Author: Jamie Bennett Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030609499 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 134
Book Description
This book explores how an audience of men serving sentences in an English prison responded to viewing five contemporary British prison films. It examines how media representations of prison vary in style and content, how film can influence public attitudes, and how this affects people in prison. The book explains the ways in which film acts as a power resource, presenting an ideological vision of criminal justice. The audience used these films to map the social terrain of prison, including issues of power and resistance; race and racism; corruption and the illicit economy; and staff-prisoner relationships, themes which are explored in the films screened. The authors argue that media consumption is one of the ways in which people in prison construct and maintain an ideal of the prisoner culture and what it is to be a ‘prisoner’. The book also reveals the ways in which audience members’ media choices and readings are part of the ongoing process of constructing their self-identity. This book illuminates the complex ways in which media consumption is an integral part of social power, cultural formation and identity construction. Recognising and engaging with audiencehood offers one potential route for supporting more progressive penal practice. This book speaks to those interested in prisons, crime, media and culture, and film studies.
Author: Alison Griffiths Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231541562 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 467
Book Description
A groundbreaking contribution to the study of nontheatrical film exhibition, Carceral Fantasies tells the little-known story of how cinema found a home in the U.S. penitentiary system and how the prison emerged as a setting and narrative trope in modern cinema. Focusing on films shown in prisons before 1935, Alison Griffiths explores the unique experience of viewing cinema while incarcerated and the complex cultural roots of cinematic renderings of prison life. Griffiths considers a diverse mix of cinematic genres, from early actualities and reenactments of notorious executions to reformist exposés of the 1920s. She connects an early fascination with cinematic images of punishment and execution, especially electrocutions, to the attractions of the nineteenth-century carnival electrical wonder show and Phantasmagoria (a ghost show using magic lantern projections and special effects). Griffiths draws upon convict writing, prison annual reports, and the popular press obsession with prison-house cinema to document the integration of film into existing reformist and educational activities and film's psychic extension of flights of fancy undertaken by inmates in their cells. Combining penal history with visual and film studies and theories surrounding media's sensual effects, Carceral Fantasies illuminates how filmic representations of the penal system enacted ideas about modernity, gender, the body, and the public, shaping both the social experience of cinema and the public's understanding of the modern prison.
Author: Bruce Crowther Publisher: B. T. Batsford Limited ISBN: Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
Prison has long fascinated film makers and audiences alike. The author explores the dark enclosed world of prisons on film from light-hearted comedies to the deeper implications of people imprisoned for their political and religious beliefs.
Author: Kevin Kehrwald Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231851049 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 130
Book Description
Prison Movies: Cinema Behind Bars traces the public fascination with incarceration from the silent era to the present. Often considered an offshoot of the gangster film, the prison film precedes the gangster film and is in many ways its opposite. Rather than focusing on tragic figures heading for a fall, the prison film focuses on fallen characters seeking redemption. The gangster's perverse pursuit of the American dream is irrelevant to the prisoner for whom that dream has already failed. At their core, prison films are about self-preservation at the hands of oppressive authority. Like history itself, prison films display long stretches of idleness punctuated by eruptions of violence, dangerous moments that signify liberation and the potential for change. The enclosed world of the prison is a highly effective microcosm, one that forces characters and audiences alike to confront vexing issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. These portrayals of men and women behind bars have thrived because they deal with such fundamental human themes as freedom, individuality, power, justice, and mercy. Films examined include The Big House (1930), I Want to Live! (1958), The Defiant Ones (1958), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Midnight Express (1978), Escape from Alcatraz (1979), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), and Starred Up (2013).
Author: David Wilson Publisher: Waterside Press ISBN: 1904380085 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
An analysis of the impact of TV on the democratic processes that lead to criminal policy making - Everthing from 'The Shawshank Redemption' to the TV sit-com; how public perceptions of serious social issues are often based on superficial, misleading and sometimes comfortable accounts.
Author: Shane Bauer Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0735223580 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 384
Book Description
An enraging, necessary look at the private prison system, and a convincing clarion call for prison reform.” —NPR.org New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018 * One of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2018 * Winner of the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize * Winner of the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism * Winner of the 2019 RFK Book and Journalism Award * A New York Times Notable Book A ground-breaking and brave inside reckoning with the nexus of prison and profit in America: in one Louisiana prison and over the course of our country's history. In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for $9 an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; there was no meaningful background check. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough, and in short order he wrote an exposé about his experiences that won a National Magazine Award and became the most-read feature in the history of the magazine Mother Jones. Still, there was much more that he needed to say. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War. For, as he soon realized, we can't understand the cruelty of our current system and its place in the larger story of mass incarceration without understanding where it came from. Private prisons became entrenched in the South as part of a systemic effort to keep the African-American labor force in place in the aftermath of slavery, and the echoes of these shameful origins are with us still. The private prison system is deliberately unaccountable to public scrutiny. Private prisons are not incentivized to tend to the health of their inmates, or to feed them well, or to attract and retain a highly-trained prison staff. Though Bauer befriends some of his colleagues and sympathizes with their plight, the chronic dysfunction of their lives only adds to the prison's sense of chaos. To his horror, Bauer finds himself becoming crueler and more aggressive the longer he works in the prison, and he is far from alone. A blistering indictment of the private prison system, and the powerful forces that drive it, American Prison is a necessary human document about the true face of justice in America.
Author: Lucy Fischer Publisher: Modern Language Association ISBN: 1603291334 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 413
Book Description
Film studies has been a part of higher education curricula in the United States almost since the development of the medium. Although the study of film is dispersed across a range of academic departments, programs, and scholarly organizations, film studies has come to be recognized as a field in its own right. In an era when teaching and scholarship are increasingly interdisciplinary, film studies continues to expand and thrive, attracting new scholars and fresh ideas, direction, and research. Given the dynamism of the field, experienced and beginning instructors alike need resources for bringing the study of film into the classroom. This volume will help instructors conceptualize contemporary film studies in pedagogical terms. The first part of the volume features essays on theory and on representation, including gender, race, and sexuality. Contributors then examine the geographies of cinema and offer practical suggestions for structuring courses on national, regional, and transnational film. Several essays focus on interdisciplinary approaches, while others describe courses designed around genre (film noir, the musical), mode (animation, documentary, avant-garde film), or the formal elements of film, such as sound, music, and mise-en-scene. The volume closes with a section on film and media in the digital age, in which contributors discuss the opportunities and challenges presented by access to resources, media convergence, and technological developments in the field.
Author: Peter Caster Publisher: ISBN: Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
In Prisons, Race, and Masculinity, Peter Caster demonstrates the centrality of imprisonment in American culture, illustrating how incarceration, an institution inseparable from race, has shaped and continues to shape U.S. history and literature in the starkest expression of what W. E. B. DuBois famously termed "the problem of the color line." A prison official in 1888 declared that it was the freeing of slaves that actually created prisons: "we had to establish means for their control. Hence came the penitentiary." Such rampant racism co ntributed to the criminalization of black masculinity in the cultural imagination, shaping not only the identity of prisoners (collectively and individually) but also America's national character. Caster analyzes the representations of imprisonment in books, films, and performances, alternating between history and fiction to describe how racism influenced imprisonment during the decline of lynching in the 1930s, the political radicalism in the late 1960s, and the unprecedented prison expansion through the 1980s and 1990s. Offering new interpretations of familiar works by William Faulkner, Eldridge Cleaver, and Norman Mailer, Caster also engages recent films such as American History X, The Hurricane, and The Farm: Life Inside Angola Prison alongside prison history chronicled in the transcripts of the American Correctional Association. This book offers a compelling account of how imprisonment has functioned as racial containment, a matter critical to U.S. history and literary study.
Author: Sue Ellen Allen Publisher: Inkwell Productions ISBN: 0982958927 Category : Self-Help Languages : en Pages : 233
Book Description
What happens to a successful woman when her world falls apart and she is faced with betrayal, breast cancer, and prison? What happens when her pain Is unimaginable and her choices look bleak. When all this happened to Sue Ellen Allen, she chose to turn her pain into power. The death of Gina, her young roommate, coupled with an atmosphere of darkness and negativity, led her to find her passion and purpose behind the bars. Her experience of cancer, prison, and Gina s death is an inspirational story of courage, wisdom, and choices.
Author: Jamie Bennett
Author: Jamie Bennett
Author: Alison Griffiths
Author: Bruce Crowther
Author: Kevin Kehrwald
Author: David Wilson
Author: Shane Bauer
Author: Lucy Fischer
Author: Peter Caster
Author: Sue Ellen Allen