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.

Interpretation and Film Studies

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

Get Book

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.

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.

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.

Hermeneutics of the Film World

Hermeneutics of the Film World PDF Author: Alberto Baracco
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319654004
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
This book identifies a new methodological strategy for the interpretation of film philosophizing. Many recent works in film philosophy, adopting the approach identified with the term film as philosophy, have considered film as capable of doing philosophy. Focused on the basic relationship between film and filmgoer, the proposed method is founded on the concept of the film world. Combining Merleau-Ponty’s and Ricœur’s philosophies, and reconsidering Goodman’s theory of worldmaking, the film world becomes the hermeneutic horizon from which film philosophical thought can emerge. The book shows how Ricœurian methodology has the potential to provide a valuable resource for film studies by inviting scholars to consider film interpretation in terms of film world hermeneutics.

Film Text Analysis

Film Text Analysis PDF Author: Janina Wildfeuer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317434226
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
This book examines film as a multimodal text and an audiovisual synthesis, bringing together current work within the fields of narratology, philosophy, multimodal analysis, sound as well as cultural studies in order to cover a wide range of international academic interest. The book provides new insights into current work and turns the discussion towards recent research questions and analyses, representing and constituting in each contribution new work in the discipline of film text analysis. With the help of various example analyses, all showing the methodological applicability of the discussed issues, the collection provides novel ways of considering film as one of the most complex and at the same time broadly comprehensible texts.

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.

Style and Meaning

Style and Meaning PDF Author: John Gibbs
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719065255
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
With a common focus on the decisions made by filmmakers, the essays in this collection explore different aspects of the relationship between textual detail and broader conceptual frameworks. These texts reflect not only those areas of film history which have traditionally been explored through mise-en-scène criticism, but also areas such as the avant-garde and television drama which have not tended to receive such detailed investigation. In these ways, the book conducts a series of dialogues with issues in film study which are specifically provoked by close analysis.

Mise-en-scène

Mise-en-scène PDF Author: John Gibbs
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231503113
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
Mise-en-scène: Film Style and Interpretation explores and elucidates constructions of this fundamental concept in thinking about film. In uncovering the history of mise-en-scène within film criticism, and through the detailed exploration of scenes from films as Imitation of Life and Lone Star, John Gibbs makes the case for the importance of a sensitive understanding of film style, and provides an introduction to the skills of close reading. This book thus celebrates film-making as well as film criticism that is alive to the creative possibilities of visual style.

Post-Theory

Post-Theory PDF Author: David Bordwell
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299149439
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 584

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Book Description
Since the 1970s, the academic study of film has been dominated by Structuralist Marxism, varieties of cultural theory, and the psychoanalytic ideas of Freud and Lacan. With Post-Theory, David Bordwell and Noel Carroll have opened the floor to other voices challenging the prevailing practices of film scholarship. Addressing topics as diverse as film scores, national film industries, and audience response. Post-Theory offers fresh directions for understanding film.

Jungian Film Studies

Jungian Film Studies PDF Author: Helena Bassil-Morozow
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317222393
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Jungian film studies is a fast-growing academic field, but Jungian and post-Jungian concepts are still new to many academics and film critics. Helena Bassil-Morozow and Luke Hockley present Jungian Film Studies: The Essential Guide, the first book to bring together all the different strands, issues and arguments in the discipline, and guide the reader through the various ways in which Jungian psychology can be applied to moving images. Bassil-Morozow and Hockley cover a range of Jungian concepts including the collective unconscious, archetypes, the individuation process, alchemy, and signs and symbols, showing how they can be used to discuss the core cinematic issues such as narrative structure, gender, identity, genre, authorship, and phenomenology. The authors argue that, as a place where the unconscious and conscious meet, cinema offers the potential for imagery that is psychologically potent, meaningful, and that plays a role in our personal psychological development. This much-needed book, which bridges the space between Jungian concepts and traditional film theory, will be essential reading for scholars and students of Analytical Psychology, psychoanalysis, Jungian film studies, media, film and cultural studies, psychosocial psychology and clinical psychology. It will also appeal to analytical psychologists, psychotherapists and readers with an interest in film analysis.