In the late 1950s, Suzuki Seijun was an unknown, anxious low-ranking film director churning out so-called program pictures for Japan's most successful movie studio, Nikkatsu. In the early 1960s, he ...met with modest success in directing popular movies about yakuza gangsters and mild exploitation films featuring prostitutes and teenage rebels. In this book, Peter A. Yacavone argues that Suzuki became an unlikely cinematic rebel and, with hindsight, one of the most important voices in the global cinema of the 1960s. Working from within the studio system, Suzuki almost single-handedly rejected the restrictive filmmaking norms of the postwar period and expanded the form and language of popular cinema. This artistic rebellion proved costly when Suzuki was fired in 1967 and virtually blacklisted by the studios, but Suzuki returned triumphantly to the scene of world cinema in the 1980s and 1990s with a series of critically celebrated, avant-garde tales of the supernatural and the uncanny. This book provides a well-informed, philosophically oriented analysis of Suzuki's 49 feature films.
This series presents diverse and fascinating movements in world cinema. Each volume concentrates on a set of films from a different national, regional or, in some cases, cross-cultural cinema which ...constitute a particular tradition.
Listening with a Feminist Ear is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities of sound in cinema. Eschewing ocularcentric and siloed disciplinary formations, the book takes seriously the ...radical theoretical and methodological potential of listening. It models a feminist interpretive practice that is not just attuned to how power and privilege are materialized in sound, but that engenders new, counter-hegemonic imaginaries. Focusing on mainstream Bombay cinema, Sundar identifies singing, listening, and speaking as key sites in which gendered notions of identity and difference take form. Charting new paths through seven decades of film, media, and cultural history, Sundar identifies key shifts in women’s playback voices and the Islamicate genre of the qawwali. She also conceptualizes spoken language as sound, and turns up the volume on a capacious, multilingual politics of belonging that scholarly and popular accounts of nation typically render silent. All in all, Listening with a Feminist Ear offers a critical sonic sensibility that reinvigorates debates about the gendering of voice and body in cinema, and the role of sound and media in conjuring community.
In his doctoral dissertation, Christoph Seelinger provides an overview of strategies for legitimizing and functionalizing documentary death scenes in narrative cinema. Seelinger's chronological arc ...begins with the earliest animal deaths on camera, such as the filmed execution of the female elephant Topsy in »Electrocuting an Elephant – Thomas A. Edison« (1903), and it continues to the glossy snuff videos of the Islamic State's media department in the 2010s. Between these two poles, the author – with the same academic scrutiny – looks at established arthouse films, but all also at countless representations of station cinema that have been dismissed as trash and exploitation and have so far eluded academic research. The result is a foray through the more ostracized regions of cinema history and, in the process, nothing less than the first detailed history of the intrusion of real depictions of death into the fiction of the feature film.
Christoph Seelinger liefert in seiner Promotionsschrift einen Überblick über Legitimations- und Funktionalisierungsstrategien dokumentarischer Toten- und Todesszenen im Erzählkino. Seelingers chronologischer Bogen beginnt bei den frühesten animalischen Toden vor laufender Kamera wie beispielsweise der filmisch festgehaltenen Hinrichtung des Elefantenweibchens Topsy in »Electrocuting an Elephant – Thomas A. Edison« (1903) und er führt bis zu den Hochglanz-Snuff-Videos der Medienabteilung des Islamischen Staates in den 2010er Jahren. Zwischen diesen beiden Polen betrachtet der Autor mit derselben medienwissenschaftlichen Hinwendung arrivierte Arthouse-Filme, vor allem aber auch zahllose als Trash und Exploitation abqualifizierte Vertreter des Bahnhofskinos, die einem akademischen Zugriff bislang entzogen waren. Das Ergebnis ist ein Streifzug durch die verfemteren Regionen der Kinogeschichte und dabei nichts weniger als die erste auführliche Geschichte des Einbruchs realer Todesdarstellungen in die Fiktion des Spielfilms.
Trauma Culture Kaplan, E. Ann
2005, 20050711, 2005-07-11
eBook
It may be said that every trauma is two traumas or ten thousand-depending on the number of people involved. How one experiences and reacts to an event is unique and depends largely on one's direct or ...indirect positioning, personal psychic history, and individual memories. But equally important to the experience of trauma are the broader political and cultural contexts within which a catastrophe takes place and how it is "managed" by institutional forces, including the media.In Trauma Culture, E. Ann Kaplan explores the relationship between the impact of trauma on individuals and on entire cultures and nations. Arguing that humans possess a compelling need to draw meaning from personal experience and to communicate what happens to others, she examines the artistic, literary, and cinematic forms that are often used to bridge the individual and collective experience. A number of case studies, including Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism, Marguerite Duras' La Douleur, Sarah Kofman's Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, and Tracey Moffatt's Night Cries, reveal how empathy can be fostered without the sensationalistic element that typifies the media.From World War II to 9/11, this passionate study eloquently navigates the contentious debates surrounding trauma theory and persuasively advocates the responsible sharing and translating of catastrophe.
Developing Heide Schlüpmann’s 2013 article, “An Alliance Between History and Theory”, we argue that the home provides the historic and theoretic foundation for cinema’s sense of perceptual play, and ...that it is also a contemporary and productive site for feminist filmmaking. Using our reflections as educators who experienced distance teaching during the Covid-19 lockdown in Melbourne, we explore how working from and within the home unexpectedly revealed new pathways to feminist pedagogy and progress. We reflect on how the home became a site of creative play, where women were forced to make movies with what they had at hand. The mobile phone or prosumer camera became, in this context, a device to be technologically exploited and used in film production. Linking this to wider developments in smartphone use in filmmaking today, we argue that 2020 was a year in which the home was not necessarily a site of entrapment.
"Concentrationary Memories has, as its premise, the idea at the heart of Alain Resnais's film Night and Fog (1955) that the concentrationary plague unleashed on the world by the Nazis in the 1930s ...and 1940s is not simply confined to one place and one time but is now a permanent presence shadowing modern life. It further suggests that memory (and, indeed art in general) must be invoked to show this haunting of the present by this menacing past so that we can read for the signs of terror and counter its deformation of the human. Through working with political and cultural theory on readings of film, art, photographic and literary practices, Concentrationary Memories analyses different cultural responses to concentrationary terror in different sites in the post-war period, ranging from Auschwitz to Argentina. These readings show how those involved in the cultural production of memories of the horror of totalitarianism sought to find forms, languages and image systems which could make sense of and resist the post-war condition in which, as Hannah Arendt famously stated 'everything is possible' and 'human beings as human beings become superfluous.' Authors include Nicholas Chare, Isabelle de le Court, Thomas Elsaesser, Benjamin Hannavy Cousen, Matthew John, Claire Launchbury, Sylvie Lindeperg, Laura Malosetti Costa, Griselda Pollock, Max Silverman, Glenn Sujo, Annette Wieviorka and John Wolfe Ackerman."
While cinema boasts of a long history that has placed the representation and aesthetics of memory at its centre, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are only starting to shape their own ...aesthetic and narrative engagement with memory. Through the analysis of Chez Moi (Caitlin Fisher and Tony Vieira, 2014), Queerskins: Ark (Illja Szilak, 2020), and Homestay (Paisley Smith, 2018), this essay shows how cinematic AR and VR involve the viewers’ movement to produce and transform collective memory and spatial habitation. Feminist digital geographies, film and media theory, and the concept of orientation developed by Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology (2006) give sense to how sound, images and viewers’ movement participate to rewrite collective memory and cultural symbols. As these artworks present personal memories of struggles to find a home within present spaces, they queer hegemonic orientations of the subject, and invite viewers to re-align body and space within ever-changing virtual and digital spaces.
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