Liam Burke
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781628462036
- eISBN:
- 9781626745193
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628462036.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
In the summer of 2000 X-Men surpassed all box office expectations and ushered in an era of unprecedented production of comic book film adaptations. This trend, now in its second decade, has blossomed ...
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In the summer of 2000 X-Men surpassed all box office expectations and ushered in an era of unprecedented production of comic book film adaptations. This trend, now in its second decade, has blossomed into Hollywood's leading genre. From superheroes to Spartan warriors, The Comic Book Film Adaptation offers the first dedicated study to examine how comic books moved from the fringes of popular culture to the center of mainstream film production. Through in-depth analysis, industry interviews, and audience research, this book charts the cause-and-effect of this influential trend. It considers the cultural traumas, business demands, and digital possibilities that Hollywood faced at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The industry managed to meet these challenges by exploiting comics and their existing audiences. However, studios were caught off-guard when these comic book fans, empowered by digital media, began to influence the success of adaptations. Nonetheless, filmmakers soon developed strategies to take advantage of this intense fanbase, while codifying the trend into a more lucrative genre, the comic book movie, which appealed to an even wider audience. Central to this vibrant trend is a comic aesthetic in which filmmakers utilize digital filmmaking technologies to engage with the language and conventions of comics like never before. The Comic Book Film Adaptation explores this unique moment in which cinema is stimulated, challenged, and enriched by the once-dismissed medium of comics.Less
In the summer of 2000 X-Men surpassed all box office expectations and ushered in an era of unprecedented production of comic book film adaptations. This trend, now in its second decade, has blossomed into Hollywood's leading genre. From superheroes to Spartan warriors, The Comic Book Film Adaptation offers the first dedicated study to examine how comic books moved from the fringes of popular culture to the center of mainstream film production. Through in-depth analysis, industry interviews, and audience research, this book charts the cause-and-effect of this influential trend. It considers the cultural traumas, business demands, and digital possibilities that Hollywood faced at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The industry managed to meet these challenges by exploiting comics and their existing audiences. However, studios were caught off-guard when these comic book fans, empowered by digital media, began to influence the success of adaptations. Nonetheless, filmmakers soon developed strategies to take advantage of this intense fanbase, while codifying the trend into a more lucrative genre, the comic book movie, which appealed to an even wider audience. Central to this vibrant trend is a comic aesthetic in which filmmakers utilize digital filmmaking technologies to engage with the language and conventions of comics like never before. The Comic Book Film Adaptation explores this unique moment in which cinema is stimulated, challenged, and enriched by the once-dismissed medium of comics.
Stephen Teo
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9789622098398
- eISBN:
- 9789882206823
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789622098398.003.0007
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter reviews Johnnie To's enunciating role as an auteur of genre film through the convention of the happy ending, as a method of drawing certain conclusions about To's achievements to date. ...
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This chapter reviews Johnnie To's enunciating role as an auteur of genre film through the convention of the happy ending, as a method of drawing certain conclusions about To's achievements to date. The happy ending is an ironic way of ending this epilogue, as will be made clear, but since To's career is ongoing and likely to contain more revelations and surprises, this chapter cannot make conclusions about his career as such, but about the way his films have ended — as a means to indicate To's contributions to genre and the art of cinema. To's ability to unsettle our perception of genre as a world of pleasure and closure is all part of his vision of Hong Kong on the road to Avici, but his action cinema carries a dialectical weight — fatalism carries meaning and redemption, thus the destiny of his films is something else entirely. The final action in the action films of Johnnie To is the act of inducing thought.Less
This chapter reviews Johnnie To's enunciating role as an auteur of genre film through the convention of the happy ending, as a method of drawing certain conclusions about To's achievements to date. The happy ending is an ironic way of ending this epilogue, as will be made clear, but since To's career is ongoing and likely to contain more revelations and surprises, this chapter cannot make conclusions about his career as such, but about the way his films have ended — as a means to indicate To's contributions to genre and the art of cinema. To's ability to unsettle our perception of genre as a world of pleasure and closure is all part of his vision of Hong Kong on the road to Avici, but his action cinema carries a dialectical weight — fatalism carries meaning and redemption, thus the destiny of his films is something else entirely. The final action in the action films of Johnnie To is the act of inducing thought.
Torben Grodal
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195371314
- eISBN:
- 9780199870585
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195371314.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This book provides analysis of how human biology, as well as human culture, determines the ways films are made and experienced. This new approach is called “bioculturalism.” The book shows how ...
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This book provides analysis of how human biology, as well as human culture, determines the ways films are made and experienced. This new approach is called “bioculturalism.” The book shows how important formats, such as films for children, romantic films, pornography, fantasy films, horror films, and sad melodramas, appeal to an array of different emotions that have been ingrained in the human embodied brain by the evolutionary process. The book also discusses how these biological dispositions are molded by culture. It explains why certain themes and emotions fascinate viewers all over the globe at all times, and how different cultures invest their own values and tastes in the universal themes.The book further uses the breakthroughs of modern brain science to explain central features of film aesthetics and to construct a general model of aesthetic experience, the PECMA flow model, which explains how the flow of information and emotions in the embodied brain provides a series of aesthetic experiences. The combination of film theory, cognitive psychology, neurology, and evolutionary theory provides explanations for why narrative forms are appealing and how and why art films use different mental mechanisms than those that support mainstream narrative films, as well as how film evokes images of inner, spiritual life and feelings of realism.Embodied Visions provides a new synthesis in film and media studies and aesthetics that combines cultural history with the long history of the evolution of our embodied brains.Less
This book provides analysis of how human biology, as well as human culture, determines the ways films are made and experienced. This new approach is called “bioculturalism.” The book shows how important formats, such as films for children, romantic films, pornography, fantasy films, horror films, and sad melodramas, appeal to an array of different emotions that have been ingrained in the human embodied brain by the evolutionary process. The book also discusses how these biological dispositions are molded by culture. It explains why certain themes and emotions fascinate viewers all over the globe at all times, and how different cultures invest their own values and tastes in the universal themes.The book further uses the breakthroughs of modern brain science to explain central features of film aesthetics and to construct a general model of aesthetic experience, the PECMA flow model, which explains how the flow of information and emotions in the embodied brain provides a series of aesthetic experiences. The combination of film theory, cognitive psychology, neurology, and evolutionary theory provides explanations for why narrative forms are appealing and how and why art films use different mental mechanisms than those that support mainstream narrative films, as well as how film evokes images of inner, spiritual life and feelings of realism.Embodied Visions provides a new synthesis in film and media studies and aesthetics that combines cultural history with the long history of the evolution of our embodied brains.
Christine Cornea
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748624652
- eISBN:
- 9780748671106
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748624652.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The science fiction film genre is separate from the irrational or unconscious meanderings of the human mind. In line with this, this book regularly pertains to examples of the genre that can found on ...
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The science fiction film genre is separate from the irrational or unconscious meanderings of the human mind. In line with this, this book regularly pertains to examples of the genre that can found on television, in books, comics, video games and even fine art, as part of the project to locate the films within a wider cultural context. Science fiction has surely adopted material from both the musical and horror film. The genre of science fiction film allows the kind of debate witnessed among critics, writers and aficionados of the written novels. The chapter then looks at what might be called proto-science fiction films. These films came before the science fiction film which boom in the 1950s. It is shown that Metropolis had a huge impact on science fiction. The interwar films evidently address the political and social unrest of their times. Until the 1950s, the science fiction feature film genre actually started in America.Less
The science fiction film genre is separate from the irrational or unconscious meanderings of the human mind. In line with this, this book regularly pertains to examples of the genre that can found on television, in books, comics, video games and even fine art, as part of the project to locate the films within a wider cultural context. Science fiction has surely adopted material from both the musical and horror film. The genre of science fiction film allows the kind of debate witnessed among critics, writers and aficionados of the written novels. The chapter then looks at what might be called proto-science fiction films. These films came before the science fiction film which boom in the 1950s. It is shown that Metropolis had a huge impact on science fiction. The interwar films evidently address the political and social unrest of their times. Until the 1950s, the science fiction feature film genre actually started in America.
Leger Grindon
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604739886
- eISBN:
- 9781604739893
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604739886.003.0002
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter discusses the history of the American boxing film from the coming of sound to the end of the twentieth century. It characterizes the chief cycles of film production in order to explain ...
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This chapter discusses the history of the American boxing film from the coming of sound to the end of the twentieth century. It characterizes the chief cycles of film production in order to explain the cinematic influences, film industry practices, and social trends that shaped the evolution of the genre.Less
This chapter discusses the history of the American boxing film from the coming of sound to the end of the twentieth century. It characterizes the chief cycles of film production in order to explain the cinematic influences, film industry practices, and social trends that shaped the evolution of the genre.
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 ...
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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.
G. Andrew Stuckey
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9789888390816
- eISBN:
- 9789888455133
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888390816.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The “Introduction” describes the theoretical and practical understanding of what metacinema is and does in the context of Chinese filmmaking. Metacinema is a kind of textual reflexivity that ...
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The “Introduction” describes the theoretical and practical understanding of what metacinema is and does in the context of Chinese filmmaking. Metacinema is a kind of textual reflexivity that foregrounds the mechanisms involved in the creation or reception of a film. Consideration of metacinema reveals a discourse on film arising from the films themselves. A key, but often overlooked, metacinematic category is genre: collective semiotic codes adopted, adapted, updated, or subverted that allow another vantage on the ways films influence each other. In the context of Chinese cinemas, this discourse ricochets amongst and between the industries of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the PRC. Further, focus on film audiences within films allows us to theorize the personal and social effects film watching has on viewers. The films provide models for ways of being in the world that characters within the films, and by analogy audiences in the real world, adopt, update, and subvert in their own lives.Less
The “Introduction” describes the theoretical and practical understanding of what metacinema is and does in the context of Chinese filmmaking. Metacinema is a kind of textual reflexivity that foregrounds the mechanisms involved in the creation or reception of a film. Consideration of metacinema reveals a discourse on film arising from the films themselves. A key, but often overlooked, metacinematic category is genre: collective semiotic codes adopted, adapted, updated, or subverted that allow another vantage on the ways films influence each other. In the context of Chinese cinemas, this discourse ricochets amongst and between the industries of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the PRC. Further, focus on film audiences within films allows us to theorize the personal and social effects film watching has on viewers. The films provide models for ways of being in the world that characters within the films, and by analogy audiences in the real world, adopt, update, and subvert in their own lives.
Leger Grindon
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604739886
- eISBN:
- 9781604739893
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604739886.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter defines the boxing film genre and describes its conventions, including animating conflicts, model plot, major characters and settings, boxing’s mise-en-scène, and the viewer’s typical ...
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This chapter defines the boxing film genre and describes its conventions, including animating conflicts, model plot, major characters and settings, boxing’s mise-en-scène, and the viewer’s typical emotional response, followed by a consideration of genre history. It concludes with a discussion of the goals of genre criticism and an outline of this book.Less
This chapter defines the boxing film genre and describes its conventions, including animating conflicts, model plot, major characters and settings, boxing’s mise-en-scène, and the viewer’s typical emotional response, followed by a consideration of genre history. It concludes with a discussion of the goals of genre criticism and an outline of this book.
Tom Ryall
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719064524
- eISBN:
- 9781781703007
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719064524.003.0017
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter sheds light on the post-war British film industry and the turn Asquith's career took during these times. He was well established as one of the British cinema's leading directors on the ...
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This chapter sheds light on the post-war British film industry and the turn Asquith's career took during these times. He was well established as one of the British cinema's leading directors on the basis of a diverse output: the middlebrow drama adaptations of Shaw and Rattigan, lowbrow genre films including a comedy thriller and a costume melodrama, patriotic war pictures and documentary dramas. Asquith resumed his directing career with While the Sun Shines (1947), and his next film, The Winslow Boy (1948), was a Rattigan adaptation in which he corraborated with Korda's revived London Films and British Lion. The Importance of Being Earnest, a version of Oscar Wilde's famous play from the 1890s, was his first film in colour. Asquith's genre exercises from the early 1950s, though containing much of interest – innovatory narrative structures, imaginative mise-enscène, lyricism, and poetry, the radical ideological questioning of war – remain little-known films on the periphery of the mainstream British cinema of the time.Less
This chapter sheds light on the post-war British film industry and the turn Asquith's career took during these times. He was well established as one of the British cinema's leading directors on the basis of a diverse output: the middlebrow drama adaptations of Shaw and Rattigan, lowbrow genre films including a comedy thriller and a costume melodrama, patriotic war pictures and documentary dramas. Asquith resumed his directing career with While the Sun Shines (1947), and his next film, The Winslow Boy (1948), was a Rattigan adaptation in which he corraborated with Korda's revived London Films and British Lion. The Importance of Being Earnest, a version of Oscar Wilde's famous play from the 1890s, was his first film in colour. Asquith's genre exercises from the early 1950s, though containing much of interest – innovatory narrative structures, imaginative mise-enscène, lyricism, and poetry, the radical ideological questioning of war – remain little-known films on the periphery of the mainstream British cinema of the time.
Leger Grindon
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604739886
- eISBN:
- 9781604739893
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604739886.003.0008
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter examines the film, Raging Bull. It reviews the film’s production history and reception, and then analyzes the genre conventions governing plot, character, setting/iconography, ...
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This chapter examines the film, Raging Bull. It reviews the film’s production history and reception, and then analyzes the genre conventions governing plot, character, setting/iconography, mise-en-scène, and its dramatic conflicts to understand how Raging Bull adopts and transforms these practices to achieve its artistry. An awareness of the interaction of genre conventions with cinematic art offers an illuminating perspective on Raging Bull—for many the most stellar achievement of the Hollywood boxing film.Less
This chapter examines the film, Raging Bull. It reviews the film’s production history and reception, and then analyzes the genre conventions governing plot, character, setting/iconography, mise-en-scène, and its dramatic conflicts to understand how Raging Bull adopts and transforms these practices to achieve its artistry. An awareness of the interaction of genre conventions with cinematic art offers an illuminating perspective on Raging Bull—for many the most stellar achievement of the Hollywood boxing film.
R. John Williams
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780300194470
- eISBN:
- 9780300206579
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300194470.003.0006
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
This chapter examines the “Oriental Detective” genre in Hollywood cinema during the 1930s and 1940s. Whereas most discussions of the Oriental detective genre have tended to focus on whether or not ...
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This chapter examines the “Oriental Detective” genre in Hollywood cinema during the 1930s and 1940s. Whereas most discussions of the Oriental detective genre have tended to focus on whether or not the character reflects a positive or negative stereotype for Asian America, this chapter analyzes a discursive convergence of machine culture, corporate aesthetics, and ethnic and racial stereotyping, pausing to notice not only what the Oriental detective genre says about American racial attitudes during the 1930s and 1940s, but also what it says about the corporate production of film and film culture.Less
This chapter examines the “Oriental Detective” genre in Hollywood cinema during the 1930s and 1940s. Whereas most discussions of the Oriental detective genre have tended to focus on whether or not the character reflects a positive or negative stereotype for Asian America, this chapter analyzes a discursive convergence of machine culture, corporate aesthetics, and ethnic and racial stereotyping, pausing to notice not only what the Oriental detective genre says about American racial attitudes during the 1930s and 1940s, but also what it says about the corporate production of film and film culture.
Philip L. Simpson
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604734539
- eISBN:
- 9781621031048
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604734539.003.0008
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter offers a critical overview of the serial killer film, especially in the light of the subgenre’s intense cultural significance during the 1980s and 1990s and its subsequent descent into ...
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This chapter offers a critical overview of the serial killer film, especially in the light of the subgenre’s intense cultural significance during the 1980s and 1990s and its subsequent descent into relative insignificance after 9/11. While pondering the larger questions of why and how horror film archetypes drift in and out of the culture’s focus of attention, it also demonstrates how the serial killer film, though often pronounced dead, has instead managed to spread throughout a field of cultural production much larger than that of a strictly defined and narrowly circumscribed cinematic genre. The chapter argues that the serial killer has even made a comeback with recent high-profile productions directed by auteurist filmmakers such as Spike Lee (Summer of Sam) and David Fincher (Zodiac).Less
This chapter offers a critical overview of the serial killer film, especially in the light of the subgenre’s intense cultural significance during the 1980s and 1990s and its subsequent descent into relative insignificance after 9/11. While pondering the larger questions of why and how horror film archetypes drift in and out of the culture’s focus of attention, it also demonstrates how the serial killer film, though often pronounced dead, has instead managed to spread throughout a field of cultural production much larger than that of a strictly defined and narrowly circumscribed cinematic genre. The chapter argues that the serial killer has even made a comeback with recent high-profile productions directed by auteurist filmmakers such as Spike Lee (Summer of Sam) and David Fincher (Zodiac).
Leger Grindon
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604739886
- eISBN:
- 9781604739893
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604739886.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter examines violence in the boxing film, arguing that though an entertainment, the boxing film portrays suffering as central to experience. The genre also highlights conflicts between ...
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This chapter examines violence in the boxing film, arguing that though an entertainment, the boxing film portrays suffering as central to experience. The genre also highlights conflicts between righteous anger and powerlessness, as well as the dilemmas posed by the tension between emotional discipline and sensitivity. The analysis includes films such as City for Conquest (1940), From Here to Eternity (1953), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), and Fat City (1972).Less
This chapter examines violence in the boxing film, arguing that though an entertainment, the boxing film portrays suffering as central to experience. The genre also highlights conflicts between righteous anger and powerlessness, as well as the dilemmas posed by the tension between emotional discipline and sensitivity. The analysis includes films such as City for Conquest (1940), From Here to Eternity (1953), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), and Fat City (1972).
Leger Grindon
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604739886
- eISBN:
- 9781604739893
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604739886.003.0007
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter explores the body and soul conflict in the boxing film genre. The boxing film highlights the quest in American culture for a spiritual alternative to the sensual. In the genre, art, ...
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This chapter explores the body and soul conflict in the boxing film genre. The boxing film highlights the quest in American culture for a spiritual alternative to the sensual. In the genre, art, education, romance, the family, and religion all serve as manifestations of the spiritual. The analysis includes films such as Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), Body and Soul (1947), and On the Waterfront (1954).Less
This chapter explores the body and soul conflict in the boxing film genre. The boxing film highlights the quest in American culture for a spiritual alternative to the sensual. In the genre, art, education, romance, the family, and religion all serve as manifestations of the spiritual. The analysis includes films such as Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), Body and Soul (1947), and On the Waterfront (1954).
Christine Gledhill (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252036613
- eISBN:
- 9780252093661
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252036613.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This book challenges traditional ways of thinking about the relationship between gender and genre, understanding their meeting as a mutually transformative encounter. Responding to postmodernist ...
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This book challenges traditional ways of thinking about the relationship between gender and genre, understanding their meeting as a mutually transformative encounter. Responding to postmodernist conceptions of genre and postfeminist theories of gender and sexuality, the book moves beyond the limits of representation. Testing new thinking about genre, gender, and sexuality against closely analyzed films, the book explores generic convention as putting into play what our culture makes of us, while finding in genre's repetitions infinite possibilities of cross-generic, cross-gender, cross-sex permutation. At the same time the aesthetic and emotional dimensions of gender and sexuality emerge as elements fueling the dramatic worlds of film genres, producing in the encounter new gendered perceptions, affects, and effects. Recognizing the intensifying transnational context of film production and responding to postcolonial perspectives, the book explores the transformational transactions between gender and genre in the meeting between world-circulating Hollywood generic practices and American independent, European, Indian, and Hong Kong cinemas. Such revised concepts of genre and gender question taken-for-granted relationships between authorship and genre, between center and periphery, and between feminism and generic filmmaking. They consequently rethink the gendering of genres, filmmakers, and their audiences.Less
This book challenges traditional ways of thinking about the relationship between gender and genre, understanding their meeting as a mutually transformative encounter. Responding to postmodernist conceptions of genre and postfeminist theories of gender and sexuality, the book moves beyond the limits of representation. Testing new thinking about genre, gender, and sexuality against closely analyzed films, the book explores generic convention as putting into play what our culture makes of us, while finding in genre's repetitions infinite possibilities of cross-generic, cross-gender, cross-sex permutation. At the same time the aesthetic and emotional dimensions of gender and sexuality emerge as elements fueling the dramatic worlds of film genres, producing in the encounter new gendered perceptions, affects, and effects. Recognizing the intensifying transnational context of film production and responding to postcolonial perspectives, the book explores the transformational transactions between gender and genre in the meeting between world-circulating Hollywood generic practices and American independent, European, Indian, and Hong Kong cinemas. Such revised concepts of genre and gender question taken-for-granted relationships between authorship and genre, between center and periphery, and between feminism and generic filmmaking. They consequently rethink the gendering of genres, filmmakers, and their audiences.
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719089770
- eISBN:
- 9781781708651
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719089770.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Hand-held cameras and night vision technology have become increasingly common in the contemporary horror film. Taking Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's phenomenally successful REC films (2007, 2009, ...
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Hand-held cameras and night vision technology have become increasingly common in the contemporary horror film. Taking Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's phenomenally successful REC films (2007, 2009, 2012) as exemplary of this and other recent trends (e.g. intertextual cannibalism and girl monsters), this chapter will examine how these innovations relate to the certain generic constants of the horror film (such as obstructed visibility and mounting dramatic structure). The driving motor of both REC and REC2 is their use of video recording technology. While the threat seems to shift from zombie-like contagion in the first film to demonic possession in the second, the technological gambit of the two films remains the same: both films are entirely mediated by recording equipment. A single professional TV camera occupies center stage in the first case while in the second, there is a proliferation of devices and locations (including cameras embedded into firefighters’ helmets). Both films give the night vision function a key role in the final (climactic) segment during which the dialectic between visibility and invisibility itself becomes the main drama and the camera the central protagonist.Less
Hand-held cameras and night vision technology have become increasingly common in the contemporary horror film. Taking Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's phenomenally successful REC films (2007, 2009, 2012) as exemplary of this and other recent trends (e.g. intertextual cannibalism and girl monsters), this chapter will examine how these innovations relate to the certain generic constants of the horror film (such as obstructed visibility and mounting dramatic structure). The driving motor of both REC and REC2 is their use of video recording technology. While the threat seems to shift from zombie-like contagion in the first film to demonic possession in the second, the technological gambit of the two films remains the same: both films are entirely mediated by recording equipment. A single professional TV camera occupies center stage in the first case while in the second, there is a proliferation of devices and locations (including cameras embedded into firefighters’ helmets). Both films give the night vision function a key role in the final (climactic) segment during which the dialectic between visibility and invisibility itself becomes the main drama and the camera the central protagonist.
Jonathan Haynes
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226387819
- eISBN:
- 9780226388007
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226388007.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, African Studies
Nigeria’s Nollywood is among the world’s largest film industries and is the most powerful expression of contemporary African culture. This book provides an overview of the industry and its history ...
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Nigeria’s Nollywood is among the world’s largest film industries and is the most powerful expression of contemporary African culture. This book provides an overview of the industry and its history while focusing on Nollywood’s major themes and genres. Nollywood arose at the intersection of African popular culture and the decay of formal state institutions, including television broadcasting. Born at a moment of economic, political, social, spiritual, and moral crisis, its most characteristic themes address this situation from a popular perspective. Nollywood’s technological basis (piracy-prone video) and its economic basis in informal market trading have led to a staggeringly high rate of production. Films are produced quickly and on very low budgets and are therefore inevitably generic. Much of the meaning and cultural power of Nollywood lies in these collective generic forms. Nollywood’s genres are sometimes related to transnational film and television culture, but they are essentially original forms arising from specific values and tensions in Nigerian society and history. Nollywood is strongly linked to the Igbo and Yoruba cultures, but the horizon of its imagination is national; the processes of hybridity and homogenization that constitute this national imagination in turn have facilitated Nollywood’s remarkable diffusion throughout Africa and the African diaspora. The book is based on more than twenty years of interviewing and research. Its method holds the description of genres and the forces that shape them in creative tension with detailed readings of particular films and profiles of leading film auteurs.Less
Nigeria’s Nollywood is among the world’s largest film industries and is the most powerful expression of contemporary African culture. This book provides an overview of the industry and its history while focusing on Nollywood’s major themes and genres. Nollywood arose at the intersection of African popular culture and the decay of formal state institutions, including television broadcasting. Born at a moment of economic, political, social, spiritual, and moral crisis, its most characteristic themes address this situation from a popular perspective. Nollywood’s technological basis (piracy-prone video) and its economic basis in informal market trading have led to a staggeringly high rate of production. Films are produced quickly and on very low budgets and are therefore inevitably generic. Much of the meaning and cultural power of Nollywood lies in these collective generic forms. Nollywood’s genres are sometimes related to transnational film and television culture, but they are essentially original forms arising from specific values and tensions in Nigerian society and history. Nollywood is strongly linked to the Igbo and Yoruba cultures, but the horizon of its imagination is national; the processes of hybridity and homogenization that constitute this national imagination in turn have facilitated Nollywood’s remarkable diffusion throughout Africa and the African diaspora. The book is based on more than twenty years of interviewing and research. Its method holds the description of genres and the forces that shape them in creative tension with detailed readings of particular films and profiles of leading film auteurs.
Leger Grindon
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604739886
- eISBN:
- 9781604739893
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604739886.003.0009
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This epilogue considers three boxing films that attracted a large audience in 2005—Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Million Dollar Baby, and Cinderella Man—and takes stock ...
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This epilogue considers three boxing films that attracted a large audience in 2005—Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Million Dollar Baby, and Cinderella Man—and takes stock of the genre at the twenty-first century mark.Less
This epilogue considers three boxing films that attracted a large audience in 2005—Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Million Dollar Baby, and Cinderella Man—and takes stock of the genre at the twenty-first century mark.
Torben Grodal
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195371314
- eISBN:
- 9780199870585
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195371314.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter contains an overview of the central findings of the book and provides additional perspectives on bioculturalism and the dynamic interaction between biology and culture. It summarizes how ...
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This chapter contains an overview of the central findings of the book and provides additional perspectives on bioculturalism and the dynamic interaction between biology and culture. It summarizes how concrete embodiment and brain architecture, including the PECMA flow, molds central features of films, and discusses the interaction between universal forms controlled by deep-seated dispositions and the unlimited number of possible cultural variations made possible by innate dispositions. It discusses how and why films are made not only to provide pleasure, but also to activate hazard precaution and support bonding, as in sad melodramas and comic fictions, just as fictions are part of mechanisms that enhance insights into possible scenarios, vital for existential flexibility. It equally discusses why love for unique configurations in the individual films must be counterbalanced with a dedication to reductionism and to understanding what is universal in films.Less
This chapter contains an overview of the central findings of the book and provides additional perspectives on bioculturalism and the dynamic interaction between biology and culture. It summarizes how concrete embodiment and brain architecture, including the PECMA flow, molds central features of films, and discusses the interaction between universal forms controlled by deep-seated dispositions and the unlimited number of possible cultural variations made possible by innate dispositions. It discusses how and why films are made not only to provide pleasure, but also to activate hazard precaution and support bonding, as in sad melodramas and comic fictions, just as fictions are part of mechanisms that enhance insights into possible scenarios, vital for existential flexibility. It equally discusses why love for unique configurations in the individual films must be counterbalanced with a dedication to reductionism and to understanding what is universal in films.
Valentina Vitali
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719099656
- eISBN:
- 9781526109774
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719099656.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
While post-war popular cinema has traditionally been excluded from accounts of national cinemas, the last fifteen years have seen the academy’s gradual rediscovery of cult and, more, generally, ...
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While post-war popular cinema has traditionally been excluded from accounts of national cinemas, the last fifteen years have seen the academy’s gradual rediscovery of cult and, more, generally, popular films. Why, many years after their release, do we now deem these films worthy of study? The book situates ‘low’ film genres in their economic and culturally specific contexts (a period of unstable ‘economic miracles’ in different countries and regions) and explores the interconnections between those contexts, the immediate industrial-financial interests sustaining the films, and the films’ aesthetics. It argues that the visibility (or not) of popular genres in a nation’s account of its cinema is an indirect but demonstrable effect of the centrality (or not) of a particular kind of capital in that country’s economy. Through in-depth examination of what may at first appear as different cycles in film production and history – the Italian giallo, the Mexican horror film and Hindi horror cinema – Capital and popular cinema lays the foundations of a comparative approach to film; one capable of accounting for the whole of a national film industry’s production (‘popular’ and ‘canonic’) and applicable to the study of film genres globally.Less
While post-war popular cinema has traditionally been excluded from accounts of national cinemas, the last fifteen years have seen the academy’s gradual rediscovery of cult and, more, generally, popular films. Why, many years after their release, do we now deem these films worthy of study? The book situates ‘low’ film genres in their economic and culturally specific contexts (a period of unstable ‘economic miracles’ in different countries and regions) and explores the interconnections between those contexts, the immediate industrial-financial interests sustaining the films, and the films’ aesthetics. It argues that the visibility (or not) of popular genres in a nation’s account of its cinema is an indirect but demonstrable effect of the centrality (or not) of a particular kind of capital in that country’s economy. Through in-depth examination of what may at first appear as different cycles in film production and history – the Italian giallo, the Mexican horror film and Hindi horror cinema – Capital and popular cinema lays the foundations of a comparative approach to film; one capable of accounting for the whole of a national film industry’s production (‘popular’ and ‘canonic’) and applicable to the study of film genres globally.
