In Cinema at the Crossroads: Nation and the Subject in East Asian Cinema, Hyon Joo Yoo argues that East Asian experiences of colonialism and postcolonialism call for a different conceptualization of postcoloniality, subjectivity, and the nation. Through its analyses of Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese cinemas, this engaging study of cinema and culture charts the ways in which national cinemas visualize colonial and postcolonial conditions that derive from the history of Japanese colonialism and the post-war alliance between Japan and the United States. What does it mean to rethink postcolonial studies through East Asian cinema and experience? Yoo pursues this question by bringing an East Asian postcolonial framework, the notion of film as a manifestation of national culture, and the methodology of psychoanalysis to bear on a failed hegemonic subject. Cinema at the Crossroads is a profound look into how cinema and national culture intertwine with hegemony and power.
"Placing the New Southern Studies in conversation with film studies, this book is simply the best edited collection available on film and the U.S. South.---Grace Hale. University of Virginia --
The 2010s might be remembered as a time of increased polarization in American life. The decade contained both the Obama era and the Trump era, and as the nation’s political fissures widened, so did the gap between the haves and have-nots. Hollywood reflected these divisions, choosing to concentrate on big franchise blockbusters at the expense of mid-budget films, while new players like Netflix and Amazon offered fresh opportunities for low-budget and independent filmmakers. As the movie business changed, films ranging from American Sniper to Get Out found ways to speak to the concerns of a divided nation. The newest installment in the Screen Decades series, American Cinema in the 2010s takes a close look at the memorable movies, visionary filmmakers, and behind-the-scenes drama that made this decade such an exciting time to be a moviegoer. Each chapter offers an in-depth examination of a specific year, covering a wide variety of films, from blockbuster superhero movies like Black Panther and animated films like Frozen to smaller-budget biopics like I, Tonya and horror films like Hereditary. This volume introduces readers to a decade in which established auteurs like Quentin Tarantino were joined by an exceptionally diverse set of new talents, taking American cinema in new directions.
There are few places where mobility has shaped identity as widely as the American West, but some locations and populations sit at its major crossroads, maintaining control over place and mobility, labor and race. In Collisions at the Crossroads, Genevieve Carpio argues that mobility, both permission to move freely and prohibitions on movement, helped shape racial formation in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles and the Inland Empire throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining policies and forces as different as historical societies, Indian boarding schools, bicycle ordinances, immigration policy, incarceration, traffic checkpoints, and Route 66 heritage, she shows how local authorities constructed a racial hierarchy by allowing some people to move freely while placing limits on the mobility of others. Highlighting the ways people of color have negotiated their place within these systems, Carpio reveals a compelling and perceptive analysis of spatial mobility through physical movement and residence.
This book examines a range of films that characterized the decade, including Hollywood movies, documentaries, and the independent and experimental films.
2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Finalist for 2016 Richard Wall Memorial Award by the Theatre Library Long listed for the 2017 Kraszna-Krausz Best Photography Book Award from the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Katharine Hepburn all made lasting impressions with the cinematic cross-dressing they performed onscreen. What few modern viewers realize, however, is that these seemingly daring performances of the 1930s actually came at the tail end of a long wave of gender-bending films that included more than 400 movies featuring women dressed as men. Laura Horak spent a decade scouring film archives worldwide, looking at American films made between 1908 and 1934, and what she discovered could revolutionize our understanding of gender roles in the early twentieth century. Questioning the assumption that cross-dressing women were automatically viewed as transgressive, she finds that these figures were popularly regarded as wholesome and regularly appeared onscreen in the 1910s, thus lending greater respectability to the fledgling film industry. Horak also explores how and why this perception of cross-dressed women began to change in the 1920s and early 1930s, examining how cinema played a pivotal part in the representation of lesbian identity. Girls Will Be Boys excavates a rich history of gender-bending film roles, enabling readers to appreciate the wide array of masculinities that these actresses performed—from sentimental boyhood to rugged virility to gentlemanly refinement. Taking us on a guided tour through a treasure-trove of vintage images, Girls Will Be Boys helps us view the histories of gender, sexuality, and film through fresh eyes.
Focusing on two film traditions not normally studied together, Maria Pramaggiore examines more than two dozen Irish and African American films, including Do the Right Thing, In the Name of the Father, The Crying Game, Boyz N the Hood, The Snapper, and He Got Game, arguing that these films foreground practices of character identification that complicate essentialist notions of national and racial identity. The porous sense of self associated with moments of identification in these films offers a cinematic counterpart to W. E. B. Du Bois's potent concept of double consciousness, an epistemological standpoint derived from experiences of colonization, racialization, and cultural disruption. Characters in these films, Pramaggiore suggests, reject the national paradigm of insider and outsider in favor of diasporic both/and notions of self, thereby endorsing the postmodern concept of identity as performance.
Historically, Los Angeles and its exhibition market have been central to the international success of Latin American cinema. Not only was Los Angeles a site crucial for exhibition of these films, but it became the most important hub in the western hemisphere for the distribution of Spanish language films made for Latin American audiences. Cinema between Latin America and Los Angeles builds upon this foundational insight to both examine the considerable, ongoing role that Los Angeles played in the history of Spanish-language cinema and to explore the implications of this transnational dynamic for the study and analysis of Latin American cinema before 1960. The volume editors aim to flesh out the gaps between Hollywood and Latin America, American imperialism and Latin American nationalism in order to produce a more nuanced view of transnational cultural relations in the western hemisphere.
Diploma Thesis from the year 2004 in the subject Film Science, grade: 3, Liverpool John Moores University, language: English, abstract: The genesis of the Hollywood Renaissance in the late 1960s was the by-product of a synthesis of factors related to social, cultural, institutional, and technological shifts that had been taking place in the United States since the late 1940s. Within this context, the role of European cinema was crucial. It has become a critical commonplace that the films of the Hollywood Renaissance embody a significant aesthetic kinship with the cinematic new waves that had emerged in Europe during the post-war period. This study aims this position further by demonstrating that post-war European new waves at once constituted aesthetic models for Hollywood Renaissance films and shaped key areas of the context that allowed this movement to emerge in the first place. As far as European cinema is concerned, the emphasis here is placed on films of the French New Wave, Italian Neorealism, and New Italian Cinema. Through an extensive use of textual and contextual evidence, this thesis investigates the origins, nature, and extent of the formal impact that post-war European cinema movements had on American filmmaking. It is argued that, inspired by their European counterparts, Hollywood Renaissance filmmakers experimented with all the components of a film: mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, sound, and narrative style – often aiming to create in their pictures the acute sense of realism that European post-war films conveyed. A more frank approach towards traditionally ‘taboo’ subjects was also employed. Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) – the film that, according to critics at large, articulated an aesthetic ‘break’ with the classical tradition and signaled the beginning of the Hollywood Renaissance – is employed as a case study, as it epitomises the European influence in social, cultural, and institutional terms. This study also considers the continuing influence of European cinema on American cinema post Bonnie and Clyde, arguing that in recent years, several American directors have re-discovered the pioneers of post-war European cinema movements and have attempted to recreate the spirit of new wave films in their own pictures.
