Film As Social Practice

Publisher description

Turner provides a clear introduction to major theoretical issues in the history of film production and film studies, examining the function of film as a national cultural industry, and its place in our popular culture.

Turner provides a clear introduction to major theoretical issues in the history of film production and film studies, examining the function of film as a national cultural industry, and its place in our popular culture.

Surveying disaster films from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, this book explores the disaster film genre from its initial appearance in 1933 (The Grapes of Wrath, 1933) to its present-day form (Don’t Look Up!, 2021), laying bare the ideological unconscious at work within the genre. The Disaster Film as Social Practice examines environmental science, history, film and literature in its interdisciplinary analysis of the disaster film genre. It explores the interplay, and the dichotomy, of “restorative” and “reflective” disaster narratives. An analysis of cinema's role in symbolizing and managing collective anxiety around disaster and death narratives examines how disaster films, through their narrative structures and symbolic elements, contribute to the public's understanding and emotional processing of real-world threats, and how cinematic narratives shape and are shaped by public and private ideological discourses, reflecting deeper psychological and environmental truths. Finally, the book offers an overview of how the transformation of the disaster film genre over time tells a history through imagining the worst. Providing a nuanced understanding of the disaster film genre and its significance in contemporary culture and thought, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of film studies, cultural studies, media studies, and environmental studies.

This book analyzes the cinematic superhero as social practice. The study’s critical context brings together psychoanalysis and restorative and reflective nostalgia as a way of understanding the ideological function of superhero fantasy. It explores the origins of cinematic superhero fantasy from antecedents in myth and religion, to twentieth-century comic book, to the cinematic breakthrough with Superman (1978). The authors then focus on Spider-Man as reflective response to Superman’s restorative nostalgia, and read MCU’s overarching narrative from Iron Man to End Game in terms of the concurrent social, political, and environmental conditions as a world in crisis. Zornado and Reilly take up Wonder Woman and Black Panther as self-conscious attempts to reflect on gender and race in restorative superhero fantasy, and explore Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy as a meditation on the need for authoritarian fascism. The book concludes with Logan, Wonder Woman 1984, and Amazon Prime’s The Boys as distinctly reflective fantasy narratives critical of the superhero fantasy phenomenon.

With a focus on socially engaged art practices in the twenty-first century, this book explores how artists use their creative practices to raise consciousness, form communities, create change, and bring forth social impact through new technologies and digital practices. Suzanne Lacy’s Foreword and section introduction authors Anne Balsamo, Harrell Fletcher, Natalie Loveless, Karen Moss, and Stephanie Rothenberg present twenty-five in-depth case studies by established and emerging contemporary artists including Kim Abeles, Christopher Blay, Joseph DeLappe, Mary Beth Heffernan, Chris Johnson, Rebekah Modrak, Praba Pilar, Tabita Rezaire, Sylvain Souklaye, and collaborators Victoria Vesna and Siddharth Ramakrishnan. Artists offer firsthand insight into how they activate methods used in socially engaged art projects from the twentieth century and incorporated new technologies to create twenty-first century, socially engaged, digital art practices. Works highlighted in this book span collaborative image-making, immersive experiences, telematic art, time machines, artificial intelligence, and physical computing. These reflective case studies reveal how the artists collaborate with participants and communities, and have found ways to expand, transform, reimagine, and create new platforms for meaningful exchange in both physical and virtual spaces. An invaluable resource for students and scholars of art, technology, and new media, as well as artists interested in exploring these intersections.

In An Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy offers an engaging overview of an important trend--the filmmaking of postcolonial, Third World, and other displaced individuals living in the West. How their personal experiences of exile or diaspora translate into cinema is a key focus of Naficy's work. Although the experience of expatriation varies greatly from one person to the next, the films themselves exhibit stylistic similarities, from their open- and closed-form aesthetics to their nostalgic and memory-driven multilingual narratives, and from their emphasis on political agency to their concern with identity and transgression of identity. The author explores such features while considering the specific histories of individuals and groups that engender divergent experiences, institutions, and modes of cultural production and consumption. Treating creativity as a social practice, he demonstrates that the films are in dialogue not only with the home and host societies but also with audiences, many of whom are also situated astride cultures and whose desires and fears the filmmakers wish to express. Comparing these films to Hollywood films, Naficy calls them "accented." Their accent results from the displacement of the filmmakers, their alternative production modes, and their style. Accented cinema is an emerging genre, one that requires new sets of viewing skills on the part of audiences. Its significance continues to grow in terms of output, stylistic variety, cultural diversity, and social impact. This book offers the first comprehensive and global coverage of this genre while presenting a framework in which to understand its intricacies.

This classic in film theory, presents a systematic study of the techniques of the film medium and of their potential uses for creating formal structures in individual films such as Dovzhenko's Earth, Antonioni's La Notte, Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, Renoir's Nana, and Godard's Pierrot le Fou. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Videography of Darcy Lange is a critical monograph of a pivotal figure in early analogue video. Trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art, Lange developed a socially engaged video practice with remarkable studies of people at work in industrial, farming, and teaching contexts that drew from conceptual art, social documentary and structuralist filmmaking. Lange saw in portable video a democratic tool for communication and social transformation, continuing the legacy of the revolutionary avant-garde projects that merged art with social life and turned audiences into producers. This book follows Lange's trajectory from his early observational studies to the crisis of representation and socially engaged video and activism, as it is shaped by, and resists, the artistic, cultural and political preoccupations of the 1970s and 1980s. It strikes a balance between being a monographic account providing a close analysis of Lange's oeuvre and drawing from unpublished archival materials—a sort of catalogue raisonné—whilst maintaining a breadth with theoretical discourses around the themes of labour and class, education, and indigenous struggles central to his work. The book's frameworks of Conceptual Art, structuralist and ethnographic film theory, social documentary and the critique of representation, video as social practice and the notion of 'feedback', participatory socially engaged art and postcolonial and indigenous theory,—expand our understanding of video outside the predominant structuralist tendencies. Lange's transnational and nomadic career introduces notions of alterity and challenges nationalistic accounts that excluded him in the past.

In this remarkable sequel to his Films of the Seventies: A Social History, William J. Palmer examines more than three hundred films as texts that represent, revise, parody, comment upon, and generate discussion about major events, issues, and social trends of the eighties. Palmer defines the dialectic between film art and social history, taking as his theoretical model the "holograph of history" that originated from the New Historicist theories of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra. Combining the interests and methodologies of social history and film criticism, Palmer contends that film is a socially conscious interpreter and commentator upon the issues of contemporary social history. In the eighties, such issues included the war in Vietnam, the preservation of the American farm, terrorism, nuclear holocaust, changes in Soviet-American relations, neoconservative feminism, and yuppies. Among the films Palmer examines are Platoon, The Killing Fields, The River, Out of Africa, Little Drummer Girl, Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Silkwood, The Day After, Red Dawn, Moscow on the Hudson, Troop Beverly Hills, and Fatal Attraction. Utilizing the principles of New Historicism, Palmer demonstrates that film can analyze and critique history as well as present it.