Fire Deepa Mehta’s Fire wrote a remarkable chapter in the history of Indian Cinema as it was the first mainstream movie to deal with homosexuality. In a patriarchal society like India, Fire tapped the prevalence of lesbianism in middle- class household. This understandably didn’t go too well with the so called protectors of Indian values and morals. Most of the public sound and fury surrounding Deepa Mehta’s Fire had to do with its purportedly ‘lesbian’ desecration of respectable, middle- class Hindu life. (Mazzarella W. , 2013) Shabana Azmi, veteran of the Indian ‘art’ cinema and long time progressive social activist said, “Once I went ahead with the decision to act in Fore, I had no confusions, ever.” Fire was passed uncut by India's censor board in May 1998 with a rating houses in most metropolitan cities across India for almost 3 weeks. However, on 2 December, more than 200 Shiv Saineks7 theatre in suburban Goregaon in Mumbai. They smashed glass panes, burning posters and shouting slogans. They compelled managers to refund tic...
Published in 1975 by Harper Perennial, The Fires of Jubilee by Stephan Oates explores the personality of Nat Turner and the events which lead up to his leadership of the Virginian slave revolt of 1831 (Oates 4, 126). Young Nat was born into slavery in 1800, but, due to his precocity, he was early lead to believe in the probability, nee inevitability, of his eventual freedom (11-16). However, things were not to be so simple for him. Disease, death, and the vicissitudes of fortune all converged to cause Nat to remain a slave in the hands of several different owners. Of a highly introspective, superstitious nature, Nat chaffed at and brooded extensively on his circumstances – longing for freedom (24-32). Seeking an outlet for his intelligence
Act 1 of Mr. Burns was the only act in the play that places it characters in a casual setting. It was easy to decipher the type of characters the actors were portraying in the scene. For example, the actor who played a meek character ported this by taking up as little space as she could and crouching behind objects. Also, two characters were pretty intimate with each other. They cuddled around the fire when discussing the probability of a power plant shutting down and shared soft smiles with each other. I felt that the characters were allowed to be themselves in this scene compared to the other acts. In Act 2, the characters were at work that called for them to have a professional mindset, even though they were familiar with each other. The
The first two acts of this film are truly inspiring because they capture the "fire" of the environmental movement. It chronologically begins by discussing the origins of conservative environmentalists, to documenting the details of successful environmental movements, and concluding by explaining the merging of civil rights with environmentalists. Ultimately, “A Fierce Green Fire “serves as a dynamic call for the continuing action of protecting and conserving our biosphere.
Catching Fire: How Coooking Made us Human by Richard Wrangham is a fresh perspective on the evolution of humankind. Wrangham has made a concentrated effort to prove that humans have evolved particular adaptations, like bipedalism, due to the introduction of cooked foods into their diet. In his book, he is legitimately arguing that humans are the way they are because early on in human evolution, early man discovered fire, discovered the joys of cooked foods, and developed all sorts of fascinating traits still being utilized today.
Bill Gates, one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, states, “It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” Instead of only looking at the advancements that his business, Microsoft, has made, Gates evaluates and learns from the mistakes or failures he’s also made, and finds ways to prevent them from happening again. Billy Joel’s song “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is about all the people or events that made a large impact on the world from 1950 to 1989 and how the United States was not the main cause of all the problems going on. A majority, if not all of the topics of this song are things that had negative impacts on the world. Mary Cornish’s poem “Numbers” is about the use and power of numbers. The main idea of the poem is how even though something may be subtracted from one thing, whatever is subtracted is usually added to another thing. The lyrics of the song “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel incorporates
In the case, “Facing a Fire” prepared by Ann Buchholtz, there are several problems and issues to identify in determining if Herman Singer should rebuild the factory due to a fire or retire on his insurance proceeds. I believe that this case is about social reform and self-interest. I think that Singer needs to ask himself, what is in the firm’s best economic interests. There are several things to question within this case, what should Herman Singer do and why, should he rebuild the factory or begin retirement, if he rebuilds, should he relocate the firm to an area where wages are lower and what provisions, if any, should Singer make for his employees as well as for the community?
In “Barn Burning” the setting is a time when people drove horse wagons and the workingmen were generally farmers. The major character in this story is Colonel Sartoris Snopes, called “Sarty” by his family who is a ten-year-old boy. In the beginning, Sarty is portrayed as a confused and frightened young boy. He is in despair over the burden of doing the right thing or sticking by his family, as his father states,” You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you ain’t going to have any blood to stick to you.”
A book that fully illustrates the hardships of dealing with the reconstruction of a nation after an era of slavery as well as concisely providing insight to a strong civil rights voice is “The Fire Next Time” by James Baldwin. His writing is a both an examination of race relations in a segregated America, and an impassioned plea for both whites and blacks to abandon the hate and embrace love as an outlet for their differences. The title of the book comes from an negro spiritual quotation that Baldwin directly relates to the inevitable consequences of continuing racial injustice: "God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!"
“Queer Cinema is Back” – headlines the front page of the 2005 issue of the Advocate, signifying to a new flood of movies making way into theatres. Five years prior to this news release B. Ruby Rich, who coined the art as New Queer Cinema almost a decade earlier, declared that the cinema had co-opted into “just another niche market” dominated by popular culture (Morrison 135 & Rich 24). What had seemed to be a movement, turned out to be only a moment in the brief years between the late 1980s and early 1990s when the energies of queer theory, the furies of AIDS activism, the legacies of independent and avant-garde filmmaking, and the schisms of postmodern identity politics came together in a bluster of cultural production to form a cinema of its own (Morrison 136). In many ways Rich’s criticism of the cinema is correct, the queer aspect that so brightly shone in films like Poison, Swoon, Paris Is Burning, Tongues Untied, The Living End and Head On, was shifting as the new millennium was approaching and making more difficult for queer films to stay queer against the forces of Hollywood. However, Rich lacks in her analysis on New Queer Cinema because she does not consider the breadth to which queer operates as a concept within the cinema. For Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin, the editors of Queer Cinema, queer is an umbrella term encompassing dissident sexualities through history and, indeed, nominating them more productively than they were ever named in their own time (Morrison 137). For Michele Aaron, queer is a specific product of exigencies of social activism of the late 1980s and early 1990s, “with AIDS accelerating its urgency” and New Queer Cinema arising as an “art-full manifestation” of i...
The immense power of a text is gained through the distinctive ideas portrayed within. Through his poetry John Foulcher, Australian poet and teacher, outlines his observations of the environment surrounding him and the conflict within it. These poems include ideas such as the brutality of nature trumping its beauty, as represented in the poems For the Fire and Loch Ard Gorge. As well as how observing nature's savagery can give insight into human mortality, as prominently expressed in Loch Ard Gorge, and lastly the complexity of society compared to the divinity of the natural world, demonstrated in Summer Rain. The distinctive ideas portrayed in these texts create powerful meaning and affect those reading them, allowing others to learn more about
In Jeannette Wall’s book The Glass Castle, the narrator and author Jeanette has had various terrifying encounters with chaos and destruction. She was burned cooking hot dogs when she was young, frozen in the winter, and starved when her family was low on money. Each time, she has pulled through and survived. In The Glass Castle, fire is a symbol representing chaos, destruction and fear. Jeanette has fought many battles involving neglect, starvation, and poverty but she has always pulled through these destructive experiences just like when she was a child burned from the hot dogs.
Fire is also referenced throughout the book as a symbol of destruction, connecting to the theme of change, but when preventing change. When one thinks of fire, they think of destruction that is the meaning conveyed from the man-made fire in the book. The fire in the society is used to burn books but on another level, it is linked to the destructive ways of the society. When looking at the women in his society, Montag sees “these women twisting in their chairs under his gaze, lighting cigarettes, blowing smoke, touching their sun-fired hair and examining their blazing fingernails as if they had caught fire from his look. Their faces grew haunted with silence” (Bradbury 92). The fire represents how the ways of the society are killing its citizens,
For the purpose of this study, I will critically examine the representation of homosexuality in Hollywood cinema. I will specifically analyse films from the early 90’s to mid 2000’s from ‘Philadelphia’ to ‘Brokeback Mountain’. This dissertation will argue that over the space of 12 years homosexuality has become an acceptable part of cinema. I will look at early Hollywood’s representation of homosexuality depicting how aesthetically so much has changed. The current paper will predominantly focus on the two films ‘Philadelphia’ and ‘Brokeback Mountain’, by critically analysing the aesthetic differences between each film as well as their overall importance to gay culture.
Lihaaf and Fire represent two highly controversial literary, artistic works, Chughtai argued that purdah had already been imposed on her, but her tongue would be a naked sword, unrestrainable. While Chughtai faced obscenity charges for her story, Fire loosely based on Lihaaf was strongly condemned by right –wing parties like the Shiv Sena and the Bhartiya Janta Party as being foreign to Indian culture, with acts of vandalism performed at the theatres. However the voice of female sexuality proved to be an indomitable one. Over the years writers like Kamala Das , Arundhati Roy and Manju Kapur have explored forbidden female desires ranging from the homoerotic to the incestuous.
Gairola, Rahul. “Burning with Shame: Desire and South Asian Patriarchy, from Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ to Deepa Mehta’s Fire.” Comparative Literature 54:4 (Fall 2002). 307-324. EBSCOhost.