Weimar Cinema, Embodiment, and Historicity

Weimar Cinema, Embodiment, and Historicity

Author: Mason Kamana Allred

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-01-20

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1351858475

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In its retrieval and (re)construction, the past has become interwoven with the images and structure of cinema. Not only have mass media—especially film and television—shaped the content of memories and histories, but they have also shaped their very form. Combining historicization with close readings of German director Ernst Lubitsch's historical films, this book focuses on an early turning point in this development, exploring how the medium of film shaped modern historical experience and understanding—how it moved embodied audiences through moving images.


Weimar Cinema, Embodiment, and Historicity

Weimar Cinema, Embodiment, and Historicity

Author: Mason Kamana Allred

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-01-20

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 1351858483

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In its retrieval and (re)construction, the past has become interwoven with the images and structure of cinema. Not only have mass media—especially film and television—shaped the content of memories and histories, but they have also shaped their very form. Combining historicization with close readings of German director Ernst Lubitsch's historical films, this book focuses on an early turning point in this development, exploring how the medium of film shaped modern historical experience and understanding—how it moved embodied audiences through moving images.


Historical Turns

Historical Turns

Author: Nicholas Baer

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024-07-30

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0520398831

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Historical Turns reassesses Weimar cinema in light of the "crisis of historicism" widely diagnosed by German philosophers in the early twentieth century. Through bold new analyses of five legendary works of German silent cinema—The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Destiny, Rhythm 21, The Holy Mountain, and Metropolis—Nicholas Baer argues that films of the Weimar Republic lent vivid expression to the crisis of historical thinking. With their experiments in cinematic form and style, these modernist films revealed the capacity of the medium to engage with fundamental questions about the philosophy of history. Reconstructing the debates over historicism that unfolded during the initial decades of moving-image culture, Historical Turns proposes a more reflexive mode of historiography and expands the field of film and media philosophy. The book excavates a rich archive of ideas that illuminate our own moment of rapid media transformation and political, economic, and environmental crises around the globe.


Con Artists in Cinema

Con Artists in Cinema

Author: Joseph H. Kupfer

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-03

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 1000956539

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This book examines the con artist film as a genre, exploring its main features while also addressing variations within it. The volume explores three diverse themes of the con artist film: edification, self-awareness, and liberation through con games; the femme fatale as con artist; and romantic love as a plot point. Analyzing movies such as Matchstick Men (2003), House of Games (1987), Body Heat (1981), The Last Seduction (1994), Birthday Girl (2001), and The Game (1997), the book also explores their psychological investigation of the con artist figure, the con artist’s mark, and how the dynamic between these roles implicates us as the audience. It also addresses the con artist film genre’s close association with neo-noir, especially through the femme fatale figure, investigating and updating the rich tradition of noir film. Demonstrating the range and flexibility of this understudied genre, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of film studies, ethics, and those studying the representation of women in film. .


Migration and Identity in British East and Southeast Asian Cinema

Migration and Identity in British East and Southeast Asian Cinema

Author: Wing-Fai Leung

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-05-31

Total Pages: 90

ISBN-13: 1000925021

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An emerging interest in a British East and Southeast Asian identity after decades of political and social exclusion has coincided with periods of economic and political challenges in the UK. In Migration and Identity in British East and Southeast Asian Cinema, Leung Wing-Fai argues that this explosive context has created rich and diverse forms of storytelling and an accented cinematic language. By offering close readings of key contemporary films and positioning them in a wider slate of releases by British East and Southeast Asian filmmakers alongside Anglophone film histories in the Global North, this book sheds light on a developing field and engenders new ways of understanding British cinema and society. The author explores changing representational politics in contemporary cinema and argues for the cinematic visibility of a hitherto silenced community. Drawing on theoretical frames from sociological, film and cultural studies to critically engage with the textual and visual language of the case studies, Leung claims the place of British East and Southeast Asian Cinema as a film and cultural movement. Highlighting diversity among the British East and Southeast Asian community, pushing boundaries in its intersectional approach to ethnicity, race, gender and sexuality, and proposing a critical framework for academic studies on diasporic film-making in the UK, this nuanced and innovative study will interest researchers, teachers and students in a range of Humanities and Liberal Arts subjects, including Film and Media Studies, Regional/Area Studies (Asia), and arts, cultural and creative productions from the East and Southeast Asian diaspora.


The Body in Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave Films

The Body in Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave Films

Author: Francesca Minnie Hardy

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-10-31

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13: 1003824986

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This original study examines the representation of the body in French New Wave films through discussion of a series of films by Jean-Luc Godard, perhaps the central figure of the French New Wave. Through analysis of À bout de souffle, Une femme est une femme, Le Mépris and Alphaville, alongside discussion of some of Godard’s lesser-known French New Wave films, the book explores the interrelation between bodies, books and bathrooms that they facilitate. In so doing, it aims to destabilise the French New Wave’s myth of male exceptionalism and denaturalise the gender dynamic most commonly viewed at its heart, revealing that the women who make up a fundamental part of its fabric are not textually trapped by Godard’s authorial presence. Instead, their corporeality disrupts any purported authorial and national ownership of their bodies. Given the enduring popularity and visibility of the French New Wave, and of Jean-Luc Godard, in universities and journals, The Body in Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave Films will appeal to scholars in the disciplines of French and film studies, as well as to undergraduate and postgraduate students of these disciplines.


Unproduction Studies and the American Film Industry

Unproduction Studies and the American Film Industry

Author: James Fenwick

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-08-09

Total Pages: 124

ISBN-13: 1000463206

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This book makes the case for unproduction studies, the study of films left unmade, unseen, or unreleased, as a radical discipline with the potential to uncover a shadow history of the American film industry. Exploring the archival methods that can be utilised in this endeavour, James Fenwick argues that a revisionist history is needed to understand the logic of the film industry, finding that it has long-been predicated on a system of unmade creativity in which finances, resources, and labour is invested into projects that production companies know will never be produced or have no intention of ever producing. Using the Production Code Administration (PCA) records, housed at the Margaret Herrick Library, as a case study, the book explores the material existence of the unmade and considers how archives and archival methods can be used to construct a shadow history that recovers the forgotten, marginalised, and overlooked figures in film history, providing explanations for structural forces that contributed to the unmade. Given its unique use of the unmade as an analytic for film history, this book will be an essential read for scholars interested in film and media history, performance studies, film production, and creative practice, as well as to archivists and archival researchers.


Virtue and Vice in Popular Film

Virtue and Vice in Popular Film

Author: Joseph H. Kupfer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-05-03

Total Pages: 106

ISBN-13: 100041342X

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This book addresses a prominent group of virtues and vices as portrayed in popular films to further our understanding of these moral character traits. The discussions emphasize the interplay between the philosophical conception of the virtues and vices and the cinematic representations of character. Joseph H. Kupfer explores how fictional characters possessing certain moral strengths and weaknesses concretize our abstract understanding of them. Because the actions that flow from these traits occur in cinematic contexts mirroring real world conditions, the narrative portrayals of these moral characteristics can further our appreciation of their import. Humility, integrity, and perseverance, for example, are depicted in Chariots of Fire, The Fabulous Baker Boys, and Billy Elliot, while the vices of envy, arrogance and vanity are captured in Amadeus, Whiplash, and Young Adult. This interdisciplinary work in philosophy and film criticism will be of great interest to scholars and students of film studies, philosophy of film, ethics, aesthetics, and popular culture.


Indian Indies

Indian Indies

Author: Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-02-10

Total Pages: 125

ISBN-13: 1000577171

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This book offers a concise and cutting-edge repository of essential information on new independent Indian films, which have orchestrated a recent renaissance in the Bollywood-dominated Indian cinema sphere. Spotlighting a specific timeline, from the Indies’ consolidated emergence in 2010 across a decade of their development, the book takes note of recent transformations in the Indian political, economic, cultural and social matrix and the concurrent release of unflinchingly interrogative and radically evocative films that traverse LGBTQ+ issues, female empowerment, caste discrimination, populist politics and religious violence. A combination of essential Indie-specific information and concise case studies makes this a must-have quick guide to the future torchbearers of Indian cinema for scholars, students, early career researchers and a global audience interested in intersecting aspects of cinema, culture, politics and society in contemporary India.