You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The chapter Experiencing Male Dominance in Swedish Film Production” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
The history of postwar German cinema has most often been told as a story of failure, a failure paradoxically epitomized by the remarkable popularity of film throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. Through the analysis of 10 representative films, Hester Baer reassesses this period, looking in particular at how the attempt to 'dismantle the dream factory' of Nazi entertainment cinema resulted in a new cinematic language which developed as a result of the changing audience demographic. In an era when female viewers comprised 70 per cent of cinema audiences a 'women's cinema' emerged, which sought to appeal to female spectators through its genres, star choices, stories and formal conventions. In addition to analyzing the formal language and narrative content of these films, Baer uses a wide array of other sources to reconstruct the original context of their reception, including promotional and publicity materials, film programs, censorship documents, reviews and spreads in fan magazines. This book presents a new take on an essential period, which saw the rebirth of German cinema after its thorough delegitimization under the Nazi regime.
Drawing on quantitative and qualitative audience research to understand how viewers categorize the reality genre. From Animal Hospital to Big Brother, this book examines the voices of people who watch reality programmes.
What happens to our sense of agency, our general ability to perform actions in our life worlds, in the course of media reception and appropriation? Whilst considering media communication as a special form of social action, this work reconsiders the key concepts of social action theory, pragmatism, communication theory as well as film, game and television theory. It thus integrates agency as the key to understanding ‘doing media’ and at the same time conceptualizes agency as a specific mode of involvement across media boundaries. This approach amalgamates miscellaneous ideas and conceptions such as interactivity, participation, cognitive control, play or empowerment and applies the theoretical considerations on the basis of textual analyses of the films Inception and The Proposal, the TV shows Lost and I’m a Celebrity and the video games Grand Theft Auto IV and The Walking Dead.
Food is everywhere in contemporary mediascapes, as witnessed by the increase in cookbooks, food magazines, television cookery shows, online blogs, recipes, news items and social media posts about food. This mediatization of food means that the media often interplays between food consumption and everyday practices, between private and political matters and between individuals, groups, and societies. This volume argues that contemporary food studies need to pay more attention to the significance of media in relation to how we 'do' food. Understanding food media is particularly central to the diverse contemporary social and cultural practices of food where media use plays an increasingly important but also differentiated and differentiating role in both large-scale decisions and most people's everyday practices. The contributions in this book offer critical studies of food media discourses and of media users' interpretations, negotiations and uses that construct places and spaces as well as possible identities and everyday practices of sameness or otherness that might form new, or renew old food politics.
It is said that the ontology of data resists slowness and also that the digital revolution promised a levelling of the playing field. Both theories are examined in this timely collection of chapters looking at time in the digital world. Since data has assumed such a paramount place in the modern neoliberal world, contemporary concepts of time have undergone radical transformation. By critically assessing the emerging initiatives of slowing down in the digital age, this book investigates the role of the digital in ultimately reinforcing neo-liberal temporalities. It shows that both "speed-up" and "slow down" imperatives often function as a form of biopolitical social control necessary to contemporary global capitalism. Problematic paradoxes emerge where a successful slow down and digital detox ultimately are only successful if the individual returns to the world as a more productive, labouring neoliberal subject. Is there another way? The chapters in this collection, broken up into three parts, ask that question.
Can a video game make you cry? Why do you relate to the characters and how do you engage with the storyworlds they inhabit? How is your body engaged in play? How are your actions guided by sociocultural norms and experiences? Questions like these address a core aspect of digital gaming--the video game experience itself--and are of interest to many game scholars and designers. With psychological theories of cognition, affect and emotion as reference points, this collection of new essays offers various perspectives on how players think and feel about video games and how game design and analysis can build on these processes.
In Posthuman Buddhism and the Digital Self, Les Roberts extends his earlier work on spatial anthropology to consider questions of time, spaciousness and the phenomenology of self. Across the book’s four main chapters – which range from David Bowie’s long-standing interest in Buddhism, to street photography of 1980s Liverpool, to the ambient soundscapes of Derek Jarman’s Blue, or to the slow, contemplative cinema of Tsai Ming-Liang – Roberts lays the groundwork for the concept of ‘dwellspace’ as a means by which to unpick the shifting spatial, temporal and experiential modalities of everyday mediascapes. Understood as a particular disposition towards time, Roberts’s foray into...
This volume maps the phenomenon of medievalism in Aotearoa, initially as an import by the early white settler society, and as a form of nation building that would reinforce Britishness and ancestral belonging. This colonial narrative underpins the volume’s focus on the imperial relationship in chapters on the academic study of the Middle Ages, on medievalism in film and music, in manuscript and book collections, and colonial stained glass and architecture. Through the alternative 21st-century frameworks of a global Middle Ages and Aotearoa’s bicultural nationalism, the volume also introduces Maori understandings of the ancestral past that parallel the European epoch and, at the opposite ...
Tracing the history of reality TV from Candid Camera to The Osbournes, Understanding Reality Television examines a range of programmes which claim to depict 'real life'.