Academic literature on the topic 'Fantasy films – History and criticism'
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Journal articles on the topic "Fantasy films – History and criticism"
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Melnova, K., and Zh Ospanova. "Diversity and Multiplicity of Fantasy Genre in Modern Literary Criticism." Bulletin of L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University PHILOLOGY Series 145, no. 4 (2023): 143–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.32523/2616-678x-2023-145-4-143-152.
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Fantasy as a genre has a long and complex history of formation. The history of fantasy is as old as humanity itself. Its legitimate predecessors are a fairy tale, a novel and a fable. Fantasy aims to build up not only the realm of dreams, but also seeks to establish itself as a significant and indispensable system. The literary fantasy genre usually starts with obvious or concealed subtext about the existence of several realities and moves in the direction of awakening heroes’ previously unknown parts of themselves. The fantastical genre, having greater freedom in creating an image of the world, has the opportunity to defend and prove “in practice” the importance of eternal humanistic values. Many scientists disagree not only in defining fantasy as a type of literature, but also on its components. In order to determine similarities and differences between the existing theories of fantasy division, the main types of fantasy worked on by Kovtun, Shidfar, F. Mendlesohn and others are described using descriptive, comparative and other literary methods. All the scientists studied have been doing their research for the past hundred years, which gives a wide field for analysis. During the review of existing theories, it was revealed that the main elements of fantasy move from one classification to another, changing only the names.
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Oktaviani, Danissa Dyah. "Konsep Fantasi dalam Film." REKAM 15, no. 2 (October 1, 2019): 125–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.24821/rekam.v15i2.3356.
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Fantasy films were born from the development of fiction films that have shown existence since the beginning of its history. Fantasy films have their own charm because they can penetrate time and space compared to other genres. Fiction films develop from their creators both in terms of story and cinematography because fiction films are at the center of the poles: real and abstract. Its greatest strength lies in its ability to integrate and combine with other genres without exception and can be broadly developed unlimitedly. That is because fantasy films contain elements with different characteristics from other films where if a fantasy film has one element in the making of the film then it has been said to be a fantasy film. The elements or components that are seen are derived from the narrative and cinematic elements of filmmaking which contain ideas of stories, characters, and settings in a film. These three elements are the forming components of fantasy films that are fictitious and imaginative. The idea of the story is not based on an imaginary reality, that is a fiction that makes no sense. In the case of fantasy films, filmmakers will compete to develop and present ideas that have not been thought of before, so the audience seems to be carried away in a new world outside of real life. Character characters in fantasy films are the imagination of creators in fictitious forms, such as: animal characters, extraterrestrials, monsters, robots, and non-physical characters such as ghosts, spirits and holograms. While the background elements in fantasy films have a character setting place and time imaginative events are unique in unknown times or dimensions, can be past, present, and future with the centuries formed by the creators.
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Ashkenazi, Ofer. "Prisoners’ fantasies in Weimar film." Journal of European Studies 39, no. 3 (September 2009): 290–304. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0047244109106683.
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Prison cells constituted a unique sphere in post-World War I German films. Unlike most of the modern city spheres, it was a realm in which the private and the public often merged, and in which reality and fantasy incessantly intertwined. This article analyses the ways in which filmmakers of the Weimar Republic envisaged the experience within the prison, focusing on its frequent association with fantasies and hallucinations. Through the analysis of often-neglected films from the period, I argue that this portrayal of the prison enabled Weimar filmmakers to engage in public criticism against the conservative, inefficient and prejudiced institutions of law and order in Germany. Since German laws forbade direct defamation of these institutions, filmmakers such as Joe May, Wilhelm Dietherle and Georg C. Klaren employed the symbolism of the prisoner’s fantasy to propagate the urgent need for thorough reform. Thus this article suggests that Weimar cinema, contrary to common notions, was not dominated by either escapism or extremist, anti-liberal worldviews. Instead, the prison films examined in this article are in fact structured as a warning against the decline of liberal bourgeois society in the German urban centres of the late 1920s.
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Andreescu, Florentina. "The changing face of the Other in Romanian films." Nationalities Papers 39, no. 1 (January 2011): 77–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2010.532776.
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This article focuses on how the Other is represented and understood in films produced in Romania during periods of radical political, social and economic change. Specifically it addresses films produced during the years of communism and the planned economy, during the transition to democracy and to capitalism, as well as films produced during the period of democracy, capitalism and membership in the European Union. The research acknowledges two main aspects: the changing face of the Other over time (the socialist state, the foreign investors, the West, etc.) and the consistency of the fantasy structure. More specifically, the relationship between self and the Other generally follows a strict masochist fantasy script in which the Other has the power to constrain freedom, to inflict pain, and to function as an essential element through which pleasure is understood and experienced. The research proposes an understanding of this structure of fantasy, reflected in film through the existence of a national psyche written by the main myths and stories embraced by the society in discussion. This structure of fantasy hails and constructs a certain subject that has a basic masochistic psychic structure.
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Bakri, Nabil. "MAGISTERIUM AS THE ENEMY OF LIBERAL THOUGHTS IN PHILLIP PULLMAN’S NORTHERN LIGHTS." Rubikon : Journal of Transnational American Studies 6, no. 2 (September 30, 2019): 116. http://dx.doi.org/10.22146/rubikon.v6i2.61493.
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Pullman’s Northern Lights is considered by many as a representation of negative criticism toward religion, especially Christianity, for its depictions of the Magisterium. Many researches aim to unravel Pullman’s criticism and prove whether or not the novel is about ‘killing God’, resulting in the general perception that Northern Lights is a condemnation of religion. By comparing the novel to the history of Medieval Church and the power of Magisterium to the Bible, this analysis means to prove whether or not the criticism is addressed to religion and to figure out who really ‘kills God’ that becomes the essential point of Pullman’s criticism in the novel. Using Marxism and its relation to power abuse, this analysis attempts to relate Pullman’s Magisterium to the real Magisterium and how the institution gains its power from God as mentioned in the holy Bible. Magisterium in Northern Lights does not represent God’s will. It serves instead as a critic of who kills God and therefore, it is not a form of literature to condemn religion.Keywords: magisterium; medieval church; scripture; fantasy; power abuse
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Kušić, Aleksandar. "West(ern urbanism): A part of social fantasy space." SAJ - Serbian Architectural Journal 3, no. 3 (2011): 226–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.5937/saj1103226k.
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New Belgrade represents one of the most intensively built and criticized settlements of the socialist Yugoslavia. Its contemporary criticism is shaped, like most of Serbian architectural historiography, by a belief in the clear distinction between selfness and otherness, contemporariness and out-datedness. The question of a contemporary approach is set, within this discourse, as a matter of the ability or will to see clearly the development of the Other, in whose reflection one's own development (through the elimination or acquisition of inner Otherness) can flourish. This paper is dedicated to the exposure of the essential limitation of these distinctions. By pointing to the way that the West and western urbanism were envisioned within three moments of New Belgrade socialist history, this paper tends to point out that these visions are nothing more but parts of a wider Lacanian social fantasy space, i.e. that the realism of their gaze is based on the possibility of a placement within the fantasy space of the current or desired social order.
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Altmann, Eliska. "Entre playas y distopías: Río de Janeiro, ex ciudad capital, y la recepción cinematográfica." Todas as Artes Revista Luso-Brasileira de Artes e Cultura 3, no. 3 (2020): 40–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.21747/21843805/tav3n3a3.
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Based on the reception of four Brazilian films, the article tries to identify imaginations about the city of Rio de Janeiro through a dystopian lens typical of our day. The comparative analysis involves “critical-cinematographic” practices that conceive a sociocritical reading assuming that social elements are found in the works themselves, and are also external to them. The criticism of the following films will be verified: Rio fantasia [Rio Fantasy] (1957), by Watson Macedo, and Rio, 40 graus [Rio, 40 degrees] (1955), by Nelson Pereira dos Santos; Rio, verão & amor [Rio, summer & love] (1966) and El Justicero [The Punisher] (1967), of the same directors, consecutively. The documents will highlight dystopian aspects both in the works and in their readings, as well as in the social configurations of the time in a temporal relationship with Brazil today
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de Groot, Renee. "What If the Pen Was Mightier Than the Sword? Civil War Alternate History as Social Criticism." aspeers: emerging voices in american studies 10 (2017): 55–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.54465/aspeers.10-06.
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Alternate histories about the American Civil War seem ideally set up to explore the possibilities and tensions of social criticism through art and literature. Counterfactual stories about the war easily invoke contemporary issues of inequality and exploitation, and they are part of a genre—alternate history—that has traditionally lent itself to social commentary. Yet while scholarship on alternate history has captured the presentist orientation of many alternate histories in the fantasy-nightmare dichotomy, these categories appear reductive as a reflection of the layered and intriguing forms social criticism takes in Civil War alternate history. This article examines two examples of this genre that position themselves as political statements. Frank Purdy Williams’s largely forgotten novel Hallie Marshall: A True Daughter of the South (1900) subverts major literary traditions of its time to mount a counterintuitive critique of capitalist exploitation. Kevin Willmott’s mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004) is both a scathing critique of American racism and a multilayered satire on the distortion of history in popular culture. Both works use the conventions of alternate history as conduits for critique and provocation, which makes the revelation of their ideological investments ingenious but perhaps dangerously circuitous.
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Bishop, P. "Rhetoric, Memory, and Power: Depth Psychology and Postmodern Geography." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10, no. 1 (February 1992): 5–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d100005.
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The attitude towards rhetoric, metaphor, and imagery is identified in this paper as being central both to the definition of postmodernism and to any postmodern scholarship. It is also claimed that questions about the relationship between archetypal psychology and geography mirrors the wider postmodern phenomenon of comparative knowledges. By focusing on radical criticism of contemporary heritage movements it is shown how archetypal psychology can help to deepen metaphorical reflection on such crucial issues as fantasy, theory, history, and memory. In particular, it is insisted that such reflections should themselves avoid philosophical abstraction and stay as close as possible to the logic of imaginative discourse.
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D, Yogalakshmi, and Vijayalakshmi S. "The Gift of Writers in Animating the Past to the Present as Tales of Remembrance: A Comparative Study of Salman Rushdie’s Victory City and Amitav Ghosh’s Jungle Nama." World Journal of English Language 13, no. 7 (July 25, 2023): 292. http://dx.doi.org/10.5430/wjel.v13n7p292.
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The research focuses on how fantasy is manifested as part of storytelling. Salman Rushdie’s Victory City (2023) and Amitav Ghosh’s Jungle Nama (2021) adopt ancient myths and histories that serve as remembrance tales. Both Rushdie and Ghosh evince a common interest in exploring social issues in their writings through an allegorical form. Rushdie’s Victory City is about the history of the Vijayanagar Empire, one of the most distinguished empires of medieval India (14th century to 16th century). Rushdie submitted his final edits of Victory City before the attack in New York City (Chautauqua) for his controversial novel The Satanic Verses. In the month of August 2022, he was stabbed in public by a youngster. He tweets that there is no freedom for authors to express themselves through writing. So, the research focuses on how fantasy serves as a tool for authors to express their views. His Victory City made him overcome all the negative criticism that he had encountered during the attack. Ghosh’s Jungle Nama also adopts the history of Sundarbans’ Forest goddess, Bon Bibi. Ghosh through his narration blends the myth and history of Bon Bibi who have been worshipped for centuries by the people of Sundarbans. Blending the real and imaginary in both fictions greatly challenges the differentiation between authenticity and fantasy. The supernatural phenomena in these narratives transport the reader from reality as a kind of escapism. During this, the characters in the fiction recall the past events and visions of the future in their present, and these aspects are also explored in the analysis. Victory City and Jungle Nama encounter the experience of mysticism in their narration which embarks on a voyage of difficulties and hindrances in the unreal world. Both these speculative fiction explore the concepts of fantasy and mystery so the theory of Magical Realism is applied to the strange creatures, other worlds, evils, demons, and demi-gods that exist in the fanciful setting which is also discussed.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "Fantasy films – History and criticism"
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Dixon, Marzena M. "The structure and rhetoric of twentieth-century British children's fantasy." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/14858.
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This thesis discusses twentieth century children's fantasy fiction. The writers whose creative output is dealt with include Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, Pat O'Shea, Peter Dickinson, T.H.White, Lloyd Alexander and, to a lesser extent, C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien. These authors have been chosen because their books, whilst being of a broadly similar nature, nevertheless have a sufficient diversity to illustrate well many different important aspects of children's fantasy. Chapter I examines the sources of modern fantasy, presents the attitudes of different authors towards borrowing from traditional sources and their reasons for doing so, and looks at the changing interpretation of myths. Chapter II talks about the presentation of the primary and secondary worlds and the ways in which they interact. It also discusses the characters' attitudes towards magic. Chapter III looks at the presentation of magic, examines the traditional fairy-tale conventions and their implementation in modern fantasies, and discusses the concepts of evil, time, and the laws governing fantasy worlds. Chapter IV deals with the methods of narration and the figure of the narrator. It presents briefly the prevailing plot patterns, discusses the use of different kinds of language, and the ideas of pan-determinism and prophecy. The concluding chapter considers the main subjects and aims of children's fantasy, the reasons why the genre is so popular, and its successes and failures.
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Strahle, Graham. "Fantasy and music in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England /." Title page, contents and abstract only, 1987. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phs896.pdf.
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Selling, Kim Liv. "Nature, reason and the legacy of romanticism : constructing genre fantasy." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/2565.
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Wong, Wai-yi Dorothy, and 黃偉儀. "Form, force, and sociality: a study of the literary fantastic with special reference to Angela Carter and MoYan." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2004. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31246114.
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Melano, Anne. "On divergence in fantasy." Master's thesis, Australia : Macquarie University, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/17998.
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The original thesis contains the novel "Stranger, I" as an integral part of the thesis. However this novel has been omitted in this digital copy.Thesis (MA (Hons))--Macquarie University, Division of Humanities, Department of English, 2006.
Bibliography: p. 93-97.
On divergence in fantasy -- Introduction -- Preliminary -- The thousand and one definitional nights -- Characteristic works: inclusions and exclusions -- Critical objections to fantasy -- Conclusion.
On Divergence in Fantasy explores the ways in which fantasy criticism continually redefines its boundaries, without arriving at agreement. The paper draws on Foucault to suggest that these disputes and dispersions are characteristic of the operation of fantasy critisim as a discursive formation.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
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Chau, Ka-wah Anna, and 周嘉華. "Imaginary spaces in children's fantasy fiction: a psychoanalytic reading of Lewis Carroll's Alice Booksand Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2004. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31364986.
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Eckstein, Simon J. "The shadow of the past : fantasy, modernism, and the aftermath of a world at war." Thesis, Swansea University, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.678625.
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This study constitutes a single strand of a wider argument for a thorough-going reassessment of the place of fantasy literature within the canon. In particular, it aims to redress a marked lack of critical attention paid to the distinct movement towards fantastic modes of representation in the mid-twentieth century.
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Foley, Matt. "Haunting modernisms : appropriations of the ghostly in Eliot, Woolf, Bowen and Lawrence." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/10994.
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This thesis is an extended reading of the topos of the ghostly as it is staged in the modernist writings of T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and D.H. Lawrence. As I argue, their distinct appropriations of haunting are innately tied to their individual theories of the aesthetic; there are also a number of recurring motifs throughout their respective oeuvres, which time and again evoke a ghostly register. Consistently appearing in the texts I read here, most of which were published between the years 1919 and 1935, are figurations of the ghostly as a symptom of ‘ontological uncertainty’, as well as renderings of purgatorial subjectivity, and aporias of mourning. I locate my reading in response to the scholarly fields of haunting studies, mourning modernisms and Gothic modernisms. In a move common to contemporary theoretical studies of haunting, I draw also from the latter work of Jacques Derrida, a theoretical lens that facilitates my reading of a complex modernist ethics of mourning and alterity, one that often courts the ghostly, but resists what Derrida terms ‘hauntological’ work. The Derridean figure of the ethical apparition, in its status as the Absolute Other, is consistently complicated or rejected in these texts. This resistance mirrors a purgatorial mode of subjectivity that recurs in a range of guises in the modernisms I read here. In uncovering the economies that lie beneath these haunted subjectivities Jacques Lacan’s metapsychology of the subject helps also to conceptualise Bowen and Lawrence’s handling of the spectral. Bowen’s is a distinctly visual imagination, and her staging of a haunted subjectivity is elucidated by calling upon Lacan’s formulation of the gaze. Lawrence, whose work is consistently concerned with a-symbolic bodily registers, bypasses a number of the purgatorial aporias staged in the writings of Woolf, Eliot and Bowen. Viewing his appropriation of haunting through a Lacanian understanding of feminine jouissance suggests Lawrence’s welcoming of a radical ghostly other that may transcend the aporias of subjectivity, ethics and mourning that characterise these haunting modernisms.
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Vermaak, Janelle Leigh. "Part one: "Horror versus terror in the body genre" : part two: "Silent planet"." Thesis, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10948/636.
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This article seeks to investigate this balance and to interrogate the difference between horror and terror in an attempt to contribute to the development of a systematic genre typology. A brief history of the genre will be given, after which the focus will fall on contemporary Horror film, paying specific attention to the relationship between violence and horror, the theme of sacrificial violence, and the transgression of ‘natural’ laws. An eclectic approach is followed, drawing from literary theory, theology, psychology, and, of course, film theory.
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Graf, Matthew D. "The animation paradox : a study in believability." Virtual Press, 2008. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1397373.
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Animation has been an integral part of the entertainment industry for over seventy years. What is it about animated films that make them just as, or even more, captivating than live-action films? While animation is most typically associated with fantasy or escapism, there is certainly an element of reality exploration that causes animation to be more believable. Through examination of this and previous creative projects, it was found that a balance of fantasy and reality exploration, along with other key factors, help to make animation successful in relating to the viewer.Department of Telecommunications
Books on the topic "Fantasy films – History and criticism"
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1948-, Donald James, ed. Fantasy and the cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1989.
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author, Lazzeretti Andrea, and Pizzo, Gian Filippo, 1951- author, eds. Guida al cinema fantasy. Bologna: Odoya, 2017.
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Gunden, Kenneth Von. Flights of fancy: The great fantasy films. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland, 1989.
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John, Stanley. Creature features: The science fiction, fantasy, and horror movie guide. New York: Berkley Boulevard Books, 2000.
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Alexius, Christian, and Sarah Beicht. Fantastisches in dunklen Sälen: Science-Fiction, Horror und Fantasy im jungen deutschen Film. Marburg: Schüren, 2018.
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Chiavini, Roberto. Il grande cinema fantasy: L'heroic fantasy dai primordi a Conan, fino al Signore degli anelli. Roma: Gremese, 2004.
Find full textBook chapters on the topic "Fantasy films – History and criticism"
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McIlroy, Brian. "Between History and Fantasy: The Irish Films of Neil Jordan." In A Companion to Irish Literature, 360–73. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781444328066.ch52.
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Akarsu, Hikmet Temel. "Fellini's Rome." In Architecture in Cinema, 16–21. BENTHAM SCIENCE PUBLISHERS, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.2174/9789815223316124010005.
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Fellini's Rome is one of the mature works of the famous Italian director Federico Fellini. Fans of Fellini's films find high artistry in his cinematic style, which does not follow coherent fiction, combines extraordinary façades with sad humor, and, with contradictory and audacious focus, excites every human emotion. Although most of the critics have described him within the neorealism movement in cinema, it should be noted that he has an extremely original style that does not fit into this category. It would be more accurate to say that he has a sui generis expressionist style that sometimes borders on fantasy and surrealism, requiring a separate definition. The movie “Fellini's Rome” is one of the refined examples of this new expressionism style. Fellini paints Rome with a completely different color in his highly impressive film, and this new color is a very, very different place from the laboratory of architectural history, which includes that familiar array of monuments. This new Rome is now completely painted with Fellinian poetry and transports us to other realms with its richness of image and irony. So, Fellini's Rome gives us an unfamiliar feeling. It allows us to see the city, which has the world's greatest architectural heritage, from a completely different perspective. What should it mean for us to shift away from architectural-monumental structures and turn to different images in such a city that served as the capital of the Roman Empire for centuries and imprinted itself in the memory of mankind with extremely powerful images? There, the philosophical and metaphorical messages of a great director come in the most artistic and mysterious way and find us. Even if you create the world's most magnificent architectural universe, your thinking, and even your life will be completely in vain if you cannot grasp the truth and validity of the human spirit.
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Shaughnessy, Robert. "Woeful pageants." In As You Like It. Manchester University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9780719086939.003.0007.
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This chapter considers the screen history of the play, examining the major film versions (directed by Paul Czinner, 1936, Christine Edzard, 1992, and Kenneth Branagh, 2006) and the BBC-Time Life Television Shakespeare production of 1978. None of these has been particularly well-received by critics and audiences, and the chapter discusses their uneasy use of film and television realism to render the pastoral fantasy world of the play. The discussion of the BBC production draws upon the corporation’s audience research data to investigate what actual spectators made of it in the context of the late 1970s television viewing experience.
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Bigelow, Benjamin. "Dirty Films: Grimy Materialism and Ecological Aesthetics." In A History of Danish Cinema, 241–51. Edinburgh University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474461122.003.0020.
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Against the backdrop of increased ecological awareness and climate activism in the Nordic region and in Denmark particularly, this chapter examines how such perspectives have become crucial aesthetic and critical tools in contemporary film culture. The chapter argues for the continued relevance of materiality in film studies by conducting a material-ecocritical reading of Hlynur Pálmason’s Vinterbrødre (Winter Brothers, 2017), a film that is fixated on the accumulation of particulate matter on the surfaces of things. Building on scholars working in material ecocriticism, the chapter takes grimy materiality as central to the broader aesthetic concerns of the film, which stages a gradual narrative progression from the realm of idealist romantic fantasy to materialist, earth-bound disillusionment via the human experience of unrequited love.
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Donelan, Carol. "Traumatic History and the Prosthesis of Myth in Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives." In ReFocus: The Films of William Wyler, 68–87. Edinburgh University Press, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781399510462.003.0004.
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This chapter examines Wyler’s first post-war film, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and argues that in it, he rehabilitates classical Hollywood cinema through the use “reborn realism.” It also reflects on how Wyler’s path to “reborn realism” relates to notions of cinematic modernism. This chapter reveals how Wyler’s double and even triple plot structure of multiple returning servicemen explores the thematic connections between work and marriage in post-war America, and, by removing the fantasy of idealized, fictional masculinity, Wyler also exposes the reality of damaged and vulnerable masculinity. Author: Carol Donelan
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Horlock, Douglas. "Introduction." In The Films of Delmer Daves, 3–10. University Press of Mississippi, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496838841.003.0001.
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The introduction establishes that despite directing popular and critically well received films, Delmer Daves has remained a neglected figure in the history of Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’. He has been similarly underestimated in film criticism and analysis, including that of authors such as Andrew Sarris who advocated an auteur theory of criticism. More recent interest in Daves’s work is recognised, such as the 2016 publication of Matthew Carter and Andrew Nelson. The introduction goes on to set out the scope of this study which focuses on all Daves’s films and significant screenplays, and which utilises underused sources such as the Delmer Daves Papers.
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Soyoung, Kim. "The State of Fantasy in Emergency: Fantasmatic Others in South Korean Film." In Korean Cinema in Global Contexts. Nieuwe Prinsengracht 89 1018 VR Amsterdam Nederland: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789463729147_ch02.
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Looking at contemporary South Korean films, the essay relies on the conceptual double structure of the “state of fantasy” as articulated in cinema and the “state of emergency” in South Korea’s history to explore the engagement of those films with a set of global-local issues of corporeality and migration that arise in the age of cognitive capitalism.
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Kam, Tan See. "Shanghai and Peking Blues: Fiction as Imagined History." In Tsui Hark's Peking Opera Blues. Hong Kong University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888208852.003.0004.
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Peking Opera Blues is a mixed-genre film built out of intertextual allusions to other film genres and texts. This enriches the film’s addressivity and is achieved particularly by functioning as a companion piece to Tsui’s 1984 film Shanghai Blues. Both films share narrative devices that mesh historicity and fictionality, creating narratives framed by history imagined into fiction and fiction imagined as history. This may be theorized as a jiegu fengjin mode of social and political criticism (using the past to comment on or lampoon the present). This jiegu fengjin mode of narration in the two Blues films, especially in the context of relating the films’ political relevance to 1980s Hong Kong, is that it yokes together, in metafictional ways, a spatio-temporal imaginary that sutures the past (turbulent times in China) to the present (political uncertainties in contemporary Hong Kong), while simultaneously seeking to engage the future (Hong Kong’s futurity as a special administrative region under Chinese sovereignty after 1997).
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Poe, G. Tom. "Thrust with a Rapier and Run: The Critics and Preston Sturges." In Refocus: the Films of Preston Sturges. Edinburgh University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474406550.003.0012.
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This chapter addresses two major questions in regard to the critical reception of the career and films of Preston Sturges. The first question is how Sturges’s public persona as a “madcap” personality working in the Hollywood studio system created a master narrative that both informed and influenced the critical reception of his films and thus proved to be a precursor to what would come to be identified as “auteur” criticism. This leads to a second question: how did the theme of public spectacle in both Sturges’s personal/professional life and in his films that take a satirical and/or cynical view of public figures, influence critical debates in regard to the director as “auteur,” as well as inciting theoretical debates regarding the final purpose and/or ideological effect of his comedies as satire and/or irony reflecting cynicism and/or nihilism? Finally, the chapter explores how a study of the ambivalence that marks the history of critical writing on both Sturges’s life and his films provides an insight into the cultural practice of film criticism itself. To that end, the chapter gives particular attention to the critical debates provoked by three films, The Great McGinty, Sullivan’s Travels, and Hail the Conquering Hero.
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Pettigrew, Ian. "The Sacred Spectacle: Subverting Scepticism in Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee Films." In Sino-Enchantment, 166–82. Edinburgh University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474460842.003.0009.
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Among the group of Hong Kong filmmakers who have transitioned into the mainland Chinese film industry, Tsui Hark brings years of experience depicting traditional Chinese beliefs and religion in films such as Green Snake and Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain, thus contributing significantly to mainland China’s new fantasy-friendly market. This chapter looks closely at the director’s three Detective Dee films to demonstrate how, through collage, the films’ visual and special effects (for example, the use of qinggong in traditional wuxia literature and films) subvert their own negative narrative framing of the supernatural and religion. This is preceded by a brief discussion of the history of the representation of the supernatural and religion in Chinese cinema, followed by a review of Tsui’s related oeuvre.
Conference papers on the topic "Fantasy films – History and criticism"
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Uya, Yifan. "Collaborative Vibration: The Mythic Journey of A Coal Boy." In LINK 2021. Tuwhera Open Access, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.24135/link2021.v2i1.119.
Full textAbstract:
Acknowledging the Anthropocene crisis, my research examines myth and myth-making to reimagine the role of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ bricoleur concept. Following Joseph M. Coll’s Taoist and Buddhist systemic thinking inspired theory of sustainable transformation, the practice-led project evolves into the making of an essayist film that conveys a specific personal myth.My research reckons that a bricoleur should perceive myth-making as an organic growing organisation that acquires intuition and posteriori knowledge. And focus on a narrative that evolves into the mythic identity of a piece of coal and a bar-tailed godwit corresponding to designated oppositional values and semiotic assets. Apart from the practitioner works of Stan Brakhage, Chris Marker and Adam Curtis, my research also dives into Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, Howie Lee and Yaksha‘s musical languages to explore the other narrative possibilities when re-examining history in a socially conscious manner. As the film soundtrack is also part of the myth-making production. My practice-led project inevitably evolves into the subject of the self as the production presents a negotiation through metaphors and signifiers concerning memory, history and experience. The filmmaking echoes a search for the wisdom of self-acceptance. It adopts Stephen Yablo’s understanding of conceivability to generate and regenerate meaningful assets. Concepts are planted to grow into newer representations compromising posteriori knowledge and self-realisations, with informal syllogistic reasoning concerning the epistemological nature of imagination and the transformative structure of myth. The contextual knowledge of my research examines the subject of myth and myth-making through Jacques Lacan's theory of fantasy, Jungian analytical psychology and Claude Lévi-Strauss knowledge of structural linguistics. It adopts Lévi-Strauss’ canonical myth formula concerning the missing discussion of experience, community, and the wilder contexts of shamanology. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological body and Martin Heidegger's thoughts on the philosophy of technology concerning the body-to-technology relation and the notion of symbolic light and darkness. With critics on the instrumentalist stance of technology and Rene Descartes's modal metaphysics concerning Arnold Gehlen’s conservative alert of mankind’s debased condition of modern existence, my research proposes that myth-making is a necessary altruistic form of social technology that can transform experience into wisdom. Acknowledging that will is the priority for behaviour change. The production examines the Dao of myth and myth-making as a specific technological answer to resolve David Attenborough's calling for a global transformation and collaboration in his book A Life of Our Planet. To further develop such a technology, my research seeks a systemic understanding of myth and myth-making. Therefore, my research hypothesis a wholistic and heuristic methodology, namely Daoist bricoleur. By experiencing a personal myth, I celebrate my Manchu and Chinese culture origin and the complexity of my upbringing. My research visits the endangered Manchu Ulabun storytelling tradition and reckons the film production rely on the structural establishment of critical mythic fragments founded on autobiography and social conventions. As a permanent resident of New Zealand born in a coal-mining town in eastern Inner Mongolia, China, with an unverifiable ancestral clan name related to Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong Emperor of the Qing Dynasty and much more.