Film and Morality

Film and Morality PDF Author: Philip Gillett
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443846503
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
Employing a thematic approach and drawing on disciplines ranging from neurobiology to philosophy, Film and Morality examines how morality is presented in films and how films serve as a source of moral values. While the role of censorship in upholding moral standards has been considered comprehensively, the presence of moral dilemmas in films has not attracted the same level of interest. Film-makers may address moral concerns explicitly, but moral dilemmas can serve as plot devices, creating dramatic tension by providing pivotal moments when characters are called upon to make life-changing decisions. Drawing on a range of well-known and neglected films mainly from Britain and America, this book provides numerous examples of how film-makers make use of morality and how audiences are invited to explore moral issues by following characters who live with the consequences of their choices. Film and Morality introduces philosophical debates on such topics as free will, conscience and the place of moral codes in everyday life, showing the relevance of film to these issues. The book presents a distinct approach to how films might be analysed.

Film and Morality

Film and Morality PDF Author: Philip Gillett
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443846503
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
Employing a thematic approach and drawing on disciplines ranging from neurobiology to philosophy, Film and Morality examines how morality is presented in films and how films serve as a source of moral values. While the role of censorship in upholding moral standards has been considered comprehensively, the presence of moral dilemmas in films has not attracted the same level of interest. Film-makers may address moral concerns explicitly, but moral dilemmas can serve as plot devices, creating dramatic tension by providing pivotal moments when characters are called upon to make life-changing decisions. Drawing on a range of well-known and neglected films mainly from Britain and America, this book provides numerous examples of how film-makers make use of morality and how audiences are invited to explore moral issues by following characters who live with the consequences of their choices. Film and Morality introduces philosophical debates on such topics as free will, conscience and the place of moral codes in everyday life, showing the relevance of film to these issues. The book presents a distinct approach to how films might be analysed.

Morality and the Movies

Morality and the Movies PDF Author: Dan Shaw
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441145419
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
An introduction to ethical theories and contemporary moral issues through film.

Films from the Future

Films from the Future PDF Author: Andrew Maynard
Publisher: Mango Media Inc.
ISBN: 1633539067
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Deftly shows how a seemingly frivolous film genre can guide us in shaping tomorrow’s world.” —Seth Shostak, senior astronomer, SETI Institute Artificial intelligence, gene manipulation, cloning, and interplanetary travel are all ideas that seemed like fairy tales but a few years ago. And now their possibilities are very much here. But are we ready to handle these advances? This book, by a physicist and expert on responsible technology development, reveals how science fiction movies can help us think about and prepare for the social consequences of technologies we don’t yet have, but that are coming faster than we imagine. Films from the Future looks at twelve movies that take us on a journey through the worlds of biological and genetic manipulation, human enhancement, cyber technologies, and nanotechnology. Readers will gain a broader understanding of the complex relationship between science and society. The movies mix old and new, and the familiar and unfamiliar, to provide a unique, entertaining, and ultimately transformative take on the power of emerging technologies, and the responsibilities they come with.

Movies and the Moral Adventure of Life

Movies and the Moral Adventure of Life PDF Author: Alan A. Stone
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262261189
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
Essays on small art films and big-budget blockbusters, including Antonia's Line, American Beauty, Schindler's List, and The Passion of the Christ, that view films as life lessons, enlarging our sense of human possibilities. For Alan Stone, a one-time Freudian analyst and former president of the American Psychiatric Society, movies are the great modern, democratic medium for exploring our individual and collective lives. They provide occasions for reflecting on what he calls “the moral adventure of life”: the choices people make—beyond the limits of their character and circumstances—in response to life's challenges. The quality of these choices is, for him, the measure of a life well lived. In this collection of his film essays, Stone reads films as life texts. He is engaged more by their ideas than their visual presentation, more by their power to move us than by their commercial success. Stone writes about both art films and big-budget Hollywood blockbusters. And he commands an extraordinary range of historical, literary, cultural, and scientific reference that reflects his impressive personal history: professor of law and medicine, football player at Harvard in the late 1940s, director of medical training at McLean Hospital, and advisor to Attorney General Janet Reno on behavioral science. In the end, Stone's enthusiasms run particularly to films that embrace the sheer complexity of life, and in doing so enlarge our sense of human possibilities: in Antonia's Line, he sees an emotionally vivid picture of a world beyond patriarchy; in Thirteen Conversations about One Thing, the power of sheer contingency in human life; and in American Beauty, how beauty in ordinary experience draws us outside ourselves, and how beauty and justice are distinct goods, with no intrinsic connection. Other films discussed in these essays (written between 1993 and 2006 for Boston Review) include Un Coeur en Hiver, Schindler's List, Pulp Fiction, Thirteen Days, the 1997 version of Lolita, The Battle of Algiers, The Passion of the Christ, Persuasion, and Water.

Moral Theory at the Movies

Moral Theory at the Movies PDF Author: Dean A. Kowalski
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0742547876
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 375

Get Book Here

Book Description
Moral Theory at the Movies provides students with a wonderfully approachable introduction to ethics. The book incorporates film summaries and study questions to draw students into ethical theory and then pairs them with classical philosophical texts. The students see how moral theories, dilemmas, and questions are represented in the given films and learn to apply these theories to the world they live in. There are 36 films and a dozen readings including: Thank you for Smoking, Plato's Gorgias, John Start Mill's Utilitarianism, Hotel Rwanda, Plato's Republic, and Horton Hears a Who. Topics cover a wide variety of ethical theories including, ethical subjectivism, moral relativism, ethical theory, and virtue ethics. Moral Theory at the Movies will appeal to students and help them think about how philosophy is relevant today.

Screen Stories

Screen Stories PDF Author: Carl R. Plantinga
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190867132
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
The way we communicate with each other is vital to preserving the cultural ecology, or wellbeing, of a place and time. Do we listen to each other? Do we ask the right questions? Do we speak about each other with respect or disdain? The stories that we convey on screens, or what author Carl Plantinga calls 'screen stories, ' are one powerful and pervasive means by which we communicate with each other. Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement argues that film and media studies needs to move toward an an approach to ethics that is more appropriate for mass consumer culture and the lives of its citizens. Primarily concerned with the relationship between media and viewers, this book considers ethical criticism and the emotional power of screen stories that makes such criticism necessary. The content we consume--from television shows and movies to advertisements--can significantly affect our welfare on a personal and societal level, and thus, this content is subject to praise and celebration, or questioning and even condemnation. The types of screen stories that circulate contribute to the cultural ecology of a time and place; through shared attention they influence what individuals think and feel. Plantinga develops a theory of the power of screen stories to affect both individuals and cultures, asserting that we can better respond ethically to such media if we understand the sources of its influence on us.

Mouse Morality

Mouse Morality PDF Author: Annalee R. Ward
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292773935
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book Here

Book Description
2004 – Clifford G. Christians Ethics Research Award — The Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research Kids around the world love Disney animated films, and many of their parents trust the Disney corporation to provide wholesome, moral entertainment for their children. Yet frequent protests and even boycotts of Disney products and practices reveal a widespread unease with the sometimes mixed and inconsistent moral values espoused in Disney films as the company attempts to appeal to the largest possible audience. In this book, Annalee R. Ward uses a variety of analytical tools based in rhetorical criticism to examine the moral messages taught in five recent Disney animated films—The Lion King, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, and Mulan. Taking the films on their own terms, she uncovers the many mixed messages they purvey: for example, females can be leaders—but male leadership ought to be the norm; stereotyping is wrong—but black means evil; historical truth is valued—but only tell what one can sell, etc. Adding these messages together, Ward raises important questions about the moral ambiguity of Disney's overall worldview and demonstrates the need for parents to be discerning in letting their children learn moral values and life lessons from Disney films.

Environmental Ethics and Film

Environmental Ethics and Film PDF Author: Pat Brereton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317752686
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
Environmental ethics presents and defends a systematic and comprehensive account of the moral relation between human beings and their natural environment and assumes that human behaviour toward the natural world can and is governed by moral norms. In contemporary society, film has provided a powerful instrument for the moulding of such ethical attitudes. Through a close examination of the medium, Environmental Ethics and Film explores how historical ethical values can be re-imagined and re-constituted for more contemporary audiences. Building on an extensive back-catalogue of eco-film analysis, the author focuses on a diverse selection of contemporary films which target audiences’ ethical sensibilities in very different ways. Each chapter focuses on at least three close readings of films and documentaries, examining a wide range of environmental issues as they are illustrated across contemporary Hollywood films. This book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of environmental communication, film studies, media and cultural studies, environmental philosophy and ethics.

Imagining America at War

Imagining America at War PDF Author: Cynthia Weber
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000155293
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ten films released between 9/11 and Gulf War II reflect raging debates about US foreign policy and what it means to be an American. Tracing the portrayal of America in the films Pearl Harbor (World War II); We Were Soldiers and The Quiet American (the Vietnam War); Behind Enemy Lines, Black Hawk Down and Kandahar (episodes of humanitarian intervention); Collateral Damage and In the Bedroom (vengeance in response to loss); Minority Report (futurist pre-emptive justice); and Fahrenheit 9/11 (an explicit critique of Bush’s entire war on terror), Cynthia Weber presents a stimulating new study of how Americans construct their identity and the moral values that inform their foreign policy. This is not just another book about post-9/11 America. It introduces the concept of 'moral grammars of war', and explains how they are articulated: Many Americans asked in the wake of 9/11 – not only 'why do they hate us?' but 'what does it mean to be a moral America(n) and how might such an America(n) act morally in contemporary international politics? This text explores how these questions were answered at the intersections of official US foreign policy and post-9/11 popular films. It also details US foreign policy formation in relation to traditional US narratives about US identity ‘who we think we were/are’, 'who we wish we’d never been', 'who we really are', and 'who we might become' as well as in relation to their foundations in nationalist discourses of gender and sexuality. This book will be of great interest to students of American Studies, US Foreign Policy, Contemporary US History, Cultural Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Film Studies.

Film and Ethics

Film and Ethics PDF Author: Lisa Downing
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135232008
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Get Book Here

Book Description
Film & Ethics considers a range of films and texts of film criticism alongside disparate philosophical discourses of ethics by Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Lacanian psychoanalysts and postmodern theorists.