character

Women's Film

• Doane divides women's film into maternal melodrama (seperation and return), love story (female desire recognised then thwarted), paranoid gothic film (associate female spectator with fear) and medical discourse film (female body as site of disease, submission to male medical control) - all constructing masochistic female spectator
• Basinger - films can be double-voiced, provide female viewres with escape/release then say they shouldn't want it and that its wrong,  but can also offer temporary sense of liberation
• Linda williams sees three body genres - sex/porn, violence/horror, emotion/women's film
• Female friendship films - nearly also positvie about relationship but stopped after Thelma and Louise - had been sentimental portrayals of woman adjusting to fit existing social structure
• Normally produced by men, but was inspired by feminist notions of sisterhood
• Literary adaptation of female novelists helped - often focused on sisterly relations of the past
• Chick flick core elements: femaale empowerment, solidarity amongst women, consumerism, fairy tale elements, old fashioned sentimentality
• Convey notion that women can have it all but renewed acceptance of traditional feminity
• most fall into makeover catergory - change identity and self confidence and enables romance
• Sexual reawakening of women in middle age
• show women's triumph over patriarchy whilst retaining their traditional femininity
• Don't address gender roles, complexities of real women's lives

Lesbian Film Theory and Criticism

• Link between portrayals of lesbians and female bonding - Jackie Stacey - homoerotic component to films about woman's obsession with other women
• Homoerotically charged relationships in films reflect that between female viewer and female star
• Fascination with the idealized other
• female spectator positioned in regard to female bonding which represents intimacy involves both identification and desire

Avant Garde and Documentary making

• In 1970s feminist avant-garde separate form previous male one started
• Early avante-garde filmmakers were all male apart from Germaine Dulac and Maya Deren
• Became seen as a place where women could challenge mainstream images but many male avant-garde films were misogynistic eg un chien andalou
• women seldom reach highest level of directorial pantheon
• Female experimentalist work often challenge avant-garde traditions
• Caught between radical aestithicism and allegiance to women's movements demands for realistic portrayals of women's activities and activism
• realism creates passive spectators from a modernist perspective as it presents a story as truth or reality
• make female characters more than an element of plot space
• often interrogate female body as a cultural and linguistic sign - not just visual image but a subject of inquiry
• destroting pleasure derived from identification, narrative involvement and eroticization of femininity
• 
  

The Actress

• star actress 'construction, a product of culture... prefabricated by men' Gaines
• Denigrate female star's acting ability in contrast to male stars
• work actress puts into her appearance never seen as a skill
• men more likely to be seen as highly trained or skilled rather than succeeding because of their natural talent or physical attractiveness
• emphasis on training and professionalism for men helps them retain roles as grow older - harder for women to transfer from acting to directing and producing
• female stars often shown as having careers managed or launched by powerful male directors or producers
• female actresses more commonly seen as celebrities
• celebrity status allows to continue despite bad performances or lower box office

Feminist Film Studies and Race:

• Classical feminism criticised for ignoring African American and Third World Women - prompted many post colonial critics many of whom were white feminists
• psychoanalysis prompted focus on one kind of oppression - also Freud's theories are not necessarily universal
• Much of postcolonial criticism has been male-dominated so doesn't focus on women's experience of it
• black men led to accept idealized images of their oppressors and to internalize racist notions of their own superiority
• Edward Said's notion of Orientalism - West thinks of the east as th antithesis of everything western men like to think that they are
• Eastern men characterized as weak feminized inferior and welcoming of western domination - Homi K. Bhabba explored how inferiorizing stereotypes used to justify western conquest and domination of the third world
• White racism structuring colonized people's experience of themselves
• Women of colour might see white western women as complicit in their oppression
• Women of colour may feel patriarchy is another learned behaviour from their White male oppressors not natural to their community - challenge to the concept of universal patriarchy
• Doane - white women and black men both embody castration for white male and black female is double threat so is virtually eliminated from the screen or with promiscuous hyper-sexual primitiveness that connects her to natural landscape
• Modleski - WoC shown in stereotypical images that reduce them to their biological functions or as surrogates for white women
• Kaplan - western imperialist gaze, unquestioned sense of white male superiority
• bell hooks - during slavery black people forbidden to look, black male gaze adopts white male structures and takes as its object white women. Black female spectatorship is more subversive due to the erasure of black womanhood from screen, black women not allowed to look or to be looked at, only serving to validate white supremacy
• Lola Young - using pychoanalsis to look at how issues of power control and subjugation have been mapped onto the black female body, white feminists' advocation of abortion and deconstruction of family unit ignores that Black women see family as a source of strength in a hostile world
• Trinh T Minh-Ha - there isn't an authentic postcolonial identity because third world women's sense of self is sahped by fragmentation, hybridity and in-betweeness

The Woman Auteur

• Pantheon of great directors doesn't have any women
• Alice Guy-Blanche directed the first feature film

And if I did what then?

And if I did what then?
Are you agreev’d therefore?
The Sea hath fishe for every man
And what would you have more?

 Thus did my Mistresse once
Amaze my mind with doubt:
 And popt a question for the nonce,
 To beat my braynes about.

 Whereto I thus replied,
 Eche fisherman can wishe,
That all the Sea at every tyde,
 Were his alone to fishe.

And so did I (in vaine),
 But since it may not be:
 Let such fishe there as find the gaine,
And leave the losse for me.

 And with such lucke and losse,
 I will content my selfe:
 Till tydes of turning time may tosse,
 Such fishers on the shelfe.

 And when they sticke on sands,
That every man may see:
 Then will I laugh and clappe my hands,
 As they do now at mee.

 George Gascoigne

Critical Views on Hamlet

C.S Lewis: We sometimes speak as if the characters in whose mouths Shakespeare puts great poetry were poets: in the sense that Shakespeare was depicting men of poetical genius. But surely this is like thinking that Wagner’s Wotan is the dramatic portrait of a baritone?

G. Wilson Knight: Hamlet is inhuman. He has seen through humanity....Instinctively the creatures of earth—Laertes, Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, league themselves with Claudius: they are of his kind. They sever themselves from Hamlet... He has no friend except Horatio, and Horatio, after the ghost scenes, becomes a queer shadowy character who rarely gets beyond "E’en so, my lord," "My lord—," and suchlike phrases. But Hamlet is not of flesh and blood, he is a spirit of penetrating intellect and cynicism and misery, without faith in himself or anyone else, murdering his love of Ophelia, on the brink of insanity, taking delight in cruelty, torturing Claudius, wringing his mother’s heart, a poison in the midst of the healthy bustle of the court. He is a superman among men. And he is a superman because he has walked and held converse with Death, and his consciousness works in terms of Death and the Negation of Cynicism. He has seen the truth, not alone of Denmark, but of humanity, of the universe: and the truth is evil. Thus Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark. The poison of his mental existence spreads outwards among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal. They are helpless before his very inactivity and fall one after the other, like victims of an infectious disease. They are strong with the strength of health —but the demon of Hamlet’s mind is a stronger thing than they. Futilely they try to get him out of their country; anything to get rid of him, he is not safe. But he goes with a cynical smile, and is no sooner gone than he is back again in their midst, meditating in graveyards, at home with Death. Not till it has slain all, is the demon that grips Hamlet satisfied. 

It was the devil of the knowledge of death, which possesses Hamlet and drives him from misery and pain to increasing bitterness, cynicism, murder, and madness. He has indeed bought converse with his father’s spirit at the price of enduring and spreading hell on Earth. But however much we may sympathize with Ophelia, with Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, the Queen, and Claudius, there is one reservation to be made. It is Hamlet who is right. What he says and thinks of them is true, and there is no fault in his logic. His own mother is indeed faithless, and the prettiness of Ophelia does in truth enclose a spirit as fragile and untrustworthy as her earthly beauty; Polonius is "a foolish prating knave"; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are timeservers and flatterers; Claudius, whose benevolence hides the guilt of murder, is, by virtue of that fact, "a damned smiling villain."

Elaine Showalter: The madwoman is a heroine

Salvador de Madariaga: This procrastination cannot be due to an instinctive and fastidious repugnance to killing, for Hamlet kills Polonius, and Laertes, and in the end the King himself; and he dispatches Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their doom with true alacrity

unhand me gentlemen,
By heaven I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me!

When it comes to doing what he is determined to do, he will not hesitate to kill even his closest friend

"But, in the beaten way of friendship, what make you at Ellsinore?" R+G are put out. Very likely they had not expected this alertness in a Hamlet the King had depicted

So much from th’understanding of himself.
They try to plot a concerted answer, but in the end are honest to him; and to his direct question they return a direct answer: "My lord, we were sent for."

The King was their legitimate sovereign
Hamlet's behavior towards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is rude in the extreme. "This courtesy is not of the right breed," says Guildenstern - the scene shows an exhibition of complete selfcenteredness and of utter disregard for the feelings of others - His egotism shows.

Peter Alexander: Dilemma of being humane without loss of toughness

J Dover Wilson: Everything that Hamlet here says is capable of an equivocal interpretation reflecting upon Polonius and Ophelia. "Fishmonger," as many commentators have noted, means a pander or procurer; "carrion" was a common expression at that time for "flesh" in the carnal sense; while the quibble in "conception" needs no explaining.
"Here in the lobby" is equivalent to a stage direction, and marks with practical certainty the moment at which Hamlet comes in and the place of his entry - long enough for him to take in the whole eavesdropping plot and to implicate Ophelia beyond possibility of doubt in his ears as one of his uncle’s minions

Ernest Jones: The association of the idea of sexuality with his mother, buried since infancy, can no longer be concealed from his consciousness
Feelings which once, in the infancy of long ago, were pleasurable desires can now, because of his repression’s, only fill him with repulsion. The long "repressed" desire to take his father’s place in his mother’s affection is stimulated to unconscious activity by the sight of someone usurping this place exactly as he himself had once longed to do. More, this someone was a member of the same family, so that the actual usurpation further resembled the imaginary one in being incestuous. Without his being in the least aware of it these ancient desires are ringing in his mind, are once more struggling. to find conscious expression, and need such an expenditure of energy again to "repress" them that he is reduced to the deplorable mental state he himself so vividly depicts.

A C Bradley: Her son was forced to see in her action not only an astounding shallowness of feeling, but an eruption of coarse sensuality, ‘rank and gross,’ speeding posthaste to its horrible delight.

Boris Pasternak: The characters are sharply differentiated by the rhythm of their speech. Polonius, the King, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz speak in one way, Laertes, Ophelia, Horatio, and the rest in another. The credulity of the Queen is shown not only in her words but also by her singsong manner of drawing out her vowels.

Hamlet is a tragedy of the will. Hamlet is not a drama of weakness, but of duty and self-denial.

Hamlet is a prince of the blood who never, for a moment, ceases to be conscious of his rights as heir to the throne; he is the spoilt darling of an ancient court, and self-assured in the awareness of his natural gifts. The audience, impressed by his brilliant prospects, is left to judge of the greatness of his sacrifice in giving them up for a higher aim.

Hamlet suppresses his love for Ophelia

T S Eliot:  The "madness" of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare's hand; in the earlier play a simple ruse, and to the end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the audience. For Shakespeare it is less than madness and more than feigned. The levity of Hamlet, his repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part of a deliberate plan of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief.

R C Evans:

• there is a need to recognise one's friends
• who to trust
• public allegiance and political friendhsips
• At first Hamlet has no friends he can speak to
• Francisco and Barnardo friends?
• Horatio says he and Marcellus are 'friends to this ground' - It is Marcellus who says that they are leigemen to the dane
• air of companionship between the four men at the beginning

Karen Cooledge: Ophelia is too good for this world

Clifford Davison: Friendship was a 'radiant ideal'

James L Calderwood:

• Two different kinds of truth - ghost's revelations and human truths
• How to act within a tainted world without becoming tainted oneself?
• He does not act but instead "acts," that is, plays mad, which plays his behavior in epoche, zoned off from the world of pragmatic affairs in which action and inaction have no meaning. Hamlet's antic disposition thus becomes a form of inactive action
• The way to resolve his uncertainties about the Ghost, about Claudius, and about his own imagination is, he decides, theatrical
• The silent truths about murder in the orchard and remarriage in hast will be made manifest to eyes and ears
• "The Murder of Gonzago" in its original form was presumably an artistic end in itself.  As revised by Hamlet, however, it becomes "The Mousetrap."  
• Dramatic art is transformed into pragmatic instrument, a weapon in the real world.  Suited mutually to one another to comprise the dramatic ensemble, words now act and acts speak, so that in one concerted motion the truth is conveyed to Claudius with the impact of a sword thrust.

Sigmund Freud: in Hamlet it remains repressed, and we learn of its existence- as we discover the relevant facts in a neurosis- only through the inhibitory effects which proceed from it. The plot of the drama shows us that Hamlet is by no means intended to appear as a character wholly incapable of action. On two separate occasions we see him assert himself: once in a sudden outburst of rage, when he stabs the eavesdropper behind the arras, and on the other occasion when he deliberately, and even craftily, with the complete unscrupulousness of a prince of the Renaissance, sends the two courtiers to the death which was intended for himself. Hamlet is able to do anything but take vengeance upon the man who did away with his father and has taken his father's place with his mother- the man who shows him in realization the repressed desires of his own childhood.

Autumn Sensations

Wading through Sunlight
Ripples across the road
Smiles dance upon the horizon
Humming busily

I see the greyness
Outbid by colourful delight
Leaves leap to their deaths
In an ecstatic moment

I hear the wind whistle
As it rushes on to fresh wonder
Tickling the toes
And unseating careful hairs

I smell the seasons
Turning and changing
New fading to old
To become once again anew

I feel shivers gather round my ankles
Coats drawn closer
Scarves playing windy tug of war
Chills creeping like incy wincy spider

I don't taste anything because that would be weird.
I'm not about to be licking leaves
What if a dog has urinated on it
Or some nasty ass man has trunched over it with his nasty ass boots?