Matthew Rebhorn
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199751303
- eISBN:
- 9780199932559
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199751303.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, Drama
Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier, 1829–1893, offers the first synoptic treatment of the history of American frontier performance ranging from Jacksonian America to Buffalo ...
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Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier, 1829–1893, offers the first synoptic treatment of the history of American frontier performance ranging from Jacksonian America to Buffalo Bill's Wild West show at the Columbian Exposition of 1893. This project is not simply an addition to the history of the American theater. It reconceives how the frontier was—and still is—defined in performance and what it means for that frontier to be called “American.” This project finds, in a series of plays written between 1829 and 1881, a theatrical genealogy that worked aesthetically and politically to challenge Manifest Destiny. By tracing performances of frontiersmen and freaks, Indians and octoroons in theaters stretching from Massachusetts to Georgia, this work shows how a succession of authors created the image of a transgressive frontier. They put that transgressive image with its fluid construction of identity up against the melodramatic frontier of hegemonic expansion that led to Buffalo Bill. This project argues that American theatrical aesthetics changed to accommodate alternative modes of performance in the nineteenth century, making the performance of the frontier the central genre in the construction of American drama. The American frontier is not just a historical “process” or a geographic “place,” as recent revisionist historians have argued. Rather, it is a set of performative practices conditioned by history and geography. Most Americans did not travel outside the metropole. For them, the frontier was created as much on the footboards of New York City as on the plains of the West, and for them, the frontier performed in the theater was thematically richer, more diverse, and more radical than critics have acknowledged.Less
Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier, 1829–1893, offers the first synoptic treatment of the history of American frontier performance ranging from Jacksonian America to Buffalo Bill's Wild West show at the Columbian Exposition of 1893. This project is not simply an addition to the history of the American theater. It reconceives how the frontier was—and still is—defined in performance and what it means for that frontier to be called “American.” This project finds, in a series of plays written between 1829 and 1881, a theatrical genealogy that worked aesthetically and politically to challenge Manifest Destiny. By tracing performances of frontiersmen and freaks, Indians and octoroons in theaters stretching from Massachusetts to Georgia, this work shows how a succession of authors created the image of a transgressive frontier. They put that transgressive image with its fluid construction of identity up against the melodramatic frontier of hegemonic expansion that led to Buffalo Bill. This project argues that American theatrical aesthetics changed to accommodate alternative modes of performance in the nineteenth century, making the performance of the frontier the central genre in the construction of American drama. The American frontier is not just a historical “process” or a geographic “place,” as recent revisionist historians have argued. Rather, it is a set of performative practices conditioned by history and geography. Most Americans did not travel outside the metropole. For them, the frontier was created as much on the footboards of New York City as on the plains of the West, and for them, the frontier performed in the theater was thematically richer, more diverse, and more radical than critics have acknowledged.
Felicity Dunworth
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719076329
- eISBN:
- 9781781702161
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719076329.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
This book studies the mother figure in English drama from the mid-sixteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. It explores a range of genres from popular mystery and moral plays to drama written for ...
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This book studies the mother figure in English drama from the mid-sixteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. It explores a range of genres from popular mystery and moral plays to drama written for the court and universities and for the commercial theatres, including history plays, comedies, tragedies, romances and melodrama. Familiar and less-known plays by such diverse dramatists as Udall, Bale, Phillip, Legge, Kyd, Marlowe, Peele, Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker and Webster are subject to readings that illuminate the narrative value of the mother figure to early modern dramatists. The book explores the typology of the mother figure by examining the ways in which her narrative value in religious, political and literary discourses of the period might impact upon her representation. It addresses a range of contemporary narratives from Reformation and counter-Reformation polemic to midwifery manuals and Mother's Legacies, and from the political rhetoric of Mary I, Elizabeth and James to the reported gallows confessions of mother convicts and the increasingly popular Puritan conduct books. The relations between tradition and change and between typology and narrative are explored through a focus upon the dramatised mother in a series of dramatic narratives that developed out of rapidly shifting social, political and religious conditions.Less
This book studies the mother figure in English drama from the mid-sixteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. It explores a range of genres from popular mystery and moral plays to drama written for the court and universities and for the commercial theatres, including history plays, comedies, tragedies, romances and melodrama. Familiar and less-known plays by such diverse dramatists as Udall, Bale, Phillip, Legge, Kyd, Marlowe, Peele, Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker and Webster are subject to readings that illuminate the narrative value of the mother figure to early modern dramatists. The book explores the typology of the mother figure by examining the ways in which her narrative value in religious, political and literary discourses of the period might impact upon her representation. It addresses a range of contemporary narratives from Reformation and counter-Reformation polemic to midwifery manuals and Mother's Legacies, and from the political rhetoric of Mary I, Elizabeth and James to the reported gallows confessions of mother convicts and the increasingly popular Puritan conduct books. The relations between tradition and change and between typology and narrative are explored through a focus upon the dramatised mother in a series of dramatic narratives that developed out of rapidly shifting social, political and religious conditions.
Gary Needham
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748633821
- eISBN:
- 9780748651252
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748633821.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Upon its release in 2005, Brokeback Mountain became a major cultural event and a milestone in independent American filmmaking. Based on the short story by Annie Proulx and directed by Ang Lee, it ...
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Upon its release in 2005, Brokeback Mountain became a major cultural event and a milestone in independent American filmmaking. Based on the short story by Annie Proulx and directed by Ang Lee, it situated a love story between two closeted cowboys at the heart of American mythology, film spectatorship, and genre. Brokeback Mountain offered an independent and queer revision of the conventions and clichés of the Western and the melodrama through a studied exploration of homophobia and the closet. This book examines the film in relation to indie cinema, genre, spectatorship, editing and homosexuality. In doing so it brings film studies and queer theory into dialogue with one another and explains the importance of Brokeback Mountain as both a contemporary independent and queer film. The book provides an overview of Focus Features as a hybrid company operating across both the mainstream and independent cinema sectors, and proposes a new way of thinking about gay spectatorship that takes into account how editing and cruising relate to one another.Less
Upon its release in 2005, Brokeback Mountain became a major cultural event and a milestone in independent American filmmaking. Based on the short story by Annie Proulx and directed by Ang Lee, it situated a love story between two closeted cowboys at the heart of American mythology, film spectatorship, and genre. Brokeback Mountain offered an independent and queer revision of the conventions and clichés of the Western and the melodrama through a studied exploration of homophobia and the closet. This book examines the film in relation to indie cinema, genre, spectatorship, editing and homosexuality. In doing so it brings film studies and queer theory into dialogue with one another and explains the importance of Brokeback Mountain as both a contemporary independent and queer film. The book provides an overview of Focus Features as a hybrid company operating across both the mainstream and independent cinema sectors, and proposes a new way of thinking about gay spectatorship that takes into account how editing and cruising relate to one another.
Bridget Orr
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199554157
- eISBN:
- 9780191720437
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199554157.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter surveys the mostly “illegitimate” theatrical forms in which The Thousand and One Nights appeared on stage between 1707 and c.1830, arguing that these dramas of state, farces, burlettas, ...
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This chapter surveys the mostly “illegitimate” theatrical forms in which The Thousand and One Nights appeared on stage between 1707 and c.1830, arguing that these dramas of state, farces, burlettas, melodramas, romances, and pantomimes effectively created popular Georgian Orientalism. Throughout this period, episodes drawn from the Arabian Nights facilitated critiques of domestic high politics while also establishing a vision of the Orient as despotic, wealthy, luxurious, and sensual. In the early decades of the 19th century however, dramatizations of “Sinbad the Sailor,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and “Aladdin” gradually supplanted tales and episodes that allegorized domestic politics, a change owing to the so-called orphan tales' ability to symbolically negotiate the tensions accompanying the sudden wealth creation and social dislocation associated with nascent industrial capitalism.Less
This chapter surveys the mostly “illegitimate” theatrical forms in which The Thousand and One Nights appeared on stage between 1707 and c.1830, arguing that these dramas of state, farces, burlettas, melodramas, romances, and pantomimes effectively created popular Georgian Orientalism. Throughout this period, episodes drawn from the Arabian Nights facilitated critiques of domestic high politics while also establishing a vision of the Orient as despotic, wealthy, luxurious, and sensual. In the early decades of the 19th century however, dramatizations of “Sinbad the Sailor,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and “Aladdin” gradually supplanted tales and episodes that allegorized domestic politics, a change owing to the so-called orphan tales' ability to symbolically negotiate the tensions accompanying the sudden wealth creation and social dislocation associated with nascent industrial capitalism.
Hikari Hori
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781501714542
- eISBN:
- 9781501709524
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501714542.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The early Showa Era (1926-45), which roughly coincides with the Nazi years (1920-45) and Mussolini’s ‘venti anni’ (1921-43), is generally assumed to be a dogmatically and fanatically nationalist ...
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The early Showa Era (1926-45), which roughly coincides with the Nazi years (1920-45) and Mussolini’s ‘venti anni’ (1921-43), is generally assumed to be a dogmatically and fanatically nationalist period, and due this putative monomania is often seen as a straightforward subject to study. To the contrary, this book reveals a very different picture of the Japanese popular media of this time period. The book examines the ways in which Japanese film and visual culture responded to the issues of the day, producing adaptations of Hollywood genre films; admiring pioneering film theories from Russia and Britain; and examining the techniques of German animation and Disney films. Importantly, the veneration of the emperor’s portrait photograph is a key to understand and contextualize the era’s media-scape. It is crucial to note that domestic film manifested the inherent promiscuity and transnationality of its medium. Japanese films did play a familiar role as propaganda, but because of their heterotopic aspects, the medium also negated, opposed, and undermined the ideologically and nationalistically defined demands of the wartime state. For other visual cultural media, too, careful examination reveals they were a site of contradictions of the dominant totalitarian discourse. (192 words)Less
The early Showa Era (1926-45), which roughly coincides with the Nazi years (1920-45) and Mussolini’s ‘venti anni’ (1921-43), is generally assumed to be a dogmatically and fanatically nationalist period, and due this putative monomania is often seen as a straightforward subject to study. To the contrary, this book reveals a very different picture of the Japanese popular media of this time period. The book examines the ways in which Japanese film and visual culture responded to the issues of the day, producing adaptations of Hollywood genre films; admiring pioneering film theories from Russia and Britain; and examining the techniques of German animation and Disney films. Importantly, the veneration of the emperor’s portrait photograph is a key to understand and contextualize the era’s media-scape. It is crucial to note that domestic film manifested the inherent promiscuity and transnationality of its medium. Japanese films did play a familiar role as propaganda, but because of their heterotopic aspects, the medium also negated, opposed, and undermined the ideologically and nationalistically defined demands of the wartime state. For other visual cultural media, too, careful examination reveals they were a site of contradictions of the dominant totalitarian discourse. (192 words)
Glyn Davis
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748637782
- eISBN:
- 9780748670864
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748637782.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Nominated for four Oscars, Far from Heaven earned rave reviews and won widespread cultural and critical recognition. A knowing and emotionally involving homage to the films of Douglas Sirk, this film ...
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Nominated for four Oscars, Far from Heaven earned rave reviews and won widespread cultural and critical recognition. A knowing and emotionally involving homage to the films of Douglas Sirk, this film is a key text in the canon of American independent cinema. This book offers a detailed and perceptive study of Haynes' film, with each chapter centred on a topic crucial for understanding Far from Heaven's richness and seductive pleasures (authorship, melodrama, queerness). The film is also positioned in relation to the rest of Todd Haynes' work, the New Queer Cinema movement, and the history of US independent cinema.Less
Nominated for four Oscars, Far from Heaven earned rave reviews and won widespread cultural and critical recognition. A knowing and emotionally involving homage to the films of Douglas Sirk, this film is a key text in the canon of American independent cinema. This book offers a detailed and perceptive study of Haynes' film, with each chapter centred on a topic crucial for understanding Far from Heaven's richness and seductive pleasures (authorship, melodrama, queerness). The film is also positioned in relation to the rest of Todd Haynes' work, the New Queer Cinema movement, and the history of US independent cinema.
Mary Ann Smart
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520239951
- eISBN:
- 9780520939875
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520239951.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
When Friedrich Nietzsche dubbed Richard Wagner “the most enthusiastic mimomaniac” ever to exist, he was objecting to a hollowness he felt in the music, a crowding out of any true dramatic impulse by ...
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When Friedrich Nietzsche dubbed Richard Wagner “the most enthusiastic mimomaniac” ever to exist, he was objecting to a hollowness he felt in the music, a crowding out of any true dramatic impulse by extravagant poses and constant nervous movements. This book takes Nietzsche's accusation as an invitation to listen to Wagner's music—and that of several of his near-contemporaries—for the way it serves to intensify the visible and the enacted. This productive fusion of music and stage movement often arises when music forsakes the autonomy so prized by the Romantics to function mimetically, underlining the sighs of a Vincenzo Bellini heroine, for instance, or the authoritarian footsteps of a Giuseppe Verdi baritone. The book tracks such effects through readings of operas by Daniel Auber, Bellini, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Verdi, and Wagner. Listening for gestural music, it finds resemblance in unexpected places: between the overwrought scenes of supplication in French melodrama of the 1820s and a cluster of late Verdi arias that end with the soprano falling to her knees, or between the mute heroine of Auber's La Muette de Portici and the solemn, almost theological pantomimic tableaux Wagner builds around characters such as Sieglinde or Kundry. The book shows how attention to gesture suggests a new approach to the representation of gender in this repertoire, replacing aural analogies for voyeurism and objectification with a more specifically musical sense of how music can surround, propel, and animate the body on stage.Less
When Friedrich Nietzsche dubbed Richard Wagner “the most enthusiastic mimomaniac” ever to exist, he was objecting to a hollowness he felt in the music, a crowding out of any true dramatic impulse by extravagant poses and constant nervous movements. This book takes Nietzsche's accusation as an invitation to listen to Wagner's music—and that of several of his near-contemporaries—for the way it serves to intensify the visible and the enacted. This productive fusion of music and stage movement often arises when music forsakes the autonomy so prized by the Romantics to function mimetically, underlining the sighs of a Vincenzo Bellini heroine, for instance, or the authoritarian footsteps of a Giuseppe Verdi baritone. The book tracks such effects through readings of operas by Daniel Auber, Bellini, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Verdi, and Wagner. Listening for gestural music, it finds resemblance in unexpected places: between the overwrought scenes of supplication in French melodrama of the 1820s and a cluster of late Verdi arias that end with the soprano falling to her knees, or between the mute heroine of Auber's La Muette de Portici and the solemn, almost theological pantomimic tableaux Wagner builds around characters such as Sieglinde or Kundry. The book shows how attention to gesture suggests a new approach to the representation of gender in this repertoire, replacing aural analogies for voyeurism and objectification with a more specifically musical sense of how music can surround, propel, and animate the body on stage.
Glyn Davis
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748637782
- eISBN:
- 9780748670864
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748637782.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Queer fans of Todd Haynes might have been searching for the director's usual politics. His career has hovered between melodramas focused on female protagonists and those centred on men. Despite the ...
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Queer fans of Todd Haynes might have been searching for the director's usual politics. His career has hovered between melodramas focused on female protagonists and those centred on men. Despite the best efforts of the gay/queer directors who sent a flurry of melodramas into cinemas in the first years of the twenty-first century, attempting to revive the genre, it remains mostly elusive on the big screen. His film undertakes seriously a large number of substantial questions — about authorship, about the persistence or loss of melodrama as a genre, about the queerness of particular narrative devices, and so on. Far from Heaven is genuinely unique and idiosyncratic. It is perhaps this uniqueness that most clearly marks Far from Heaven as a truly independent film.Less
Queer fans of Todd Haynes might have been searching for the director's usual politics. His career has hovered between melodramas focused on female protagonists and those centred on men. Despite the best efforts of the gay/queer directors who sent a flurry of melodramas into cinemas in the first years of the twenty-first century, attempting to revive the genre, it remains mostly elusive on the big screen. His film undertakes seriously a large number of substantial questions — about authorship, about the persistence or loss of melodrama as a genre, about the queerness of particular narrative devices, and so on. Far from Heaven is genuinely unique and idiosyncratic. It is perhaps this uniqueness that most clearly marks Far from Heaven as a truly independent film.
Matthew Rebhorn
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199751303
- eISBN:
- 9780199932559
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199751303.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, Drama
All these performances reveal a frontier that worked to highlight the theatricality of Manifest Destiny, as opposed to its factuality, and derived its aesthetic energy from interrogating the ideology ...
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All these performances reveal a frontier that worked to highlight the theatricality of Manifest Destiny, as opposed to its factuality, and derived its aesthetic energy from interrogating the ideology undergirding Buffalo Bill's and Turner's imperialistic fantasies. Nowhere is this energizing dismantling more evident than in the way Dion Boucicault uses the two plots of his “tragic mulatta” melodrama The Octoroon (1859) to dispute the frontier's “legacy of conquest.” This chapter thus argues, first ,that Boucicault employs the play's main plot to critique the theatrical practice of performing the frontier melodramatically, that is, as a “black-or-white” dialectic that reinforces the ideology of American imperialism, insofar as that ideology depended on a clear division between the white, civilized “self” and the racial, savage “other.” More important, by then focusing on the play's largely ignored subplot, centered on an Indian played by Boucicault, the chapter develops the idea that Boucicault emplots the frontier as a necessarily blurred, “black-and-white” set of performative practices that challenge the “black-or-white” opposition that defines both melodrama and imperialism.Less
All these performances reveal a frontier that worked to highlight the theatricality of Manifest Destiny, as opposed to its factuality, and derived its aesthetic energy from interrogating the ideology undergirding Buffalo Bill's and Turner's imperialistic fantasies. Nowhere is this energizing dismantling more evident than in the way Dion Boucicault uses the two plots of his “tragic mulatta” melodrama The Octoroon (1859) to dispute the frontier's “legacy of conquest.” This chapter thus argues, first ,that Boucicault employs the play's main plot to critique the theatrical practice of performing the frontier melodramatically, that is, as a “black-or-white” dialectic that reinforces the ideology of American imperialism, insofar as that ideology depended on a clear division between the white, civilized “self” and the racial, savage “other.” More important, by then focusing on the play's largely ignored subplot, centered on an Indian played by Boucicault, the chapter develops the idea that Boucicault emplots the frontier as a necessarily blurred, “black-and-white” set of performative practices that challenge the “black-or-white” opposition that defines both melodrama and imperialism.
Matthew Rebhorn
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199751303
- eISBN:
- 9780199932559
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199751303.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, Drama
This chapter contrasts two plays, Augustin Daly's Horizon (1871) and Joaquin Miller's The Danites of the Sierras (1881). In the plays examined in preceding chapters, the frontier was both the place ...
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This chapter contrasts two plays, Augustin Daly's Horizon (1871) and Joaquin Miller's The Danites of the Sierras (1881). In the plays examined in preceding chapters, the frontier was both the place where civilization conquered savagery and a fundamental wildness that critiqued America's imperialist ideology. These two visions, which had already become separated in the competing plots of The Octoroon, split completely apart in Daly's and Miller's plays. For Daly, the frontier was a site of memory that needed to be regulated theatrically, and thus he concretized a set of performative practices that systematically erased the “other” in support of imperialism—the same set of practices that helped Buffalo Bill mythologize the Wild West. Daly's memory of the frontier was, however, already just a memory of the frontier, for at the moment of its articulation, it was being challenged by Miller's play, which used what Miller referred to as the frontier's unsettled, “plastic” qualities to disrupt the script of an imperialism that consolidated its power by insisting on rigid social categories.Less
This chapter contrasts two plays, Augustin Daly's Horizon (1871) and Joaquin Miller's The Danites of the Sierras (1881). In the plays examined in preceding chapters, the frontier was both the place where civilization conquered savagery and a fundamental wildness that critiqued America's imperialist ideology. These two visions, which had already become separated in the competing plots of The Octoroon, split completely apart in Daly's and Miller's plays. For Daly, the frontier was a site of memory that needed to be regulated theatrically, and thus he concretized a set of performative practices that systematically erased the “other” in support of imperialism—the same set of practices that helped Buffalo Bill mythologize the Wild West. Daly's memory of the frontier was, however, already just a memory of the frontier, for at the moment of its articulation, it was being challenged by Miller's play, which used what Miller referred to as the frontier's unsettled, “plastic” qualities to disrupt the script of an imperialism that consolidated its power by insisting on rigid social categories.
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/9780195371314.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter analyzes why tragic films are successful and prestigious although they evoke sadness and grief, whereas fitness-enhancing activities in general evoke pleasure. First, it focus on general ...
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This chapter analyzes why tragic films are successful and prestigious although they evoke sadness and grief, whereas fitness-enhancing activities in general evoke pleasure. First, it focus on general brain mechanisms by which superior goals temporarily modify reactions of unpleasure to support coping in the service of goals, as in action and adventure films. Second, it argues that such general mechanisms cannot explain films with negative endings. It argues that viewer preferences for such stories may be explained as adaptations created during the evolutionary process. Third, it argues that there are two adaptive mechanisms at play: a general mechanism that makes negative events fascinating to support information about negative events (enhancing learning), and a cluster of more specific adaptations that support bonding—pair-bonding, male bonding, and tribal bonding—based on rituals of mourning. Rituals of mourning are often linked to scenes that elicit awe and submission to some higher power (fate or divine forces); the chapter discusses the biological-evolutionary underpinnings of such emotions and behaviors and analyzes Saving Private Ryan, The Last of the Mohicans, Hero, Pan’s Labyrinth, and others, in this light.Less
This chapter analyzes why tragic films are successful and prestigious although they evoke sadness and grief, whereas fitness-enhancing activities in general evoke pleasure. First, it focus on general brain mechanisms by which superior goals temporarily modify reactions of unpleasure to support coping in the service of goals, as in action and adventure films. Second, it argues that such general mechanisms cannot explain films with negative endings. It argues that viewer preferences for such stories may be explained as adaptations created during the evolutionary process. Third, it argues that there are two adaptive mechanisms at play: a general mechanism that makes negative events fascinating to support information about negative events (enhancing learning), and a cluster of more specific adaptations that support bonding—pair-bonding, male bonding, and tribal bonding—based on rituals of mourning. Rituals of mourning are often linked to scenes that elicit awe and submission to some higher power (fate or divine forces); the chapter discusses the biological-evolutionary underpinnings of such emotions and behaviors and analyzes Saving Private Ryan, The Last of the Mohicans, Hero, Pan’s Labyrinth, and others, in this light.
Robert Miklitsch
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252040689
- eISBN:
- 9780252099120
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252040689.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Given that 1955, the dead center of “the Fifties,” was the year in which RKO, the “house of noir,” was sold to Desilu Studios, the home of I Love Lucy, it would appear on the face of things that ...
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Given that 1955, the dead center of “the Fifties,” was the year in which RKO, the “house of noir,” was sold to Desilu Studios, the home of I Love Lucy, it would appear on the face of things that classic American film noir was good and dead by midcentury. But despite the received critical wisdom about the genre, The Red and the Black proposes that the grand, rise-and-fall narrative about classic noir misprizes the way in which, via various subgenres (melodrama, semi-documentary, etc.), it dramatizes complex notions about gender and sexuality, race and family, nation and homosexuality. The clichés about 1950s noir also misrecognize the way in which, via new media and technologies (color, television, 3-D, widescreen), it effects a dynamic segue between 1940s expressionist noir and early, “modernist” neo-noir. Since the negative, stereotypical determination of Cold War noir tends to be a function of generalities about the genre and the period, The Red and the Black focuses less on “the Fifties” than on the performative contradictions of particular films and the representative cultural-political formations—anticommunism, the atomic bomb, and new media/technologies--of which they are singular “examples.” In fine, in “the Fifties,” in the age of TV and three-dimension, the femme fatale and the nuclear family, Cinemascope and Technicolor, the A-bomb and McCarthyism, the blacklist and “reds under the beds,” ‘50s noir not only existed but flourished.Less
Given that 1955, the dead center of “the Fifties,” was the year in which RKO, the “house of noir,” was sold to Desilu Studios, the home of I Love Lucy, it would appear on the face of things that classic American film noir was good and dead by midcentury. But despite the received critical wisdom about the genre, The Red and the Black proposes that the grand, rise-and-fall narrative about classic noir misprizes the way in which, via various subgenres (melodrama, semi-documentary, etc.), it dramatizes complex notions about gender and sexuality, race and family, nation and homosexuality. The clichés about 1950s noir also misrecognize the way in which, via new media and technologies (color, television, 3-D, widescreen), it effects a dynamic segue between 1940s expressionist noir and early, “modernist” neo-noir. Since the negative, stereotypical determination of Cold War noir tends to be a function of generalities about the genre and the period, The Red and the Black focuses less on “the Fifties” than on the performative contradictions of particular films and the representative cultural-political formations—anticommunism, the atomic bomb, and new media/technologies--of which they are singular “examples.” In fine, in “the Fifties,” in the age of TV and three-dimension, the femme fatale and the nuclear family, Cinemascope and Technicolor, the A-bomb and McCarthyism, the blacklist and “reds under the beds,” ‘50s noir not only existed but flourished.
Juliet John
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199257928
- eISBN:
- 9780191594854
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199257928.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter examines the role of Dickens's aesthetics works in enabling Dickens to become the author most adapted for the screen. It is an exploration, through Dickens's relationship with film, of ...
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This chapter examines the role of Dickens's aesthetics works in enabling Dickens to become the author most adapted for the screen. It is an exploration, through Dickens's relationship with film, of the ideology of the aesthetic in relation to the mass market, a topic famously addressed by Sergei Eisenstein in his essay ‘Dickens, Griffith and Ourselves’. The chapter argues that the ‘structures of feeling’ in Dickens's art enabled it to function as a bridge between the most popular form of entertainment in his own day (stage melodrama) and the most popular form of entertainment in the age that followed (the screen). While Dickens's influence on film and the influence of nineteenth‐century stage melodrama on Dickens is well known, this chapter maintains that it is the ability of Dickens's novels to ‘sit astride’ melodramatic and realist aesthetics that is the key to their capacity to function as a bridge between stage melodrama and the new medium of the cinema. The history of Dickens on screen makes clear that aesthetic forms, especially when transported across historical periods and cultures, do not carry with them unchanging or consistent ideological baggage.Less
This chapter examines the role of Dickens's aesthetics works in enabling Dickens to become the author most adapted for the screen. It is an exploration, through Dickens's relationship with film, of the ideology of the aesthetic in relation to the mass market, a topic famously addressed by Sergei Eisenstein in his essay ‘Dickens, Griffith and Ourselves’. The chapter argues that the ‘structures of feeling’ in Dickens's art enabled it to function as a bridge between the most popular form of entertainment in his own day (stage melodrama) and the most popular form of entertainment in the age that followed (the screen). While Dickens's influence on film and the influence of nineteenth‐century stage melodrama on Dickens is well known, this chapter maintains that it is the ability of Dickens's novels to ‘sit astride’ melodramatic and realist aesthetics that is the key to their capacity to function as a bridge between stage melodrama and the new medium of the cinema. The history of Dickens on screen makes clear that aesthetic forms, especially when transported across historical periods and cultures, do not carry with them unchanging or consistent ideological baggage.
Condee Nancy
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195366761
- eISBN:
- 9780199867394
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195366761.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Mikhalkov’s films constitute Russian cinema’s most ambitious reclamation project. While several films, including 12, address contemporary subjects, his work more typically crafts an elegiac and ...
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Mikhalkov’s films constitute Russian cinema’s most ambitious reclamation project. While several films, including 12, address contemporary subjects, his work more typically crafts an elegiac and turbulent Russia of 1877–1937, simultaneously distinct from the West, yet recognizably European, with a leisured, pastoral enchantment that the West has putatively lost. The prerevolutionary estate becomes barely distinguishable from the Soviet dacha; the intensely charged enactments of one era come to stand in for those of another, as if they were recurrent or interchangeable. His films seek to draw audiences into a world where the morally ineffectual landowning class blurs into the Soviet ineffectual nomenklatura, lending moral anomie an aura of nostalgic, aristocratic allure. Property seizure becomes a paradoxically reassuring disruption of estate and dacha life, suggesting a cycle of imperial regeneration. Though often indebted to Chekhov, using his work to invite participation in a consensual fiction where class distinctions are sharpened, yet gentility is available with the purchase of a cinema ticket; historical rupture is reimagined as a newly coherent continuum; social dispersal is rescripted as endearing melodramatic excess.Less
Mikhalkov’s films constitute Russian cinema’s most ambitious reclamation project. While several films, including 12, address contemporary subjects, his work more typically crafts an elegiac and turbulent Russia of 1877–1937, simultaneously distinct from the West, yet recognizably European, with a leisured, pastoral enchantment that the West has putatively lost. The prerevolutionary estate becomes barely distinguishable from the Soviet dacha; the intensely charged enactments of one era come to stand in for those of another, as if they were recurrent or interchangeable. His films seek to draw audiences into a world where the morally ineffectual landowning class blurs into the Soviet ineffectual nomenklatura, lending moral anomie an aura of nostalgic, aristocratic allure. Property seizure becomes a paradoxically reassuring disruption of estate and dacha life, suggesting a cycle of imperial regeneration. Though often indebted to Chekhov, using his work to invite participation in a consensual fiction where class distinctions are sharpened, yet gentility is available with the purchase of a cinema ticket; historical rupture is reimagined as a newly coherent continuum; social dispersal is rescripted as endearing melodramatic excess.
Condee Nancy
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195366761
- eISBN:
- 9780199867394
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195366761.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Muratova’s cheerful skepticism toward collectivity sets the stakes high, disallowing not only higher-order social belonging, but also the “commanding heights” of the human as such. Dismantling ...
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Muratova’s cheerful skepticism toward collectivity sets the stakes high, disallowing not only higher-order social belonging, but also the “commanding heights” of the human as such. Dismantling boundaries that divide humans from animals, living from nonliving, organic from inorganic, her cinema’s only meaningful boundary is that of the film itself, capacious enough to accommodate her playful, indulgent domination. Any effort to marshal “lofty utterances,” as Soviet cinema bureaucrats had historically urged upon her work, becomes fodder for mock schemas of a coercive civilization fettered by brutal norms and fueled by demonic optimism. Her egalitarianism and refusal of imposed collectivity allows her to set the only functioning limits to behavior as the formal limits of cinema, a mock-Soviet play space for the feral mammals who are her actors. In this sense, Muratova’s cinema functions as a kind of a game preserve within which her characters roam freely, innocent of knowledge that they belong together.Less
Muratova’s cheerful skepticism toward collectivity sets the stakes high, disallowing not only higher-order social belonging, but also the “commanding heights” of the human as such. Dismantling boundaries that divide humans from animals, living from nonliving, organic from inorganic, her cinema’s only meaningful boundary is that of the film itself, capacious enough to accommodate her playful, indulgent domination. Any effort to marshal “lofty utterances,” as Soviet cinema bureaucrats had historically urged upon her work, becomes fodder for mock schemas of a coercive civilization fettered by brutal norms and fueled by demonic optimism. Her egalitarianism and refusal of imposed collectivity allows her to set the only functioning limits to behavior as the formal limits of cinema, a mock-Soviet play space for the feral mammals who are her actors. In this sense, Muratova’s cinema functions as a kind of a game preserve within which her characters roam freely, innocent of knowledge that they belong together.
Marian Wilson Kimber
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252040719
- eISBN:
- 9780252099151
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252040719.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
Poetry recitation and music intersected in performances by American women between ca. 1850 and 1950. Through oral interpretation of literature, women aspired to a place in high culture, yet in taking ...
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Poetry recitation and music intersected in performances by American women between ca. 1850 and 1950. Through oral interpretation of literature, women aspired to a place in high culture, yet in taking to the platform, female elocutionists transgressed the previous boundaries between private and public domains. Nonetheless, programs, press reports, and archival materials from women’s clubs, elocution schools, women’s colleges, and the Chautauqua circuit demonstrate that musical and literary entertainments by professional and amateur female performers were widespread. Repertoire was selected to be socially acceptable for women and to distinguish elocutionists from morally-suspect actresses. Many of the performance practices typical of spoken word and accompaniment are unknown today because they fall outside our conception of the musical work. Although women’s increasing dominance of the field of elocution resulted in its subsequent denigration as a “feminine” profession, their spoken-word performance tradition influenced the history of music, and they became the primary composers of melodramatic compositions in twentieth-century America. The Elocutionists is thus a study of the intersection of gender and genre, demonstrating female elocutionists’ role in the creation of musically-accompanied recitation and women composers’ transformations of late nineteenth-century practices in creating works that would appeal specifically to women.Less
Poetry recitation and music intersected in performances by American women between ca. 1850 and 1950. Through oral interpretation of literature, women aspired to a place in high culture, yet in taking to the platform, female elocutionists transgressed the previous boundaries between private and public domains. Nonetheless, programs, press reports, and archival materials from women’s clubs, elocution schools, women’s colleges, and the Chautauqua circuit demonstrate that musical and literary entertainments by professional and amateur female performers were widespread. Repertoire was selected to be socially acceptable for women and to distinguish elocutionists from morally-suspect actresses. Many of the performance practices typical of spoken word and accompaniment are unknown today because they fall outside our conception of the musical work. Although women’s increasing dominance of the field of elocution resulted in its subsequent denigration as a “feminine” profession, their spoken-word performance tradition influenced the history of music, and they became the primary composers of melodramatic compositions in twentieth-century America. The Elocutionists is thus a study of the intersection of gender and genre, demonstrating female elocutionists’ role in the creation of musically-accompanied recitation and women composers’ transformations of late nineteenth-century practices in creating works that would appeal specifically to women.
Martin O'Shaughnessy
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719091506
- eISBN:
- 9781781708590
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719091506.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Laurent Cantet is of one France’s leading contemporary directors. He probes the evolution and fault-lines of contemporary society from the home to the workplace and from the Republican school to ...
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Laurent Cantet is of one France’s leading contemporary directors. He probes the evolution and fault-lines of contemporary society from the home to the workplace and from the Republican school to globalized consumption more acutely than perhaps any other French film-maker. His films always challenge his characters’ assumptions about their world. But they also make their spectators rethink their position in relation to what they see. This is what makes Cantet such an important film-maker, the book argues. It explores Cantet’s unique working ‘method,’ his use of amateur actors and attempt to develop an egalitarian authorship that allows other voices to be heard rather than subsumed. It discusses his way of constructing films at the uneasy interface of the individual, the group and the broader social context and his recourse to melodramatic strategies and moments of shame to force social tensions into view. It shows how the roots of the well-known later films can be found in his early works. It explores the major fictions from Ressources humaines to the recent Foxfire, Confessions of a Girl Gang. It combines careful close analysis with attention to broader cinematic, social and political contexts while drawing on a range of important theorists from Pierre Bourdieu to Jacques Rancière, Michael Bakhtin and Mary Ann Doane. It concludes by examining how, resolutely contemporary of the current moment, Cantet helps us rethink the possibilities and limits of political cinema in a context in which old resistances have fallen silent and new forms of protest are only emergent.Less
Laurent Cantet is of one France’s leading contemporary directors. He probes the evolution and fault-lines of contemporary society from the home to the workplace and from the Republican school to globalized consumption more acutely than perhaps any other French film-maker. His films always challenge his characters’ assumptions about their world. But they also make their spectators rethink their position in relation to what they see. This is what makes Cantet such an important film-maker, the book argues. It explores Cantet’s unique working ‘method,’ his use of amateur actors and attempt to develop an egalitarian authorship that allows other voices to be heard rather than subsumed. It discusses his way of constructing films at the uneasy interface of the individual, the group and the broader social context and his recourse to melodramatic strategies and moments of shame to force social tensions into view. It shows how the roots of the well-known later films can be found in his early works. It explores the major fictions from Ressources humaines to the recent Foxfire, Confessions of a Girl Gang. It combines careful close analysis with attention to broader cinematic, social and political contexts while drawing on a range of important theorists from Pierre Bourdieu to Jacques Rancière, Michael Bakhtin and Mary Ann Doane. It concludes by examining how, resolutely contemporary of the current moment, Cantet helps us rethink the possibilities and limits of political cinema in a context in which old resistances have fallen silent and new forms of protest are only emergent.
Frank Noack
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780813167008
- eISBN:
- 9780813167794
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813167008.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Veit Harlan has often been called “the male Leni Riefenstahl,” but he poses a much bigger challenge for the biographer because he directed a frighteningly effective anti-Semitic hate picture, Jud ...
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Veit Harlan has often been called “the male Leni Riefenstahl,” but he poses a much bigger challenge for the biographer because he directed a frighteningly effective anti-Semitic hate picture, Jud Süss (1940), for which he had to defend himself in two trials. A detailed portrait of him raises the question whether it is permitted to appreciate the artistic talents of a man who actively supported the Nazi regime’s genocidal politics. There is no precedent for this challenge because none of the leading Nazi criminals produced enduring works of art, whereas Harlan did. Moral questions inevitably arise throughout the book, but another task is the portrait of a man whose function in Nazi Germany didn’t fit into the familiar villain/hero/victim scenario. Harlan was the product of Weimar Germany’s leftist youth movement and after 1933 managed to combine opportunism with a passionate individualism. The body of work he left is intriguing not despite but because of his moral flaws: his mysticism, sentimentality, and sexism as well as, above all, the perception of himself as a philosopher-artist. His preferred genre was melodrama, a canon that deserves to be expanded beyond the films of Douglas Sirk and Frank Borzage. As someone who chiefly addressed female audiences and who allowed his actress-wife Kristina Söderbaum to dominate his oeuvre with her child-bride persona, Harlan is of interest to women’s studies and, with its recurring transgender motives, gay studies as well. Many stimulating articles have been written about individual Harlan films, but so far no one has analyzed them in the context of his biography. The research for this book includes discussions with dozens of people who worked with Harlan or watched all his films, half of which have never been before been analyzed in any language.Less
Veit Harlan has often been called “the male Leni Riefenstahl,” but he poses a much bigger challenge for the biographer because he directed a frighteningly effective anti-Semitic hate picture, Jud Süss (1940), for which he had to defend himself in two trials. A detailed portrait of him raises the question whether it is permitted to appreciate the artistic talents of a man who actively supported the Nazi regime’s genocidal politics. There is no precedent for this challenge because none of the leading Nazi criminals produced enduring works of art, whereas Harlan did. Moral questions inevitably arise throughout the book, but another task is the portrait of a man whose function in Nazi Germany didn’t fit into the familiar villain/hero/victim scenario. Harlan was the product of Weimar Germany’s leftist youth movement and after 1933 managed to combine opportunism with a passionate individualism. The body of work he left is intriguing not despite but because of his moral flaws: his mysticism, sentimentality, and sexism as well as, above all, the perception of himself as a philosopher-artist. His preferred genre was melodrama, a canon that deserves to be expanded beyond the films of Douglas Sirk and Frank Borzage. As someone who chiefly addressed female audiences and who allowed his actress-wife Kristina Söderbaum to dominate his oeuvre with her child-bride persona, Harlan is of interest to women’s studies and, with its recurring transgender motives, gay studies as well. Many stimulating articles have been written about individual Harlan films, but so far no one has analyzed them in the context of his biography. The research for this book includes discussions with dozens of people who worked with Harlan or watched all his films, half of which have never been before been analyzed in any language.
GILLIAN RUSSELL
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122630
- eISBN:
- 9780191671500
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122630.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Drama
After Napoleon had been defeated in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, British theatre was greatly affected, as there were no longer any new victories to portray, and the reduction in the peacetime ...
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After Napoleon had been defeated in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, British theatre was greatly affected, as there were no longer any new victories to portray, and the reduction in the peacetime establishment entailed fewer soldiers, sailors, and officers. Some provincial theatres were not able to recover from the patronage decline, while other metropolitan stages opted to re-enact some of the most significant battles through making use of nautical melodrama and other such elaborating forms. As such, the war and theatre sustained each other politically, culturally, and even ideologically, and this is viewed through several different aspects that include language. In this concluding chapter, the author focuses more on various implications of the reflexivity of soldiering and acting during the late Georgian period.Less
After Napoleon had been defeated in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, British theatre was greatly affected, as there were no longer any new victories to portray, and the reduction in the peacetime establishment entailed fewer soldiers, sailors, and officers. Some provincial theatres were not able to recover from the patronage decline, while other metropolitan stages opted to re-enact some of the most significant battles through making use of nautical melodrama and other such elaborating forms. As such, the war and theatre sustained each other politically, culturally, and even ideologically, and this is viewed through several different aspects that include language. In this concluding chapter, the author focuses more on various implications of the reflexivity of soldiering and acting during the late Georgian period.
Torben Grodal
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198159834
- eISBN:
- 9780191673719
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198159834.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter summarizes some of the characteristic dimensions that produce emotions in visual fiction, and uses these dimensions to formulate a typology of prototypical emotion-producing genres. The ...
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This chapter summarizes some of the characteristic dimensions that produce emotions in visual fiction, and uses these dimensions to formulate a typology of prototypical emotion-producing genres. The eight prototypical genre-patterns in visual fiction, based on their emotional effect on the viewer, are: lyricism, canonical narratives, obsessional fictions, melodramas, horror fictions, schizoid fictions, comic fictions, and metafictions.Less
This chapter summarizes some of the characteristic dimensions that produce emotions in visual fiction, and uses these dimensions to formulate a typology of prototypical emotion-producing genres. The eight prototypical genre-patterns in visual fiction, based on their emotional effect on the viewer, are: lyricism, canonical narratives, obsessional fictions, melodramas, horror fictions, schizoid fictions, comic fictions, and metafictions.
