Rebecca Harrison
Autor von The Empire Strikes Back (BFI Film Classics)
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I expressed an interest in reviewing The Empire Strikes Back because one of my English lecturers at the University of Melbourne discussed Star Wars (1977) as an example of a modern morality play. We were studying early English drama, reading medieval miracle plays, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and Cyril Tourneur before moving on to Shakespeare, Chekhov and Ibsen et al. So we were quite startled at the presence of Star Wars in this company but soon made sense of it as sharing the characteristics of medieval morality plays, i.e. a battle between good and evil in which the good guys win as they are supposed to. His argument was a tad more sophisticated than that but hey, this was back in 1980 and no, I have not kept my lecture notes. But it stuck in my mind and I was interested to see if Harrison's critique of the sequel would amplify the same idea.
The book turned out to be much better than that. Some readers may recall that I reviewed Michael Wood's Film, a Very Short Introduction a while back, but I have to say that Harrison's book makes the VSI look rather old-fashioned. An unabashed fan of Empire, she critiques the film through a variety of lenses including its politics, its historical context, and its representations of race, gender, identity and class. The film has, apparently, been the subject of a great deal of scholarly interest, but Harrison goes further to explore fandom, marketing, divergent US and UK industrial relations and even colonialism.
I discovered from this book that I enjoyed an irreplaceable privilege when I took The Offspring to see it in 1977. (He was only a little boy and had never been to the pictures before, and at the end he stood up and applauded). We saw it in a cinema with a huge screen and surround sound, and this is not an experience that younger generations can have because it's not shown in cinemas any more. They may get to see it in one of those home cinema setups, but are more likely to see it on an ordinary TV. I'm no film aficionado but even I know that the cinema experience contributes to the impact of the film. No one in that cinema will ever forget that opening crawl, that pounding fanfare and then the death star which emerges to take up the entire screen as if it were flying overhead.
But remarkable as it was, by comparison with Empire, Star Wars was quite old-fashioned.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/01/02/the-empire-strikes-back-by-rebecca-harrison/… (mehr)