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The films of Ethan and Joel Coen have been embraced by mainstream audiences, but also have been subject to intense scrutiny by critics and cinema scholars. Movies such as Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Raising Arizona represent the filmmakers’ postmodern tendencies, a subject many academics have written about at length. But is it enough to reduce their features as expressions of postmodernism or are there other ways of viewing their work—not only their individual films but their entire output as a collective whole? In Constructing the Coens: From Blood Simple to Inside Llewyn Davis, Allen H. Redmon looks beyond the postmodern sensibilities of every film written and directed by the Coens to find an unexpected range of recurring ideas expressed in and about contemporary film. In this volume, Redmon tackles all of the films in the Coen brothers’ canon by examining—among other topics—narrative coherence in The Man Who Wasn’t There, intertextuality in No Country for Old Men, and sexuality in Burn after Reading and O Brother, Where Art Thou? Additional chapters look at their films through the prisms of gender studies, adaptation studies, and a constructivist sensibility weaved throughout their work. Considering the whole of the Coens’ output, as well as many of the topics being discussed in contemporary film studies, this book challenges viewers to reexamine their initial responses to these movies. By engaging both the familiar and foreign elements in each film, Constructing the Coens will appeal to fans of the brothers’ cinema, but also to students and scholars of film theory, adaptation studies, queer theory, and gender studies.
The Big Lebowski begins with a case of mistaken identity which escalates when Jeffrey Lebowski - alias The Dude - attempts to seek recompense for the despoilation of his ratty-ass little rug, and then finds himself entangled in a kidnapping caper as a bagman - a situation that goes from bad to worse due to the interference of his hapless bowling partners. In The Big Lebowski the Coen brothers have taken on the preoccupations of Raymond Chandler, but have given them a postmodern spin, while at the same time leaving Philip Marlowe's ethos intact as The Dude wanders thorugh the fractured world of nineties LA trying to do the right thing. Like the award-winning Fargo, The Big Lebowski is suffused with a droll humour and a verbal felicity that is as delightful as it is startling.
Anthony Cohen makes a distinct break with earlier approaches to the study of community, which treated the subject in largely structural terms. His view is interpretive and experiential, seeing the community as a cultural field with a complex of symbols whose meanings vary among its members. He delineates a concept applicable to local and ethnic communities through which people see themselves as belonging to society. The emphasis on boundary is sensitive to the circumstances in which people become aware of the implications of belonging to a community, and describes how they symbolise and utilise these boundaries to give substance to their values and identities.
“Written for both fans of the Coen brothers and the philosophically curious, without the technical language . . . educational and entertaining.” —Library Journal Joel and Ethan Coen have made films that redefined the gangster movie, the screwball comedy, the fable, and the film noir, but no matter what genre they’re playing with, they consistently focus on the struggles of complex characters to understand themselves and their places in the strange worlds they inhabit. To borrow a phrase from Barton Fink, all Coen films explore “the life of the mind” and show that the human condition can often be simultaneously comic and tragic, profound and absurd. The essays in this book explore the challenging moral and philosophical terrain of the Coen repertoire. Several address how Coen films often share film noir’s essential philosophical assumptions: power corrupts, evil is real, and human control of fate is an illusion. In Fargo, not even Minnesota’s blankets of snow can hide Jerry Lundegaard’s crimes or brighten his long, dark night of the soul. The tale of love, marriage, betrayal, and divorce in Intolerable Cruelty transcends the plight of the characters to illuminate competing theories of justice. Even in lighter fare, such as Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski, the comedy emerges from characters’ journeys to the brink of an amoral abyss. However, the Coens often knowingly and gleefully subvert conventions and occasionally offer symbolic rebirths and other hopeful outcomes. At the end of The Big Lebowski, for example, the Dude abides, his laziness has become a virtue, and the human comedy is perpetuating itself with the promised arrival of a newborn Lebowski. The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers sheds new light on the work of these cinematic visionaries. From Blood Simple to No Country for Old Men, the Coens’ characters look for answers—though in some cases, their quest for answers leads, at best, only to more questions.
Written in easy-to-understand language, this important text provides a systematic and commonsense approach to developing instruments for data collection and analysis. This book can be used by both those who are developing instruments for the first time and those who want to hone their skills, including students, agency personnel, program managers, and researchers. This book provides a thorough presentation of instrument construction, from conception to development and pre-testing of items, formatting the instrument, administration, and, finally, data management and presentation of the findings. Throughout the book, the authors emphasize how to create an instrument that will produce trustworthy and accurate data. To that end they have included guidelines for reviewing and revising the questionnaire to enhance validity and reliability. They also show how to work effectively with stakeholders such as instruments designers, decision-makers, agency personnel, clients, and raters or respondents.
For more than three decades, Joel and Ethan Coen have produced some of the most memorable and influential American roots music soundtracks in film history. From Raising Arizona (1987) to O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) to Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), the Coens, along with musical archivist and producer T-Bone Burnett, have curated half-forgotten yet unforgettable genres, artists and songs from America's cultural past for new audiences. This book is the first devoted to giving a full account of this rich cinematic legacy.
Reel Kabbalah: Jewish Mysticism and Neo-Hasidism in Contemporary Cinema​ studies the ways in which fictional film in the first decade of the twenty-first century represents the esoteric Jewish speculative traditions known as Kabbalah and Hasidism. It examines the textual and conceptual traditions behind five important cinematic representations -- Pi (1998), Ushpizin (2004), Bee Season (2005), The Secrets (2007), and A Serious Man (2009) -- and it considers how film both stands in continuity with those traditions and modifies them in the New Age vein of what is known as neo-Kabbalah and neo-Hasidism. Brian Ogren transforms our understanding of reception history by focusing on how cinema has altered perceptions of Jewish mysticism. In showing how the Jewish speculative traditions of Kabbalah and Hasidism have been able to affect mass-consumed cinematic portrayals of ultimate Truth, this book sheds light on the New Age, pop-cultural dialectic of the particular within the universal and of the universal within the particular.
Collected interviews with the quirky and distinctive writer/director team of such films as Raising Arizona, Intolerable Cruelty, and Barton Fink
Many critics agree that Joel and Ethan Coen are one of the most visionary and idiosyncratic filmmaking teams of the last three decades. Combining thoughtful eccentricity, wry humor, irony, and often brutal violence, the Coen brothers have crafted a style of filmmaking that pays tribute to classic American movie genres yet maintains a distinctly postmodern feel. Since arriving on the film scene, the Coens have amassed an impressive body of work that has garnered them critical acclaim and a devoted cult following. From Raising Arizona and Fargo to O Brother, Where Art Thou? and No Country for Old Men, the Coens have left an unmistakable imprint on Hollywood. The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers investigates philosophical themes in the works of these master filmmakers and also uses their movies as vehicles to explore fundamental concepts of philosophy. The contributing authors discuss concepts such as justice, the problem of interpretation, existential role-playing, the philosophy of comedy, the uncertainty principle, and the coldness of modernity. The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers is not just for die-hard Lebowski Fest attendees, but for anyone who enjoys big ideas on the big screen.
With landmark films such as Fargo, O Brother Where art Thou?, Blood Simple, and Raising Arizona, the Coen brothers have achieved both critical and commercial success. Proving the existence of a viable market for "small" films that are also intellectually rewarding, their work has exploded generic conventions amid rich webs of transtextual references. R. Barton Palmer argues that the Coen oeuvre forms a central element in what might be called postmodernist filmmaking. Mixing high and low cultural sources and blurring genres like noir and comedy, the use of pastiche and anti-realist elements in films such as The Hudsucker Proxy and Barton Fink clearly fit the postmodernist paradigm. Palmer argues that for a full understanding of the Coen brothers' unique position within film culture, it is important to see how they have developed a new type of text within general postmodernist practice that Palmer terms commercial/independent. Analyzing their substantial body of work from this "generic" framework is the central focus of this book.