Cinematic Sociology

Cinematic Sociology is a one-of-a-kind resource that helps students to view films sociologically while also providing much-needed pedagogy for teaching sociology through film. In this engaging text, the authors take readers beyond watching movies and help them "see" films sociologically while also developing critical thinking and analytical skills that will be useful in college coursework and beyond. The book's essays from expert scholars in sociology and cultural studies explore the ways social life is presented--distorted, magnified, or politicized--in popular film. Contributor to the SAGE Teaching Innovations and Professional Development Award

Sociology Through Film uses feature films to teach central areas in sociology such as culture, race/ethnicity, social class, and gender/sexuality. By using Film to introduce the sociological imagination, students will 'experience' social context being studied, and reinforce critical thinking skills. An introductory chapter includes a discussion of the significance of film in modern society, a consideration of the ways that film both reflects and shapes social reality, an explanation of how sociologists analyze film, and coverage of sociological tools for 'reading' film as text. Films will provide an illustrative framework for understanding the social world, and therefore the films discussed will not go 'out of date'.

Sociology Through Film uses feature films to teach central areas in sociology such as culture, race/ethnicity, social class, and gender/sexuality. By using Film to introduce the sociological imagination, students will 'experience' social context being studied, and reinforce critical thinking skills. An introductory chapter includes a discussion of the significance of film in modern society, a consideration of the ways that film both reflects and shapes social reality, an explanation of how sociologists analyze film, and coverage of sociological tools for 'reading' film as text. Films will provide an illustrative framework for understanding the social world, and therefore the films discussed will not go 'out of date'.

Sociology through the Projector takes issue with the question of how contemporary film can help answering the general, abstract but still urgent question: what is the social today? This book explains the performative relation to contemporary social theory in which cinema functions as a tool for social diagnosis. There is much to be learned about social theory through an encounter with films as films are part and parcel of the society they portray. Increasingly more lay knowledge about social problems and facts stems from cinema as it offers to large audiences a popular and pedagogical introduction to social knowledge. Social theory cannot avoid a critical engagement with cinema as cinema interprets, invents, displaces and distorts the object of sociological inquiry. This book will provide a deeper understanding of contemporary social theory as the chosen films will work as a pedagogical route into contemporary social theory. The films represent a mix of European and American blockbusters and more aesthetically orientated films. The authors question several dominant topics and concerns within social theory and film studies. Firstly, by cross-examining a series of concepts such as identity, representation, memory and surveillance (filming social behaviour) which are of concern to both film theory and social theory. Secondly, by trying to develop imaginative approaches to standard social concerns such as exclusion, gender roles and inequalities, power, infantilisation and commodification of the social and psychological bonds. This book will be a great resource for students and researchers of Sociology, Contemporary Social Theory, Film Studies and Cultural Studies.

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This book is the first comprehensive and systematic study of cross-class romance films throughout the history of American cinema. It provides vivid discussions of these romantic films, analyses their normative patterns and thematic concerns, traces how they were shaped by inequalities of gender and class in American society, and explains why they were especially popular from World War I through the roaring twenties and the Great Depression. In the vast majority of cross-class romance films the female is poor or from the working class, the male is wealthy or from the upper class, and the romance ends successfully in marriage or the promise of marriage.

Ranging over a rich variety of material from film and film literature, and encompassing a critical interrogation of traditional realist ethnographic and cinematic texts, this book highlights the extent to which the cinema has contributed to the rise of voyeurism throughout society. The cinema not only turns its audience into voyeurs, eagerly following the lives of its screen characters, but casts its key players as onlookers, spying on other's lives. The nature of the cinematic voyeur is examined in depth, as are its implications for contemporary society. Norman K Denzin analyzes Hollywood's manipulations of gender, race and class, and, drawing on the work of Foucault, argues that the cinematic gaze must be understood as pa

This book brings together the literature of urban sociology and film studies to explore new analytical and theoretical approaches to the relationship between cinema and the city, and to show how these impact on the realities of life in urban societies.

Kracauer. Film, medium of a disintegrating world. -- Curious Americanism. -- Benjamin. Actuality, antinomies. -- Aura: the appropriation of a concept. -- Mistaking the moon for a ball. -- Micky-maus. -- Room-for-play. -- Adorno. The question of film aesthetics. -- Kracauer in exile. Theory of film.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.