John Caughie
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198742197
- eISBN:
- 9780191694981
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198742197.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This book offers an account of British television drama from its origins in live studio drama in the prewar and immediate postwar years, through the Golden Age of the single play in the 1960s and ...
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This book offers an account of British television drama from its origins in live studio drama in the prewar and immediate postwar years, through the Golden Age of the single play in the 1960s and 1970s, to its convergence with an emerging British art cinema in the 1990s. It relates the development of television drama to movements which were going on within the culture. In particular, it is concerned with a series of arguments and debates about politics and form which centred around issues of immediacy and naturalism, realism and modernism in public culture. The book addresses contemporary television in the form of the television film and the classic serial, and raises new questions about such issues as adaptation and acting. The importance of the book lies in its attempt to place television drama at the centre of late twentieth-century British culture and to relate the criticism of television drama to a wider history of aesthetic debates and arguments.Less
This book offers an account of British television drama from its origins in live studio drama in the prewar and immediate postwar years, through the Golden Age of the single play in the 1960s and 1970s, to its convergence with an emerging British art cinema in the 1990s. It relates the development of television drama to movements which were going on within the culture. In particular, it is concerned with a series of arguments and debates about politics and form which centred around issues of immediacy and naturalism, realism and modernism in public culture. The book addresses contemporary television in the form of the television film and the classic serial, and raises new questions about such issues as adaptation and acting. The importance of the book lies in its attempt to place television drama at the centre of late twentieth-century British culture and to relate the criticism of television drama to a wider history of aesthetic debates and arguments.
Alex Symons
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748649587
- eISBN:
- 9780748676484
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748649587.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter discusses how Brooks did not just recycle Hollywood film, but hybridised film content together with a wide range of content from television. It is through hybridising film with ...
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This chapter discusses how Brooks did not just recycle Hollywood film, but hybridised film content together with a wide range of content from television. It is through hybridising film with television that Brooks made his reputation as a director with Blazing Saddles (1974) and Young Frankenstein (1974), and in doing so, contributed towards a cycle of television-film hybrids that continues today. The rise of television-film hybrids has been central to the production of what has come to be understood by critics as the parody film genre. Furthermore, it was, in part, Brooks's own apparent choice not to capitalise on television content to the same extent in his subsequent films Spaceballs (1987), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) that brought about the end of his career as a film director.Less
This chapter discusses how Brooks did not just recycle Hollywood film, but hybridised film content together with a wide range of content from television. It is through hybridising film with television that Brooks made his reputation as a director with Blazing Saddles (1974) and Young Frankenstein (1974), and in doing so, contributed towards a cycle of television-film hybrids that continues today. The rise of television-film hybrids has been central to the production of what has come to be understood by critics as the parody film genre. Furthermore, it was, in part, Brooks's own apparent choice not to capitalise on television content to the same extent in his subsequent films Spaceballs (1987), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) that brought about the end of his career as a film director.
Shawn Malley
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781786941190
- eISBN:
- 9781789629088
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786941190.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Well-known in popular culture for tomb-raiding and mummy-wrangling, the archaeologist is also a rich though often unacknowledged figure for constructing ‘strange new worlds’ from ‘strange old worlds’ ...
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Well-known in popular culture for tomb-raiding and mummy-wrangling, the archaeologist is also a rich though often unacknowledged figure for constructing ‘strange new worlds’ from ‘strange old worlds’ in science fiction. But more than a well-spring for scenarios, SF’s archaeological imaginary is also a hermeneutic tool for excavating the ideological motivations of digging up the past buried in the future. A cultural study of an array of popular though critically neglected North American SF film and television texts–spanning the gamut of telefilms, pseudo-documentaries, teen serial drama and Hollywood blockbusters–Excavating the Future treats archaeology as a trope for exploring the popular archaeological imagination and the uses to which it is being put by the U.S. state and its adversaries. By treating SF texts as documents of archaeological experience circulating within and between scientific and popular culture communities and media, Excavating the Future develops critical strategies for analyzing SF film and television’s critical and adaptive responses to contemporary geopolitical concerns about the war on terror, homeland security, the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq, and the ongoing fight against ISIS.Less
Well-known in popular culture for tomb-raiding and mummy-wrangling, the archaeologist is also a rich though often unacknowledged figure for constructing ‘strange new worlds’ from ‘strange old worlds’ in science fiction. But more than a well-spring for scenarios, SF’s archaeological imaginary is also a hermeneutic tool for excavating the ideological motivations of digging up the past buried in the future. A cultural study of an array of popular though critically neglected North American SF film and television texts–spanning the gamut of telefilms, pseudo-documentaries, teen serial drama and Hollywood blockbusters–Excavating the Future treats archaeology as a trope for exploring the popular archaeological imagination and the uses to which it is being put by the U.S. state and its adversaries. By treating SF texts as documents of archaeological experience circulating within and between scientific and popular culture communities and media, Excavating the Future develops critical strategies for analyzing SF film and television’s critical and adaptive responses to contemporary geopolitical concerns about the war on terror, homeland security, the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq, and the ongoing fight against ISIS.
Kristyn Gorton
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748624171
- eISBN:
- 9780748670956
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748624171.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter turns to film theory where the concept of emotion has been explored primarily through research by cognitive film theorists. Television is still a new area in terms of work on emotion and ...
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This chapter turns to film theory where the concept of emotion has been explored primarily through research by cognitive film theorists. Television is still a new area in terms of work on emotion and affect, so it is necessary to draw on theoretical models within film studies in order to think about how these ideas might be transposed to television studies. In so doing, this chapter also discusses television aesthetics and the 'quality' debate. Moving away from generalised ideas of feelings towards formal qualities in the television text, this chapter considers how 'emotion markers,' 'mood cues,' 'the scene of empathy,' music, identification and aesthetic qualities work together to produce emotion.Less
This chapter turns to film theory where the concept of emotion has been explored primarily through research by cognitive film theorists. Television is still a new area in terms of work on emotion and affect, so it is necessary to draw on theoretical models within film studies in order to think about how these ideas might be transposed to television studies. In so doing, this chapter also discusses television aesthetics and the 'quality' debate. Moving away from generalised ideas of feelings towards formal qualities in the television text, this chapter considers how 'emotion markers,' 'mood cues,' 'the scene of empathy,' music, identification and aesthetic qualities work together to produce emotion.
Shawn Malley
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781786941190
- eISBN:
- 9781789629088
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786941190.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The introductory chapter establishes relationships between archaeology as a trope within SF film and television and as a cultural site from which to investigate the medium’s critical engagement with ...
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The introductory chapter establishes relationships between archaeology as a trope within SF film and television and as a cultural site from which to investigate the medium’s critical engagement with post 9/11 geopolitics. Arguing that the imagination of the future is indelibly overrun by the past, scholars like Fredric Jameson, Gary Wolfe and Carl Freeman contend that SF is a historicist genre that exposes its master fantasy of progress to the kinds of real and symbolic assaults on Western global power represented by 9/11. The introduction contends that SF film and television offer resistant readings of the ways mediatized weapons of retaliation on the West circulate within popular culture as potent images of threat and fear that have leant Western governments extraordinary powers of surveillance and control over its citizens and the world in the name of freedom and security. The introduction historicises the cinematic and televisual response to 9/11 and its aftermath by looking back to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a film that speaks obliquely to the terrible events of the year it imagines, in which the cinematics of terror have been naturalized within the SF cinematic imagination.Less
The introductory chapter establishes relationships between archaeology as a trope within SF film and television and as a cultural site from which to investigate the medium’s critical engagement with post 9/11 geopolitics. Arguing that the imagination of the future is indelibly overrun by the past, scholars like Fredric Jameson, Gary Wolfe and Carl Freeman contend that SF is a historicist genre that exposes its master fantasy of progress to the kinds of real and symbolic assaults on Western global power represented by 9/11. The introduction contends that SF film and television offer resistant readings of the ways mediatized weapons of retaliation on the West circulate within popular culture as potent images of threat and fear that have leant Western governments extraordinary powers of surveillance and control over its citizens and the world in the name of freedom and security. The introduction historicises the cinematic and televisual response to 9/11 and its aftermath by looking back to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a film that speaks obliquely to the terrible events of the year it imagines, in which the cinematics of terror have been naturalized within the SF cinematic imagination.
Justin A. Joyce
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526126160
- eISBN:
- 9781526138743
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526126160.003.0008
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This concluding chapter examines the relationship between the increasing codification of aggressive “Stand Your Ground” laws since 2005 and the continued relevance of the Western as a popular genre. ...
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This concluding chapter examines the relationship between the increasing codification of aggressive “Stand Your Ground” laws since 2005 and the continued relevance of the Western as a popular genre. This final chapter presents a reading of two contemporary Westerns, the television series Justified (2010-15) and Quentin Tarrantino's film, Django Unchained (2012), arguing that the film epitomizes the challenge of gun possession and self-defense within a neoliberal state.Less
This concluding chapter examines the relationship between the increasing codification of aggressive “Stand Your Ground” laws since 2005 and the continued relevance of the Western as a popular genre. This final chapter presents a reading of two contemporary Westerns, the television series Justified (2010-15) and Quentin Tarrantino's film, Django Unchained (2012), arguing that the film epitomizes the challenge of gun possession and self-defense within a neoliberal state.
Michele Schreiber
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781474403924
- eISBN:
- 9781474426756
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474403924.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter examines the recent careers of Allison Anders and Mary Harron, who took off in the early-to-mid 1990s but subsequently turned to television and have found a workspace in the Lifetime TV ...
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This chapter examines the recent careers of Allison Anders and Mary Harron, who took off in the early-to-mid 1990s but subsequently turned to television and have found a workspace in the Lifetime TV Network’s made-for-television film aimed at women. Like Seidelman, Anders and Harron target an older female demographic and make films about women whose stories have been marginalised (June Carter in Anders’ Ring of Fire, 2013) or discredited (Anna Nicole Smith in Harron’s Anna Nicole, 2013). Harron, moreover, exploits the subversive potential of the celebrity biopic to expose the media’s role in constructing the self-destructing Anna Nicole.Less
This chapter examines the recent careers of Allison Anders and Mary Harron, who took off in the early-to-mid 1990s but subsequently turned to television and have found a workspace in the Lifetime TV Network’s made-for-television film aimed at women. Like Seidelman, Anders and Harron target an older female demographic and make films about women whose stories have been marginalised (June Carter in Anders’ Ring of Fire, 2013) or discredited (Anna Nicole Smith in Harron’s Anna Nicole, 2013). Harron, moreover, exploits the subversive potential of the celebrity biopic to expose the media’s role in constructing the self-destructing Anna Nicole.
Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748625369
- eISBN:
- 9780748671151
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748625369.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Iceland is a very small nation-state with a population of just over 300,000 inhabitants. This chapter addresses the various strategies its filmmakers have reverted to in fashioning a film industry in ...
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Iceland is a very small nation-state with a population of just over 300,000 inhabitants. This chapter addresses the various strategies its filmmakers have reverted to in fashioning a film industry in such a constrained environment. In particular, it emphasizes what is described as “the transnational turn” during the 1990s when Icelandic film producers began to rely heavily on international funding with the Nordic Film and Television Fund and Eurimages playing especially important roles. The effects of this turn on the films of such directors as Friðrik þór Friðriksson and Baltasar Kormákur are studied, while attention is also drawn to the still lingering tradition of local filmmaking.Less
Iceland is a very small nation-state with a population of just over 300,000 inhabitants. This chapter addresses the various strategies its filmmakers have reverted to in fashioning a film industry in such a constrained environment. In particular, it emphasizes what is described as “the transnational turn” during the 1990s when Icelandic film producers began to rely heavily on international funding with the Nordic Film and Television Fund and Eurimages playing especially important roles. The effects of this turn on the films of such directors as Friðrik þór Friðriksson and Baltasar Kormákur are studied, while attention is also drawn to the still lingering tradition of local filmmaking.
Timotheus Vermeulen
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780748691661
- eISBN:
- 9781474400909
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748691661.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Suburbia. Say the word and a stream of images pass before your eyes: white picket fence, neatly mowed lawns, winding roads nicely lined with trees, pastel tinted bungalows, bored housewives, ...
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Suburbia. Say the word and a stream of images pass before your eyes: white picket fence, neatly mowed lawns, winding roads nicely lined with trees, pastel tinted bungalows, bored housewives, conspicuous consumption. We all know what the suburbs are about. Or do we? This book looks again at the filmic and televised spaces we think we know so well. How are these spaces built up? What is it that makes us recognize them as suburbs? How do they function? Exploring the hometowns of amongst others Desperate Housewives, The Simpsons, Pleasantville and Brick, Scenes from the Suburbs examines what it means to be suburban today.Less
Suburbia. Say the word and a stream of images pass before your eyes: white picket fence, neatly mowed lawns, winding roads nicely lined with trees, pastel tinted bungalows, bored housewives, conspicuous consumption. We all know what the suburbs are about. Or do we? This book looks again at the filmic and televised spaces we think we know so well. How are these spaces built up? What is it that makes us recognize them as suburbs? How do they function? Exploring the hometowns of amongst others Desperate Housewives, The Simpsons, Pleasantville and Brick, Scenes from the Suburbs examines what it means to be suburban today.
Shawn Malley
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781786941190
- eISBN:
- 9781789629088
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786941190.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter transposes the analogical investigation of ancient astronauts as a source of geopolitical meditation in Ancient Aliens to a SF film that make this connection explicit: Steven Spielberg's ...
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This chapter transposes the analogical investigation of ancient astronauts as a source of geopolitical meditation in Ancient Aliens to a SF film that make this connection explicit: Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull (2006), which adapts the cinematic antecedent of 1950s B SF movies—in which aliens function as a trope for governmental conspiracy, atomic anxiety, and Soviet hysteria—into ancient astronaut discourse. An interesting subtext of Spielberg’s nostalgic throwback to SF film history is the nature of the aliens themselves. As archaeologists and collectors, they replicate the kinds of colonial archaeology that Jones and even the audience may take for granted. These beings function within the SF métier as an external threat, but they simultaneously sanction the civilizing activities undertaken by democratic institutions like the British Museum, Louvre and Metropolitan Museum. The film thus neatly closes the hermeneutic circle on the Indiana Jones franchise by mining its latent SF tropes: the intrepid figure of colonial archaeology is reinvigorated through the exotic adventures of technologically-advanced beings from outer space. Archaeology is a device for manifesting threats that can be foiled by the very scientific structures and geopolitical forces that inform the entertaining world of action and adventure.Less
This chapter transposes the analogical investigation of ancient astronauts as a source of geopolitical meditation in Ancient Aliens to a SF film that make this connection explicit: Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull (2006), which adapts the cinematic antecedent of 1950s B SF movies—in which aliens function as a trope for governmental conspiracy, atomic anxiety, and Soviet hysteria—into ancient astronaut discourse. An interesting subtext of Spielberg’s nostalgic throwback to SF film history is the nature of the aliens themselves. As archaeologists and collectors, they replicate the kinds of colonial archaeology that Jones and even the audience may take for granted. These beings function within the SF métier as an external threat, but they simultaneously sanction the civilizing activities undertaken by democratic institutions like the British Museum, Louvre and Metropolitan Museum. The film thus neatly closes the hermeneutic circle on the Indiana Jones franchise by mining its latent SF tropes: the intrepid figure of colonial archaeology is reinvigorated through the exotic adventures of technologically-advanced beings from outer space. Archaeology is a device for manifesting threats that can be foiled by the very scientific structures and geopolitical forces that inform the entertaining world of action and adventure.
Miklós Kiss and Steven Willemsen
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781474406727
- eISBN:
- 9781474430470
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474406727.003.0002
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Chapter 1 briefly introduces the trend of narrative complexity in contemporary cinema. It concisely positions narrative complexity within broader shifts in the audiovisual media landscape, including ...
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Chapter 1 briefly introduces the trend of narrative complexity in contemporary cinema. It concisely positions narrative complexity within broader shifts in the audiovisual media landscape, including the relation to recent developments in a techno-economical context, as well as this changing context’s impact on modes of viewing. This introductory chapter also briefly reviews existing studies on taxonomies that have so far offered formal-structural approaches to narrative complexity.Less
Chapter 1 briefly introduces the trend of narrative complexity in contemporary cinema. It concisely positions narrative complexity within broader shifts in the audiovisual media landscape, including the relation to recent developments in a techno-economical context, as well as this changing context’s impact on modes of viewing. This introductory chapter also briefly reviews existing studies on taxonomies that have so far offered formal-structural approaches to narrative complexity.
Shawn Malley
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781786941190
- eISBN:
- 9781789629088
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786941190.003.0009
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Prometheus (2012) provides ample material for cyborg criticism in the figure of its android protagonist, David. Modelling himself after the archaeologist, promoter of Arab nationalism and British spy ...
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Prometheus (2012) provides ample material for cyborg criticism in the figure of its android protagonist, David. Modelling himself after the archaeologist, promoter of Arab nationalism and British spy T.E. Lawrence, David functions as both a cultural artefact in, and an agent of, Prometheus's expedition to the origins of human life, an enterprise that, like Lawrence’s, is an anthropological recovery of an early phase of civilization that promotes the interests of the industrial-military complex that David serves (in Lawrence's case, Britain's Foreign and Colonial Office). David is the pivot upon which the film's historical fabula turns, is the "cyborg site" from which the diegetic environment of material science flows: as a non-human marginalized figure, the cyborg David simultaneously embodies and resists the originary trajectory and the racist/speciesist discourse that lay at the heart of early archaeological thinking. Ultimately, theories of common origins that infuse Scott's film are dismantled along with the conservative political agendas such myths serve. As a signifier of the archaeological business of gathering artefacts into partial typologies of origins and progress, the cyborg archaeologist is a fitting coda to my investigation of the uneasy and ongoing alliance between archaeology and global politics circulating in the popular imaginary of SF.Less
Prometheus (2012) provides ample material for cyborg criticism in the figure of its android protagonist, David. Modelling himself after the archaeologist, promoter of Arab nationalism and British spy T.E. Lawrence, David functions as both a cultural artefact in, and an agent of, Prometheus's expedition to the origins of human life, an enterprise that, like Lawrence’s, is an anthropological recovery of an early phase of civilization that promotes the interests of the industrial-military complex that David serves (in Lawrence's case, Britain's Foreign and Colonial Office). David is the pivot upon which the film's historical fabula turns, is the "cyborg site" from which the diegetic environment of material science flows: as a non-human marginalized figure, the cyborg David simultaneously embodies and resists the originary trajectory and the racist/speciesist discourse that lay at the heart of early archaeological thinking. Ultimately, theories of common origins that infuse Scott's film are dismantled along with the conservative political agendas such myths serve. As a signifier of the archaeological business of gathering artefacts into partial typologies of origins and progress, the cyborg archaeologist is a fitting coda to my investigation of the uneasy and ongoing alliance between archaeology and global politics circulating in the popular imaginary of SF.
Michael K. Johnson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617039287
- eISBN:
- 9781626740013
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617039287.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos undertakes an interdisciplinary exploration of the African American West through close readings of select texts from a variety of media. This approach allows for ...
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Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos undertakes an interdisciplinary exploration of the African American West through close readings of select texts from a variety of media. This approach allows for both an in-depth analysis of individual texts and a discussion of material often left out or under-represented in studies focused only on traditional literary material: heretofore unexamined writing by Rose Gordon, who wrote for local western publications rather than for a national audience; memoirs and letters of musicians, performers, and singers (such as W. C. Handy) who lived in or wrote about touring the American West; Percival Everett’s fiction addressing contemporary black western experience; the novels and films of Oscar Micheaux; black-cast westerns starring Herb Jeffries; largely unappreciated and unexamined episodes from the “golden age of western television” that feature African American actors; film and television westerns that use science fiction settings to imagine a “post-racial” or “post-soul” frontier. Despite recent interest in the history of the African American West, we know very little about how the African American past in the West has been depicted in a full range of imaginative forms. Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos takes us another step further in the journey of discovering how the African American West has been experienced, imagined, and performed.Less
Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos undertakes an interdisciplinary exploration of the African American West through close readings of select texts from a variety of media. This approach allows for both an in-depth analysis of individual texts and a discussion of material often left out or under-represented in studies focused only on traditional literary material: heretofore unexamined writing by Rose Gordon, who wrote for local western publications rather than for a national audience; memoirs and letters of musicians, performers, and singers (such as W. C. Handy) who lived in or wrote about touring the American West; Percival Everett’s fiction addressing contemporary black western experience; the novels and films of Oscar Micheaux; black-cast westerns starring Herb Jeffries; largely unappreciated and unexamined episodes from the “golden age of western television” that feature African American actors; film and television westerns that use science fiction settings to imagine a “post-racial” or “post-soul” frontier. Despite recent interest in the history of the African American West, we know very little about how the African American past in the West has been depicted in a full range of imaginative forms. Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos takes us another step further in the journey of discovering how the African American West has been experienced, imagined, and performed.
Robert Moses Peaslee and Robert G. Weiner (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781628462388
- eISBN:
- 9781626746831
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628462388.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
Along with Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman, the Joker is one of the most recognizable sequential art characters in popular culture. While there has been a great deal of scholarly attention on ...
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Along with Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman, the Joker is one of the most recognizable sequential art characters in popular culture. While there has been a great deal of scholarly attention on superheroes, very little has been done looking at the role of supervillains; The Joker: A Critical Study of the Clown Prince of Crime attempts to fill this gap. It is the first academic work to provide a comprehensive study of this character, asking the question, why, particularly today, is the Joker so relevant to audiences? Scholars from a wide array of disciplines look at the Joker through the lens of feature films, video games, comics, politics, magic and mysticism, psychology, animation, television, performance studies, and philosophy. This collection adds to our understanding of the role comic book and cinematic villains play in the world and the ways various media affect their interpretation. The Joker: A Critical Study of the Clown Prince of Crime will be useful for those scholars in Game Studies, Comic Studies, Graphic Narrative, Television and Film Studies.Less
Along with Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman, the Joker is one of the most recognizable sequential art characters in popular culture. While there has been a great deal of scholarly attention on superheroes, very little has been done looking at the role of supervillains; The Joker: A Critical Study of the Clown Prince of Crime attempts to fill this gap. It is the first academic work to provide a comprehensive study of this character, asking the question, why, particularly today, is the Joker so relevant to audiences? Scholars from a wide array of disciplines look at the Joker through the lens of feature films, video games, comics, politics, magic and mysticism, psychology, animation, television, performance studies, and philosophy. This collection adds to our understanding of the role comic book and cinematic villains play in the world and the ways various media affect their interpretation. The Joker: A Critical Study of the Clown Prince of Crime will be useful for those scholars in Game Studies, Comic Studies, Graphic Narrative, Television and Film Studies.
Shawn Malley
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781786941190
- eISBN:
- 9781789629088
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786941190.003.0004
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter examines the representation of archaeology in the action/adventure cinematics of Michael Bay's Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen (2007), a film predicated on hidden relics ...
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This chapter examines the representation of archaeology in the action/adventure cinematics of Michael Bay's Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen (2007), a film predicated on hidden relics transforming explosively into action. The film's diegetic environment—which features a hunt for a lost relic that happens to be the key to an ancient doomsday device secreted away inside the Great Pyramid at Giza—is analogous to the its specific geographical and historical setting. The film is "Babylonian" in that it invokes Orientalist imagery as an almost inevitable generic necessity within SF action/adventure cinema. The chapter argues specifically that the military, archaeological and geopolitical motifs of the film are most clearly and coherently aligned in the framing and shot-making techniques of the action sequences themselves. By figuratively compressing time into literally compressed spaces (here principal photography at Petra, Giza and Luxor is collapsed into a single location), the set/setting is a chronotopic threshold that transforms antiquity into a battle ground for military technocratic modernity.Less
This chapter examines the representation of archaeology in the action/adventure cinematics of Michael Bay's Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen (2007), a film predicated on hidden relics transforming explosively into action. The film's diegetic environment—which features a hunt for a lost relic that happens to be the key to an ancient doomsday device secreted away inside the Great Pyramid at Giza—is analogous to the its specific geographical and historical setting. The film is "Babylonian" in that it invokes Orientalist imagery as an almost inevitable generic necessity within SF action/adventure cinema. The chapter argues specifically that the military, archaeological and geopolitical motifs of the film are most clearly and coherently aligned in the framing and shot-making techniques of the action sequences themselves. By figuratively compressing time into literally compressed spaces (here principal photography at Petra, Giza and Luxor is collapsed into a single location), the set/setting is a chronotopic threshold that transforms antiquity into a battle ground for military technocratic modernity.
James Naremore
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520285521
- eISBN:
- 9780520960954
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520285521.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
In this, the first book devoted to one of the world’s most admired independent filmmakers, James Naremore offers a close critical study of all of Charles Burnett’s important works for movies and ...
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In this, the first book devoted to one of the world’s most admired independent filmmakers, James Naremore offers a close critical study of all of Charles Burnett’s important works for movies and television—among them Killer of Sheep, My Brother’s Wedding, To Sleep with Anger, The Glass Shield, Nightjohn, The Wedding, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, and Warming by the Devil’s Fire. Naremore shows that Burnett’s important career has developed against the odds and that his artistry, social criticism, humor, and commitment to “symbolic knowledge” have given his films enduring value.Less
In this, the first book devoted to one of the world’s most admired independent filmmakers, James Naremore offers a close critical study of all of Charles Burnett’s important works for movies and television—among them Killer of Sheep, My Brother’s Wedding, To Sleep with Anger, The Glass Shield, Nightjohn, The Wedding, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, and Warming by the Devil’s Fire. Naremore shows that Burnett’s important career has developed against the odds and that his artistry, social criticism, humor, and commitment to “symbolic knowledge” have given his films enduring value.
Shawn Malley
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781786941190
- eISBN:
- 9781789629088
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786941190.003.0002
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Predicated on the infamous looting of the Baghdad Museum during the first week of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Tripp Reed’s telefilm Manticore (2005) is a "Babylonian" text that reverses the ...
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Predicated on the infamous looting of the Baghdad Museum during the first week of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Tripp Reed’s telefilm Manticore (2005) is a "Babylonian" text that reverses the events and politics upon which its scenario is based—the destruction of antiquities in wartime—into a liberation story. In the film, U.S. Marines save Iraq from a legendary beast unleashed from its own archaeological past by a megalomaniacal terrorist claiming Babylonian ancestry. Wedding the (neo)imperialist rhetoric of archaeological stewardship in the "cradle of civilization" with military adventure, Manticore exemplifies how SF as a symbolic medium frequently capitalizes on (and thereby exposes) archaeology's latent complicity with geopolitical activity. The notion of the "archaeology-military complex" in Iraq—the absorption of archaeologists into military structures—provides an important critical context for the investigation of the ways values like heritage and stewardship promote Western interventions in the Middle East, activities that in turn provide diegetic materials for SF narrativesLess
Predicated on the infamous looting of the Baghdad Museum during the first week of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Tripp Reed’s telefilm Manticore (2005) is a "Babylonian" text that reverses the events and politics upon which its scenario is based—the destruction of antiquities in wartime—into a liberation story. In the film, U.S. Marines save Iraq from a legendary beast unleashed from its own archaeological past by a megalomaniacal terrorist claiming Babylonian ancestry. Wedding the (neo)imperialist rhetoric of archaeological stewardship in the "cradle of civilization" with military adventure, Manticore exemplifies how SF as a symbolic medium frequently capitalizes on (and thereby exposes) archaeology's latent complicity with geopolitical activity. The notion of the "archaeology-military complex" in Iraq—the absorption of archaeologists into military structures—provides an important critical context for the investigation of the ways values like heritage and stewardship promote Western interventions in the Middle East, activities that in turn provide diegetic materials for SF narratives
Shawn Malley
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781786941190
- eISBN:
- 9781789629088
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786941190.003.0003
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter develops the central thesis of Chapter 1, namely that paramilitary archaeology is a means of invoking then containing dangerous pasts as an imaginative extension of U.S. foreign policy. ...
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This chapter develops the central thesis of Chapter 1, namely that paramilitary archaeology is a means of invoking then containing dangerous pasts as an imaginative extension of U.S. foreign policy. Aired in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, Stargate (1994) translates the colonial milieu of 1930s Egyptology to the science fictional terrain of Abydos and the battle against Ra. But the shift to the small screen's televisual identity is symptomatic of the deepening complexities of representing geopolitical activity in the region. Just as archaeology passes from a source of wonder into a vehicle for military adventure, the show's ideological commitments to global (read intra-galactic) security become increasingly destabilized, particularly in the Mesopotamian-themed episodes aired after 9/11. The mercurial figure of Babylon offers a counterpoint to the film's overlay of archaeology and militarism, and indeed to the rhetoric of military stewardship at the heart of the "military-archaeology complex." The shifting representation of Mesopotamian antiquity in SG-1's ten-year run (1997-2007) offers powerful cultural criticism of the show's own premise.Less
This chapter develops the central thesis of Chapter 1, namely that paramilitary archaeology is a means of invoking then containing dangerous pasts as an imaginative extension of U.S. foreign policy. Aired in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, Stargate (1994) translates the colonial milieu of 1930s Egyptology to the science fictional terrain of Abydos and the battle against Ra. But the shift to the small screen's televisual identity is symptomatic of the deepening complexities of representing geopolitical activity in the region. Just as archaeology passes from a source of wonder into a vehicle for military adventure, the show's ideological commitments to global (read intra-galactic) security become increasingly destabilized, particularly in the Mesopotamian-themed episodes aired after 9/11. The mercurial figure of Babylon offers a counterpoint to the film's overlay of archaeology and militarism, and indeed to the rhetoric of military stewardship at the heart of the "military-archaeology complex." The shifting representation of Mesopotamian antiquity in SG-1's ten-year run (1997-2007) offers powerful cultural criticism of the show's own premise.
Shawn Malley
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781786941190
- eISBN:
- 9781789629088
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786941190.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Focusing on the History Channel's popular series Ancient Aliens (2009-), this chapter examines how the (pseudo)documentary mode of representing the incredible idea that extra-terrestrial ...
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Focusing on the History Channel's popular series Ancient Aliens (2009-), this chapter examines how the (pseudo)documentary mode of representing the incredible idea that extra-terrestrial intelligences intervened in human history directs amateur experiences of archaeology towards SF conventions. Integral to these viewing experiences of Ancient Aliens are the kinds of future-pasts exposed in the series. Of particular interest is the threatening sense of the past, which capitalizes and obliquely comments on the current state of insecurity generated in all sorts of news, documentary and fictional media. This chapter contends that recurrent themes such as doomsday weapons, extra-terrestrial invasion threats, government conspiracies, genetic tampering, the rise and fall of civilizations, the Mayan calendar, and the insistent focus on the Middle East as the origin of civilization and setting for the (imminent) apocalypse cast palpable contemporary geopolitical anxieties into challenging narratives of cultural origins. As such, the ancient alien topos, though pseudo-archaeological, is a significant cultural expression of the dialogic relationship between archaeology and SF film and television as popular and imaginative expressions of historical identity and geopolitical mediation.Less
Focusing on the History Channel's popular series Ancient Aliens (2009-), this chapter examines how the (pseudo)documentary mode of representing the incredible idea that extra-terrestrial intelligences intervened in human history directs amateur experiences of archaeology towards SF conventions. Integral to these viewing experiences of Ancient Aliens are the kinds of future-pasts exposed in the series. Of particular interest is the threatening sense of the past, which capitalizes and obliquely comments on the current state of insecurity generated in all sorts of news, documentary and fictional media. This chapter contends that recurrent themes such as doomsday weapons, extra-terrestrial invasion threats, government conspiracies, genetic tampering, the rise and fall of civilizations, the Mayan calendar, and the insistent focus on the Middle East as the origin of civilization and setting for the (imminent) apocalypse cast palpable contemporary geopolitical anxieties into challenging narratives of cultural origins. As such, the ancient alien topos, though pseudo-archaeological, is a significant cultural expression of the dialogic relationship between archaeology and SF film and television as popular and imaginative expressions of historical identity and geopolitical mediation.
Justin A. Joyce
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526126160
- eISBN:
- 9781526138743
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526126160.003.0007
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter presents a reading of Unforgiven (1992), situating this film within a paradigmatic shift in the extension of due process protections for minorities, and the transformation of American ...
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This chapter presents a reading of Unforgiven (1992), situating this film within a paradigmatic shift in the extension of due process protections for minorities, and the transformation of American self-defense doctrine brought about through a focus on battered women.Less
This chapter presents a reading of Unforgiven (1992), situating this film within a paradigmatic shift in the extension of due process protections for minorities, and the transformation of American self-defense doctrine brought about through a focus on battered women.
