Academic literature on the topic 'Film; Cinema iconography'

The Western ‘discovery’ of Japanese cinema in the 1950s prompted scholars to articulate essentialist visions understanding its singularities as a result of its isolation from the rest of the world and its close links to local aesthetic and philosophical traditions. Recent approaches however, have evidenced the limitations of this paradigm of ‘national cinema’. Higson (1989) opened a critical discussion on the existing consumption, text and production-based approaches to this concept. This article draws on Higson´s contribution and calls into question traditional theorising of Japanese film as a national cinema. Contradictions are illustrated by assessing the other side of the ‘discovery’ of Japanese cinema: certain gendaigeki works that succeeded at the domestic box office while jidaigeki burst into European film festivals. The Taiyōzoku and subsequent Mukokuseki Action films created a new postwar iconography by adapting codes of representation from Hollywood youth and western films. This article does not attempt to deny the uniqueness of this film culture, but rather seeks to highlight the need to reformulate the paradigm of national cinema in the Japanese case, and illustrate the sense in which it was created from outside, failing to recognise its reach transnational intertextuality.

The heritage film is generally considered to be a less commercial form of film-making, one which eschews populism for ‘quality’. This article seeks to question the distinctions drawn between the heritage film and more commercial film franchises by examining the links between the conventions of heritage cinema and the Harry Potter films. Bringing together scholarship on the heritage film, the Harry Potter series and film genre, the article considers these productions in the light of their themes, with the political or class-centred aspects of the narrative examined in relation both to the visual display and to Andrew Higson's early critique of the heritage film. The article argues for different associations of heritage iconography in contemporary film-making from the initial criticisms of heritage cinema made by Higson. Details of the visual style of the Harry Potter films are also considered in relation to the allegedly typical characteristics of the heritage film. Ultimately, the article argues for the success of this film cycle being due to the incorporation of genre characteristics from both the heritage film and the fantasy genre and suggests that because of the increased prevalence of generic hybridity it is time that we began to reconceptualise the heritage film and its associated audiences.

Film representation of the Ainu people is as old as cinema but it has not remained stable over time. From the origins of cinema, Ainu people were an object of interest for Japanese and foreign explorers who portrayed them as an Other, savage and isolated from the modern world. The notion of “otherness” was slightly modified during wartime, as the Ainu were represented as Japanese subjects within the “imperial family”, and at the end of the fifties when entertainment cinema presented the Ainu according to the codes of the Hollywood Western on the one hand; and Mikio Naruse proposed a new portrayal focusing on the Ainu as a long-discriminated social collective rather than as an ethnic group, on the other. However, Tadayoshi Himeda’s series of seven documentaries following the Ainu leader Shigeru Kayano’s activities marked a significant shift in Ainu iconography. Himeda challenged both the postwar institutional discourse on the inexistence of minorities in Japan, and the touristic and ahistorical image that concealed the Ainu’s cultural assimilation to Japanese culture. The proposed films do not try to show an exotic people but a conventional people struggling to recover their collective past.

Abstract A historical drama that can be interpreted at the juncture of theoretical discourses (heritage film, auteur film), genres (historical film, western, road movie) and representational modes (connecting to, but subverting the master narrative of Romanian historical cinema), Radu Jude’s Aferim! (2015) has attracted the attention of the international public by the unique response that it gives to the tradition of representation of the (Romanian) historical past. Its unmatched character even within New Romanian Cinema can be attributed to the fact that it does not focus on tensions of the post-communist condition or their antecedents in the recent communist past; instead, it goes back in history to a much earlier period, to the Romanian ancien régime, after the Ottoman occupation and before the abolition of Gypsy slavery, only to point at the historical roots of current social problems. Through its ingenuous (inter)medial solutions (black-and-white film, with an implied media-archaeological purport; period mise en scène but with an assumed artificiality and constructedness; a simple linear plot infused with a dense dialogue in archaic Romanian, drawn from a multitude of literary and historical sources; a sweeping panorama of 19th-century Wallachian society presented in a succession of tableau compositions), Radu Jude’s ironical-critical collage defetishizes the traditional historical iconography and debunks the mythical national imaginary, unveiling the traumatic history of an ethnic and racial mix.1

The article summarises the results attained so far through research and expert processing of the photographs held in the iconography collections of the Bedřich Smetana Museum. It provides information about Růžena Maturová (1869–1938) including previously unpublished details about the period of her life after the end of her career as an opera singer at the National Theatre in Prague (1910–1938), concerning Maturová’s performing in silent film (1920–1922), her work in healthcare services (1914–1920), and her sociocultural activities in support of retired soloists from the National Theatre in Prague (at the Na Slovanech Cinema, 1920–1938). The subject matter of the study is a photo album titled R. Maturová. In many cases, comparisons of the photographs from this album with other available sources have enabled the recognition of persons not previously identified in portraits, more exact determination of dating and provenience, and the identification of photography studios.

Abstract This study examines journalistic, publicist, and critical discourse in relation to the popular genres in the Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s in Czechoslovak film and non-film periodical press. Of interest are mainly comprehensive texts that analyse Italian popular genres as a genre system and a specific corpus of films that belong to the same genre. Czech and Slovak translations of foreign studies and texts (with the exception of some examples), interviews with Italian filmmakers, short glosses, or informative texts are beyond the scope of this research. This study reflects critical, journalistic, and publicist interpretations and views by Czechoslovak press of popular genres in national Italian cinema in the selected historical period. Research is divided into two parts that develop specific aspects of these analytic questions. The first part analyses texts about this subject matter in various film a and non-film periodicals, including newspapers and journals with emphasis on long studies and interpretations of a few categories of popular genres viewed in the extensive context of their national, socio-cultural, iconographic, and industrial aspects. The second part deals only with the popular genre of western all’italiana (western in Italian style), which represented an international cinematic and socio-cultural phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s and was of the greatest interest to Czechoslovak critics, journalists, and publicists in relation to popular genres of Italian cinema in general.

The article deals with the relationship between film and painting, as well as the sciences (physics, cosmology) of the 20th century. It introduces the historical context important for the time when Kubrick’s film was made, and addresses the issue of abstraction in cinema, contemporary painting and cosmology, confronting artistic and scientific ideas (the models of the Universe). The starting point for the detailed analysis was “autonomous abstract film” (Alicja Helman), which as a film inside a film combines various cinematic types and genres. The analysis of takes and sequences of this film inside a film made it possible to decipher the director’s idea, which is expressed in intra-film references. The particular results of the research were compared with the possible iconographic context (Gerhard Richter). The inclusion of a diagnosis obtained on the basis of materials examined in the Kubrick Archives in London (Kamil Kościelski), and references to cultural tradition (Plato), supplement the aforementioned considerations in an important way.

AbstractThe representation of other arts in cinema can be regarded as a different semiotic system revealing what is hidden in the narrative, as a site of cultural meanings inherent to the cinematic apparatus addressing a pensive spectator, or a discourse on cinema born in the space of intermediality. In the post-1989 films of Romanian director Lucian Pintilie, painterly and sculptural references, as well as miniatures become figurations of cultural identity inside allegories about a society torn between East and West. I argue that art references are liberating these films from provincialism by transforming them into a discourse lamenting over the loss of Western, Christian and local values, endangered or forgotten in the post-communist era. In the films under analysis – An Unforgettable Summer (1994), Too Late (1996) and Tertium Non Datur (2006) – images reminding of Byzantine iconography, together with direct references and remediations of sculptures by Romanian-born Constantin Brâncuşi, participate in historico-political allegories as expressions of social crisis and the transient nature of values. They also reveal the tension between an external and internal image of Romania, the aspiration of the “other Europe” to connect with the European cultural tradition, in a complex demonstration of a “self-othering” process. I will also argue that, contrary to the existing criticism, this generalizing, allegorical tendency can also be detected in some of the films of the generation of filmmakers representing the New Romanian Cinema, for example in Radu Jude’s Aferim! (2015).1

FQ columnist Rebecca Wanzo examines the new genre of “gentrification” films and documentaries that has emerged during the first two decades of the 21st century. Gentrification documentaries, such as Laura Poitras and Linda Goode Bryant’s Flag Wars (2003), tend to highlight not only displacement but the effects arising from class disparities that have become hypervisible with the proximity of new, affluent residents. In fictional films, however, gentrification has been a new iteration of what Paula Massood has characterized as “Black city cinema”—films in which migration and “visual and aural iconography” play a role in defining Black bodies in city spaces. Wanzo argues that the ephemerality and ambivalence arising from the displacement produced by gentrification is perhaps best exhibited by two recent fictional films: The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Joe Talbot, 2019) and Residue (Merawi Gerima, 2020). These elegiac works explore how gentrification eliminates spaces for Black men to inhabit.

The article advocates the importance of studying conceptual meaning and change in modern mass media and highlights the significance of conceptual intermediality. The article first analyzes anger in Hindi cinema as an audiovisual key concept within the framework of an Indian national ideology. It explores how anger and the Indian angry young man became popularized, politicized, and stereotyped by popular films and print media in India in the 1970s and 1980s. The article goes on to advocate for extending conceptual history beyond language on theoretical grounds and identifies two major obstacles in political iconography: the methodological subordination of visuals to language in the negotiation of meaning, and the distinction of emotion and reason by assigning them functionally to different sign systems.

Comment appréhender, au tournant des années 1970 et dans des films réalisés par des cinéastes ne faisant pas mystère de leur engagement marxiste, communiste ou révolutionnaire (Pasolini, Arrabal, Fassbinder, Jancsó, Garrel, etc.), la récurrence de motifs et de schèmes empruntés à l’iconographie et à la liturgie chrétiennes ?« L’article des lucioles », publié par Pasolini en 1975, offre la matrice allégorique et théorique permettant d’appréhender la séquence historico-politique singulière qui va de la fin des années 50 au milieu des années 70. Il désigne d’abord l’avènement d’un dangereux pouvoir néo-capitaliste, destructeur et totalisant, face auquel marxisme et christianisme vont être amenés à modifier leurs outils de lutte et de vision du monde. Il décrit ensuite une véritable crise anthropologique qui solde la destruction de mondes culturels entiers, face à laquelle il s’agira de rendre aux rites et aux traditions leur potentiel contestataire, qui leur permet de jouer comme les opérateurs capables de mobiliser les énergies manquantes aux luttes politiques, comme la mémoire ou la communion. En tant qu’élégie pleurant la disparition de cultures aimées, il présente enfin un véritable constat eschatologique sur la fin du monde, problématique théologique ré-exposée, à cette même époque, par la menace nucléaire, paroxysme industriel de la domination du règne de la technique.Ainsi, les lucioles pasoliniennes dessinent-elles le régime iconologique singulier dont procèdent ces films résistants, qui oppose la faible lueur d’une gestualité archaïque, fût-elle religieuse, aux puissants projecteurs rationalistes de la civilisation capitaliste. Les problèmes d’images repérés dans ces œuvres filmiques procèdent donc d’un paradigme historico-esthétique qui fait du passé survivant l’outil privilégié d’une prise de position politique, dont il est possible de tracer l’archéologie, depuis les notions de Nachleben, de Pathosformel et d’Inversion forgées par l’historien de l’art Aby Warburg jusqu’à celle d’« image dialectique » chez Walter Benjamin ; et dont il est possible de retrouver les traces à l’époque, dans des disciplines très variées (la théologie politique de Johann Baptist Metz, qui a fait de la memoria passionis chrétienne une catégorie anti- bourgeoise ; ou encore l’ethnologie du geste élaborée par l’anthropologue Ernesto De Martino, qui devait ouvrir le marxisme à son impensé : l’essentielle dimension réparatrice et socio-culturelle des rites et des images d’origine religieuse).Au confluent de ces deux grandes traditions de l’espérance que sont le christianisme et le communisme, les films analysés dans cette étude mettent en crise le paradigme contemporain de la sécularisation et nous renseignent sur la relance, à l’époque moderne, des grands problèmes anthropologiques qui n’ont cessé d’occuper la pensée humaine : la contestation d’un ordre établi, la fin d’un monde ou d’une civilisation, mais aussi l’énergie morale qui permet de les faire survivre
How to grasp, at the turn of the 1970s and in films made by filmmakers who made no secret of their Marxist, Communist or revolutionary commitment (Pasolini, Arrabal, Fassbinder, Jancsó, Garrel, etc.), the recurrence of patterns and schemes borrowed from Christian iconography and liturgy?The article about « the disappearance of the fireflies », published by Pasolini in 1975, offers the allegorical and theoretical matrix permitting to apprehend the singular historical and political sequence which goes from the end of the 50s to the middle of the 70s. First, it designates the advent of a dangerous neo-capitalist power, destructive and totalizing, in the face of which Marxism and Christianity will be led to modify their tools of struggle and vision. The article, then, describes a real anthropological crisis which attains the destruction of entire cultural worlds, in the face of which it will be a question of giving back to rites and traditions their potential for revolt, which allows them to play as operators capable of mobilizing the energies lacking in the political struggles, such as memory or communion. As an elegy mourning the disappearance of beloved cultures, the article finally presents a real eschatological report on the end of the world, a theological problematic re-exposed, at the same time, by the nuclear threat, the industrial paroxysm of the domination of the technical reign.Thus, the Pasolinian fireflies draw the singular iconological regime from which these resistant films proceed, opposing the faint gleam of an archaic gesture, albeit religious, to the powerful rationalist spotlights of capitalist civilization. The patterns identified in these films therefore proceed from a historical-aesthetic paradigm which makes the surviving past the privileged tool of a political struggle, of which it is possible to trace the archeology, from the notions of Nachleben, Pathosformel and Inversion forged by the german art historian Aby Warburg to the “dialectical image” in Walter Benjamin; and of which it is possible to find traces at the time, in a wide variety of disciplines (the political theology of Johann Baptist Metz, who made Christian memoria passionis an anti-bourgeois category; or the ethnology of gesture elaborated by the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino, who was to open Marxism to its unthought: the essential restorative and socio-cultural dimension of rites and images of religious origin).At the confluence of these two great traditions of hope that are Christianity and Communism, the films analyzed in this study challenge the contemporary paradigm of secularization and inform us about the revival, in modern times, of the great anthropological problems which have never ceased to occupy human thought: the contestation of an established order, the end of a world or a civilization, but also the moral energies which allows them to survive

Cette thèse de doctorat se consacre à l’analyse de périodiques créés au cours du XXe siècle par des cinéastes et des plasticiens à l’œuvre dans le champ des avant-gardes et du cinéma expérimental. Les revues forment des objets plastiques et spéculatifs, complexes et composites de par les relations qui se nouent entre le texte et l’image, les montages qui se créent et le défi que constitue la transposition des images filmiques. En quoi ces revues d’artistes témoignent-elles d’une recherche expérimentale ? Comment les revues d’artistes participent-elles à une histoire critique et plastique des formes cinématographiques ? L’étude tente de comprendre les manières originales dont les cinéastes et les plasticiens se saisissent des revues afin d’élaborer, défendre, documenter, objectiver et analyser certains paradigmes cinématographiques. À quels titres les revues deviennent elles-mêmes des propositions expérimentales, des laboratoires de recherche sur les liens entre l’image et le texte ? Nous observerons comment, grâce à leurs propositions techniques, graphiques et visuelles propres, les revues exposent certains enjeux matériels, poétiques, plastiques et théoriques propres à l’image cinématographique, comment elles questionnent le regard. Les revues offrent des plateformes de diffusion et de dissémination esthétiques, servent à ouvrir des réseaux de circulation pour les idées, singulières ou collectives, des rédacteurs en chef. Comment accompagnent-elles leurs efforts dans la construction d’un milieu cinématographique alternatif ? Les revues Dada I de Tristan Tzara et Hans Arp (1916), Dada Sinn der Welt de John Heartfield et George Grosz (1921), Le Promenoir de Jean Epstein, Pierre Deval et Jean Lacroix (1921-1922), G. für elementare Geschaltung de Hans Richter (1923-1926), Close Up du groupe Pool composé de Kenneth Macpherson, Bryher et H.D. (1927-1933), Film Culture de Jonas Mekas (1955-1996) et Cantrill’s Filmnotes d’Arthur et Corinne Cantrill (1971-2000) forment le corpus de cette thèse qui vise à contribuer à une histoire plastique des publications expérimentales
This PhD thesis focuses on analyzing periodicals created during the XXth Century by both visual artists and filmmakers operating in the realm of avantgardes and experimental cinema. The journals become plastic, conceptual, complex, and composite objects because of the interplay between text and image as well as the reproduction of images and realization of photomontages. How these artists’ journals show signs of an experimental approach ? How do artists’ journals contribute to the critical and plastic history of film ? The dissertation aims to understand the unique ways the visual artists and filmmakers make use of the journals to create, defend, document, visualize and analyze some cinematic paradigms. To what extent the journals become in turn experimental works about the relationships between text and image ? We will study how magazines exhibit various plastic, aesthetical, theoretical, and poetical dimensions at stake in the cinematic image, relying on specific technical, graphic and visual undertakings, and how they call into question the perception. Journals become instrumentalized in ensuring the movement of the editors’ ideas, either collective or indivuals. How do journals support the editors’ efforts in building an alternative cinema domain ? Dada I edited by Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp (1916), Dada Sinn der Welt by John Heartfield and George Grosz (1921), Le Promenoir by Jean Epstein, Pierre Deval and Jean Lacroix (1921-1922), G. für elementare Geschaltung by Hans Richter (1923-1926), Close Up by Kenneth Macpherson, Bryher and H.D. (1927-1933), Film Culture by Jonas Mekas (1955-1996) and Cantrill’s Filmnotes by Arthur et Corinne Cantrill (1971-2000) form the corpus of this PhD thesis, which aims to contribute to a plastic history of experimental publications

The color films of French film director Robert Bresson (1901-99) have largely been neglected, despite the fact that Bresson himself considered them to be more fully realized reflections of his aspirations for the cinema. This study presents a revised and revitalized Bresson, comparing his late style to painterly innovations in color, light, and iconography from the Middle Ages to the present, to abstract painting in France after World War II, and to affinities with the avant-garde movements of Surrealism, Constructivism, and Minimalism. Drawing on media archeology, this study views Bresson's work through such allied visual arts practices as painting, photography, sculpture, theater, and dance.

This article appears in theOxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aestheticsedited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. During the 1980s and 1990s, China experienced an explosion of films for youth, imbued with the aesthetic and ethic of rock ‘n’ roll. This chapter examines a variety of films, from the countercultural to the more mainstream, focusing on the voice, image, persona, and iconography of Cui Jian, and offering an audiovisual perspective on urban youth cinema and Chinese rock. The emergence and development of Chinese rock ‘n’ roll film from the late 1980s to the twenty-first century resulted from widespread, multifaceted transformations in postsocialist China. At the core of this rock imaginary is the aesthetic of cinema vérité and postsocialist realism. In sync with the kaleidoscopic manifestation of the cityscape and long tracking shots of protagonists roaming the metropolis, rock music and the hand-held mobile camera seek to document a reality of postmodern life and capture a feeling of postsocialist anxiety-a concern for realism articulated through dialogue and ambient sound.

The cultural imaginary of kung-fu cinema has been codified as a physically balletic and graceful, if also violently bloody and brutal, genre defined in part by the persistent presence of deadly, thrusting hands. Of course, hands are also central to another type of cultural production, one that has often incorporated kung-fu action and iconography. This chapter assesses a broad range of motion pictures that showcase hands in thematically complex and symptomatically relevant ways, be they the severed anatomical remnants of long- departed souls sprung back to life in Witch from Nepal (1986) or the skeletal appendages that comically grab the protagonist’s crotch in Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980). This chapter strives to pin down the powerful forces that lay dormant within the genre, including its tendency to dredge up and display moments of excessive, otherwordly violence for which there is seemingly no “rational” explanation.

In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema delineates a new performative genre based on replay and self-awareness. The book argues that in-person reenactment, an actual person reenacting her past on camera, departs radically from other modes of mimetic reconstruction. In Person theorizes this figure’s protean temporality and revisionist capabilities, and it considers its import in terms of social representativity and exemplarity. Close readings of select, historicized examples define an alternate, confessional-performative vein to understand the self-reflexive nature of postwar and post-Holocaust testimonial cinemas. The book contextualizes Zavattini’s proposal that in neorealism everyone should act his own story in a sort of anti-individualist, public display (Love in the City and We the Women). It checks the convergence between verité experiments, a heightened self-critique in France, and the reception of psychodrama in France (Chronicle of a Summer and The Human Pyramid) in the late 1950s. And, through Bazin, it reflects on the quandaries of celebrity biopics: how the circularity of the star’s iconography is checked by her corporeal limits (Sophia: Her Own Story and the docudrama Torero!). In Person traces a shift from the exemplary and transformative ethos of 1950s reenactment toward the unredemptive stance of contemporary reenactment films such as Lanzmann’s Shoah, Zhang Yuan’s Sons, and Andrea Tonacci’s Hills of Chaos. It defines continuities between verité testimony (Chronicle and Moi un Noir) and later parajuridical films such as The Karski Report and Rithy Panh’s S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, suggesting the power of co-presence and in-person actualization for an ethics of viewership.

This article appears in theOxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aestheticsedited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. The most successful superheroes of modern cinema are Superman and Batman. This chapter considers the changes wrought by digital technology in their cinematic construction and the impact on their music. The relationship between action, heroic theme, and the iconography of the superhero demonstrates a significant shift in how thematic music is employed in the more recentBatmanandSupermanfilms. This chapter contrasts musical and visual construction of the title characters inSuperman(Richard Donner, 1978) andBatman(Tim Burton, 1989) with the treatment of the same characters inBatman Begins(Christopher Nolan, 2005) andSuperman Returns(Bryan Singer, 2006). The problem of superheroic action and the musical solutions that analog films employed to address the limitations on representing the superheroes’ abilities is then contrasted with the subsequent decoupling of heroic action and musical theme in the later films, in which digital technology allows more convincing presentation of superheroic powers.

This chapter describes how addressing the issue of poverty has been a continuous feature of Indian cinema. Mira Nair's award-winning directorial debut Salaam Bombay! (1988), depicting the lives of Bombay's impoverished street children, is one of the most moving Indian films of the 1980s. It was also one of the few Indian films to find an international, largely arthouse, audience while launching the career of diaspora film-maker Mira Nair, who resides in America. The chapter deals with Indian diaspora cinema and Mira Nair as a female director. It also examines the production history of the shoot; the iconography of the urban slum in Indian cinema; representations of family, poverty, and power in the city of Bombay; and the film's criticisms of the state.

Fashion is ubiquitous in the depiction of la Parisienne and demonstrates perhaps better than any other motif the variations within the type. These variations are reflected in the eclectic array of film genres in which a fashionable Parisienne appears. The association of la Parisienne with fashion can be traced back to the nineteenth century, when the image of the chic Parisienne was first exported, both throughout France and abroad, as an ambassador for French luxury goods and style. The relationship between la Parisienne and fashion is perpetuated in cinema primarily through the way the type is costumed, but also includes extra-cinematic considerations such as the actress/couturier relationship and the way a certain look, designed or self-styled, was achieved and marketed. Costume forms an integral part of the mise en scène in Parisienne films and has three primary functions: it denotes the elegance of the Parisienne, aids in periodising a film, and provides meaning beyond denotation by referencing a pre-existing iconography. The films examined in this chapter are: Jules Dassin’s Reunion in France, Stanley Donen’s Funny Face(1956), Vincente Minnelli’s Gigi, (1958), Roman Polanski’s Frantic (1988), François Ozon’s 8 femmes (2001) and Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle(1960).

This chapter examines the extreme cinema of Michael Haneke. Whilst increasingly well covered in scholarly accounts of extreme art cinema, Haneke’s work is most often approached from an aesthetic and thematic point of view, wherein the text becomes the focal point. While these studies are key to understanding Haneke’s films, and the metaphorical significance he places on scenes of brutalism and sex, it has left certain areas underexplored. This chapter addresses this by undertaking detailed paratextual analysis of Haneke’s key extreme films. Firstly, the chapter focuses upon Funny Games, the most critically disliked Haneke film. Looking first at Tartan Video’s release before discussing Artificial Eye’s remediation, the chapter highlights the important role time can play in defining the commercial validity of extremity. Showing how the growing status of Haneke’s auteur brand challenged the use extreme iconography, the chapter alludes to the ways highbrow commercial symbols compete with lowbrow traits. Thereafter, the chapter undertakes an assessment of Artificial Eye’s ‘Michael Haneke Trilogy’. This example – due the centralisation of a dead pig on the cover – exposes the way paratexts can oppose critical and cultural canonisation.

This chapter examines the cinematic representation of the railway station, examining the different ways in which the space and iconography of the station have been used in film to represent cultural integration, transformation and/or friction. The station is both physical space and symbol or metaphor for cultural encounter of all kinds: encounter engendered by travel and tourism, conflict and displacement, memory and identity. One of the very earliest moving pictures, the Lumière brothers’ Arrivée d’un train à la gare de La Ciotat (France, 1896), puts a station at its heart reminding us of the shared origins of both cinema and the modern station in the nineteenth century and presaging the countless filmic representations of the station which would ensue. Via close analysis of David Lean’s seminal ‘station’ film, Brief Encounter (1945) the chapter examines the reasons for this cinematic fascination with the railway station and examines this film’s particular representations of journeys, encounters and identities.

This chapter examines Pedro Almodóvar's mise-en-scène and cinematography. Almodóvar's mise-en-scène is rich with intertextual references, whether it be from high culture, through the pastiche of other films, or through the mise-en-scène and the symbolism of props and costume. Heavily used visual motifs, such as 'the Matador', occur frequently in Talk to Her (2002), perhaps in homage and parody of the traditional Spanish iconography encouraged under the Franco regime. Similarly, Almodóvar is renowned for drawing upon and being influenced by Hollywood directors of the 1950s, such as Alfred Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk, and one can see influences from both of these directors in the film through the performances, bright colour palettes, and themes. Like the melodrama films of the 1950s and like the cinema of Hitchcock, Almodóvar's unique and distinctive style is classified by a somewhat obsessive attention to mise-en-scène. This is most noticeable in the domestic settings. Almodóvar pays close attention to objects, colour, painting, and production design, much of which has deeper symbolism and meaning.

The conclusion offers the following provisional definition of la Parisienne: a type of which atypicality is the dominant feature; a type whose identity is continuously displaced or deferred, simultaneously reaching back to her earliest manifestations in the nineteenth century and forward to future manifestations which will both affirm and rework the iconography of the type. The further turn of the screw for the difficulty of defining la Parisienne as a type is that this difficulty is not in spite of her iconography but is in fact built into it. This apparent contradiction is accounted for within iconography itself as a methodology, the two aspects of which are stability and mutability. Since a type is only a type because of recognisable motifs, certain motifs must be established which have both universal, and particular or historical validity. One of the ways iconography may respond to its dual imperatives of stability and mutability is by constructing a cycle of films featuring a certain type, and the conclusion reveals that this book goes some way toward constructing what might be called a cycle of Parisienne films.

Laura Copier builds on Elizabeth Castelli, who characterises the discourse on martyrdom as highly ambivalent, yet persistent and powerful to this day and age, evaluating martyrdom as ‘an idea without a precise origin’ (Castelli, 2004, p. 35). Because it is both impossible and unproductive to pinpoint the exact historical moment in which martyrdom came into existence, Copier focuses, with Castelli, on the ongoing manifestations of martyrdom, in particular on the sustained investigation of contemporary, popular, and secular representations of martyrdom. The discourse of martyrdom is so powerful precisely because of its adaptability and, critically, the transformation of the object that it allows. It is not just the concept of martyrdom that is not fixed; it also causes related discourses to change. One of those discourses is Hollywood cinema, and its representations of gender and the body in female action heroes. Castelli’s ‘culture making’ dimensions of martyrdom that ‘depend upon repetition and dynamics of recognition’ are played out, as Copier shows, in the female character of Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) in the 2015 film Mad Max Fury Road. Through a close reading of the film’s genre, narrative, and iconography, Copier argues that the female action hero Furiosa is able to transcend and destabilise the equation of martyrdom with death.

This chapter assesses the portrayal of the cyborg in Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987). RoboCop was part of the cycle of 1980 films in which the cyborg was consolidated as a genuinely ambivalent iconographic motif of science-fiction cinema. In many ways, it is the complicated experience of emotion and memory that defines the ubiquity of the cyborg in science-fiction cinema. The chapter then considers the ‘transmigration’ theory of Robotics professor Hans Moravec, who helped pioneer the development of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). It also discusses religious, philosophical, and mythological dimensions, chiefly the potential of reading the film as an allegory of Christ. Whereas the Christ parable is nothing innovative to the way Hollywood heroism can be read, what makes RoboCop's Christian allegory markedly distinctive is that it takes places in the context of the science-fiction-cyborg-film sub-genre.

La Parisienne is frequently associated with prostitution, whether in the narrow sense of the streetwalker or courtesan or the general sense of the object and subject of consumption. Tracing her development in nineteenth-century art and literature, this chapter examines the way the Parisienne as courtesan is re-presented in cinema in Charles Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923), Alain Cavalier’s La Chamade (1968), and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001). Cinematic courtesans have their prefigurations in both real life courtesans of the Second Empire, as well as in representations in French art, literature, and visual culture (Manet, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Balzac, Zola, Dumas fils). Motifs associated with the Parisienne courtesan include the familiar tropes associated with Paris as a demimonde: desire, pleasure, and consumption. Alongside these tropes are the visual and narrative motifs on which the iconography of the Parisienne courtesan is based: fashion or style (often conceived to denote luxury and leisure), transformation (usually from provincial to high class), ambiguity (insofar as her class origins, motivations, and emotional allegiances are generally obscure), and the ménage à trois (films featuring Parisienne courtesans often involve the choice between an earnest but poor lover and a rich benefactor).

The introduction provides an overview of the origins of the Parisienne type in nineteenth-century French art and culture. It traces these origins to specific works of art and literature, including the novels of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and Dumas fils; the paintings of Renoir, James Tissot, Toulouse-Lautrec; and the numerous physiognomies written on the type. The origin of the term la Parisienne is examined and two key features of her mythology are identified: visibility and mobility. A provisional definition of la Parisienne as ‘a figure of French modernity’ and ‘more than just a female inhabitant of Paris’ is then offered. Both the technological (railways, printing press, fashion plates, photography) and cultural (art, literature, advertising, print media) developments in nineteenth-century France which provided the basis for the emergence of la Parisienne as a dominant cultural figure are then discussed. Also introduced here is the main theoretical approach of the book: iconography.The iconography of la Parisienne can be categorised according to the following concepts: visibility and mobility (both social and spatial); style and fashionability, including self-fashioning; artist and muse; cosmopolitanism; prostitution; danger; consumption (the consumer and the consumed); and transformation.