The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema PDF Download

Author: Jessica Balanzategui
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789462986510
Category : ART
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema illustrates how global horror film depictions of children re-conceptualised childhood at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and considers the cultural conditions surrounding their emergence.

Author: Steffen Hantke
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781604734546
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Creatively spent and politically irrelevant, the American horror film is a mere ghost of its former self-or so goes the old saw from fans and scholars alike. Taking on this undeserved reputation, the contributors to this collection provide a comprehensive look at a decade of cinematic production, covering a wide variety of material from the last ten years with a clear critical eye. Individual essays profile the work of up-and-coming director Alexandre Aja and reassess William Malone's muchmaligned Feardotcom in the light of the torture debate at the end of President George W. Bush's administration. Other essays look at the economic, social, and formal aspects of the genre; the globalization of the U.S. film industry; the alleged escalation of cinematic violence; and the massive commercial popularity of the remake. Some essays examine specific subgenres-from the teenage horror flick to the serial killer film and the spiritual horror film-as well as the continuing relevance of classic directors such as George A. Romero, David Cronenberg, John Landis, and Stuart Gordon. Essays deliberate on the marketing of nostalgia and its concomitant aesthetic, and the curiously schizophrenic perspective of fans who happen to be scholars as well. Taken together, the contributors to this collection make a compelling case that American horror cinema is as vital, creative, and thought-provoking as it ever was.

Author: Carol Vernallis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190258179
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 833

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media surveys the contemporary landscape of audiovisual media. Contributors to the volume look not only to changes brought by digital innovations, but to the complex social and technological past that informs, and is transformed by, new media. This collection is conceived as a series of dialogues and inquiries by leading scholars from both image- and sound-based disciplines. Chapters explore the history and the future of moving-image media across a range of formats including blockbuster films, video games, music videos, social media, digital visualization technologies, experimental film, documentaries, video art, pornography, immersive theater, and electronic music. Sound, music, and noise emerge within these studies as integral forces within shifting networks of representation. The essays in this collection span a range of disciplinary approaches (film studies, musicology, philosophy, cultural studies, the digital humanities) and subjects of study (Iranian documentaries, the Twilight franchise, military combat footage, and Lady Gaga videos). Thematic sections and direct exchanges among authors facilitate further engagement with the debates invoked by the text.

Author: Stephanie Hemelryk Donald
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501318594
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
The child has existed in cinema since the Lumière Brothers filmed their babies having messy meals in Lyons, but it is only quite recently that scholars have paid serious attention to her/his presence on screen. Scholarly discussion is now of the highest quality and of interest to anyone concerned not only with the extent to which adult cultural conversations invoke the figure of the child, but also to those interested in exploring how film cultures can shift questions of agency and experience in relation to subjectivity. Childhood and Nation in World Cinema recognizes that the range of films and scholarship is now sufficiently extensive to invoke the world cinema mantra of pluri-vocal and pluri-central attention and interpretation. At the same time, the importance of the child in figuring ideas of nationhood is an undiminished tic in adult cultural and social consciousness. Either the child on film provokes claims on the nation or the nation claims the child. Given the waning star of national film studies, and the widely held and serious concerns over the status of the nation as a meaningful cultural unit, the point here is not to assume some extraordinary pre-social geopolitical empathy of child and political entity. Rather, the present collection observes how and why and whether the cinematic child is indeed aligned to concepts of modern nationhood, to concerns of the State, and to geo-political organizational themes and precepts.

Author: Vicky Lebeau
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 9781861893529
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Vicky Lebeau investigates how films use children to probe such themes as sexuality, death, imagination, the terrors of childhood, and hope.

Author: Helen Oyeyemi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408846381
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Jessamy Harrison is eight years old. Sensitive, whimsical, possessed of a powerful imagination, she spends hours writing, reading or simply hiding in the dark warmth of the airing cupboard. As the half-and-half child of an English father and a Nigerian mother, Jess just can't shake off the feeling of being alone wherever she goes, and other kids are wary of her terrified fits of screaming. When she is taken to her mother's family compound in Nigeria, she encounters Titiola, a ragged little girl her own age. It seems that at last Jess has found someone who will understand her. TillyTilly knows secrets both big and small. But as she shows Jess just how easy it is to hurt those around her, Jess begins to realise that she doesn't know who TillyTilly is at all.

Author: Arnika Fuhrmann
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374250
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Through an examination of post-1997 Thai cinema and video art Arnika Fuhrmann shows how vernacular Buddhist tenets, stories, and images combine with sexual politics in figuring current struggles over notions of personhood, sexuality, and collective life. The drama, horror, heritage, and experimental art films she analyzes draw on Buddhist-informed conceptions of impermanence and prominently feature the motif of the female ghost. In these films the characters' eroticization in the spheres of loss and death represents an improvisation on the Buddhist disavowal of attachment and highlights under-recognized female and queer desire and persistence. Her feminist and queer readings reveal the entangled relationships between film, sexuality, Buddhist ideas, and the Thai state's regulation of heteronormative sexuality. Fuhrmann thereby provides insights into the configuration of contemporary Thailand while opening up new possibilities for thinking about queer personhood and femininity.

Author: Bruce Bennett
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1906897999
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
A unique exploration of the history of the bicycle in cinema, from Hollywood blockbusters and slapstick comedies to documentaries, realist dramas, and experimental films. Cycling and Cinema explores the history of the bicycle in cinema from the late nineteenth century through to the present day. In this new book from Goldsmiths Press, Bruce Bennett examines a wide variety of films from around the world, ranging from Hollywood blockbusters and slapstick comedies to documentaries, realist dramas, and experimental films, to consider the complex, shifting cultural significance of the bicycle. The bicycle is an everyday technology, but in examining the ways in which bicycles are used in films, Bennett reveals the rich social and cultural importance of this apparently unremarkable machine. The cinematic bicycles discussed in this book have various functions. They are the source of absurd comedy in silent films, and the vehicles that allow their owners to work in sports films and social realist cinema. They are a means of independence and escape for children in melodramas and kids' films, and the tools that offer political agency and freedom to women, as depicted in films from around the world. In recounting the cinematic history of the bicycle, Bennett reminds us that this machine is not just a practical means of transport or a child's toy, but the vehicle for a wide range of meanings concerning individual identity, social class, nationhood and belonging, family, gender, and sexuality and pleasure. As this book shows, two hundred years on from its invention, the bicycle is a revolutionary technology that retains the power to transform the world.

Author: Parisa Vaziri
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452970203
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Rethinking the history of African enslavement in the western Indian Ocean through the lens of Iranian cinema From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding regions with African slave labor from antiquity to the nineteenth century. This book reveals how Iranian cinema preserves the legacy of this vast and yet long-overlooked history that has come to be known as Indian Ocean slavery. How does a focus on blackness complicate traditional understandings of history and culture? Parisa Vaziri addresses this question by looking at residues of the Indian Ocean slave trade in Iranian films from the second half of the twentieth century. Revealing the politicized clash between commercial cinema (fīlmfārsī) and alternative filmmaking (the Iranian New Wave), she pays particular attention to the healing ritual zār, which is both an African slave descendent practice and a constitutive element of Iranian culture, as well as to cinematic sīyāh bāzī (Persian black play). Moving beyond other studies on Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slavery, Vaziri highlights the crystallization of a singular mode of historicity within these cinematic examples—one of “absence” that reflects the relative dearth of archival information on the facts surrounding Indian Ocean slavery. Bringing together cinema studies, Middle East studies, Black studies, and postcolonial theory, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery explores African enslavement in the Indian Ocean through the revelatory and little-known history of Iranian cinema. It shows that Iranian film reveals a resistance to facticity representative of the history of African enslavement in the Indian Ocean and preserves the legacy of African slavery’s longue durée in ways that resist its overpowering erasure in the popular and historical imagination. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

Author: Gene Youngblood
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823287432
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
Fiftieth anniversary reissue of the founding media studies book that helped establish media art as a cultural category. First published in 1970, Gene Youngblood’s influential Expanded Cinema was the first serious treatment of video, computers, and holography as cinematic technologies. Long considered the bible for media artists, Youngblood’s insider account of 1960s counterculture and the birth of cybernetics remains a mainstay reference in today’s hypermediated digital world. This fiftieth anniversary edition includes a new Introduction by the author that offers conceptual tools for understanding the sociocultural and sociopolitical realities of our present world. A unique eyewitness account of burgeoning experimental film and the birth of video art in the late 1960s, this far- ranging study traces the evolution of cinematic language to the end of fiction, drama, and realism. Vast in scope, its prescient formulations include “the paleocybernetic age,” “intermedia,” the “artist as design scientist,” the “artist as ecologist,” “synaesthetics and kinesthetics,” and “the technosphere: man/machine symbiosis.” Outstanding works are analyzed in detail. Methods of production are meticulously described, including interviews with artists and technologists of the period, such as Nam June Paik, Jordan Belson, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Stan VanDerBeek, Les Levine, and Frank Gillette. An inspiring Introduction by the celebrated polymath and designer R. Buckminster Fuller—a perfectly cut gem of countercultural thinking in itself—places Youngblood’s radical observations in comprehensive perspective. Providing an unparalleled historical documentation, Expanded Cinema clarifies a chapter of countercultural history that is still not fully represented in the arthistorical record half a century later. The book will also inspire the current generation of artists working in ever-newer expansions of the cinematic environment and will prove invaluable to all who are concerned with the technologies that are reshaping the nature of human communication.