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1
Jung, Berenike. Narrating Violence in Post-9/11 Action Cinema: Terrorist Narratives, Cinematic Narration, and Referentiality. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften / GWV Fachverlage GmbH, Wiesbaden, 2010.
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2
Cinematic political thought: Narrating race, nation, and gender. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
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3
Shapiro, Michael J. Cinematic political thought: Narrating race, nation, and gender. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
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4
M, Wilson George. Narration in light: Studies in cinematic point of view. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
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5
Emison, Patricia. Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History. NL Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789463724036.
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Film, like the printed imagery inaugurated during the Renaissance, spread ideas – not least the idea of the power of visual art – across not only geographical and political divides but also strata of class and gender. Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History examines the early flourishing of film, from the 1920s to the mid-1960s, as partly reprising the introduction of mass media in the Renaissance, allowing for innovation that reflected an art free of the control of a patron though required to attract a broad public. Rivalry between word and image, between the demands of narrative and those of visual composition, spurred new ways of addressing the compelling nature of the visual. The twentieth century also saw the development of the discipline of art history; transfusions between cinematic practice and art historical postulates are part of the story told here.
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Cinematic narration and its psychological impact: Functions of cognition, emotion and play. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009.
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7
Hoegsberg, Simon. Suggested narratives: On Philip-Lorca diCorcia's cinematic style and how it influeneces our interpretation of his photography. London: LCP, 2002.
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8
Narrative and Narration: Analyzing Cinematic Storytelling. Columbia University Press, 2020.
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9
Lewis, Hannah. Source Music and Cinematic Realism. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190635978.003.0006.
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Chapter 5 focuses on the role of diegetic music in early poetic realist films. Poetic realism, the filmmaking genre that emerged out of the politics of the mid-1930s, had its roots in transition-era films by filmmakers such as Jean Grémillon, Julien Duvivier, Jacques Feyder, and perhaps most notably, Jean Renoir. The soundtracks of these filmmakers tended to favor a “realistic” incorporation of music into the narrative, an aesthetic decision grounded in a broader preference for direct recording, and frequently featured popular songs and street musicians to enhance the realism of a film’s setting. But diegetic music in early poetic realist films was multivalent, revealing the emotions or thoughts of characters, providing narrative commentary, and at times going against the expectations of a scene’s mood or actions. Considering diegetic music in early poetic realist sound films shows the ways in which audiovisual realism and stylization worked hand in hand.
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McGregor, Rafe. A Criminology Of Narrative Fiction. Policy Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/policypress/9781529208054.001.0001.
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This book answers the question of the usefulness of criminological fiction. Criminological fiction is fiction that can provide an explanation of the causes of crime or social harm and could, in consequence, contribute to the development of crime or social harm reduction policies. The book argues that criminological fiction can provide at least the following three types of criminological knowledge: (1) phenomenological, i.e. representing what certain experiences are like; (2) counterfactual, i.e. representing possible but non-existent situations; and (3) mimetic, i.e. representing everyday reality in detail and with accuracy. The book employs the phenomenological, counterfactual, and mimetic values of fiction to establish a theory of the criminological value of narrative fiction. It begins with a critical analysis of current work in narrative criminology and current criminological work on fiction. It then demonstrates the phenomenological, counterfactual, and mimetic values of narrative fiction using case studies from fictional novels, graphic novels, television series, and feature films. The argument concludes with an explanation of the relationship between the aetiological and pedagogic values of narrative fiction, focusing on cinematic fictions in virtue of the vast audiences they reach courtesy of their place in global popular culture.
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Cutting, James E. Movies on Our Minds. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197567777.001.0001.
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Why do we enjoy popular movies? This book explores perceptual, cognitive, and emotional reasons for our engagement. It considers effects of camera lenses and the layout of images. It outlines the types of transitions between shots, and it traces their historical functions and changes. It classifies different kinds of shots and the changes in them across a century. It explains the arcs of scenes and how they fit into the larger structure of sequences, and then it explores scene- and sequence-like units that have become increasingly prevalent in recent years. It then breaks movies into larger, roughly half-hour parts and provides psychological evidence for them. Finally, it explores the rhythms of whole movies, first observing the flow of physical changes—shot durations, luminance, motion, and clutter—as it has developed over time, and then how cinematic polyrhythms have come to match aspects of those in the human body. Overall, this book focuses on how the narration, the manner in which the story is told, has come to reinforce the structure of the narrative, the story proper. It uses several hundred popular movies released over a century and embeds its exploration in discussions of evolution, culture, and technological change. The changes in movies have contributed to viewers’ engagement by sustaining attention, promoting understanding of the narrative, heightening emotional commitment, and fostering their felt presence in the story. Examples of cinematic effects in particular movies are given at every turn.
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Richards, Rashna Wadia. Cinematic TV. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190071257.001.0001.
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In the last two decades, media scholars have often suggested that television has become cinematic. Once considered “a mere instrument of transmission,” as Rudolf Arnheim put it, or derided as a vast wasteland, TV is now praised for its visual density and complexity. Serial dramas, in particular, are acclaimed for their imitations of cinema’s stylistically innovative and narratively challenging conventions. But what exactly does “cinematic TV” mean? Cinematic TV takes up this question comprehensively, arguing that TV dramas quote, copy, and appropriate (primarily) American cinema in multiple ways and toward multiple ends. Putting together an innovative framework by combining intertextuality and memory studies, Cinematic TV focuses on four modalities of intermedial borrowings: homage, evocation, genre, and parody. Through close readings of such exemplary shows as Stranger Things, Mad Men, Damages, and Dear White People, the book demonstrates how serial dramas reproduce and rework, undermine and idolize, and, in some cases, compete with and outdo cinema. Ultimately, Cinematic TV argues that serial dramas function archivally in relation to cinema, for cinematic moments, motifs, and contours hover around the televisual frame, constantly breaking through. How serial dramas handle such cinematic hauntings is the story that this book tells.
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Hudson, Dale. “Making” Americans from Foreigners. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474423083.003.0003.
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Although conventional studies look to the earliest surviving vampire film, Prana-Films’ Nosferatu (1922) as source for visual codes and narrative conventions in Hollywood vampire media, this chapter locates them in segregation comedies, immigration romances, and miscegenation melodramas. These films establish conventions that facilitate or inhibit foreigners being americanized. Since citizenship for women was derivative from fathers or husbands, foreign women were considered less threatening. Consequently, male immigrants in Edison Company shorts (1895–1896), industrial and state recruitment films, and commercial entertainments, such as Alice Guy-Blaché’s Making an American Citizen (1912), Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915), D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919), and George Melford’s The Sheik (1921), serve as cinematic prototypes for classical Hollywood’s vampires. Within these narratives of americanizing foreigners, the afterlives of race emerge in relation to sex and nativity around issues of universal citizenship and sovereign territory.
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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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Righteous Anger in Contemporary Italian Literary and Cinematic Narratives. University of Toronto Press, 2020.
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16
Iyer, Usha. Dancing Women. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190938734.001.0001.
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Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia’s most popular cultural forms—cinema and dance—historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers the “women’s question” via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women, including devadasis and tawaifs, Eurasian actresses, oriental dancers, vamps, choreographers, and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, such as the “choreomusicking body” and “dance musicalization,” aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the Natya Sastra and the Abhinaya Darpana, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic “techno-spectacles,” Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema, and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities, by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.
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Balma, Philip. Edith Bruck in the Mirror: Fictional Transitions and Cinematic Narratives. Purdue University Press, 2014.
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Balma, Philip. Edith Bruck in the Mirror: Fictional Transitions and Cinematic Narratives. Purdue University Press, 2014.
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Edith Bruck in the Mirror: Fictional Transitions and Cinematic Narratives. Purdue University Press, 2014.
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20
Wilson, George M. Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.
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21
Chattopadhyay, Budhaditya. The Auditory Setting. Edinburgh University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474474382.001.0001.
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The Auditory Setting introduces and investigates how narrative and a sense of place are constructed in film and media arts through the reproduction and mediation of site-specific environmental sounds, or ‘ambience’. Although this sonic backdrop acts as the acoustically mediated space where a story or event can take place, there has been little academic study of sound’s undervalued role in cinematic setting and its production. The aim of this book is to question classical assumptions about sound in film and media arts (e.g., image-based relationships) and shift the focus towards the site and its sonic environment, whose presence is often carefully constructed in a film or media artwork’s diegetic world as a vital narrative strategy. The emphasis on site in the book enables an informed investigation of an essentially anthropogenic process of the sonic environment’s mediation and (re)production. Sonic environments are inhabited, experienced, exploited and transformed every day, their corporeality augmented by human agency in mediated forms. The human agency of sonic environments is crucial to unwrap in order to understand cultural expectations from the audiovisual media; greater awareness is required of narration, depiction, communication and artistic production approaches and affordances harnessed through media technologies. Drawing on theories of narrative, diegesis, mimesis and presence, and following a varied number of relevant audio-visual works, this book is a ground-breaking exploration of human agency in mediating environmental sounds and the nature of the sonic experience in the Anthropocene.
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Marrone, Gaetana. The Cinema of Francesco Rosi. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190885632.001.0001.
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Francesco Rosi’s work, which includes an impressive number of individually celebrated films, occupies a unique place in postwar Italian, indeed postwar world, cinema. Over the years, Rosi has offered films that trace an intricate path between the real and the fictive, the factual and the imagined. His films show an extraordinarily consistent formal balance while representing historical events as social emblems that examine, shape, and reflect the national self. They rely on a labyrinthine narrative structure, in which the sense of an enigma replaces the unidirectional path leading ineluctably to a designated end and solution. The truth itself, so fragmented and confused, may never be discovered. Rosi’s logical investigations are conducted by an omniscient eye and translated into a cinematic approach that embraces the details of material reality with the panoramic perspective of a dispassionate observer. This study addresses Rosi’s films as mosaics fashioned out of “clips” collected from the various stages of production, most specifically from the director’s own archival materials. It examines Rosi’s creative use of film as document (and as spectacle). This is, inevitably then, a study of the specific cinematic techniques that characterize Rosi’s work and that visually, compositionally, express his vision of history and the elusive “truth” of past and present social and political realities.
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Koresky, Michael. Bathed in the Fading Light. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252038617.003.0001.
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This chapter examines the film career of British director Terence Davies. The cinema of Davies is one of contradictions—between beauty and ugliness, the real and the artificial, progression and tradition, motion and stasis. These opposites reflect a certain struggle, for the filmmaker and his characters, to make sense of a confusing and sometimes violent world. For Davies, this struggle constitutes a reckoning with his past, a highly personal account of a fractured childhood; for the viewer it has resulted in one of the richest, most idiosyncratic, and arrestingly experimental bodies of work put out by a narrative filmmaker. The chapter focuses on the distinct emotional quandaries Davies' films evoke in the viewer and proposes that their tonal and political in-betweenness is a form of cinematic queering. Through the exploration of their contradictions, these films function within seemingly recognizable generic parameters only to then explode and thus queer conventional notions of narrative cinema.
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Campos, David, and Ericka Knudson. Cultivating Creativity Through World Films: Exploring Cinematic Narratives Featuring Child Protagonists. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated, 2020.
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Fletcher, Judith. Myths of the Underworld in Contemporary Culture. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198767091.001.0001.
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Stories of a visit to the realm of the dead and a return to the upper world are among the oldest narratives in European literature, beginning with Homer’s Odyssey and extending to contemporary culture. This volume examines a series of fictional works by twentieth- and twenty-first century authors, such Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante, which deal in various ways with the descent to Hades. Myths of the Underworld in Contemporary Culture surveys a wide range of genres, including novels, short stories, comics, a cinematic adaptation, poetry, and juvenile fiction. It examines not only those texts that feature a literal catabasis, such as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, but also those where the descent to the underworld is evoked in more metaphorical ways as a kind of border crossing, for instance Salman Rushdie’s use of the Orpheus myth to signify the trauma of migration. The analyses examine how these retellings relate to earlier versions of the mythical theme, including their ancient precedents by Homer and Vergil, but also to post-classical receptions of underworld narratives by authors such as Dante, Ezra Pound, and Joseph Conrad. Arguing that the underworld has come to connote a cultural archive of narrative tradition, the book offers a series of case studies that examine the adaptation of underworld myths in contemporary culture in relation to the discourses of postmodernism, feminism, and postcolonialism.
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Roche, David. Quentin Tarantino. University Press of Mississippi, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496819161.001.0001.
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An in-depth study of all Tarantino’s feature films to date (from Reservoir Dogs to The Hateful Eight), Quentin Tarantino: A Poetics and Politics of Cinematic Metafiction argues that, far from wallowing in narcissism and solipsism, a charge directed not only at Tarantino but at metafiction in general, these self-conscious fictions do more than just reflexively foreground their status as artefacts; they offer metacommentaries that engage with the history of cultural representations and exalt the aesthetic, ethical and political potential of creation as re-recreation and resignification. By combining cultural studies and neo-formalist approaches, this book seeks to highlight how intimately the films’ poetics and politics are intertwined. Each chapter explores a specific salient feature, some of which have drawn much academic attention (history, race, gender, violence), others less so (narrative structure, style, music, theatricality). Ultimately, Quentin Tarantino: Poetics and Politics of Cinematic Metafiction places Tarantino’s films firmly in the legacy of Hawks, Godard, Leone and the New Hollywood, and revises the image of cool purveyor of pop culture the American director cultivated at the beginning of his career by foregrounding the breadth and layeredness of the films’ engagement with cultural history, high and low, screen and print, American, East Asian and European. The films produced by the Tarantino team are formal invitations for viewers to similarly engage with, and reflect on, the material, and delight in doing so.
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Gledhill, Christine. Introduction. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252036613.003.0018.
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Two key areas of Film Studies—genre and gender representation—have generated challenging theories and debate. However, these concepts rarely intersect. Studies of gender representation and sexed spectatorship largely subsume genre into narrative and visual organization. This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to open up questions about the complex interaction of aesthetics, cultural meanings, and affect in mass-mediated cinematic fictions. For too long, represented gender has been taken as a means of ideologically assessing films. The challenge, then, is to open a perspective from the side of genre: to explore the aesthetic and imaginative power of gender as a tool of genre, and to explore what genre returns to the cultural sphere. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
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1946-, Palmer R. Barton, ed. The Cinematic text: Methods and approaches. New York: AMS Press, 1989.
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Clasen, Mathias. Lost and Hunted in Bad Woods. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190666507.003.0013.
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Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project (1999) launched the horror subgenre of “found footage”—pseudodocumentary horror—into the mainstream. The film was marketed as a true story and features the footage of three student filmmakers who got lost on a trip to document the Blair Witch phenomenon. The film was remarkably effective in using simple cinematic techniques to generate an authenticity aesthetic, and in using a suggestive multiplatform advertising campaign, thus capturing audience interest and generating strong emotional responses. The film tapped into evolved defense mechanisms through its depiction of vulnerable youths getting lost in an unknown, hostile natural environment and being hunted by some malignant, apparently supernatural agent. The film’s promise of authenticity, of real horror, made the narrative premise even more salient to audiences.
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Chan, Kenneth. Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee Films: Police Procedural Colludes with Supernatural-Martial Arts Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474424592.003.0009.
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Through a close analysis of Hong Kong director Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010), this chapter argues that the film’s successful appeal to local and global Chinese audiences is based on a conservative reading of the familiar cultural trope of modernity versus tradition, as mirrored in the supposed tensions between the police procedural and the horror/supernatural elements in the wuxia shenguai genre. These tensions are problematic precisely because their narrative and rhetorical purpose is to shore up the deterministic logic of Chinese cultural history, the interpellative call of Chinese political power, and the cultural nationalist logic of being Chinese. However, the film is also capable to generating counter-readings of its politics by recasting itself as a global cinematic text of political irony and oppositional resistance.
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O'Meara, Jennifer. Engaging Dialogue. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420624.001.0001.
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This book examines the centrality of dialogue to American independent cinema, arguing that it is impossible to separate small budgets from the old adage that ‘talk is cheap’. Focusing on the 1980s until the present, particularly on films by writer-directors like Jim Jarmusch, Noah Baumbach and Richard Linklater, the book demonstrates dialogue’s ability to engage audiences and bind together the narrative, aesthetic and performative elements of selected cinema. When compared to the dialogue norms of more mainstream cinema, the verbal styles of these independent writer-directors are found to be marked by alternations between various extremes, particularly those of naturalism and hyper-stylization, and between the poles of efficiency and excess. More broadly, these writer-directors are used as case studies that allow for an understanding of how dialogue functions in verbally experimental cinema, which, this book contends, is more often found in ‘independent’ or ‘art’ cinema. In questioning the association of dialogue-centred films with the ‘literary’ and the ‘un-cinematic’, the book highlights how speech in independent cinema can instead hinge on what is termed ‘cinematic verbalism’: when dialogue is designed and executed in complex, medium-specific ways. More broadly, the book provides a framework for analysing dialogue design and execution that can be readily applied to other films and filmmakers. It also highlights how speech can be central to cinema without overshadowing its medium-specific components. In so doing, the book develops new connections between film dialogue, reception studies, independent cinema and auteur studies.
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Schonig, Jordan. The Shape of Motion. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190093884.001.0001.
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Cinematic motion has long been celebrated as an emblem of change and fluidity or claimed as the source of cinema’s impression of reality. But such general claims undermine the sheer variety of forms that motion can take onscreen—the sweep of a gesture, the rush of a camera movement, the slow transformations of a natural landscape. What might one learn about the moving image when one begins to account for the many ways that movements move? In The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement, Jordan Schonig provides a new way of theorizing cinematic motion by examining cinema’s “motion forms”: structures, patterns, or shapes of movement unique to the moving image. From the wild and unpredictable motion of flickering leaves and swirling dust that captivated early spectators, to the pulsing abstractions that emerge from rapid lateral tracking shots, to the bleeding pixel-formations caused by the glitches of digital video compression, each motion form opens up the aesthetics of movement to film theoretical inquiry. By pairing close analyses of onscreen movement in narrative and experimental films with concepts from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Bergson, and Immanuel Kant, Schonig rethinks long-standing assumptions within film studies, such as indexical accounts of photographic images and analogies between the camera and the human eye. Arguing against the intuition that cinema reproduces the natural perception of motion, The Shape of Motion shows how cinema’s motion forms do not merely transpose the movements of the world in front of the camera; they transform them.
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Tulloch, John, and Belinda Middleweek. Conclusion. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190244606.003.0014.
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This book has provided a new reading of the transformation of intimacy that can be found in real sex films using an interdisciplinary perspective drawing on new risk sociology; feminist critical geography; and literary and film studies concepts such as structure of feeling, narrative, genre, stardom, social audience, spectatorship, and mise en scène. In this pursuit the book has incorporated a bricoleur methodology of social audience and textual analysis and devised a “soft ethnography” to explore the different authorial signatures on a filmic text. By viewing real sex cinema through a variety of theoretical, empirical, sociohistorical, and reflexive lenses, it has suggested ways that readers can bring to the cinematic experience their own search for a mutual understanding of ideas and perspectives and yet also, like our social audience groups in their discussions with one another, a sense of critical extension as well.
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Platte, Nathan. Selznick beyond Hollywood. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199371112.003.0014.
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Selznick’s co-productions with elite European filmmakers contrast noticeably with his Hollywood work. The Third Man’s hyper-stylized cinematography and solo zither score by Anton Karas resemble no other Selznick film, partly because Selznick’s role was much reduced. But with subsequent European co-productions the producer sought to reinsert himself into the music. This chapter traces these battles as they unfolded on the soundtrack, with Selznick reasserting his creative voice through re-edited versions distributed only in the United States. Most striking is the case of Stazione Termini, which Selznick released as Indiscretion of an American Wife. With Alessandro Cicognini’s score re-edited by Audray Granville, music in the new version does different work from its cinematic sibling. In his final productions, including Mario Nascimbene’s music for A Farewell to Arms, Selznick’s use of music to structure narrative and develop commercial appeal re-emerges as one of the producer’s greatest priorities.
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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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Radner, Hilary, and Alistair Fox. Cinema and the Body: The Ghost in the Theater. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422888.003.0004.
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This chapter focuses its attention on why, in returning in the twenty-first century to a preoccupation with classical cinema, Bellour argued that hypnosis rather than the dream (as in the view of Christian Metz) offers the most accurate metaphor for understanding the cinematic viewer’s relationship to screen narrative. Like an animal, Bellour explains, the spectator is caught by, and subject to, somatic responses that are basically emotional in nature (hence not under his or her rational control) and generated from outside him or her, but which he or she experiences as autogenic in origin as vitality affects, borrowing from Daniel Stern. The chapter explores how, in Bellour’s view, the physicality of these responses highlights the tenuous dividing line between that which is human and that which is animal, within a worldview that dispenses with “the soul” under modernity. Finally, the chapter examines Bellour’s argument that the images of animals that appear in films “mirror” the condition of the spectator in the theater.
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Duckett, Victoria. Mothers of France. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252039669.003.0007.
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This chapter explores new interconnections between private and public life, the provincial home and the global stage, in Mothers of France, a patriotic film that was made to encourage Americans—particularly women—to participate in World War I. More specifically, it considers how Sarah Bernhardt in Mothers of France was used as a propaganda tool to sway American audiences to the Allied cause. Now engaging ideas about nation and nationhood in explicitly combative ways, the film's narrative begins in the bourgeois home but quickly moves into a provincial village and then into the trenches of the war. In the film Sarah Bernhardt appears at her most “cinematic” in contemporary terms, because film allowed her, literally, to move after the amputation of her leg. This chapter considers how World War I brings new meanings to the notion of “the home front” by following Bernhardt as a mother in the home, then see her as a patriot in the town, and finally as a nurse on the home front.
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Lurie, Peter. Fargo’s Whitened Spaces. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199797318.003.0004.
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This chapter reads the Coens’ film Fargo as a typical Gothic narrative, replete with paternal sin, uncanny doubles, and a dark historical past that returns to trouble a violent present. It traces the Gothic’s history in the United States and notes its uniquely American features in describing Fargo’s affinity with writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, in the latter case by way of the film’s concern with whiteness—both the visual field of the film’s mise-en-scéne and the ethnic whiteness (or historical whitening) of the American interior. It shows a particularly cinematic version of the Gothic due to Fargo’s use of an offscreen, “unlawful” space associated with the film’s criminal element. It posits a postmodern sublime in the film’s tonal and visual ironies and, by way of postmodern theory, in a stubbornly immanent sublimity through affinities between the snowbound scene and the screen’s planar surface.
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Sites Of Disquiet The Nonspace In Spanish American Short Narratives And Their Cinematic Transformations. Purdue University Press, 2013.
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Block, Marcelline, and Jennifer Kirby, eds. ReFocus: The Films of Michel Gondry. Edinburgh University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456012.001.0001.
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The acclaimed French auteur behind the mind-bending modern classic Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, Michel Gondry has directed innovative, ground-breaking films and documentaries, episodes of the acclaimed television show Kidding and some of the most influential music videos in the history of the medium. In this book, a range of international scholars offers a comprehensive study of this significant and influential figure, covering his French and English-language films and videos, and framing Gondry as a transnational and transcultural auteur whose work provides insight into both French/European and American cinematic and cultural identity. With detailed case studies of films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Dave Chappelle’s Block Party (2005), The Science of Sleep (2006), Be Kind Rewind (2008), Mood Indigo (2013) and Microbe & Gasoline (2015), the book examines significant themes throughout Gondry’s filmography including surrealism, adaptation, memory, dreams, play and African-American identity. The book compares Gondry to other filmmakers including Wes Anderson and Jean Vigo, allowing for an understanding of how Gondry’s films might compare with both his global contemporaries and his predecessors in French and international cinema. Furthermore, the book demonstrates how Gondry’s work in narrative film, documentary and music video represents significant innovation in narrative, visual aesthetic, and genre.
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Hoel, Jon. Stalker. Liverpool University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781800348332.001.0001.
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This book examines Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, one of the most powerful science-fiction films ever made, with the goal of unraveling the film’s many intricacies, from its difficult production and inspecting its many cinematic elements. Included are examinations of composition and cinematography, the many philosophies, poetic and literary influences, and the enormity of its influence across the following generations. The film juxtaposes its speculative elements with a gripping tale of human fragility and introspection. It is as much a movie about the complexity of the human as it is the mysteriousness of the film’s labyrinthine landscape: the ambiguous Zone and its epicenter, the Room of Desire. Stalker challenges us to engage with film in a different way: taking the sensuous and the analytical viewers to task and presenting a narrative that is both deeply pessimistic and yet profoundly hopeful and embedded in a framework of the deepest and most sincere form of faith. The resulting experience is a film viewing unlike any the viewer has experienced before, irrevocably altering cinema forever.
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Elliott, Paul. Studying the British Crime Film. Liverpool University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781906733742.001.0001.
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Ever since its inception, British cinema has been obsessed with crime and the criminal. One of the first narrative films to be produced in Britain, the Hepworth's 1905 short Rescued by Rover, was a fast-paced, quick-edited tale of abduction and kidnap, and the first British sound film, Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail (1930), centred on murder and criminal guilt. For a genre seemingly so important to the British cinematic character, there is little direct theoretical or historical work focused on it. The Britain of British cinema is often written about in terms of national history, ethnic diversity, or cultural tradition, yet very rarely in terms of its criminal tendencies and dark underbelly. This volume assumes that, to know how British cinema truly works, it is necessary to pull back the veneer of the costume piece, the historical drama, and the rom-com and glimpse at what is underneath. For every Brief Encounter (1945) there is a Brighton Rock (2010), for every Notting Hill (1999) there is a Long Good Friday (1980).
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Kressner, Ilka. Sites of Disquiet: The Non-Space in Spanish American Short Narratives and Their Cinematic Transformations. Purdue University Press, 2014.
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Kressner, Ilka. Sites of Disquiet: The Non-Space in Spanish American Short Narratives and Their Cinematic Transformations. Purdue University Press, 2013.
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Kressner, Illka. Sites of Disquiet: The Non-Space in Spanish American Short Narratives and Their Cinematic Transformations. Purdue University Press, 2013.
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Magerstädt, Sylvie. TV antiquity. Manchester University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9781784995324.001.0001.
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TV antiquity explores representations of ancient Greece and Rome throughout television history. It is the first comprehensive overview of the genre in television. More specifically, the author argues that serial television set in antiquity offers a perspective on the ancient world quite distinct from their cinematic counterparts. The book traces the historic development of fictional representations of antiquity from the staged black-and-white shows of the 1950s and 60s to the most recent digital spectacles. A key argument explored throughout the book is that the structure of serial television (with its focus on intimacy and narrative complexity) is at times better suited to explore the complex mythic and historic plots of antiquity. Therefore, the book consciously focusses on multipart television dramas rather than made-for-TV feature films. This enables the author to explore the specific narrative and aesthetic possibilities of this format. The book features a range of insightful case studies, from the high-profile serials I, Claudius (1976) and Rome (2005-8) to lesser known works like The Caesars (1968) or The Eagle of the Ninth (1976) and popular entertainment shows such as Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995-9) and STARZ Spartacus (2010-3). Each of the case studies also draws out broader issues in the specific decade under consideration. Consequently, the book highlights the creative interplay between television genres and production environments and illustrates how cultural and political events have influenced the representations of antiquity in television.
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Bliss, Michael, ed. A Uniquely American Epic. University Press of Kentucky, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5810/kentucky/9780813178141.001.0001.
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Widely acknowledged as a highly innovative film, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch was released in 1969. From the outset, the movie was considered controversial because of its powerful, graphic, and direct depiction of violence, but it was also praised for its lush photography, intricate camera work, and cutting-edge editing. Peckinpah’s tale of an ill-fated, aging outlaw gang bound by a code of honor is often regarded as one of the most complex and influential Westerns in American cinematic history. The issues dealt with in this groundbreaking film—violence, morality, friendship, and the legacy of American ambition and compromise—are just as relevant today as when the film first debuted. To honor the significance of The Wild Bunch, this collection brings together leading Peckinpah scholars and critics to examine what many consider to be the director’s greatest work. The book’s nine essays explore the function of violence in the film and how its depiction is radically different from what is seen in other movies; the background of the film’s production; the European response to the film’s view of human nature; and the role of Texas/Mexico milieu in the narrative.
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Matzner, Sebastian, and Gail Trimble, eds. Metalepsis. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846987.001.0001.
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‘Metalepsis’ is a classical term. Ancient critics, however, only used it within the confines of rhetoric and stylistics to describe certain usages akin to metaphor and metonymy. In the twentieth century, metalepsis was then reframed much more broadly as a crossing of the boundaries that separate distinct narrative worlds. This modern notion of metalepsis, introduced by Gérard Genette, has proved highly insightful for exploring interactions between the worlds of author and text, such as scenarios in fiction—typically postmodern, typically novelistic or cinematic—where an author and a character enter into conversation. Yet metalepsis has a much greater potential to address all sorts of transgressions between ‘worlds’ or ‘levels’, not only in postmodern but also pre-modern literature. If metalepsis consists fundamentally in the breaking down of barriers, to what sort of barriers and what sort of transgressions can the concept be fruitfully applied? Can it be used within approaches other than narratology? Does metalepsis require recognizable levels of reality and fictionality, and if so, what role might be played by other planes, such as the past, the mythical, or the divine? What form does metalepsis take in less obviously ‘narrative’ genres (such as lyric poetry)? And how should it be understood in visual media (such as vase-painting)? As classicists begin to examine what metalepsis might mean in ancient literature, this volume uses such questions to consider where metalepsis can most productively join other critical concepts in classical research, and how explorations of ancient metalepsis might change, refine, or extend our understanding of the concept itself.
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Kent, Miriam. Women in Marvel Films. Edinburgh University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474448826.001.0001.
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The concept of identity in superhero narratives has become a burgeoning field in academic studies of this increasingly popular cinematic genre. Women in Marvel Films provides the first rigorous analysis of the portrayals of women, heroic and otherwise, in films based on Marvel comics from the 1980s to the present. It explores the relationships between this cultural phenomenon and wider issues of gender equality, considering the cultural moments in which Marvel films are made and incorporating complex histories of the comic book and Hollywood industries. Highlighting characterisations of women, narratives and cinematic elements such as music and mise-en-scène, and questioning how these elements collectively engage with gendered discourses, the discussion also positions previous iterations of women in Marvel comic book narratives as highly relevant. Women in Marvel Films thereby considers how feminist issues surface within superhero adaptations and how they are dealt with via Hollywood and comic book conventions. This book ultimately shows how the Marvel superhero film taps into political complexities regarding gender and related identity issues, such as women’s roles in society and their relation to men, and provides a fascinating insight into gendered power dynamics in contemporary American popular culture. The films discussed include The Punisher (1989), Blade (1998), the X-Men series (2000–2020), Elektra (2005), and the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including Black Panther (2018) and Captain Marvel (2019).
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Foltz, Jonathan. The Novel after Film. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190676490.001.0001.
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The Novel After Film examines how literary fiction has been redefined in response to the emergence of narrative film. It charts the institutional, stylistic, and conceptual relays that linked literary and cinematic cultures, and that fundamentally changed the nature and status of storytelling in the early twentieth century. In the cinema, a generation of modernist writers found a medium whose bad form was also laced with the glamour of the popular, and whose unfamiliar visual language seemed to harbor a future for innovative writing after modernism. As The Novel After Film demonstrates, this fascination with film was played out against the backdrop of a growing discourse about the novel’s respectability. As the modern novel was increasingly venerated as a genre of aesthetic refinement and high moral purpose, a range of authors, from Virginia Woolf and H. D. to Henry Green and Aldous Huxley, turned their attention to the cinema in search of alternative aesthetic histories. For authors working in modernism’s atmosphere of heightened formal sophistication, film’s violations of style took on a perverse attraction. In this way, film played a key role in changing the way that novelists addressed a transforming public culture which could seem at moments to be leaving the novel behind.