All posts tagged: bushra varachia

Technological Success, Emotional Failure: Civilization and Unhappiness in THERE WILL BE BLOOD

Published by Bushra Varachia

Happy is the man free of business cares, who, like the men of olden days, ploughs the family fields with his own oxen and neither lends nor borrows. — Horace, Beatus Ille[1] In his essay, Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud seeks to connect the unhappiness of man as an individual to civilization and society, exploring concepts such as the sexual and death instincts, the relationship between technological development and happiness, and, to some extent, the god-complex. Freud defines civilization as “the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors,” “protect men against nature,” and “adjust their mutual relations.”[2] He remarks especially upon the “exploitation of the earth by man,”[3] or the domination of nature in order to then wield it as a tool to aid human progress. Freud also claims that civilization requires the renunciation or limitation of the sexual and death instincts.[4] Thus, civilization becomes “largely responsible for [mankind’s] misery,” and man would be more satisfied in his primitive state.[5] Each of these key concepts from Freud’s …

Bushra Varachia is a Cinema Studies filmmaking major with a minor in Spanish. After graduation, she hopes to edit videos to help her pay her way through Europe. If she's not at Kresge Library, you can probably find her in her car, driving 2,000 miles to walk around some rocks and sleep on some dirt.

Queer Christina: The Representation of LGBT Characters in Pre-Code Era Films

Published by Bushra Varachia

Historically, the representation of queer characters in film and onscreen is very poor. They are often one-dimensional stereotypes portrayed through gender inversions — the gay “pansy” or the “butch” lesbian. Despite the presence of LGBT persons in front of and behind the camera, showing homosexual characters in the early years of Hollywood “in anything but a degrading comic light” was “extremely rare.”[1] Queer characteristics were also often applied to the villains or monsters of early and classical Hollywood cinema to represent evil.[2] These demeaning representations lessened as Hollywood entered the pre-Code era. Homosexual and queer filmmakers and stars, such as Marlene Dietrich and arguably Greta Garbo, rose to fame, and studios grew more daring in the face of censorship, testing how far they could push the Production Code Administration and Studio Relations Committee in regards to the screen-time of banned topics. Although the Code prohibited “sex perversion,” which mainly concerned homosexuality, queer characters still appeared in pre-Code era films with alarming explicitness, growing less one-dimensional and more prominent, as particularly demonstrated in Morocco (1930), Queen …

Bushra Varachia is a Cinema Studies filmmaking major with a minor in Spanish. After graduation, she hopes to edit videos to help her pay her way through Europe. If she's not at Kresge Library, you can probably find her in her car, driving 2,000 miles to walk around some rocks and sleep on some dirt.