Robert W. Lewis
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781526106247
- eISBN:
- 9781526120816
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526106247.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
The stadium century traces the history of stadia and mass spectatorship in modern France from the vélodromes of the late nineteenth century to the construction of the Stade de France before the 1998 ...
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The stadium century traces the history of stadia and mass spectatorship in modern France from the vélodromes of the late nineteenth century to the construction of the Stade de France before the 1998 soccer World Cup, and argues that stadia played a privileged role in shaping mass society in twentieth-century France. Drawing off a wide range of archival and published sources, Robert W. Lewis links the histories of French urbanism, mass politics and sport through the history of the stadium in an innovative and original work that will appeal to historians, students of French history and the history of sport, and general readers alike.
As The stadium century demonstrates, the stadium was at the centre of long-running debates about public health, national prestige and urban development in twentieth-century France. The stadium also functioned as a key space for mobilizing and transforming the urban crowd, in the twin contexts of mass politics and mass spectator sport. In the process, the stadium became a site for confronting tensions over political allegiance, class, gender, and place-based identity, and for forging particular kinds of cultural practices related to mass consumption and leisure. As stadia and the narratives surrounding them changed dramatically in the years after 1945, the transformed French stadium not only reflected and constituted part of the process of postwar modernisation, but also was increasingly implicated in global transformations to the spaces and practices of sport that connected France even more closely to the rest of the world.Less
The stadium century traces the history of stadia and mass spectatorship in modern France from the vélodromes of the late nineteenth century to the construction of the Stade de France before the 1998 soccer World Cup, and argues that stadia played a privileged role in shaping mass society in twentieth-century France. Drawing off a wide range of archival and published sources, Robert W. Lewis links the histories of French urbanism, mass politics and sport through the history of the stadium in an innovative and original work that will appeal to historians, students of French history and the history of sport, and general readers alike.
As The stadium century demonstrates, the stadium was at the centre of long-running debates about public health, national prestige and urban development in twentieth-century France. The stadium also functioned as a key space for mobilizing and transforming the urban crowd, in the twin contexts of mass politics and mass spectator sport. In the process, the stadium became a site for confronting tensions over political allegiance, class, gender, and place-based identity, and for forging particular kinds of cultural practices related to mass consumption and leisure. As stadia and the narratives surrounding them changed dramatically in the years after 1945, the transformed French stadium not only reflected and constituted part of the process of postwar modernisation, but also was increasingly implicated in global transformations to the spaces and practices of sport that connected France even more closely to the rest of the world.
Weihong Bao
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816681334
- eISBN:
- 9781452950655
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816681334.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Cinema in modern China was a dynamic entity, not strictly tied to one media technology, one mode of operation, or one system of aesthetic code. It was, in Weihong Bao’s term, an affective medium, a ...
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Cinema in modern China was a dynamic entity, not strictly tied to one media technology, one mode of operation, or one system of aesthetic code. It was, in Weihong Bao’s term, an affective medium, a distinct notion of the medium as mediating environment with the power to stir passions, frame perception, and mold experience. In Fiery Cinema, Bao traces the permutations of this affective medium from the early through the mid-twentieth century, exploring its role in aesthetics, politics, and social institutions. Mapping the changing identity of cinema in China in relation to Republican-era print media, theatrical performance, radio broadcasting, television, and architecture, Bao has created an archaeology of Chinese media culture. Within this context, she grounds the question of spectatorial affect and media technology in China’s experience of mechanized warfare, colonial modernity, and the shaping of the public into consumers, national citizens, and a revolutionary collective subject. Carrying on a close conversation with transnational media theory and history, she teases out the tension and affinity between vernacular, political modernist, and propagandistic articulations of mass culture in China’s varied participation in modernity. Fiery Cinema advances a radical rethinking of affect and medium as a key insight into the relationship of cinema to the public sphere and the making of the masses. By centering media politics in her inquiry of the forgotten future of cinema, Bao makes a major intervention into the theory and history of media.Less
Cinema in modern China was a dynamic entity, not strictly tied to one media technology, one mode of operation, or one system of aesthetic code. It was, in Weihong Bao’s term, an affective medium, a distinct notion of the medium as mediating environment with the power to stir passions, frame perception, and mold experience. In Fiery Cinema, Bao traces the permutations of this affective medium from the early through the mid-twentieth century, exploring its role in aesthetics, politics, and social institutions. Mapping the changing identity of cinema in China in relation to Republican-era print media, theatrical performance, radio broadcasting, television, and architecture, Bao has created an archaeology of Chinese media culture. Within this context, she grounds the question of spectatorial affect and media technology in China’s experience of mechanized warfare, colonial modernity, and the shaping of the public into consumers, national citizens, and a revolutionary collective subject. Carrying on a close conversation with transnational media theory and history, she teases out the tension and affinity between vernacular, political modernist, and propagandistic articulations of mass culture in China’s varied participation in modernity. Fiery Cinema advances a radical rethinking of affect and medium as a key insight into the relationship of cinema to the public sphere and the making of the masses. By centering media politics in her inquiry of the forgotten future of cinema, Bao makes a major intervention into the theory and history of media.
Brandeise Monk-Payton
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781496807045
- eISBN:
- 9781496807083
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496807045.003.0004
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
In “Worship at the Altar of Perry: Spectatorship and the Aesthetics of Testimony,” Brandeise Monk-Payton encourages us to think more richly about the relationship between affect and testimony that is ...
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In “Worship at the Altar of Perry: Spectatorship and the Aesthetics of Testimony,” Brandeise Monk-Payton encourages us to think more richly about the relationship between affect and testimony that is available to fans of Perry’s content. Calling Perry’s affective effect on his audiences a “cinematic ministry” that is replete with scenes of pulpit-like testimony, Monk-Payton examines faith-based affect as a type of responsiveness that characterizes intimate encounters with Perry’s films. In her reading of Perry’s 2012 film, Good Deeds, Monk-Payton theorizes that Perry, as title character Wesley Deeds, “testifies” for his fans using a mode of “cinematic address” that is predicated on the affective desire for the audience to engage in a version of African American expressivity.Less
In “Worship at the Altar of Perry: Spectatorship and the Aesthetics of Testimony,” Brandeise Monk-Payton encourages us to think more richly about the relationship between affect and testimony that is available to fans of Perry’s content. Calling Perry’s affective effect on his audiences a “cinematic ministry” that is replete with scenes of pulpit-like testimony, Monk-Payton examines faith-based affect as a type of responsiveness that characterizes intimate encounters with Perry’s films. In her reading of Perry’s 2012 film, Good Deeds, Monk-Payton theorizes that Perry, as title character Wesley Deeds, “testifies” for his fans using a mode of “cinematic address” that is predicated on the affective desire for the audience to engage in a version of African American expressivity.
Laura Lindenfeld and Fabio Parasecoli
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780231172516
- eISBN:
- 9780231542975
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231172516.003.0007
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Analyses food films that invite audiences to visit the homes of ethnic others as vicarious tourists. The Joy Luck Club (Wang, 1993), Soul Food (Tillman 1997), Tortilla Soup (Ripoll, 2001), What’s ...
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Analyses food films that invite audiences to visit the homes of ethnic others as vicarious tourists. The Joy Luck Club (Wang, 1993), Soul Food (Tillman 1997), Tortilla Soup (Ripoll, 2001), What’s Cooking (Chadha, 2000), and My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Zwick, 2002) operate as forms of mediated culinary tourism. While the previous chapters focus predominantly on the ambivalent representations and treatment of femininity and masculinity, this chapter suggests that mainstream food films carefully appeal to the ethnic groups they represent while offering them as object of culinary tourism of mainstream white audiences through the presentation of familiar—although vaguely exotic—food. The films provide an unstable means of educating audiences about the foodways of different ethnic groups in the U.S., as they reiterate stereotypes and lace ethnicity with expectations and biases, also in terms of gender and class.Less
Analyses food films that invite audiences to visit the homes of ethnic others as vicarious tourists. The Joy Luck Club (Wang, 1993), Soul Food (Tillman 1997), Tortilla Soup (Ripoll, 2001), What’s Cooking (Chadha, 2000), and My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Zwick, 2002) operate as forms of mediated culinary tourism. While the previous chapters focus predominantly on the ambivalent representations and treatment of femininity and masculinity, this chapter suggests that mainstream food films carefully appeal to the ethnic groups they represent while offering them as object of culinary tourism of mainstream white audiences through the presentation of familiar—although vaguely exotic—food. The films provide an unstable means of educating audiences about the foodways of different ethnic groups in the U.S., as they reiterate stereotypes and lace ethnicity with expectations and biases, also in terms of gender and class.
Gian Maria Annovi
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780231180306
- eISBN:
- 9780231542708
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231180306.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Chapter Five is devoted to films that feature Pasolini in roles that evoke or directly address his authorial function. This is the case for his self-projections onto character-authors such as Chaucer ...
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Chapter Five is devoted to films that feature Pasolini in roles that evoke or directly address his authorial function. This is the case for his self-projections onto character-authors such as Chaucer in I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales, 1972), or Giotto’s pupil in Il Decameron (The Decameron, 1971). The director’s on-screen performances contribute to the composition of the self-portrait of a multimedia author, and at the same time affirm the intimate bond between work and authorial corporeality. In The Trilogy of Life, Pasolini presents authorship like a corporeal, material element in the film, not a mere abstract function. In doing so, he also develops a discourse of cinematic spectatorship based on the spectator’s recognition of the film’s author. In the case of Il fiore delle mille e una note (Arabian Nights)’s night original screenplay, this recognition would have also included the open representation of Pasolini’s homosexuality, and his sexual encounter with three young Arabs guys. This explicit on-screen queer performance was ultimately not included in the version of Arabian Nights that was actually shot. However, even if the author’s body is not on the screen, through the mise-en-scène of his queer gaze and the explicit depiction of the male body, Pasolini obliges the spectator to participate in the dynamics of homosexual desire, thus challenging the allegedly tolerant society of the 1970s.Less
Chapter Five is devoted to films that feature Pasolini in roles that evoke or directly address his authorial function. This is the case for his self-projections onto character-authors such as Chaucer in I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales, 1972), or Giotto’s pupil in Il Decameron (The Decameron, 1971). The director’s on-screen performances contribute to the composition of the self-portrait of a multimedia author, and at the same time affirm the intimate bond between work and authorial corporeality. In The Trilogy of Life, Pasolini presents authorship like a corporeal, material element in the film, not a mere abstract function. In doing so, he also develops a discourse of cinematic spectatorship based on the spectator’s recognition of the film’s author. In the case of Il fiore delle mille e una note (Arabian Nights)’s night original screenplay, this recognition would have also included the open representation of Pasolini’s homosexuality, and his sexual encounter with three young Arabs guys. This explicit on-screen queer performance was ultimately not included in the version of Arabian Nights that was actually shot. However, even if the author’s body is not on the screen, through the mise-en-scène of his queer gaze and the explicit depiction of the male body, Pasolini obliges the spectator to participate in the dynamics of homosexual desire, thus challenging the allegedly tolerant society of the 1970s.
Viv Gardner
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780719090387
- eISBN:
- 9781781707128
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719090387.003.0005
- Subject:
- Sociology, Culture
Viv Gardner’s essay begins with a discussion of ‘scuttling’ incidents in Manchester in the 1890s, originating in music hall and theatre venues and spilling onto the streets, and the debates in the ...
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Viv Gardner’s essay begins with a discussion of ‘scuttling’ incidents in Manchester in the 1890s, originating in music hall and theatre venues and spilling onto the streets, and the debates in the press about these. This leads her into a study of the complex relationship of performance, performance sites and urban spectatorship in Manchester in the period, with a particular focus on theatre architecture and urban topography. The essay considers the supposed ‘rapprochement of polite and popular culture’, and offers a detailed study of the programmes and audiences at a variety of venues.Less
Viv Gardner’s essay begins with a discussion of ‘scuttling’ incidents in Manchester in the 1890s, originating in music hall and theatre venues and spilling onto the streets, and the debates in the press about these. This leads her into a study of the complex relationship of performance, performance sites and urban spectatorship in Manchester in the period, with a particular focus on theatre architecture and urban topography. The essay considers the supposed ‘rapprochement of polite and popular culture’, and offers a detailed study of the programmes and audiences at a variety of venues.
Robert Shaughnessy
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780719086939
- eISBN:
- 9781526132192
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719086939.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
This chapter focuses on the lived reality of Shakespearean theatre-going, recording the author’s experience of a performance of As You Like It at Shakespeare’s Globe towards the end of the summer of ...
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This chapter focuses on the lived reality of Shakespearean theatre-going, recording the author’s experience of a performance of As You Like It at Shakespeare’s Globe towards the end of the summer of 2015. Offering a moment-by-moment response to this stage production, the chapter moves to situate this within the larger contexts of everyday interactions and encounters, and in relation to broader and deeper currents of performance memory and reminiscence.Less
This chapter focuses on the lived reality of Shakespearean theatre-going, recording the author’s experience of a performance of As You Like It at Shakespeare’s Globe towards the end of the summer of 2015. Offering a moment-by-moment response to this stage production, the chapter moves to situate this within the larger contexts of everyday interactions and encounters, and in relation to broader and deeper currents of performance memory and reminiscence.
Carol Margaret Davison
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781784992699
- eISBN:
- 9781526124050
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784992699.003.0015
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Taking as its point of focus E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a cinematic mise-en-abîme homage to, and a self-referential twenty-first century commentary on F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, ...
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Taking as its point of focus E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a cinematic mise-en-abîme homage to, and a self-referential twenty-first century commentary on F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, this essay examines vampire cinema as an emblem of ‘technological necromancy’ that mediates our ambivalent responses to modernity, its proliferating technologies, and death in the wake of the secularising Enlightenment whose driving ideal – rational empiricism – undermined long established Christian certainties about the existence and nature of a soul and an afterlife. This essay reads Shadow as a compelling and sedimented, twenty-first century meditation on the nefarious, desensitizing impact of our cultural addiction to visual technologies, in which the vampire is used to mirror its audience. Shadow is also assessed as an interrogation of the gender and racial politics of cinematic spectatorship – particularly the influence and impact of pornography and propaganda cinema.Less
Taking as its point of focus E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a cinematic mise-en-abîme homage to, and a self-referential twenty-first century commentary on F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, this essay examines vampire cinema as an emblem of ‘technological necromancy’ that mediates our ambivalent responses to modernity, its proliferating technologies, and death in the wake of the secularising Enlightenment whose driving ideal – rational empiricism – undermined long established Christian certainties about the existence and nature of a soul and an afterlife. This essay reads Shadow as a compelling and sedimented, twenty-first century meditation on the nefarious, desensitizing impact of our cultural addiction to visual technologies, in which the vampire is used to mirror its audience. Shadow is also assessed as an interrogation of the gender and racial politics of cinematic spectatorship – particularly the influence and impact of pornography and propaganda cinema.
Robert W. Lewis
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781526106247
- eISBN:
- 9781526120816
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526106247.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
The third chapter focuses on the stadium’s relationship to the efforts of French sporting elites to create a well-disciplined, deferential and masculine public at spectator sporting events in the ...
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The third chapter focuses on the stadium’s relationship to the efforts of French sporting elites to create a well-disciplined, deferential and masculine public at spectator sporting events in the period between 1918 and the mid-1950s. During this era, rugby, soccer and cycling became the pre-eminent spectator sports in France, promoted and analysed by a burgeoning media complex. Far from rejoicing at the burgeoning popularity of spectator sport, French sporting journalists and officials sought to ‘improve’ and reshape the crowd, both physically through the stadium and discursively in the narratives about ‘sporting education’ that surrounded it. However, these physical and rhetorical efforts to redefine the sporting public as respectable and masculine were continually undermined by the commercial logic of sport itself and the actual practices of male and female spectators present both inside and outside the stade. Faced with a public that resisted physical and rhetorical discipline and that created its own spectator experience, the journalists and sporting impresarios who promoted French sport slowly and somewhat begrudgingly came to recognize the crowd as a less overtly problematic public of male and female consumers which needed to be recruited and accommodated.Less
The third chapter focuses on the stadium’s relationship to the efforts of French sporting elites to create a well-disciplined, deferential and masculine public at spectator sporting events in the period between 1918 and the mid-1950s. During this era, rugby, soccer and cycling became the pre-eminent spectator sports in France, promoted and analysed by a burgeoning media complex. Far from rejoicing at the burgeoning popularity of spectator sport, French sporting journalists and officials sought to ‘improve’ and reshape the crowd, both physically through the stadium and discursively in the narratives about ‘sporting education’ that surrounded it. However, these physical and rhetorical efforts to redefine the sporting public as respectable and masculine were continually undermined by the commercial logic of sport itself and the actual practices of male and female spectators present both inside and outside the stade. Faced with a public that resisted physical and rhetorical discipline and that created its own spectator experience, the journalists and sporting impresarios who promoted French sport slowly and somewhat begrudgingly came to recognize the crowd as a less overtly problematic public of male and female consumers which needed to be recruited and accommodated.
Jonathon Shears (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780719099120
- eISBN:
- 9781526128270
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719099120.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
Chapter 2 houses material that relates to the Victorian preoccupation with display. It considers the moral, social and sexual implications of viewing in an age of material abundance and the ...
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Chapter 2 houses material that relates to the Victorian preoccupation with display. It considers the moral, social and sexual implications of viewing in an age of material abundance and the cultivation of desire for consumer goods. The chapter also explores further the impact of Joseph Paxton’s glass building and the importance of phantasmagoria and spectatorship within the Palace. The chapter begins with a section on the logistics and physical arrangement of exhibits and the problems faced by the Commission in attempting to impose a conceptual classification on material objects.Less
Chapter 2 houses material that relates to the Victorian preoccupation with display. It considers the moral, social and sexual implications of viewing in an age of material abundance and the cultivation of desire for consumer goods. The chapter also explores further the impact of Joseph Paxton’s glass building and the importance of phantasmagoria and spectatorship within the Palace. The chapter begins with a section on the logistics and physical arrangement of exhibits and the problems faced by the Commission in attempting to impose a conceptual classification on material objects.
Justin T. Clark
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469638737
- eISBN:
- 9781469638751
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469638737.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
Even more effectively than outdoor vistas, indoor galleries offered reformers the ability to manipulate what urbanites saw. Embracing the arts as a form of moral instruction, late-Federal Bostonians ...
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Even more effectively than outdoor vistas, indoor galleries offered reformers the ability to manipulate what urbanites saw. Embracing the arts as a form of moral instruction, late-Federal Bostonians established public exhibition spaces to divert the city’s growing middle-class from more fashionable and sensualist attractions. Yet the 1820’s public exhibition culture that emerged at the Athenaeum and elsewhere was ridden with anxiety, as moralists warned that connoisseurship concealed a shallow and fashionable sensualism. To avert this danger, art gallery patrons absorbed themselves in visions that transcended the material art object and the social imposture of their fellow viewers. These supersensory flights from the urban gallery proved a key template for Transcendentalist encounters with nature, epitomized by Emerson’s famous “transparent eyeball” metaphor.Less
Even more effectively than outdoor vistas, indoor galleries offered reformers the ability to manipulate what urbanites saw. Embracing the arts as a form of moral instruction, late-Federal Bostonians established public exhibition spaces to divert the city’s growing middle-class from more fashionable and sensualist attractions. Yet the 1820’s public exhibition culture that emerged at the Athenaeum and elsewhere was ridden with anxiety, as moralists warned that connoisseurship concealed a shallow and fashionable sensualism. To avert this danger, art gallery patrons absorbed themselves in visions that transcended the material art object and the social imposture of their fellow viewers. These supersensory flights from the urban gallery proved a key template for Transcendentalist encounters with nature, epitomized by Emerson’s famous “transparent eyeball” metaphor.
Weihong Bao
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816681334
- eISBN:
- 9781452950655
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816681334.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Chapter 1 situates the action-based aesthetic of “fiery films” (1927 to 1931) as a response to Hollywood serialized thrillers mediated by the competition between stage and screen. I complicate the ...
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Chapter 1 situates the action-based aesthetic of “fiery films” (1927 to 1931) as a response to Hollywood serialized thrillers mediated by the competition between stage and screen. I complicate the popular scene by looking at how New Heroism, a composite modernist discourse, reframed “fiery films” to foreground “resonance” as a theory of affect for its distinct social and aesthetic agendas.Less
Chapter 1 situates the action-based aesthetic of “fiery films” (1927 to 1931) as a response to Hollywood serialized thrillers mediated by the competition between stage and screen. I complicate the popular scene by looking at how New Heroism, a composite modernist discourse, reframed “fiery films” to foreground “resonance” as a theory of affect for its distinct social and aesthetic agendas.
Weihong Bao
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816681334
- eISBN:
- 9781452950655
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816681334.003.0002
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Chapter 2 places “resonance” in relation to emergent media technologies—wireless technology and newly invented media as well as popular scientific imaginations of the diverse future of cinema—to ...
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Chapter 2 places “resonance” in relation to emergent media technologies—wireless technology and newly invented media as well as popular scientific imaginations of the diverse future of cinema—to consider renewed notion of the medium connecting the spectator’s body and a field of social experience.Less
Chapter 2 places “resonance” in relation to emergent media technologies—wireless technology and newly invented media as well as popular scientific imaginations of the diverse future of cinema—to consider renewed notion of the medium connecting the spectator’s body and a field of social experience.
Weihong Bao
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816681334
- eISBN:
- 9781452950655
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816681334.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Chapter 3 examines how left-wing spoken drama and films invoked fire, torrents, and other natural forces to politicize spectatorial affect through visual and sensory confrontations. I then revisit ...
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Chapter 3 examines how left-wing spoken drama and films invoked fire, torrents, and other natural forces to politicize spectatorial affect through visual and sensory confrontations. I then revisit the dichotomy between left-wing and “soft” film advocates by problematizing the central question of medium specificity with an inquiry of the medium and intermedial aesthetic.Less
Chapter 3 examines how left-wing spoken drama and films invoked fire, torrents, and other natural forces to politicize spectatorial affect through visual and sensory confrontations. I then revisit the dichotomy between left-wing and “soft” film advocates by problematizing the central question of medium specificity with an inquiry of the medium and intermedial aesthetic.
Weihong Bao
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816681334
- eISBN:
- 9781452950655
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816681334.003.0004
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Chapter 4 reframes left-wing cinema in the material “culture of glass,” closely affiliated with international modernist architecture and a commodity culture of display. Left-wing cinema interacted ...
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Chapter 4 reframes left-wing cinema in the material “culture of glass,” closely affiliated with international modernist architecture and a commodity culture of display. Left-wing cinema interacted with other perceptual media in pursuit of a critical spectatorship, challenging the claim of transparency by particular material medium (glass and sound) with aesthetic organization and politics of intermediality.Less
Chapter 4 reframes left-wing cinema in the material “culture of glass,” closely affiliated with international modernist architecture and a commodity culture of display. Left-wing cinema interacted with other perceptual media in pursuit of a critical spectatorship, challenging the claim of transparency by particular material medium (glass and sound) with aesthetic organization and politics of intermediality.
Weihong Bao
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816681334
- eISBN:
- 9781452950655
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816681334.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Chapter 5 follows the migration of the Chinese film industry from Shanghai to Chongqing during the Sino-Japanese War. I examine the impact of the war and the rise of propaganda that initiated both a ...
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Chapter 5 follows the migration of the Chinese film industry from Shanghai to Chongqing during the Sino-Japanese War. I examine the impact of the war and the rise of propaganda that initiated both a rethinking of film language and a reorientation of the cinematic medium in terms of simultaneous dissemination and mobile exhibition.Less
Chapter 5 follows the migration of the Chinese film industry from Shanghai to Chongqing during the Sino-Japanese War. I examine the impact of the war and the rise of propaganda that initiated both a rethinking of film language and a reorientation of the cinematic medium in terms of simultaneous dissemination and mobile exhibition.
Weihong Bao
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816681334
- eISBN:
- 9781452950655
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816681334.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Chapter 6 complicates the claim of propaganda as a utopia media infrastructure by returning to individual films across the geopolitical division between Chongqing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. I ...
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Chapter 6 complicates the claim of propaganda as a utopia media infrastructure by returning to individual films across the geopolitical division between Chongqing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. I illustrate how these films advance agitation in negotiate with earlier notions of affective spectatorship with enduring implication for modern Chinese film and media culture.Less
Chapter 6 complicates the claim of propaganda as a utopia media infrastructure by returning to individual films across the geopolitical division between Chongqing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. I illustrate how these films advance agitation in negotiate with earlier notions of affective spectatorship with enduring implication for modern Chinese film and media culture.
Weihong Bao
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816681334
- eISBN:
- 9781452950655
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816681334.003.0007
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This book traces the permutations of the affective medium in modern China as a way to rethink cinema as a material, aesthetic, and social medium deeply connected to the artificial production of ...
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This book traces the permutations of the affective medium in modern China as a way to rethink cinema as a material, aesthetic, and social medium deeply connected to the artificial production of affect central for the consolidation of media institutions and the formation of mass publics. I argue that affect, rather than something intrinsic to a private individual, was evoked and engineered as a sharable social experience through media technologies and their aesthetic interplay; in return, media institutions and the social agents involved became solidified. My inquiry traces the rise of mass-media culture in China from its flourishing in the 1910s to its increasing politicization in the 1930s, culminating in China’s participation in World War II. By investigating mass media’s engagement with colonization, urban consumption, and mechanized warfare, I trace the shift from commercial to political modernist and propagandist film and media culture. Placing my narrative end point at wartime propaganda, my project creates a critical genealogy of spectatorial affect to examine the affinity and tension between commercially and politically oriented mass culture and their particular promises and stakes.Less
This book traces the permutations of the affective medium in modern China as a way to rethink cinema as a material, aesthetic, and social medium deeply connected to the artificial production of affect central for the consolidation of media institutions and the formation of mass publics. I argue that affect, rather than something intrinsic to a private individual, was evoked and engineered as a sharable social experience through media technologies and their aesthetic interplay; in return, media institutions and the social agents involved became solidified. My inquiry traces the rise of mass-media culture in China from its flourishing in the 1910s to its increasing politicization in the 1930s, culminating in China’s participation in World War II. By investigating mass media’s engagement with colonization, urban consumption, and mechanized warfare, I trace the shift from commercial to political modernist and propagandist film and media culture. Placing my narrative end point at wartime propaganda, my project creates a critical genealogy of spectatorial affect to examine the affinity and tension between commercially and politically oriented mass culture and their particular promises and stakes.
Jing Jing Chang
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9789888455768
- eISBN:
- 9789888455621
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888455768.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This introduction chapter outlines the theoretical framework of the book, and the methodological potential of the act of “screening,” when exploring the interplay between image and idea, politics and ...
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This introduction chapter outlines the theoretical framework of the book, and the methodological potential of the act of “screening,” when exploring the interplay between image and idea, politics and culture, film talent and audience in postwar Hong Kong film culture. While concepts of reflecting and viewing imply a unidirectional relationship between film and subject, the author argues that “screening” focuses more on the processes through which cinema contributed to the building of Hong Kong’s postwar community and identity. By using the double meaning of “screening” as both revealing and concealing, the author argues that postwar Hong Kong cinema—which in this book include 1950s and 1960s official documentary films, leftist family melodrama, and youth films— both conceals the anxieties of the British colonial government during the Cold War, and exposes the different narratives constructed by local filmmakers about what it means to be Chinese citizens during the postwar period. This introduction also takes into consideration the importance of postwar Hong Kong audiences, both real and implied, whose spectatorship was negotiated at the intersection colonialist and nationalist “address” and a familial and localized “reception.” This study has implication for the fields of Hong Kong, Chinese cinema, Cold War, and film reception studies.Less
This introduction chapter outlines the theoretical framework of the book, and the methodological potential of the act of “screening,” when exploring the interplay between image and idea, politics and culture, film talent and audience in postwar Hong Kong film culture. While concepts of reflecting and viewing imply a unidirectional relationship between film and subject, the author argues that “screening” focuses more on the processes through which cinema contributed to the building of Hong Kong’s postwar community and identity. By using the double meaning of “screening” as both revealing and concealing, the author argues that postwar Hong Kong cinema—which in this book include 1950s and 1960s official documentary films, leftist family melodrama, and youth films— both conceals the anxieties of the British colonial government during the Cold War, and exposes the different narratives constructed by local filmmakers about what it means to be Chinese citizens during the postwar period. This introduction also takes into consideration the importance of postwar Hong Kong audiences, both real and implied, whose spectatorship was negotiated at the intersection colonialist and nationalist “address” and a familial and localized “reception.” This study has implication for the fields of Hong Kong, Chinese cinema, Cold War, and film reception studies.
Susan Potter
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780252042461
- eISBN:
- 9780252051302
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042461.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter focuses on an expanded visual archive that is emblematic of the intermediality of early cinema: the electric light dance performances of late-nineteenth-century celebrity Loïe Fuller and ...
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This chapter focuses on an expanded visual archive that is emblematic of the intermediality of early cinema: the electric light dance performances of late-nineteenth-century celebrity Loïe Fuller and their early film copies. The chapter argues that Fuller’s on-stage performances, and the cinematic remediations that imitated her disembodied modes of performance, represent a specific response to, and transformation of, conditions of vision, practices of looking, and modes of voyeurism that had until recently been cultural norms for women. Fuller’s visual archive suggests how the developing sexual subjectivities of female spectators were already bound up in proto-cinematic forms of spectatorship that turned on the visual pleasures of the moving female body. Appropriating and reorienting the sexuality effects of late-nineteenth-century visual culture, Fuller’s performances sustained a paradoxically disembodied and depersonalized homoerotic mode of spectatorship.Less
This chapter focuses on an expanded visual archive that is emblematic of the intermediality of early cinema: the electric light dance performances of late-nineteenth-century celebrity Loïe Fuller and their early film copies. The chapter argues that Fuller’s on-stage performances, and the cinematic remediations that imitated her disembodied modes of performance, represent a specific response to, and transformation of, conditions of vision, practices of looking, and modes of voyeurism that had until recently been cultural norms for women. Fuller’s visual archive suggests how the developing sexual subjectivities of female spectators were already bound up in proto-cinematic forms of spectatorship that turned on the visual pleasures of the moving female body. Appropriating and reorienting the sexuality effects of late-nineteenth-century visual culture, Fuller’s performances sustained a paradoxically disembodied and depersonalized homoerotic mode of spectatorship.
