Op Verhaal Komen. Moderne Sagen en Geruchten uit Vlaanderen

With his most recent book, Stefaan Top has published an impressive collection of modern legends and rumours that were collected among Flemish youngsters. This book is the sixth and last part of the author’s legend collection Op Verhaal Komen. The previous five parts dealt with traditional legends recorded in the five Flemish provinces.

Top enthusiastically reassures the reader that storytelling is still alive today. Just like their traditional counterparts, modern legends voice the fears, frustrations, and obsessions of their narrators. What distinguishes modern legends from traditional ones is primarily their contemporary setting and modern themes. The author pays attention to classical problems such as terminology and definitions associated with modern legends. Regarding terminology, Top presents an elaborate inventory of nineteen Dutch names for modern legends, forty English, eleven German, and four French ones. He also discusses the content, presentation, sources, and circulation of these legends.

Whereas the roots of collecting and recording traditional folk narratives lie in Europe, the first scientific studies of contemporary legends come from the United States of the 1940s and 1950s. Later on, Europe caught up, which the author shows by a non-exhaustive overview of publications on this subject. In 1982 Top attended the first international contemporary legend conference in Sheffield. Since then he has pursued this fascinating subject in his educational activities at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. This book presents the striking results of fieldwork during which university students questioned hundreds of pupils in youth groups and secondary schools about their knowledge of modern legends. In his foreword to this book, the Minister of Youth and Culture praises the author’s ability to render the oral discourse of adolescents with great precision.

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Double Indemnity. Film Review

The shadows look more ominous than ever in this remastered print of one of Hollywood’s first films noirs. Fred MacMurray plays against type as Walter Neff, an insurance salesman who falls for a client’s wife and gets snared in a scheme to kill the husband. Barbara Stanwyck thickly applies both the femme and the fatale, and Edward G. Robinson is superb as Neff’s suspicious boss. This was second of four pairings for MacMurray and Stanwyck, and definitely the best. Extras on the two-disc set tend toward the scholarly, with a documentary and two commentaries. (Fun fact: Director Billy Wilder had to take a bathroom break every 15 minutes while writing the screenplay because he and co-writer Raymond Chandler couldn’t stand each other.) The second disc includes a faithful 1973 television remake starring Richard Crenna.

You can buy the film here