Film Criticism as Cultural Fantasy

Film Criticism as Cultural Fantasy PDF Author: Andrew McGregor
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783034300537
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
This book presents an unprecedented analysis of the dynamics of cultural representation and interpretation in film criticism. It examines how French critical reception of Australian cinema since the revival period of the 1970s has evolved as a narrative of perpetual discovery, and how a clear parallel can be drawn between French critics' reading of Australian film and their interpretation of an exotic Australian national identity. In French critical writing on Australian cinema, Australian identity is frequently defined in terms of extremes of cultural specificity and cultural anonymity. On the one hand, French critics construct a Euro-centric orientalist fantasy of Australia as not only a European Antipodes, but the antithesis of Europe. At the same time, French critics have tended to subordinate Australian cultural identity within the framework of a resented Anglo-American filmic and cultural hegemony. The book further explores this marginalisation by examining the influence of the French auteur paradigm, particularly in reference to the work of Jane Campion, as well as by discussing the increasingly problematic notion of national identity, and indeed national cinemas, within the universal framework of international film culture.

Science Fiction Cinema

Science Fiction Cinema PDF Author: Christine Cornea
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748628703
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This major new study offers a broad historical and theoretical reassessment of the science fiction film genre. The book explores the development of science fiction in cinema from its beginnings in early film through to recent examples of the genre. Each chapter sets analyses of chosen films within a wider historical/cultural context, while concentrating on a specific thematic issue. The book therefore presents vital and unique perspectives in its approach to the genre, which include discussion of the relevance of psychedelic imagery, the 'new woman of science', generic performance and the prevalence of 'techno-orientalism' in recent films. While American films will be one of the principle areas covered, the author also engages with a range of pertinent examples from other nations, as well as discussing the centrality of science fiction as a transnational film genre. Films discussed include The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Body Snatchers, Forbidden Planet, The Quatermass Experiment, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Demon Seed, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Wars, Altered States, Alien, Blade Runner, The Brother from Another Planet, Back to the Future, The Terminator, Predator, The One, Dark City, The Matrix, Fifth Element and eXistenZ. Key Features*Thematically organised for use as a course text.*Introduces current and past theories and practices, and provides an overview of the main themes, approaches and areas of study.*Covers new and burgeoning approaches such as generic performance and aspects of postmodern identity.*Includes new interviews with some of the main practitioners in the field: Roland Emmerich, Paul Verhoeven, Ken Russell, Stan Winston, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Joe Morton, Dean Norris and Billy Gray.

The Material Ghost

The Material Ghost PDF Author: Gilberto Perez
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801865239
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
Gilberto Perez draws on his lifelong love of the movies as well as his work as a film scholar to write a lively, wide-ranging, penetrating study of films and filmmakers and the nature of the art form.

Fantasy and the Cinema

Fantasy and the Cinema PDF Author: James Donald
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
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Reality and Fantasy in American Independent Cinema

Reality and Fantasy in American Independent Cinema PDF Author: Rick Zinman
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031702077
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description


Culture, Identities and Technology in the Star Wars Films

Culture, Identities and Technology in the Star Wars Films PDF Author: Carl Silvio
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476611068
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Released in May 1977, the original Star Wars movie inaugurated the age of the movie blockbuster. It also redefined the use of cinematic special effects, creating a new textual universe that now stretches through three decades, two trilogies and generations of fascinated viewers. The body of critical analysis that has developed from this epic focuses primarily on the Star Wars universe as a contemporary myth. However, like any fiction, it must also be viewed--and consequently analyzed--as a product of the culture which created it. The essays in this book analyze the Star Wars trilogies as a culturally and historically specific phenomenon. Moving away from the traditional myth-based criticism of the films, the essayists employ a cultural studies model to examine how this phenomenon intersects with social formations such as economics, technology, race and gender. Critical approaches are varied and include political and economic analysis informed by feminism, contemporary race theory, Marxism, new media studies and post-humanism. Among the topics covered are the connections between the trilogies and our own cultural landscape; the problematic issues of race and gender; and the thematic implications of Lucas' presentation of technology. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Fantasy Fiction into Film

Fantasy Fiction into Film PDF Author: Leslie Stratyner
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476611351
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This work examines the symbolism of fantasy fiction, literal and figurative representation in fantastic film adaptations, and the imaginative differences between page and screen. Essays focus on movies adapted from various types of fantasy fiction--novels, short stories and graphic novels--and study the transformation and literal translation from text to film in the Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Howl's Moving Castle, Finding Neverland, The Wizard of Oz, Wicked and Practical Magic.

Locating the Voice in Film

Locating the Voice in Film PDF Author: Tom Whittaker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190261137
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This book locates the voice in cinema in different national and transnational contexts, to explore how the critical approaches to the voice as well as the practices of sound design, technologies and even reception are often grounded in cultural specificity, to present readings which challenge traditional theories of the voice in film.

Fantasy

Fantasy PDF Author: Kim-Anh Schreiber
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781940090115
Category : Essays
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Fiction. Drama. Literary Nonfiction. Film. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Part exegesis on Nobuhiko Obayashi's film HOUSE and part meditation on the ineffable specters that inhabit homes and ancestral histories, FANTASY is a daughter's story of her Vietnamese mother and their twin journeys towards belonging with one another and in the world. Where exilic, inherited memory encounters its limits, FANTASY reaches towards cult cinematic atmospheres, irreverent flowers, pop culture, and photographs with no images, making for a reading experience like no other. "Schreiber uses the fabric of cinema and horror to quasi-measure the length and width of her pre-adolescent and adolescent consciousness. It's a GORGEOUS dress that the ghost in her psyche demands that it wears before falling into ash. Here, in these immolatable, scriptive dialogues with all of her consanguineous, anecdotal, exegetical selves ('who become shoes without feet that walk back and forth' in a house that eats like hungry ghosts), her psyche is cut, recut, uncut, though not forgotten, un-linearly and nonchalantly and numerously, by her relationship to film and her relationship with her Vietnamese mother, surrogated mother in grandmother(s) and auntie(s). ... As Kim-Anh Schreiber seeks closure with the uncloseable, we see an acutely talented scholar and inventive memoirist." --Vi Khi Nao. "'Schreiber, the daughter of a Vietnamese refugee and a German immigrant, combines recognizable modes--memoir, criticism, dramatic play script--into something as uncategorizable as the film she deploys throughout the book as muse and foil: Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1977 post-Hiroshima 'horror-comedy' HOUSE, in which generations of women are trapped together in a haunted house. Beginning with extended considerations of the instability of memory ('an evocative curator'), of the 'impossible problem of drawing a picture,' and of the pull to use projection and doubling as bridges across gaps in experience and understanding, FANTASY finally resolves into a flickering, unstable but vivid portrait of a mother and daughter both separated and bonded by history, violence, human fallibility, and love." --Anna Moschovakis

The Age of Promiscuity

The Age of Promiscuity PDF Author: Doru Pop
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498580610
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
This book presents an original and engaging look at contemporary popular culture, opening with the provocative idea that this is a day and age of complete exhaustion of ideas, images, stories, and myths. Questioning the effects of content recycling in cinema and other media, the author further elaborates on the repurposing of cultural junk, the reassembling of narratives and myths. The thought-provoking hypothesis proposed in this research is that we have entered an age of cultural promiscuity. By analyzing the mutations of myth-making practices and connecting them with larger cultural manifestations, the author explains these transformations as integral to the development of a myth-illogical imagination. Cinematic and mythological representations in mainstream Hollywood films have reached a point of amalgamation with no return, which marks the beginning of a "fourth age of representations," where signs and meanings are manifested in illogical permutations. This is more explicit in films that commingle aliens, cowboys, undead American presidents, and zombie nazis, joining together in the same narrative ghosts, werewolves, and vampires, aggregating disjoined storylines and historical fake facts, all coalesced in an orgy of empty burlesque and infantile masquerades. This interdisciplinary research combines cultural studies, film criticism, art and myth interpretations, bringing into the debate multiple concepts from related fields such as critical theory and media criticism. The book also opens up to innovative approaches from a wide array of academic disciplines, offering researchers, students and those fascinated by the transformations happening in contemporary cinema an interpretative tool based on a revised dialectic approach. The conclusion is that we are now victims of a zombie semiotics. Meaning-making in contemporary culture, politics, and aesthetics is dominated by a process of incessant desecration of significations, specific to the total mishmash of representations analyzed here.