In a message dated 10/16/97 6:13:16 AM, you wrote: <<I find that many American movies of the last twenty years or so, which depict an encounter with supernatural phenomena (e.g., Close Encounters, E.T., Contact, maybe 2001) tend to suggest the possibility of the supernatural offering an experience of transcendent redemption: In each of these movies something fantastic arrives from far away, from the future, or from another dimension, equipped with superior intelligence, technology, and --more important--sensitivity, and releases the characters in the film, and thereby the audience in the theater as well, from the intolerable or meaningless or repressive existence they have known. By contrast, encounters with the supernatural in American films of the 1930s and 40s like It's a Wonderful Life and The Wizard of Oz seem to convey the message that in fact American life as we know it is just fine, and that when it comes down to it there really is no place like home.>> As a longtime teacher of film at UCSC, let me say, I wish I had more undergraduates like this....it sounds like a really interesting and provocative topic. It seems like your student has already read Leo Bersani's Culture of Redemption - if not, he definitely should. Bersani's work can also be taken in conjunction with Kaja Silverman's (esp. Male Subjectivity at the Margins which she wrote while in close association with Bersani at Berkeley) -- her essay in that book, "Celestial Suture" deals with historical trauma and masculinity in It's A Wonderful Life. Both Silverman and Bersani are very interested in the possibilities of an anti-redemptive art, so their work should provide a useful jumping off point. While I think that the focus on aliens as the latest figuration of "heavenly" intervention is fascinating, he might also want to consider the spate of "angel films" - many of them remakes of Forties films - that have recently become so popular: The Bishop's Wife, Michael, Field of Dreams, and possibly the unaccountably popular TV series Touched By an Angel and Highway to Heaven. The independent film, The Rapture (starring none other than Mr. Supernatural Intervention himself, David Duchovny) also offers a very provocative twist on this genre. If he's interested in broadening the focus to include European films, Wings of Desire, of course, would provide an interesting point of comparison. The problem that redemption narratives raise, according to Bersani's account, is that they reduce the substance of everyday life to complete insignificance by placing it in some sort of teleological schema: generating meaning only through reference to some supernatural moment of utopian completeness or completion (whether religious, political, or even epistemological, as in the case of Flaubert's "encyclopedic fictions"), the content of human life is thereby trivialized, debased, and demoted to the status of "what comes before." Tracing this notion through cultural shifts in American film sensibilities sounds like a great project; I wonder if, in some of these remak es especially, the idealized historical past constructed by Capra and others doesn't become something of a supernatural entity itself. Consider Field of Dreams, for instance, in which the all-American specter of a (pre-integration) baseball team serves to redeem the yuppie fantasy of a return to a "simpler" time. Aren't pastiche films like The Bishop's Wife, Always, Heaven Can Wait basically about the fantasy of older, simpler narrative forms returning to redeem a corrupt and deficient contemporary culture too? David Conner History of Consciousness UC Santa Cruz ---- To sign off SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]