The Cinematic Sublime

The Cinematic Sublime

Author: Nathan Carroll

Publisher: Intellect (UK)

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781789382396

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An academic reader bridging the disciplines of aesthetics and film studies by focusing on cinematic sublimity. Original essays by contemporary film scholars and philosophers with topics and case studies ranging from early cinema and classical Hollywood to avant-garde film and contemporary digital cinema.


Terror and the Cinematic Sublime

Terror and the Cinematic Sublime

Author: Todd A. Comer

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2013-01-30

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1476601763

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This collection considers film in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Eleven essayists address Hollywood movies, indie film, and post-cinematic media, including theatrical films by directors such as Steven Spielberg, Darren Aronofsky, Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee, and post-cinematic works by Wafaa Bilal, Douglas Gordon and Peter Tscherkassky, among others. All of the essays are written with an eye to what may be the central concept of our time, the sublime. The sublime--that which can be thought but not represented (the "unpresentable")--provides a ready tool for analyses of trauma, horror, catastrophe and apocalypse, the military-industrial complex, the end of humanism and the limits of freedom. Such essays take the pulse of our cultural moment, while also providing the reader with a sense of the nature of the sublime in critical work, and how it continues to evolve conceptually in the 21st century.


Terror and the Cinematic Sublime

Terror and the Cinematic Sublime

Author: Todd A. Comer

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2013-02-11

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0786472073

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This collection considers film in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Eleven essayists address Hollywood movies, indie film, and post-cinematic media, including theatrical films by directors such as Steven Spielberg, Darren Aronofsky, Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee, and post-cinematic works by Wafaa Bilal, Douglas Gordon and Peter Tscherkassky, among others. All of the essays are written with an eye to what may be the central concept of our time, the sublime. The sublime--that which can be thought but not represented (the "unpresentable")--provides a ready tool for analyses of trauma, horror, catastrophe and apocalypse, the military-industrial complex, the end of humanism and the limits of freedom. Such essays take the pulse of our cultural moment, while also providing the reader with a sense of the nature of the sublime in critical work, and how it continues to evolve conceptually in the 21st century.


The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Zizek's Theory of Film

The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Zizek's Theory of Film

Author: M. Flisfeder

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2012-10-16

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780230341470

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Returning to questions about ideology and subjectivity, Flisfeder argues that Slavoj Žižek's theory of film aims to re-politicize film studies and film theory, bringing cinema into the fold of twenty-first century politics.


The Supernatural Sublime

The Supernatural Sublime

Author: Raúl Rodríguez-Hernández

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2019-07-01

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1496214242

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The Supernatural Sublime explores the long-neglected element of the supernatural in films from Spain and Mexico by focusing on the social and cultural contexts of their production and reception, their adaptations of codes and conventions for characters and plot, and their use of cinematic techniques to create the experience of emotion without explanation. Deploying the overarching concepts of the supernatural and the sublime, Raúl Rodríguez-Hernández and Claudia Schaefer detail the dovetailing of the unnatural and the experience of limitlessness associated with the sublime. The Supernatural Sublime embeds the films in the social histories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexico and Spain, both of which made a forced leap into modernity after historical periods founded on official ideologies and circumscribed visions of the nation. Evoking Kant’s definition of the experience of the sublime, Rodríguez-Hernández and Schaefer concentrate on the unrepresentable and the contradictory that oppose purported universal truths and instead offer up illusion, deception, and imagination through cinema, itself a type of illusion: writing with light.


Destructive Sublime

Destructive Sublime

Author: Tanine Allison

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2018-06-25

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0813597528

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The American popular imagination has long portrayed World War II as the “good war,” fought by the “greatest generation” for the sake of freedom and democracy. Yet, combat films and other war media complicate this conventional view by indulging in explosive displays of spectacular violence. Combat sequences, Tanine Allison argues, construct a counter-narrative of World War II by reminding viewers of the war’s harsh brutality. Destructive Sublime traces a new aesthetic history of the World War II combat genre by looking back at it through the lens of contemporary video games like Call of Duty. Allison locates some of video games’ glorification of violence, disruptive audiovisual style, and bodily sensation in even the most canonical and seemingly conservative films of the genre. In a series of case studies spanning more than seventy years—from wartime documentaries like The Battle of San Pietro to fictional reenactments like The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan to combat video games like Medal of Honor—this book reveals how the genre’s aesthetic forms reflect (and influence) how American culture conceives of war, nation, and representation itself.


Masks in Horror Cinema

Masks in Horror Cinema

Author: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2019-10-15

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1786834979

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Why has the mask been such an enduring generic motif in horror cinema? This book explores its transformative potential historically across myriad cultures, particularly in relation to its ritual and mythmaking capacities, and its intersection with power, ideology and identity. All of these factors have a direct impact on mask-centric horror cinema: meanings, values and rituals associated with masks evolve and are updated in horror cinema to reflect new contexts, rendering the mask a persistent, meaningful and dynamic aspect of the genre’s iconography. This study debates horror cinema’s durability as a site for the potency of the mask’s broader symbolic power to be constantly re-explored, re-imagined and re-invented as an object of cross-cultural and ritual significance that existed long before the moving image culture of cinema.


Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick

Author: Elisa Pezzotta

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2013-07-25

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1496800761

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Although Stanley Kubrick adapted novels and short stories, his films deviate in notable ways from the source material. In particular, since 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), his films seem to definitively exploit all cinematic techniques, embodying a compelling visual and aural experience. But, as author Elisa Pezzotta contends, it is for these reasons that his cinema becomes the supreme embodiment of the sublime, fruitful encounter between the two arts and, simultaneously, of their independence. Stanley Kubrick's last six adaptations—2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999)—are characterized by certain structural and stylistic patterns. These features help to draw conclusions about the role of Kubrick in the history of cinema, about his role as an adapter, and, more generally, about the art of cinematic adaptations. The structural and stylistic patterns that characterize Kubrick adaptations seem to criticize scientific reasoning, causality, and traditional semantics. In the history of cinema, Kubrick can be considered a modernist auteur. In particular, he can be regarded as an heir of the modernist avant-garde of the 1920s. However, author Elisa Pezzotta concludes that, unlike his predecessors, Kubrick creates a cinema not only centered on the ontology of the medium, but on the staging of sublime, new experiences.


Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick

Author: Elisa Pezzotta

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2013-07-25

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1617038946

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Although Stanley Kubrick adapted novels and short stories, his films deviate in notable ways from the source material. In particular, since 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), his films seem to definitively exploit all cinematic techniques, embodying a compelling visual and aural experience. But, as author Elisa Pezzotta contends, it is for these reasons that his cinema becomes the supreme embodiment of the sublime, fruitful encounter between the two arts and, simultaneously, of their independence. Stanley Kubrick's last six adaptations—2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999)—are characterized by certain structural and stylistic patterns. These features help to draw conclusions about the role of Kubrick in the history of cinema, about his role as an adapter, and, more generally, about the art of cinematic adaptations. The structural and stylistic patterns that characterize Kubrick adaptations seem to criticize scientific reasoning, causality, and traditional semantics. In the history of cinema, Kubrick can be considered a modernist auteur. In particular, he can be regarded as an heir of the modernist avant-garde of the 1920s. However, author Elisa Pezzotta concludes that, unlike his predecessors, Kubrick creates a cinema not only centered on the ontology of the medium, but on the staging of sublime, new experiences.


Disaster Cinema in Historical Perspective

Disaster Cinema in Historical Perspective

Author: Nikita Mathias

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Published: 2020-07-10

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 9048550009

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'Disaster Cinema in Historical Perspective: Mediations of the Sublime is a genuine and original contribution to the fields of art history and cinema studies as well as to discussions on the concept of the sublime in the field of aesthetics. It is well-organized, well-informed, and lucidly written and draws on an impressive body of empirical and theoretical materials. As importantly, it is critical and nuanced in its claims and assertions, leaving ample room for discussion and counter-argument.' (Ina Blom, University of Chicago, University of Oslo)