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Cinematic Encounters with Disaster takes Hollywood's disaster movies and their codified versions of natural disaster, post-apocalyptic survival, and extra-terrestrial threat as the starting point for an analytical trajectory that works toward new understandings of how cinema shapes and informs our conceptions of disaster and catastrophe. It examines a range of films from distinct regional and industrial contexts: Hollywood, indie movies, different kinds of documentaries from the US and elsewhere, and auteurist-realist cinema from Europe and Asia. Moving across and beyond critical and industrial categories that often inform thinking about cinema, this book contends that different approaches to film style can push us to imagine disaster in distinct ways, with distinct ethical connotations. Framed by contemporary concerns around the global climate crisis and the advent of the Anthropocene, questions about how films can best offer responses to historical exigency guide the book's explorations of spectacular 2010s blockbusters like Gravity (2013) and San Andreas (2015), environmental documentaries including the paradigmatic An Inconvenient Truth (2006), post-disaster films by auteurs including Abbas Kiarostami and Lav Diaz, and more. Conceiving of disaster as intersubjective ethics between humans and nonhuman alterity – forces of nature, errant technology, monsters, ghosts, and other entities – it analyses how formal techniques and narrative strategies render encounters in which human protagonists are confronted with the threat of death and respond in ways that can be instructive for our planet's present juncture.
Explore new routes into the burgeoning field of biblical literature and film theory The present collection of essays is a sequel to the groundbreaking Semeia 74 issue, published in 1996, entitled Biblical Glamour and Hollywood Glitz. These new essays showcase the divergent approaches from film studies and cultural studies that can be used in the visual analysis of biblical and religious themes, narratives, and characters in cinema. It is the first volume that specifically addresses issues of methodology, theory, and analysis in the study between bible and film. As such, this collection is of interest to scholars in film studies and theology/religion/biblical studies, who are invested in doing interdisciplinary research in the expanding field of religion and film. Features Specific focus on methods of film analysis, rather than the more common focus on thematic analysis in the study of religion, Bible, and film. Visual analysis in the encounter between Bible and film Fourteen essays and an introduction by top scholars in the field
Starting in the early 1990s, artists such as Quentin Tarantino, David Foster Wallace, and Kurt Cobain contributed to a swelling cultural tide of pop postmodernism that swept through music, film, literature, and fashion. In cinema in particular, some of the arts most fundamental aspects—stories, characters, and genres, for instance—assumed such a trite and trivialized appearance that only rarely could they take their places on the screen without provoking an inward smirk or a wink from the audience. Out of this highly self-conscious and world-weary environment, however, a new group of filmmakers began to develop as the decade wore on, with a new set of styles and sensibilities to match. In Post-Pop Cinema author Jesse Fox Mayshark takes us on a film-by-film tour of the works of these filmmakers-including Wes and P. T. Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Richard Linklater, Alexander Payne, and David O. Russell-and seeks to reveal how a common pool of styles, collaborators, and personal connections helps them to confront the unifying problem of meaning in American film. Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket (1996) and Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997) were ultimately about their characters' lives-even though their characters often dealt with highly contrived environments and situations. And soon after Wes Anderson scored his first success, others like David O. Russell (Flirting With Disaster, Three Kings), the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (who collaborated with Spike Jonze on such projects as Being John Malkovich and Adaptation), Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways), Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko), and Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation) began to tread their own paths over this same ground. Although these men and women represent a wide range of styles and subject matter, all their films revolve in different ways around the difficulty of establishing and maintaining connections. This theme of connection also runs deeper than the films made: the directors share actors (Mark Wahlberg, Bill Murray, Ben Stiller, Jason Schwartzman), collaborators (the musician Jon Brion) and sometimes even personal connections (Spike Jonze starred in Russell's Three Kings, and was married to Coppola). Together these filmmakers form a loose and distinctly American school of filmmaking, one informed by postmodernism but not in thrall to it, and one that every year becomes more important to the world of cinema both within and beyond the United States.
Recent films are increasingly using themes and conventions of science fiction such as dystopian societies, catastrophic environmental disasters, apocalyptic scenarios, aliens, monsters, time travel, teleportation, and supernatural abilities to address cosmopolitan concerns such as human rights, climate change, economic precarity, and mobility. This book identifies and analyses the new transnational turn towards cosmopolitanism in science fiction cinema since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The book considers a wide selection of examples, including case studies of films such as Elysium, In Time, 2012, Andrew Niccol’s The Host, Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, and Cloud Atlas. It also questions the seeming cosmopolitanism of these narratives and exposes how they sometimes reproduce social hierarchies and exploitative practices. Dealing with diverse, interdisciplinary concerns represented in cinema, this book in the Studies in Global Genre Fiction series will be of interest to readers and scholars working in the fields of science fiction, film and media studies, cosmopolitanism, border theory, popular culture, and cultural studies. It will also appeal to fans of science fiction cinema and literature.
This major new study offers a broad historical and theoretical reassessment of the science fiction film genre. The book explores the development of science fiction in cinema from its beginnings in early film through to recent examples of the genre. Each chapter sets analyses of chosen films within a wider historical/cultural context, while concentrating on a specific thematic issue. The book therefore presents vital and unique perspectives in its approach to the genre, which include discussion of the relevance of psychedelic imagery, the 'new woman of science', generic performance and the prevalence of 'techno-orientalism' in recent films. While American films will be one of the principle areas covered, the author also engages with a range of pertinent examples from other nations, as well as discussing the centrality of science fiction as a transnational film genre. Films discussed include The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Body Snatchers, Forbidden Planet, The Quatermass Experiment, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Demon Seed, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Wars, Altered States, Alien, Blade Runner, The Brother from Another Planet, Back to the Future, The Terminator, Predator, The One, Dark City, The Matrix, Fifth Element and eXistenZ. Key Features*Thematically organised for use as a course text.*Introduces current and past theories and practices, and provides an overview of the main themes, approaches and areas of study.*Covers new and burgeoning approaches such as generic performance and aspects of postmodern identity.*Includes new interviews with some of the main practitioners in the field: Roland Emmerich, Paul Verhoeven, Ken Russell, Stan Winston, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Joe Morton, Dean Norris and Billy Gray.
Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema takes a new approach to world cinema through critical theory. Whereas world cinema often refers to non-American films deemed artistic or peripheral, Seung-hoon Jong examines its mapping frames: the territorial 'national frame,' the deterritorializing 'transnational frame,' and the 'global frame.' If world cinema studies have mostly displayed national cinemas and their transnational mutations, his global frame highlights two conflicting ethical facets of globalization: the 'soft-ethical' inclusion of differences in multicultural, neoliberal systems and their 'hard-ethical' symptoms of fundamentalist exclusion and terror. Reflecting both, global cinema draws attention to new changes in subjectivity and community that Jeong investigates in terms of biopolitical 'abjection' and ethical 'agency.' In this frame, the book explores a vast net of post-1990 films circulating in both the mainstream market and the festival circuit. Jeong comparatively navigates these films, highlighting less essentialist particularities than compatible localities that perform universal aspects of biopolitical ethics by centering the narrative of 'double death': the abject as symbolically dead struggle for lost subjectivity or new agency until physically dying. This narrative pervades global cinema from Hollywood blockbusters and European art films to Middle Eastern dramas and Asian genre films. Ultimately, the book renews critical discourses on global issues--including multiculturalism, catastrophe, sovereignty, abjection, violence, network, nihilism, and atopia--through a core cluster of political, ethical, and psychoanalytic philosophies.
A Companion to Russian Cinema provides an exhaustive and carefully organised guide to the cinema of pre-Revolutionary Russia, of the Soviet era, as well as post-Soviet Russian cinema, edited by one of the most established and knowledgeable scholars in Russian cinema studies. The most up-to-date and thorough coverage of Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet cinema, which also effectively fills gaps in the existing scholarship in the field This is the first volume on Russian cinema to explore specifically the history of movie theatres, studios, and educational institutions The editor is one of the most established and knowledgeable scholars in Russian cinema studies, and contributions come from leading experts in the field of Russian Studies, Film Studies and Visual Culture Chapters consider the arts of scriptwriting, sound, production design, costumes and cinematography Provides five portraits of key figures in Soviet and Russia film history, whose works have been somewhat neglected
The political films that have emerged on the global film festival circuit since the 1990s mark a shift in cinematic strategies for critically addressing dominant, militant, or otherwise repressive ideologies. From a focus on the representation of oppression in films like The Battle of Algiers, films such as Timbuktu, Nobody Knows About Persian Cats and Chop Shop now contribute to the active formation of political characters and viewers, a form not fully realized until the 21st century due to shifts in information technologies and resulting political organization. This book demonstrates that a contemporary form of political cinema has emerged, centered on the production of subjectivity and networks of protest, which depicts the active formation of political identities that resonates with off-screen protest movements.
The Necronomicon Shocking Cinema of the Seventies continues the acclaimed journal's exploration of film culture with a special edition devoted to film from this special era. In a series of innovative articles, leading critics and scholars consider the social and cinematic issues which shaped the films of the decade. Covering genres such as horror, the disaster movie, blaxploitation, and kung fu, the authors discover the truth behind one of the most prolific, turbulent, and challenging periods of cinema history.
Exploring cultural and social differences in defining a children's film / Becky Parry -- Screening innocence in children's film / Debbie Olson -- Screen adaptations of the Wizard of OZ and metafilmicity in children's film / Ryan Bunch -- Children's films and the avant-garde / Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer -- Intertextuality and 'adult' humour in children's film / Sam Summers -- Children's film and the problematic 'happy ending' / Noel Brown -- The cop and the kid in 1930s American film / Pamela Robertson-Wojcik -- History, forbidden games, children's play, and trauma theory / Ian Wojcik-Andrews -- Changing conceptions of childhood in the work of the Children's Film Foundation / Robert Shail -- Migrant children and the 'space between' in the films of Angelopoulos / Stephanie Hemelryk Donald -- Iranian cinema and a world through the eyes of a child / John Stephens -- The American tween and contemporary Hollywood cinema / Timothy Shary -- Growing up on Scandinavian screens / Anders Lysne -- Mary Pickford, Alma Taylor, and girlhood in Early Hollywood and British cinema / Matthew Smith -- Craft and play in Lotte Reiniger's fairy tale films / Caroline Ruddell -- Disney's musical landscapes / Daniel Batchelder -- Hayley Mills and the Disneyfication of childhood / David Buckingham -- Danny Kaye as children's film star / Bruce Babington -- Real animals and the problem of anthropomorphism in children's film / Claudia Alonso-Recarte and Ignacio Ramos-Gay -- Nation, identity, and the arrikin streak in Australian children's cinema / Adrian Schober -- Nationalism in Swedish Children's Film and the Case of Astrid Lindgren / Anders Wilhelm Åberg -- Unreality, Fantasy, and the Anti-Fascist Politics of the Children's Films of Satyajit Ray / Koel Banerjee -- Gender, Ideology, and Nationalism in Chinese Children's Cinema / Yuhan Huang -- Ethnic and racial difference in the Hungarian animated features Macskafogó/Cat City (1986) and Macskafogó 2/Cat City 2 (2007) / Gábor Gergely -- Negotiating East and West when representing childhood in Miyazaki's Spirited away / Katherine Whitehurst -- Coming of age in South Korean cinema / Sung-Ae Lee -- The Walt Disney Company, family entertainment, and global movie hits / Peter Krämer -- Reading Jason and the argonauts as a children's film / Susan Smith -- Hollywood and the baby boom audience in the 1950s and 1960s / James Russell -- Don Bluth and the Disney renaissance / Peter Kunze -- On 'love experts', evil princes, gullible princesses, and Frozen / Amy M. Davis -- Hollywood, regulation, and the 'disappearing' children's film / Filipa Antunes -- How children learn to 'read' movies / Cary Bazalgette -- Star Wars, children's film culture, and fan paratexts / Lincoln Geraghty -- Norwegian tween girls and everyday life through Disney tween franchises / Ingvild Kvale Sørenssen -- A multimethod study on contemporary young audiences and their film/cinema discourses and practices in Flanders, Belgium / Aleit Veenstra, Philippe Meers, and Daniël Biltereyst -- An empirical report on young people's responses to adult fantasy films / Martin Barker -- Disney's adult audiences / James R. Mason.