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The Cinema of Neil Jordan: Dark Carnival (Directors' Cuts)

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Carole Zucker is a Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University in Montreal; she is one of the few scholars in the world who has brought film acting into academic scrutiny and criticised the way in which - as she writes - the "human is taken out of humanities". Her previous books, such as The Idea of the Image: Josef von Sternberg's Dietrich Films (1988) and In the Company of Actors: Reflections on the Craft of Acting (1999), reflect Zucker's deep engagement with the work of film actors and the craft of film acting; she single-handedly redeems the presence of "human" in film and film studies.

In her latest book, The Cinema of Neil Jordan: Dark Carnival, Zucker takes the question "what does it mean to be human?" to a new level by illuminating how Jordan's films in one way or another examine this universal question. Zucker offers the reader bucketloads of intelligent insights into the work of Neil Jordan by creating a dialogue between Irish film, Celtic myth and folklore as well as postmodern fairy tales. Zucker's writing inspires the reader to interrogate the films of Jordan - and simultaneously the Irish cinema - from a renewed perspective by emphasizing the "universal" more than the "national" as the level on which Jordan's films can be seen to function. She takes Jordan to be an artist of mythopoeic stature, a figure whose work partakes of an ecumenical relationship to the world, an artist who resonates with poets such as Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Yeats.

Zucker comprehensively explores Jordan's diverse films, literary work and Jordan himself as, who she terms a "postmodern Romantic" - a postmodern artist whose work crosses the boundaries of generic and stylistic categories and a Romantic who "embraces perception, intuition and sensation." Thus, she looks at Jordan the filmmaker and his actors not so much against the ideological and national backdrop (although she excels in her knowledge of what Yeats would call "Irishry,") but also as an artist in whose work the impulses of Celtic folklore, fairy tales, the Gothic, Dark Romanticism and Postmodernism predominate.

This interdisciplinary breadth of insight and scholarship signals the consummate richness of the book, which holds the reader's interest from beginning to end. Zucker's text is both creative and poetic; it takes the reader on a fascinating ride into Jordan's imaginative world, brilliantly excavating the (heretofore largely unexplored) profundity of the filmmaker's poetic intelligence as an artist and writer.