Download or read book Cinematic Quests for Identity written by Maria Garcia and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-04-02 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether embodied in literature, theater, or film, an enduring theme of many artistic works has been the protagonist’s search for identity. Such quests are typically psychological or spiritual journeys and depicted on the screen in a variety of manifestations—endeavors embarked upon to address an emotional trauma or to overcome an obstacle in the hero’s life. Using Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête as a leitmotif, these pursuits are discussed by author Maria Garcia as encounters with the “Beast.” At the end of their quests, heroes are reborn into their new identities, while the Beast disappears, transforms, or dies. In Cinematic Quests for Identity: The Hero’s Encounter with the Beast, Garcia examines the cinematic conventions of the male and female search for individuation across several genres. After discussing La Belle et La Bête, the author looks at a number of films including three iconic male journeys—The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Searchers, and The Deer Hunter. Additional chapters focus on The Silence of the Lambs, Bringing Up Baby, The Lady Eve, The Secret of Roan Inish, The Natural, and Moneyball. The book concludes with a consideration of the three fairy tale films by Catherine Breillat—Fat Girl, Bluebeard, and The Sleeping Beauty—and the female characters in several Robert Bresson films, including The Trial of Joan of Arc. Providing a unique and original perspective on films throughout the world, this provocative book draws upon Jungian thought, as well as several literary traditions including fairy tales, epic poetry, and Greek and Celtic mythology. Aimed at scholars of film and film theory, Cinematic Quests for Identity will also appeal to movie fans interested in a deeper understanding of films that explore a character’s struggle to live a conscious life.

Download or read book The Cinema of the Low Countries written by Ernest Mathijs and published by Wallflower Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Films from the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg have long been regarded as isolated texts. The Cinema of the Low Countries points to the interconnectedness between these national cinemas from the point of view of genre, language and format, and their local and international importance by explicitly focusing on 24 key feature films and documentaries from the region. Building on each film's relationship with its particular cultural context, this volume presents twenty-four specially commissioned essays that explore the particular significance and influence of a wide range of exemplary films. Covering the work of internationally acclaimed directors such as Joris Ivens, Henri Stock, Paul Verhoeven and the Dardenne Brothers and featuring the films Turkish Delight, The Vanishing, Daughters of Darkness, Rosetta, Soldiers of Orange and Man Bites Dog, this collection offers an original approach to the appreciation of a diverse and increasingly important regional cinema.

Download or read book Zoom In Zoom Out written by Sandra Barriales-Bouche and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the context of the transformations that Europe is undergoing, Zoom in, Zoom out: Crossing Borders in Contemporary European Cinema attempts to serve as a testimony to the multiple ways in which European filmmakers are questioning the many borders of the continent. European films have become a vital cultural space where the relationship between borders and identity is being renegotiated. The films discussed here self-consciously address the question of European identity while overtly crossing geographic, cultural, linguistic and aesthetic borders. While all the articles explore the crossing of borders in Contemporary European films, the volume maintains diverse themes and perspectives as subtopics. It includes articles not only about films that deal thematically with border-crossings, but also articles that examine movies that cross borders in genres and techniques. The articles have different theoretical approaches (Film theory, Cultural Studies, History, Sociology, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis) and cover films from well-known cinematic traditions (French, Spanish, German, and Italian) as well as lesser-known cinematic traditions (Yugoslavian, Greek, and Irish). As a whole, the essays frame the self-conscious gesture by European filmmakers to define European cinema as a work-in-progress, or at the very least, as a project that, like Europe itself, raises as many questions as it answers. "This volume is a welcome addition to the growing critical literature on the evolution of the conception and practice of national cinema in Europe over the last two decades. Sandra Barriales-Bouche and Marjorie Attignol Salvodon have chosen a solid selection of representative case studies that reflects different critical approaches to the problem of maintaining local or national cinema production in Europe during a period of intense globalization. Their insightful introduction formulates the theme of “unsettled borders” and “renegotiated identities” that will resonate in the nine essays that follow. With a focus on the critical concept of these unsettled borders, the various authors explore the ways that the traditional mark of national space has been transformed through political and economic realignments as well as new technologies and the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers for whom national cinema no longer means what it did even twenty years ago. The volume provides a good balance of critical approaches that includes auteur studies, descriptions of state policies and the particular practices of filmmakers and producers in different parts of the continent (Spain, Germany, Ireland, the Balkans) and, finally, useful appendices that provide a close-up view of the complex nature of international co-productions." —Marvin D’Lugo, Professor of Spanish, Clark University "This is an interesting collection of essays that has been well conceived and organised. The standard of writing is high and I recommend publication. I particularly commend the conceptual framework underpinning the volume. This marries a cultural studies approach, which still dominates the study of film in Area Studies and language departments across Europe and the US (where filmic texts are increasingly used as teaching tools), with the more industry-based focus one tends to find adopted by Media and Screen Studies departments. Thus this collection will appeal to a wide range of students and academics. The introduction sets out the volume’s overarching framework cogently and clearly, giving a nuanced exploration of the way that the notion of the border can be used as a dynamic prism to help define and explore the limits of our understanding of Europe, European identity and European culture, within which cinema has long played a key role. The editors give a good account, for example, of the way film has been employed as a space to explore the possibilities of European integration by EU politicians as well as highlighting the flaws inherent within this project. They do, however, perhaps suggest a certain Western European/North American-centric view in their suggestion that the cinema of Yugoslavia, Greece or Ireland is somehow less well known than other national and transnational cinemas explored here. Less well known to whom? ... However, from the broad range of cinemas explored in the rest of the volume clearly this is not the case. Particular high points for me are the chapters on the work of Fatih Akin by Janis Little Solomon and John Davidson’s discussion of Schulze gets the Blues, as well as Olivier Asselin’s fascinating account of Database Cinema. This will be a good addition to scholarship on European film and I look forward to receiving my copy." —Professor Paul Cooke (University of Leeds)

Download or read book The Figure of the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema written by Temenuga Trifonova and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Figure of the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema explores contemporary debates around the concepts of 'Europe' and 'European identity' through an examination of recent European films dealing with various aspects of globalization (the refugee crisis, labour migration, the resurgence of nationalism and ethnic violence, neoliberalism, post-colonialism) with a particular attention to the figure of the migrant and the ways in which this figure challenges us to rethink Europe and its core Enlightenment values (citizenship, justice, ethics, liberty, tolerance, and hospitality) in a post-national context of ephemerality, volatility, and contingency that finds people desperately looking for firmer markers of identity. The book argues that a compelling case can be made for re-orienting the study of contemporary European cinema around the figure of the migrant viewed both as a symbolic figure (representing post-national citizenship, urbanization, the 'gap' between ethics and justice) and as a figure occupying an increasingly central place in European cinema in general rather than only in what is usually called 'migrant and diasporic cinema'. By drawing attention to the structural and affective affinities between the experience of migrants and non-migrants, Europeans and non-Europeans, Trifonova shows that it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate stories about migration from stories about life under neoliberalism in general

Download or read book Contemporary Latin American Cinema written by Deborah Shaw and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging book explores some of the most significant films to emerge from Latin America since 2000, an extraordinary period of international recognition for the region's cinema. Each chapter assesses an individual film, with some contributors considering the reasons for the unprecedented commercial and critical successes of movies such as City of God, The Motorcycle Diaries, Y tu mama tambien, and Nine Queens, while others examine why equally important films failed to break out on the international circuit. Written by leading specialists, the chapters not only offer textual analysis, but also trace the films' social context and production conditions, as well as critical national and transnational issues. Their well-rounded analyses provide a rich picture of the state of contemporary filmmaking in a range of Latin American countries. Nuanced and thought-provoking, the readings in this book will provide invaluable interpretations for students and scholars of Latin American film. Contributions by: Sarah Barrow, Nuala Finnegan, David William Foster, Miraim Haddu, Geoffrey Kantaris, Deborah Shaw, Lisa Shaw, Rob Stone, Else R. P. Vieira, and Claire Williams.

Download or read book The Journal of Korean Studies Volume 16 Number 2 Fall 2011 written by Clark W. Sorensen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The University of Washington-Korea Studies Program, in collaboration with Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, is proud to publish the Journal of Korean Studies. In 1979 Dr. James Palais (PhD Harvard 1968), former UW professor of Korean History edited and published the first volume of the Journal of Korean Studies. For thirteen years it was a leading academic forum for innovative, in-depth research on Korea. In 2004 former editors Gi-Wook Shin and John Duncan revived this outstanding publication at Stanford University. In August 2008 editorial responsibility transferred back to the University of Washington. With the editorial guidance of Clark Sorensen and Donald Baker, the Journal of Korean Studies (JKS) continues to be dedicated to publishing outstanding articles, from all disciplines, on a broad range of historical and contemporary topics concerning Korea. In addition the JKS publishes reviews of the latest Korea-related books. To subscribe to the Journal of Korean Studies or order print back issues, please click here.

Download or read book The Asian Cinema Experience written by Stephen Teo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the range and dynamism of contemporary Asian cinemas, covering East Asia (China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan), Southeast Asia (Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia), South Asia (Bollywood), and West Asia (Iran), in order to discover what is common about them and to engender a theory or concept of "Asian Cinema". It goes beyond existing work which provides a field survey of Asian cinema, probing more deeply into the field of Asian Cinema, arguing that Asian Cinema constitutes a separate pedagogical subject, and putting forward an alternative cinematic paradigm. The book covers "styles", including the works of classical Asian Cinema masters, and specific genres such as horror films, and Bollywood and Anime, two very popular modes of Asian Cinema; "spaces", including artistic use of space and perspective in Chinese cinema, geographic and personal space in Iranian cinema, the private "erotic space" of films from South Korea and Thailand, and the persistence of the family unit in the urban spaces of Asian big cities in many Asian films; and "concepts" such as Pan-Asianism, Orientalism, Nationalism and Third Cinema. The rise of Asian nations on the world stage has been coupled with a growing interest, both inside and outside Asia, of Asian culture, of which film is increasingly an indispensable component – this book provides a rich, insightful overview of what exactly constitutes Asian Cinema.

Download or read book Fiction Film and Indian Popular Cinema written by Florian Stadtler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-30 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses the novels of Salman Rushdie and their stylistic conventions in the context of Indian popular cinema and its role in the elaboration of the author’s arguments about post-independence postcolonial India. Focusing on different genres of Indian popular cinema, such as the ‘Social’, ‘Mythological’ and ‘Historical’, Stadtler examines how Rushdie’s writing foregrounds the epic, the mythic, the tragic and the comic, linking them in storylines narrated in cinematic parameters. The book shows that Indian popular cinema’s syncretism becomes an aesthetic marker in Rushdie’s fiction that allows him to elaborate on the multiplicity of Indian identity, both on the subcontinent and abroad, and illustrates how Rushdie uses Indian popular cinema in his narratives to express an aesthetics of hybridity and a particular conceptualization of culture with which ‘India’ has become identified in a global context. Also highlighted are Rushdie’s uses of cinema to inflect his reading of India as a pluralist nation and of the hybrid space occupied by the Indian diaspora across the world. The book connects Rushdie’s storylines with modes of cinematic representation to explore questions about the role, place and space of the individual in relation to a fast-changing social, economic and political space in India and the wider world.

Download or read book French language Road Cinema written by Michael Gott and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on a corpus of films from France, Belgium and Switzerland, French-language Road Cinema contends that nowhere is the impulse to remap the spaces and identities of 'New Europe' more evident than in French-language cinema.

Download or read book European Cinema and Intertextuality written by E. Mazierska and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-07-12 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an up-to-date approach to the question of representing history through film, exploring how films represent crucial events in twentieth-century European history. This includes the Second World War, Armenian Genocide, anti-Semitic attacks in Poland, European terrorism of the 1970s, and the end of communism.

Download or read book Rethinking Testimonial Cinema in Postdictatorship Argentina written by Verónica Garibotto and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For roughly two decades after the collapse of the military regime in 1983, testimonial narrative was viewed and received as a privileged genre in Argentina. Today, however, academics and public intellectuals are experiencing "memory fatigue," a backlash against the concepts of memory and trauma, just as memory and testimonial films have reached the center of Argentinian public discourse. In Rethinking Testimonial Cinema in Postdictatorship Argentina, Verónica Garibotto looks at the causes for this reticence and argues that, rather than discarding memory texts for their repetitive excess, it is necessary to acknowledge them and their exhaustion as discourses of the present. By critically examining how trauma theory and subaltern studies have previously been applied to testimonial cinema, Garibotto rereads Argentinian films produced since 1983 and calls for an alternate interpretive framework at the intersection of semiotics, theories of affect, scholarship on hegemony, and the ideological uses of documentary and fiction. She argues that recurrent concepts—such as trauma, mourning, memory, and subalternity—miss how testimonial films have changed over time, shifting from subaltern narratives to official, hegemonic, and iconic accounts. Her work highlights the urgent need to continue to study these types of narratives, particularly at a time when military dictatorships have become entrenched in Latin America and memory narratives proliferate worldwide. Although Argentina is Garibotto’s focus, her theory can be adapted to other contexts in which narratives about recent political conflicts have shifted from alternative versions of history to official, hegemonic accounts—such as in Spanish, Chilean, Uruguayan, Brazilian, South African, and Holocaust testimonies. Garibotto’s study of testimonial cinema moves us to pursue a broader ideological analysis of the links between film and historical representation.

Download or read book Post Crisis European Cinema written by György Kalmár and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the cinematic representations of the pervasive socio-cultural change that the 21st century brought to Europe and the world. Discussing films such as I, Daniel Blake, Cold War and Jupiter’s Moon, it puts distinctively “post-crisis”, gendered representations in a complex, theoretically informed and socially committed interdisciplinary perspective that maps the newly emerging formations of masculinity at a time of rapid socio-economic transition. Kalmar argues that the series of crises that started with the 9/11 terrorist attacks changed some of our fundamental expectations about history, debunked many of our grand narratives, and thus changed the cultural logic of our (thoroughly globalized) civilization. The book focuses on the ways cinema reflects, interprets and shapes a rapidly changing world: the hot issues of the times, the new formations of identity, and the shifts in cinematic representation. This is an interdisciplinary research that is equally interested in what new the 21st century brought about, most specifically to Europe and to its white men, as in film and its responses to these socio-cultural changes.

Download or read book Ideology in Turkish Cinema written by Mustafa Mencutekin and published by Blue Dome Press. This book was released on 2014-07-16 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mencutekin takes on the role of ideology in the history of Turkish cinema critically analyzing the values and ideas that have shaped the message and stories of Turkish movies. This study is based on the thesis that to truly explore the specific issues currently vexing Turkish cinema, one has to confront the aesthetic, technological, and ideological assumptions in the deeply nationalistic and secular approach to Turkish cinema and how they engage with the real social values of Turkish society. If one hopes to attain a cinema purified from all kinds of crisis, more democracy is required to create a cinema that is at peace with the past, present, and future of Turkish society.

Download or read book The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos written by Vrasidas Karalis and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2021-09-17 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with his first film Reconstruction, released in 1970, Theo Angelopoulos’s notoriously complex cinematic language has long explored Greece’s contemporary history and questioned European culture and society. The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos offers a detailed study and critical discussion of the acclaimed filmmaker’s cinematic aesthetics as they developed over his career, exploring different styles through which Greek and European history, identity, and loss have been visually articulated throughout his oeuvre, as well as his impact on both European and global cinema.

Download or read book Heritage and Ruptures in Indian Literature Culture and Cinema written by Cornelius Crowley and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the millennial history of the Indian subcontinent. Through the various methods adopted, the objects and moments examined, it questions various linguistic, literary and artistic appropriations of the past, to address the conflicting comprehensions of the present and also the figuring/imagining of a possible future. The volume engages with this general cultural condition, in relation both to the subcontinent’s current “synchronic” reality and to certain aspects of the culture’s underlying diachronic determinations. It also reveals how the multiple heritages are negotiated through the subcontinent’s long-term sedimentational history. It scrutinizes both conservative interpretations of heritage and a possibly incremental enrichment, and the additional possibility of a mode of appropriation open to a dialectic of creative destruction, in which the patrimonial imperative is challenged, leaving room for processes of renewal and rejuvenation. The collection is organized around four major topics: Orientalism, addressed by way of the Tamil Epic Manimekalai, through the evocation of the Hastings Circle and views on a possible Hindu-Muslim unity sketched out by Sayyid Ahmed Khan; modernism in Indian and Burmese texts written in English; pictorial art, through a consideration of the work of British Asian and Indian film directors; and, finally, the current state of a body of critical thinking on gender.

Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema written by Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-11-04 with total page 743 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection offers new approaches to theorizing Asian film in relation to the history, culture, geopolitics and economics of the continent. Bringing together original essays written by established and emerging scholars, this anthology transcends the limitations of national borders to do justice to the diverse ways in which the cinema shapes Asia geographically and imaginatively in the world today. From the revival of the Silk Road as the “belt and road” of a rising China to historical ruminations on the legacy of colonialism across the continent, the authors argue that the category of “Asian cinema” from Turkey to the edges of the Pacific continues to play a vital role in cutting-edge film research. This handbook will serve as an essential guide for committed scholars, students, and all those interested in the past, present, and possible future of Asian cinema in the 21st century.

Download or read book Envisioning Taiwan written by June Yip and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004-10-07 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In discussions of postcolonial nationhood and cultural identity, Taiwan is often overlooked. Yet the island—with its complex history of colonization—presents a particularly fascinating case of the struggle to define a “nation.” While the mainland Chinese government has been unequivocal in its resistance to Taiwanese independence, in Taiwan, government control has gradually passed from mainland Chinese immigrants to the Taiwanese themselves. Two decades of democratization and the arrival of consumer culture have made the island a truly global space. Envisioning Taiwan sorts through these complexities, skillfully weaving together history and cultural analysis to give a picture of Taiwanese identity and a lesson on the usefulness and the limits of contemporary cultural theory. Yip traces a distinctly Taiwanese sense of self vis-à-vis China, Japan, and the West through two of the island’s most important cultural movements: the hsiang-t’u (or “nativist”) literature of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Taiwanese New Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. At the heart of the book are close readings of the work of the hsiang-t’u writer Hwang Chun-ming and the New Cinema filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien. Key figures in Taiwan’s assertion of a national identity separate and distinct from China, both artists portray in vibrant detail daily life on the island. Through Hwang’s and Hou’s work and their respective artistic movements, Yip explores “the imagining of a nation” on the local, national, and global levels. In the process, she exposes a perceptible shift away from traditional models of cultural authenticity toward a more fluid, postmodern hybridity—an evolution that reflects both Taiwan’s peculiar multicultural reality and broader trends in global culture.