Cinema And Its Representations

This volume is a timely and necessary intervention as it provides a rich, multifaceted approach to the study of cinema and visual representation. It presents a lucid and intelligent account of twentieth century film criticism essential for students in the fields of media studies and cultural studies. It leads the reader through the major contemporary philosophical and sociocultural theories of appreciating cinematic signs and themes. The book also gathers together informed discussions about the nature and principles of literary adaptation that will greatly benefit anyone interested in this field of study.

Cultures of Representation is the first book to explore the cinematic portrayal of disability in films from across the globe. Contributors explore classic and recent works from Belgium, France, Germany, India, Italy, Iran, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, Russia, Senegal, and Spain, along with a pair of globally resonant Anglophone films. Anchored by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder's coauthored essay on global disability-film festivals, the volume's content spans from 1950 to today, addressing socially disabling forces rendered visible in the representation of physical, developmental, cognitive, and psychiatric disabilities. Essays emphasize well-known global figures, directors, and industries – from Temple Grandin to Pedro Almodóvar, from Akira Kurosawa to Bollywood – while also shining a light on films from less frequently studied cultural locations such as those portrayed in the Iranian and Korean New Waves. Whether covering postwar Italy, postcolonial Senegal, or twenty-first century Russia, the essays in this volume will appeal to scholars, undergraduates, and general readers alike.

Since its inception, cinema has evolved into not merely a ‘reflection’ but an indispensable index of human experience – especially our experience of time’s passage, of the present moment, and, most importantly perhaps, of the past, in both collective and individual terms. In this volume, Kilbourn provides a comparative theorization of the representation of memory in both mainstream Hollywood and international art cinema within an increasingly transnational context of production and reception. Focusing on European, North and South American, and Asian films, Kilbourn reads cinema as providing the viewer with not only the content and form of memory, but also with its own directions for use: the required codes and conventions for understanding and implementing this crucial prosthetic technology — an art of memory for the twentieth-century and beyond.

Performing Difference is a compilation of seventeen essays from some of the leading scholars in history, criticism, film, and theater studies. Each author examines the portrayal of groups and individuals that have been traditionally marginalized or excluded from dominant historical narratives. As a meeting point of several fields of study, this book is organized around three meta-themes: race, gender, and genocide. Included are analyses of films and theatrical productions from the United States, as well as essays on cinema from Southern and Central America, Europe, and the Middle East. Topically, the contributing authors write about the depiction of race, ethnicities, gender and sexual orientation, and genocides. This volume assesses how the performing arts have aided in the social construction of the 'other' in differing contexts. Its fundamental premise is that performance is powerful, and its unifying thesis is that the arts remain a major forum for advancing a more nuanced and humane vision of social outcasts, not only in the realm of national imaginations, but in social relations as well.

"It is essential reading for anyone concerned with the theoretical discussion of cinema, and ideology in general." -- Semiotica ..". Heath is an antidote to the Cinema 101 worldview." -- Voice Literary Supplement Heath's study of film draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis, semiotics, and Marxism, presenting film as a signifying practice and the cinema as a social institution of meanings.

Cinema articulates the economic anxieties of each generation of filmmakers and audiences. It has an influence on people’s views on various economic issues and many orders of magnitude larger than that of economics as a discipline. This book offers a sweeping study of the representation of economics in cinema across a wide range of areas and genres, from the conflicts over resources in the lawless Old West to the post-scarcity societies of science fiction futures. This book studies how films have portrayed trade unions, scarcity, money, businesses, innovators, migrant workers, working women, globalization, the stock market, and the automation of work. It aims to be useful to those who are interested in cinema with economic themes and to those who want to learn about economics through cinema.

In this imaginative new work, Adam Lowenstein explores the ways in which a group of groundbreaking horror films engaged the haunting social conflicts left in the wake of World War II, Hiroshima, and the Vietnam War. Lowenstein centers Shocking Representation around readings of films by Georges Franju, Michael Powell, Shindo Kaneto, Wes Craven, and David Cronenberg. He shows that through allegorical representations these directors' films confronted and challenged comforting historical narratives and notions of national identity intended to soothe public anxieties in the aftermath of national traumas. Borrowing elements from art cinema and the horror genre, these directors disrupted the boundaries between high and low cinema. Lowenstein contrasts their works, often dismissed by contemporary critics, with the films of acclaimed "New Wave" directors in France, England, Japan, and the United States. He argues that these "New Wave" films, which were embraced as both art and national cinema, often upheld conventional ideas of nation, history, gender, and class questioned by the horror films. By fusing film studies with the emerging field of trauma studies, and drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Adam Lowenstein offers a bold reassessment of the modern horror film and the idea of national cinema.

Crash Cinema: Representation in Film is a collection of essays that emerged from Crash Cinema an annual symposium that is an integral part of the Bradford Film Festival at the National Media Museum (UK). The symposium was created by academics and curators who share the common aim of promoting the importance of film both as an academic study and for critical public appreciation. Films can be enjoyed as entertainment, they can educate and inform and they can excite and disturb. Films are powerful pieces of culture. The films that we now ‘consume’ do more than simply amuse or horrify. Cinema not only thrills us but also communicates to us about ourselves and in the twentieth and twenty-first century moving images have become the dominant form of this communication. Bombarded by images, we inhabit a media intensive world in which every aspect of life is pervaded by visual signs. In these circumstances it becomes increasingly significant to engage with the politics of representation. Through this vital process we can acknowledge that all cultural forms, whether in high art or the mass media, are in the broadest sense political. We can also appreciate that it is a complex agenda of interests that shapes specific ideological meanings. Fulsomely equipped, we can apply this essential tool to the exciting task of decoding the political, social and cultural meanings articulated through the making, promotion and consumption of film. This book aims to offer an arena for the analysis of these representations. Representations cannot depict the ‘truth’ and the essays in this book do not claim to search for the ‘truth’. We ask whose ‘truth’ is being represented, how is it represented and why is it represented like that? We also ask how do representations tell us something about the culture within which they are created. Yet the essays in this volume are not ‘stuck’ in the representational concerns of the past and try instead to uncover the power of cinema to shock and surprise whether that be through visceral impact, subversive content, experiments with identity or the exploration of the taboo. Representation, as defined by the eleven essays in this book, is a fluid and dynamic approach to the study of film. The study of film, to which this book contributes some unique case studies, is as popular as ever and has withstood growing challenge from the new media such as CG Animations, the internet and computer, console and online gaming. This is because the pleasure of film is still the most humanistic and because the sophistication of the representations offered by cinematic expression remain ever more complex and pleasurable to decipher. This book can therefore be read by any student, academic, writer or filmmaker hooked on these delights.

New Chinese Cinema: Challenging Representations examines the ‘search for roots’ films that emerged from China in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. The authors contextualize the films of the so-called Fifth Generation directors who came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, and Tian Zhuangzhuang. Including close analysis of such pivotal films as Farewell My Concubine, Raise the Red Lantern, and The Blue Kite, this book also examines the rise of contemporary Sixth Generation underground directors whose themes embrace the disaffection of urban youth.

This book analyzes the changes in the representation of women in Iranian cinema since the 1960s, and investigates the reasons and motives for this. Iranian cinema, both before and after the Islamic Revolution, has been closely monitored by the ruling power, and has been utilized to relay messages and information that comply with the ruling ideology. However, it was only after the 1979 Revolution and the subsequent legitimization of cinema by the Islamic rule that cinema became widely accessible to the general public. Within this context, this book explores the changing roles of women in film production and their representation in films made between the 1960s and 2000s. Although some aspects of women’s lives became stricter after the revolution, it was in the late 1980s that women took a prominent role both behind and in front of the camera for the first time. It is demonstrated here that such shifts were due to several factors, including factionalism within the Islamic Republic, shifts in the Iranian film industry, and the emergence of a group of highly educated film production teams, in addition to the fuller integration of women into the film industry, which is analyzed in particular detail. This study explores a number of representative female-centric films, with a focus on their cultural, social and cinematic contexts. Discussing these films with respect to the representation of women, it uses textual analysis as its base methodology. Interviews conducted with filmmakers and people active in the industry also serve to place the films into their historical, social, and political context.