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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema > Film theory & criticism
This international collection focuses on the phallic character of
classic and contemporary literary and visual cultures and their
invasive nature. The phallic eye is analyzed as a spectacle of the
obscene, the scene and the sin, a visualization of guilty pleasures
and outrageous lusts that evoke anxiety, guilt, satisfaction,
intimacy and intimidation. The phallic eye is a powerful and useful
metaphor for a radical investigation of the interrelations between
spectatorship, authorship, dominance, Mulvey's theorization of
voyeurism/exhibitionism/Looked-at-ness, and surveillance of human
desires and visual pleasures. This volume suggests a broad
perspective on the phallus as passionate, dynamic and energetic
force, which is more than the consuming, predatory eye of the
beholder who yearns for sensational spectacles. The chapters focus
on thrillers, horror cinema, pornography, sexual art and
photography, erotic literature, female and male body politics,
queer pleasures, gender/cross-gender/transgenderism, CCTV and
phallic ethnicities.
A Critical Companion to Christopher Nolan provides a wide-ranging
exploration of Christopher Nolan's films, practices, and
collaborations. From a range of critical perspectives, this volume
examines Nolan's body of work, explores its industrial and economic
contexts, and interrogates the director's auteur status. This
volume contributes to the scholarly debates on Nolan and includes
original essays that examine all his films including his short
films. It is structured into three sections that deal broadly with
themes of narrative and time; collaborations and relationships; and
ideology, politics, and genre. The authors of the sixteen chapters
include established Nolan scholars as well as academics with
expertise in approaches and perspectives germane to the study of
Nolan's body of work. To these ends, the chapters employ
intersectional, feminist, political, ideological, narrative,
economic, aesthetic, genre, and auteur analysis in addition to
perspectives from star theory, short film theory, performance
studies, fan studies, adaptation studies, musicology, and media
industry studies.
Bringing together scholars from film and television studies, media
and cultural studies, literary studies, medical humanities, and
disability studies, Discourses of Care collectively examines how
the analysis of media texts and practices can contribute to
scholarship on and understandings of health and social care, and
how existing research focusing on the ethics of care can inform our
understanding of media. Featuring a critical introductory essay and
13 specially commissioned original chapters, this is the first
edited collection to address the relationship between media and the
concept and practice of care and caregiving. Contributors consider
the representation of care and caregiving through a range of forms
and practices - the television documentary, photography, film,
non-theatrical cinema, tabloid media, autobiography, and public
service broadcasting - and engage with the labour, as well as the
practical and ethical dimensions of media production. Together,
they offer an original and wide ranging exploration of the various
ways in which media forms represent, articulate and operate within
caring relationships and practices of care; whether this is between
individuals, communities as well as audiences and institutions.
Individual reviews of 90+ films created and released before 1941
are included here in the first title-by-title reference guide to
the forerunners of film noir. Silent Hitchcock thrillers and German
expressionist masterpieces, French poetic realist dramas and
forgotten Hollywood B-movies, pseudo-Freudian gangster films and
costume melodramas are among the works covered. The collection
spans subgenres and cultures of filmmaking, aiming to demonstrate
that the roots of noir were sown far and wide, long before the
lasting and mysterious genre flowered in America during the war
years.
This remarkable journey through the Hammer vault includes props,
annotated script pages, unused poster artwork, production designs,
rare promotional material and private correspondence. Hundreds of
rare and previously unseen stills help to create a rich souvenir of
Hammer's legacy, from the X certificate classics of the 1950s to
the studio's latest productions. This new updated edition includes
an extra chapter covering the years 2010.
Federico Fellini's masterpiece 8 1/2 (Otto e mezzo) shocked
audiences around the world when it was released in 1963 by its
sheer auteurist gall. The hero, a film director named Guido
Anselmi, seemed to be Fellini's mirror image, and the story to
reflect the making of 8 1/2 itself. Whether attacked for
self-indulgence or extolled for self-consciousness, 8 1/2 became
the paradigm of personal filmmaking, and numerous directors,
including Fassbinder, Truffaut, Scorsese, Bob Fosse and Bruce
LaBruce, paid homage to the film and its themes of personal and
creative ennui in their own work. Now that 8 1/2's conceit is less
shocking, D.A. Miller argues, we can see more clearly how
tentative, even timid, Fellini's ground-breaking incarnation always
was. Guido is a perfect blank, or is trying his best to seem one.
By his own admission he doesn't even have an artistic or social
statement to offer: 'I have nothing to say, but I want to say it
anyway.' 8 1/2's deepest commitment is not to this man (who is
never quite 'all there') or to his message (which is lacking
entirely) but to its own flamboyant manner. The enduring timeliness
of 8 1/2 lies, Miller suggests, in its aggressive shirking of the
shame that falls on the man - and the artist - who fails his
appointed social responsibilities.
[This book] explores the changing role of screens, new media
objects, and social media in Japanese horror films from the 2010s
to present day. Lindsay Nelson places these films and their
paratexts in the context of changes in the new media landscape that
have occurred since J-horror's peak in the early 2000s; in
particular, the rise of social media and the ease of user
remediation through platforms like YouTube and Niconico. This book
demonstrates how Japanese horror film narratives have shifted their
focus from old media-video cassettes, TV, and cell phones-to new
media-social media, online video sharing, and smart phones. In
these films, media devices and new media objects exist both inside
and outside the frame: they are central to the films' narratives,
but they are also the means through which the films are consumed
and disseminated. Across a multitude of screens, platforms,
devices, and perspectives, Nelson argues, contemporary Japanese
horror films are circulated as an ever-shifting series of images
and fragments, creating a sense of "fractured reality" in the
films' narratives and the media landscape that surrounds them.
Scholars of film studies, horror studies, media studies, and
Japanese studies will find this book particularly useful.
Film and television offer important insights into social outlooks
on borders in France and Europe more generally. This book
undertakes a visual cultural history of contemporary borders
through a film and television tour. It traces on-screen borders
from the Gare du Nord train station in Paris to Calais, London,
Lampedusa and Lapland. It contends that different types of
mobilities and immobilities (refugees, urban commuters, workers in
a post-industrial landscape) and vantage points (from borderland
forests, ports, train stations, airports, refugee centers) are all
part of a complex French and European border narrative. It covers a
wide range of examples, from popular films and TV series to auteur
fiction and documentaries by well-known directors from across
Europe and beyond. -- .
Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke is an extended dialogue between film
scholar Michael Berry and the internationally acclaimed Chinese
filmmaker. Drawing from extensive interviews and public talks, this
volume offers a portrait of Jia's life, art, and approach to
filmmaking. Jia and Berry's conversations range from Jia's
childhood and formative years to extensive discussions of his major
narrative films, including the classics Xiao Wu, Platform, The
World, Still Life, and A Touch of Sin. Jia gives a firsthand
account of his influences, analyzes the Chinese film industry, and
offers his thoughts on subjects such as film music, working with
actors, cinematography, and screenwriting. From industry and
economics to art and politics, Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke
represents the single most comprehensive document of the director's
candid thoughts on the art and challenges of filmmaking.
The trajectory of Hong Kong films had been drastically affected
long before the city's official sovereignty transfer from the
British to the Chinese in 1997. The change in course has become
more visible in recent years as China has aggressively developed
its national film industry and assumed the role of powerhouse in
East Asia's cinematic landscape. The author introduces the "Cinema
of Transitions" to study the New Hong Kong Cinema and on- and
off-screen life against this background. Using examples from the
1980s to the present, this book offers a fresh perspective on how
Hong Kong-related Chinese-language films, filmmakers, audiences,
and the workings of film business in East Asia have become major
platforms on which "transitions" are negotiated.
Scholars have consistently applied psychoanalytic models to
representations of gender in early teen slasher films such as
"Black Christmas (1974)," "Halloween (1978)" and "Friday the 13th
(1980)" in order to claim that these were formulaic, excessively
violent exploitation films, fashioned to satisfy the misogynist
fantasies of teenage boys and grind house patrons. However, by
examining the commercial logic, strategies and objectives of the
American and Canadian independents that produced the films and the
companies that distributed them in the US, "Blood Money"
demonstrates that filmmakers and marketers actually went to
extraordinary lengths to make early teen slashers attractive to
female youth, to minimize displays of violence, gore and suffering
and to invite comparisons to a wide range of post-classical
Hollywood's biggest hits - including "Love Story (1970)," "The
Exorcist (1973)," "Saturday Night Fever (1977)," "Grease," and
"Animal House (both 1978)." "Blood Money" is a remarkable piece of
scholarship that highlights the many forces that helped establish
the teen slasher as a key component of the North American film
industry's repertoire of youth-market product.
This ground-breaking interdisciplinary collection brings together
leading international scholars working across the humanities and
social sciences to examine ways in which representations of sports
coaching in narrative and documentary cinema can shape and inform
sporting instruction. The central premise of the volume is that
films featuring sports coaches potentially reflect, reinforce or
contest how their audiences comprehend the world of coaching.
Despite the growing interest in theories of coaching and in the
study of the sports film as a genre, specific analyses of filmic
depictions of sports coaches are still rare despite coaches often
having a central role as figures shaping the values, social
situation and cultural expectations of the athletes they train. By
way of a series of enlightening and original studies, this volume
redresses the relative neglect afforded to sports coaching in film
and simultaneously highlights the immense value that research in
this emerging field has for sporting performance and social
justice. This book was originally published as a special issue of
the journal Sports Coaching Review.
Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time-fun and
fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball
shows, we are still writing them-and still living them-today. From
Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman, many stories written in
the past few centuries are commonly, perhaps glibly, called "modern
myths." But Ball argues that we should take that idea seriously.
Our stories of Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Sherlock
Holmes are doing the kind of cultural work that the ancient myths
once did. Through the medium of narratives that all of us know in
their basic outline and which have no clear moral or resolution,
these modern myths explore some of our deepest fears, dreams, and
anxieties. We keep returning to these tales, reinventing them
endlessly for new uses. But what are they really about, and why do
we need them? What myths are still taking shape today? And what
makes a story become a modern myth? In The Modern Myths, Ball takes
us on a wide-ranging tour of our collective imagination, asking
what some of its most popular stories reveal about the nature of
being human in the modern age.
This is the first major collection of essays specifically to
address the impact of visual technologies on the production of
literature in the twentieth century. "Literature and Visual
Technologies" investigates the manifold effects which a visual
century has wrought upon literary conventions. From the influence
of Mutoscope parlours on Joyce's fiction, to the interrelation
between Peter Greenaway's "A TV Dante," the collection consists of
an integrated series of high-level intellectual engagements with a
hundred years of cultural revolution and covers the whole
twentieth-century, from silent to digital film.
Premiering at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival, Andrzej Zulawski's
Possession remains a distinct phenomenon. Though in competition for
the illustrious Palme d'Or, its art cinema context did not rescue
it from being banned as part of the United Kingdom's 'video
nasties' campaign, alongside unashamedly lowbrow titles such as
Faces of Death and Zombie Flesh Eaters. Skirting the boundary
between art and exploitation, body horror and cerebral reverie,
relationship drama and political statement, Possession is a truly
astonishing film. Part visceral horror, part surreal experiment,
part gothic romance dressed in the iconography of a spy thriller:
there is no doubt that the polarity evinced by Possession's initial
release was in part a product of its resistance to clear
categorisation. With a production history almost as bizarre as the
film itself, a cult following gained with its VHS release, and
being re-appreciated in the decades since as a valuable work of
auteur cinema, the story of how this film came to be is as
fascinating as it is unfathomable. Alison Taylor's Devil's Advocate
considers Possession's history, stylistic achievement, and legacy
as an enduring and unique work of horror cinema. Beginning with a
marital breakdown and ending with an apocalypse, the film's
strangeness has not dissipated over time; its transgressive
imagery, histrionic performances, and spiral staircase logic remain
affective and confounding to critics and fans alike. Respecting the
film's wilfully enigmatic nature, this book helps to unpack its key
threads, including the collision between the banal and the
horrific, the socio-historical context of its divided Berlin
setting, and the significance of its legacy, particularly with
regard to the contemporary trend for extreme art horror on the
festival circuit.
Since Robert Flaherty's landmark film Nanook of the North (1922)
arguments have raged over whether or not film records of people and
traditions can ever be "authentic." And yet never before has a
single volume combined documentary, ethnographic, and folkloristic
filmmaking to explore this controversy. What happens when we turn
the camera on ourselves? This question has long plagued documentary
filmmakers concerned with issues of reflexivity, subject
participation, and self-consciousness. Documenting Ourselves
includes interviews with filmmakers Les Blank, Pat Ferrero, Jorge
Preloran, Bill Ferris, and others, who discuss the ways their own
productions and subjects have influenced them. Sharon Sherman
examines the history of documentary films and discusses current
theiroeis and techniques of folklore and fieldwork. But Sharon
Sherman does not limit herself to the problems faced by filmmakers
today. She examines the history of documentary films, tracing them
from their origins as a means of capturing human motion through the
emergence of various film styles. She also discusses current
theories and techniques of folklore and fieldwork, concluding that
advances in video technology have made the camcorder an essential
tool that has the potential to redefine the nature of the
documentary itself.
This book revisits discourse analytic practice, analyzing the idea
that the field has access to, provides, or even constitutes a
'toolbox' of methods. The precise characteristics of this toolbox
have remained largely un-theorized, and the author discusses the
different sets of tools and their combinations, particularly those
that cut across traditional divides, such as those between
disciplines or between quantitative and qualitative methods. The
author emphasizes the potential value of integrating methods in
terms of triangulation and its specific benefits, arguing that
current trends in Open Science require Discourse Studies to
re-examine its methodological scope and choices, and move beyond
token acknowledgements of 'eclecticism'. In-depth case studies
supplement the methodological discussion and demonstrate the
challenges and benefits of triangulation. This book will be a
valuable resource for students and scholars in Discourse Studies,
particularly those with an interest in combining methods and
working across disciplines.
In Elizabeth Taylor: Icon of American Empire, Gloria Shin contends
that the titular movie star is a model of postcolonial whiteness as
her tenure as the most beautiful woman in the world coincides with
the era of postcolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. Taylor is
examined through a series of overlapping readings: as the Mistress
in a cycle of Hollywood plantation, via her extra-cinematic image
as a jet-setting wanton seductress and oriental in whiteface in the
early 1960, through her repatriation to the U.S. in the 1970s via
her marriage to and the election of her pro-military husband John
Warner to the U.S. Senate, and her evolution as a relentless AIDS
activist in the 1980s. Across these interpretative frames, Taylor
emerges as the figuration who performs the vast possibilities open
to postcolonial whites for mobility, pleasure, and political agency
while operating without the burdens of race that allows her stardom
to be symbolic of American Empire at the apex of its power.
New readings of 20th-century literary cinematic texts are presented
here in historical context, informed by cultural theory. New
readings of literary and cinematic texts are presented here in
historical context, informed by cultural theory. In her survey of
the history of Spanish cinema in the dictatorship and democratic
periods, the author argues thatstudies of adaptations must
simultaneously address questions of 'text' - formal issues central
to the study of film and literature - and 'context' - ideological
concerns crucial to late twentieth-century Spain. She examines
threethemes of particular importance to contemporary Spanish
culture - the recuperation of history, the negotiation of the rural
and the urban, and the representation of gender - and considers the
related stylistic issues of the affinities between cinematic
expression and nostalgia, the city and phallocentrism. The study
concludes with an analysis of the formal question of the narrator
in film and literature, through an assessment of Bunuel's
previously unacknowledged stylistic debt to Galdos as manifested in
his adaptations of Nazarin and Tristana. SALLY FAULKNER is Lecturer
in Hispanic Studies at the University of Exeter.
In this volume, Richard Gilmore explores film as a channel through
which to engage in philosophical reflection and analyzes the
relationship between philosophy and film. This book argues that
philosophy and film can and should be used for the amelioration of
life's difficulties and the promotion of life's boons. Gilmore
identifies how philosophy and film complement and enrich one
another and explores their relationship by connecting classic
wisdom texts to significant movies. For example, the volume
analyzes the Coen brothers' films The Big Lebowski and A Serious
Man in light of The Book of Job. Gilmore considers the ancient idea
of philosophy as "spiritual exercise" and a way of life. The volume
concludes by examining what the author labels "sublime
conversations" as the highest expression of philosophy. The book
identifies and dissects these conversations in movies directed by
the likes of Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean-Luc Godard, and
Ingmar Bergman, among others.
A Critical Companion to Stanley Kubrick offers a thorough and
detailed study of the works of Stanley Kubrick. Labeled a recluse,
a provocateur, and a perfectionist, Kubrick remains one of the
greatest legends of cinema who continues to influence contemporary
filmmakers and visual culture. An unequaled visionary, Kubrick
revolutionized film genres, the use of music in film, narrative
pacing and structure, and depictions of war and violence. This book
delves into the complexities of his work and examines the wide
range of topics and the multiple interpretations that his films
inspire. The eighteen chapters in this book use different
methodologies, explore new trends of research in film studies,
providing a series of unique and novel perspectives on all of
Kubrick's thirteen feature films, from Fear and Desire (1953) to
Eyes Wide Shut (1999), as well as his work on A.I. Artificial
Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001).
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