In this blog post, Jane E. Schultz, Ph.D., describes how the handling of the dead, on a scale unimaginable to most people today, presented challenges to Civil War medical staff and army administrators alike.
Warming by the Devil’s Fire (an episode in the mini-series,
The Blues, 2003), among other films. Professor Naremore authored a book about Burnett’s work,
Charles Burnett: A Cinema of Symbolic Knowledge (University of California Press, 2017).
Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan in
Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
The second part of the conversation concentrated on
Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948), a film directed by German-born Max Ophuls while he was in exile in the US in the 1940s. Naremore has written a study of the film, recently published by BFI Film Classics. The film, produced by John Houseman and with a script by Howard Koch (a future blacklist victim), is based on a 1922 novella by Austrian author Stefan Zweig (1881-1942).
Part one of a conversation with film historian, scholar James Naremore: The films of American director Charles Burnett
James Naremore has been one of the most insightful commentators on film and film history over the past four decades. He remains one of the relatively few figures in the field interested in (or capable of) “interweaving” as he notes in our conversation below a genuine aesthetic sensibility with a political and social interest. Now retired from teaching, Professor Naremore is Chancellors’ Professor Emeritus of Communication and Culture, English and Comparative Literature at Indiana University. He is the editor of the Contemporary Film Directors series of books at University of Illinois Press and a writer at large for