Category: Arts & Culture

Catching Connections

Catching Connections It is 6 PM on a Friday night. As I walk through Utrecht Central Station, I hear a song echo through the hall. On my way to catch my train which will depart in twenty minutes, I stop and watch a group of people of all ages form a circle around a piano….

Frantic: A Classic Thriller based on Foreign Anxieties

Frantic: A Classic Thriller based on Foreign Anxieties Any international who’s moved to the Netherlands has undoubtedly had to face some of the weirdness/awkwardness that comes automatically with being a stranger in a foreign country. Every place, every country has its own unique elements that can make it intimidating for foreigners, visitors, tourists, expats. As…

The Confusing Chronology of the Alien Sequels

By Romke van der Veen Just recently a new ‘Alien’ movie was announced, this time to be produced (not directed) by Ridley Scott. But this news got little media attention. Why is this? For a franchise that was once considered some of the best science-fiction out there. A franchise that produced blockbusters and even one…

Ukraine and the Charge of the Light Brigade

By Romke van der Veen There are certain regions of the world, which have historically been at the convergence point of conflicting cultures. Ukraine has been one of these frontiers; a place of tensions between powers, not unlike the Balkans, Caucasus or the Arabian Peninsula have to an even greater degree. In Mackinder’s ‘Heartland Theory’…

Why Do We Know Friday the 13th?

By Romke Van Der Veen With another Halloween that has come and gone, I was reminded of some of the holiday’s most infamous icons and horror in general. Jason Voorhees, I’m sure you’ve heard that name alongside that of Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers (from Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween, respectively). But why? These names are commonly known…

The Conflict of Historical Filmmaking

Romke van der Veen  When you’re depicting history in movies, or portraying a historical event, making a biopic or period-piece, you are always confronted with walking the line between drama, historical accuracy, or even documentarian type filmmaking. A great example of this conflict is the 2008 German film, Baader Meinhof Complex. Now, German historical films…

Some Thoughts on the Women’s Prize for Fiction

By Marije Huging In March, the longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the UK’s most prestigious book award for women writers, for which the winner gets 30 000 pounds, was released. The drama that ensued earlier this month regarding the prize has something larger to say about literary prize culture, and it’s entering into…

Olivia Laing and Loneliness at UCR

By Marije Huging ‘Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person (…) Like depression, like melancholy or restlessness, it is subject too to pathologization, to being considered a disease. It has been said emphatically that…

Beating the Winter Blues

By Marije Huging During the last week of a UCR semester, my head usually feels strangely detached from my body, like a little homunculus living in an empty shell. This is what exams, presentations, and what seems like an endless array of papers (that I actually wrote in two days) feel like. During this time,…

Smallest cinema of the Netherlands!!!!

By Marije Huging When walking drearily on the almost-empty streets of Middelburg after a 16:00-18:00 class, you realize that you forgot to buy food. So you go to the supermarket in the dark to pick up ready-made pasta, a vegetable for nutrition, and some candy, which you can open on the way back for comfort…

Explaining Things to My Hamster

By Marije Huging On many evenings during corona, sitting alone in my room – or, not entirely alone- I pass the time by watching series. In lonesome solitude one night (except for the company of a small rodent), I began to reminisce of my time as a fourteen-year-old girl, addicted to Gossip Girl, which in…

A Millennial’s Struggle to Read

by Alice Fournier “In a secular age,” writes Ceridwen Dovey in a The NewYorker article, “I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence.” The article, published in the newspaper’s section ‘Cultural Comments’ and titled, “Can Reading Make You Happier?” had me wondering this exact same question. I don’t remember…

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