Interpreting Films

Interpreting Films PDF Author: Janet Staiger
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216061
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Employing a wide range of examples from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Birth of a Nation to Zelig and Personal Best, Janet Staiger argues that a historical examination of spectators' responses to films can make a valuable contribution to the history, criticism, and philosophy of cultural products. She maintains that as artifacts, films do not contain immanent meanings, that differences among interpretations have historical bases, and that these variations are due to social, political, and economic conditions as well as the viewers' constructed images of themselves. After proposing a theory of reception study, the author demonstrates its application mainly through analyzing the varying responses of audiences to certain films at specific moments in history. Staiger gives special attention to how questions of class, gender, sexual preference, race, and ethnicity enter into film viewers' interpretations. Her analysis reflects recent developments in post-structuralism, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies, and includes a discussion of current reader-response models in literary and film studies as well as an alternative approach for thinking about historical readers and spectators.

Interpreting Films

Interpreting Films PDF Author: Janet Staiger
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216061
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
Employing a wide range of examples from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Birth of a Nation to Zelig and Personal Best, Janet Staiger argues that a historical examination of spectators' responses to films can make a valuable contribution to the history, criticism, and philosophy of cultural products. She maintains that as artifacts, films do not contain immanent meanings, that differences among interpretations have historical bases, and that these variations are due to social, political, and economic conditions as well as the viewers' constructed images of themselves. After proposing a theory of reception study, the author demonstrates its application mainly through analyzing the varying responses of audiences to certain films at specific moments in history. Staiger gives special attention to how questions of class, gender, sexual preference, race, and ethnicity enter into film viewers' interpretations. Her analysis reflects recent developments in post-structuralism, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies, and includes a discussion of current reader-response models in literary and film studies as well as an alternative approach for thinking about historical readers and spectators.

Interpreting Films

Interpreting Films PDF Author: Janet Staiger
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691006161
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Political, and economic conditions as well as the viewers' constructed images of themselves. Alter proposing a theory of reception study, the author demonstrates its application mainly through analyzing the varying responses of audiences to certain films at specific moments in history. Staiger gives special attention to how questions of class, gender, sexual preference, race, and ethnicity enter into film viewers' interpretations. Her analysis reflects recent.

Interpreting Films

Interpreting Films PDF Author: Janet Staiger
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780691047973
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Political, and economic conditions as well as the viewers' constructed images of themselves. Alter proposing a theory of reception study, the author demonstrates its application mainly through analyzing the varying responses of audiences to certain films at specific moments in history. Staiger gives special attention to how questions of class, gender, sexual preference, race, and ethnicity enter into film viewers' interpretations. Her analysis reflects recent.

Making Meaning

Making Meaning PDF Author: David BORDWELL
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674028538
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
David Bordwell's new book is at once a history of film criticism, an analysis of how critics interpret film, and a proposal for an alternative program for film studies. It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship. As such Making Meaning should be a landmark book, a focus for debate from which future film study will evolve. Bordwell systematically maps different strategies for interpreting films and making meaning, illustrating his points with a vast array of examples from Western film criticism. Following an introductory chapter that sets out the terms and scope of the argument, Bordwell goes on to show how critical institutions constrain and contain the very practices they promote, and how the interpretation of texts has become a central preoccupation of the humanities. He gives lucid accounts of the development of film criticism in France, Britain, and the United States since World War II; analyzes this development through two important types of criticism, thematic-explicatory and symptomatic; and shows that both types, usually seen as antithetical, in fact have much in common. These diverse and even warring schools of criticism share conventional, rhetorical, and problem-solving techniques--a point that has broad-ranging implications for the way critics practice their art. The book concludes with a survey of the alternatives to criticism based on interpretation and, finally, with the proposal that a historical poetics of cinema offers the most fruitful framework for film analysis.

Viewing and Interpreting Films Otherwise

Viewing and Interpreting Films Otherwise PDF Author: Ahmadou Siendou Konaté
Publisher: Boucliers Publications
ISBN: 2491557452
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
This book presents things to the reader in ways that are untraditional and different. Look is taken at the political import of the filmic productions at hand. Guiding questions will be, but are not limited to the following: why was such a film produced by a person like the producer? Does the film attain the political goal the politicalized viewer sees in it? These are the questions the author seeks to answer in the book.

Identifying and Interpreting Incongruent Film Music

Identifying and Interpreting Incongruent Film Music PDF Author: David Ireland
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030005062
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
This book explores the concept of incongruent film music, challenging the idea that this label only describes music that is inappropriate or misfitting for a film’s images and narrative. Defining incongruence as a lack of shared properties in the audiovisual relationship, this study examines various types of incongruence between a film and its music and considers the active role that it can play in the construction of a film’s meaning and influencing audience response. Synthesising findings from research in the psychology of music in multimedia, as well as from ideas sourced in semiotics, film music, and poststructuralist theory, this interdisciplinary book provides a holistic perspective that reflects the complexity of moments of film-music incongruence. With case studies including well-known films such as Gladiator and The Shawshank Redemption, this book combines scene analysis and empirical audience reception tests to emphasise the subjectivity, context-dependency, and multi-dimensionality inherent in identifying and interpreting incongruent film music.

American History/American Film

American History/American Film PDF Author: John E. O'Connor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474281907
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
In this pioneering work, sixteen historians analyse individual films for deeper insight into US institutions, values and lifestyles. Linking all of the essays is the belief that film holds much of value for the historian seeking to understand and interpret American history and culture. This title will be equally valuable for students and scholars in history using film for analysis as well as film students and scholars exploring the way social and historical circumstances are reflected and represented in film.

Interpreting the Moving Image

Interpreting the Moving Image PDF Author: Noel Carroll
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521589703
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
A collection of film essays by the well-respected critic, Noël Carroll.

Interpretation and Film Studies

Interpretation and Film Studies PDF Author: Phillip Novak
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030447391
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This book argues that the sustained interpretation of individual movies has, contrary to conventional wisdom, never been a major preoccupation of film studies—that, indeed, the field is marked by a dearth of effective, engaging, and enlightening critical analyses of single films. The book makes this case by surveying what has been written about four historically important and well-known movies (D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East, Marcel Carné’s Port of Shadows, Mike Nichols’s The Graduate, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert), none of which has been the focus of sustained critical attention, and by exhaustively examining the kinds of work published in four influential film journals (Cinema Journal, Screen, Wide Angle, and Movie). The book goes on to argue for the value of the work of interpretation, illustrating this value through extended analyses of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and Christopher Nolan’s Memento, both of which thematize interpretation. Novak demonstrates the causes and consequences of reading poorly and the importance of reading well.

Seeing Film and Reading Feminist Theology

Seeing Film and Reading Feminist Theology PDF Author: U. Vollmer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230606857
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Using feminist theory and examining films that describe women artists who see others through the lens of feminist theology, this book puts forward an original view of the act of seeing as an ethical activity - a gesture of respect for and belief in another person's visible and invisible sides, which guarantees the safekeeping of the Other's memory.