Books on the topic 'Cinematic Model'
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1
Nagib, Lúcia. Realist Cinema as World Cinema. NL Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789462987517.
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This book presents the bold and original proposal to replace the general appellation of ‘world cinema’ with the more substantive concept of ‘realist cinema’. Veering away from the usual focus on modes of reception and spectatorship, it locates instead cinematic realism in the way films are made. The volume is structured across three innovative categories of realist modes of production: ‘noncinema’, or a cinema that aspires to be life itself; ‘intermedial passages’, or films that incorporate other artforms as a channel to historical and political reality; and ‘total cinema’, or films moved by a totalising impulse, be it towards the total artwork, total history or universalising landscapes. Though mostly devoted to recent productions, each part starts with the analysis of foundational classics, which have paved the way for future realist endeavours, proving that realism is timeless and inherent in cinema from its origin.
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Aitken, Ian. Cinematic Realism. Edinburgh University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474441346.001.0001.
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This book explores the subject of cinematic realism through a long Introduction which covers general notions related to cinematic realism, and then through close analysis of book chapters written by Siegfried Kracauer and Georg Lukács. The theories of Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson are also covered. The long Introduction attempts to set out a model of cinematic realism based on a philosophical realist and ‘externalist’ position. This is followed by an introductory chapter on Bergson, which serves as a foundation for the following four chapters, which cover the work of Lukács. The same structure is then repeated for Kracauer: an introductory chapter on Husserl is followed by four chapters on Kracauer.
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Radner, Hilary, and Alistair Fox. Spectators, Dispositifs, and the Cinematic Body. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422888.003.0010.
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Raymond Bellour explains why he returned to a preoccupation with cinema in general, and the spectator in particular, and how he came to write Le Corps du cinéma, emphasizing his interest in the diverse dispositifs represented by Foucault’s Panopticon on one hand, and by the phenomena of panoramas and phantasmagorias on the other. He describes how his discovery of Daniel Stern’s The Interpersonal World of the Infant marked a critical turning point, leading him to explore an analogy between the infant and a spectator watching a film in the cinema – an analogy that enabled him to break with the psychoanalytic model, reflected in his eventual substitution of the notion of the body for that of the text.
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Cenciarelli, Carlo, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190853617.001.0001.
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It has long been suggested that films have changed the way we listen, but cinema’s contribution to broader listening cultures has only recently started to receive serious academic attention. Taking this issue as its central topic, The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening explores—from philosophical, archival, empirical, and analytical perspectives—the genealogies of cinema’s audiovisual practices, the relationship between film aesthetics and listening protocols, and the extension of cinematic modes of listening into other media and everyday situations.
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Lewis, Hannah. Théâtre filmé, Opera, and Cinematic Poetry. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190635978.003.0005.
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Chapter 4 focuses on a famous debate between playwright Marcel Pagnol and film director René Clair. Pagnol was a successful playwright who was excited about film’s potential for recording live theater. His screenplays, perhaps most notably Marius, emphasized spoken dialogue, relegating music to a secondary role. Clair was a silent filmmaker who was interested in the poetic qualities of the image, and he feared that sound, particularly dialogue, would threaten cinema’s poetic potential. His film Le Million relied heavily on music, particularly live musical-theatrical forms like operetta and opera, to create alternative models for film’s sound–image relationship. The debate between Pagnol and Clair reveals diverging approaches to sound film, the aesthetic connections and tensions between live theater and cinema, and music’s importance in articulating those tensions.
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Lehman, Frank. Tonal Practices. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190606398.003.0002.
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This chapter lays out a series of conventions toward pitch design that both constrain musical meaning making in film and enable its unique effects. The chapter begins by examining the idiom of late Romanticism in European art music and the ways in which film music conforms to and differs from that model. This exploration is followed by a discussion of three vital aspects of American cinematic tonality: subordination, immediacy, and referentiality. Examples are drawn from an expansive set of filmmaking eras and styles; these range from the early days of the Sound Era to far more contemporary sounds. Beginning in this chapter, the beginnings of an interpretive methodology are constructed, recruiting from approaches as diverse as leitmotivic, atonal, Schenkerian, and audiovisual styles of analysis.
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Lehman, Frank. Expression and Transformation. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190606398.003.0003.
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This chapter introduces the two core theoretical concepts of this study: expressivity and transformation. These two topics are broached through an initial examination of two highly dissimilar cinematic style topics: whole-tone harmony and stepwise modulations. The stylistic and aesthetic continuity with Romantic Era practices, especially from Wagner, is emphasized. A working model of tonal expressivity is constructed, in which intrinsic and extrinsic musical factors combine to form combinatorial meaning. With these concepts in hand, the notion of transformation—the cornerstone of neo-Riemannian theory—is introduced, and the second half of this chapter fleshes out the idiom of pantriadic chromaticism. A clear definition for pantriadicism is offered, along with a provisional aesthetics and analytical methodology for the idiom. The chapter concludes with a treatment of three common guises of pantriadicism—absolute progressions, sequences, and discursive chromaticism—all of which tend to occur on the musical surface rather than background.
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Lurie, Peter. “Orders from the House”. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199797318.003.0003.
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This chapter takes its title from an essay about The Shining by Fredric Jameson, “Historicism in the Shining,” which, for all its acuity about the film’s awareness of economic history, demonstrates a notable blind spot around issues of race and the violence subtending America’s past in regions like the U.S. west. It shows a troubling alliance between Jack Torrance’s will to mastery and director Stanley Kubrick’s unique wielding of cinematic omniscience, suggesting the film’s awareness of the frontier as both a space of supposed white sovereignty and aesthetic spectacle. It employs key visual tropes and verbal details as well as the film’s stylistic excesses to suggest the history of genocide embedded in both the Overlook Hotel’s history and in American historical concepts such as manifest destiny. Its conclusion utilizes Gilles Deleuze’s model of the time-image to describe an apprehensible historicity in the film’s dual ending.
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Szczepaniak-Gillece, Jocelyn. The Optical Vacuum. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190689353.001.0001.
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Between the 1920s and the 1960s, American mainstream cinematic architecture underwent a seismic shift. From the massive urban movie palace to the intimate streamlined theater, movie theaters became “neutralized” spaces for calibrated, immersive watching. Leading this charge was New York architect Benjamin Schlanger, a fiery polemicist whose designs and essays reshaped how movies were watched. This book examines the impact of Schlanger’s work in the context of changing patterns of spectatorship; his theaters and writing propose that the essence of film viewing lies not only in the text, but in the spaces where movies are shown. As such, this study insists that changing models of cinephilia are determined by physical structure: from the decorations of the palace to the black box of the contemporary auditorium, variations in movie theater design are icons for how twentieth-century viewing has similarly transformed. And by looking backward into cinema’s architectural history, 1970s screen theory becomes clearer as a historical in addition to a theoretical model; the emergence of the apparatus can be found in the immersive powers of the neutralized movie theater. In this book, exhibition practice takes its place as a force that propels spectatorship through time. Ultimately, space and viewing are revealed to be intertwined and mutually constitutive phenomena through which spectatorship’s discourses are all the more clearly seen.
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Verevis, Constantine. Remakes, Sequels, Prequels. Edited by Thomas Leitch. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199331000.013.15.
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Film remakes, sequels, and prequels are often understood as forms of adaptation: that is, modes of cinematic remaking characterized by strategies of repetition, variation, and expansion. This essay seeks to examine the circumstances in which these modes of serialization have been taken up in the first decades of the new millennium. It analyzes the practice, aesthetics, and politics of cinematic remaking to build an inventory of contexts, descriptions, and knowledges that contribute to the cultural and economic currency of serial forms. Specifically, the essay interrogates a new millennial context that has mobilized a set of discourses around intermediality, transnationalism, and a logic of convergence to determine how these factors have been worked in and through the concepts of adaptation and remaking.
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Halle, Randall. The Film Apparatus. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252038457.003.0002.
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This chapter illustrates how the discussion of cinematic apparatus was international and in many instances foundational for the establishment of film studies as a discipline. Apparatus offered a means to consider precisely the study of film as more than formal analysis of the projected image; it sought to arrive at a more comprehensive discussion of cinema. The production of the image was understood not simply as an industrial tale, but as a matter of signification, social relations, modes of production, methods of projection, space of reception, and subjective effects on spectators. In the 1960s, the discourse on the apparatus was connected to the quest for revolutionary forms. By the 1980s, the debates regarding apparatus theory became bogged down by considerations of ideology and an overwhelming focus on psychoanalytic models.
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Boon, Timothy. Medical Film and Television: An Alternative Path to the Cultures of Biomedicine. Edited by Mark Jackson. Oxford University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199546497.013.0034.
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This article is concerned with the triangular territory between biomedicine, relevant moving image media production, and lay people — sometimes cinematic subjects, sometimes patients, and sometimes audiences. The examples quoted — mainly British — arise from the period stretching from the late nineteenth century up to the 1960s. The significant costs and effort involved in producing medical films and programmes make their existence in certain times and places particularly interesting evidence for the terrain of biomedicine in the past. The three modes of medical film and television are discussed and they stand for different aspects of biomedicine. This article provides an understanding of how biomedicine came to be made and used and gives access to the politics and social attitudes of participants in interesting ways. The coverage of each mode of film-making is concentrated in the decade of its emergence.
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Williams, Keith. James Joyce and Cinematicity. Edinburgh University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474402484.001.0001.
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This book investigates how the cinematic tendency of Joyce’s writing developed from popular media predating film. It explores Victorian culture’s emergent 'cinematicity' as a key creative driver of Joyce’s experimental fiction, showing how his style and themes share the cinematograph’s roots in Victorian optical entertainment and science. The book’s scope reveals and elucidates Joyce's references to optical toys, shadowgraphs, magic lanterns, panoramas, photographic analysis and film peepshows; while abundant close analysis shows how his techniques elaborated and critiqued their effects on modernity’s ‘media-cultural imaginary’, making Joyce’s writing appear in advance of the narrative forms of early film itself. The introduction historicises the visual culture during Joyce’s youth, as well as optical science, Dublin’s first screenings and the context of his Volta Cinematograph. Chapter 1 focuses on the key role of magic lantern themes and techniques in Dubliners’ breakthrough into Modernist style and form. Chapter 2 how experiments in photographic analysis and reanimation of movement furnished a model for Joyce’s representation of the dynamic development of consciousness through the three versions of A Portrait of the Artist. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Joyce created a literary equivalent to the moving panorama in Ulysses, providing an influential template for immersive representations of the city in both Modernist fiction and film. Finally, a Coda qualifies ‘radiophonic’ readings of Finnegans Wake arguing instead that it extends Joyce’s interest in the history and future of cinematicity, through ‘verbal dissolves’ and engaging with the emergent medium of television.
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Doane, Mary Ann. Bigger Than Life. Duke University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/9781478021780.
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In Bigger Than Life Mary Ann Doane examines how the scalar operations of cinema, especially those of the close-up, disturb and reconfigure the spectator's sense of place, space, and orientation. Doane traces the history of scalar transformations from early cinema to the contemporary use of digital technology. In the early years of cinema, audiences regarded the monumental close-up, particularly of the face, as grotesque and often horrifying, even as it sought to expose a character's interiority through its magnification of detail and expression. Today, large-scale technologies such as IMAX and surround sound strive to dissolve the cinematic frame and invade the spectator's space, “immersing” them in image and sound. The notion of immersion, Doane contends, is symptomatic of a crisis of location in technologically mediated space and a reconceptualization of position, scale, and distance. In this way, cinematic scale and its modes of spatialization and despatialization have shaped the modern subject, interpolating them into the incessant expansion of commodification.
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Stilwell, Robynn J. Audio-Visual Space in an Era of Technological Convergence. Edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199733866.013.0004.
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This article appears in theOxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aestheticsedited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. While the commercial and sociological aspects of technological convergence have been discussed among scholars, producers, and consumers, this chapter explores the aesthetics of convergence and how the technological/historical/aesthetic conventions of distinctly different media can be used as “meta” gestures. Two multimedia products focusing on the same complex topic-climate change-are used to illustrate how audiovisual space is configured differently in “theatrical” and “cinematic” modes and how those spaces can create a higher level rhythm and texture. The film documentaryAn Inconvenient Truthalternates rhetorical theatrical and affective cinematic spaces. The three-part television seriesClimate Warsis markedly more complex and contrapuntal, “theatricalizing” the audience-screen relationship of cinema and deploying a dense, layered visual texture. The soundscape and visual field organize information from relatively straightforward, reinforcing “harmony"; to a counterpoint commenting on earlier documentaries; to streams of information that can overwhelm comprehension, creating affective “bursts” akin to musical stings.
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Baumgartner, Michael. Metafilm Music in Jean-Luc Godard's Cinema. Oxford University PressNew York, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190497156.001.0001.
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Abstract This monograph explores the underresearched use of music in Jean-Luc Godard’s films and video essays from the early 1960s to the late 1990s. While Godard is largely hailed as a leading innovator of visual montage, unique storytelling style, and groundbreaking cinematography, his achievements as a leading pioneer in sculpting complex soundtracks altering the familiar relationship between sound and image have been mainly overlooked. On these soundtracks, music assumes the unique role of metafilm music. Metafilm music self-consciously refers to its own role as film music and disrupts the primary function of film music as an essential filmic device creating cinematic illusion. The concept of metafilm music describes how Godard thinks with film music about film music. Metafilm music manifests itself in Godard’s work in four distinct manners: as fragmentized musical cues; as the same fragment verbatim repeated several times; as extrapolated, short excerpts from classical or popular music; and as music making as a model for filmmaking. With a detailed analysis of these parameters, the book explores fragmented and repeated music as Godard’s critique of the leitmotif technique. Godard further self-reflexively investigates genre-specific music in musical comedies, films noir, and melodramas, as well as prototypical film music as arguably its own musical genre. His last foray into metafilm music entails music making as a metaphor for filmmaking. By thinking with music about the function of film music, Godard has created throughout his career multilayered soundtracks that challenge the conventional norms of film music and sound.
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Cook, Pam. No Fixed Address. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252036613.003.0002.
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This chapter draws on post-structural conceptions of the mutability of gendered and sexualized identities in order to question cinematic identification with one's gendered like, an assumption underpinning categorization of genres by gender. Speculating that we go to the cinema to lose rather than confirm identities, it opens a conceptual space for male masochism and female violence, thus challenging a dominant binary in feminist thinking. In questioning the gendering of genres, the chapter notes shared structures and affects between the western and women's picture, normally posed in antithetical terms. Arguably, such similarities can be traced to their common foundation in melodrama conceived as a mode underpinning Hollywood's genre system.
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Birtwistle, Andy. Meaning and Musicality. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190469894.003.0009.
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The chapter critically reappraises the work of the British experimental filmmaker John Smith, drawing on analyses of key films and interview material to explore his use of sound, music and voice. Smith’s films often engage self-reflexively with how sound creates or accepts meaning within an audiovisual context. Influenced by structural film practice of the 1960s and 1970s, and underpinned by a Brechtian concern with the politics of representation, Smith’s often humorous work both foregrounds and deconstructs the sound-image relations at work in dominant modes of cinematic representation. This analysis of Smith’s work identifies the political dynamic of the filmmaker’s use of sound, and addresses what is at stake—for both Smith and his audience—in the self-reflexive concern with audiovisual modes of representation. Examined within this context are Smith’s creative focus on the production of meaning and how this relates to aspects of musicality and abstraction in his work.
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Potter, Susan. Queer Timing. University of Illinois Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252042461.001.0001.
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This book is a counter-history of the emergence of lesbian sexuality in early cinema. Drawing on the critical insights of queer theory and the history of sexuality, it challenges approaches to lesbian representation, initially by reframing the emergence of lesbian figures in cinema in the late 1920s and early 1930s as only the most visible and belated signs of an array of strategies of sexuality. The emergence of lesbian representation and spectatorship in early cinema is not a linear progression and consolidation but rather arises across multiple sites in dispersed forms that are modern and backward-looking, recursive and anachronistic. In this tumultuous period, new but not always coherent sexual knowledges and categories emerge, even as older modalities of homoeroticism persist. The book articulates some of the discursive and institutional processes by which women’s same-sex desires and identities have been reorganized as impossible, marginal or—perhaps not so surprisingly—central to new forms of cinematic representation and spectatorship. Complicating the critical consensus of feminist film theory and history, the book foregrounds the centrality of women’s same-sex desire to historically distinct cinematic discourses of both homo- and heterosexuality. It articulates across its chapters the emergence of lesbian sexuality—and that of its intimate “other,” heterosexuality—as the effect of diverse discursive operations of early cinema, considered as a complex assemblage of film texts, exhibition practices, modes of female spectatorship, and reception.
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Herman, David. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190850401.003.0001.
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Emphasizing the power of narrative to reframe the cultural models or ontologies that undergird hierarchical understandings of humans’ place in the larger biotic communities of which they are members, the introduction acknowledges that narrative can at the same time be used to shore up, reproduce, and even amplify human-centric understandings of animals and cross-species relationships. After situating the book’s approach more fully within the broader context of contemporary narrative studies as well as human-animal studies (and related fields), the introduction then uses a case study in storytelling across media—more specifically, a comparison of Julia Leigh’s 1999 novel The Hunter and its 2011 cinematic adaptation by director Daniel Nettheim—to provide a sketch of the concerns to be explored in each chapter and also a brief demonstration of the analytic methods that will be used to engage with those concerns.
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Nieland, Justus. Wrapped in Plastic. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252036934.003.0001.
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This chapter presents a commentary on David Lynch's film career. It focuses on how plastic is the prime matter of his filmmaking, essential to his understanding of cinema. It takes up plasticity's capacity for infinite transformation as an architectural and design dynamic, a feature of mise-enscène, and a mode of fashioning and psychologizing cinematic space. It then explores the emotional registers of plasticity, attempting to explain a key affective paradox in Lynch's work: the way it seems both so manifestly insincere and so emotionally powerful, so impersonal and so intense. Finally, it considers Lynch's persistent tendency to think of forms of media and forms of life as related species. Here, plastic is useful for conceptualizing his picture of the human organism as malleable and heterogeneous. The films examined in this chapter include Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), and Lost Highway (1997).
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Wyke, Maria. The Pleasures and Punishments of Roman Error. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198803034.003.0011.
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Early cinema, this chapter argues, struggled to balance the competing claims of moral purpose and entertainment where the legacy of Roman error was concerned. At the same time, cinema also sought to redefine and outperform other modes of classical reception (such as theatre, opera, painting, and the novel). Through a close examination of the French film Héliogabale, ou l’orgie romaine (Elagabalus, or the Roman Orgy), this chapter reveals how this dynamic plays out in the case of the boy-ruler viewed by tradition as the worst of Roman emperors. While the film’s concluding punishment of the emperor by a virile praetorian guard evokes contemporary French discourses of regeneration out of national decline, The Roman Orgy also displays an internal conflict in lingering pleasurably over Elagabalus’s transgressions. In this, its central character becomes device for cinematic mise-en-abyme, a technique that reflects the broader cultural debate over cinema in France.
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Uva, Christian. Sergio Leone. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190942687.001.0001.
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Spectacle, myth, fable. These are the main categories that have traditionally defined Sergio Leone’s cinematic production, but it is necessary to underline how much they are fueled by a profound, layered political interest. Leone’s cinema bears witness to a critical outlook both on the subjects it showcases and on its representational means. Far from any militancy and escaping ideological classifications, Leone’s perspective is problematic and unreconciled: it is grounded in the coexistence of different elements in a state of perennial productive tension and instability. The adjective “political” takes on a deeper meaning when it is used to denote the director’s ability to narrate and interpret key aspects of Italian national identity and history. The abstract quality of his production relies on an original use of different genres, particularly sword-and-sandal and the Spaghetti Western, which allowed Leone to insert frequent symbolic references to both history and then-current events. On the stylistic level, his constant disobedience to classical models and his need to revolutionize forms were motivated by an authorial desire to make films politically, though still within a conception of cinema as an industrial spectacle.
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Whitesell, Lloyd. Wonderful Design. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190843816.001.0001.
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Glamour is an elusive aspect of cinematic style. This book critically examines previous scholarship on glamour; defines the concept as a compound of artifice, allure, and magic; and examines the phenomenon at work in the genre of the film musical. The focus is on the role of music in representing glamour, and the stylistic and semiotic conventions by which glamour is embodied in sound. The book develops an analytical framework that applies across media, the better to appreciate music’s collaborative role within multimedia spectacle. First, glamour is situated as one of a handful of “style modes” orienting stylistic treatment in musical numbers. Second, glamour is shown to blend four distinct aesthetic parameters: sensuousness, restraint, elevation, and sophistication. Instead of being interpreted in relation to film narrative, the musical number is treated as a semiautonomous locus of meaning and expression, with its own formal demands and the power to eclipse narrative logic. Dozens of musical numbers are analyzed, drawn from more than eighty films, exploring glamour from the perspectives of arranging and orchestrational technique, the fantasies awoken in the spectator, and the invocation of magical belief. Anticonsumerist critiques of glamour are evaluated alongside counterarguments upholding glamour’s transformative and sustaining potential. Concluding discussion shows how the musical genre has affinities with the hybrid aesthetic of “magical realism.”
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Moore, Robbie. Hotel Modernity. Edinburgh University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456654.001.0001.
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Hotel Modernity explores the impact of corporate space on the construction and texture of modern literature and film. It centres the hotel and corporate space as key sites of modern experience and culture. Examining architectural and financial records, hotel trade journals, travel journalism, advertisements and cinematic and literary representations, it charts the rise of hotel culture from 1870 to 1939. The book defines corporate space as the new urban, capital-intensive, large-scale spaces brought about by corporations during the nineteenth century, including department stores, railway stations and banking halls. Only in hotels, however, did the individual live within corporate space: sleeping in its beds and lounging in its parlours. The hotel structured intimate encounters with the impersonal and the anonymous, representing a radically new mode of experience. In chapters featuring readings of both canonical and relatively little-studied texts by Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Bowen, Arnold Bennett, and Henry Green, alongside films by F. W. Murnau, Segundo de Chomón, and Charlie Chaplin, Hotel Modernity considers the relationship between new kinds of spatial organisation and new forms of subjective and intersubjective life. Hotels provoked these writers and filmmakers to rethink the conventions and functions of fictional characters. This book charts the warping and decentring of the category of ‘character’ within the corporate, architectural, informatic and technological networks which come to define hotel space in this period.
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Meis, Morgan, and J. M. Tyree. Wonder, Horror, Mystery: Letters on Cinema and Religion in Malick, Von Trier, and Kieślowski. punctum books, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.53288/0359.1.00.
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Wonder, Horror, Mystery is a dialogue between two friends, both notable arts critics, that takes the form of a series of letters about movies and religion. One of the friends, J.M. Tyree, is a film critic, creative writer, and agnostic, while the other, Morgan Meis, is a philosophy PhD, art critic, and practicing Catholic. The question of cinema is raised here in a spirit of friendly friction that binds the personal with the critical and the spiritual. What is film? What’s it for? What does it do? Why do we so intensely love or hate films that dare to broach the subjects of the divine and the diabolical? These questions stimulate further thoughts about life, meaning, philosophy, absurdity, friendship, tragedy, humor, death, and God. The letters focus on three filmmakers who challenged secular assumptions in the late 20th century and early 21st century through various modes of cinematic re-enchantment: Terrence Malick, Lars von Trier, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. The book works backwards in time, giving intensive analysis to Malick’s To The Wonder (2012), Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), and Kieślowski’s Dekalog (1988), respectively, in each of the book’s three sections. Meis and Tyree discuss the filmmakers and films as well as related ideas about philosophy, theology, and film theory in an accessible but illuminating way. The discussion ranges from the shamelessly intellectual to the embarrassingly personal. Spoiler alert: No conclusions are reached either about God or the movies. Nonetheless, it is a fun ride.
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Daniel, Rob. Cape Fear. Liverpool University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781800857018.001.0001.
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Can a film made in one genre be better understood by viewing it as another? This book investigates this question in relation to Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Cape Fear. Scorsese approached the film as a thriller, but Cape Fear is thematically and formally more coherent when viewed as a horror film. Across an introduction and five chapters, this book explores why this is the case. How Scorsese’s Catholicism and passion for horror has informed artistic decisions throughout his career, and the ways in which it reached an apex when he directed Cape Fear. The ways in which conventions of Gothic literature and fairy tales influenced this richly metatextual film, plus the impact of historical trends in horror cinema. How Robert De Niro’s research into antagonist Max Cady created a character who is closer to cinematic bogeymen rather than the more earthbound villains expected in thrillers. Film theory models around genre are utilised, along with interviews with key personnel on the film. Including a primary source interview with screenwriter Wesley Strick, who relates his experiences. Scorsese’s hyper-stylised directorial technique in Cape Fear is analysed for the ways in which it works to creates sensations typically associated with horror cinema, and the film’s legacy is also reviewed. Sexual politics and the controversy that surrounded Cape Fear’s depiction of sexual threat is also analysed, within the context of Scorsese’s depiction of women and accusations of misogyny that have been levelled against him during his career.
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Chang, Jing Jing. Screening Communities. Hong Kong University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888455768.001.0001.
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Screening Communities uses multi-media archival sources, including government archives, memoirs, fan magazines, newspaper reports, and films to narrate the complexity of social change and political turmoil, both screened and lived, in postwar Hong Kong. In particular, Screening Communities explores the political, ideological, and cultural work of Hong Kong film culture and its role in the building of a postwar Hong Kong community during the 1950s and 1960s, which was as much defined by lived experiences as by a cinematic construction, forged through negotiations between narratives of empire, nation, and the Cold War in and beyond Hong Kong. As such, in order to appreciate the complex formation of colonial Hong Kong society, Screening Communities situates the analysis of the “poetics” of postwar Hong Kong film culture within the larger global processes of colonialism, nationalism, industrialization, and Cold War. It argues that postwar Hong Kong cinema is a three-pronged process of “screening community” that takes into account the factors of colonial governance, filmic expression of left-leaning Cantonese filmmakers, and the social makeup of audiences as discursive agents. Through a close study of genre conventions, characterization, and modes of filmic narration across select Cantonese films and government documentaries, I contend that 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong cinema, broadly construed, became a site par excellence for the construction and translation (on the ground and onscreen) of a postwar Hong Kong community, whose context was continually shifting—at once indigenous and hybrid, postcolonial and global.
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LaRocca, David, ed. Metacinema. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190095345.001.0001.
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When a work of art shows an interest in its own status as a work of art—either by reference to itself or to other works—we have become accustomed to calling this move “meta.” While scholars and critics have, for decades, referred to reflexivity in films, it is only here, for the first time, that a group of leading and emerging film theorists joins to directly and systematically address with clarity and rigor the meanings and implications of the meta for cinema. In ten new essays and a selection of vital canonical works, contributors chart, explore, and advance the ways in which metacinema is at once a mode of filmmaking and a heuristic for studying cinematic attributes. What we have here, then, is not just an engagement with certain practices and concepts in widespread use in the movies (from Hollywood to global cinema, from documentary to the experimental and avant-garde), but also the development of a veritable and vital new genre of film studies. Since metacinema has become an increasingly prominent cultural phenomenon—a kind of art and logic familiar to everyday experience around the world—its abundance and pervasiveness draws our attention. With more and more films expressing reflexivity, recursion, reference to other films, mise en abîme, seriality, and exhibiting related intertextual traits, the time is overdue for the kind of capacious yet nuanced critical study now in hand.
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Kazemi, Farshid. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Liverpool University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781800859203.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night analyses the eponymous film within three theoretical coordinates: vampire cinema, psychoanalytic (film) theory and German Idealism. The book situates the film in the history of the vampire genre through the spectral vampire in early German expressionist cinema (Murnau’s Nosferatu, 1922) and theorizes it as part of a transnational movement in Iranian films that represents ‘the uncanny’ between the two modes of ‘the weird and the eerie,’ theorized by Mark Fisher. The film is situated in relation to the history of Iranian horror films, as well as the female vampire’s evocation of the figure of the Nightmare in Iranian myth-folklore, and the cinematic vampire’s relation to Islamicate occult sciences. The book provides an intervention in second-wave psychoanalytic film theory (Joan Copjec, Slavoj Žižek) through a Lacanian reading of the film that analyzes the female vampire as ‘the return of the repressed’ of feminine sexuality, and as the Lacanian (traumatic) Real in female sexuality for the Shi’ite clerical order in Iran. The romantic love story at the heart of the film is theorized through ideas of central figures in German Idealism, such as Hegel and Schelling. The book establishes a relation between the female vampire and the spectral vampire by linking German Idealism and its deployment of metaphors such as phantasmagoria in early magic lantern projections. The book’s central theoretical intervention is an enactment of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and Hegelian dialectics that brings out what is hidden on the surface of the film’s textual unconscious.