John Sayles

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"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it." --John Steinbeck Scientific research confirms what people have always known: answers, ideas, and inspiration do come to us in dreams. Harvard psychologist and world-renowned dream specialist Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., offers this rich collection of examples of how the world's most creative practitioners in art, music, film, science, literature and other fields have used the revelations of their dream life to inform their work. Dr. Barrett offers insights showing us how to encourage lucid, meaningful dreaming, and how to apply the meanings of our dreams to solving problems--from the everyday to the extraordinary. This is the stuff dreams are made of. In the visual arts, Jasper Johns couldn't find his unique artistic vision until he dreamed it in the form of a large American flag. Salvador Dali and his colleagues built the startling new genre of surrealism out of dreams. Kubla Kahn dreamed the design for his stately pleasure dome; thousands of years later, Lucy Davis, chief architect at a major firm, continues the tradition of dreaming designs into life in her extraordinary buildings. Film is a fertile avenue for dreams: "Twice I have transferred dreams to film exactly as I had dreamed them," confides director Ingmar Bergman, as have Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, and John Sayles. From Mary Shelley's terrible nightmare, which became Frankenstein, to Stephen King's haunting dream as a little boy, which led to his first bestseller, countless writers have consulted the Committee. Musicians from Beethoven to Billy Joel and Paul McCartney have whistled the Committee's tunes. In science, physiologist Otto Loewi dreamed the medical experiment that earned him the Nobel Prize. In sports, Marion Jones dreamed she'd broken a world record, then brought the dream to life. Gandhi translated his dream of resistance into a movement that changed the world. Since Freud, we take it for granted that our dreams reflect our past. In The Committee of Sleep, Barrett reveals how dreams can also tell us about our future potential--and how to reach it.

John Sayles is one of America’s most successful independent filmmakers, whose works include Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), City of Hope (1991), and Lone Star (1996). This article examines Sayles’ portrait of place in Sunshine State (2002), a film set in Plantation Island, Florida, where large-scale corporate development is transforming two communities—one black, the other white—into upscale winter resorts. Sayles’ film probes the place experience of some sixteen vividly drawn characters and illuminates how the same physical place, for different individuals and groups, can evoke a broad spectrum of situations, meanings, and potential futures. One of Sayles’ conclusions is that people cannot escape the place in which they find themselves. They can, however, learn from that place and thereby decide whether and in what ways they will offer that place commitment or not.

""The theories of the Russian literary critic and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) are highly suggestive for helping to understand cinema, yet their usefulness has yet to be fully and accessibly articulated in relation to the key debates of Film Studies. At the heart of this text is the key notion of chronotope, which Flanagan adapts to show how time and space 'fuse together' in cinematic narrative. Similarly crucial are the Bakhtinian concepts of dialogism and polyphony, which help to address fundamental questions about film form and reception. The 'unfinalizable' Bakhtinian word seems to hold great significance for a changing media world where meanings seem constantly renewable, and diffuse practices of spectatorship outgrow earlier, rigid models of interpretation. Via case studies of a diverse range of films (from Die Hard 4.0 to House of Games, The Searchers to The Incredibles), this book vividly demonstrates that Bakhtin's theories can bring about an exciting intervention into some of the most contested areas of film theory.

'A well-needed instalment in the sparse critical work on Bakhtin and cinema...this study unlocks new ways of understanding the circulation and production of film meaning.'
- Hunter Vaughan, New Review of Film and Television Studies""

Cognitive dissonance provides a model for understanding how we experience film texts as profound. This article looks at the ways in which filmmakers might motivate or exploit the pleasure of resolving familiar narrative dissonance to inspire emotions associated with profundity, sublimity, or transcendence. David Lynch scholarship provides a primary case study in the conflation of cognitive dissonance and transcendence, however it is contended that moral obligations to rape and trauma victims are sublimated in the process. Alternative moral dissonances across a range of different cinematic modes are subsequently addressed. Comparative analysis of vigilantism in American revenge and “social cleansing” films, Ken Loach’s social realism, Richard Linklater’s Bernie (2011), and John Sayles’s Lone Star (1996) permits an exploration of variability in filmic dissonance and narrative comprehension, as well as alternative approaches to filmmaking ethics and responsibility. The article concludes with suggestions for an applied ethics extended from cognitive film theory.

Comentamos la ideología y estética de la película de John Sayles 'Silver City', completando la crítica de Roger Ebert. En particular examinamos la cuestión de la reflexividad: la representación del posicionamiento de la propia película como ejemplo de los discursos minoritarios y de resistencia que retrata, y el modo en que promueve un 'heroísmo de perdedor' que posiciona al público y al director como almas bellas.

In this chapter, I draw on one film by American independent filmmaker John Sayles to consider the relationship between place and spirituality. To provide a conceptual context, I begin with theologian Philip Sheldrake’s Space for the Sacred, a book that probes the spiritual dimensions of place, place experience, and place meaning (Sheldrake 2001). Sheldrake argues for jettisoning any nostalgic, idealized understandings of place, home, rootedness, and environmental belonging. Instead, he calls for a ‘workable theology of place’ that moves beyond environmental and place naivety to ‘contend with estrangement, with what is flawed and damaged in material existence’ (Sheldrake 2001: 63). The need is ‘a sacramental sensibility in which the particularities of places may point beyond themselves to the mystery of God’ (Sheldrake 2001: 63).

To illustrate one place rendition toward which Sheldrake’s sacramental sensibility points, I draw on Sayles’ 1999 Limbo, a film that dramatizes shifting relationships between people and one specific place that provokes both existential possibilities and limitations. This place is early-21st-century Alaska, both the setting and antagonist for the film’s three main characters who face personal and interpersonal risk impelled by place in both its natural and human forms. Other, less central characters in the film illustrate other modes of place relationship, some that are more real, necessary, and ethically engaged; others that are more self-serving, delusive, and ethically irresponsible.

To locate and specify Limbo’s range of place relationships, I draw on the existential concepts of authenticity and inauthenticity. On one hand, authenticity relates to a way of being in which individuals accept responsibility for their lives and seek to be honest and consistent in their dealings with the world. On the other hand, inauthenticity relates to a way of being in which individuals deal with the world unrealistically: they accept it as fated and immutable, or understand and act only via blindered, self-centered motivations out of touch with the world at hand. Obviously, no human being is totally authentic or inauthentic, and different situations provoke varying degrees of autonomy or dependence, candor or deceit, appropriate or inappropriate actions. From the perspective of existentialism, the key point is that individuals best choose for themselves how to live, basing that choice on who they are, who they wish to be, and how that choice does good (or bad) for their worlds (Golomb 1995; Pollard 2005). Drawing on personal determination and progressive insight, individuals may find ways to overcome estrangement with place and move toward Sheldrake’s sacramental sensibility.

In this chapter, I begin by overviewing Limbo’s story line and introducing its main characters. I then draw on several contrasting definitions of ‘limbo’ to discuss how the film’s characters illustrate a range of authentic and inauthentic relationships with Alaska as a place and as a natural and human environment. I conclude by relating this range of relationships to Sheldrake’s sacramental sensibility.

Further information on this chapter is available at:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-28848-8_13

A major theme in American independent filmmaker John Sayles’ films is exploring relationships between people and places, particularly as those places incorporate economic and existential limitations or possibilities. In Sayles’ 1999 Limbo, the place is current-day Alaska, which is both the setting and antagonist for the three main characters who face personal and interpersonal risk as that risk is impelled by place in both its human and natural forms—in other words, the hazard of civilization, on one hand; the hazard of pure nature and wilderness, on the other hand. A central conclusion that Sayles points to in Limbo is that looking for one’s place may ultimately be more significant than the actual finding itself. Here, I examine this phenomenon of “trying to find one’s place” as portrayed in the experiences, situations, and events encountered by Limbo’s major and minor characters. I also consider how Sayles presents the place of the natural world in this effort to find one’s place.

Spanish abstract: 'Lone Star' (John Sayles, 1996) es una película sobre la etnicidad y sobre el peso del pasado tratado aquí de manera reflexiva. Es un tema inevitablemente presente en las películas norteamericanas (o en muchas de ellas) pero a menudo sólo como parte del trasfondo, o evitado en el desarrollo de la historia principal. Aquí está en el centro —y los dos temas son en realidad el mismo: cómo las relaciones entre comunidades étnicas en el presente están marcadas y condicionadas por lo que han sido sus relaciones (de opresión, de confrontación) en el pasado.

English abstract: 'Lone Star' (John Sayles, 1996) is a film on ethnicity and on the weight of the past, which is dealt with here in a reflexive mode. It is a subject which is inevitably present in many American films, but as a rule merely as part of the background, and usually avoided in the unfolding of the main storyline. Here it is at the centre, and both subjects are really the same: the way in which the relationships between ethnic communities in the present are marked and conditioned by the history of their relations (of oppression or confrontation) in the past.

Como falar dos anos 90? Quando eles começaram? Quando eles acabaram? Começaram com as esperanças de uma Europa unificada e democrática após a queda do Muro de Berlin e terminaram com a queda do World Trade Center e a crescente belicização do Império Americano? Sai o confronto Leste/Oeste e reafirma as tensões entre Oriente e Ocidente?
Esta coletânea de artigos sobre os filmes da última década do milênio passado se propõe a fazer um mapeamento do a partir diversidade de sua produção. Se não há mais cinemas novos, vanguardas, movimentos fortes não se trata de decadência ou homogeneização. As opções são diversificadas desde bons trabalhos de veteranos a cineastas que surgem nesta década. Não se pretende fazer um trabalho completo, mas uma primeiro panorama como uma provocação para aprofundamentos, debates. Estes filmes estrangeiros e brasileiros sintetizam nossas angústias e esperanças. Aceitamos olhar nos olhos do que estamos vivemos e dos filmes que estamos fazendo, sem nostalgia mas sem deslumbramento. Esse é o convite que fazemos.







Sumário
"Confiança" de Hal Hartley (1990) - FAbiano Souza
"Um Anjo na Minha Mesa" de Jane Campion (1990) - Paulo Menezes
"Dick Tracy" de Warren Beatty (1999) - Fernando Mascarello
"Grand Canyon – Ansiedade de Uma Geração" (1991) de Lawrence Kasdan, "Short Cuts – Cenas da Vida" de Robert Altman (1993) e "Magnólia" de Paul Thomas Anderson (1999) - Ângela Prysthon e Rodrigo Carrero
"Batman - O Retorno" de Tim Burton(1992) - Laura Cánepa
"Tempo de Violência" de Quentin Tarantino (1994) - Fernando Vugman
"A Fraternidade é Vermelha" de Kieslowski (1994) - Denilson Lopes
"Terra Estrangeira" de Walter Salles (1995) - Renato Pucci
"O Livro de Cabeceira" de Peter Greenaway (1996) - Susana Dobal
"Estrela Solitária" de John Sayles (1996) - Anelise Reich Corseuil
"A Estrada Perdida" de David Lynch (1997) - Vladimir Safatle
"O Rio" de Tsai Ming Liang (1997)- Cláudio da Costa
"Gosto de Cereja" de Kiarostami (1997) - Andréa França
"Felizes Juntos" de Wong Kar Wai (1997) - José Gatti
"Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo" de Manoel de Oliveira (1997) - Bernadette Lyra
"Carne Trêmula" de Pedro Almodóvar (1998) - Wilton Garcia
"De Olhos bem Fechados" de Stanley Kubrick (1999) - Marcus Mello
"Sâo Jerônimo" de Júlio Bressane (1999) - Liliane Heynemann
"eXistenZ" de David Cronenberg (1999) - João Luiz Vieira e Luiz Antônio Coelho
"Cronicamente Inviável" de Sérgio Bianchi (1999) - Consuelo Lins e Cezar Migliorin
"Amores Brutos"de Alejandro González Iñarritu (2000) - Evando Nascimento
"Dançando no Escuro" de Lars von Triers (2001) - César Guimarães

A major theme in American independent filmmaker John Sayles’ films is exploring relationships between people and places, particularly as those places incorporate economic and existential limitations or possibilities. In Sayles’ 1999 Limbo, the place is current-day Alaska, which is both the setting and antagonist for the three main characters who face personal and interpersonal risk as that risk is impelled by place in both its human and natural forms—in other words, the hazard of civilization, on one hand; the hazard of pure nature and wilderness, on the other hand. A central conclusion that Sayles points to in Limbo is that looking for one’s place may ultimately be more significant than the actual finding itself.  Here, I examine this phenomenon of “trying to find one’s place” as portrayed in the experiences, situations, and events encountered by Limbo’s major and minor characters. I also consider how Sayles presents the place of the natural world in this effort to find one’s place.