Download or read book Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television written by Agustín Zarzosa and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of mode is critical in the reevaluation of melodrama. As a mode, melodrama appears not only as a dramatic genre pervaded by sensationalism, exaggerations, and moral polarities, but also as a cultural imaginary that shapes the emotional experience of modernity, characterized by anxiety, moral confusion, and the dissolution of hierarchy. Despite its usefulness, the notion of mode remains mystifying: What exactly are modes and how do they differ from genres? Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television: Captive Affects, Elastic Sufferings, Vicarious Objects argues that, whereas genres divide a universe in terms of similarities and differences, modes express or modify an indivisible whole. This study contends that the melodramatic mode is concerned with the expression of the social whole in terms of suffering. Zarzosa explains how melodrama is not a cultural imaginary that proclaims the existence of a defunct moral order in a post-sacred world, but an apparatus that shapes suffering and redistributes its visibility. The moral ideas we associate with melodrama are only a means to achieve this end. To develop this conception of melodrama, Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television offers a novel conceptualization of the following aspects of melodrama theory: affect, interpretation, exchange, excess, sacrifice, and coincidence. These aspects of melodrama are coupled with the analysis of classic melodramas (Home from the Hill and The Story of Adele H.), contemporary films (The Piano, Safe], and Year of the Dog), and television series (Torchwood and Lost). Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television provides an essential new look at melodrama and its function in popular culture and media.
Download or read book Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television written by M. Stewart and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-07-03 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Melodrama in Contemporary Film and Television debates the ways in which melodrama expresses and gives meaning to: trauma and pathos; memory and historical re-visioning; home and borders; gendered and queer relations; the family and psychic identities; the national and emerging public cultures; and morality and ethics.
Download or read book Refiguring Spain written by Marsha Kinder and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Refiguring Spain, Marsha Kinder has gathered a collection of new essays that explore the central role played by film, television, newspapers, and art museums in redefining Spain's national/cultural identity and its position in the world economy during the post-Franco era. By emphasizing issues of historical recuperation, gender and sexuality, and the marketing of Spain's peaceful political transformation, the contributors demonstrate that Spanish cinema and other forms of Spanish media culture created new national stereotypes and strengthened the nation's place in the global market and on the global stage. These essays consider a diverse array of texts, ranging from recent films by Almodóvar, Saura, Erice, Miró, Bigas Luna, Gutiérrez Aragón, and Eloy de la Iglesia to media coverage of the 1993 elections. Francoist cinema and other popular media are examined in light of strategies used to redefine Spain's cultural identity. The importance of the documentary, the appropriation of Hollywood film, and the significance of gender and sexuality in Spanish cinema are also discussed, as is the discourse of the Spanish media star--whether involving film celebrities like Rita Hayworth and Antonio Banderas or historical figures such as Cervantes. The volume concludes with an investigation of larger issues of government policy in relation to film and media, including a discussion of the financing of Spanish cinema and an exploration of the political dynamics of regional television and art museums. Drawing on a wide range of critical discourses, including feminist, postcolonial, and queer theory, political economy, cultural history, and museum studies, Refiguring Spain is the first comprehensive anthology on Spanish cinema in the English language. Contributors. Peter Besas, Marvin D'Lugo, Selma Reuben Holo, Dona M. Kercher, Marsha Kinder, Jaume Martí-Olivella, Richard Maxwell, Hilary L. Neroni, Paul Julian Smith, Roland B. Tolentino, Stephen Tropiano, Kathleen M. Vernon, Iñaki Zabaleta
Download or read book Refiguring American Film Genres written by Nick Browne and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1998-04-22 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays by leading American film scholars charts a whole new territory in genre film criticism. Rather than assuming that genres are self-evident categories, the contributors offer innovative ways to think about types of films, and patterns within films, in a historical context. Challenging familiar attitudes, the essays offer new conceptual frameworks and a fresh look at how popular culture functions in American society. The range of essays is exceptional, from David J. Russell's insights into the horror genre to Carol J. Clover's provocative take on "trial films" to Leo Braudy's argument for the subject of nature as a genre. Also included are essays on melodrama, race, film noir, and the industrial context of genre production. The contributors confront the poststructuralist critique of genre head-on; together they are certain to shape future debates concerning the viability and vitality of genre in studying American cinema.
Download or read book Ride the Frontier written by Flavia Brizio-Skov and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With fresh appraisals of popular Westerns, this book examines the history of the genre with a focus on definitional aspects of canon, adaptation and hybridity. The author covers a range of largely unexplored topics, including the role of "heroines" in a (supposedly) male-oriented system of film production, the function of the celluloid Indians, the transcultural and transnational history of the first spaghetti Western, the construction of femininity and masculinity in the hybrid Westerns of the 1950s, and the new paths of the Western in the 21st century.
Download or read book The Films of Konrad Wolf written by Larson Powell and published by Screen Cultures: German Film a. This book was released on 2020 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book in any language on the films of Konrad Wolf (1925-1982), East Germany's greatest filmmaker, and puts Wolf in a larger European filmic and historical context.
Download or read book Melancholy Emotion in Contemporary Cinema written by Francesco Sticchi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work outlines a new methodology for film analysis based on the radical materialist thought of Baruch Spinoza, re-evaluating contemporary cognitive media theory and philosophical theories on the emotional and intellectual aspects of film experience. Sticchi’s exploration of Spinozian philosophy creates an experiential constructive model to blend the affective and intellectual aspects of cognition, and to combine it with different philosophical interpretations of film theory. Spinoza’s embodied philosophy rejected logical and ethical dualisms, and established a perfect parallelism between sensation and reason and provides the opportunity to address negative emotions and sad passions without referring exclusively to traditional notions such as catharsis or sublimation, and to put forth a practical/embodied notion of Film-Philosophy. This new analytical approach is tested on four case studies, films that challenge the viewer’s emotional engagement since they display situations of cosmic failure and depict controversial and damaged characters: A Serious Man (2009); Melancholia (2011); The Act of Killing (2012) and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013). This book is an important addition to the literature in Film Studies, particularly in Cognitive Film Theory and Philosophy of Film. Its affective and semantic analyses of film experience (studies of embodied conceptualisation), connecting Spinoza’s thought to the analysis of audiovisual media, will also be of interest to Philosophy scholars and in academic courses of film theory, film-philosophy and cognitive film studies.
Download or read book Empires of light written by Niharika Dinkar and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Light was central to the visual politics and imaginative geographies of empire, even beyond its role as a symbol of knowledge and progress in post-Enlightenment narratives. This book describes how imperial mappings of geographical space in terms of ‘cities of light’ and ‘hearts of darkness’ coincided with the industrialisation of light (in homes, streets, theatres) and its instrumentalisation through new representative forms (photography, film, magic lanterns, theatrical lighting). Cataloguing the imperial vision in its engagement with colonial India, the book evaluates responses by the celebrated Indian painter Ravi Varma (1848–1906) to reveal the centrality of light in technologies of vision, not merely as an ideological effect but as a material presence that produces spaces and inscribes bodies.
Download or read book The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era written by Laura Stamm and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-21 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Queer Biopic returns to the historical moment of the AIDS crisis and the emergence of New Queer Cinema to investigate the phenomena of queer biopic films produced during the late 1980s-early 1990s. More specifically, the book asks why queer filmmakers repeatedly produced biographical films of queer individuals living and dead throughout the years surrounding the AIDS crisis. While film critics and historian typically treat the biopic as a conservative, if not cliché, genre, queer filmmakers have frequently used the biopic to tell stories of queer lives. This project pays particular attention to the genre's queer resonances, opening up the biopic's historical connections to projects of education, public health, and social hygiene, along with the production of a shared history and national identity. Queer filmmakers' engagement with the biopic evokes the genre's history of building life through the portrayal of lives worthy of admiration and emulation, but it also points to another biopic history, that of representing lives damaged. By portraying lives damaged by inconceivable loss, queer filmmakers challenge the illusion of a coherent self presumably reinforced by the biopic genre and in doing so, their films open up the potential for new means of connection and relationality. The book features fresh readings of the cinema of Derek Jarman, John Greyson, Todd Haynes, Barbara Hammer, and Tom Kalin. By calling for a reappraisal of the queer biopic, the book also calls for a reappraisal of New Queer Cinema's legacy and its influence of contemporary queer film"--
Download or read book Struggles for Recognition written by Juan Sebastián Ospina León and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Struggles for Recognition traces the emergence of melodrama in Latin American silent film and silent film culture. Juan Sebastián Ospina León draws on extensive archival research to reveal how melodrama visualized and shaped the social arena of urban modernity in early twentieth-century Latin America. Analyzing sociocultural contexts through film, this book demonstrates the ways in which melodrama was mobilized for both liberal and illiberal ends, revealing or concealing social inequities from Buenos Aires to Bogotá to Los Angeles. Ospina León critically engages Euro-American and Latin American scholarship seldom put into dialogue, offering an innovative theorization of melodrama relevant to scholars working within and across different national contexts.
Download or read book Popular Cinemas in East Central Europe written by Dorota Ostrowska and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-30 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The continued interest in the social and cultural life of the former Warsaw pact countries - looking at but also beyond their socialist pasts - encompasses a desire to know more about their national cinemas. Yet, despite the increasing consumption of films from these countries - via DVD, VOD platforms and other alternative channels - there is a lack of comprehensive information on this key aspect of visual culture. This important book rectifies the glaring gap and provides both a history and a contemporary account of East Central European cinema in the pre-WW2, socialist, and post-socialist periods. Demonstrating how at different historical moments popular cinema fulfilled various roles, for example in the capacity of nation-building, and adapted to the changing markets of a morphing political landscape, chapters bring together experts in the field for the definitive analysis of mainstream cinema in the region.Celebrating the unique contribution of films from Hungary, the Czech Republic/Czechoslovakia and Poland, from the award-winning Cosy Dens to cult favourite Lemonade Joe, and from 1960s Polish Westerns to Hollywood-influenced Hungarian movies, the book addresses the major themes of popular cinema. By looking closely at genre, stardom, cinema exhibition, production strategies and the relationship between the popular and the national, it charts the remarkable evolution and transformation of popular cinema over time.
Download or read book Researching the Archaeological Past through Imagined Narratives written by Daniël van Helden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archaeological interpretation is an imaginative act. Stratigraphy and artefacts do not tell us what the past was like; that is the task of the archaeologist. The diverse group of contributors to this volume address the relationship between archaeology and imagination through the medium of historical fiction and fictive techniques, both as consumers and as producers. The fictionalisation of archaeological research is often used to disseminate the results of scholarly or commercial archaeology projects for wider public outreach. Here, instead, the authors focus on the question of what benefits fiction and fictive techniques, as inspiration and method, can bring to the practice of archaeology itself. The contributors, a mix of archaeologists, novelists and other artists, advance a variety of theoretical arguments and examples to advance the case for the value of a reflexive engagement between archaeology and fiction. Themes include the similarities and differences in the motives and methods of archaeologists and novelists, translation, empathy, and the need to humanise the past and diversify archaeological narratives. The authors are sensitive to the epistemological and ethical issues surrounding the influence of fiction on researchers and the incorporation of fictive techniques in their work. Sometimes dismissed as distracting just-so stories, or even as dangerously relativistic narratives, the use of fictive techniques has a long history in archaeological research and examples from the scholarly literature on many varied periods and regions are considered. The volume sets out to bring together examples of these disparate applications and to focus attention on the need for explicit recognition of the problems and possibilities of such approaches, and on the value of further research about them.
Download or read book Reading Roman Declamation written by Martin T. Dinter and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-11-27 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a genre situated at the crossroad of rhetoric and fiction, declamatio offers the freedom to experiment with new forms of discourse. Placing the literariness of declamatio into the spotlight, this volume showcases declamation as a realm of genuine literary creation with its own theoretical underpinning, literary technique and generic conventions. Focusing on the oeuvre of (Ps)Quintilian, this volume demonstrates that these texts constitute a genre on their own, the rhetorical and literary framework of which remains not yet fully mapped. It is of interest to students and scholars of Rhetoric and Roman Literature.
Download or read book Displaced Things in Museums and Beyond written by Sandra H. Dudley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-29 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Displaced Things in Museums and Beyond looks anew at the lives, effects and possibilities of things. Starting from the perspectives of things themselves, it outlines a particular, displacement approach to the museum, anthropology and material culture. The book explores the ways in which the objects are experienced in their present, displaced settings, and the implications and potentialities they carry. It offers insights into matters of difference and the hope that may be offered by transformative encounters between persons and things. Drawing on anthropological studies of ritual to conceptualise and examine displacement and its implications and possibilities, Dudley develops her arguments through exploration of displaced objects now in museums and dislocated or exiled from their prior geographical, historical, cultural, intellectual and personal contexts. The book’s approach and conclusions are relevant far beyond the museum, showing that even in the most difficult of circumstances there is agency, distinction and dignity in the choices and impacts that are made, and that things and places as well as people have efficacy and potency in those choices. In Displaced Things, displacement emerges as fundamental to understanding the lives of things and their relationships with human beings, and the places, however defined, that they make and pass within. The book will be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of museums, heritage, anthropology, culture and history.
Download or read book Indict the Author of Affection written by Bradley W. Buchanan and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2023-04-03 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many scholars have touched tangentially on the topic of affectation in Hamlet, but none have yet offered an adequate rhetorical analysis of Shakespeare’s treatment of the concept. Making the claim that affectation is an anomalous affective malady that afflicts nearly everyone in the play, Bradley Buchanan explores the many manifestations of affectation at the court of Elsinore in light of classical rhetorical theory, as well as in the broader context of early modern intellectual culture. Buchanan shows that the special twist in Shakespeare’s depictions of affectation lies in the catachrestic abuse of the older English word “affection” by Hamlet himself (among other characters) to signify the new, foreign concept of affectation. This disturbing conflation of two opposing conditions encapsulates Hamlet’s much-discussed problem: he cannot tell the difference between genuine affection and deceptive affectation. Drawing on a growing field of scholarship engaged in the study of rhetoric in early modern English texts, Indict the Author of Affection explores how Shakespeare’s extensive and self-conscious use of catachresis involves not only far-fetched metaphors but subversive new meanings that can infect familiar words, dramatizing his characters’ psychological conflicts and producing a rich but treacherous instability in language itself. Indict the Author of Affection brings to Hamlet a groundbreaking analysis engaged with the complex, wide-ranging, and contentious discourse concerning affectation as a rhetorical, moral, and aesthetic issue.
Download or read book Other Americans written by Matthew Bush and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grounded in perspectives of affect theory, Other Americans examines the writings of Roberto Bolaño and Daniel Alarcón; films by Alfonso Cuarón, Claudia Llosa, Matt Piedmont, and Joel and Ethan Coen; as well as the Netflix serials Narcos and El marginal. These widely consumed works about Latin America—equally balanced between narratives produced in the United States and in the region itself—are laden with fear, anxiety, and shame, which has an impact that exceeds the experience of reception. The negative feelings encoded in visions of Latin America become common coinage for US audiences, shaping their ideological relationship with the region and performing an affective interpellation. By analyzing the underlying melodramatic structures of these works that would portray Latin America as an implicit other, Bush examines a process of affective comprehension that foments an us/them, or north/south binary in the reception of Latin America’s globalized art.
Download or read book Global Melodrama written by Carla Marcantonio and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-10-07 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global Melodrama is the first booklength work to investigate melodrama in a specifically twenty-first century setting across regional and national boundaries, analyzing film texts from a variety of national contexts in the wake of globalization.
