This book traces the circulation in Britain of three Hollywood films--Basic Instinct, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Natural Born Killers --from marketing and critical reception to consumption in cinemas and on video. It draws on economic discursive contexts and original audience research to trace how meanings, pleasures, and uses are derived from popular film. A significant intervention into methodological debates in film studies and a timely investigation of film culture, it focuses on key questions about genre, taste, sexual pleasure and screen violence.
How did audiences across the world respond to the films of The Lord of the Rings? This book presents findings from the largest film audience project ever undertaken, drawing from 25,000 questionnaire responses and a wide array of other materials. Contributors use these materials to explore a series of widely speculated questions: why is film fantasy important to different kinds of viewers? Through marketing, previews and reviews, debates and cultural chatter, how are audiences prepared for a film like this? How did fans of the book respond to its adaptation on screen? How do people choose their favorite characters? How was the films' reception shaped by different national and cultural contexts? The answers to these questions shed fresh light on the extraordinary popularity of The Lord of the Rings and provide important new insights into the global reception of cinema in the twenty-first century.
Recent years have witnessed an explosion of interest in the 'spatialities of cinema' across the social sciences and humanities, yet to date critical inquiry has tended to explore this issue as a question of the 'city' and the 'urban'. For the first time, leading scholars in geography, film and cultural studies have been drawn together to explore the multiple ways in ideas of cinema and countryside are co-produced: how 'film makes rural' and 'rural makes film'. From the expanse of the American great west to the mountainous landscapes of North Korea, Cinematic Countrysides draws on a range of popular and alternative film genres to demonstrate how film texts come to prefigure expectations of rural social space, and how these representations come to shape, and be shaped by, the material and embodied circumstances of 'lived' rural experience. At the heart of this volume's varied apprehensions of the 'cinematic countryside' is a concern to argue that ideas of rurality in film are central to wider questions of 'modernity' and 'tradition', 'self' and 'other', 'nationhood' and 'globalisation', and crucially, ones that are central to an account of the 'cinematic city'.
Fully revised, updated, and extended, the fifth edition of Hollywood’s America provides an important compilation of interpretive essays and primary documents that allows students to read films as cultural artifacts within the contexts of actual past events. A new edition of this classic textbook, which ties movies into the broader narrative of US and film history This fifth edition contains nine new chapters, with a greater overall emphasis on recent film history, and new primary source documents which are unavailable online Entries range from the first experiments with motion pictures all the way to the present day Well-organized within a chronological framework with thematic treatments to provide a valuable resource for students of the history of American film
A unique perspective on half a century of American cinema—from the audience's point of view. Tom Stempel goes beyond the comments of professional reviewers, concentrating on the opinions of ordinary people. He traces shifting trends in genre and taste, examining and questioning the power films have in American society. Stempel blends audience response with his own observations and analyzes box office results that identify the movies people actually went to see, not just those praised by the critics. Avoiding statistical summary, he presents the results of a survey on movies and moviegoing in the respondents' own words—words that surprise, amuse, and irritate. The moviegoers respond: "Big bad plane, big bad motorcycle, and big bad Kelly McGillis."—On Top Gun "All I can recall were the slave girls and the Golden Calf sequence and how it got me excited. My parents must have been very pleased with my enthusiasm for the Bible."—On why a seven-year-old boy stayed up to watch The Ten Commandments "I learned the fine art of seduction by watching Faye Dunaway smolder."—A woman's reaction to seeing Bonnie and Clyde "At age fifteen Jesus said he would be back, he just didn't say what he would look like."—On E.T. "Quasimodo is every seventh grader."—On why The Hunchback of Notre Dame should play well with middle-schoolers "A moronic, very 'Hollywoody' script, and a bunch of dancing teddy bears."—On Return of the Jedi "I couldn't help but think how Mad magazine would lampoon this." —On The Exorcist
Hollywood Abroad is the first book to examine the reception of Hollywood movies by non-American audiences. Although numerous books on film history have analyzed the ways in which American films came to dominate world markets, there has so far been very little published work on how audiences outside the United States have responded to Hollywood-produced films. Hollywood Abroad explores the reception of U.S. films in Britain, France, Belgium, Turkey, Australia, India, Japan, and Central Africa. The book covers topics from the first major penetration of American films into France, Britain, and Australia to the impact of such films as The Best Years of Our Lives to the response of Belgian young people in the age of the multiplex. It demonstrates that the story of the reception of American films overseas is less one of domination than of a complex adoption of Hollywood into various cultures.
Paul Verhoeven's 1992 thriller Basic Instinct - starring Michael Douglas as a police detective and Sharon Stone as the femme fatale Catherine Tramell - was one of the first mainstream 'erotic thrillers', a film which shifted the boundaries for graphic representations of sex in Hollywood cinema. It remains a significant milestone in film censorship and controversy. In his fascinating study, the first in-depth account of the film, Stevie Simkin explores the unrest and protest that Basic Instinct sparked in the gay, lesbian and feminist communities in the US, incensed by what they saw as the script's homophobia and misogyny. Simkin considers the social and cultural context in which Basic Instinct was made, examining the film's troubled production history, the battles with censors, and its reception. He offers a number of readings of the movie, looking at its representation of bisexuality and the depiction of a 'transgressive' female protagonist. He also focuses on key sequences, including the infamous interrogation scene, and details the cuts demanded by the censors, resulting in different UK and US versions. In conclusion, Simkin considers the legacy of Basic Instinct, and its enduring effect on media representations of the violent woman. STEVIE SIMKIN is Reader in Drama and Film at the University of Winchester, UK. His publications include work on cult television, popular music, and Renaissance drama. He is the author of, amongst other works, A Preface to Marlowe (1999), Revenge Tragedy: A New Casebook (2001), Early Modern Tragedy and the Cinema of Violence (2005), and, also in the Controversies series, a book on the Peckinpah film, Straw Dogs.
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. One of the first books to put memory at the centre of analysis when exploring the relationship between film culture and the past. Provides a sustained, interdisciplinary perspective on memory and film from early cinema to the present, drawing from film studies, American studies and cultural studies. Adopts a resolutely cultural perspective and unlike psychoanalytic or formalist approaches to memory, explores questions of culture, power and identity. Contributes to the growing debate about the status and function of the past in cultural life and discourse, discussing issues of memory in film, and of film as memory. Considers such well known films as Forrest Gump, Pleasantville, and Jackie Brown.
While histories of Czech cinema often highlight the quality of Czechoslovak New Wave films made in the 1960s, post-socialist Czech cinema receives little attention. Through a methodology of historical reception, Stories between Tears and Laughter explores how attitudes towards post-socialist Czech cinema have shifted from viewing it as radical “art cinema” and more towards popular cinema. By analyzing publicity materials, reviews, and articles, Richard Vojvoda offers a new perspective on the notions of cultural value and quality that have been shaping the history of post-socialist Czech cinema.
