Film, Folklore, and Urban Legends (review)
2008; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1536-1802
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoFolklore, and Urban Legends. By MikelJ. Koven. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008. ix +199 pp. Films offer excellent opportunities to demonstrate the legend's dynamics. I have shown The Burning (1981), Urban Legend (1998), and other films to my students, explaining how they and encourage the spread of traditional narratives. Until now, there has been no textbook that covers convergences of legends with film. Mikel Koven's Folkore, and Urban Legends fills that gap, explaining complex interrelationships with thoroughness, insight, and wit. This book brings together revised versions of Koven's previously published essays on and film, with the purpose of examining the relationship between traditional and popular culture. The author explains that this is not meant to be a definitive study of and film; instead, it strives to apply folkloristic terms to film analysis, redefining for studies and how we can engage popular film and television (ix). He succeeds in this endeavor, explicating aspects of methodology, belief, and ostension that concern legend scholars and other folklorists. his introductory chapter, Koven summarizes questions raised in earlier scholarship. Do mass-mediated texts qualify as folklore? How massmediated texts influence traditional storytelling style and content? Citing S. Elizabeth Bird's For Enquiring Minds (1992), he suggests that we focus on how certain popular culture forms succeed because they act like folklore (345). He decries motif spotting and tale-type identification, which connect films' traditional content to myth, Marchen, and legend, because these methods seem too superficial. Part 2, In Search of a Methodology, introduces some diverse relationships between and film. the chapter devoted to Robin Hardy's film The Wicker Man (1973), Koven criticizes the film's creators for uncritically using Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough as the basis for their portrayal of human sacrifice by inhabitants of a Scottish island. This portrayal, he argues, unproblematically literalize[s] a colonialist agenda that sees the Celtic nations as an undifferentiated (33). While this argument rings true, the next chapter, Searching for Tale Types and Motifs in the Zombie Film, seems less persuasive. One can delve deeper than identifying types and motifs, to be sure, but comparison of oral-traditional and cinematic zombies to their quasi- cognates in European raises intriguing issues. Koven admits that placing these two phenomena side by side does create a discursive juxtaposition (50); it also makes the reader think about cultural differences and analytic categories. part 3, Issues of Belief, Koven analyzes two episodes of the popular series The X-Files, finding that the series stimulates discussion within a framework of legend collection and folkloristic debates about belief (81). Such debates also arise in relation to bee films such as Deadly Invasion (1995). How, Koven asks, relatively recent anxieties about killer bees compare to worries about killer bees in the late 1970s? Beeing Anxious he explains that recent films show American families under attack, while older films depict a whole society struggling with disaster. Although he could go farther in interpreting what this focus on the family means, he persuades the reader that these popular films reflect contemporary anxieties much as urban legends do (95). …
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