This paper examines Philip Glass's soundtrack for The Thin Blue Line, a "nonfiction film noir" directed by Errol Morris in 1988. The film, which focuses on the trial of Randall Adams, accused of murdering a police officer in Dallas in 1976, had a tangible impact on the real world, as it led to Adams's acquittal and the identification of the real murderer, David Harris. The film also plays with the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, departing from the conventions of cin & eacute;ma v & eacute;rit & eacute; and the more observational types of documentaries in a number of ways. The soundtrack, composed by Philip Glass, who belongs to the minimal/repetitive music movement, is almost ubiquitous and seemingly runs counter to the film's purpose, which is to show the protagonist's innocence. Through musicological analysis, this paper demonstrates, on the contrary, that Glass's music helps to flesh out the film's abstract argument thanks, precisely, to its nonrepresentational, non-narrative, minimalist and repetitive nature, which makes it an essential element of the documentary voice.
This article analyzes the various principles that drive King Richard III's bloodthirsty ambitions, based on Guillaume Severac-Schmitz's adaptation of Clement Camar-Mercier's translation. The originality of this stage production lies in its emphasis on Richard III's physical deformities, which gradually worsen to give rise to a new Frankenstein who questions his narcissistic wound.
Toni Morrison's fourth novel, Tar Baby (1981), is a rewriting of the folktale by the same title brought to the Americas with the arrival of enslaved populations. If this story became famous in the United States with the work of Joel Chandler Harris, a white man, Morrison's novel reappropriates it, retelling the original tale of how a rabbit manages to manipulate its captor after falling into its trap. In Tar Baby, Morrison replaces the rabbit and the tar baby with Jadine and Fils, two African Americans who, throughout their love story on the imaginary Caribbean island of Isle des Chevaliers, go from trickster to tar baby and back again. These constant changes lead to ambivalence and instability, thus mimicking the multitude of oral versions in a way that at times confuses the reader, ensuring that the diegesis resists interpretation. Furthermore, Morrison creates a truly hybrid narrative, a text in which biblical and folkloric references work together to produce a representation of digenesis, a source of the "unhomely" in the novel.
