SC Online Poetry

The Moving Image

Editor’s Note: The Moving Image Upstate
Several years ago, during the annual Syracuse International Film Festival (SYRFILM), a visiting African filmmaker asked me if I would drive him to a book store so that he could browse the movie books and journals. I took him to Barnes & Noble, which sits along a boulevard of strip malls and restaurants out on the eastern edge of the city. On the way, he told me that Syracuse had more movie theaters than his entire country. This, he said, had not stopped a bustling film industry there, but it had shaped their common practice of largely direct-to-DVD distribution. And this in turn meant he came to the classic big-screen-in-the-dark, communal movie experience with a fresh, even thrilled, appreciation.
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How Video Became Art: Bill Viola and David Ross Return to the Everson Museum
“Will we have time to talk about The Passions?” asks one. It’s not surprising that we didn’t hear it at the time, occupied as we were, already several minutes into the fourth video clip that Bill Viola would show that evening during “A Conversation with Bill Viola and David A. Ross.” But it’s there, unmistakably, a whispered exchange picked up by their mics and resurrected at the tail end of the recording. Conducted last October before an overflow audience in the Everson Museum’s Hosmer Auditorium, the event on stage between these two friends and collaborators of four decades had already run well over an hour. Read more...

Bollywood and Beyond: An Interview with Tula Goenka
More than five hundred people came to the opening session of last fall’s Illuminating Oppression, the annual human rights film festival at Syracuse University. That first night, they first filled the Hergenhan Auditorium at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communication, then overflowed to two other rooms equipped with monitors. Read more...

The Lost Art of Showing ‘Dangerous’ Films
The first public screening of a motion picture occurred in 1895 and within a decade the movie theater had burst onto the American scene in what historians now call the “Nickelodeon boom.” 1905 saw an enormous expansion of movie projectors and a dramatic increase in the number of nickelodeon
theaters. Read more...

From Text to Film: The Human Stain and the Burden of Blackness
In Philip Roth’s 2000 novel The Human Stain, we meet quiet and reflective Coleman Silk, classics professor and first Jewish dean of faculty at a small private college in New England in the late 1990s. His history-making achievement is no match for the accusations of racism made against him when he wonders aloud if two students who’ve never come to class are “spooks.” Read more...

“It’s Alive! Alive!” - Hideous Progeny: The Horror and Fascination of Film Adaptation
Julio Cortázar once said of Blow Up (1966), Michelangelo Antonioni’s adaptation of Cortázar’s short story by the same name, “I left Antonioni absolutely free to depart from my story and follow his own ghosts; and in search for them, he met with some of mine.” Hitchcock said similarly, if more bluntly, “What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema.”
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SC Online Visual Art

In addition to the images on the Stone Canoe home page, which are in the printed journal, we are pleased to feature additional work by the following artists in SC Online:

Roberley Bell Video Room with Bench
Roger De Muth Sea Monsters Stand
Lauren DiCioccio For the Love
Mary Lum Condition Two; Condition Three
Lucy Mink Goldberg Center
Jim Morris Power and Flux L009
Lin Price Romulus
Amos Scully Delvage; Delvage (detail)
Amy Swartele Burst Egg
Linn Underhill H.L. Mencken; Tennessee Williams, both images from the series NoMan’s Land