Download or read book The Role of Monstrous Bodies in Tod Browning s Freaks written by Stefan Langenbach and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2010-03 with total page 29 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Comparative Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Cologne (Englische Seminar 1), course: The films of Tod Browning, language: English, abstract: Table of contents 1. Introduction...........................................................................................3 2. Freaks..................................................................................................4 3. Monstrous bodies ...................................................................................6 4. Outlook .............................................................................................13 5. Conclusion...........................................................................................14 Appendix...............................................................................................16 List of references......................................................................................20 1. Introduction "I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here." (Radiohead - Creep, 1993) Since the beginning of mankind there have always been a few humans who differed from the vast majority. They showed (and still show) various features which separated them from "normal people". These characteristics can be caused by genetic defects or other, medical reasons and lead to a life "outside of the boundaries of 'normal'". Physically and / or mentally they differ from the majority. Some are taller than average people, some are smaller. Some are hermaphrodites. Some have missing or extra body parts, some lack extremities at all. These so called "freaks" are defined by freedictionary.com as having "an abnormally formed organism" and "regarded as a curiosity or monstrosity". Tod Browning's film Freaks deals with handicapped people, who comply with this definition and will be the core theme of this term paper, so that the role of monstrous bodies in this specific movie will be explained and analyzed. In order to do that, it will be started with a rendering of the movie's content, important basic facts about it and its' effect on the viewers and the critics, before the analysis will be focused. Are the "freaks" in the movie creeps and weirdos or aren't they and if so, what else are they if anything? What was Browning's aim concerning the
Download or read book Deconstruction of the norm in Tod Browning s Freaks written by and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject American Studies - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,3, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Institut für England- und Amerikastudien), course: The American Carnival, language: English, abstract: This paper is about Tod Browning’s controversial movie "Freaks". It serves to explain how the movie "Freaks", deconstructs what is understood as the category of “normal” people. What leads the viewer to judge the “normals” as such in the beginning of the movie is going to be examined throughout this work. This paper illustrates what is understood as “monsters” and what the function of this constructed borderline between “normals” and “freaks” is. Therefore it is looked at the meaning of deformity in history. It is going to be analyzed how the viewer is introduced into the movie by the preface. At the film’s turning point (wedding banquet), what is firstly presented to the viewer as “freak” suddenly is understood as “normal”. How this deconstruction of the “freak” proceeds is going to be described in the following. In the movie, terms for referring to disabled people play an important role in determining how the viewer perceives the characters that are presented. Already the movie title Freaks is very provocative for it is the term describing a failed product of procreation. Throughout this paper the term “freaks” is going to be used. No other terms like “disabled” or “handicapped” appeared more reasonable as the term “freak” for it expresses best how the assumed category of the “freak” is a construct and dependent on the condition of a relation, in addition it is connected to perspectives. From an anthropological perspective it is always recommended, in case of doubt, to call a group by its self-imposed name. Moreover the term “freak” refers to the relation of a person whose deviation from the norm is used for the entertainment of others and the person who is entertained. This describes best that this category is a construct and underlines that to be a “freak” is not primarily a body condition but rather a social relation.
Download or read book All Around Monstrous Monster Media in Their Historical Contexts written by Verena Bernardi and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We know all kinds of monsters. Vampires who suck human blood, werewolves who harass tourists in London or Paris, zombies who long to feast on our brains, or Godzilla, who is famous in and outside of Japan for destroying whole cities at once. Regardless of their monstrosity, all of these creatures are figments of the human mind and as real as they may seem, monsters are and always have been constructed by human beings. In other words, they are imagined. How they are imagined, however, depends on many different aspects and changes throughout history. The present volume provides an insight into the construction of monstrosity in different kinds of media, including literature, film, and TV series. It will show how and by whom monsters are really created, how time changes the perception of monsters and what characterizes specific monstrosities in their specific historical contexts. The book will provide valuable insights for scholars in different fields, whose interest focuses on either media studies or history.
Download or read book Freaks written by Jim Woodring and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Films of Tod Browning written by Bernd Herzogenrath and published by Black Dog Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known as the 'Edgar Allan Poe of cinema', Tod Browning is the dark master of filmmaking. However, despite the commercial success he enjoyed during his lifetime, he has never received the critical acclaim his work deserves. The Films of Tod Browning at last pays tribute to his cinematic legacy. With contributors including Vivian Sobchack, Bernd Herzogenrath and Nicole Brenez, The Films of Tod Browning covers subjects including images of disability, the body as spectacle, the transition from silent to 'talkie' films and theatrical illusion in Browning's films as well as analysing films such as Dracula, Mark of the Vampire and the often overlooked Iron Man in detail. An essential for film buffs and academics alike.
Download or read book The Cinema of Tod Browning written by Bernd Herzogenrath and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2008-09-22 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a director, actor, writer and producer, Tod Browning was one of the most dynamic Hollywood figures during the birth of commercial cinema. Known for his fantastic collaborations with Lon Chaney in numerous silents, and for directing the horror classic Dracula and the still-controversial Freaks, Browning has been called "the Edgar Allan Poe of the cinema." Despite not entering the profession until he began acting in his early thirties, he went on to helm more than 60 films in a 25-year career. His work continues to influence directors such as David Lynch, John Waters, and Alejandro Jodorowsky. These essays critically explore such topics as the connection between Browning, Poe and Kant; Browning's cinematic techniques; disability; masochism; sound and suspense; duality; parenthood; narrative and cinematic trickery; George Melford; surrealism; and the occult. A Browning filmography is included.
Download or read book The Monstrous Organization written by T. Thanem and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book marks a major shift in the way we think and feel about organizations. Radically reconsidering what we see as organizationally normal and abnormal, Thanem shatters the borders of convention to enable the becoming of a new and monstrously radical politics of difference. With reflexivity, sensitivity and courage, this politically and theoretically charged work offers an affirmative alternative to habituated organizational violence and oppression. It does so in the form of a monstrous ethics of organizations. Essential reading for those interested in the best of the latest advances in organization studies. Carl Rhodes, Swansea University, UK A beautifully expressed, wonderfully crafted object, transcending the idea of organization theory book ; this is a playfully serious and provocatively modest encounter with the monstrous we inhabit and the monsters we create with our work and everyday life. It made me laugh with embarrassment and cry with joy by prying open much that we, organizational scholars, often try to hide. Finally, our monstrosity was free to roam in the light of what we claim as knowledge! It felt very liberating. Marta B. Calás, University of Massachusetts, US Invited to experience becoming-monster as we get to exercise our norms as students of organizations, Thanem makes a case for the socio-corporeal ontology of organization. Disassembled by the generosity of the multitude, we are provided with an opportunity to learn to know our own particular heterogeneity, our styles of assembling ourselves to what we have become. Becoming is thereby learnt. Important lessons, both for analysts and practitioners of organizations. Daniel Hjorth, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark Drawing on contemporary debates in organization theory, this book explores the monsters that populate organizations, what organizations do to these monsters, and how this challenges us to re-construct organization theory. Torkild Thanem first interrogates how organizations and organization theory seek to kill monsters and how organizations exploit the monstrous for commercial purposes from the alien monsters of the sci-fi entertainment industry to the monstrous branding of energy drinks and the organic-synthetic chimeras produced by biotech and agribusiness companies. He then argues for more diverse, more joyful and more responsible organizations through a positively monstrous theory, politics and ethics of organizational life. Proposing a theory and ontology of organizations beyond poststructuralist constructionism and critical realism, The Monstrous Organization creatively addresses the history and theory of monsters in organizational life. It will appeal to scholars, doctoral students and master's students in management and organization studies, business ethics, diversity management, cultural studies, gender studies and sociology.
Download or read book Monstrous Bodies written by June Pulliam and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent works of young adult fantastic fiction such as Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga have been criticized for glamorizing feminine subordination. But YA horror fiction with female protagonists who have paranormal abilities suggests a resistance to restrictive gender roles. The "monstrous Other" is a double with a difference, a metaphor of the Western adolescent girl pressured to embody an untenable doll-like feminine ideal. This book examines what each of three types of female monstrous Others in young adult fiction--the haunted girl, the female werewolf and the witch--has to tell us about feminine subordination in a supposedly post-feminist world, where girls continue to be pressured to silence their voices and stifle their desires.
Download or read book Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters written by Markus P.J. Bohlmann and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-03-25 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps because of the wisdom received from our Romantic forbears about the purity of the child, depictions of children as monsters have held a tremendous fascination for film audiences for decades. Numerous social factors have influenced the popularity and longevity of the monster-child trope but its appeal is also rooted in the dual concepts of the child-like (innocent, angelic) and the childish (selfish, mischievous). This collection of fresh essays discusses the representation of monstrous children in popular cinema since the 1950s, with a focus on the relationship between monstrosity and "childness," a term whose implications the contributors explore.
Download or read book Analysing Gender in Performance written by J. Paul Halferty and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-12-12 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analysing Gender in Performance brings together the fields of Gender Studies and Performance Analysis to explore how contemporary performance represents and interrogates gender. This edited collection includes a wide range of scholarly essays, as well as artists’ voices and their accounts of their works and practices. The Introduction outlines the book’s key approaches to concepts in English language gender discourses and gender’s intersectionalities, and sets out the approaches to performance analysis and methods of research employed by the various contributors. The book focuses on performances from the Global North, staged over the past fifty years. Case studies are diverse, ranging from site-specific, dance theatre, speculative drag, installation, and music video performances to Mabou Mines, Churchill, Shakespeare and Ibsen. Contributors explore how gender intersects with sexuality, social class, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, culture and history. Read individually or in tension with one another, the essays confront the contemporary complexities of analysing gender in performance.
Download or read book The Gothic World written by Glennis Byron and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gothic World offers an overview of this popular field whilst also extending critical debate in exciting new directions such as film, politics, fashion, architecture, fine art and cyberculture. Structured around the principles of time, space and practice, and including a detailed general introduction, the five sections look at: Gothic Histories Gothic Spaces Gothic Readers and Writers Gothic Spectacle Contemporary Impulses. The Gothic World seeks to account for the Gothic as a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional force, as a style, an aesthetic experience and a mode of cultural expression that traverses genres, forms, media, disciplines and national boundaries and creates, indeed, its own ‘World’.
Download or read book Trick Treat Transgress written by Sandra Danneil and published by Schüren Verlag. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Simpsons are not only the world's most famous TV family; they are also the protagonists of one of the longest-lasting animation programs in US television. Over the course of the past thirty years, the yellow five from Springfield have become an indispensable part of American popular culture which still turns academics into fans and inspires fans to research the objects of their fascination. This book focuses on the Halloween Special TREEHOUSE OF HORROR, a part of THE SIMPSONS which research has largely left unnoticed. If THE SIMPSONS revolutionized how we look through television at US-American culture and society, TREEHOUSE OF HORROR has changed the way we re-member popular-culture history by way of horror traditions. This study demonstrates how Matt Groening's cartoon shows have painted a yellow archive of the digital age.
Download or read book The Big Top on the Big Screen written by Teresa Cutler-Broyles and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2020-01-13 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Circuses and film are a natural pairing, and the new essays making up this volume begin the exploration of how these two forms of entertainment have often worked together to create a spectacle of onscreen alchemy. The films discussed herein are an eclectic group, ranging from early silent comedies to animated, 21st century examples, in which circuses serve as liminal or carnivalesque spaces wherein characters--and by extension audience members--can confront issues as far-reaching as labor relations, sensuality, identity, ethics, and more. The circus as discussed in these essays encompasses the big top, the midway, the sideshow and the freak show; it becomes backdrop, character, catalyst and setting; and it is welcoming, malicious or terrifying. Circus performers are family, friends, foe or all of the above. And film is the medium that brings it all together. This volume starts the conversation about how circuses and film can combine to form productive, exciting spaces where almost anything can happen.
Download or read book Screening Disability written by Christopher R. Smit and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Films include: The hunchback of Notre Dame (various versions based on the novel `Notre Dame de Paris' by Victor Hugo), Freaks (directed by Tod Browning), Ordinary people, Smoke (Wayne Wang), the films of John Woo, Crash (David Cronenberg).
Download or read book Monster Cinema written by Barry Keith Grant and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-16 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monster Cinema introduces readers to a vast menagerie of movie monsters. Some are gigantic, like King Kong or the kaiju in Pacific Rim, while others are microscopic. Some monsters appear uncannily human, from serial killers like Norman Bates to the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And of course, other movie monsters like demons, ghosts, vampires, and witches emerge from long folklore traditions. Film expert Barry Keith Grant considers what each type of movie monster reveals about what it means to be human and how we regard the world. Armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of film history, Grant presents us with an eclectic array of monster movies, from Nosferatu to Get Out. As he discovers, although monster movies might claim to be about Them!, they are really about the capacity for horror that lurks within each of us.
Download or read book The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous written by Asa Simon Mittman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-02-24 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The field of monster studies has grown significantly over the past few years and this companion provides a comprehensive guide to the study of monsters and the monstrous from historical, regional and thematic perspectives. The collection reflects the truly multi-disciplinary nature of monster studies, bringing in scholars from literature, art history, religious studies, history, classics, and cultural and media studies. The companion will offer scholars and graduate students the first comprehensive and authoritative review of this emergent field.
Download or read book Grotesque written by Justin Edwards and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-29 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grotesque provides an invaluable and accessible guide to the use (and abuse) of this complex literary term. Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund explore the influence of the grotesque on cultural forms throughout history, with particular focus on its representation in literature, visual art and film. The book: presents a history of the literary grotesque from Classical writing to the present examines theoretical debates around the term in their historical and cultural contexts introduce readers to key writers and artists of the grotesque, from Homer to Rabelais, Shakespeare, Carson McCullers and David Cronenberg analyses key terms such as disharmony, deformed and distorted bodies, misfits and freaks explores the grotesque in relation to queer theory, post-colonialism and the carnivalesque. Grotesque presents readers with an original and distinctive overview of this vital genre and is an essential guide for students of literature, art history and film studies.