Justin A. Joyce
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526126160
- eISBN:
- 9781526138743
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526126160.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter traces the changing iconography of guns within an array of literary texts from the nineteenth century and cinematic texts of the twentieth century. This chapter outlines the shifting ...
More
This chapter traces the changing iconography of guns within an array of literary texts from the nineteenth century and cinematic texts of the twentieth century. This chapter outlines the shifting emphases within the Western; for though the gun has always been important to the Western, the genre’s representations of gun violence have varied through its history. This chapter argues that the Western's changing iconographic emphases, from aim to speed, codes violence morally upright and justifiable at different moments within the genre’s long history.Less
This chapter traces the changing iconography of guns within an array of literary texts from the nineteenth century and cinematic texts of the twentieth century. This chapter outlines the shifting emphases within the Western; for though the gun has always been important to the Western, the genre’s representations of gun violence have varied through its history. This chapter argues that the Western's changing iconographic emphases, from aim to speed, codes violence morally upright and justifiable at different moments within the genre’s long history.
Justin A. Joyce
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526126160
- eISBN:
- 9781526138743
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526126160.003.0008
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This concluding chapter examines the relationship between the increasing codification of aggressive “Stand Your Ground” laws since 2005 and the continued relevance of the Western as a popular genre. ...
More
This concluding chapter examines the relationship between the increasing codification of aggressive “Stand Your Ground” laws since 2005 and the continued relevance of the Western as a popular genre. This final chapter presents a reading of two contemporary Westerns, the television series Justified (2010-15) and Quentin Tarrantino's film, Django Unchained (2012), arguing that the film epitomizes the challenge of gun possession and self-defense within a neoliberal state.Less
This concluding chapter examines the relationship between the increasing codification of aggressive “Stand Your Ground” laws since 2005 and the continued relevance of the Western as a popular genre. This final chapter presents a reading of two contemporary Westerns, the television series Justified (2010-15) and Quentin Tarrantino's film, Django Unchained (2012), arguing that the film epitomizes the challenge of gun possession and self-defense within a neoliberal state.
Justin A. Joyce
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526126160
- eISBN:
- 9781526138743
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526126160.003.0007
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter presents a reading of Unforgiven (1992), situating this film within a paradigmatic shift in the extension of due process protections for minorities, and the transformation of American ...
More
This chapter presents a reading of Unforgiven (1992), situating this film within a paradigmatic shift in the extension of due process protections for minorities, and the transformation of American self-defense doctrine brought about through a focus on battered women.Less
This chapter presents a reading of Unforgiven (1992), situating this film within a paradigmatic shift in the extension of due process protections for minorities, and the transformation of American self-defense doctrine brought about through a focus on battered women.
Michael K. Johnson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617039287
- eISBN:
- 9781626740013
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617039287.003.0007
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
In television and film westerns of the 1960s and into the 1970s, two particular African American performers, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Woody Strode, are repeatedly cast as the representatives of the ...
More
In television and film westerns of the 1960s and into the 1970s, two particular African American performers, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Woody Strode, are repeatedly cast as the representatives of the African American West—in popular televisions shows such as The Rifleman and Rawhide, in classic western films such as Sergeant Rutledge and Once Upon a Time in the West. Through Davis and Strode, this chapter examines the dual strategies developed for representing the African American westerner on screen during the civil rights era: the erasure of race, resulting in the character type of the “raceless (black) westerner”; the exact opposite, narratives that explicitly draw attention to race, resulting in the character type of the civil rights westerner. This chapter traces the evolution of those types in later westerns such as Fred Williamson’s blaxploitation film westerns and the television series Hell on Wheels and The Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr.Less
In television and film westerns of the 1960s and into the 1970s, two particular African American performers, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Woody Strode, are repeatedly cast as the representatives of the African American West—in popular televisions shows such as The Rifleman and Rawhide, in classic western films such as Sergeant Rutledge and Once Upon a Time in the West. Through Davis and Strode, this chapter examines the dual strategies developed for representing the African American westerner on screen during the civil rights era: the erasure of race, resulting in the character type of the “raceless (black) westerner”; the exact opposite, narratives that explicitly draw attention to race, resulting in the character type of the civil rights westerner. This chapter traces the evolution of those types in later westerns such as Fred Williamson’s blaxploitation film westerns and the television series Hell on Wheels and The Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr.
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824831820
- eISBN:
- 9780824868772
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824831820.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
This chapter examines the Japanese film genre known as “middle-class film” (shoshimin eiga), a formative genre in the classical Japanese cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. It first considers genre ...
More
This chapter examines the Japanese film genre known as “middle-class film” (shoshimin eiga), a formative genre in the classical Japanese cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. It first considers genre criticism as a strategy for national cinema studies, as well as an elaboration of genre’s specific historical construction in Japanese cinema. It then explores how the middle-class film genre established connections with an audience of the urban middle class and how idiosyncratically the Japanese film industry employed genres apart from Hollywood in the cinematic modes of that period. It also discusses the politics of genre in Japan’s national cinema and the creation of a modern national subject in two films by Ozu Yasujiro: Tokyo Chorus (Tokyo no gassho, 1931) and I Was Born, But… Finally, the chapter explains how notions of Japanese genre have been molded in cross-cultural misunderstandings within Western film scholarship, along with the culturally specific use of genre appropriation in Japan.Less
This chapter examines the Japanese film genre known as “middle-class film” (shoshimin eiga), a formative genre in the classical Japanese cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. It first considers genre criticism as a strategy for national cinema studies, as well as an elaboration of genre’s specific historical construction in Japanese cinema. It then explores how the middle-class film genre established connections with an audience of the urban middle class and how idiosyncratically the Japanese film industry employed genres apart from Hollywood in the cinematic modes of that period. It also discusses the politics of genre in Japan’s national cinema and the creation of a modern national subject in two films by Ozu Yasujiro: Tokyo Chorus (Tokyo no gassho, 1931) and I Was Born, But… Finally, the chapter explains how notions of Japanese genre have been molded in cross-cultural misunderstandings within Western film scholarship, along with the culturally specific use of genre appropriation in Japan.
Kirsten Day
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781474402460
- eISBN:
- 9781474422055
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474402460.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
In the American cultural imagination, the Wild West is a mythic-historical place where our nation’s values and ideologies were formed. The heroes of this dangerous world, most familiar to us through ...
More
In the American cultural imagination, the Wild West is a mythic-historical place where our nation’s values and ideologies were formed. The heroes of this dangerous world, most familiar to us through film, are men of violence who fight the bad guys as they build the foundations of civilization out of wilderness, forging notions of justice, manhood, and honor in the process. In the Greco-Roman societies that are America’s cultural ancestors, epics provided similar narratives: like Western film, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid focus on the mythic-historical past and its warriors, men who helped shape the ideological frameworks of their respective civilizations. At the same time, the best works from both genres are far from simplistic, but instead, call the assumptions underlying society’s core beliefs and value systems into question even as they promote them. Cowboy Classics examines the connections between these seemingly disparate yet closely related genres by first establishing the broad generic parallels and then providing deeper analysis through case-studies of five critically acclaimed Golden Age Westerns: Howard Hawks’s Red River, Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, George Stevens’s Shane, and John Ford’s The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In the end, this important comparison allows the American Western to serve as a lens through which to better understand the more remote works of antiquity, while identifying epic patterns in film provides the distance that allows us to see Westerns, in whose ideological undercurrents we are more directly implicated, in a more objective light.Less
In the American cultural imagination, the Wild West is a mythic-historical place where our nation’s values and ideologies were formed. The heroes of this dangerous world, most familiar to us through film, are men of violence who fight the bad guys as they build the foundations of civilization out of wilderness, forging notions of justice, manhood, and honor in the process. In the Greco-Roman societies that are America’s cultural ancestors, epics provided similar narratives: like Western film, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid focus on the mythic-historical past and its warriors, men who helped shape the ideological frameworks of their respective civilizations. At the same time, the best works from both genres are far from simplistic, but instead, call the assumptions underlying society’s core beliefs and value systems into question even as they promote them. Cowboy Classics examines the connections between these seemingly disparate yet closely related genres by first establishing the broad generic parallels and then providing deeper analysis through case-studies of five critically acclaimed Golden Age Westerns: Howard Hawks’s Red River, Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, George Stevens’s Shane, and John Ford’s The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In the end, this important comparison allows the American Western to serve as a lens through which to better understand the more remote works of antiquity, while identifying epic patterns in film provides the distance that allows us to see Westerns, in whose ideological undercurrents we are more directly implicated, in a more objective light.
Benjamin Noys
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748638635
- eISBN:
- 9780748671915
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748638635.003.0006
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
This chapter re-reads the work of Alain Badiou as a probing of the problem of negativity. Tracing the history of Badiou’s political involvement in the radical Maoist formations of the 1970s suggests ...
More
This chapter re-reads the work of Alain Badiou as a probing of the problem of negativity. Tracing the history of Badiou’s political involvement in the radical Maoist formations of the 1970s suggests how he tries to articulate a politics of destruction and subtraction. Turning to Badiou’s more recent work on formalising the logic of negation the chapter traces inconsistency in the attempt to subordinate negation to affirmation. Probing Badiou’s dismissal of certain radical forms of politics as forms of nihilism the chapter closes with a consideration, prompted by Badiou, of the Western as an aesthetic form able to convey a sense of political courage. Against his explicit intentions, Badiou’s work gives a sense of what it might mean to depart from the ‘affirmationist consensus’, and the possibilities of an alternative form of political negativity.Less
This chapter re-reads the work of Alain Badiou as a probing of the problem of negativity. Tracing the history of Badiou’s political involvement in the radical Maoist formations of the 1970s suggests how he tries to articulate a politics of destruction and subtraction. Turning to Badiou’s more recent work on formalising the logic of negation the chapter traces inconsistency in the attempt to subordinate negation to affirmation. Probing Badiou’s dismissal of certain radical forms of politics as forms of nihilism the chapter closes with a consideration, prompted by Badiou, of the Western as an aesthetic form able to convey a sense of political courage. Against his explicit intentions, Badiou’s work gives a sense of what it might mean to depart from the ‘affirmationist consensus’, and the possibilities of an alternative form of political negativity.
Ken K. Ito
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804757775
- eISBN:
- 9780804779623
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804757775.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, Japanese fiction pulsed with an urge to render good and evil in ways that evoked dramatic emotions. This book examines four ...
More
At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, Japanese fiction pulsed with an urge to render good and evil in ways that evoked dramatic emotions. This book examines four enormously popular novels from this period by interweaving two threads of argument. Using approaches to melodrama developed in Western literary and film criticism, it first shows how these texts used their binary morality to construct a semblance of moral certainty in a moment of social transformation. The book then examines how the novels responded to a particular set of ideologies of the family, which the Japanese state attempted to use as an instrument of social control. The melodramatic novels of the Meiji period generated a plethora of alternative family models that explored the myriad ways in which human beings could connect in a modernizing culture. The fictional families in these works revealed the ties of the family to the nation, delineated traumatic changes in social hierarchy, and showed the effects of new discourses of gender. These powerful portrayals and the social discourses which surround them reveal that melodrama was a central mode of sensibility in Meiji culture.Less
At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, Japanese fiction pulsed with an urge to render good and evil in ways that evoked dramatic emotions. This book examines four enormously popular novels from this period by interweaving two threads of argument. Using approaches to melodrama developed in Western literary and film criticism, it first shows how these texts used their binary morality to construct a semblance of moral certainty in a moment of social transformation. The book then examines how the novels responded to a particular set of ideologies of the family, which the Japanese state attempted to use as an instrument of social control. The melodramatic novels of the Meiji period generated a plethora of alternative family models that explored the myriad ways in which human beings could connect in a modernizing culture. The fictional families in these works revealed the ties of the family to the nation, delineated traumatic changes in social hierarchy, and showed the effects of new discourses of gender. These powerful portrayals and the social discourses which surround them reveal that melodrama was a central mode of sensibility in Meiji culture.
Kirsten Day
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474440844
- eISBN:
- 9781474460279
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440844.003.0009
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Plays and Playwrights: Classical, Early, and Medieval
In the first of two chapters that treat promises of an imperial golden age in Aeneid Book 6 in relation to American expansionism as portrayed in the Western film genre, Kirsten Day compares the ...
More
In the first of two chapters that treat promises of an imperial golden age in Aeneid Book 6 in relation to American expansionism as portrayed in the Western film genre, Kirsten Day compares the production contexts of Vergil’s epic, during the “golden age of Latin literature” in the wake of epochal civil wars, to the Westerns produced after World War II during the “golden age” of Hollywood. So too the dramatic settings of the Aeneid, after the Trojan War, and of Westerns, after the American Civil War, enshrine these trailblazing pioneers in the pantheon of founding heroes whose struggles (re)built the nation of the narrative’s audience. Through a wide-ranging survey of many of the genre’s most famous films, such as Red River and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Day examines several key themes, including nation-building as divinely driven labor; the laconic characterization of the Western male hero and his troubling resemblance to the villain; and the sacrificial role assigned to female characters. Day concludes that these ancient and modern texts also share an undercurrent of anxiety about the moral ambiguities of these projects, which belies their superficial optimism.Less
In the first of two chapters that treat promises of an imperial golden age in Aeneid Book 6 in relation to American expansionism as portrayed in the Western film genre, Kirsten Day compares the production contexts of Vergil’s epic, during the “golden age of Latin literature” in the wake of epochal civil wars, to the Westerns produced after World War II during the “golden age” of Hollywood. So too the dramatic settings of the Aeneid, after the Trojan War, and of Westerns, after the American Civil War, enshrine these trailblazing pioneers in the pantheon of founding heroes whose struggles (re)built the nation of the narrative’s audience. Through a wide-ranging survey of many of the genre’s most famous films, such as Red River and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Day examines several key themes, including nation-building as divinely driven labor; the laconic characterization of the Western male hero and his troubling resemblance to the villain; and the sacrificial role assigned to female characters. Day concludes that these ancient and modern texts also share an undercurrent of anxiety about the moral ambiguities of these projects, which belies their superficial optimism.
