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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema > Film theory & criticism
This book presents a historical overview of the Indonesian film
industry, the relationship between censorship and representation,
and the rise of Islamic popular culture. It considers scholarship
on gender in Indonesian cinema through the lens of power relations.
With key themes such as nationalism, women's rights, polygamy, and
terrorism which have preoccupied local filmmakers for decades,
Indonesia cinema resonates with the socio-political changes and
upheavals in Indonesia's modern history and projects images of the
nation through the debates on gender and Islam. The text also sheds
light on broader debates and questions about contemporary Islam and
gender construction in contemporary Indonesia. Offering cutting
edge accounts of the production of Islamic cinema, this new book
considers gendered dimensions of Islamic media creation which
further enrich the representations of the 'religious' and the
'Islamic' in the everyday lives of Muslims in South East Asia.
Esfir Shub was the only prominent female director of nonfiction
film present at the dawning of the Soviet film industry. She was,
in fact, the first woman both to write critical texts on cinema and
then practically apply these theorisations in her own films. As
such, her syncretism of cinema theory and praxis inspired her to
ask questions regarding both the nature of nonfiction film, such as
the problem of authenticity and reality, and the function of the
artist in society; issues which are still relevant in contemporary
discussions about the documentary. Accordingly, this book
demonstrates Shub's position not only as a significant filmmaker
and recognised member of the early Soviet avant-garde but also as a
key figure in global cinema history. Shub deserves recognition both
as the founder and ardent promoter of the compilation film genre
and as a pioneer of the theory and practice of documentary
filmmaking.
Afrofuturism in Black Panther: Gender, Identity, and the Re-making
of Blackness, through an interdisciplinary and intersectional
analysis of Black Panther, discusses the importance of superheroes
and the ways in which they are especially important to Black fans.
Aside from its global box office success, Black Panther paves the
way for future superhero narratives due to its underlying
philosophy to base the story on a narrative that is reliant on
Afro-futurism. The film's storyline, the book posits, leads viewers
to think about relevant real-world social questions as it taps into
the cultural zeitgeist in an indelible way. Contributors to this
collection approach Black Panther not only as a film, but also as
Afrofuturist imaginings of an African nation untouched by
colonialism and antiblack racism: the film is a map to alternate
states of being, an introduction to the African Diaspora, a
treatise on liberation and racial justice, and an examination of
identity. As they analyze each of these components, contributors
pose the question: how can a film invite a reimagining of
Blackness?
This collective book analyzes seriality as a major phenomenon
increasingly connecting audiovisual narratives (cinematic films and
television series) in the 20th and 21st centuries. The book
historicizes and contextualizes the notion of seriality, combining
narratological, aesthetic, industrial, philosophical, and political
perspectives, showing how seriality as a paradigm informs media
convergence and resides at the core of cinema and television
history. By associating theoretical considerations and close
readings of specific works, as well as diachronic and synchronic
approaches, this volume offers a complex panorama of issues related
to seriality including audience engagement, intertextuality and
transmediality, cultural legitimacy, authorship, and medium
specificity in remakes, adaptations, sequels, and reboots. Written
by a team of international scholars, this book highlights a
diversity of methodologies that will be of interest to scholars and
doctoral students across disciplinary areas such as media studies,
film studies, literature, aesthetics, and cultural studies. It will
also interest students attending classes on serial audiovisual
narratives and will appeal to fans of the series it addresses, such
as Fargo, Twin Peaks, The Hunger Games, Bates Motel, and Sherlock.
This turn-of-the-century moment - when queer love has become
increasingly visible in both popular culture and socio-political
realms - provides an ideal occasion for a critical examination of
same-sex love stories in the media. Focusing primarily on film and
televisual texts from the ten years before and after the
millennium, the essays collected in Queer Love in Film and
Television ask how recent films and television programs play with,
imitate, subvert, mock, critique, and queer the romantic narrative
conventions so common in Western culture. The collection follows
the trajectory of the conventional romance narrative, from the
pursuit of romantic love to the creation of families, and then it
pushes further, into marginal regions where conventional narratives
fail to venture, and then turns back to consider how that narrative
is itself transformed (or queered) through adaptation.
Soccer has the unique ability to represent and strengthen different
cultural identities and ideologies throughout the world. Perhaps
nowhere can this be seen more prominently than in Spain, which has
surged to the forefront of the world's most popular sport. The
national team has won the last two European Championships and the
2010 World Cup, while the two preeminent club teams in Spain, Real
Madrid and FC Barcelona, have reached the semifinals of the UEFA
Champions League in 2011, 2012, and 2013. Even before the sport
became a global phenomenon, soccer had established a strong
connection with Spanish identity and culture. In Soccer in Spain:
Politics, Literature, and Film, Timothy J. Ashton examines the
sport's association with Spanish culture and society. In this
volume, Ashton demonstrates how Spain's soccer clubs reflected the
politics of the region they represented and continue to reflect
them today. The author also explores the often-tenuous relationship
between the intellectual classes and the soccer community in Spain.
Although some of the country's most highly-praised literary figures
had a passion for soccer-which was often reflected in their
work-many intellectuals deemed the topic unsuitable for critical
study. Ashton also discusses how soccer films faced a similar
rebuff from Spanish intellectuals, though the popularity of these
films has grown in recent years. As soccer continues to be one of
the modern world's most significant representations of
globalization, its importance as a cultural touchpoint cannot be
ignored. For anyone wanting to learn more about the relationship
between soccer, politics, and popular culture, this volume offers
critical insights. Soccer in Spain is a valuable read for students
and scholars of Spanish political history, literature, film, and
sport.
Meta-Narrative in the Movies investigates narrative theory through
close analysis of films featuring stories and storytelling. The
cinematic interpretations investigate the role of story creation in
knowing ourselves and planning our future, in structuring social
relationships, and in sharpening our experience of popular culture.
Will appeal to scholars across both film studies and psychoanalysis
Uses a range of contemporary films to illustrate Combines
socio-political commentary and psychological insight
Among professional storytellers whose works have been adapted for
cinematic dramatization, mid-19th century English novelist Charles
Dickens stands in a class of his own. In addition to his most
well-known works such as A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist, which
are unrivaled for their sheer number of film adaptations, each of
Dickens' other major works have been adapted for the screen
multiple times, and many remain accessible for viewing on a variety
of platforms. This book-by-book survey highlights the most popular
adaptations of each Dickens book, spanning from the films of the
silent era through the 21st century. The survey also includes a
critical examination that compares the adaptations to the original
texts. An analysis outlines the many connections between the
fictional narratives and the novelist's own frequently
misunderstood biography.
One of the most celebrated figures in the world of cinema, Jack
Nicholson has appeared in more than fifty films, stamping each with
his larger-than-life presence. Because Nicholson brought a set of
traits and attitudes with him to his roles that the actor and
filmmakers variously inflected, audiences associated certain
characteristics with his screen identity. At times his
rebelliousness was celebrated as an act of self-expression against
an oppressive system (Five Easy Pieces, The Passenger, One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest), and at others it was revealed as an absurd
masculine fantasy (The Last Detail, Chinatown, and The Shining). In
each, the actor embodies an inherent tension between a desire to
make authentic choices and a pressure to conform to societal
expectations of manly behavior. In Becoming Jack Nicholson: The
Masculine Persona from Easy Rider to The Shining, Shaun Karli looks
at the actor's on-screen presence in eight key films between 1969
and 1980. Karli explores how in each of these films, the actor and
the filmmakers played upon audience expectations of Jack Nicholson
to challenge prevailing attitudes about masculinity and
power.Focusing on Nicholson's persona as created in a string of
counterculture films, Karli argues that audiences abstracted a
composite Nicholson persona as the author of the actor's
nineteen-seventies output. Examining both the actor and the
on-screen version of the Nicholson character, this book offers a
fascinating look at one of the major screen figures of the past
forty years. Becoming Jack Nicholson will appeal to scholars of
cinema, but also to those interested in gender studies, American
studies, and sociology.
Explores Haneke's historically complex film as a reflection on
purity, ideology, violence, and child-rearing. White ribbons and
black pedagogy - Michael Haneke's award-winning film The White
Ribbon (2009) is a multilayered reflection on purity, ideology,
violence, and child rearing. In this tense black-and-white
whodunit, mysterious events occur in a small town on the
German-Polish border in 1913-14. A tripwire fells the doctor's
horse; a farmhand's wife falls through the floor of a shed; a barn
goes up in flames; the baron's son is terribly beaten; a girls
takes claims to clairvoyance; a mentally disabled boy is tortured
and maimed. While the film unfolds on the eve of the First World
War, the violence evokes other historical moments: the breakup of
the multi ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire, the rise of National
Socialism, the emergence of 1960s German terrorism, and religious
fundamentalism post 9/11. Fatima Naqvi's book looks at Haneke's
technique of combining various histories in the digital era. It
also reflects on the guise of literariness and historical
authenticity in which the director clothes this fictional film. It
meditates on the film's inscription techniques and its ability to
appeal to international audiences. Naqvi shows that The White
Ribbon bespeaks a certain historical "translatability" into
historical and aesthetic contexts outside of Germany-in marked
contrast to the historical specificity it conveys on a surface
level.
In this book, Tal S. Shamir sets out to identify cinema as a novel
medium for philosophy and an important way of manifesting and
developing philosophical thought. The volume presents a
comprehensive analysis of the nature of philosophy's potential-or,
more strongly put, its need-to be manifested cinematically. Drawing
on the fields of cinema, philosophy, and media studies, Cinematic
Philosophy adds film to the traditional list of ways through which
philosophy can be created, concentrating on the unique potential of
the cinematic medium to effectively put forward and create
philosophy. In the process, the book opens up innovative horizons
for new types of knowledge and wisdom grounded in contemporary
contexts and philosophical thought. Philosophy, best characterized
as the love of wisdom, is not dependent on a specific medium nor
solely situated within written text or oral lectures. Shamir
asserts that philosophy can, should, and must be manifested and
identified in a range of different platforms.
Essays on the continuing power and applicability of medieval
images, with particular reference to recent films. The middle ages
provide the material for mass-market films, for historical and
fantasy fiction, for political propaganda and claims of legitimacy,
and these in their turn exert a force well outside academia. The
phenomenon is tooimportant to be left unscrutinised: these essays
show the continuing power and applicability of medieval images -
and also, it must be said, their dangerousness and often their
falsity. Of the ten essays in this volume, several examine modern
movies, including the highly-successful A Knight's Tale (Chaucer as
a PR agent) and the much-derided First Knight (the Round Table
fights the Gulf War). Others deal with the appropriation of history
and literature by a variety of interested parties: King Alfred
press-ganged for the Royal Navy and the burghers of Winchester in
1901, William Langland discovered as a prophet of future Socialism,
Chaucer at once venerated and tidied into New England
respectability. Vikings, Normans and Saxons are claimed as
forebears and disowned as losers in works as complex as Rider
Haggard's Eric Brighteyes, at once neo-saga and anti-saga.
Victorian melodramaprovides the cliches of "the bad baronet" who
revives the droit de seigneur (but baronets are notoriously modern
creations); and of the "bony grasping hand" of the Catholic Church
and its canon lawyers (an image spread in ways eerily reminiscent
of the modern "urban legend" in its Internet forms). Contributors:
BRUCE BRASINGTON, WILLIAM CALIN, CARL HAMMER, JONA HAMMER, PAUL
HARDWICK, NICKOLAS HAYDOCK, GWENDOLYN MORGAN, JOANNE PARKER, CLARE
A. SIMMONS, WILLIAM F. WOODS. Professor TOM SHIPPEY teaches in the
Department of English at the University of St Louis; Dr MARTIN
ARNOLD teaches at University College, Scarborough.
The links between cinema and war machines have long been
established. This book explores the range, form, and valences of
trauma narratives that permeate the most notable narrative films
about the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Maverick Slovenian cultural theorist, philosopher and psychoanalyst
Slavoj Zizek has made his name elaborating the complexities of
psychoanalytic and Marxist theory through the exotic use of
examples from film and popular culture. But what if we were to take
Zizek's pretensions to cinephilia and film criticism seriously? In
this book, adopting Zizek's own tactic of counterintuitive
observation, we shall read the corpus of Alfred Hitchcock's films
('one of the great achievements of Western civilization') and
Zizek's idiosyncratic citation of them in order to arrive at a
position where we can identify the core commitments that inform
Zizek's own work. From the practice of Hitchcock we shall
(hopefully) arrive at a theory of Zizek (just as Zizek in his
collection Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But
Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (Verso, 1992) arrives at a theory of
Lacan from the practice of Hitchcock). To achieve this goal each
chapter looks at a specific film by Hitchcock and explores a
specific key concept crucial to the elaboration and core of Zizek's
ideas.
"Narratives of Memory: British Writing of the 1940s "identifies
memory as a previously unexamined concern in both literary and
popular writing of this period. Emphasizing the use of memory as a
structural device and a theme, this book traces developments in
narrative, especially the novel, during the war years and
immediately after. Authors discussed include Margery Allingham,
Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Patrick Hamilton and Denton Welch.
This book describes the main characteristics that define the
emotion of fear, its dimensions, functions, types, and social and
individual meanings. It also shows that fear represents a desire to
eliminate the Other and that horror films have their origin
precisely in crisis and fear, which gives it a fundamentally
xenophobic nature. This is demonstrated in the book through the
analysis of the four most important versions of the King Kong myth:
1933, 1976, 2005 and 2017. These versions are the result of the
fear of the Other that was generated by particular crises in US
society: the stock market crash of 1929, the 1970s energy crisis,
9/11 and the military intervention in Iraq in 2003 and its
consequences. These conflicts also led to psychological and
sociological effects that created a desire for escape that King
Kong's films manifest.
This ground-breaking volume is the first of its kind to examine the
extraordinary prevalence and appeal of the Gothic in contemporary
British theatre and performance. Chapters range from considerations
of the Gothic in musical theatre and literary adaptation, to
explorations of the Gothic's power to haunt contemporary
playwriting, macabre tourism and site-specific performance. By
taking familiar Gothic motifs, such as the Gothic body, the monster
and Gothic theatricality, and bringing them to a new contemporary
stage, this collection provides a fresh and comprehensive take on a
popular genre. Whilst the focus of the collection falls upon Gothic
drama, the contents of the book will embrace an interdisciplinary
appeal to scholars and students in the fields of theatre studies,
literature studies, tourism studies, adaptation studies, cultural
studies, and history.
This book explores representations of same-sex desire in Indian
literature and film from the 1970s to the present. Through a
detailed analysis of poetry and prose by authors like Vikram Seth,
Kamala Das, and Neel Mukherjee, and films from Bollywood and
beyond, including Onir's My Brother Nikhil and Deepa Mehta's Fire,
Oliver Ross argues that an initially Euro-American "homosexuality"
with its connotations of an essential psychosexual orientation, is
reinvented as it overlaps with different elements of Indian
culture. Dismantling the popular belief that vocal gay and lesbian
politics exist in contradistinction to a sexually "conservative"
India, this book locates numerous alternative practices and
identities of same-sex desire in Indian history and modernity.
Indeed, many of these survived British colonialism, with its
importation of ideas of sexual pathology and perversity, in changed
or codified forms, and they are often inflected by gay and lesbian
identities in the present. In this account, Oliver Ross challenges
the preconception that, in the contemporary world, a grand
narrative of sexuality circulates globally and erases all
pre-existing narratives and embodiments of sexual desire.
This book brings together key works by pioneering film studies
scholar Steve Neale. From the 1970s to the 2010s Neale's vital and
unparalleled contribution to the subject has shaped many of the
critical agendas that helped to confirm film studies' position as
an innovative discipline within the humanities. Although known
primarily for his work on genre, Neale has written on a far wider
range of topics. In addition to selections from the influential
volumes Genre (1980) and Genre and Hollywood (2000), and articles
scrutinizing individual genres - the melodrama, the war film,
science fiction and film noir - this Reader provides critical
examinations of cinema and technology, art cinema, gender and
cinema, stereotypes and representation, cinema history, the film
industry, New Hollywood, and film analysis. Many of the articles
included are recommended reading for a range of university courses
worldwide, making the volume useful to students at undergraduate
level and above, researchers, and teachers of film studies, media
studies, gender studies and cultural studies. The collection has
been selected and edited by Frank Krutnik and Richard Maltby,
scholars who have worked closely with Neale and been inspired by
his diverse and often provocative critical innovations. Their
introduction assesses the significance of Neale's work, and
contextualizes it within the development of UK film studies. DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47788/YRCC6901
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