Download or read book Jacking In To the Matrix Franchise written by Matthew Kapell and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2004-06-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There have already been several very successful books devoted to the original film in the Matrix trilogy. This entirely new collection of essays is the first book to examine the trilogy as a whole - as well as related products such as The Animatrix and the computer game. Contributors tackle these subjects from a range of perspectives: religion, philosophy, gender, race, film studies, and science, providing a comprehensive view of everything Matrix-related.Reviewing the cultural and religious implications of the trilogy, authors look at:* American Religion, Community and Revitilization: Why The Matrix Resonates* Religion and Salvation, the Optiate of The Matrix Franchise* Gimme that Bullet Time Religion, or, The Dream of Spiritually Perfect Violence* Ultimate Reality: Buddhist and Gnostic Constructions of BlissAlso covered are theories of cyberworlds, issues of gender and race and the games and ethics of simulation.
Download or read book Jacking In To the Matrix written by Matthew Kapell and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2006-09-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jacking in to the Matrix franchise', edited by Matthew Kapell and William G. Doty, is a fascinating collection of essays on the movie sensation 'The Matrix Trilogy.
Download or read book Sound Design and Science Fiction written by William Whittington and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-01-27 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sound is half the picture, and since the 1960s, film sound not only has rivaled the innovative imagery of contemporary Hollywood cinema, but in some ways has surpassed it in status and privilege because of the emergence of sound design. This in-depth study by William Whittington considers the evolution of sound design not only through cultural and technological developments during the last four decades, but also through the attitudes and expectations of filmgoers. Fans of recent blockbuster films, in particular science fiction films, have come to expect a more advanced and refined degree of film sound use, which has changed the way they experience and understand spectacle and storytelling in contemporary cinema. The book covers recent science fiction cinema in rich and compelling detail, providing a new sounding of familiar films, while offering insights into the constructed nature of cinematic sound design. This is accomplished by examining the formal elements and historical context of sound production in movies to better appreciate how a film sound track is conceived and presented.Whittington focuses on seminal science fiction films that have made specific advances in film sound, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, THX 1138, Star Wars, Alien, Blade Runner (original version and director's cut), Terminator 2: Judgment Day and The Matrix trilogy and games—milestones of the entertainment industry's technological and aesthetic advancements with sound. Setting itself apart from other works, the book illustrates through accessible detail and compelling examples how swiftly such advancements in film sound aesthetics and technology have influenced recent science fiction cinema, and examines how these changes correlate to the history, theory, and practice of contemporary Hollywood filmmaking.
Download or read book The Matrix in Theory written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Matrix trilogy continues to split opinions widely, polarising the downright dismissive and the wildly enthusiastic. Nevertheless, it has been fully embraced as a rich source of theoretical and cultural references. The contributions in this volume probe the effects the Matrix trilogy continues to provoke and evaluate how or to what extent they coincide with certain developments within critical and cultural theory. Is the enthusiastic philosophising and theorising spurred by the Matrix a sign of the desperate state theory is in, in the sense of “see how low theory (or ‘post-theory’) has sunk”? Or could the Matrix be one of the “master texts” for something like a renewal for theory as now being mainly concerned with new and changing relations between science, technology, posthumanist culture, art, politics, ethics and the media? The present volume is unashamedly but not dogmatically theoretical even though there is not much agreement about what kind of theory is best suited to confront “post-theoretical” times. But it is probably fair to say that there is agreement about one thing, namely that if theory appears to be “like” the Matrix today it does so because the culture around it and which “made” it itself seems to be captured in some kind of Matrix. The only way out of this is through more and renewed, refreshed theorising, not less.
Download or read book Reconstructing Hybridity written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary collection of critical articles seeks to reassess the concept of hybridity and its relevance to post-colonial theory and literature. The challenging articles written by internationally acclaimed scholars discuss the usefulness of the term in relation to such questions as citizenship, whiteness studies and transnational identity politics. In addition to developing theories of hybridity, the articles in this volume deal with the role of hybridity in a variety of literary and cultural phenomena in geographical settings ranging from the Pacific to native North America. The collection pays particular attention to questions of hybridity, migrancy and diaspora.
Download or read book Apocalyptic Transformation written by Elizabeth K. Rosen and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008-02-15 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apocalyptic Transformation explores how one the oldest sense-making paradigms, the apocalyptic myth, is altered when postmodern authors and filmmakers adopt it. It examines how postmodern writers adapt a fundamentally religious story for a secular audience and it proposes that even as these writers use the myth in traditional ways, they simultaneously undermine and criticize the grand narrative of apocalypse itself.
Download or read book The Matrix Trilogy written by Stacy Gillis and published by Wallflower Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of essays on the films as well as the websites, games and The Animatrix video and DVD. Among the topics discussed are the new cyberpunk, Baudrillarian simulacra and simulation, gender, race and costume, cyberculture and the body, virtual realities and special effects.
Download or read book Cinematic Sociology written by Jean-Anne Sutherland and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2013 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cinematic Sociology is a one-of-a-kind resource that helps students to view films sociologically while also providing much-needed pedagogy for teaching sociology through film. In this engaging text, the authors take readers beyond watching movies and help them "see" films sociologically while also developing critical thinking and analytical skills that will be useful in college coursework and beyond. The book's essays from expert scholars in sociology and cultural studies explore the ways social life is presented--distorted, magnified, or politicized--in popular film. Contributor to the SAGE Teaching Innovations and Professional Development Award
Download or read book Alternate Americas written by M. Keith Booker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2006-02-28 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than 50 years, science fiction films have been among the most important and successful products of American cinema, and are worthy of study for that reason alone. On a deeper level, the genre has reflected important themes, concerns and developments in American society, so that a history of science fiction film also serves as a cultural history of America over the past half century. M. Keith Booker has selected fifteen of the most successful and innovative science fiction films of all time, and examined each of them at length—from cultural, technical and cinematic perspectives—to see where they came from and what they meant for the future of cinema and for America at large. From Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Star Wars, from Blade Runner to The Matrix, these landmark films have expressed our fears and dreams, our abilities and our deficiencies. In this deep-seeking investigation, we can all find something of ourselves that we recognize, as well as something that we've never recognized before. The focus on a fairly small number of landmark films allows detailed attention to genuinely original movies, including: Forbidden Planet, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Blade Runner, The Terminator, Robocop, The Abyss, Independence Day, and The Matrix. This book is ideal for general readers interested in science fiction and film.
Download or read book Romanticism and Postmodernism written by Edward Larrissy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-08-28 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The persistence of Romantic thought and literary practice into the late twentieth century is evident in many contexts, from the philosophical and ideological abstractions of literary theory to the thematic and formal preoccupations of contemporary fiction and poetry. Though the precise meaning of the Romantic legacy is contested, it remains stubbornly difficult to move beyond. This collection of essays by prominent critics and literary theorists was first published in 1999, and explores the continuing impact of Romanticism on a variety of authors and genres, including John Barth, William Gibson, and John Ashbery, while writers from the Romantic and Victorian period include Wordsworth, Byron and Emily Brontë. Many critics have assumed that the forms and modes of feeling associated with the Romantic period continued to influence the cultural history of the the first half of the twentieth century. This was the first book to consider the mutual impact of postmodernism and Romanticism.
Download or read book Gender Race and American Science Fiction written by Jason Haslam and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-08 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the interplay of gender, race, and their representation in American science fiction, from the nineteenth-century through to the twenty-first, and across a number of forms including literature and film. Haslam explores the reasons why SF provides such a rich medium for both the preservation of and challenges to dominant mythologies of gender and race. Defining SF linguistically and culturally, the study argues that this mode is not only able to illuminate the cultural and social histories of gender and race, but so too can it intervene in those histories, and highlight the ruptures present within them. The volume moves between material history and the linguistic nature of SF fantasies, from the specifics of race and gender at different points in American history to larger analyses of the socio-cultural functions of such identity categories. SF has already become central to discussions of humanity in the global capitalist age, and is increasingly the focus of feminist and critical race studies; in combining these earlier approaches, this book goes further, to demonstrate why SF must become central to our discussions of identity writ large, of the possibilities and failings of the human —past, present, and future. Focusing on the interplay of whiteness and its various 'others' in relation to competing gender constructs, chapters analyze works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary E. Bradley Lane, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Philip Francis Nowlan, George S. Schuyler and the Wachowskis, Frank Herbert, William Gibson, and Octavia Butler. Academics and students interested in the study of Science Fiction, American literature and culture, and Whiteness Studies, as well as those engaged in critical gender and race studies, will find this volume invaluable.
Download or read book Teaching Peace Through Popular Culture written by Laura L. Finley and published by IAP. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authored by scholars from a variety of disciplines, including English, Theology, Philosophy, Communications, Sociology, Humanities and Peace Studies, this edited volume provides detailed descriptions of the many ways popular culture can be used to teach peace. Chapters discuss documentary and feature film, music, television, literature and more, providing both educators and the general public with a timely and useful tool. From popular dystopian novels like The Hunger Games to feature films like The Matrix to modern rap and hip-hop music, contributors not only provide critical analysis of the violence in popular culture but also an assessment of how the same or alternate forms can be used by peace educators. Additionally, each chapter project synopses and teaching ideas, as well as recommended resources.
Download or read book AI Narratives written by Stephen Cave and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-02-28 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to examine the history of imaginative thinking about intelligent machines. As real Artificial Intelligence (AI) begins to touch on all aspects of our lives, this long narrative history shapes how the technology is developed, deployed and regulated. It is therefore a crucial social and ethical issue. Part I of this book provides a historical overview from ancient Greece to the start of modernity. These chapters explore the revealing pre-history of key concerns of contemporary AI discourse, from the nature of mind and creativity to issues of power and rights, from the tension between fascination and ambivalence to investigations into artificial voices and technophobia. Part II focuses on the twentieth and twenty-first-centuries in which a greater density of narratives emerge alongside rapid developments in AI technology. These chapters reveal not only how AI narratives have consistently been entangled with the emergence of real robotics and AI, but also how they offer a rich source of insight into how we might live with these revolutionary machines. Through their close textual engagements, these chapters explore the relationship between imaginative narratives and contemporary debates about AI's social, ethical and philosophical consequences, including questions of dehumanization, automation, anthropomorphisation, cybernetics, cyberpunk, immortality, slavery, and governance. The contributions, from leading humanities and social science scholars, show that narratives about AI offer a crucial epistemic site for exploring contemporary debates about these powerful new technologies.
Download or read book Beyond The Chinese Connection written by Crystal S. Anderson and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2013-06 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Bruce Lee to Samurai Champloo, how Asian fictions fuse with African American creative sensibilities
Download or read book Framing the Apocalypse written by Sheila C. Bibb and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-07-22 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The apocalypse’s triumph is witnessed in the arts, literature, music, film, TV, and digital media thereby enabling us to view the very essence of Apocalypse as a cultural phenomenon.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen written by Melissa Blanco Borelli and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen sets the agenda for the study of dance in popular moving images - films, television shows, commercials, music videos, and YouTube - and offers new ways to understand the multi-layered meanings of the dancing body by engaging with methodologies from critical dance studies, performance studies, and film/media analysis. Through thorough engagement with these approaches, the chapters demonstrate how dance on the popular screen might be read and considered through bodies and choreographies in moving media. Questions the contributors consider include: How do dance and choreography function within the filmic apparatus? What types of bodies are associated with specific dances and how does this affect how dance(s) is/are perceived in the everyday? How do the dancing bodies on screen negotiate power, access, and agency? How are multiple choreographies of identity (e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation) set in motion through the narrative, dancing bodies, and/or dance style? What types of corporeal labors (dance training, choreographic skill, rehearsal, the constructed notion of "natural talent") are represented or ignored? What role does a specific film have in the genealogy of Hollywood dance film? How does the Hollywood dance film inform how dance operates in making cultural meanings? Whether looking at Bill "Bojangles" Robinson's tap steps in Stormy Weather, or Baby's leap into Johnny Castle's arms in Dirty Dancing, or even Neo's backwards bend in The Matrix, the book's arguments offer powerful new scholarship on dance in the popular screen.
Download or read book The Politics of Big Fantasy written by John C. McDowell and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-06-04 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing critical attention to a particular set of science fiction and fantasy films--Larry and Andy Wachowski's The Matrix, George Lucas' Star Wars saga, and Joss Whedon's Avengers--this book utilizes a wide-ranging set of critical tools to illuminate their political ideologies, while also examining any resistant and complicating turns or byways the films may provide. What they all have in common ideologically is that they--or at least the genres they belong to--tend to be regarded as belonging to politically conservative frames of sociocultural reference. With the Star Wars saga, however, this idea is shown to be superficial and weak.
