Blog

  • The Protean Cartoon: Currents of Animation Theory

    Open Access Review | Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons (2019) by Hannah Frank | The truly monumental film director Sergei Eisenstein, pioneer of the “montage of attractions,” creator of the intense Russian masterpieces Battleship Potemkin (1925), Strike (1925) and Ivan the Terrible (1944), loved Mickey Mouse. Pre-colour Mickey exemplifies what Eisenstein… Read more

  • A.C. Gunter’s Baron Montez: 23. The Honor of France

    The previous chapter closed dramatically with a frightened and frantic Louise at the door of Larchmont’s hotel clutching ‘THE BULKY, BIG POCKETBOOK OF BARON FERNANDO MONTEZ!’ Gunter’s decision to end the previous chapter like this, with Louise rejoining Harry, means that this coming chapter falls into retrospective: detailing how Louise came to have the object… Read more

  • A.C. Gunter’s Baron Montez: 22. The Mind of a Lunatic

    Harry has returned to Paris, and in this chapter he has to deal with the dangerously paranoid delusional antics of his brother, and the effect of his behaviour on everyone around him. The use of the word ‘lunatic’ in a medical sense serves to remind the reader that through the pages of the novel we… Read more

  • A.C. Gunter’s Baron Montez: 21. After Her!

    As the title suggests, this chapter, the last in Book Three has a sense of haste and urgency about it. Louise has to navigate a series of diverse interactions and does so skillfully and with a will, including another encounter with Domingo in which she deftly uses his own vernacular to deflect him from the… Read more

  • A.C. Gunter’s Baron Montez: 20. Domingo of Porto Bello

    In a gradual increase in intensity over the past chapters two relics have been revealed. First the tintype image of Alice Ripley, then the contents of the powder canister: a string of pearls and a note inscribed in blood on a cuff. These have only reinforced Louise’s belief, first raised by Harry, that Montez is… Read more