Taking Place argues that the relation between geographical location and the moving image is fundamental and that place grounds our experience of film and media. Its original essays analyze film, television, video, and installation art from diverse national and transnational contexts to rethink both the study of moving images and the theorization of place. Through its unprecedented—and at times even obsessive— attention to actual places, this volume traces the tensions between the global and the local, the universal and the particular, that inhere in contemporary debates on global cinema, television, art, and media.
Contributors: Rosalind Galt, U of Sussex; Frances Guerin, U of Kent; Ji-hoon Kim; Hugh S. Manon, Clark U; Ara Osterweil, McGill U; Brian Price, U of Toronto; Linda Robinson, U of Wisconsin–Whitewater; Michael Siegel; Noa Steimatsky, U of Chicago; Meghan Sutherland, U of Toronto; Mark W. Turner, Kings College London; Aurora Wallace, New York U; Charles Wolfe, U of California, Santa Barbara.
The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film examines the importance of rhetoric in the study of film and film theory. Rhetorical approaches to film studies have been widely practiced, but rarely discussed until now. Taking on such issues as Hollywood blacklisting, fascistic aesthetics, and postmodern dialogics, editor David Blakesley presents fifteen critical essays that examine rhetoric’s role in such popular films as The Fifth Element, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Usual Suspects, Deliverance, The English Patient, Pulp Fiction, The Music Man, Copycat, Hoop Dreams,and A Time to Kill.
Aided by sixteen illustrations, these insightful essays consider films rhetorically, as ways of seeing and not seeing, as acts that dramatize how people use language and images to tell stories and foster identification.
Contributors include David Blakesley, Alan Nadel, Ann Chisholm, Martin J. Medhurst, Byron Hawk, Ekaterina V. Haskins, James Roberts, Thomas W. Benson, Philip L. Simpson, Davis W. Houck, Caroline J.S. Picart, Friedemann Weidauer, Bruce Krajewski, Harriet Malinowitz, Granetta L. Richardson, and Kelly Ritter.
In the aftermath of total war and unconditional surrender, Germans found themselves receiving instruction from their American occupiers. It was not a conventional education. In their effort to transform German national identity and convert a Nazi past into a democratic future, the Americans deployed what they perceived as the most powerful and convincing weapon-movies.
In a rigorous analysis of the American occupation of postwar Germany and the military’s use of “soft power,” Jennifer Fay considers how Hollywood films, including Ninotchka, Gaslight, and Stagecoach, influenced German culture and cinema. In this cinematic pedagogy, dark fantasies of American democracy and its history were unwittingly played out on-screen. Theaters of Occupation reveals how Germans responded to these education efforts and offers new insights about American exceptionalism and virtual democracy at the dawn of the cold war.
Fay’s innovative approach examines the culture of occupation not only as a phase in U.S.–German relations but as a distinct space with its own discrete cultural practices. As the American occupation of Germany has become a paradigm for more recent military operations, Fay argues that we must question its efficacy as a mechanism of cultural and political change.
Jennifer Fay is associate professor and codirector of film studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University.
Explores how two language systems inform and cross-fertilize the author’s work
As the writer, director, producer, and cinematographer of almost all her 30 films, videos, and shorts, Abigail Child has been recognized as a major and influential practitioner of experimental cinema since the early 1970s. Hallmarks of her style are the appropriation and reassembly of found footage and fragments from disparate visual sources, ranging from industrial films and documentaries to home movies, vacation photography, and snippets of old B movies.
The resulting collages and montages are cinematic narratives that have been consistently praised for their beauty and sense of wonder and delight in the purely visual. At the same time, Child's films are noted for their incisive political commentary on issues such as gender and sexuality, class, voyeurism, poverty, and the subversive nature of propaganda.
In the essays of This Is Called Moving, Child draws on her long career as a practicing poet as well as a filmmaker to explore how these two language systems inform and cross-fertilize her work. For Child, poetry and film are both potent means of representation, and by examining the parallels between them—words and frames, lines and shots, stanzas and scenes—she discovers how the two art forms re-construct and re-present social meaning, both private and collective.
Traditions in World Cinema brings together a colorful and wide ranging collection of world cinematic traditions—national, regional, and global—all of which are in need of introduction, investigation and, in some cases, critical reassessment. The movements described range from well-known traditions such as German expressionism, Italian neorealism, French, British, and Czech new wave, and new Hollywood cinema to those of emerging significance, such as Danish Dogma, postcommunist cinema, Brazilian post–Cinema Novo, new Argentine cinema, pre-independence African film traditions, Israeli persecution films, new Iranian cinema, Hindi film songs, Chinese wenyi pian melodrama, Japanese horror, and global found-footage cinema.
The essays, all written by recognized experts in the field, are jargon free and accessible to both general readers and students. In addition, each chapter is followed by a list of suggested films and readings, offering readers pathways to further viewing and study.
Bringing fresh insights to those movements that have provided significant and noteworthy alternatives to Hollywood, this book is an essential introduction to the rich diversity of world cinema.
In May of 1976, documentary filmmaker and proclaimed socialist Raymundo Gleyzer mysteriously disappeared in Buenos Aires. Like many political activists, Gleyzer was the target of a brutalizing military junta that had recently assumed power. Amazingly, within a few decades, leftist filmmakers would be celebrated as intellectual vanguards in this same city.
In Transition Cinema, Jessica Stites Mor documents the critical role filmmakers, the film industry, and state regulators played in Argentina’s volatile transition to democracy. She shows how, during different regimes, the state moved to either inhibit or facilitate film production and its content, distribution, and exhibition. She also reveals the strategies the film industry employed to comply with, or circumvent these regulations.
Stites Mor divides the transition period into three distinct generations, each defined by a major political event and the reactions to these events in film. The first generation began with the failed civil uprising in Córdoba in 1969, and ended with the 1976 military takeover. During military rule, repressive censorship spurred underground exhibitions, and allied filmmakers with the Peronist left and radical activists. The second generation arose after the return of civilian rule in 1983. Buenos Aires became the center for state-level cultural programs that included filmmakers in debates over human rights and collective memory campaigns. In 1989, a third generation of filmmaking emerged, with new genres such as cine piquetero (picketer cinema) that portrayed a variety of social movements and brought them into the public eye. By the new millennium, Argentine filmmakers had gained the attention and financial support of international humanitarian and film industry organizations.
In this captivating study, Stites Mor examines how populist movements, political actors, filmmakers, government, and industry institutions all became deeply enmeshed in the project of Argentina’s transition cinema. She demonstrates how film emerged as the chronicler of political struggles in a dialogue with the past, present, and future, whose message transcended both cultural and national borders.
In this innovative work of cultural history, Simon Sigley tells the story of film culture in New Zealand from the establishment of the Auckland Film Society in the 1920s to the present day.
Rather than focusing on the work of individual filmmakers, Sigley approaches cinema as a form of social practice. He examines the reception of international film theories and discourses and shows how these ideas helped to shape distinct cultural practices, including new forms of reviewing; new methods of teaching; and new institutions such as film societies, art house cinemas, and film festivals. He goes on to trace the emergence in New Zealand of the full range of activities and institutions associated with a sophisticated film culture—including independent distribution and exhibition networks, film archives, university courses, a local feature film industry, and liberalized film censorship. In doing so, Sigley makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the myriad ways film can shape our thinking, our icons, our institutions, and our conversations. A fascinating case history of how a culture can develop, Transnational Film Culture in New Zealand will be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of anyone interested in film culture and cultural history.
Treacherous Subjects is a provocative and thoughtful examination of Vietnamese films and literature viewed through a feminist lens. Lan Duong investigates the postwar cultural productions of writers and filmmakers, including Tony Bui, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Tran Anh Hung.
Taking her cue from the double meaning of "collaborator," Duong shows how history has shaped the loyalties and shifting alliances of the Vietnamese, many of whom are caught between opposing/constricting forces of nationalism, patriarchy, and communism. Working at home and in France and the United States, the artists profiled in Treacherous Subjects have grappled with the political and historic meanings of collaboration. These themes, which probe into controversial issues of family and betrayal, figure heavily in fictions such as the films The Scent of Green Papaya and Surname Viet Given Name Nam.
As writers and filmmakers collaborate, Duong suggests that they lay the groundwork for both transnational feminist politics and queer critiques of patriarchy.
From 1972 to 1976, Hollywood made an unprecedented number of films targeted at black audiences. But following this era known as “blaxploitation,” the momentum suddenly reversed for black filmmakers, and a large void separates the end of blaxploitation from the black film explosion that followed the arrival of Spike Lee’s She's Gotta Have It in 1986. Illuminating an overlooked era in African American film history, Trying to Get Over is the first in-depth study of black directors working during the decade between 1977 and 1986.
Keith Corson provides a fresh definition of blaxploitation, lays out a concrete reason for its end, and explains the major gap in African American representation during the years that followed. He focuses primarily on the work of eight directors—Michael Schultz, Sidney Poitier, Jamaa Fanaka, Fred Williamson, Gilbert Moses, Stan Lathan, Richard Pryor, and Prince—who were the only black directors making commercially distributed films in the decade following the blaxploitation cycle. Using the careers of each director and the twenty-four films they produced during this time to tell a larger story about Hollywood and the shifting dialogue about race, power, and access, Corson shows how these directors are a key part of the continuum of African American cinema and how they have shaped popular culture over the past quarter century.
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