bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Kringelein’s Disease
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Kringelein is dying, but the movie cannot name his disease, whose narrative function resembles that of Rick’s mysterious crime in Casablanca. Rick “cannot return to his country,” as Major Strasser summarizes. “The reason is a little vague.” Like Gatsby’s past, Rick’s offense must remain unspecified, for while anything less than murder (e.g., theft, forgery) would make Rick simply a common criminal, any capital crime would disqualify him as Ilsa’s suitor. Similarly, Grand Hotel’s narrative evades particulars. Naming Kringelein’s disease (e.g., cancer, ALS) would evoke both existing symptoms and inevitable outcome, thereby disabling the movie’s fragile happy ending, Kringelein’s flight to Paris with Flaemmchen. Since in her memoirs, Vicki Baum was less discreet (Kringelein, she revealed, has stomach cancer), we suspect that Grand Hotel’s silence results from an attempt to avoid what Susan Sontag identified as cancer’s connotations: scandal, contamination, the violation of a taboo. Thus, Grand Hotel’s spectator becomes like a cancer patient, “lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene.” Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor contrasts cancer with tuberculosis, romanti- cally associated with heightened artistic sensibilities (the myth of Keats, The Magic Mountain). Just four years before Baum’s Grand Hotel, another novel appeared, also in German, written by a clerk, dying like Kringelein: The Trial.
Numbers
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Like Pride and Prejudice, Grand Hotel assigns precise value to every detail. Thus, we know: Kringelein’s monthly salary is 320 marks. Every minute on the lobby telephones costs 2 marks 90. Flaemmchen was to earn 1,000 marks, plus clothing expenses, for becoming Preysing’s temporary mistress. The Baron owes the burglary ring 5,000 marks. Kringelein has 13,600 marks in his pocketbook: 3,400 from his savings and 10,200 from his gambling winnings. Kringelein gives Flaemmchen 3,200 marks to go with him and promises her the rest of his money after he dies.
Room Assignments
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

The new arrangement’s ability to imply a realistic space depends on its being asserted only in passing. In classic Hollywood filmmaking, a descendant of the nineteenth-century novel, overt schema appear as what Barthes called “prattle,” a vestige of earlier narrative forms’ insecurity about communication. The modern viewer will experience any obvious communiqués as “corny” and heavy-handed. Thus, although the film either shows or tells us exactly where most of the main characters are staying (Dr. Otternschlag is the exception), this information almost never calls attention to itself. It remains available for retrieval, but only by the kind of fetishistic re-viewing discouraged by the studios, always eager to sell their next product. Room numbers, therefore, simply appear on doors, usually in the background, unannounced. When someone actually mentions a number, the film works to divert our attention, like a magician using sleight of hand. Ballet master Pimenov’s request for his room key, “Number 168,” for example, occurs so quickly and inconsequentially (we never see him enter or leave his room) that noticing the number requires actively looking for it—as opposed to following the story.
Telephone
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

In their celebrations of photogénie, proposed as “the purest expression of cinema,” the French impressionist filmmakers often treated narrative as an obstacle to be overcome. “The telephone rings,” Jean Epstein complained, pointing to the event that so often initiates a plot. “All is lost.” Instead of stories, the French championed the movies’ intermittent intensities (a face, a landscape, an actor’s movement, the fall of light across a room) that break free from the sometimes indifferent movies containing them. As a production strategy, however, photogénie was complicated. The impressionists’ own films proved static and dull: intensities, it turned out, work best when they emerge from a narrative background and seem to arrest the story that generated them. (Sunrise’s trolley sequence, a respite from the movie’s conventional melodrama, provides this effect’s ideal example.) Nevertheless, if the impressionists were right to equate photogénie with the cinema itself, the Hollywood studios could not ignore the concept. Hence another “equation of pictures”: how to balance the demands of narrative with the attractions of photogénie? Grand Hotel offers one solution. Even if we ignore the switchboard scenes, the movie contains 21 calls, many of them important to a plot that symbolically turns on Preysing’s murder of the Baron, when the telephone becomes an instrument of violence. And yet, by consistently using an overhead angle to remake the switchboard into a visual design, Grand Hotel creates photogenic “intensity” out of what would otherwise function as simply a narrative building block. In those shots, the telephones are ringing, but nothing is lost.
X
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

This figure, joining two (unfinished) triangles at a nexus, repre- sents one image of Grand Hotel’s structure: Flaemmchen connects the two triangles of Grusinskaya-Baron-Flaemmchen and Preysing- Kringelein-Flaemmchen. By revealing her character as the movie’s center, the fulfills Crawford’s ambition to make the soubrette part more important than the grande dame’s, an achievement not accomplished by the Broadway musical until South Pacific, which would banish the grande dame role into Bloody Mary’s parody. In fact, at the time of Grand Hotel, Crawford and Garbo were the same age (26). And despite the X (which, as a butterfly, insinuates itself into her ballet costume), Garbo dominates the movie.
Elizabeth Imbrie
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Playing the Eve Arden role, a wisecracking working woman, Ruth Hussey was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She didn’t win, and although only 25 at the time of The Philadelphia Story, she would never get close to stardom again. A Brown philosophy major, she seems to have simply grown impatient with Hollywood. She shifted to Broadway, where she had her greatest success in 1945’s State of the Union, in a role given to Katharine Hepburn for the movie version. Hussey provides yet another link to The Great Gatsby, a book that everywhere shadows The Philadelphia Story: In the 1949 film version, she would play Jordan Baker, Nick Carraway’s friend who has cheated at golf.
Intoxication
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Sometimes what has become objectionable behavior can date a film as much as its characters’ clothes. Dexter pushes Tracy to the ground, and a modern audience thinks “domestic abuse.” As he waits to meet the Lords, Connor lights one cigarette after another, and we think “lung cancer.” So drunk she can barely keep her eyes open, Tracy drives Mike home from Dexter’s house. Indeed, all the movie’s visible signs of intoxication, and the resulting hangovers, are played for laughs, with censure reserved for Dexter’s prior, and hence conveniently off screen, alcoholism. “I’d sell my grandmother for a drink,” Mike proclaims at noon on wedding day, blithely adopting the prevailing mores.
Joe Smith
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Somewhere back among what Fitzgerald called “the lost Swede towns” of the upper Midwest, always Hollywood shorthand for the “real America,” Macaulay Connor has grown up in South Bend, Indiana (Tracy: “South Bend! It sounds like dancing”), and Liz Imbrie of Duluth (“it’s west of here, isn’t it?”) has been married to “Joe Smith, hardware.” Like Tracy’s missing brother, Junius, Joe Smith will remain offscreen, fostering some anxiety in the viewer accustomed to having all characters present and accounted for. (The obvious analogy: sounds issuing from unidentified offscreen sources, a recurring feature of horror films.) Nevertheless, “Joe Smith, hardware” offers the pleasures of the uncanny. Jimmy Stewart, whose Best Actor Academy Award for The Philadelphia Story seemed a payback for the more deserving, but nonwinning, performance in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, kept the Oscar statuette proudly displayed in his father’s hardware store on Philadelphia Street in his oxymoronically named hometown, Indiana, Pennsylvania.
Notecards
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

While waiting with Liz to meet the Lords, Mike catalogs objects and wedding presents on notecards. After running through his research on Kittredge and Seth Lord, he stops at Tracy’s card, asking, “What’s her leading characteristic?” “I can fill them in right now,” he tells Liz. “The young, rich, rapacious American female. There’s no other country where she exists.” This desire to simplify signification mimics studio era filmmaking, which reduced actors to types for the purposes of narrative economy. As played by Jimmy Stewart, Mike himself is a type, the goodhearted, down- to-earth midwesterner, and by 1940, Katharine Hepburn certainly represented precisely the type of character The Philadelphia Story asks her to play.
PA55
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

As Mike and Tracy leave the suburban library, they pass a car with the license plate PA55, an object that demonstrates Hollywood’s use of marginal details. While the PA indicates “Pennsylvania,” and thus contributes to the movie’s verisimilitude, the 55 is random: changing the number would have no effect on the film. Indeed, the number’s realistic effect depends precisely on its meaning- lessness. Any obviously significant number (e.g., 1940, 1776, Hepburn’s age) would undermine its status. The realism of these “futile,” “useless” details, in other words, derives from the assumption of reality’s inscrutability. As Barthes observed about what he called “the reality effect”: “The pure and simple ‘representation’ of the ‘real’ . . . thus appears as a resistance to meaning; this resistance confirms the great mythic opposition of the true-to- life (the lifelike) and the intelligible.” The Philadelphia Story’s characters rarely engage with any parts of the set (Dinah’s piano and Tracy’s swimming pool are the great exceptions.
Zingers
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

With Barry’s play as its blueprint, The Philadelphia Story relies on a verbal repartee that becomes a means of intimacy. Zingers abound: Liz uses them to bring Mike down to earth, Dinah punctuates family conversations with them, and Dexter deploys them as weapons against Kittredge. “I suppose I should object,” George remarks, upon finding Tracy and Dexter together. “That would be most objection- able,” replies Dexter, a typical exchange. Barry’s dialogue, as Cukor explained to Gavin Lambert, “seemed to be realistic, but it wasn’t really. The words always had a kind of rhythm underneath them, and the speech was sometimes quite elaborate.” “Can you use a type- writer?” Dexter asks, eager to have a formal copy made of Connor’s dirt on Sidney Kidd. “No thanks, I already have one,” Liz replies.
Doorbell
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Returning home after visiting the Archer murder scene, Spade takes off his coat and sits on the side of his bed, pouring a drink. A doorbell buzzes insistently from off screen. Spade looks to his left, apparently toward the sound. acknowledge the scandal of some illogicality, some disturbance of ‘common sense.’” The Maltese Falcon defends itself with speed, rushing Spade from murder scene to telephone to apartment, using the rapid dissolves that provide the movie with almost all of its transitions and keep the viewer from asking too many questions. Ultimately, Spade’s call and Iva’s admission match; by confirming each other, they forestall scrutiny of the movie’s logic. Spade’s unnecessary stop also serves to fill in spaces mentioned elsewhere in the film. “The readerly abhors a vacuum,” Barthes insisted, using his own term for commercial storytelling; its goal is always “an illusion of continuity.” A drugstore immediately “across from” Spade’s apartment is too close to leave unseen.
Edeson
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

With a nearly famous last name (Thomas Edison, after all, had been one of the movies’ inventors), The Maltese Falcon’s head cameraman, Arthur Edeson, had a long and distinguished career. In 1919, he had helped found the American Society of Cinematog- raphers, and he quickly developed a reputation as Douglas Fairbanks’s preferred director of photography. “The Maltese Falcon called for strong, modernistic, eye-arresting camerawork,” Edeson recalled, and his compositions, with their deep-focus low angles, resemble those of the more celebrated Gregg Toland, who shot Citizen Kane the same year. Edeson would go on to film both Casablanca and The Mask of Dimitrios, but the complete absence of any mention of him in two standard reference books on John Huston (Lesley Brill’s John Huston’s Filmmaking and Robert Emmet Long’s collection John Huston Interviews) confirms just how success- ful la politique des auteurs has been in gathering attention to directors. Both Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon were directorial.
Flitcraft
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

“A man named Flitcraft,” Spade tells Brigid in the novel, “had left his real-estate office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned.” He did not keep an engagement to play golf after four that afternoon, though he had taken the initiative in making the engagement less than half an hour before he went out to luncheon. His wife and children never saw him again. His wife and he were supposed to be on the best of terms. He had two children, boys, one five and the other three. He owned his house in a Tacoma suburb, a new Packard, and the rest of the appurtenances of successful American living.
Kitchen
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Twice in The Maltese Falcon, Spade’s apartment “kitchen” changes status from its existence as merely an undefined door to an imaginary room. In the first instance, Spade’s conversation with Brigid continues even as he slips through the door and offscreen. His emergence with a coffee pot (the narratively appropriate synecdoche) encourages the viewer to “fill in” the unseen area, supplying it with the appliances and utensils that name it “kitchen.
L a Paloma
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

“Do you know who he is?” Effie asks Spade, referring to the man who has delivered the Falcon to them before dying at their feet. “Yeah, he’s Captain Jacobi, master of the La Paloma.” Hammett’s novel had explicitly rejected the redundancy: “What about Miss O’Shaughnessy?” she [Effie] de- manded.
Maltese Cross
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

The Maltese Falcon inadvertently deploys the iconography of Nazism, almost certainly familiar to an audience in 1941, when Hitler’s European conquests had reached their peak. The eagle statue on Spade’s desk, its head turned to the left, had been a widely circulated image of Germany’s ruling party, and the globe on Spade’s office cabinet refers obliquely to the world events dominating newsreels. In Bogart’s next major success, Casablanca, maps of Africa will give way to a spinning globe that stops on Europe, and the of Spade’s desk, he leans forward to leer at Miss Wonderly. The most important code defining “Archer” is, however, Jerome Cowan, the character actor who plays him. Only two years older than Bogart, Cowan appeared in 132 movies, typically in comic parts. By The Maltese Falcon, he had already been in 39 films, never as a star. Thus, the audience would not be surprised by his sudden disappearance from the movie. He is also the only character with a mustache. At some point in the late 1930s, somewhere between The Thin Man (1934) and The Maltese Falcon (1941), the pencil mustache shifts from being the signifier of urban sophistication (William Powell) to that of a lounge lizard’s lechery (Jerome Cowan). Thus, precisely because the cinema lacks literature’s assertive power, its history amounts to a record of cultural taste, the vagaries of style, the ceaseless dissolve of fashion.
Newspapers
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Like so many Warner Brothers movies, often advertised as “torn from the headlines,” The Maltese Falcon uses newspapers to advance its plot: The close-up of the San Francisco Post-Dispatch front page, with its headline “THURSBY, ARCHER MURDERS LINKED!” provides the transition between the Dundy-Polhaus inter- rogation of Spade and his arrival at his office the next day. become increasingly out of sync with its viewers’ as the movie ages. The movies, in other words, even when new, are always history.
Quay
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

How does a set-bound film stage the burning of a large freighter? In The Maltese Falcon, a dissolve takes us from the “Shipping News” notice of La Paloma’s arrival to a medium shot of a fireman scaling a ladder toward what seems a burning ship. The cut to grainy stock footage of a smaller boat (a documentary image roughly docked to the quay of the movie’s narrative) calls attention to the artificial nature of what follows: a mastless vessel rising to a visible ceiling, attended to by men wearing uniforms labeled “Los Angeles Fire Department.
Value
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

These values, a brief history of fetishism and its production, suggest Hollywood’s success in stimulating desire for the referential grail. In his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechani- cal Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin argued that the new media, especially photography and film, had annulled the traditional distinction between original and copy: Asking for “the original copy” of a snapshot dead-ends in an oxymoron. And yet, Ben- jamin was wrong to predict that mechanical reproducibility would destroy “cult value.” If in the cinema, an “original” does not exist (where are The Maltese Falcon’s hotels and apartments and streets? like all sets, struck after their usefulness has ended), that condi- tion has encouraged an even greater longing for it. The movies were always designed for exchange value, that ungrounded worth existing only in circulation and desire. The Maltese Falcon itself represents this situation, converting its viewers into seekers for the unattainable.
Webley-Forsby
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

“A Webley-Forsby 45-automatic, eight-shot,” Spade replies, responding to Polhaus’s request to identify Archer’s murder weapon. “They don’t make them any more.” In fact, they never did. Even under its actual name, Webley-Fosbery produced only 38-caliber eight-shot revolvers. Hammett, who got both the name and the caliber correct, almost certainly underestimated this gun’s rarity: some reports suggest that as few as 40 were manufactured. By making Spade able to recognize an impossibly rare weapon that he would have almost certainly never seen, Hammett was endowing his hero with the kind of specialized knowledge championed by Sherlock Holmes. But why does Huston’s film depart from Hammett’s text? On the one hand, “Forsby” sounds like “Thursby,” a near-rhyme linking Archer’s murder weapon to his suspected killer. On the other, The Maltese Falcon’s effect depends far less on precise verisimilitude than on convincing presentation. If Spade’s description of the gun sounds right, the audience will accept it. Would it also accept the following uncanny coinci- dence? The revolver’s original manufacturer, an Englishman prove far longer than Hammett’s 200 pages. The film, in other words, both abridges and expands its written source, providing a more exhaustive history. In doing so, it confirms Irving Thalberg’s remark, cited elsewhere in this book: “In the future, the movies will be the best record of how we once lived.” A contemporary viewer will likely mistake “Wells” for “Welles,” the Orson Welles whose own accounts of Charles Foster Kane and the Ambersons amount to counternarratives that resist Hollywood’s “history as usual.” As if to further the confusion, Orson Welles’s initial fame derived from his radio play of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, designed to resemble a breaking- news report. The mass panic caused by Welles’s show resulted not only from its perfect mimicry of the news (the harried announcers, abruptly cut off; the crackling static), but also from its audience’s late tuning in (many people had been listening to Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy). This latter factor seems peculiar to film, radio, and television. When, if ever, do we begin reading in the middle of a novel? Yet we often tune into a program already in progress, understanding and accepting the irretrievability of the missing scenes. Like Welles’s listeners, Spade enters the Falcon story in medias res: like them, he must learn to accept that story as a story, and not as something historically true.
Xenophobia
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

The Maltese Falcon relies on a miseen-scène stripped down to the objects that “count.” Unlike many films, it does not offer what Seymour Chatman finds typical of the cinema, “a plenitude of visual details, an excessive particularity,” a “visual ‘over-specification.’” Instead, Huston’s film often resembles a cartoon: everything appears suffused with meaning, ready to further the narrative. Even the most insignificant objects seem deliberate: the statues and paintings of horses, a heart-shaped pill box (contents unknown), a movie poster (Swing Your Lady), the title on a marquee (The Great Lie), a partially dated theater ticket. This quasi- allegorical world, simultaneously remote and familiar, becomes, in Spade’s valediction, “the stuff that dreams are made of.” Humphrey Bogart (in The Maltese Falcon). But in Baudelaire’s original formulation, dandyism appeared as “an institution beyond the laws,” a practice of “opposition and revolt” against bourgeois conformity. Roland Barthes connected dandyism to the pleasures of perversity, arguing that “in a given situation—of pessimism and rejection—it is the intellectual class as a whole which, if it does not become militant, is virtually a dandy.” To the extent that classical Hollywood’s enterprise depended on the recruitment of the middle-class audience, the movies’ antibourgeois dandies would often appear threatening. But what Baudelaire called the dandy’s “elegance and originality,” his “joy of astonishing others,” his “burning need to create . . . a personal originality”—all seem definitions of photogénie. When Joel Cairo fondles his umbrella and purrs, “May a stranger offer condolences for your partner’s unfortu- nate death?”; when Kasper Gutman replies to Spade’s objection to being underpaid with, “This is genuine coin of the realm. With a dollar of this you can buy ten dollars of talk,” we are watching moments of villainy, foreignness, dandyism, and cinema.
Blue Slippers
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Let us imagine two possible ways of filming Esther and Tootie’s cakewalk. The first will require the actors to execute a single continuous performance, covered by at least two cameras. Shot 1: a full shot of the two girls dancing, watched by 10 or 11 others, including Lon, sitting on the floor to the right and accompanying them on a mandolin. As the camera pans in his direction to follow the dance, cut to shot 2, a midshot, provided by another camera, showing only Esther, Tootie, and Lon. The girls reach down to the right for their hats and canes, and as they straighten up, cut to shot 3, a return to shot 1’s camera set-up. Since both cameras will presumably be running for the entire sequence, the articulation points will require no scrutiny for potential matching problems.
Dalmatians
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

The scene of Colonel Darly dropping off Rose begins with a close-up of his two Dalmatians. First possibility: the Dalmatians as signifiers of wealth. Pure- bred, slightly exotic in origin, dutiful, and purchased in matching pairs, the dogs suit a rich “colonel” with a decided streak of dandyism, the owner represented by his breed (as with Mr. Braukoff and his bulldog, attired in its studded leather collar).
Ice
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Mr. Neeley’s ice wagon represents precisely the kind of syndecdochic detail regularly deployed by Hollywood cinema: like Esther’s corset, it is short- hand for an entire era. Nevertheless, the movie’s nostalgic image of the horse-drawn cart is ruthlessly ironic. With its electric light shows, 140 automobiles (driven from as far away as Boston), dishwashers, wireless telegraphy, and mechanized refrigeration (“mechanical refrigeration offers much that is spectacular,” proclaimed one ad), the 1904 World’s Fair would signal the death throes of Mr. Neeley’s world. The year before had already seen the founding of the Ford Motor Company and the publication of Frederick Taylor’s Shop Management, which proposed a method for scientifically organizing labor. As Tootie sits blithely singing in the back of the wagon, and the last few blocks of ice lie melting under their tarpaulins, this once-familiar routine of everyday life is on the verge of obsolescence. Designed to evoke the gentle quaintness of turn-of-the-century life, Mr. Neeley’s wagon and the dissolving ice only suggest its difficulties: the deadly provincialism, the nonexistent sanitation, the claustrophobic, endless summer heat.
Jockey
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Esther’s first appearance in Meet Me in St. Louis occurs as her buggy pulls up to the Smiths’ carriage step, a precisely placed signifier (like the muddy road) of turn-of- the-centuryness. Just to the step’s right stands a miniature statue of a black jockey, its right arm extended in greeting. While the carriage step amounts merely to an obsolete utility, nostalgia’s idea of a more graceful time (eliding the uncomfortable realities of horse-drawn conveyances), the lawn jockey represents an obsolete ideology, a tacit racism perpetuated by the movie. Although 1903 St. Louis included 97,000 African Americans, blacks appear in the film only as art (the Smiths’ African bust), an unacknowledged source (for Esther and Tootie’s cakewalk, a slave dance step), and exotica (the fair’s two men wearing Arab headdress). This exclusion of blacks suits the Smiths’ self-satisfied provinciality, camouflaged as whimsy: “Wasn’t I lucky to have been born in my favorite city?” Tootie sighs to Mr. Neeley. The exposition itself practiced an explicit racism, restricting black attendance to certain “Negro Days” and black employment almost completely. Its organizer.
Leaves
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

What happens when the cinema stages the accidental? As Esther sings “The Boy Next Door,” the leaves around her rustle in a studio-manufactured breeze, an homage to the Lumière brothers’ Le Déjeuner de bébé, whose background foliage had distracted viewers from the intended center of attention, an infant’s feeding. But by locating “the third meaning” in details left over after the deliberate informational and symbolic messages have been pared away, Roland Barthes proposed the coincidence of the filmic and the unintentional. André Bazin, although never cited by Barthes, had made the same argument, celebrating the dust carelessly kicked up by Boudu on a summer road. This tradition diminishes a meticulous craftsman like Minnelli, attentive to every detail.
Pipe
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Esther and Rose stare longingly at John Truitt as he stands in his front yard trying a new pipe, an object intended to suggest both his maturity and his masculinity. For Meet Me in St. Louis, this latter quality proved to be particularly urgent: Tom Drake, the actor playing Truitt, never seems convincing as Esther’s boyfriend. (Drake, in fact, was gay.) Hence the movie mobilizes several devices (the pipe, basketball) to “heterosexualize” his character. The pipe, however, remains unlit, and is then tossed aside, implying an impotence confirmed by John’s subsequent behavior: He does not kiss the eager Esther at her party, he nearly misses the trolley, he cancels their date for the Christmas ball. Even when he finally proposes, he leaves Esther in tears, urging her to choose between him and her family. Truitt’s aversion to flame appears most tellingly in the party’s turning-out-the-lights sequence (to which the also gay Minnelli devoted four days), where he not only puts out the Smiths’ lights but Esther’s, too, extinguishing her hopes with a flaccid handshake and hasty departure.
Value
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

This single take amounts to a kind of Kuleshovian miseen-sc Smith turns his back to the camera and watches for almost 10 seconds as they sulk up the stairs. As Mr. Smith moves to his chair, music, previously absent from the sequence, appears, initially only in the soft ringing of chimes, but then as an instrumental reprise of “The Trolley Song.” Mr. Smith sits down, and the music segues into a halting version of “Meet Me in St. Louis.” As Mr. Smith lights a match (off his shoe!), the melody repeats at a louder volume, and the camera begins its slow zoom in on Mr. Smith’s face. His eyes widen and dart back and forth; he stares into space as the match burns down and threatens his fingers.
Zoom
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Minnelli admitted to modeling Meet Me in St. Louis less on the real 1903–1904 city than on Thomas Eakins’s paintings. As James Naremore puts it, “[H]e seems not to have asked himself what turn-of-the-century St. Louis was actually like. Instead, he asked what art in the period was like.” Nevertheless, the zoom-ins that introduce each of the movie’s four sections suggest that Minnelli understood the crucial difference between painting and cinema. Despite their careful geometric arrangements, Eakins’s still images accommodate idle scanning, detours to study The Swimming Hole’s nearly invisible dog, or the second scull in the distance behind Max Schmitt, the one with Eakins himself. Like so many others, these paintings seem to precede, or follow, a withheld narrative that would have disciplined the viewer’s eye, forcing it to attend to certain things at the expense of others. Thus, Minnelli’s zooms imply a revision of Chaplin’s famous dictum that “life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.” In fact, the movie depends utterly on the zoom-ins: narrative cannot coexist with the wide view.
A Social Relationship
Authors: Garland-Thomson Rosemarie
Published: November 2023

An eye-snagging stare of intense attention opens a social relationship between two people. The kind of visual scrutiny leveled by a stare is both impersonal and intimate. On the one hand, staring is a social activity governed by rules of engagement, an etiquette of looking that people generally know and observe. On the other hand, staring affords a spontaneous moment of interpersonal connection, however brief, during which two people have the opportunity to regard and be known to one another. So while social rules script staring, individual improvisation can take the staring encounter in fruitful directions.
Regulating Our Looks
Authors: Garland-Thomson Rosemarie
Published: November 2023

Everybody knows that curiosity killed the cat. As an enactment of curiosity, staring is risky business. As we have seen, a long-standing wariness about curiosity pervades the Western tradition, underpinning America’s prohibitions against staring. To those who condemn it, the curiosity launched by the impulse to stare at inexplicable sights is a grab for unauthorized knowledge, a presumptuous overreaching. As the desiring mind following the desiring eye, curiosity can bespeak discontent and breed iconoclasm. A poke in the eye of the gods, curiosity puts us in charge of the story, trouncing obedience and risking sound punishment. Eve, Prometheus, Icarus, Oedipus, and Frankenstein warn us against the hubris of curiosity, of wanting to know more than is good for you. To understand our contemporary proscriptions against staring, we need to explore more fully the distrust of curious looking in the Western tradition.
Looking Away, Staring Back
Authors: Garland-Thomson Rosemarie
Published: November 2023

The contradictions among our desire to stare, the abundant offering of stareable sights, and the perpetual admonitions of our mothers make public staring a furtive pleasure at best for many Americans. Few of us get the unambivalent license to stare that the writer Walker Evans found, as we saw in the last chapter, in Parisian café society. Consequently, our eager stares often quickly shift to uncomfortable looking away. Our ocular id, in other words, jerks our eyes toward a stimulating sight and our ocular super-ego guiltily retracts them. We may withdraw a stare in simple deference to propriety or parental prohibition. Charges of rudeness further encourage us to cut and run. Sometimes, however, truncated stares come from our distress at witnessing fellow humans so unusual that we cannot accord them a look of acknowledgment. To be suddenly confronted with a person extraordinary enough to provoke our most baroque stares withers our ready curiosity and we turn away, snuffing out the possibility for mutual recognition. If the knowledge that staring delivers is unbearable, the expected elasticity of human connection that mutual looking offers becomes brittle. When we suddenly find ourselves face to face with some moment mirror our most dreaded fate—we look away.
General Provisions
Authors: Gabriel Henry Deeb
Published: November 2023

Chapter II of the Convention governs the interpretation of contracts. The chapter consists of seven articles (Articles 7–13). Because uniformity of interpretation adds to the long-term viability of the Convention, or any international commercial convention for that matter, Article 7(1) embodies the standard UNCITRAL language that the Convention should be interpreted in light of its international character.323 Uniformity of interpretation
Provisions Common to the Obligations of the Seller and of the Buyer
Authors: Gabriel Henry Deeb
Published: November 2023

Article 71, along with Article 72, provides the Convention’s default provisions1074 on anticipatory breach. Article 71(1) permits the aggrieved party to “suspend1075 the performance of his obligations if . . . it becomes apparent that the other party 1073 Official Comment 3 to Section 2-510 indicates that this allocation of risk of loss is not to be disturbed by any subrogation right of an insurer. These provisions that tie risk of loss to deficiencies in the aggrieved party’s insurance coverage have been roundly criticized in the commentary on risk of loss under Article 2; however, Section 2-510 was retained in the revisions.
Assignment Of Rights And Transfer Of Obligations
Authors: Gabriel Henry Deeb
Published: November 2023

Assignment of Rights and Transfer of Obligations The Convention has no provision that deals with set-off. Thus, the appropriate rules will be determined by the applicable con?ict of law rules of the forum.
1900 and Beyond
Authors: Pickover Clifford A
Published: November 2023

It seems we all face a fundamental paradox in that it’s impossible to think about the universe except in terms of its relation to humans. You can’t make sense of language, or even scientific laws or mathematics, without the concept of an observer, and yet at the same time we know perfectly well that humans are a very late addition: the universe was here long before us and will be here long after us.
Introduction “As with a Startling Picture”: Modernism and the Domestic Sphere
Authors: Edmunds Susan
Published: November 2023

In his 1939 essay “What Is Epic Theater?” Walter Benjamin conjures up “a family scene” to explain the concept of Brecht’s alienation effect to his reader: Suddenly a stranger enters. The mother was just about to seize a bronze bust and hurl it at her daughter; the father was in the act of opening the window in order to call a policeman. At that moment the stranger appears in the doorway. This means that the stranger is confronted with a situation as with a startling picture: troubled faces, an open window, the furniture in disarray. But there are eyes to which even more ordinary scenes of middle-class life look almost equally startling.
“Not Sentimental”: The Double Bind of White Working-Class Femininity in Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio
Authors: Edmunds Susan
Published: November 2023

When Tillie Olsen began Yonnondio in 1932, she was a committed member of the Young Communist League who had already been jailed once for her political activity. A portion of the novel’s first chapter appeared in Partisan Review in 1934; with the help of a Random House contract, Olsen spent the next several years balancing the demands of writing with childrearing, labor activism, and more jail time. As she cast back from the crisis of the early thirties to focus her novel on the impoverished domestic life of a working-class family in the 1920s, she wrote with a strong sense of the revolutionary import of her subject matter.
The Arbitrators
Authors: Madsen Finn
Published: November 2023

Any person who enjoys full legal capacity in regard to his actions and his property may act as arbitrator.The seventh section sets out the general capacity conditions applicable to arbitrators. The requirements are justified in the preparatory works1 on the grounds that an arbitrator should possess legal capacity and be able to take care of himself and his property. A person who is unable to do so due to lack of years or mental ill health should not be able to serve as an arbitrator and is therefore excluded from the group of conceivable arbitrators. The capacity requirements are absolute and thus apply irrespective of the issue which is the subject matter of the arbitration and irrespective of the identity of the parties. With an eye to foreign arbitrators, the rule has been formulated in a general manner in order to cover corresponding restrictions in foreign legislation.
Invalidity and Setting Aside Arbitral Awards
Authors: Madsen Finn
Published: November 2023

The arbitral proceedings are based on the dispute between the parties being conclusively determined through the arbitral award. In choosing arbitration, the parties waive the possibility to challenge the decision on the grounds that the arbitrators have reached an incorrect substantive decision in the referred matter in dispute, e.g., through erroneous application of law or evaluation of evidence. It might be said that the parties have sacrificed the possibility of enhanced substantive fairness in the decision, which the more formalistic, multi-instance court procedure is intended to ensure, in exchange for the other advantages offered by arbitration.
Recognition and Enforcement
Authors: Madsen Finn
Published: November 2023

An arbitral award which is issued abroad is deemed to be foreign. This follows from the first paragraph. Both the Model Law and the New York Convention are based on the same principle as the Act, namely that the nationality of the award is determined on a territorial basis.1 Conversely, an award is deemed to be Swedish if it is made in Sweden.2 The provisions of the New York Convention are aimed solely at foreign awards, i.e., awards made in a state other than the one in which recognition or enforcement of the award is sought. According to the second paragraph, for the purposes of applying the Act, an arbitral award shall be deemed to have been made in the country where the place of arbitration is situated. Pursuant to section 22, the parties determine the place of arbitration. The parties’ choice of place of arbitration may be made in an arbitration clause or after a dispute has arisen.
CISG: Talking the Leap into Drafting
Authors: Cook* V Susanne
Published: November 2023

This chapter provides a sample agreement that can be used as a guide when drafting contracts intended to be governed by the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (“CISG” or “the Convention”). This reflects a proactive approach, in contrast to simply analyzing the effect of contract language inadvertently subject to the CISG because of the drafter’s inattention to the intricacies of opting out of the Convention. Anecdotal evidence tells us that even sophisticated practitioners hesitate to permit contracts to be governed by the CISG because the next step—actually drafting the agreement—would place the attorney on unfamiliar ground.
A Comparative Perspective on theCISG
Authors: Curran* Vivian Grosswald
Published: November 2023

The CISG demonstrates the transformation law is undergoing today as the globalizing world globalizes law. For present purposes, we may define globalization as a process in which functional criteria increasingly replace geographic ones, with nation-states’ traditional law-generating organs diminishing in importance in determining legal significance, regulation and evolution.
The Business Lawyer’s Perspective
Authors: Saiegh Sandra
Published: November 2023

I expect this chapter to serve as an appeal to all the experts on the U.N. Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (“CISG” or “the Convention”)1 to reach out to the legal business community and ensure that U.S. business lawyers have the necessary tools to take advantage of the CISG as a contract drafting tool.
Force Majeure and CISG Article 79: Competing Approaches and Some Drafting Advice
Authors: Garro* Alejandro M
Published: November 2023

The obligation to perform a contract involving an international sale of goods may be excused, in exceptional cases, under Article 79 of the Vienna Sales Convention (CISG) if extraordinary circumstances render the performance impossible-or at least virtually impossible. Although Article 79 seeks to establish a uniform standard of force majeure, the actual degree of protection to be received by the obligor will vary with competing interpretative approaches to the provision. Whether a court called upon to evaluate the alleged excuse will take a narrow or permissive approach to the notion of “impediment” may well depend on the legal culture of the court and the contextual set of circumstances surrounding the performance of the contract.
The Multifaceted Nature of International Investment Law
Authors: Geiger Rainer
Published: November 2023

International investment has expanded exponentially over the past decades. While industrialized countries still account for the bulk of outward investment, emerging market economies are becoming major sources of investment as well. There is a growing consensus that investment is a driving force for economic development and that there is a common interest in providing favorable conditions for investment—which implies a transparent and equitable set of rules governing the relations between investors and governments. The importance of investment and private sector initiatives is recognized in the Monterrey Consensus and the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals.
Implications for the Future of International Investment Law
Authors: Alvarez José E
Published: November 2023

This volume, the product of a symposium on “Transparency and Consistency in International Law: Is There a Need for a Review Mechanism?” held at Columbia University on April 4, 2006, addresses a unique emerging regime that is neither the product of a single multilateral treaty nor the subject of an overreaching international institution. The international rules governing foreign direct investment (FDI) do not arise from anything resembling the enormous multi-year trade rounds that produced the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its impressive post-Uruguay Round dispute settlement system. Unlike the rules governing trade in goods, the world’s FDI rules emerge instead from some 2,500 bilateral agreements as well as an increasing number of free trade agreements that contain investment guarantees, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)’s Chapter 11. Even while WTO lawyers still debate the virtues of increased transparency—such as whether or when amici briefs from non-state entities ought to be considered by the WTO’s dispute settlers or whether the emerging WTO case law has indeed generated harmonious interpretations over time—the WTO still inspires the envy of investment lawyers.
Variation in the Substantive Provisions and Interpretation of International Investment Agreements
Authors: Juillard Patrick
Published: November 2023

M. Sornarajah has been critical of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) for an extended period, and the views which he expresses in his chapter in this volume should thus come as no surprise. His criticism, however, should not be taken lightly, if for no other reason than that it does reflect positions that are held in some circles, be it within developing countries, or within developed countries. His criticism seems to be twofold. On the one hand, it deals with BITs, and on the other, it deals with the interpretation and application of BIT provisions through investor-State arbitration. This chapter is limited to the first aspect; i.e., the BITs themselves. The reason for this is that my contribution deals with the differences between the substantive provisions of international investment agreements (IIAs), including BITs.
Examining the Institutional Design of International Investment Law
Authors: Brummer Christopher
Published: November 2023

The Columbia Program on International Investment symposium on the law of international investment took place at a critical moment in the development of international rules relating to foreign direct investment (FDI). The past 20 years have seen a dramatic rise not only in FDI flows to developing countries, but also in the number of bilateral and regional agreements granting, among other things, foreign investors the right to sue countries hosting their investment where they fail to honor substantive commitments contained in those agreements. Together, these two trends have led to an exponential rise in investor-State litigation, with at least 219 treaty arbitrations brought between 1987 and 2005, two-thirds of which have been initiated in the past three years, and virtually all of them initiated by firms.
Breach of Contract: The CISG
Authors: Zeller Bruno
Published: November 2023

As seen in previous chapters, a breach of contract attracts widely divergent solutions, and every legal system uses technical expressions and techniques that are recognized nowhere else. Devising correct and just remedies that take account of both parties’ interests and are economically defensible are the key considerations for the success of any remedial system. A degree of certainty is required so parties can calculate the risk of entering into contracts. It is of doubtful utility when a party can discover the merits of a remedial system only once a claim is lodged. There are few legal systems in the world where the available remedies are not known in advance.
Limitation on Claims
Authors: Zeller Bruno
Published: November 2023

Like many legal systems, the CISG limits the contractual liability of parties. Economic loss suffered by one party cannot be unlimited, as that would stiKe economic activities.
Calculation of Losses under Article 74
Authors: Zeller Bruno
Published: November 2023

When we consider the calculation of direct or indirect damages, it needs be stressed again that the theory of causation as used in civil law systems has no place, as it is excluded from the sphere of the CISG because of the introduction of the foreseeability rule. The only relevant question is whether the loss is caused by the breach of the contract and is an assessable consequence of that breach.
Attorneys’ Fees
Authors: Zeller Bruno
Published: November 2023

As seen in previous chapters, article 74 attempts to put the innocent party into the position they would have occupied had the contract been properly performed. In other words, damages that have reduced the asset base of a business can be claimed pursuant to article 74. There is a proviso that even if there is a reduction of the asset base, this reduction must or “ought to have been foreseen at the time of the conclusion of the contract.” At first glance, this article seems to be straightforward, but there is one class of cost, namely attorneys’ fees, that poses considerable problems in practice and in theory.