This is an open access book available on www.peterlang.com and www.oapen.org. All content published can be shared under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 ...International License (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0).
This history of the early American film industry identifies key political aspects in the rise of the classical Hollywood system. It uniquely identifies and explores the political development of ...American film that shows how movies shaped political culture and consumer capitalism in the twentieth century.
This book argues that the fundamental shift in Chinese Cinema away from Socialism and towards Post-Socialism can be located earlier than the emergence of the "Fifth Generation" in the mid-eighties ...when it is usually assumed to have occured. By close analysis of films from the 1949-1976 Maoist era in comparison with 1976-81 films representing the Cultural Revolution, it demonstrates that the latter already breaks away from Socialism.
Still and moving images are crucial factors in contemporary political conflicts. They not only have representational, expressive or illustrative functions, but also augment and create significant ...events. Beyond altering states of mind, they affect bodies and often life or death is at stake. Various forms of image operations are currently performed in the contexts of war, insurgency and activism. Photographs, videos, interactive simulations and other kinds of images steer drones to their targets, train soldiers, terrorise the public, celebrate protest icons, uncover injustices, or call for help. They are often parts of complex agential networks and move across different media and cultural environments. This book is a pioneering interdisciplinary study of the role and function of images in political life. Balancing theoretical reflections with in-depth case studies, it brings together renowned scholars and activists from different fields to offer a multifaceted critical perspective on a crucial aspect of contemporary visual culture.
In this article an examination of various cultural/traditional tropes, and how they are employed to perform subversive functions in three of the Nigerian filmmaker Tunde Kelani's political films ...(Saworoide, Agogo Ewo and Arugba) in delineating the concept of Irreducible Africanness, and show how each of the film's constituent elements function. The conclusion argues that Auteur theory is only able to find apt expression and illustration through the cinematographer's filmic oeuvre built upon a Yoruba/African aesthetic matrix, and an authentic Yoruba /African aesthetic practice.
Adopting and developing a ‘cultural politics’ approach, this comprehensive study explores how Hollywood movies generate and reflect political myths about social and personal life that profoundly ...influence how we understand power relations. Instead of looking at genre, it employs three broad categories of film. ‘Security’ films present ideas concerning public order and disorder, citizen–state relations and the politics of fear. ‘Relationalities’ films highlight personal and intimate politics, bringing norms about identities, gender and sexuality into focus. In ‘socially critical’ films, particular issues and ideas are endowed with more overtly political significance. The book considers these categories as global political technologies implicated in hegemonic and ‘soft power’ relations whose reach is both deep and broad.
This is the first major work on pre-1949 Chinese cinema in English. As such, it represents a major contribution to existing discussions of both Chinese cinema and national cinema, and is an ...indispensible basic resource for scholars interested in Chinese f
Wag the Dog is a film that became a media event and a cultural icon because it inadvertently short-circuited the distance that is supposed to separate reality and fiction. The film’s narration ...challenges the established boundaries between the fiction and nonfiction tradition, as Barry Levinson, the director, embeds his interest in documentary filmmaking and complicates the issue of narrative agency in the way he frames the story. The examination of the historical and social context in which it was produced, exhibited and received worldwide enables the author to illuminate a series of changes in the way a fiction film reflects and interacts with reality, urging us to reconsider some of our central and long-standing concepts or even paradigms in film theory. Eleftheria Thanouli provides new insights into a series of issues from both classical and contemporary film theory, like the conceptual and ontological stakes in the use of digital technology, the impact of mass media on public memory and the political role of cinema in a globalized and conglomerated world.
