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A Companion to the Biopic

A Companion to the Biopic PDF Author: Deborah Cartmell
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119554810
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Book Description
The most comprehensive reference text of theoretical and historical discourse on the biopic film The biopic, often viewed as the most reviled of all film genres, traces its origins to the early silent era over a century ago. Receiving little critical attention, biopics are regularly dismissed as superficial, formulaic, and disrespectful of history. Film critics, literary scholars and historians tend to believe that biopics should be artistic, yet accurate, true-to-life representations of their subjects. Moviegoing audiences, however, do not seem to hold similar views; biopics continue to be popular, commercially viable films. Even the genre’s most ardent detractors will admit that these films are often very watchable, particularly due to the performance of the lead actor. It is increasingly common for stars of biographical films to garner critical praise and awards, driving a growing interest in scholarship in the genre. A Companion to the Biopic is the first global and authoritative reference on the subject. Offering theoretical, historical, thematic, and performance-based approaches, this unique volume brings together the work of top scholars to discuss the coverage of the lives of authors, politicians, royalty, criminals, and pop stars through the biopic film. Chapters explore evolving attitudes and divergent perspectives on the genre with topics such as the connections between biopics and literary melodramas, the influence financial concerns have on aesthetic, social, or moral principles, the merger of historical narratives with Hollywood biographies, stereotypes and criticisms of the biopic genre, and more. This volume: Provides a systematic, in-depth analysis of the biopic and considers how the choice of historical subject reflects contemporary issues Places emphasis on films that portray race and gender issues Explores the uneven boundaries of the genre by addressing what is and is not a biopic as well as the ways in which films simultaneously embrace and defy historical authenticity Examines the distinction between reality and ‘the real’ in biographical films Offers a chronological survey of biopics from the beginning of the 20th century A Companion to the Biopic is a valuable resource for researchers, scholars, and students of history, film studies, and English literature, as well as those in disciplines that examine interpretations of historical figures

A Companion to the Biopic

A Companion to the Biopic PDF Author: Deborah Cartmell
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119554810
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Book Description
The most comprehensive reference text of theoretical and historical discourse on the biopic film The biopic, often viewed as the most reviled of all film genres, traces its origins to the early silent era over a century ago. Receiving little critical attention, biopics are regularly dismissed as superficial, formulaic, and disrespectful of history. Film critics, literary scholars and historians tend to believe that biopics should be artistic, yet accurate, true-to-life representations of their subjects. Moviegoing audiences, however, do not seem to hold similar views; biopics continue to be popular, commercially viable films. Even the genre’s most ardent detractors will admit that these films are often very watchable, particularly due to the performance of the lead actor. It is increasingly common for stars of biographical films to garner critical praise and awards, driving a growing interest in scholarship in the genre. A Companion to the Biopic is the first global and authoritative reference on the subject. Offering theoretical, historical, thematic, and performance-based approaches, this unique volume brings together the work of top scholars to discuss the coverage of the lives of authors, politicians, royalty, criminals, and pop stars through the biopic film. Chapters explore evolving attitudes and divergent perspectives on the genre with topics such as the connections between biopics and literary melodramas, the influence financial concerns have on aesthetic, social, or moral principles, the merger of historical narratives with Hollywood biographies, stereotypes and criticisms of the biopic genre, and more. This volume: Provides a systematic, in-depth analysis of the biopic and considers how the choice of historical subject reflects contemporary issues Places emphasis on films that portray race and gender issues Explores the uneven boundaries of the genre by addressing what is and is not a biopic as well as the ways in which films simultaneously embrace and defy historical authenticity Examines the distinction between reality and ‘the real’ in biographical films Offers a chronological survey of biopics from the beginning of the 20th century A Companion to the Biopic is a valuable resource for researchers, scholars, and students of history, film studies, and English literature, as well as those in disciplines that examine interpretations of historical figures

Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable

Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable PDF Author: Agnieszka Piotrowska
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317355768
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Book Description
Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable opens a space for meaningful debate about translating psychoanalytic concepts from the work of clinicians to that of academics and back again. Focusing on the idea of the unrepresentable, this collection of essays by psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, artists and film and literary scholars attempts to think through those things that are impossible to be thought through completely. Offering a unique insight into areas like trauma studies, where it is difficult – if not impossible – to express one’s feelings, the collection draws from psychoanalysis in its broadest sense and acts as a gesture against the fixed and the frozen. Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable is presented in six parts: Approaching Trauma, Sense and Gesture, Impossible Poetics, Without Words, Wounds and Suture and Auto/Fiction. The chapters therein address topics including touch and speech, adoption, the other and grief, and examine films including Gus Van Sant’s Milk and Michael Haneke’s Amour. As a whole, the book brings to the fore those things which are difficult to speak about, but which must be spoken about. The discussion in this book will be key reading for psychoanalysts, including those in training, psychotherapists and psychotherapeutically-engaged scholars, academics and students of culture studies, psychosocial studies, applied philosophy and film studies, filmmakers and artists.

Representing the Unpresentable

Representing the Unpresentable PDF Author: Negar Mottahedah
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815631798
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
In this pioneering book, Negar Mottahedeh explores the central issues of vision and visibility in Iranian culture. She focuses on historical and literary texts to understand the use of visual culture and performance traditions in the production of the contemporary nation. Tracing the historical mediation and dissemination of ideas for national reform in the modern period of Iran, the book examines the various discourses that have constituted the image of the unpresentable “Babi” as the figure of Iran’s Other. In her exploration of gender and Iranian cinema, the author powerfully argues that this unpresentable image continues to haunt contemporary Iranian cinema’s representations of the nation. As cinema began to displace other forms of representation in Iran, Islamic culture attempted to keep the motion picture industry free from what it perceived to be the taint of foreign values and intervention. With insight and detail, Mottahedeh looks at the revealing ways in which contemporary Iranian cinema has dealt with representing an unpresentable national modernity articulated through traversals in time and space. These deeply national tropes of traversal shaped the image of the “Babi,” against which nineteenth-century Iran produced its own modernity. This highly original work, signaling a paradigmatic shift in Iranian studies and gender studies, will be an invaluable resource for scholars in cultural, Iranian, or film studies.

Divas on Screen

Divas on Screen PDF Author: Mia Mask
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252091825
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Book Description
This insightful study places African American women's stardom in historical and industrial contexts by examining the star personae of five African American women: Dorothy Dandridge, Pam Grier, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Halle Berry. Interpreting each woman's celebrity as predicated on a brand of charismatic authority, Mia Mask shows how these female stars have ultimately complicated the conventional discursive practices through which blackness and womanhood have been represented in commercial cinema, independent film, and network television. Mask examines the function of these stars in seminal yet underanalyzed films. She considers Dandridge's status as a sexual commodity in films such as Tamango, revealing the contradictory discourses regarding race and sexuality in segregation-era American culture. Grier's feminist-camp performances in sexploitation pictures Women in Cages and The Big Doll House and her subsequent blaxploitation vehicles Coffy and Foxy Brown highlight a similar tension between representing African American women as both objectified stereotypes and powerful, self-defining icons. Mask reads Goldberg's transforming habits in Sister Act and The Associate as representative of her unruly comedic routines, while Winfrey's daily television performance as self-made, self-help guru echoes Horatio Alger narratives of success. Finally, Mask analyzes Berry's meteoric success by acknowledging the ways in which Dandridge's career made Berry's possible.

Bigger Than Life

Bigger Than Life PDF Author: Mary Ann Doane
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478021780
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Book Description
In Bigger Than Life Mary Ann Doane examines how the scalar operations of cinema, especially those of the close-up, disturb and reconfigure the spectator's sense of place, space, and orientation. Doane traces the history of scalar transformations from early cinema to the contemporary use of digital technology. In the early years of cinema, audiences regarded the monumental close-up, particularly of the face, as grotesque and often horrifying, even as it sought to expose a character's interiority through its magnification of detail and expression. Today, large-scale technologies such as IMAX and surround sound strive to dissolve the cinematic frame and invade the spectator's space, “immersing” them in image and sound. The notion of immersion, Doane contends, is symptomatic of a crisis of location in technologically mediated space and a reconceptualization of position, scale, and distance. In this way, cinematic scale and its modes of spatialization and despatialization have shaped the modern subject, interpolating them into the incessant expansion of commodification.

Global London on screen

Global London on screen PDF Author: Keith B. Wagner
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526157551
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Book Description
Global London on screen presents a mélange of films by directors from the Global South and North, portraying everyday life to the more fantastical, odious, or extraordinary in terms of circumstances as captured cinematically in this superdiverse city. This book portrays a segment of such superdiversity by historicising and theorising various cinematic reproductions of London by filmmakers coming to this megacity from abroad. As visitors, cosmopolitans, or even migrant filmmakers, their treatment of London’s zonal locations as both foreign and familiar is fascinating; their narratives and visualisations of London’s spatial and architectural uniqueness is given a sojourners’ touch; while other foreign filmmakers showcase and sometimes problematise London’s socio-cultural globality and locality as both British and a city open (and sometimes closed off) to the world.

The Eloquent Screen

The Eloquent Screen PDF Author: Gilberto Perez
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145295965X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 564

Book Description
A lifetime of cinematic writing culminates in this breathtaking statement on film’s unique ability to move us Cinema is commonly hailed as “the universal language,” but how does it communicate so effortlessly across cultural and linguistic borders? In The Eloquent Screen, influential film critic Gilberto Perez makes a capstone statement on the powerful ways in which film acts on our minds and senses. Drawing on a lifetime’s worth of viewing and re-viewing, Perez invokes a dizzying array of masters past and present—including Chaplin, Ford, Kiarostami, Eisenstein, Malick, Mizoguchi, Haneke, Hitchcock, and Godard—to explore the transaction between filmmaker and audience. He begins by explaining how film fits into the rhetorical tradition of persuasion and argumentation. Next, Perez explores how film embodies the central tropes of rhetoric––metaphor, metonymy, allegory, and synecdoche––and concludes with a thrilling account of cinema’s spectacular capacity to create relationships of identification with its audiences. Although there have been several attempts to develop a poetics of film, there has been no sustained attempt to set forth a rhetoric of film—one that bridges aesthetics and audience. Grasping that challenge, The Eloquent Screen shows how cinema, as the consummate contemporary art form, establishes a thoroughly modern rhetoric in which different points of view are brought into clear focus.

Cultures of United States Imperialism

Cultures of United States Imperialism PDF Author: Amy Kaplan
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822314134
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 686

Book Description
Cultures of United States Imperialism represents a major paradigm shift that will remap the field of American Studies. Pointing to a glaring blind spot in the basic premises of the study of American culture, leading critics and theorists in cultural studies, history, anthropology, and literature reveal the "denial of empire" at the heart of American Studies. Challenging traditional definitions and periodizations of imperialism, this volume shows how international relations reciprocally shape a dominant imperial culture at home and how imperial relations are enacted and contested within the United States. Drawing on a broad range of interpretive practices, these essays range across American history, from European representations of the New World to the mass media spectacle of the Persian Gulf War. The volume breaks down the boundary between the study of foreign relations and American culture to examine imperialism as an internal process of cultural appropriation and as an external struggle over international power. The contributors explore how the politics of continental and international expansion, conquest, and resistance have shaped the history of American culture just as much as the cultures of those it has dominated. By uncovering the dialectical relationship between American cultures and international relations, this collection demonstrates the necessity of analyzing imperialism as a political or economic process inseparable from the social relations and cultural representations of gender, race, ethnicity, and class at home. Contributors. Lynda Boose, Mary Yoko Brannen, Bill Brown, William Cain, Eric Cheyfitz, Vicente Diaz, Frederick Errington, Kevin Gaines, Deborah Gewertz, Donna Haraway, Susan Jeffords, Myra Jehlen, Amy Kaplan, Eric Lott, Walter Benn Michaels, Donald E. Pease, Vicente Rafael, Michael Rogin, José David Saldívar, Richard Slotkin, Doris Sommer, Gauri Viswanathan, Priscilla Wald, Kenneth Warren, Christopher P. Wilson

The New American Exceptionalism

The New American Exceptionalism PDF Author: Donald E. Pease
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816627827
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Book Description
For a half century following the end of World War II, the seemingly permanent cold war provided the United States with an organizing logic that governed nearly every aspect of American society and culture, giving rise to an unwavering belief in the nation's exceptionalism in global affairs and world history. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this cold war paradigm was replaced by a series of new ideological narratives that ultimately resulted in the establishment of another potentially endless war: the global war on terror. In The New American Exceptionalism, pioneering scholar Donald E. Pease traces the evolution of these state fantasies and shows how they have shaped U.S. national identity since the end of the cold war, uncovering the ideological and cultural work required to convince Americans to surrender their civil liberties in exchange for the illusion of security. His argument follows the chronology of the transitions between paradigms from the inauguration of the New World Order under George H. W. Bush to the homeland security state that George W. Bush's administration installed in the wake of 9/11. Providing clear and convincing arguments about how the concept of American exceptionalism was reformulated and redeployed in this era, Pease examines a wide range of cultural works and political spectacles, including the exorcism of the Vietnam syndrome through victory in the Persian Gulf War and the creation of Islamic extremism as an official state enemy. At the same time, Pease notes that state fantasies cannot altogether conceal the inconsistencies they mask, showing how such events as the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and the exposure of government incompetence after Hurricane Katrina opened fissures in the myth of exceptionalism, allowing Barack Obama to challenge the homeland security paradigm with an alternative state fantasy that privileges fairness, inclusion, and justice.

Screening Gender, Framing Genre

Screening Gender, Framing Genre PDF Author: Peter Dickinson
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802044751
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Book Description
Examines the history and theory of films adapted from Canadian literature through the lens of gender studies. This study offers readings of works by well-known Canadian authors such as Margaret Atwood, Marie-Claire Blais, and Michael Ondaatje, and by important Canadian filmmakers such as Mireille Dansereau, Claude Jutra, and Bruce McDonald.