Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy

Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy PDF Author: Nicholas de Villiers
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452967806
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
A brilliant approach to the queerness of one of Taiwan’s greatest auteurs A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films. Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai’s films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation. Conceiving of Tsai’s cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai’s body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema.

Care and Disability

Care and Disability PDF Author: D. Christopher Gabbard
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040303684
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Care and Disability is an edited collection offering critical perspectives on representations of care and disability, by emerging and established scholars across multiple periods, regions, and genres of literary studies. The authors demonstrate the range of fields in which care ethics can elucidate alternative cultural and social dynamics, including Indigenous, African American, and Asian texts, and historical eras that predate the modern medical profession. This collection is committed to drawing out the changing racial, gendered, classed, and sexual elements of care, emphasizing how care communities develop as alternatives to the heteronormative couple and the nuclear family. Drawing from the care ethics and disability theory, the work in this volume demonstrates the possibilities inherent in this new cutting-edge field. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, care ethics, sociology, narrative medicine, Romanticism, eighteenth-century studies, transatlantic nineteenth-century studies, film, and contemporary race studies.

The Rebirth of Suspense

The Rebirth of Suspense PDF Author: Rick Warner
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231559526
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Typically, films are suspenseful when they keep us on the edge of our seats, when glimpses of a turning doorknob, a ticking clock, or a looming silhouette quicken our pulses. Exemplified by Alfred Hitchcock’s masterworks and the countless thrillers they influenced, such films captivate viewers with propulsive plots that spur emotional investment in the fates of protagonists. Suspense might therefore seem to be a curious concept to associate with art films featuring muted characters, serene landscapes, and unrushed rhythms, in which plot is secondary to mood and tone. This ambitious and wide-ranging book offers a redefinition of suspense by considering its unlikely incarnations in the contemporary films that have been called “slow cinema.” Rick Warner shows how slowness builds suspense through atmospheric immersion, narrative sparseness, and the withholding of information, causing viewers to oscillate among boredom, curiosity, and dread. He focuses on works in which suspense arises where the boundaries between art cinema and popular genres—such as horror, thriller, science fiction, and gothic melodrama—become indefinite, including Chantal Akerman’s La captive, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves, Lucrecia Martel’s Zama, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy, and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Warner investigates the pivotal role of sound in generating suspense and traces how the experience of suspense has changed in the era of digital streaming. The Rebirth of Suspense develops a fresh theory, history, typology, and analysis of suspense that casts new light on the workings of films across global cinema.

Tsaï Ming-liang

Tsaï Ming-liang PDF Author: Jean-Pierre Rehm
Publisher: Dis Voir Editions
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
The first in-depth study of filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang's sensual and solitary universe. Acclaimed Taiwan-based filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang is renowned for creating some of the most nihilistic and erotic films of the 1990s. His films often use water in its multiple capacities--cleansing, raining, nourishing, flooding--to symbolize his character's emotions. Depicting the human body as a mysterious, malleable machine consuming and excreting on its own volition, he turns bodily functions into metaphors for loneliness, desire, decay, and escape. His obsessive and isolated characters give his films a bleak outlook, but they also embody a wry sense of absurdist humor. Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang (born 1957) has directed a dozen full-length films, inlcluding Rebels of Neon God, Vive l'Amour (Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, 1994), The River (Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, 1997), The Hole, The Wayward Cloud, Face and Stray Dogs (Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, 2013). In 2013, Tsai was voted by UK newspaper The Guardian as number 18 of the 40 best directors in the world.

Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness

Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness PDF Author: Song Hwee Lim
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824839234
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
How can we qualify slowness in cinema? What is the relationship between a cinema of slowness and a wider socio-cultural “slow movement”? A body of films that shares a propensity toward slowness has emerged in many parts of the world over the past two decades. This is the first book to examine the concept of cinematic slowness and address this fascinating phenomenon in contemporary film culture. Providing a critical investigation into questions of temporality, materiality, and aesthetics, and examining concepts of authorship, cinephilia, and nostalgia, Song Hwee Lim offers insight into cinematic slowness through the films of the Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang. Through detailed analysis of aspects of stillness and silence in cinema, Lim delineates the strategies by which slowness in film can be constructed. By drawing on writings on cinephilia and the films of directors such as Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, he makes a passionate case for a slow cinema that calls for renewed attention to the image and to the experience of time in film. Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness will speak to readers with an interest in art cinema, queer studies, East Asian culture, and the question of time. In an age of unrelenting acceleration of pace both in film and in life, this book invites us to pause and listen, to linger and look, and, above all, to take things slowly.

Opacity and the Closet

Opacity and the Closet PDF Author: Nicholas De Villiers
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816675708
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Looking beyond the closet at the lives and works of renowned queer public figures

Regarding Frank Capra

Regarding Frank Capra PDF Author: Eric Loren Smoodin
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822333944
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
From feature films to television production.

1989

1989 PDF Author: Krishan Kumar
Publisher: Choice Publishing Co., Ltd.
ISBN: 9780816634538
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
In 1989, from East Berlin to Budapest and Bucharest to Moscow, communism was falling. The walls were coming down and the world was being changed in ways that seemed entirely new. The conflict of ideas and ideals that began with the French Revolution of 1789 culminated in these revolutions, which raised the prospects of the "return to Europe" of East and Central European nations, the "restarting of their history," even, for some, the "end of history." What such assertions and aspirations meant, and what the larger events that inspired them mean-not just for the world of history and politics, but for our very understanding of that world-are the questions Krishan Kumar explores in 1989. A well-known and widely respected scholar, Kumar places these revolutions of 1989 in the broadest framework of political and social thought, helping us see how certain ideas, traditions, and ideological developments influenced or accompanied these movements-and how they might continue to play out. Asking questions about some of the central dilemmas facing modern society in the new century, Kumar offers critical insight into how these questions might be answered and how political, social, and historical ideas and ideals can shape our destiny. Contradictions Series, volume 12

Taiwan Cinema

Taiwan Cinema PDF Author: G. Hong
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230118321
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
A groundbreaking study of Taiwan cinema, Hong provides helpful insight into how it is taught and studied by taking into account not only the auteurs of New Taiwan Cinema, but also the history of popular genre films before the 1980s. The book is essential for students and scholars of Taiwan, film and visual studies, and East Asian cultural history.

Sexography

Sexography PDF Author: Nicholas de Villiers
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452953902
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an eruption of nonfiction films on sex work. The first book to examine a cross-section of this diverse and transnational body of work, Sexography confronts the ethical questions raised by ethnographic documentary and interviews with sexually marginalized subjects. Nicholas de Villiers argues that carnal and cultural knowledge are inextricably entangled in ethnographic sex work documentaries. De Villiers offers a reading of cinema as a technology of truth and advances a theory of confessional and counterconfessional performance by the interviewed subject who must negotiate both loaded questions and stigma. He pays special attention to the tactical negotiation of power in these films and how cultural and geopolitical shifts have affected sex work and sex workers. Throughout, Sexography analyzes the films of a range of non–sex-worker filmmakers, including Jennie Livingston, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Shohini Ghosh, and Cui Zi’en, as well as films produced by sex workers. In addition, it identifies important parallels and intersections between queer and sex worker rights activist movements and their documentary historiography. De Villiers ultimately demonstrates how commercial sex is intertwined with culture and power. He advocates shifting our approach from scrutinizing the motives of those who sell sex to examining the motives and roles of the filmmakers and transnational audiences creating and consuming films about sex work.