By Jamie A. Thomas

"Why won't you let me finishing my painting? I'm satisfied with it. I'm proud of what I've done." ​Emily can't understand why her art teacher isn't enthused. Her voice wavering, Dina implores her student to push her  creation by seeking a transcendent level of evocativeness and emotion. She must go beyond the real. "Your work is good," Dina tells Emily. "But it's about getting the work right, it's about the work!" I paraphrase here, but it was in these tense moments between art teacher and student that I began to personally connect with the on-screen story of Words and Pictures (2014). 

Yes, it's loosely a romantic story between an artist and a poet. Yes, I had been shamelessly looking on Prime for a new romcom earlier this afternoon. But no, this movie is not a romcom. It has a brilliant screenplay by Gerald DiPego, and a wonderful, poignant message on the importance of creativity, passion, and teaching.

In the movie, painter Dina Delsanto (Juliette Binoche) develops a friendly rivalry with poet Jack Marcus (Clive Owen) who also teaches at the high school. He finds himself "teaching in the era of the undead," where high school students seem devoid of passion and intuition. Searching for a way to motivate his students, Jack asks them to question: "Are words more powerful than pictures?"

One such word at the center of Jack and Dina's friendly feud is hyperemotionality. As the storyline advanced, I took this word to relate to the exceptional emotional response inspired by evocative artwork, prose, and poetry. While watching the movie, I had to press pause so I could reflect. Already, my mind was recalling the wonder, surprise, laughter, and gloom I've experienced in reading ethnographic encounters. 

From Geertz' thick description of the Balinese cock fight, to Ochs and Schieffelin's account of communication among mothers and their children in Samoa. In ethnography, there's not so much a rivalry between words and pictures, as a combining of these into imagery that recreates lived experience for those of us who were never there. Just like the painted canvas or stanza are crafted to draw audiences into the artist's own worldview.

These days, I'm more and more fascinated by ethnographic writing and creation, because I'm pulling together my very own first book, Zombies Speak Swahili. So now I want to share developing reflections on experimental ethnography as an artistic and cinematic exploration in creation. 

by Fanyi Ma

I’ll just be honest with you—I am very disappointed by this movie. The zombie is a social concept we’ve been contesting throughout the semester, and it has so many potential ways to be embedded in Jane Austen’s novel. Being a by-product of pride and prejudice itself, the zombie can be a perfect tool for conveying themes like social class, self-identity, hatred, fear, etc.However, what I saw in the movie was just the thread of human vs. zombie simply synchronized and paired up with the plots of the original story, creating a logically flawed, overly dramatized and self-contradicting pandemonium.

Another detail of the film ​Pride and Prejudice and Zombies that caught my attention was the time period in which the story takes place. The early 19th century is a crucial era in the history of China-Western interaction. That’s when the falling empire of the Qing Dynasty clashed with rising Western powers.

Great Britain, along with many other European countries and westernized Asian countries, forced the historically self-sufficient agricultural empire to open its gate and pushed China into the trend of global trade. The weakened Chinese empire had no choice but giving away its land and sovereignty after several unsuccessful attempts at fighting back.

Foreign missionaries and businessmen swarmed into China to spread "civilization" and seek their fortunes. Encounters with Chinese culture were usually described as modern civilization converting the primitive, mysterious, and incompetent doctrines of the Chinese. If we keep this historical background in mind, the appreciation of what is referred to in the film as "Oriental culture" seems pretty out of place.

These two paradoxes--Orientalism and female empowerment in the early 19th century--both have the potential to escalate the original story to a deeper level of inquiry into gender and cultural privilege. However, the movie's directors don't seem to bother. Instead, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies easily focuses on  dramatic battle scenes, while leaving these two threads unresolved. 

Following the trend of mash-ups between history, literature, and the supernatural, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies takes the British classic by Jane Austen and adds in a zombie-fighting quest. The love story between Jane and Mr. Bingley, and between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, unfolds against a backdrop of a zombie outbreak that is rapidly taking over England. In the end, Darcy and Elizabeth overcome their initial impressions of each other and work together to minimize the spread of the outbreak.

In the movie, viewers see hundreds of zombies that constantly hunt for brains while being hunted down themselves. Historically, this stems from the Haitian belief, in which zombies came in multiple forms: They were spirits stolen by magicians, humans who willingly became zombies, or mindless servants of their zombie creator. In American society, however, the historical appeal of the zombie initially came largely from the creature's lack of autonomy. Many even considered zombies to be the ideal slaves, since they could work for long hours and survive on minimal amounts of food. This characterization of the zombie as a mindless corpse is what the American public is most familiar with today.

By Claudia Romano, Dana Leonard, & Elizabeth Teerlink

As we made the journey from Swarthmore to North Philadelphia to meet with James Burns, we discussed our expectations, or lack thereof, for this interview. We had done a MuralArts tour through our sociolinguistics course a couple of weeks prior that had inspired us to center our final project around murals in Philly. But on that train ride, we realized that we didn’t really know where we were going with this project’s narrative. We walked out of the train station into North Philly and found ourselves in an alleyway after following the directions James had given us. We called James, unable to find the studio he was working in, and it all became clear from there.