Download or read book Fast Cars Clean Bodies written by Kristin Ross and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996-02-28 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fast Cars, Clean Bodies examines the crucial decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s when France shifted rapidly from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and fully industrial one. In this analysis of a startling cultural transformation Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts—automobiles, washing machines, women's magazines, film, popular fiction, even structuralism—as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses. In each of the book's four chapters, a central object of mythical image is refracted across a range of discursive and material spaces: social and private, textual and cinematic, national and international. The automobile, the new cult of cleanliness in the capital and the colonies, the waning of Sartre and de Beauvoir as the couple of national attention, and the emergence of reshaped, functionalist masculinities (revolutionary, corporate, and structural) become the key elements in this prehistory of postmodernism in France. Modernization ideology, Ross argues, offered the promise of limitless, even timeless, development. By situating the rise of "end of history" ideologies within the context of France's transition into mass culture and consumption, Ross returns the touted timelessness of modernization to history. She shows how the realist fiction and film of the period, as well as the work of social theorists such as Barthes, Lefebvre, and Morin who began at the time to conceptualize "everyday life," laid bare the disruptions and the social costs of events. And she argues that the logic of the racism prevalent in France today, focused on the figure of the immigrant worker, is itself the outcome of the French state's embrace of capitalist modernization ideology in the 1950s and 1960s.
Download or read book May 68 and Its Afterlives written by Kristin Ross and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-26 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During May 1968, students and workers in France united in the biggest strike and the largest mass movement in French history. Protesting capitalism, American imperialism, and Gaullism, 9 million people from all walks of life, from shipbuilders to department store clerks, stopped working. The nation was paralyzed—no sector of the workplace was untouched. Yet, just thirty years later, the mainstream image of May '68 in France has become that of a mellow youth revolt, a cultural transformation stripped of its violence and profound sociopolitical implications. Kristin Ross shows how the current official memory of May '68 came to serve a political agenda antithetical to the movement's aspirations. She examines the roles played by sociologists, repentant ex-student leaders, and the mainstream media in giving what was a political event a predominantly cultural and ethical meaning. Recovering the political language of May '68 through the tracts, pamphlets, and documentary film footage of the era, Ross reveals how the original movement, concerned above all with the question of equality, gained a new and counterfeit history, one that erased police violence and the deaths of participants, removed workers from the picture, and eliminated all traces of anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism, and the influences of Algeria and Vietnam. May '68 and Its Afterlives is especially timely given the rise of a new mass political movement opposing global capitalism, from labor strikes and anti-McDonald's protests in France to the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle.
Download or read book The Everyday Life Reader written by Ben Highmore and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using primary materials, Highmor brings together a wide range of thinkers to provide a comprehensive resource on theories of everyday life. Highmore's introduction surveys the development of thought about everyday life.
Download or read book Masculine Singular written by Geneviève Sellier and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-25 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masculine Singular is an original interpretation of French New Wave cinema by one of France’s leading feminist film scholars. While most criticism of the New Wave has concentrated on the filmmakers and their films, Geneviève Sellier focuses on the social and cultural turbulence of the cinema’s formative years, from 1957 to 1962. The New Wave filmmakers were members of a young generation emerging on the French cultural scene, eager to acquire sexual and economic freedom. Almost all of them were men, and they “wrote” in the masculine first-person singular, often using male protagonists as stand-ins for themselves. In their films, they explored relations between men and women, and they expressed ambivalence about the new liberated woman. Sellier argues that gender relations and the construction of sexual identities were the primary subject of New Wave cinema. Sellier draws on sociological surveys, box office data, and popular magazines of the period, as well as analyses of specific New Wave films. She examines the development of the New Wave movement, its sociocultural and economic context, and the popular and critical reception of such well-known films as Jules et Jim and Hiroshima mon amour. In light of the filmmakers’ focus on gender relations, Sellier reflects on the careers of New Wave’s iconic female stars, including Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot. Sellier’s thorough exploration of early New Wave cinema culminates in her contention that its principal legacy—the triumph of a certain kind of cinephilic discourse and of an “auteur theory” recognizing the director as artist—came at a steep price: creativity was reduced to a formalist game, and affirmation of New Wave cinema’s modernity was accompanied by an association of creativity with masculinity.
Download or read book The Emergence of Social Space written by Kristin Ross and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Communal Luxury written by Kristin Ross and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-11-22 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reclaiming the legacy of the Paris Commune for the twenty-first century Kristin Ross’s highly acclaimed work on the thought and culture of the Communard uprising of 1871 resonates with the motivations and actions of contemporary protest, which has found its most powerful expression in the reclamation of public space. Today’s concerns—internationalism, education, the future of labor, the status of art, and ecological theory and practice—frame and inform her carefully researched restaging of the words and actions of individual Communards. This original analysis of an event and its centrifugal effects brings to life the workers in Paris who became revolutionaries, the significance they attributed to their struggle, and the elaboration and continuation of their thought in the encounters that transpired between the insurrection’s survivors and supporters like Marx, Kropotkin, and William Morris. The Paris Commune was a laboratory of political invention, important simply and above all for, as Marx reminds us, its own “working existence.” Communal Luxury allows readers to revisit the intricate workings of an extraordinary experiment.
Download or read book Motion Performance Tales of a Muscle Car Builder written by Martyn L. Schorr and published by . This book was released on with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book From Empire to the World written by Malini Guha and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-20 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of globalization in cinema assumes many guises, from the exploration of global cinematic cities to the burgeoning 'world cinema turn' within film studies, which addresses the global nature of film production, exhibition and distribution. In this ambitious new study, Malini Guha draws together these two distinctly different ways of thinking about the cinema, interrogating representations of global London and Paris as migrant cinematic cities, featuring the arrival, settlement and departure of migrant figures from the decline of imperial rule to the global present. Drawing on a range of case studies from contemporary cinema, including the films of Michael Haneke, Claire Denis, Horace OvcY nd Stephen Frears, Guha also considers their world cinema status in light of their reconfiguration of established forms of filmmaking, from modernism to social realism. An illuminating analysis of London and Paris in world cinema from the vantage point of migrant mobilities, From Empire to the World explores the ramifications of this historical shift towards the global, one that pertains in equal measure to cityscapes, their representation as world cinema texts, and to the rise of world cinema discourse within film studies itself.
Download or read book Architecture and Film written by Mark Lamster and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architecture and Film looks at the ways architecture and architects are treated on screen and, conversely, how these depictions filter and shape the ways we understand the built environment. It also examines the significant effect that the film industry has had on the American public's perception of urban, suburban, and rural spaces. Contributors to this collection of essays come from a wide range of disciplines. Nancy Levinson from Harvard Design Magazine writes on how films from The Fountainhead to Jungle Fever have depicted architects. Eric Rosenberg from Tufts University looks at how architecture and spatial relations shape the Beatles films A Hard Day's Night, Help!, and Let It Be. Joseph Rosa, curator at the National Building Museum, discusses why modern domestic architecture in recent Hollywood films such as The Ice Storm, L. A. Confidential, and The Big Lebowski has become synonymous with unstable inhabitants. I.D. Magazine writer Peter Hall discusses the history of film titling, focusing on the groundbreaking work of Saul Bass and Maurice Binder. Edited by Mark Lamster examines the anti-urbanism of the Star Wars trilogy. The collection also includes the voices of those from within the film industry, who are uniquely able to provide a "behind the scenes" perspective: film Edited by Bob Eisenhardt comments on the making of Concert of Wills, a documentary on the construction of the Getty Museum; and Robert Kraft focuses on his work as a location director for Diane Keaton's upcoming film about Los Angeles. Also included are interviews with David Rockwell, architect of numerous Planet Hollywood restaurants worldwide and designer of a new hall to host the Academy Awards ceremony; Kyle Kooper, who created title sequences for Seven and Mission Impossible; and motion picture art director Jan Roelfs, whose credits include Gattaca, Orlando, and Little Women.
Download or read book Stuff Theory written by Maurizia Boscagli and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-03-27 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stuff, the hoard of minor objects which have shed their commodity glamor but which we refuse to recycle, flashes up in fiction, films and photographs as alluring, unruly reminder of how people and matter are intertwined. Stuff is modern materiality out of bounds that refuses to be contained by the western semiotic system. It declines its role as the eternal sidekick of the subject, and is thus the ideal basis for a counter-narrative of materiality in flux. Can such a narrative, developed by the new materialism, reinvigorate the classical materialist account of human alienation from commodities under capital? By shifting the discussion of materiality toward the aesthetic and the everyday, the book both embraces and challenges the project of new materialism. It argues that matter has a politics, and that its new plasticity offers a continued possibility of critique. Stuff Theory's five chapters illustrate the intermittent flashes of modern 'minor' materiality in twentieth-century modernity as fashion, memory object, clutter, home décor, and waste in a wide range of texts: Benjamin's essays, Virginia Woolf's and Elfriede Jelinek's fiction, Rem Koolhaas' criticism, 1920s German photography and the cinema of Tati, Bertolucci, and Mendes. To call the commodified, ebullient materiality the book tracks stuff, is to foreground its plastic and transformative power, its fluidity and its capacity to generate events. Stuff Theory interrogates the political value of stuff's instability. It investigates the potential of stuff to revitalize the oppositional power of the object. Stuff Theory traces a genealogy of materiality: flashpoints of one kind of minor matter in a succession of cultural moments. It asserts that in culture, stuff becomes a rallying point for a new critique of capital, which always works to reassign stuff to a subaltern position. Stuff is not merely unruly: it becomes the terrain on which a new relation between people and matter might be built.
Download or read book Radical History Review Volume 61 Winter 1995 written by Calvin B. Holder and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-04-13 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Radical History Review presents innovative scholarship and commentary that looks critically at the past and its history from a non-sectarian left perspective. RHR scrutinises conventional history and seeks to broaden and advance the discussion of crucial issues such as the role of race, class and gender in history.
Download or read book Radical Dreams written by Elliott H. King and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2022-03-17 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surrealism is widely thought of as an artistic movement that flourished in Europe between the two world wars. However, during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, diverse radical affinity groups, underground subcultures, and student protest movements proclaimed their connections to surrealism. Radical Dreams argues that surrealism was more than an avant-garde art movement; it was a living current of anti-authoritarian resistance. Featuring perspectives from scholars across the humanities and, distinctively, from contemporary surrealist practitioners, this volume examines surrealism’s role in postwar oppositional cultures. It demonstrates how surrealism’s committed engagement extends beyond the parameters of an artistic style or historical period, with chapters devoted to Afrosurrealism, Ted Joans, punk, the Situationist International, the student protests of May ’68, and other topics. Privileging interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and material culture approaches, contributors address surrealism’s interaction with New Left politics, protest movements, the sexual revolution, psychedelia, and other subcultural trends around the globe. A revelatory work, Radical Dreams definitively shows that the surrealist movement was synonymous with cultural and political radicalism. It will be especially valuable to those interested in the avant-garde, contemporary art, and radical social movements. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Jonathan P. Eburne, David Hopkins, Claire Howard, Michael Löwy, Alyce Mahon, Gavin Parkinson, Grégory Pierrot, Penelope Rosemont, Ron Sakolsky, Marie Arleth Skov, Ryan Standfest, and Sandra Zalman.
Download or read book Consumer Chronicles written by David H. Walker and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-31 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when the world is contemplating the depletion of non-renewable natural resources, the consumer society is increasingly being called into question. This is nowhere more acutely evident than in France, where since its beginnings in the nineteenth century, the consumer revolution, extending market forces into every area of social and private life, has been perceived as a challenge to core elements in French culture, such as traditional artisan crafts and small businesses serving local communities. Cultural historians and sociologists have charted the increasing commercialisation of everyday life over the twentieth century, but few have paid systematic attention to the crucial testimony provided by the authors of narrative fiction. Consumer Chronicles rectifies this omission by means of close readings of a series of novels, selected for their authentic portrayal of consumer behaviour, and analysed in relation to their social, cultural and historical contexts. Walker's study, offering an imaginative interdisciplinary panorama covering the impact of affluence on French shoppers, shopkeepers and society, provides telling new insights into the history and characteristics of the consumer mentality.
Download or read book No Place Like Home written by Johannes von Moltke and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-09-06 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first comprehensive account of Germany's most enduring film genre, the Heimatfilm, which has offered idyllic variations on the idea that "there is no place like home" since cinema's early days. Charting the development of this popular genre over the course of a century in a work informed by film studies, cultural history, and social theory, Johannes von Moltke focuses in particular on its heyday in the 1950s, a period that has been little studied. Questions of what it could possibly mean to call the German nation "home" after the catastrophes of World War II are anxiously present in these films, and von Moltke uses them as a lens through which to view contemporary discourses on German national identity.
Download or read book The Sober Revolution written by Joseph Bohling and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Burgundy, Bordeaux, Champagne. The names of these and other French regions bring to mind time-honored winemaking practices. Yet the link between wine and place, in French known as terroir, was not a given. In The Sober Revolution, Joseph Bohling inverts our understanding of French wine history by revealing a modern connection between wine and place, one with profound ties to such diverse and sometimes unlikely issues as alcoholism, drunk driving, regional tourism, Algeria’s independence from French rule, and integration into the European Economic Community. In the 1930s, cheap, mass-produced wines from the Languedoc region of southern France and French Algeria dominated French markets. Artisanal wine producers, worried about the impact of these "inferior" products on the reputation of their wines, created a system of regional appellation labeling to reform the industry in their favor by linking quality to the place of origin. At the same time, the loss of Algeria, once the world’s largest wine exporter, forced the industry to rethink wine production. Over several decades, appellation producers were joined by technocrats, public health activists, tourism boosters, and other dynamic economic actors who blamed cheap industrial wine for hindering efforts to modernize France. Today, scholars, food activists, and wine enthusiasts see the appellation system as a counterweight to globalization and industrial food. But, as The Sober Revolution reveals, French efforts to localize wine and integrate into global markets were not antagonistic but instead mutually dependent. The time-honored winemaking practices that we associate with a pastoral vision of traditional France were in fact a strategy deployed by the wine industry to meet the challenges and opportunities of the post-1945 international economy. France’s luxury wine producers were more market savvy than we realize.
Download or read book Captive Bodies written by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the film industry's fascination with bondage and captivity.
Download or read book Body State written by Jen Dickinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Body/State brings together original essays addressing various aspects of the evolving interaction between bodies and states. While each essay has different empirical and/or theoretical focus, authors consider a number of overlapping themes to appreciate the state's engagement with, and concern about, bodies. Divided into five parts, the first part, 'Bodies Modified and Divided' considers how the production, regulation, policing and maintenance of borders (physical, social, sexual, political, religious, etc.) are used to enable or constrain the physical (re)shaping of the body. Part two, 'Capital Bodies', extends the state's concern with the flows of bodies that make up the nation to consider how they are enrolled in the complex structures of capitalist exchange that form the basis for maintaining and contesting a set of relationships between states and markets. Part three, 'Deviance and Resistance', examines both how states seek to discipline ’non-normal’ bodies and appreciates the capacity of changes in the socio-cultural meaning and nature of bodies to resist and/or escape states. Part four, ’Sovereignty and Surveillance’, develops themes of deviancy and resistance by considering the impact of new technologies both on the intimate regulatory reach of states into and across bodies and on the nature of embodiment itself. Finally, Part five, ’The Body Virtual’, examines the impact of new technologies and online spaces both on the intimate regulatory reach of states into and across bodies and on the nature of embodiment itself. A varied collection of essays that address important and complex topics in a readable and creative way.
