In part one of this series, I advocated for including a well-maintained blog as part of an integrated business development program, but it still left open the gapingly large question of what to write about. In this post, I'm hoping to alleviate some of that anxiety by proposing a flexible editorial approach and a list of themes that can generate an endless number of topics.
First, decide on the frequency of your posts – and understand that quantity isn't as important as consistency – don't embark on a weekly posting schedule only to peter out after a few weeks of posts. That being said, you probably don't want to post any less than monthly. That's only twelve posts a year, a pretty reasonable number!
Next, have an editorial theme for your blog. And as far as I'm concerned, your overriding editorial theme should be based on your agency's positioning. Right away, this opens up a range of possible topics.
Take a controversial position. Strong opinions usually make for good reading, but only if you can express them articulately and add value rather than simply complaining. These kinds of opinion pieces can also be enticing to editors at trade magazines who love to publish controversial ideas.
News curation. Since you're already reading news and analysis pertaining to your area of expertise, compile a running list of the best, most informative, most insightful pieces you've read that quarter, introducing it with a short executive summary. Voila. You've just taken care of 25% of your 12 web posts for the year.
Industry events. Ideally you're attending a handful of industry conferences per year. Maybe it's SxSW, CES, or the ANA's Masters of Marketing; or maybe it's a vertical conference like the Kitchen & Bath Industry Show (KBIS) or the National Restaurant Association (NRA) conference. Go in with your eyes wide open, knowing that you're not the only person writing a trends piece about a trade show that thousands will be attending, but record your thoughts through the filter of your expertise and write your post with the needs of your clients and prospects in mind.
Expert profiles. Conduct interviews with experts in your field that complement the work you do. Even better if you can figure out how to use this as a device to meet prospects. I know a consultant that does this brilliantly. He'll often write commentaries about how a particular company is approaching an issue, interviewing the CMO for more insight. I'm not sure how often this actually results in new business for him, but he gets to have a conversation with someone who might never return a sales call.
Geography. Smaller agencies with defined geographic scopes should have plenty to say about demographic shifts or even regulatory issues affecting the city/state/region where they and their clients do business.
Unravel esoteric information. If you're a specialist in emerging digital or media technologies, devote one or two posts per year to complicated topics and make them easier to understand.
Publish industry presentations. Get more exposure for the presentations you make at industry conferences by publishing them online after the event. Or, use the months leading up to the event to stress test ideas you want to use in your presentation.
Seasonal topics. This applies most to firms whose work has a seasonal focus, of course. If you work with retail clients, you want to make sure you're covering big shopping seasons like back-to-school and Christmas. If your focus is sports marketing, then you might want to touch on issues affecting the upcoming football, basketball, baseball, etc., season.
Case studies. Tout the solutions you're developing for your clients. But ONLY publish case studies if they: 1. Have demonstrable results that your readers will care about; 2. Tell a great story; 3. Align back to the theme of your blog/positioning.
Employee spotlights. Like the case studies, write these in such a way that clearly illustrates how this person pays off your firm's value proposition. Resist writing a fluff piece about how they make a mean banana bread or how they've trained their dog to bark the alphabet.
Another way to magically turn one blog post into two or three: write a series, just like the one you're reading right now.
I also advise you to have a way to quickly jot down ideas whenever they come to you. I record them in Evernote, which syncs between my iPhone and my laptop, plus I can clip web pages and other information that I may want to refer to in the post.
It's my promise you that once you get in the habit of keeping these themes in mind, new ideas will come to you at an astonishing rate.


According to Chinese state media, the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges have carried out investigations into 30 percent of companies listed on their exchanges that are performing operations pertaining to distributed ledger technology (DLT). Of the companies investigated, less than half were able to demonstrate applications for blockchain technology.
The recent speculative frenzy surrounding cryptocurrencies has led to a number of businesses seeking to associate their operations with virtual currencies and DLT. In many cases, the purported foray into blockchain has appeared dubious at best, despite many companies seeing dramatic volatility in the price of their shares, buoyed by news of blockchain adoption.
Chinese state-operated media outlet Securities Daily estimates that 80 public companies listed on the exchanges purport to have included DLT in their business model. Of the 80 companies, 56 have seen a rise in price, placing blockchain among the few sectors to be performing well in the two cities.
Data produced by Hithink Flush Information Network has indicated that 70 of the 80 blockchain-related stocks have seen price moves meeting the daily limit 10 percent price volatility during 2018, seven of which exceeded the limit more than 10 times this year.
23 of the 80 DLT companies have been directly investigated by the Shenzhen and Shanghai stock exchanges. Two thirds of the examinations took place during the first quarter of 2018.
According to Sina, the exchanges' investigations predominantly sought to ascertain "the specific model of the blockchain business, including application scenarios and profit models," and potential "operational risks" that may arise as a consequence of adopting DLT.
When asked to demonstrate the results of their blockchain operations, the companies are reported to have most frequently used the words "exploration" and "research," with 13 of the 23 companies suspected of having sought to associate themselves with blockchain solely to drive speculation while failing to evidence applications for DLT.
What is your response to the exchanges' findings that the majority of companies seeking to ride the blockchain bandwagon have no intention of delivering products and applications built on the technology? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!


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You are here: Home / Colognes & Perfumes / Brands / Best Versace Perfumes For Women in 2023 – Reviews
Best Versace Perfumes For Women in 2023 – Reviews
If you are a fashion-enthusiastic woman, you obviously know of the fashion brand, Versace. This brand is famous for its pride, style, and elegance. Versace designs clothes, beauty products, as well as perfumes.
Best Versace Perfumes for Women
1. Versace Bright Crystal
2. Versace Eros Pour Femme
3. Versace Vanitas Perfume
4. Versace Yellow Diamond Perfume
5. Versace Crystal Noir Perfume
6. Versace Versense EDT Spray
7. Versace Woman Eau De Parfum Spray
8. Versace Dylan Blue Pour Femme
9. Versace Red Jeans for Women EDT Spray
10. Versace Bright Crystal Absolu Eau de Perfume
The Versace perfumes for women are among the leading on the market, and they are known to deliver unique and classy fragrance. If you are spoilt for choice on the Versace perfume to purchase, here is a look at the top Versace perfumes for women you should give a shot.
This is supposedly the best Versace perfume for women. It was introduced in 2006 and is also one of the most sold perfumes in the world. The first thing that'll catch your eyes when you purchase this perfume is the elegant crystal-shaped bottle.
You'll enjoy the sweet smell that comes with the first spray. The fragrance is balanced with natural Lotus and Magnolia notes. The fragrance concludes with seductive base notes that will undoubtedly appeal to men. Also, the smell is long-lasting throughout the day.
It's a good perfume that you can wear to work or when running your errands during the day.
Elegant Bottle
Sweet Smell Profile
Has an Upbeat Vibe
Designed For Younger Women
This perfume is yet another good choice if you want a seductive scent that is balanced with some wild notes. It was launched in 2014 and has remained on the top performers' list over the years.
Eros Pour Femme comes with top notes of bergamot gerbera and pomegranate, which are blended well with the sexy jasmine and peony notes. The scent is then harmonized with a warm fragrance of amber musk. These notes assure you of a seductive scent that will give you some extra level of confidence around your friends.
As seductive as it is, the fragrance should work well for you if you are going out for a romantic evening. However, you can still wear it during the day when you are off to work.
Musky Overtones Can Be Strong
Sharp Citrus Top Notes
Has a Luxurious Feel
Versace Vanitas joined the perfume world back in 2011, and it is one of the perfumes that are designed for the young and vibrant ladies. The perfume has been designed with a super fresh fragrance.
It starts with top notes of citrus lemon, orchid flowers, and Tiare flowers. The patchouli flavor then harmonizes it as the perfume settles. This also balances the lemon and floral fragrances to give you a unique scent of freshness. The base notes of cedar wood deliver a warm and appealing smell that will stay with you throughout the day.
You'd also love the nice bottle of the perfume, which has some yellow tinge that also features a gold-plated piece. It is a good choice for the young ladies under 25 years.
Moderate Projection
Citrus Top Notes
Can Be a Bit Strong
If you are a fan of perfumes that come with an appealing look and packaging, then you would love the Versace Yellow Diamond. It doesn't only look good, but it also delivers an irresistibly sweet floral-citrus scent.
It comes with top notes of pear sorbet, diamante citron, neroli, and bergamot. The fragrance is harmonized with middle notes of Nymphaea, mimosa, freesia, and orange blossom. The base notes are Palo Santo Wood, amber woods, and musk. You can be sure of having a fresh floral smell on you, which will appeal to men as well.
With its freshness, this is a perfect perfume to wear to work. However, it won't last for too long, so you can carry it in your purse to spray after a few hours.
Fresh, Vibrant Profile
Citrus & Flowery Notes
Sweet Scent Profile
Doesn't Last Long
Sillage a Bit Heavy
This is yet another top Versace perfume for women that delivers appropriately. It comes with a luxurious fragrance that is appealing and refreshing. The perfume comes in a sophisticated bottle that is quite appealing. The lid is also one of a kind, and you can use the bottle as a décor in the house.
When you spray it, it will start with top notes of pepper, nutmeg, and ginger, which are then balanced with middle notes of peony, coconut, and African orange. The base notes of amber, sandalwood, and musk harmonize the fragrance to give you an irresistibly sweet smell.
If you're one of the women who need a perfume that delivers a refreshing and long-lasting feminine fragrance, this should be a perfect choice for you. You can wear it to work or if you are going for a day out over the weekend.
Exotic Scent Profile
Sillage is a Bit Heavy
Designed to be a scent suggestive of summer walks through breezy Mediterranean gardens, this Eau de Toilette spray has fruity top notes, flowery middle notes, and woody base notes. When first sprayed on the skin, this EDT spray releases notes of bergamot, figs, green mandarin, and pear. These notes quickly yield to its heart notes which smell very much like jasmine, and cardamom. It finishes everything off with nice subtle base notes of sandalwood, cedar, and olive tree wood. Underneath all of that is a sexy musk scent that has a moderate amount of longevity and a sillage that isn't too heavy.
While it's top citrus notes come out strong, they're never overpowering or end up overwhelming the wearer. It's also a suitable fragrance for year-round use. If there's one complaint that could be said about this high-quality perfume, it's that it ends up with a bit of a soapy finish that some people don't appreciate. However, this isn't the consensus among everyone, and some people find its finish to be clean and refreshing.
Sweet Mediterranean Scent
Sexy Scent Profile
Moderate Longevity
Ends With a Soapy Finish
Women who love a floral scent that has a modern profile but still tips a hat to perfumes of the 1990s may want to examine this complex perfume. It starts off with the light, floral top notes of rose, bergamot, and jasmine, then slowly fades into its heart and base notes. At its heart, this perfume contains notes of plum, raspberry, lotus and a touch of cedar. Eventually, this scent profile yields to its dark, smoky base notes which contain mere hints of musk and amber. While this scent profile isn't very memorable, it also isn't overpowering or offensive either.
With moderate sillage and average longevity, this perfume is strong enough to persist through most days but will need to be reapplied as the evening hours approach. It's a scent that performs equally well at the beach as it does on a cool autumn day and can be worn for both day and night activities. While it's not a scent that's going to knock anyone off of their feet, it's modern scent is pleasant and attractive.
Modern Scent
Floral Overtones
Dark Middle & Base Notes
Not a Memorable Fragrance
This perfume starts off with powerful fruity notes, gentle fade into flowery middle notes and then end on a finish that some wearers have described as soapy. Its top notes contain hints of black currant, green apple, clover, and peach. It's heart notes smell like a combination of rose and jasmine. As it yields to its base, this perfume then begins to smell like patchouli, white oak, and musk. While this means that this perfume has a very feminine scent, it also means that it's finishing notes leaves a lot to be desired.
It's mainly a perfume intended to be worn during warm, summer days or cool spring days. It's not a scent ever intended to be worn during the winter months and is definitely not one meant for evening use. One of this perfume's flaws is that it has a weak projection that tends to fade off too quickly and isn't very memorable. Although this perform will appeal to a large demographic of women, it's not an overly impressive perfume.
Fruity Top Notes
Flowery Heart Notes
Very Feminine Scent
Finishes Soapy
Projection is Weak
With a moderate sillage and longevity, this product won't fade too quickly but isn't considered to be a long-lasting fragrance. When first applied to the skin, this product comes out with strong floral notes that smell like apricot, ylang-ylang, and blackcurrant. It's heart notes are released fairly quickly, and they suggest overtones of rose, violet, Lilly of the valley and water lily. When the fragrance eventually slips into its base notes, it is very reminiscent of sandalwood, vanilla, and musk.
Although this perfume's scent profile can be overpowering at times, it's a sweet and feminine scent that many younger women will enjoy. And this is perhaps this fragrance's greatest flaw. This perfume appeals to a narrow demographic and isn't a scent that can be embraced by all women. It's an immature scent that won't be enjoyed by everyone.
Flowery Middle Notes
Sweet & Feminine
A Very Immature Scent
Floral Notes Can Be Overpowering
Unlike Versace Bright Crystal, the sister product to this one, Versace Bright Crystal Absolu doesn't deliver the longevity or the projection that many people would like it to deliver. While it starts off with bright floral notes which include yuzu, water, and pomegranate, it too quickly moves through its middle and base notes. This fragrance's heart notes include peony, lotus, and magnolia, while it's base notes are muskier and smell like amber and musk.
Although its performance leaves a lot to be desired, it does have a classic scent that is very complex and seems to smell differently every time it's worn. Sometimes it smells like it has hints of raspberry and mahogany to it, and the other times it seems to have notes of rose in it. The one thing that can be said about it is that it smells very much like an expensive perfume, which makes it even more unfortunate that it doesn't perform like a top perfume.
Bright Notes
Clean Floral Notes
Longevity is Just Okay

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Munir's Disney Retrospective -- Animated Classic #25: The Black Cauldron (1985)
Last Week's: Munir's Disney Retrospective -- Animated Classic #24: The Fox and the Hound (1981)
Here's a film that has the words "wasted potential" all over it. The Black Cauldron was a movie intended for a more mature audience, as Disney felt they needed to do something for teens instead of little children, without realizing that was Walt did was entertainment for everyone and for all ages. The Disney team wanted to create a "darker movie" and Lloyd Alexander's "Prydain Chronicles" seemed like the perfect choice on paper. Unfortunately, the final product is a bloated mixture of half-baked ideas and underdeveloped characters. The story of Taran and his quest to reach the mythical Black Cauldron and save humanity before The Evil Horned King takes it and rules over the world seems like a great adventure story, but the Disney animators created a painfully slow and unfunny film that really wastes any potential of becoming something better by giving Taran the personality of a potato. Yep, Taran is one of the most bland and contradictory characters ever created for a Disney film and, as heroes go, he's one of the worst. Alongside a slate of horrible supporting characters (just look at Gurgi, one of the most annoying creatures I've ever encountered in a film) he drags the whole picture down; the film is a nearly complete disaster from beginning to end. What saves it from being a compete waste is some inspired backgrounds and The Horned King, who is a menacing villain with a great design. But, aside from that, The Black Cauldron is the main reason why this was a dark time for Disney Animation. It didn't help that Jeffrey Katzenberg, the newly appointed head of the department, demanded many cuts in the final sequences that were too "dark" for the audience. When the film premiered, audiences turned their back on this "ambitious" project and Cauldron plummeted at the box office, becoming an epic disaster and threatening the very existence of the studio. Fortunately, that wasn't quite the case and since the movie's disastrous premiere it has achieved some sort of "cult status" among some circles. But I must say that The Black Cauldron remains one of the worst and most boring pictures the famous studio have ever created. Rating: 2/5.
Next Week: Animated Classic #26 Review: The Great Mouse Detective (1986)
Labels: Dark Era, Disney, Disney Retrospective, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Munir, Review, the Black Cauldron


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Nobel winner Dylan is likely in Stockholm next year
The Swedish Academy says Bob Dylan, who was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature, likely will travel to Stockholm
Nobel winner Dylan is likely in Stockholm next year The Swedish Academy says Bob Dylan, who was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature, likely will travel to Stockholm Check out this story on detroitnews.com: http://detne.ws/2fCDBbl
AP Published 7:53 a.m. ET Nov. 18, 2016
Bob Dylan(Photo: Vince Bucci / AP)
Copenhagen, Denmark — Bob Dylan, who was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature but won't be attending the prize ceremony, likely will travel to Stockholm next year and might give his Nobel Lecture then, the Swedish Academy said Friday.
Dylan likely will give a concert in the Swedish capital, offering "a perfect opportunity to deliver his lecture," the academy said. The Swedish Academy awards the Nobel Prize for literature.
Sara Danius, the organization's permanent secretary, told Swedish public radio Friday that the Nobel Foundation's rules for laureate lectures are "flexible." Dylan can deliver his as "a written speech, a spontaneous discourse, a film," or another format of his choosing, Danius said.
In 2004, Austrian playwright and Nobel literature prize winner Elfriede Jelinek stayed home because of social phobia. Her lecture was pre-recorded, and shown on video in Stockholm.
Dylan has said he cannot attend the Dec. 10 prize ceremony, pleading other commitments.
The 75-year-old American singer-songwriter was awarded the prize on Oct. 13 "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."
The Academy said in a statement it had "decided not to organize an alternative plan" for his lecture.
The laureate lectures must be held within six months from the Dec. 10 ceremonies, on a subject related to the topic of the prizes.
Normally, they occur during the week leading up to the award ceremony. However, several recipients have delivered the lectures after the fact.
Former political prisoner and now the de facto leader of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi, delivered hers 21 years after being award the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1991.
Peace prize recipient Lech Walesa, the Polish dissident and leader of the Solidarity union movement, gave his lecture 12 years later while visiting Norway as Poland's president.
The six Nobel Prizes will be officially conferred upon winners in Stockholm and Oslo next month on the anniversary of award founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.
Details about who would accept the award on Dylan's behalf were still unclear.
Read or Share this story: http://detne.ws/2fCDBbl
21-year-old dies in shooting on Detroit's west side


Shoptiques is a New York, NY based company that is trying to make online shopping better by bringing boutiques to the web, and they're hiring.
Posted by Willy Franzen on May 14, 2012. Jobs updated daily.
I do as much of my shopping online as possible, but that's because I don't really enjoy shopping. It's all about minimizing my time doing something that I don't want to do. For some people online shopping is great for the opposite reason–it allows them to spend even more time shopping (at work, on the train, walking down the street, on the couch, etc.). The big problem with online shopping is that the experience feels a bit homogenized–you're typically buying from major retailers or e-commerce companies. Shoptiques is a New York, NY based company that is trying to make online shopping better by bringing boutiques to the web. Why boutiques? Boutiques offer the ultimate shopping experience: "beautiful hard-to-find hand-picked fashion and knowledgeable advice from the owners who know so much about style and how to make you look beautiful." Boutiques are anything but homogenized, but their business models don't translate well to the web–at least they didn't until Shoptiques came along.
If you love shopping online and at boutiques, it would be hard to beat a job at Shoptiques.
Do you shop at boutiques?


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Locating Overseas France ("outre-mer") through Open Access:The Periodicals of "Établissements français dans l'Inde"
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WESSWeb > WESS Newsletter > Fall 2017 > Locating Overseas France ("outre-mer") through Open Access
Locating Overseas France (outre-mer)[1] through Open Access:The Periodicals of Établissements français dans l'Inde
2 Scope and Limitations
3 Literature Review
4 Findings
5 Hathi Trust Digital Library and French India periodicals
6 Discussion and Final Analysis
France's long colonial past, and the possession of overseas territories, has meant that there is a wealth of print materials that were produced by the French colonial administrators, colonists and those whom they ruled. One of the print artifacts of Colonial rule is the collection of newspapers and periodicals that were published by the French in the colonies. These materials serve as a testimony to the complex processes of colonization, dominance sometimes hegemonic or sometimes without hegemony, acculturation and partial assimilation of the French ideas by some of those whom they ruled [2] The construct of France as the civilizing entity has been examined in the several works by various scholars.[3][4] Post-colonial theorists have pored over various archival documents of the territories that France once held and were defined as overseas territories of France. These territories were not contiguous with geographic France and their possession thus "dislocated France" out of its European boundaries and implanted it on various continents like Africa, the Americas and Asia.
In the case of the French colonial experience in South Asia, French India remained the last colonial outpost in India, from 1668 until 1954, where France transferred these territories to India's de facto control. And in 1962, French India finally ceased to exist with the ratification of a treaty. While the French colonial experience in India was interrupted on several occasions due to the British interregnum in French territories, the historical continuity is well described in works by several authors including Malleson,[5] Kennedy,[6] and others.[7] Newspapers and journals were produced to be consumed immediately by those who lived in the colonies with a finite time-span for their circulation in mind. However, these French periodicals serve as a print documentary record of the time.
These historical newspapers and periodicals are often used as primary source materials by undergraduates, graduate students and scholars in their academic research. While these newspapers and periodicals serve as a rich trove of information about the society as it existed in a particular time period, access to these historical periodicals is problematic. In North American settings, issues pertaining to library access to these periodicals if these are from the non-English speaking world is further complicated as often these are perceived as high-value, low-use-specific print materials. Not all academic libraries have rich collections of Francophone Studies, or if they have had historically rich collections, in the current era of the structural economic changes within the library milieu that is compounded by the rising costs of continuations, not all libraries can afford to collect, organize and disseminate these as individual titles or as a group. In some cases, these periodicals can be considered to be a part of special collections, thus further access to them becomes restrictive. The imagery of France as it was portrayed in these periodicals, the one that civilized the Orient, the one that shared French values with the natives through the process of Francization and the one that considered its overseas territories as a part of the Metropole, thus acquires a special interest in light of limited access to these materials. However, current advances in digital technologies along with the National Library of France's commitment to Open Access and its goal of emphasizing access to these colonial-era publications become important factors that help us locate France overseas through these periodicals.
In this article, I have tried to answer the following questions:
1. What were some of the periodicals that were published in French India?
2. How many of these titles are available in North American libraries in digital format?
3. What are the periodicals of French India that are digitally available to its users along the open-access model?
Scope and Limitations
This article is a preliminary survey of the periodicals of French India that are currently available along the principles of Open Access in various repositories in France and the United States. The searches that were done in the catalog of the National Library of France as well as in the Hathi Trust Digital Library have their inherent limitations as searching for these bibliographic records in itself is nuanced due to several factors. First, the way the languages of publication are currently coded did not allow me to search for the bilingual periodicals. Secondly, not all publications of French India can be found digitally. This article does not gauge the impact of French colonization of South Asia through the lens of historians. Due to the limitation of the scope, I was not able to carry out a detailed subject analysis of each of these periodicals. I was not able to also see the percentage of periodicals that were published privately in French India vs. those that were published by the Colonial government.
Sources on the periodicals of French India remain limited as not much has been written about them. In the large scheme of French Colonial administrative politics, their Indian possessions had relatively minor importance. One of the key sources that deals with the printed materials of French India remains Henry Scholberg and Emmanuel Divien's Bibliographie des Français dans l'Inde that was published in 1973.[8] The other source that allows us to triangulate the findings of Scholberg and Divien is Inventaire des anciennes archives de l'inde française.[9]
On the other hand, the Open Access policy of the European Union of which France is a constituent doesn't spell out specific OA mandates for the Colonial era periodicals. A recent EU publication entitled, "Guidelines to the Rules on Open Access to Scientific Publications and Open Access to Research Data in Horizon 2020," defines OA as follows:
Open access (OA) can be defined as the practice of providing on-line access to scientific information that is free of charge to the user and that is re-usable. In the context of R&D, open access to 'scientific information' refers to two main categories: Peer-reviewed scientific publications (primarily research articles published in academic journals) Scientific research data: data underlying publications and/or other data (such as curated but unpublished datasets or raw data." [10]
Since the EU OA policy, does not specifically mandate making available historical European periodicals to wide audiences, as these were produced in the colonial milieu, it is left to an individual member state and their national libraries and archives to make these available.
There are two excellent readily available sources of information on French Colonial Archives. One is the Archives nationales d'outre mer and its online database called "Instruments de rechercrecherchéne (IREL-Anom)". Its landing page is shown below.
The landing page of IREL-ANOM.
However, for our research purposes, this archive falls short when it comes to indexing periodicals and newspapers of the colonial era. If one conducts searches using multiple keywords like "L'Inde française", "Établissements français dans l'Inde" or "Pondichéry," we only get limited results on the archival fonds as shown below.
Results of searches on French India in IREL-ANOM database
Since none of the searches in the IREL-ANOM indicated any specific periodical title from French India, one thus relies on the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France) and its catalog's advanced search to locate these periodicals. I used the following limits for my first search.
Language= French, Country/ies of publication=France, India, Format of Print Item=Periodical, Date of publishing=1700-1954 and keyword= "Inde." I used similar words for the following keywords: "L'Inde française", "Établissements français dans l'Inde" or "Pondichéry".
Lastly, the territory of French India was not contiguous. As the map below shows, French possessions were Pondicherry, Karikal, Yanaon, Chandernagore, and Mahe. Thus, besides French, I also added languages like Bengali, Tamil, and Malayalam to see if there are any other additional results.
By Produits du Lion Noir. France 1920s. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.[12]
The different results that I obtained are in the table below:
Table 1: The distribution of results by keyword and language for the years 1700-1954 for the publications of French India.[14]
Below is a screenshot of the results of my first search, which are described in Table 1 above. The table shows that the BnF is a natural source for periodicals of French India. However, how many of these 470 are digitally available to the user along the OA model?
The results of a search query in the BnF's catalog.
How many of these periodicals are contained within United States libraries remains another difficult task. To this end, I used the Worldcat FirstSearch database, and I performed the following searches. To this end, I used, place of publications, i.e., Pondichéry (Pondichery/ Pondicherry), Chandernagore, Karikal, and Mahe (Mahé). In the table below, one sees the distribution by the places of publication. For Mahe, there were no results, most of the time; one has to disambiguate the place from the capital of Seychelles.
Table 2: FirstSearch Results by places of publication in French India.
Below are the results as they appear in FirstSearch.
The results from a Worldcat-FirstSearch search for Pondichéry.
I consulted two online resources in order to see if any of these periodicals were available in their digital fora. The first was Gallica.fr, which the digital component of the BnF, and the second source was Hathi Trust. For Gallica, I used the same previously used keywords to search as follows, "L'Inde française", "Établissements français dans l'Inde" or "Pondichéry". Also, Gallica's holdings can be searched effectively in the General Catalog of the BnF.
The search string and the limits were kept the same as these were in the previous searches within the BnF. For example, if one searches in Gallica for Pondichery/ Pondichéry as a keyword, with India as the place for publication, for the years from 1700 to 1954, and the format equals periodicals, we see that there are 20 digital surrogates of these periodicals as shown below.
Digitized French India periodicals in Gallica.
If one highlights one of the periodicals, one gets further bibliographic details.
L'Echo de Pondichéry. Journal politique, commercial et littéraire. Paraissant le dimanche - 1887-1887
However, the BnF's general catalog did not allow me to directly link to the digital images of the issues of the periodical. To this end, I had to search again in Gallica's separate catalog. And I was able to access the digital surrogates of "L'Echo de Pondichéry."
L'Echo de Pondichéry
The results of searches of my findings are shown below.
Table 3: The results of a keyword search in BnF's general catalog by keyword terms that are part of Gallica's holdings.
While French India's early periodicals were part of a governmental program to document legislative acts, local regulations, and news from the Metropole, they acquire a special importance for the researchers of Early French colonization of India. Thus, I wanted to see how many of these governmental periodicals of French India are available online. I was able to locate the following governmental as shown in the table 4 below.
Table 4: Government periodicals of French India in Gallica.
Hathi Trust Digital Library and French India periodicals
Hathi Trust is an important North American repository and its self-description is as follows, "HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. The mission of HathiTrust is to contribute to research, scholarship, and the common good by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge. There are more than 120 partners in HathiTrust, and membership is open to institutions worldwide."[15]
One can access the digital surrogates of the French India periodicals in Hathi Trust under the Open Access model. However, one of the limitations of Hathi Trust is that it doesn't allow for searching by place of publication. I repeated the same three keyword searches, with the same time limits for the publication, languages and formats of the item. The 60 results that I received are indicated below. For 32 out of these 60 hits, we see that the author is French India.
Periodicals of French India in Hathi Trust. Keyword used was Pondichéry.
For the keyword term, "L'Inde française," I got the same 60 hits and for "Établissements français dans l'Inde," I got 78 results.
Results for the keyword search, "Établissements français dans l'Inde," in Hathi Trust.
Discussion and Final Analysis
In this very basic survey of issues that surround access to periodicals of French India, I have provided some insights on why these periodicals, as a testimony to Overseas France, are important. While, in general, due to the introductory nature of my article, I have tried to avoid issues like, how did the colonial press function? Did or it did not create this "imagined community" of the Francized/Frenchified natives who in turn aspired to become like the ones who initially ruled them?[16] The picture of French colonial presence in South Asia remains extremely nuanced due to the relatively small sizes of these French territories when compared to their British counterparts, and due to the general apathy toward their South Asian possessions in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.
In general, I have addressed the issues surrounding access to openly available digital surrogates of these periodicals. As one can see from these arguments, there is a substantial portion of French India periodicals that are available digitally under Open Access principles. These can be utilized by researchers, students and faculty members who are currently working on Colonial France and French India.
Liladhar R. Pendse
Librarian for East European Collections, UC Berkeley Library
Lpendse@library.berkeley.edu
↑ The term outre-mer was adapted to indicate the overseas territories of France. There is a ministry for Overseas France
↑ Guha, Ranajit. Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Print.
↑ Conklin, Alice L. 2003. A mission to civilize: the republican idea of empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
↑ Said, Edward W. 1993. Culture and imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus.
↑ Malleson, G B. History of the French in India: From the Founding of Pondichery in 1674 to the Capture of That... Place in 1761 (classic Reprint). S.l.: Forgotten Books, 2015. Print.
↑ Kennedy, B. E. "Anglo-French Rivalry in Southeast Asia 1763-93: Some Repercussions." Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 4, no. 2 (1973): 199-215. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20070048.
↑ Gobalakichenane, M. "The 'French Revolution' of the Tamils in Pondicherry (1790-1793)." East and West 50, no. 1/4 (2000): 295-308. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29757458.
↑ Scholberg, Henry, and Emmanuel Divien. 1973. Bibliographie des Français dans l'Inde. [Pondicherry]: [Historical Society of Pondicherry; distributors: India Book Exports, Madras].
↑ "Guidelines to the Rules on Open Access to Scientific Publications and Open Access to Research Data in Horizon 2020. EU-Research and Innovation. March 21, 2017. Accessed June 19, 2017.
↑ Wikimedia-Map of French India Poster, accessed June 19, 2017, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ACollectible_card_Comptoirs_des_Indes.jpg.
↑ I did not include Hindi language in my search, but Aditi (8-O2K-2231) is one of the Hindi annual that was published in Pondicherry from 1947-1949. The Arcana was another Hindi language periodical that was published by Aurobindo Ashrama in Pondicherry (4-JO-10244 in BnF's catalog).
↑ "Welcome to HathiTrust!" Welcome to HathiTrust! | www.hathitrust.org | HathiTrust Digital Library. Accessed June 23, 2017. https://www.hathitrust.org/about.
↑ Anderson, Benedict. 2016. Imagined Communities Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Paw Prints.
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Chris Burden, 40 Foot Stepped Skyscraper / 2019
Chris Burden's 40 Foot Stepped Skyscraper (2011) will be featured in The Estate Show of artgenève 2019, an annual fixture presenting a monumental work by a historic artist.
In 2008, Burden's massive architectural structure What My Dad Gave Me was installed at Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan. One of the greatest technical feats of his oeuvre, the sculpture was built using approximately one million stainless-steel replicas of Erector set pieces, the popular twentieth-century children's building toy. Though smaller than its 65-foot-high forebear, 40 Foot Stepped Skyscraper attests to Burden's mastery of even more complex engineering principles. It was built in the approximate form of a ziggurat, with stairs that spiral around and step back from the perimeter as they rise to the sculpture's apex. By moving around the sculpture, the viewer can conceive of climbing to the top, underscoring the tensions between monumental architecture and human possibility.
artgenève 2019, The Estate Show, Chris Burden, 40 Foot Stepped Skyscraper, 2016, presented by Gagosian.
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At age six, artist Jocelyn Cohen rebelled against staying inside the lines of a coloring book while coloring a cardinal bird. Not only did she get in big trouble for the bright red crayon strokes she made across the page, she also refused to fix it. This early interaction of "coloring outside the lines" had a positive effect. Though she didn't know it then, color would continue as a dominating feature of her art.
"She's incorrigible" were the words of Jocelyn's first grade teacher as she greeted Toba Cohen, Jocelyn's mother, on her first visit to her daughter's classroom. But Toba enjoyed Jocelyn's moxie. "I believe Jocelyn's assertiveness was an indication of her independence," she says now. "I liked that. I wasn't troubled that at two and a half years old she dressed herself, unlocked the front door and went outside to play at six in the morning. She woke her neighbor and friend David by throwing stones at his window. They both loved climbing trees together. Jocelyn preferred the outdoors to anything else. It was magic to her. I don't know if incorrigible was the word, but I couldn't stop her!"
Jocelyn's artistic talent eventually took her to Indiana University, where she studied fine arts and folklore. An art professor convinced her that she had a gift as a colorist, and urged her to use it, express it, and live it! After two years at IU and another at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, she left school to devote herself to painting.
As luck would have it, Jocelyn met Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. They had just completed an homage to women artists up and down the West Coast. The isolation they found when they visited their studios led them to start The Feminist Art Program to provide a supportive community for women artists within the safe and prestigious institution of California Institute of the Arts.
Jocelyn introduced herself to Schapiro and Chicago, and asked to study with them. Almost immediately, she found herself at their program (http://www.calarts.edu) in Valencia, California. At CalArts Judy Chicago told Jocelyn her images were cramped and advised her to start painting on canvases five to six feet wide. Jocelyn's first big painting was of pomegranates and figs bursting open. Jocelyn felt her life was bursting open. She thought she would be a painter forever.
The next year, Jocelyn was asked to co-edit a special issue of "Sister" on "Women In Art" with her then lover, Nancy Poore. While still in Los Angeles, Jocelyn painted and published postcards and trained to be an offset and letterpress printer. During a serious bout with pneumonia,the opportunity to move to the Indiana, where Jocelyn's family lived, came up. A long-held dream -- setting up a studio and press in a rural setting -- was about to come true.
Living in the Indiana countryside, Jocelyn and Nancy modeled their lives on Millennium Hall, a semi-fictionalized account of two women building a women's community in the eighteenth century and Helen and Scott Nearing (now deceased), back-to-the-land proponents and what Jocelyn calls "lefties" up in Maine.
Following these models, they ran Helaine Victoria Press and lived subsistantly selling vegetables, red raspberries and postcards. Jocelyn augmented her rural life with what she calls the spices of life by becoming a papermaker, preparing for and living with wolves on Isle Royal for a winter, and spending summers as an active participant in the women's crafts and music festival circuit. She also found time to restore twelve acres of rural countryside into a small ecologically balanced habitat for wildlife. She put in a pond and built animal habitats throughout the property. With the help of her father, Herschel Cohen, she planted over 500 trees.
In 1995, Jocelyn found a permanent home for the press at TheWomen's Rights National History Park, Suffrage Print Shop, 116 Fall Street, Seneca Falls, New York -- the birthplace of women's suffrage (http://www.calarts.edu). Middle-school children visit to experience the development of the free press in America, the suffrage movement and to actually create a hand crafted press publication.
Her dream realized, Jocelyn jumped in a red Toyota pickup truckand headed west to art school,this time to The Academy of Art College in San Francisco (http://www.academyart.edu).
While completing her MFA, she attended the demonstration prototype of an interactive exhibit of Ellis Island. Immigrant oral histories, stories, images and music touched Jocelyn deeply. "I flipped out the same way with this new medium as I had over the work of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro." It was then that Jocelyn decided to shift from painting and fine letterpress printing to digital and interactive media creation. (Her clients include Warner New Media, LucasArts Learning, StarPress Multimedia, Media Vision Inc., Continuum Productions Corporation, Interval Research and Purple Moon Media, to name a few). Her online and interactive multimedia experience is presented on her website (http://www.jocelync.com).


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Tag: Kim Jin-kyu
The Body Confession (肉体의 告白 / 육체의 고백, Jo Keung-ha, 1964)
June 19, 2019 by Hayley Scanlon
The Korea of 1964 was one beginning to look forwards towards a new global future rather than back towards the turbulent colonial past, but the rapid leap forward into a new society had perhaps left an entire generation behind as they prepared to watch their children reject everything they'd strived for in search of "modernity". 1964's The Body Confession (肉体의 告白 / 육체의 고백, Yukche-ui Gobak) is the story of one such woman. Widowed young, she turned to sex work in order to support her three daughters in the hope that sending them to university would win them wealthy husbands only for her daughters to encounter the very problems she worked so hard for them to avoid.
The heroine, a veteran sex worker known as The President (Hwang Jung-seun), has become a kind of community leader in the red light district largely catering to American servicemen in the post-war era. While she labours away in the brothels of Busan, her three daughters are living happily in Seoul believing that she runs a successful fashion store which is how she manages to send them their tuition money every month. The President goes to great lengths to protect them from the truth, even enlisting a fashion store owning friend when the girls visit unexpectedly. Nevertheless, she is becoming aware that her position is becoming ever more precarious – as an older woman with a prominent limp she can no longer command the same kind of custom as in her youth and is increasingly dependent on the support of her fellow sex workers who have immense respect for her and, ironically, view her as a maternal figure in the often dangerous underworld environment.
This central idea of female solidarity is the one which has underpinned The President's life and allowed her to continue living despite the constant hardship she has faced. Yet she is terrified that her daughters may one day find out about her "shameful" occupation and blame her for it, or worse that it could frustrate her hopes for them that they marry well and avoid suffering a similar fate. Despite having, in a sense, achieved a successful career in the red light district, The President wants her daughters to become respectable wives and mothers rather than achieve success in their own rights or be independent. Thus her goal of sending them to university was not for their education but only to make them more attractive to professional grade husbands.
The daughters, however, are modern women and beginning to develop differing ideas to their mother's vision of success. Oldest daughter Song-hui (Lee Kyoung-hee) has fallen in love with a lowly intellectual truck driver (Kim Jin-kyu) who has placed all his hopes on winning a literary competition. He is a war orphan and has no money or family connections. Meanwhile, second daughter Dong-hui (Kim Hye-jeong) has failed her exams twice and developed a reputation as a wild girl. Toying with a poor boy, she eventually drifts into a relationship with the wealthy son of a magnate (Lee Sang-sa) but fails to realise that he too is only toying with her and intends to honour his family's wishes by going through with an arranged marriage. Only youngest daughter Yang-hui (Tae Hyun-sil) is living the dream by becoming a successful concert musician and planning to marry a diplomat's son.
The three daughters have, in a sense, suffered because of their mother's ideology which encourages them to place practical concerns above the emotional. Song-hui is conflicted in knowing that she will break her mother's heart by marrying a man with no money or family but also knows that she will choose him all the same. Dong-hui, by contrast, enthusiastically chases Man-gyu for his money but naively fails to realise that he is selfish and duplicitous. In another evocation of the female solidarity that informs the film, Man-gyu's fiancée Mi-ri eventually dumps him on witnessing the way he treats Dong-hui, roundly rejecting the idea of being shackled to a chauvinistic man who assumes it is his right to have his way with whomever he chooses and face no consequences. Like Song-hui, Mi-ri breaks with tradition in breaking off her engagement against her parents' wishes and reserving her own right to determine her future.
Yang-hui, whose future eventually works out precisely because of the sacrifices made on her behalf by her mother, turns out to be her harshest critic, rejecting The President on learning the truth and attempting to sever their connection by repaying all the "ill-gotten" investment. Her wealthy husband, however, turns out to be unexpectedly sympathetic in pointing out that her mother has suffered all these long years only to buy her future happiness and that now is the time they both should be thanking her. Meanwhile, The President has become despondent in realising she is out of road. There is no longer much of a place for her in the red light district, and she has nowhere left to turn. Only the kindly Maggie, another sex worker who has been a daughter to her all this time, is prepared to stand by her and take care of her in her old age.
The gulf between the two generations is neatly symbolised by the surprising inclusion of stock footage from the April 19 rising against the corrupt regime of Rhee Syngman which led to a brief period of political freedom before the dictatorship of Park Chung-hee took power in 1961. The poor intellectual author whom The President dismissed, eventually becomes an internationally renowned literary figure after being published abroad while the wealthy magnate's son turns out to be a louse. The President staked her life on the old feudal ways of ingratiating oneself with privilege by playing by its rules, but the world has moved on and it's up to the young to forge their own destinies rather than blindly allowing those in power to do as they please. Sadly for The President, her sacrifices will be appreciated only when it's too late and her desire for her daughters to escape the hardship she had faced misunderstood as greed and snobbishness. There is no longer any place for her old fashioned ideas in the modern era and her daughters will need to learn to get by on their own while accepting that their future was built on maternal sacrifice.
The Body Confession was screened as part of the 2019 Udine Far East Film Festival. It is also available to stream online via the Korean Film Archive's YouTube Channel.
Posted in Korea, Korean Film Archive, Udine Far East Film Festival 2019Tagged 1960s, 1964, Bang Su-Il, Beak Song, Choi Sam, Choi sung, Gang Mi-ae, Ha Ryong, Hwang Jung-seun, Jang Hoon, Jo Keung-ha, Kang Kye-shik, Kim Hee-kap, Kim Hye-jeong, Kim Jin-kyu, Kim Ok-gyeong, Kim Ung, Korea, Korean, Korean Film Archive, Lee Bin-hwa, Lee Kyoung-hee, Lee Sang-sa, Na Ae-shim, Nam Mi-ri, Nam Seok-hun, Seo Young Choon, Seok Geum-Seong, Tae Hyun-sil, Udine Far East Film Festival, Udine Far East Film Festival 2019
The Sea Knows (玄海灘은 알고 있다 / 현해탄은 알고 있다, Kim Ki-young, 1961)
July 27, 2018 by Hayley Scanlon 1 Comment
The Korea of 1961 was a land in flux. The corrupt regime of Rhee Syngman had been brought to its knees following mass protests regarding the rigged 1960 elections but hopes for a new democracy were cut short when military General Park Chung-hee staged a coup, later declaring himself president for life and continuing his authoritarian rule until he was assassinated by one of his own subordinates. Kim Ki-young's The Sea Knows (玄海灘은 알고 있다 / 현해탄은 알고 있다, Hyeonhaetaneun Algoitta) arrived perhaps at just the right time, ducking under the radar before the Motion Picture Law of 1962 would forever change the industry and if not prevent at least frustrate any attempt to discuss the controversial themes at the heart of Kim's drama. The Sea Knows is, like much of Kim's work, a tale of power and desire only this time on a wider scale as he examines the complicated relationship between Korea and Japan as mediated through romantic melodrama.
We open in 1944. Korean student Aro-un (Kim Wun-ha) has been conscripted into the Japanese army following an incident in which he embarrassed a high-ranking official (something which has made him a local hero at home). Despite the fact that Korea has been inducted into the Japanese empire and Koreans are now sons of the emperor too, the regular Japanese troops are not exactly grateful for service of their brethren from across the sea. Koreans are a pain, they decry. They're always going on about justice and fairness. They won't just shut up and take their lumps like regular Japanese soldiers. The "50 year tradition" of the Japanese army is to break the will of new recruits through violence, strip them of their individuality, and reduce them to a finely tuned hive mind.
Needless to say, Aro-un is not eager to comply. There's a strong strain of homoeroticism in the strangely camp banter between the higher-ups. At the first inspection the commanding officer takes a good look at Aro-un, decides he resembles a "cute puppy" and recommends he come to his room to get some "biscuits". Meanwhile a particularly sadistic NCO, Mori (Lee Ye-chun), pinches the chest of Aro-run's judo champion friend Inoue (Lee Sang-sa) and decides he'll not be an easy target – unlike the short and wiry Aro-un who is too righteous to know what's good for him. Mori, an insecure and under qualified NCO, makes use of men like Aro-un to entrench his own position through the "50 year tradition" of military discipline. The humiliations mount until Aro-un is forced to lick Mori's excrement encrusted boots in punishment for having failed to polish them to his satisfaction.
Yet, unlike in the majority of Korean films dealing with war and occupation, the Japanese are not universally bad – there are many just like Aro-un who are uncomfortable with the militarist line and are doing what they can to resist, albeit often passively. Aro-un's university friend, Nakamura (Kim Jin-kyu), is just such a man, turning down the possibilities of promotion to avoid endorsing the regime while acknowledging that there is little more he can do to free himself from it. It's through Nakamura that Aro-un meets his own source of salvation in the unlikely figure of a young Japanese woman – Nakamura's sister Hideko (Gong Midori). Hideko originally betrays the common prejudice against Koreans in claiming that the perpetrators of a nearby robbery were most likely Korean seeing as Koreans can't get jobs and therefore have no other options than to steal, though in retrospect perhaps her assertions were a more logical comment on poverty and entrenched oppression than they were on racial stereotyping.
Hideko is, as Aro-un later points out, a very unusual Japanese woman. A free spirit, she finds herself drawn to Aro-un and is committed to pursuing a course of true feeling over that laid down by the codes of her society, choosing his sensitivity over the brutalisation of her militarist nation. War, Aro-un muses philosophically, is about the manipulation of the present. Love is about the foundation of a future. Yet there is also something dark and imbalanced even in their otherwise pure romance as each finds themselves becoming a symbol of suffering and violence. Aro-un is drawn to Hideko's unexpected warmth as she sheds tears for his suffering on hearing of his various degradations, seeing no difference in the tears of a Japanese woman and those of his Korean mother who each felt his pain as their own, but Hideko's insistence on hearing of his latest humiliations almost takes on a sadistic quality as the pair become bound by suffering as much as by innocent connection.
Kim's central tenet is a bold one for the increasingly volatile world of 1961, making a case for borderless connection over nationalistic chest thumping and championing the resilience of the human spirit as well as the enduring power of love as a counter to the horrors of war. War is, in another of Aro-un's philosophical musings, just something that happens to you and makes enemies of those who might have been friends. Making extensive use of stock footage and model shots, Kim plunges Aro-un into a fiery hell from which only love and will can save him. An unexpectedly nuanced but no less harrowing tale of wartime brutalisation and spiritual resistance, The Sea Knows is an impassioned plea for humanity in an inhumane age in which there are no heroes and no villains, only victims and resistors caught in a vast web of power and madness.
The Sea Knows was screened as part of the Korean Cultural Centre's Korean Film Nights 2018: Rebels with a Cause series. You can also watch it online for free courtesy of the Korean Film Archive's YouTube channel. The existing print is, however, incomplete and badly damaged – four sequences in which there is picture but no sound or sound but no picture are missing / unsubtitled in the online version but are present in the restoration.
Posted in Korea, Korean Film ArchiveTagged 1960s, 1961, Gong Midori, Ju Jeung-ryu, Kim Jin-kyu, Kim Seok-hun, Kim Seung-ho, Kim Wun-ha, Korea, Korean, Korean Cultural Centre, Korean Film Nights 2018: Rebels With a Cause, Lee Sang-sa, Lee Ye-chun, Park Am, Park Nou-sik
The Devil's Stairway (마의 계단 / 魔의 階段, Lee Man-hee, 1964)
June 14, 2018 by Hayley Scanlon Leave a comment
By 1964, Korea's economic situation was beginning to improve and for many there seemed to be a bright light shining in the distance, a fixed point to which they could aspire and felt was in their grasp if they could only catch a lucky break. Throughout Lee Man-hee's relatively short career (the director sadly passed away at the young age of only 45 – apparently a casualty of his fondness for drink and intensive work habit which accounts for his high output), his protagonists struggle with a conflict between the desire for the new kind of "success" their society promises them, and a feeling that they can never truly obtain it. Ambitious surgeon Dr. Hyeon (Kim Jin-kyu) attempts to climb The Devil's Stairway (마의 계단 / 魔의 階段, Maui Gyedan, AKA The Evil Stairs) by abandoning the compassion that ought to define his profession for coldhearted pragmatism but discovers that the path has its price while his victims are not quite so passive as he'd assumed them to be.
When we first meet Dr. Hyeon he's lounging around in bed while his female companion, Nurse Nam (Moon Jeong-suk), dresses and prepares to leave. Somewhat coldly, Hyeon tells her to exit via the back stairs and avoid being seen by the security guard on her way. Irritated, Nam leaves and the pair go back to work at the hospital the next morning pretending there's nothing more between them than the relationship between a nurse and a chief surgeon. This situation might have continued indefinitely were it not for the fact that Jeong-ja (Bang Sung-ja), the daughter of the hospital's head doctor, has taken a liking to Hyeon and seeing as her father has no sons to take over when he retires, an arranged marriage is in the offing. Dr. Hyeon, who is ambitious and emotionally cold, considers accepting the offer but Nurse Nam is unwilling to let him go, especially as she is pregnant with his child. When she threatens to spill the beans about their illicit relationship, he decides to kill her by dosing her up with sedatives and throwing her body in the pool behind the hospital to make it look like she drowned herself in heartbreak and shame, but Nurse Nam refuses to go quietly.
The titular "Devil's Stairway" is a literal staircase from the hospital floor to the head doctor's office. There has recently been accident in which the bannister was broken and a woman was killed. The banister is repeatedly mended throughout the film but represents a point of fracture in the spiritual path to success. Nurse Nam is another early casualty when she and Hyeon argue in the middle of the stairs and the recently mended bannister breaks as he struggles with her. Despite the minimal drop to the floor, Nam is left with serious injuries requiring surgery, loses her baby, and gains a conviction that Hyeon bears her ill will. Her position is extremely difficult – the accident has exposed the fact that she had conceived a child outside of wedlock and though she has not yet disclosed the name of the father, Hyeon fears that she will destroy his bright future either by speaking out or through forcing him to marry her to avoid social disgrace.
Hyeon gives in to darker instincts. He tells Nam that his heart is hers, perhaps intending to carry on an arrangement even after he's decided to accept the marriage proposal, but excuses himself for stringing her along by reminding her of his lack of financial stability and comparatively low social status. We are reminded later that he is old be unmarried and, even stranger, is assumed to be a "virgin" – a solitary, perhaps dull, bachelor not known for mixing with women. This again signals his coldhearted ambition – he waits and he calculates. He wants a hospital of his own and knows his only way to get one is to marry into it, and so he does even if it means sacrificing "love" and emotional happiness for the cold comforts of conventional success and the false acclamation of social status.
Hyeon thinks he's got away with it, but his crime haunts him. Going slowly out of his mind, Hyeon sees Nam everywhere, placing a strain on his relationship with his new wife who grows wary of his increasing violence and bad temper. His madness culminates in a tense surgery scene in which everyone around him has Nam's face and he finds himself surrounded by his crime, forced to confess himself as a murderer in order to free himself of her ghost. Yet, things are not quite as they seem and it is not he alone who finds his grand plan floundering.
Hyeon posits his poverty as a reason for his crime, but it's his greed which guides him towards the Devil's Stairway. He could have married Nam, had his child, and led an ordinary middle-class life of relative comfort perhaps even opening his own clinic in good time, but he chose the quick fix in marrying for money and (literally) throwing over the woman he claimed to love to ease his feelings of insecurity and resentment at his position in the social order. His murder is cowardly but, as Nam points out, the law may protect him while there are precious few looking out for her, a betrayed woman, pregnant outside of marriage, and without a family to press her case.
As he did in the same year's Black Hair, Lee co-opts the murkiness of the film noir, sending its sense of betrayed morality into the realms of the gothic with an ever increasing atmosphere of supernatural dread. The pond seems to emanate evil while the stairs beckon ominously, the wind rattles the doors open without warning and the rain pours down outside adding to the claustrophobic gloom of the creepy old hospital as if attempting to embody the evil that lies at its centre. Drawing heavily from Les Diaboliques, Lee declares no winners in his tale of fractured morality and emotional betrayal, painting it as a symptom of a confused era in which all emerge tarnished from a struggle to gain some kind of personal agency in an otherwise oppressive environment. Taut to the last, The Devil's Stairway is a forgotten masterpiece of psychological horror and a mild condemnation of a society's slide into national paranoia and greedy consumerism at the cost of true human feeling.
Available to stream online via the Korean Film Archive's YouTube Channel.
Posted in Korea, Korean Film ArchiveTagged 1960s, 1964, Bang Sung-ja, Choi Nam-Hyun, Jeong Ae-ran, Jeong Cheol, Ji Bang-yeol, Jo Hang, Kim Jin-kyu, Kim Ung, Korea, Korean, Korean Film Archive, Lee Man-hee, Moon Jeong-suk, Yu Gye-seon
The Descendants of Cain (카인의 후예 / 카인의 後裔, Yu Hyun-mok, 1968)
April 13, 2018 by Hayley Scanlon 1 Comment
Yu Hyun-mok, often regarded as among the more "intellectual" of film directors in Korea's Golden Age, is also among those to have been arrested for violation of the Anti-Communist laws. Yu was later exonerated and went back to filmmaking as before but it remains true that Yu betrays a little more ambivalence to the anti-communist message so often required than many of his colleagues. That is to say, Yu often leans economically left in his frequent criticism of social inequality and his anti-consumerist stance, but remains socially conservative if with a strong desire for social justice. The Descendants of Cain (카인의 후예 / 카인의 後裔, Kainui Huyea), adapted from a novel by Hwang Sun-won, is as anti-communist as they come, but also offers its share of ironies in painting "communism" as a kind of disease born of greed and self-interest which thrives on fear and eventually consumes those who are seduced by its false promises.
Irony is indeed our starting point as our cheerful villagers enjoy a raucous celebration in honour of Independence Day only for the communists to suddenly turn up and spoil the party. Worst of all, one of the communists is a long lost son of the village – Choe is the absentee husband of Ojaknyeo (Moon Hee), a maid, who has developed an affection for her boss, the nephew of the local landlord, Park Hun (Kim Jin-kyu). The communists' first action is to close down the school that Park Hun opened to provide education for the peasants and co-opt it as their base. Park knows he's in a dangerous position and has little power to resist, opting to wait it out and see how far the communists really intend to go. The peasants, however, are becoming excited hearing about the land redistribution programme and are starting to forget everything that Park and his family have done for them over the generations, swayed by the false promises of the communists who preach equality while insisting on deference.
The central conflict is, in many ways, between the feudal past and the "democratic" future. Set in what would shortly the "the north" in 1946, Descendants of Cain positions itself on more than one kind of dividing line with the lingering spectre of tragedy always on the horizon. High on a ridge there's a large stone slab erected as a memorial to the late Park, Park Hun's grandfather, whose solicitous care for the villagers had earned their eternal respect and perhaps their love. The Parks are "good" landlords. They take their "feudal" responsibilities seriously as evidenced by Park Hun's school and his father's desire to finish construction on the local reservoir which is both his legacy and an important failsafe precaution against draught which is in the interests of all. By all appearances this is a well functioning village where no one is hungry or alone. The peasants have not felt "oppressed" or been unhappy, which is not to say they don't want to better their lot but they have no burning desire for revolution and have nothing in particular to rebel against.
This leaves the communists with a problem – they have little leverage over happy peasantry which has never acknowledged its own oppression let alone longed for freedom from it. Their approach is therefore one of divide and conquer. Cynical in the extreme, the communists set about exploiting petty village disputes to foster discord between people – something which eventually contributes to a murder which they also manipulate for political gain. The "landowners" are of course a prime target, but their judgement must be at the hands of "the people" by means of a farmers' trial. Having recruited something close to a former village leader, the communists assume they will have the villagers on side but they all (bar two) refuse to indict the Parks. The communist leader, fond of irony, gestures towards towards his armed men and reminds the villagers that no one here is "impinging on their freedom". That is, their freedom to express the views they are required to express or suffer the consequences.
Threatened with violence and intimidation, feudal deference bends or perhaps shifts to a different master. The villagers, losing their attachment to the Parks, salivate over the possibility of "redistribution" and of being handed "free land". Their desires are material and not political. Thus when the Parks' estate is "returned" to the people, they simply walk in and start taking things. Not the most sensible way to redistribute wealth concentrated in the hands of the elite – the fast get horses, the indecisive dented pans which sounds like a recipe for rancour and discontent. When the old village chief becomes disillusioned with his choices and smashes the memorial to old Park, a small fight breaks out among villagers keen to snag the large pieces of stone for various other projects. Happy peasants who once shared everything and wanted for nothing, are now fighting with each other over rubble and trinkets.
The communists, far from fostering collective spirit, have become the evil feudal lords they rail against, oppressing the peasants with their rules and regulations while wilfully creating an atmosphere of fear in order to better oppress them. Their hypocrisy is rammed home early on by the slimy Cheol who complains about his wife's supposed faithlessness while molesting a barmaid and smugly repeating the story of a large scar he has on his forearm. His superior, believing he got the scar during a labour dispute at a mine, promoted him for his communist spirit, but Cheol really got the scar in a scuffle over a girl (not his wife, incidentally).
Cheol is "a" force which comes between the two lovers, Ojaknyeo and Park Hun, as both are too morally upright to pursue a full romance when Ojaknyeo is still married to another man, even if the other man's first action on seeing her is to throw her to the ground and begin kicking the living daylights out of her. Later Ojaknyeo gets another, more serious, beating from her father but this time because she's chosen the wrong side in refusing to step away from the feudal world in her responsibility to Park Hun and his household, even if that responsibility is partly romantic desire. Yet Park Hun and Ojaknyeo are also separated by the feudal world's rules in their obvious class difference. Communism is supposed to break down these barriers, not to mention removing the "patriarchal tyranny" of marriage, yet the communists would rather award Ojaknyeo to her former husband, little caring that he is abusive and neglectful. Ojaknyeo, at least, will not be freed from her oppression any time soon.
If Yu is making a mild defence of paternalistic feudalism as a metaphor for compassionate government, it is probably a little ambitious given the times in which he lived. Following a regular pattern, Yu paints the world as a terrible place where fear and self interest trump all, only to find small rays of light in the closing moments when an act of violence provokes a series of unexpected epiphanies and reconciliations. He ends on a note of hope in which an older man sacrifices himself for a younger one but is then rewarded with the possibility of salvation and a happier future with the woman he loves (and is now unafraid to pursue) south of the border. Communism seduces and betrays, whereas liberal democracy at least affords the "freedom" to be miserable with personal integrity.
Screened as part of the Korean Novels on Screen season at the Korean Cultural Centre London.
Posted in Korea, Korean Film ArchiveTagged 1960s, 1968, book to film, Choe Bong, Jang Dong-he, Jang Hoon, Jeong Min, Kim Chil-seong, Kim Jin-kyu, Korea, Korean Film Archive, Lee Sang-hyun, Lee Seok-chul, Moon Hee, Park Nou-sik, Seong So-min, Yang Hun, Yu Hyun-mok
Confession of an Actress (어느 여배우의 고백 / 어느女俳優의告白, Kim Soo-yong, 1967)
March 2, 2018 March 20, 2018 by Hayley Scanlon Leave a comment
Korean filmmaking of the 1960s is sometimes referred to as a "golden age", but the reality is that films were often churned out at a rapid pace for immediate distribution. Producers got an advance from local distributors, picked a scenario, assigned a suitable director and slotted in big name stars they already had under contract. For this reason production values are often low, but performance standard high despite the fact that many stars are bouncing around from one film to another shooting a scene here and a scene there. Director Kim Soo-yong filmed 10 features in 1967 – including his masterpiece Mist. Confessions of an Actress (어느 여배우의 고백 / 어느女俳優의告白, Eoneu Yeobaeu-ui Gobaek), inspired by a novel by Yun Seok-ju, is the kind of straightforward melodrama that was going out of style – a virtual remake of Chaplin's Limelight with a little Phantom of the Opera thrown in, but Kim neatly repurposes it as a meta take on the Korean film industry of the day.
Kim Jin-kyu (played by the actor of the same name) was once a famous movie star, but heartbreaking tragedy ruined his career and now he's a washed up drunk dreaming of the past. Hearing the dreaded "hey mister, didn't you used to be somebody?", Jin-kyu wanders into a film shoot and is thrown back to a happier time when he starred in prestige pictures with his regular co-star who was also his lover. Sadly, Miyong died of an illness leaving their last picture unfinished. The studio producers wanted to replace her and complete the movie, but Jin-kyu wouldn't have it. They sued him for obstruction and his career was ruined. Jin-kyu was told that the child Miyong was carrying had died, but unbeknownst to him, a daughter was born and Miyong asked her friend Hwang Jung-seun to give the baby up for adoption and save it from the stigma of being illegitimate. Running into Jung-Seung at the shoot, Jin-kyu finds out his daughter is alive and determines to turn her into a great star – the only thing he can do for her as her father now that he is in such a sorry state.
Almost all of the characters in the film are named for their actors, though they are obviously not playing themselves in any biographical sense. Nevertheless, there is an intentional reflexivity in Kim's decision to shift away from his literary source to towards one more immediately cinematic. Much as in Chaplin's Limelight which does seem to provide a blueprint for the narrative, the arc is one of tragedy and redemption as Jin-kyu attempts to make up for lost time by imparting all his professional knowledge to the daughter he never knew and ensuring her success even at the cost of his own. Ashamed to introduce himself to her as a father given that long years of lonely drinking have reduced him to a broken old man, Jin-kyu gives his advice via letter and avoids seeing Jeong-im, longing to embrace her but afraid he'll bring shame on her growing fortunes.
When Jin-kyu gets Jeong-im into show business, Kim gets a chance to put the Korean film industry on screen. He starts with a mildly sleazy producer and the established star who's getting too old for ingenue roles but is desperate to hang on to her leading lady status. Nevertheless, she does have the option, as she points out, of a dignified escape through marriage should her career fail – something that is not an option for her male co-stars. As a young hopeful with no experience and nothing to recommend her beyond a pretty face, Jeong-im's entry into the world of film is a baptism of fire. Rushed through makeup with its uncomfortable fake eyelashes and into an unfamiliar costume, Jeong-im's rabbit in the headlights performance does not endear her to the director or more particularly the producer who is looking on from the wings in exasperation quietly calculating how much all of these extra takes are costing in wasted film. Nevertheless, the film is a success and, thanks to Jin-kyu's careful tutoring, Jeong-im is on track for stardom.
Kim fetishises the camera, the process of filming with its bright artificial lights, tricks and techniques from the ice cold studio shoots to the difficult trips out on location. He makes full use of the relatively rare colour format utilising frequent superimpositions and montages, overlaying the bright neon lights of Seoul with the interior journey of our leading lady as she begins to find her voice. Making a final self cameo, Kim gives in to the inherently melodramatic quality of the underlying narrative but he does so somewhat ironically, rolling his eyes at the need for overly dramatic emotionality while actively embracing it, and lamenting the hardships of filmmaking while churning out his third picture in as many months. Confession of an Actress is not the salacious exposé promised by the title, but it is an illicit look at the decidedly unglamorous side of film production a world away from the bright lights and glossy magazines.
Available on DVD as part of the Korean Film Archive's Kim Soo-yong box set. Not currently available to stream online.
Posted in Korea, Korean Film ArchiveTagged 1960s, 1967, Han Seong, Heo Jang-gang, Heo Jang-kang, Hwang Jung-seun, Im Hae-rim, Jeon Chang-geun, Jeon Gye-hyeon, Jo Deok-seong, Kim Jeong-ok, Kim Jin-kyu, Korea, Korean, Korean Film Archive, Mun Mi-bong, Nam Jeong-im, Seok Geum-Seong, Seok Un-a, Yun Seok-ju
Aimless Bullet (오발탄, AKA Obaltan, Yu Hyun-mok, 1961)
March 11, 2017 December 1, 2017 by Hayley Scanlon 3 Comments
Post-war cinema took many forms. In Korea there was initial cause for celebration but, shortly after the end of the Japanese colonial era, Korea went back to war, with itself. While neighbouring countries and much of the world were engaged in rebuilding or reforming their societies, Korea found itself under the corrupt and authoritarian rule of Syngman Rhee who oversaw the traumatic conflict which is technically still ongoing if on an eternal hiatus. Yu Hyun-mok's masterwork Aimless Bullet (오발탄, Obaltan) takes place eight years after the truce was signed, shortly after mass student demonstrations led to Rhee's unseating which was followed by a short period of parliamentary democracy under Yun Posun ending with the military coup led by Park Chung-hee and a quarter century of military dictatorship. Of course, Yu could not know what would come but his vision is anything but hopeful. Aimless Bullets all, this is an entire nation left reeling with no signposts to guide the way and no possible destination to hope for. All there is here is tragedy, misery, and inevitable suffering with no possibility of respite.
Nominal head of the family Cheolho (Kim Jin-kyu) has an OK job as an accountant but still he can't make ends meet and his small family consisting of his wife, two children, war hero younger brother Yeongho (Choi Moo-ryong), unmarried sister Myeongsuk (Seo Ae-ja), and senile mother with wartime PTSD lives in a makeshift hovel in the middle of a fetid slum. Yeongho may have distinguished himself on the battlefield, but now the war is over society can't find a use for him and so he remains jobless and another drain on his brother's resources. In many ways he was one of the lucky ones, returning from the war with physical and mental scars but no permanent impairments. Myeongsuk's former fiancé was not so lucky and requires the use of crutches to get around leading him to reject the woman he loves in the belief that he will never be anything more than a burden to all around him.
Cheolho suffers with a persistent toothache which he refuses to get treatment for despite the constant urging from his colleagues because he cannot in good conscience consider spending the money on himself when he has so many people with so many different needs to take care of. His toothache is not just a toothache but a manifestation of the unending torment of life in this ruined city defined by despair, madness, and cruelty.
The film begins with broken glass – a motif which will be repeated throughout as the structural integrity of this makeshift environment is repeatedly tested and repeatedly fails. A group of former soldiers is drinking in a bar, each lamenting their sorry progress in the post-war world. Yeongho remarks that he feels like a broken bowl – something used up and ready for the scrap heap. The country he fought so hard to protect has no place for him now the fighting is done. After such a long time searching for work, Yeongho is finally offered a promising job by an old flame currently working as an actress in the fledgling film industry, but the part they've offered him is that of a war veteran with similar scarring to his own. The studio want realism and casually ask him to remove his shirt and show off the traces of bullet holes on his side which is a step too far for Yeongho who objects to his wartime service being "exploited" in such a mercenary way. Insulted and not wanting to dishonour the memories of his fallen comrades Yeongho storms out only to later reconsider and realise he may have been foolish to turn down such a promising opportunity despite his indignation.
It isn't just bowls and glass which end up shattered but dreams too as love lies bleeding in a land of permanent despair. Yeongho seems like something of a ladies' man but re-encountering a kindly nurse he met at the front he begins to feel another life is possible. This particular dream is complicated by the presence of a disturbed neighbour who has also fallen in love with the nurse and stops by late at night to read her poetry despite the fact that she has taken to waving a gun to scare him off.
Cheolho has committed himself to living honestly, even if it means his family suffers. Yeongho is beginning to wonder if his philosophy is worth suffering for, why should they have to keep living like this when they could abandon conventional morality and humanitarian concerns and become rich through immoral means. Myeongsuk, abandoned by the love of her life and unable to find work, has fallen into prostitution, another effect of the ongoing American military presence. Yeongho, having lost all hope, makes a drastic decision of his own but one which is destined to be as ill fated as each of his other dreams, hollow and unfulfillable as they are.
Experiencing a moment of selfish indulgence born of total despair, Cheolho finally gets his tooth seen to. Actually he asks the dentist to just pull all his teeth right now but medical ethics suggest that's not a good idea. Ignoring the dentist's advice, Cheolho roams the streets of the city before stopping into another dental clinic for more "treatment". Dazed and bloody he steps into a taxi but confuses his drivers by changing his mind on destinations from the morgue to the hospital to the police station. The Aimless Bullet of the title, as the cabbie calls him, Cheolho can only echo the words of his senile mother, "let's go", even if he has no idea where. Earlier in the film another character has the same dilemma and frames it as a joke – ask a dying man where he's going, he says, and he'll tell you he doesn't know. There is nowhere for Cheolho to go. His road is blocked, his meter running. Korea is directionless and lost, a desolate land of broken bowls and ruined hearts too tired to keep moving even if there were any destination available.
So relentlessly bleak, it's little wonder that the film ran into censorship problems which eventually saw it pulled from cinema screens. Legend has it censors objected to the frequent refrains of "let's go" from the bedridden mother which they interpreted as "let's go to North Korea" as opposed to the "just let us die" which seems to be the much darker message implied by her later talk of sheep and green pastures. Everything here is broken, caged, ruined. There is no way out or possibility of salvation in this life or any other. Lasting only a few seconds, the film's most shocking moment passes with little to no reaction as Yeongho, on the run from the police, dashes past the body of a woman who has hanged herself with her crying baby still tied to her back. Yeongho, and presumably the police chasing him, ignore both the body and the wailing of the child in their self obsessed propulsion forwards. A warning – but one which is heeded only too late.
Short scene from the film (English subtitles)
Aimless Bullet is available on English subtitled region free blu-ray courtesy of the Korean Film Archive but you can currently watch the HD restoration version of the film in its entirety legally and for free via the Korean Film Archive's YouTube channel. (You may have to sign in and "confirm" you're a grown up.)
Posted in Korea, Korean Film ArchiveTagged 1960s, Black & White, Choi Moo-ryong, Kim Hye-jeong, Kim Jin-kyu, Korea, Korean, Korean Classic, Korean Film Archive, Moon Jung-suk, Nam Chun-yeok, Noh Jae-sin, Park Gyeong-hui, Seo Ae-ja, Yoon Il-Bong, Yu Gye-seon, Yu Hyun-mok


text:
A Portal to 2015
Jan Wright, Publisher, art & society
For eight years, we've promoted the arts and culture in central Illinois. Like everyone, we've been through some tough (and changing) times, yet the spirit of our Midwestern community continues to shine brightly. In recent years, we've seen the opening of the museum block, renovation of the Hotel Pere Marquette (and Marriott Courtyard addition), and the relocation and expansion of Running Central and the Waterhouse. Water Street is a lively place to be, with performances by the Peoria Municipal Band and others, while efforts to restore the Madison Theater continue.
The vision for Peoria's Warehouse District, newly listed in the National Register of Historic Places, is finally coming to life! With the recent groundbreaking at the Rozelle-Sealtest building, Sugar, Dozer Park and the various artist studios in the area will soon have some new neighbors, including Thyme Kitchen and Craft Beer and Rhodell Brewery, which will move into the Murray Building in early 2015.
If you've traveled along Washington Street lately, you've probably seen Portal, the new sculpture from Bruce White, gifted to the city by Dr. George and Norma Kottemann through the Peoria Art Guild. Installed at the center of the roundabout at Washington and Harrison, it makes for a splendid transition between downtown and the Warehouse District. Next year, public art will receive another boost when the efforts of Sculpture Walk Peoria begin to take hold—more on that to come. And let's not forget the tremendous growth of First Fridays and first-year success of IGNITE Peoria.
Take note of the many new events in our social scenes, including the "demolition party" for the Peoria PlayHouse, the inaugural 40 leaders Under Forty alumni event, the Peoria Symphony Orchestra's Sunday in the Park with George, and the dedication of Morgan Elser's Giving Tree sculpture at the Morton Community Foundation. That's not to mention the return of perennial favorites, from Whitney's Walk to the United Way campaign kickoff to the ever-popular Lobster Boil.
During the winter months, we have fantastic Broadway Theater shows at the Civic Center—in this issue, we take a peek behind the scenes at what goes into "teching" a show in Peoria. We also learn how the animals at Wildlife Prairie Park are cared for. Since returning to private ownership, the park has seen around $3 million in improvements… and did you know it's open year-round?
There's so much to celebrate—no need to leave the area, just bundle up and enjoy a holiday drink! a&s
art & society - nov/dec 2014


Is this a non-starter as an issue? Or does it matter that elements and lines from Michelle Obama's speech were apparently lifted and used in Melania Trump's RNC convention speech this week? Either way, speechwriter Meredith McIver is in the limelight for the wrong reasons.