"This is the most complete, in-depth, sophisticated study of Spanish cinema available in any language."—Marvin D'Lugo, author of The Films of Carlos Saura
In this innovative synthesis of film history and cultural analysis, Marsha Kinder examines the films of such key directors as Buñuel, Saura, Erice, and Almodóvar, as well as works from the popular cinema and television, exploring how they manifest political and cultural tensions related to the production of Spanish national identity within a changing global context. Concentrated on the decades from the 1950s to the 1990s, Kinder's work is broadly historical but essentially conceptual, moving backward and forward in time, drawing examples from earlier films and from works of art and literature, and providing close readings of a wide range of texts. Her questioning and internationalizing of the "national cinema" concept and her application of contemporary critical theory—especially insights from feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and discourse theory—distinguish Blood Cinema from previous film histories. The author also makes use of a variety of sources within Spain such as the commentaries on Spanish character and culture by Unamunov and others, the contemporary debate over the restructuring of Spanish television. Kinder's book moves Spanish cinema into the mainstream of film studies by demonstrating that a knowledge of its history alters and enriches our understanding of world cinema. The interactive CD-ROM is available from CINE-DISCS, 2021 Holly Hill Terrace, Los Angeles, CA 90068, (213) 876-7678.
Director and screenwriter Michael Mann is the creative force behind such movies as Last of the Mohicans and Ali. Markedly reticent, Mann prefers that his personal background remain an enigma, but his disparate films contain clear and consistent messages. One of Mann's focuses is on the Information Age. He addresses the nature of modern communication, its use to manipulate and coerce, and the resultant subjugation of truth. The perils inherent in modern technology and communication stand in stark contrast to the power of symbolic and oral exchange, the trusted medium of Mann's protagonists. This critical exploration of the films of Michael Mann examines his recurring focus on the nature of modern communication and information and their effect on the individual and society. Mann's films highlight the struggle to maintain a connection to reality in a world where information is a commodity manipulated and abused by forces that exert increasing control over its content and dissemination. Each chapter examines one of Mann's films--including Manhunter, The Keep, Last of the Mohicans, The Insider and Ali--in which the protagonist longs for a sense of human connection but is pitted against forces that devalue and destroy individuality. Photographs illustrate specific moments from the films. A bibliography and an index are included.
Through studying images of blood in film from the mid-1950s to the end of the 1960s, this path-breaking book explores how blood as an (audio)visual cinematic element went from predominately operating as a signifier, providing audiences with information about a film’s plot and characters, to increasingly operating in terms of affect, potentially evoking visceral and embodied responses in viewers. Using films such as The Return of Dracula, The Tingler, Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs, Color Me Blood Red, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Wild Bunch, Rødje takes a novel approach to film history by following one (audio)visual element through an exploration that traverses established standards for film production and reception. This study does not heed distinctions regarding to genres (horror, western, gangster) or models of film production (exploitation, independent, studio productions) but rather maps the operations of cinematic images across marginal as well as more traditionally esteemed cinematic territories. The result is a book that rethinks and reassembles cinematic practices as well as aesthetics, and as such invites new ways to investigate how cinematic images enter relations with other images as well as with audiences.
Since the turn of the millennium, a growing number of female filmmakers have appropriated the aesthetics of horror for their films. In this book, Patricia Pisters investigates contemporary women directors such as Ngozi Onwurah, Claire Denis, Lucile Hadzihalilovic and Ana Lily Amirpour, who put 'a poetics of horror' to new use in their work, expanding the range of gendered and racialised perspectives in the horror genre. Exploring themes such as rage, trauma, sexuality, family ties and politics, New Blood in Contemporary Cinema takes on avenging women, bloody vampires, lustful witches, scary mothers, terrifying offspring and female Frankensteins. By following a red trail of blood, the book illuminates a new generation of women directors who have enlarged the general scope and stretched the emotional spectrum of the genre.
Will Smith in I Am Legend. Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic. Charlton Heston in just about everything. Viewers of Hollywood action films are no doubt familiar with the sacrificial victim-hero, the male protagonist who nobly gives up his life so that others may be saved. Washed in Blood argues that such sacrificial films are especially prominent in eras when the nation—and American manhood—is thought to be in crisis. The sacrificial victim-hero, continually imperiled and frequently exhibiting classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, thus bears the trauma of the nation. Claire Sisco King offers an in-depth study of three prominent cycles of Hollywood films that follow the sacrificial narrative: the early–to–mid 1970s, the mid–to–late 1990s, and the mid–to–late 2000s. From Vietnam-era disaster movies to post-9/11 apocalyptic thrillers, she examines how each film represents traumatized American masculinity and national identity. What she uncovers is a cinematic tendency to position straight white men as America’s most valuable citizens—and its noblest victims.
Examines how recent Argentine horror films engage with the legacies of dictatorship and neoliberalism. Argentina is a dominant player in Latin American film, known for its documentaries, detective films, melodramas, and auteur cinema. In the past twenty years, however, the country has also emerged as a notable producer of horror films. Blood Circuits focuses on contemporary Argentine horror cinema and the various cinematic pleasures it offers national and transnational audiences. Jonathan Risner begins with an overview of horror film culture in Argentina and beyond. He then examines select films grouped according to various criteria: neoliberalism and urban, rural, and suburban spaces; English-language horror films; gore and affect in punk/horror films; and the legacies of the last dictatorship (19761983). While keenly aware of global horror trends, Risner argues that these films provide unprecedented ways of engaging with the consequences of authoritarianism and neoliberalism in Argentina. Blood Circuits is an important and much-needed contribution to the fields of Latin American cinema and popular culture, and genre film studies with a focus on horror cinema. It offers original and innovative directions that will pave the way for new studies in different areas of film studies: the internationalization of horror that unfolds a problematic relationship between the United States and the Global South, the use of punk horror as a form of affect, and the development of new kinds of pleasures and displeasures in the spectator. Victoria Ruétalo, coeditor of Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas, and Latin America
Mass-murderers, serial killers, spree killers, homicidal rapists, cannibals and other human predators; 20th century history is poxed with the atrocious, apparently motiveless acts of violence and mayhem perpetrated by these psychopathic outsiders. As the century progressed, cinema and TV played an increasingly important role in the enormous influence of the mass-murder phenomenon on contemporary popular culture. Bad Blood also reveals how life imitates art, examing those allegedly inspired to murder by exposure to violent movies.
This volume explores the proliferation of contemporary art that uses sequences of images to explore ideas of space, time, movement and duration. Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge and other 'chronophotographers' first explored these ideas at the turn of the nineteenth century; since then chronophotography has been in the shadow of cinema, but now it is emerging once again in post-cinema practices, digital art and new experimental photography. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, artists have found that sequences offer new opportunities for exploring continuing issues regarding aesthetics that operate at the intersection of time and space.#13;#13;The book contains number of illustrated essays by international critics and theorists and discusses the work of a wide range of artists engaged in contemporary chronophotography. The introduction also uses insights from chronophotography to dispel the myth of persistence of vision.
The definitive look at one of the most important Black art cinema films and original filmmakers of the 1970s. Bill Gunn's Ganja & Hess (1973) has across the decades attained a sizable cult following among African American cinema devotees, art house aficionados, and horror fans, thanks to its formal complexity and rich allegory. Pleading the Blood is the first full-length study of this cult classic. Ganja & Hess was withdrawn almost immediately after its New York premiere by its distributor because Gunn's poetic re-fashioning of the vampire genre allegedly failed to satisfy the firm's desire for a by-the-numbers "blaxploitation" horror flick for quick sell-off in the urban market. Its current status as one of the classic works of African American cinema has recently been confirmed by the Blu-ray release of its restored version, by its continued success in screenings at repertory houses, museums, and universities, and by an official remake, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014), directed by Spike Lee, one of the original picture's longtime champions. Pleading the Blood draws on Gunn's archived papers, screenplay drafts, and storyboards, as well as interviews with the living major creative participants to offer a comprehensive, absorbing account of the influential movie and its highly original filmmaker.