Word: frankenstein
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...incredible variety of Frankenstein films points to the richness of Shelley's text, and its uncanny ability to inspire horror. The novel is surprisingly unassuming, the first work of a 19 year-old writer who was to have few other lasting successes. But it is powerfully midwifed by the godfathers of the Romantic movement, Lord Byron and Percy Blythe Shelley, and Mary Shelley's own traumatic family experiences. The frustrations of her position--her selfimposed exile with the radical, and still-married, Shelley, her confinement in the home and her failed pregnancies--are expressed in the passion with which...
Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein is a man obsessed with the discovery of knowledge at any price, committed to the exploration of charlatanry, if necessary, to learn all the secrets of the natural world. He is above all completely self-absorbed, unable to see beyond the experiment at hand. His monster is the product of an inevitable sequence of events: he believes reanimation is possible, and works maniacally until it is achieved. The Frankenstein films have been less successful than Shelley in defining his motive for creating inhuman life. Branagh chooses to make the death of Victor Frankenstein's mother...
...novel resolutely refuses to describe the actual techniques of its doctor, while film makers feel the need to explain to their audience how this miracle is wrought. This is not only a necessity for the visual medium of film, but an indication that as we move closer to Frankenstein's work in modern science, such unspeakable horrors become everyday occurences. The rebirth of tissue, while still contraversial, is conceiveable in our time, and we are certainly interested to hear how it might be realized...
Branagh's film, for all its transgressions, succeeds in communicating Shelley's own horror at the monstrous birth. Frankenstein's monster is neither child of God, nor of woman. He is an assault on universal order, on the principles of science and religion. This is most effectively described in the film's birth scenes. In the first, Victor Frankenstein's mother dies in caesarean delivery performed by her husband. Though physically (and graphically) destroying the mother, the birth produces a joyful child who is a delight from his first moments. The monster's birth, however, is an awkward torment...
Shelley's novel explores not only the process of birth, but the effects of parenthood Frankenstein is littered with parentless children, like Shelley herself, whose mother died shortly after her birth. The monster's wrath stems from the refusal of the man he calls his father to acknowledge his offspring, or to provide for his spiritual comfort by creating a companion like him. The monster who grows under these circumstances has great capacities both for good and evil, presumably like all children at their birth. He is well-educated and seeks human companionship, but his rejection by the human race...