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The Call is Coming from Across the Border: The University of Toronto in Black Christmas (1974) and Black Christmas (2019)

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  [image: Mental Floss ] Filmed at the University of Toronto, Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974), has important connections to Canadian politics and feminist history. While we’re often reminded that Roe v. Wade, a significant US legal decision, coincided with the year of the film’s release, the Morgentaler   trials were the more relevant and timely news event in Canada — where the film was made and initially released — and crucial to the development of that country’s federal abortion laws. These trials occurred after Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau (who would become a two-time PM and father of the current PM) successfully passed a bill decriminalizing abortion, contraception, and homosexuality (for more information, see this helpful description courtesy of The University of Toronto). Focusing on the visceral horror of forced birth rather than “medical privacy,” the Morgentaler trials secured abortion rights in Canada (although abortion access remains a problem in many regio...
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About This Blog

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Image: British History Online This blog is about two things: the ways that history stays with us in the present, and the ways that history is represented and discussed in popular culture. It is is inspired by two figures from literature that remind us that the past is always with us. Who is Anne*? Anne of Oxford Street appears in Thomas De Quincey’s 1821 memoir, Confessions of an English Opium Eater . According to De Quincey, she was a real woman—so young, that today she would be called a teenager —he befriends after leaving boarding school for London. Having never known her last name, in its place he gives us the street where they spent time as impoverished youths. Anne is a woman of the streets, a kind-hearted prostitute who cares for the author. He vows to return to her and repay her kindness, but on returning to London, is unable to find her. With only her common Christian name, he wanders hopelessly through the streets of London in search of her. He imagines her coming to so...
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X: Art About Art

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  [Trying to escape the past; image:  Bloody Disgusting ] Ti West’s homage to '70s exploitation cinema succeeds in mastering the key technique of absorbing historical fiction: depicting a deeper past in contrast to the period in which it is set, thereby making the setting appear modern, contemporary, and present . The past creeps closer. This ability to evoke an era, to touch history, is mostly accomplished with set design. While coeval events are separated by a simple split screen, the split between past and present is made spatially: inside the old house is a deep past, and outside the old house it is modern times. The house is so convincing as a portal to another time that I am reminded of visiting the house my father grew up in before it was torn down: dark and oppressive with the weight of the previous century, cluttered with dusty brack-a-brac. Full of dust and objects that seem layered in it, the old dark house is a time capsule that sucks the characters into history an...
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