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A Critical Companion to Terry Gilliam provides a fresh, up-to-date exploration of the director’s films and artistic practices, ranging from his first film Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) to his recently released and latest film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018). This volume presents Gilliam as a director whose films weave together an avant-garde cinematic style, imaginative exaggeration, and social critique. Consequently, while his films can seem artistically chaotic and thus have the effect of frustrating and upsetting the viewer, the essays in this volume show that this is part of a very disciplined creative plan to achieve the defamiliarization of various accepted notions of human and social life.
This edited collection aims to respond to dominant perspectives on twenty-first-century war by exploring how the events of 9/11 and the subsequent Wars on Terror are represented and remembered outside of the US framework. Existing critical coverage ignores the meaning of these events for people, nations and cultures apparently peripheral to them but which have - as shown in this collection - been extraordinarily affected by the social, political and cultural changes these wars have wrought. Adopting a literary and cultural history approach, the book asks how these events resonate and continue to show effects in the rest of the world, with a particular focus on Australia and Britain. It argue...
Even though much has been said and written about 9/11, the work developed on this subject has mostly explored it as an unparalleled event, a turning point in history. This book wishes to look instead at how disruptive events promote a network of associations and how people resort to comparison as a means to make sense of the unknown, i.e. to comprehend what seems incomprehensible. In order to effectively discuss the complexity of 9/11, this book articulates different fields of knowledge and perspectives such as visual culture, media studies, performance studies, critical theory, memory studies and literary studies to shed some light on 9/11 and analyze how the event has impacted on American social and cultural fabric and how the American society has come to terms with such a devastating event. A more in-depth study of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close draws attention to the cultural construction of catastrophe and the plethora of cultural products 9/11 has inspired. It demonstrates how the event has been integrated into American culture and exemplifies what makes up the 9/11 imaginary.
Men and women struggling for control of marriage and sexuality; narratives that focus on trickery, theft, and adultery; descriptions of sexual activities and body parts, the mention of which is prohibited in polite society: such are the elements that constitute what Nicole Nolan Sidhu calls a medieval discourse of obscene comedy, in which a particular way of thinking about men, women, and household organization crosses genres, forms, and languages. Inviting its audiences to laugh at violations of what is good, decent, and seemly, obscene comedy manifests a semiotic instability that at once supports established hierarchies and delights in overturning them. In Indecent Exposure, Sidhu explores...
Explores how games actively influence the ways people interpret and relate to American life. In 1975, design engineer Dave Nutting completed work on a new arcade machine. A version of Taito's Western Gun, a recent Japanese arcade machine, Nutting's Gun Fight depicted a classic showdown between gunfighters. Rich in Western folklore, the game seemed perfect for the American market; players easily adapted to the new technology, becoming pistol-wielding pixel cowboys. One of the first successful early arcade titles, Gun Fight helped introduce an entire nation to video-gaming and sold more than 8,000 units. In Gamer Nation, John Wills examines how video games co-opt national landscapes, livelihoo...
This book contends that Hollywood films help illuminate the incongruities of various periods in American diplomacy. From the war film Bataan to the Revisionist Western The Wild Bunch, cinema has long reflected US foreign policy’s divisiveness both directly and allegorically. Beginning with the 1990s presidential drama The American President and concluding with Joker’s allegorical treatment of the Trump era, this book posits that the paradigms for political reflection are shifting in American film, from explicit subtexts surrounding US statecraft to covert representations of diplomatic disarray. It further argues that the International Relations theorist Walter Mead’s concept of a US polity dominated by contesting beliefs, or a ‘kaleidoscope’, permeates these changing paradigms. This synergy reveals a cultural milieu where foreign policy fissures are increasingly encoded by cinematic representation. The interdisciplinarity of this focus renders this book pertinent reading for scholars and students of American Studies, Film Studies and International Relations, along with those generally interested in Hollywood filmmakers and foreign policy.
For more than 30 years, Lifetime has aired a broad range of programming, including original movies, sitcoms, dramas and reality shows. As other networks dedicated to women have come and gone, Lifetime continues to thrive in an ever-expanding cable marketplace, exploring such sensitive topics as race, commercialism, eating disorders, rape and domestic violence. This collection of new essays is the first to focus on Lifetime and the programs that helped define the network's brand that appeals to both viewers and advertisers. Series like Project Runway, Girlfriend Intervention and Army Wives are explored in depth. The contributors discuss the network's large opus of original films, as well at its online presence.
"This book describes in detail how music and sound function as a constituent part of the prestige combat film's larger work of memorialization in the cultural realm of commercial cinema. As Rikke Schubart and Anne Gjelsvik note, historians must deal with 'the complexity of history, war, heroism, patriotism, memory, and the process of their representation.' Hymns for the Fallen traces an expressive sonic continuity in this 'process of representation' for serious war films. The three elements of the soundtrack--dialogue, sound effects, music--are treated in detail in the chapters which follow, although music proves to be of particular interest."--Site de l'éditeur.
The Health of the State is a cultural history that explores how war writing figured in three phases of modern America's political evolution: Civil War remembrance during the Progressive Era, the culture of World War I and the new internationalism, and World War II's legitimation of Cold War liberalism.