When I was a child my entrepreneur father moved us around a lot. Mostly we ended up in places where everyone spoke Spanish, from Mexico to Spain. As a result I learned how to read in Spanish before I learned how to read in English. I learned how to conjugate verbs in Spanish while I was a schoolgirl in Spain but never really mastered the same material in English.
Is The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus Steampunk? What about Book of Eli?
A couple of blogs back I posted a list of media I think is steampunk. I am considering adding
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus and The Book of Eli to that list. I'd like to hear arguments for and against. For example, does the fact that Imaginarium is set in the present day mean it is not steampunk?
See my guest blog on Steampunk and the recent movie Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, on Alicia Rasley's excellent blog on everything a writer needs to know.
The Whitney Museum of Art in New York is screening almost all of the films of the first woman filmmaker, Alice Guy Blaché. The show runs until the end of January. Six of the nearly ninety films to be screened have been newly preserved.
I've been working on a steampunk western romance tentatively entitled The Separation of the Senses. Although I've been a fan of steampunk since I first started reading Jules Verne in the 1960s, once I actually started writing my own work I wanted to immerse myself in steampunk worlds completely. The best way to do that, of course, is to watch movies. But figuring out which movies to watch was not so easy, as there is wide disagreement on what exactly constitutes Steampunk. For what is is worth, here is my list.
The first time I learned about Romance (as in literary Romances, not as in romance novels) I was a playwriting student (the first student to major in playwriting there, in fact) at Catholic University.
The teacher was talking about canon formation, and how often what ended up making it into the canon were things people actually liked to read, which is Romance.
Shakespeare’s last four plays, Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale, Pericles, and Tempest are Romances.
Sam Waterston has recorded the narration for Bare Hands and Wooden Limbs and we are now in the final phases of post-production.
Alison McMahan is a judge at the Non Violence International Film Festival - www.nviff.com - and is taking a sidebar of films by Cinewomen NY members. Read more about CineWomenNY.
Alison McMahan will give a lecture on the films of Alice Guy Blaché at the Festival du Films des Femmes in Brussels on September 22nd.