The screenplays and films of Quentin Tarantino raise profound comic and ethical dilemmas. Developing ideas from Lacanian psychoanalysis, Botting and Wilson explore ethical issues in relation to Tarantino's work, postmodernity and recent cultural theory. They argue that Tarantino's texts provide a provocative and telling contribution to theorized accounts of contemporary culture. The term `Tarantinian' has been coined to refer to a set of sampled, self-authorizing signs that are cinematically assembled in processes of `consuming-producing-expending' in the general context of a postmodern capitalism that enjoins excess. The Tarantinian ethics are elaborated, in the midst of a homogenized fast-food, movie and video culture, in
Film & Ethics considers a range of films and texts of film criticism alongside disparate philosophical discourses of ethics by Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Lacanian psychoanalysts and postmodern theorists.
Ethics of Cinematic Experience: Screens of Alterity deals with the relationship between cinema and ethics from a philosophical perspective, finding an intrinsic connection between film spectatorship and the possibility of being open to different modes of alterity. The book’s main thesis is that openness to otherness is already found in the basic structures of cinematic experience. Through a close examination of the ethical relevance of the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Stanley Cavell, Emmanuel Levinas and Gilles Deleuze to cinema studies, Ethics of Cinematic Experience: Screens of Alterity pursues the question of how film can open the viewer to what is not her, and so bring her to encounter otherness in a way that is unique to cinematic experience. The book sees ethics as not just the subject, content or story of a film but part of its aesthetic structure. Accompanied by readings of films mainly from mainstream cinema, each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the encounter with alterity through cinema. The book gives particular attention to how theoretical discussion of the cinematic close-up can lead to ethical insights into the status of both the human and the non-human in film, and thus lead to an understanding of the relationships the viewer makes with them. The book is a helpful resource for students and scholars interested in the relationship between philosophy, film and ethics, and is appropriate for students of philosophy and media and cultural studies.
This book examines a set of theoretical perspectives that critically engage with the notion of postmodernism, investigating whether this concept is still useful to approach contemporary cinema. This question is explored through a discussion of the films written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, largely regarded as the epitome of postmodern cinema and considered here as theoretical contributions in their own right. Each chapter first presents key ideas proposed by a specific theorist and then puts them in conversation with Tarantino’s films. Jacques Rancière’s theory of art is used to reject postmodernism’s claims about the ‘death’ of the aesthetic image in contemporary cinema. Fredric Jameson’s and Slavoj Žižek’s dialectical thinking is mobilized to challenge simplistic, ideological readings of postmodern cinema in general, and Tarantino’s films in particular. Finally, the direct influence of Carol Clover’s psychoanalytical approach to the horror genre on Tarantino’s work is discussed to prove the director’s specific contribution to a theoretical understanding of contemporary film aesthetics.
Lisa Downing's comprehensive study of the films of Patrice Leconte traces lines of continuity and revision through a body of apparently disparate films whose "messages" often appear both contradictory and controversial. Pursuing a close reading of the recurrent themes, styles, intertexts and techniques which structure Leconte's filmmaking, Downing re-evaluates Leconte's status as an enigmatic artist offering complex and paradoxical commentary on contemporary questions of sexuality, ethics and identity. This book is the first full-length critical work in English on Leconte's cinema. It provides essential reading for both enthusiasts of French cinema and for those fascinated by the relationship between popular culture and theory.
This book provides a comprehensive, critical overview of the turn to ethics in literature, film, and visual culture. It discusses the concept of a biovisual ethics, offering a new theory of the relation between film and ethics based on the premise that images are capable of generating their own ethical content. This ethics operates hermeneutically and materializes in cinema’s unique power to show us other modes of being. The author considers a wealth of contemporary art films and documentaries that embody ethical issues through the very form of the text. The ethical imagination generated by films such as The Nine Muses, Post Tenebras Lux, Amour, and Nostalgia For the Light is crucially defined by openness, uncertainty, opacity, and the refusal of hegemonic practices of visual representation.
Philosophy, and in particular continental philosophy, has provided a conceptual underpinning for cinema since its beginnings, especially in the development of cinematic aesthetics. In its turn, film has rethought the abstractions of space and time and the categories of sex and gender and has created new concepts which illuminate phenomenology, metaphysics and epistemology. "Film and Philosophy" brings together leading scholars to provide a detailed overview of the key thinkers who have shaped the field of film philosophy. The thinkers include continental and 'post-continental' philosophers, analytic philosophers, film-makers, film reviewers, sociologists, and cultural theorists.The essays reveal how philosophy can be applied to film analysis and how film can be used to illustrate philosophical problems. But more importantly, the essays explore how film has shaped what philosophy thinks and how philosophy has lead to a reappraisal of film. The book will prove an invaluable reference and guide to readers interested in a deeper understanding of the issues and insights presented by film philosophy." Film and Philosophy" includes essays on: Hugo Munsterberg, Vilem Flusser, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor Adorno, Antonin Artaud, Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Andre Bazin, Roland Barthes, Serge Daney, Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Cavell, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Sarah Kofman, Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, Felix Guattari, Raymond Bellour, Christian Metz, Julia Kristeva, Laura Mulvey, Homi Bhabha, Slavoj Zizek, Stephen Heath, Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, Leo Bersani, Giorgio Agamben, and Michel Chion.
"Post-Theory, Culture, Criticism offers a collection of essays that provide provocative re-articulations of theory, culture and criticism. It contains distinguished and original work by a number of leading and emerging figures within cultural and critical theory and cultural studies who believe that all of the above is in urgent need of theoretical and practical exploration. In probing the feasibility and desirability of theory's re-articulation, the essays demonstrate that theory can only reinvent itself as worthwhile 'post-theory' through its own critical self-revaluation."--Jacket.
This is the first ever book to analyse outsourcing - contracting out public services to private business interests. It is an unacknowledged revolution in the British economy, and it has happened quietly, but it is creating powerful new corporate interests, transforming the organisation of government at all levels, and is simultaneously enriching a new business elite and creating numerous fiascos in the delivery of public services. What links the brutal treatment of asylum-seeking detainees, the disciplining of welfare benefit claimants, the profits effortlessly earned by the privatised rail companies, and the fiasco of the management of security at the 2012 Olympics? In a word: outsourcing. This book, by the renowned research team at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change in Manchester, is the first to combine 'follow the money' research with accessibility for the engaged citizen, and the first to balance critique with practical suggestions for policy reform.
La 4e de couv. indique : "The industry's only director-cinematographer-screenwriter-producer-actor-editor, Steven Soderbergh is contemporary Hollywood's most innovative and prolific filmmaker. A Palme d'or and Academy Award-winner, he has directed nearly thirty films, including political provocations, digital experiments, esoteric documentaries, and global blockbusters, as well as atypical genre films. This volume considers its slippery subject from a variety of perspectives, analysing Soderbergh as an expressive auteur of art cinema as well as genre fare, a politically-motivated guerrilla filmmaker and Hollywood insider. Preoccupied with the detective's role to investigate truth, as well as the criminal's alternative value system, his films tackle social justice in a corporate world, Soderbergh's career demonstrates the richness of contemporary American cinema ; this volume gives his complex oeuvre the in-depth critical analysis it deserves."
