Perverse Spectators

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Release : 2000-07-01
Genre : Social Science
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Book Rating : 094/5 ( reviews)

Perverse Spectators - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Perverse Spectators write by Janet Staiger. This book was released on 2000-07-01. Perverse Spectators available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Film and television have never been more prevalent or watched than they are now, yet we still have little understanding of how people process and make use of what they see. And though we acknowledge the enormous role the media plays in our culture, we have only a vague sense of how it actually influences our attitudes and desires. In Perverse Spectators, Janet Staiger argues that studying the interpretive methods of spectators within their historical contexts is both possible and necessary to understand the role media plays in culture and in our personal lives. This analytical approach is applied to topics such as depictions of violence, the role of ratings codes, the horror and suspense genre, historical accuracy in film, and sexual identities, and then demonstrated through works like JFK, The Silence of the Lambs, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Psycho, and A Clockwork Orange. Each chapter shows a different approach to reconstructing audience responses to films, consistently and ingeniously finding traces of what would otherwise appear to be unrecoverable information. Using vivid examples, charting key concepts, and offering useful syntheses of long-standing debates, Perverse Spectators constitutes a compelling case for a reconsideration of the assumptions about film reception which underlie contemporary scholarship in media studies. Taking on widely influential theories and scholars, Perverse Spectators is certain to spark controversy and help redefine the study of film as it enters the new millennium.

Perverse Spectators

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Author :
Release : 2000-07
Genre : Performing Arts
Kind :
Book Rating : 381/5 ( reviews)

Perverse Spectators - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Perverse Spectators write by Janet Staiger. This book was released on 2000-07. Perverse Spectators available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The thesis of this collection of a dozen essays written by Staiger (communication, U. of Texas-Austin) since Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (1992) is that contextual factors more than textual ones account for viewers' "perverse" (i.e., negotiated) experience of films. The essays are organized by the themes of historical theory and reception studies, interpretation and Hollywood film history, interpretation and identity theory, and interpretation and representation of the real. Featured films are A Clockwork Orange,The Silence of the Lambs, and The Return of Martin Guerre. c. Book News Inc.

Hollywood Incoherent

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Release : 2010-10-01
Genre : Performing Arts
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Book Rating : 796/5 ( reviews)

Hollywood Incoherent - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Hollywood Incoherent write by Todd Berliner. This book was released on 2010-10-01. Hollywood Incoherent available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. "Most books about American film in the 1970s tell stories about iconoclastic auteurs working in the shadow of the Vietnam War. Stepping away from this tradition, Todd Berliner gives us a bold and compelling study of the strange, paradoxical narrative style of seventies films, which seemed to flout the canonical structure of the well-made film. Berliner sheds new light on a well-studied period. His lively prose and the delight he takes in explicaring the classics of that era make this book a real pleasure to read."---Stephen Prince, Professor of Cinema at Virginia Tech and author of Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism "The wave of innovative filmmaking that surged in 1970s Hollywood has come to be cherished as dearly by many cineastes as the earlier `golden age' of studio filmmaking. American filmmaking of this period has been much discussed in relation to the crisis of the film industry and the sociopolitical currents of the time, Todd Berliner's important study focuses on what is usually taken for granted in such work: the form, texture, and tone of the films themselves, and the experiences that they create for spectators. His exacting and wide-ranging study explores the interplay between narrative unity and `incongruity,' as it is manifested in different ways in acknowledged classics directed by Coppola, Friedkin, Scorsese, and Cassavetes, as well as in many less well-known films. Berliner also shows how these films have had a lasting impact on Hollywood filmmaking. Hollywood Incoherent provides the sustained and systematic exploration of the aesthetics of the `Hollywood Renaissance' that the films deserve and the field of film studies needs."---Murray Smith, Professor of Film Studies, University of Kent

Moving Viewers

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Release : 2009-04-08
Genre : Performing Arts
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Book Rating : 964/5 ( reviews)

Moving Viewers - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Moving Viewers write by Carl Plantinga. This book was released on 2009-04-08. Moving Viewers available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Everyone knows the thrill of being transported by a film, but what is it that makes movie watching such a compelling emotional experience? In Moving Viewers, Carl Plantinga explores this question and the implications of its answer for aesthetics, the psychology of spectatorship, and the place of movies in culture. Through an in-depth discussion of mainstream Hollywood films, Plantinga investigates what he terms "the paradox of negative emotion" and the function of mainstream narratives as ritualistic fantasies. He describes the sensual nature of the movies and shows how film emotions are often elicited for rhetorical purposes. He uses cognitive science and philosophical aesthetics to demonstrate why cinema may deliver a similar emotional charge for diverse audiences.

The Politics of Insects

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Release : 2011-08-18
Genre : Performing Arts
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Book Rating : 709/5 ( reviews)

The Politics of Insects - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Politics of Insects write by Scott Wilson. This book was released on 2011-08-18. The Politics of Insects available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Canadian film director David Cronenberg has long been a figure of artistic acclaim and public controversy. Bursting into view with a trio of shocking horror films in the 1970s, Cronenberg's work has become increasingly complex in its sensibilities and inward-looking in its concerns and themes. This trajectory culminates in the multiplex successes of his most recent films, which appear to conclude a straightforward evolutionary arc that begins in the cold outside of shock-horror and arrives in the warm embrace of commercial and critical success. Scott Wilson argues persuasively that Cronenberg's career can be divided into broad thematic stages and instead offers a complex examination of the relationship between three inter-related terms: the director as auteur; the industry that support or denies commercial opportunity; and the audience who receive, interpret and support (or decry) the vision represented on screen. The Politics of Insects provides an opportunity to explore Cronenberg's films in relation to each other in terms of their thematic continuity, and in terms of their relationship to industrial concerns and audience responses.