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VOLUME 2: "Movies and Methods," Volume II, captures the developments that have given history and genre studies imaginative new models and indicates how feminist, structuralist, and psychoanalytic approaches to film have achieved fresh, valuable insights. In his thoughtful introduction, Nichols provides a context for the paradoxes that confront film studies today. He shows how shared methods and approaches continue to stimulate much of the best writing about film, points to common problems most critics and theorists have tried to resolve, and describes the internal contraditions that have restricted the usefulness of post-structuralism. Mini-introductions place each essay in a larger context ...
What did it feel like to be a child in France during World War II? Feeling Memory is an affective exploration of children’s lives in wartime France and the ways they are remembered. Lindsey Dodd draws on the recorded oral narratives of a hundred people to examine the variety of experiences children had during the war. She considers different aspects of remembering, underscoring the centrality of emotion to memory. This book covers a wide range of locations—the country and the city, Occupied France and the Free Zone—and situations—well-off and poor children, those separated from their families and those with them; it places Jewish children’s experiences alongside non-Jewish children...
The hugely acclaimed biography of one of history's greatest directors, Jean-Luc Godard 'MacCabe's book is in a league of its own ... this is a rich, rewarding and essential read for anyone seriously interested in the intellectual, cultural and cinematic history of Europe since World War II' Sight and Sound 'Godard fans, practitioners of cinema and anyone interested in the intellectual and artistic life of the second half of the twentieth century should read this important and entertaining book' Observer Jean-Luc Godard's early films revolutionised the language of cinema for everyone, from the Superbrats of Hollywood to the political cinema of the Third World. Yet in l968 he abandoned one of ...
The Comedy of Philosophy brings modern debates in continental philosophy to bear on the historical study of early cinematic comedy. Through the films of Mack Sennett, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and the Marx Brothers, Lisa Trahair investigates early cinema's exploration of sense and nonsense by utilizing the contributions to the philosophy of comedy made by Freud and Bataille and by examining significant poststructuralist interpretations of their work. Trahair explores the shift from the excessive physical slapstick of the Mack Sennett era to the so-called structural comedy of the 1920s, and also offers a new perspective on the importance of psychoanalysis for the study of film by focusing on the implications of Freud's theory of the unconscious for our understanding of visuality.
D.N. Rodowick offers a critical analysis of the development of film theory since 1968. He shows how debates concerning the literary principles of modernism—semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and feminism—have transformed our understanding of cinematic meaning. Rodowick explores the literary paradigms established in France during the late 1960s and traces their influence on the work of diverse filmmaker/theorists including Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Gidal, Laura Mulvey, and Peter Wollen. By exploring the "new French feminisms" of Irigaray and Kristeva, he investigates the relation of political modernism to psychoanalysis and theories of sexual difference. In a new introduction...
Despite altruistic goals, humanitarianism often propagates foreign, and sometimes unjust, power structures where it is employed. Tracing the visual rhetoric of French colonial humanitarianism, Peter J. Bloom's unexpected analysis reveals how the project of remaking the colonies in the image of France was integral to its national identity. French Colonial Documentary investigates how the promise of universal citizenship rights in France was projected onto the colonies as a form of evolutionary interventionism. Bloom focuses on the promotion of French education efforts, hygienic reform, and new agricultural techniques in the colonies as a means of renegotiating the social contract between citi...
Noel Burch's new book is a critique of the assumptions underlying 'classical' approaches to film history: the assumption that what we call the language of film was a natural, organic development, that it lay latent from the outset in the basic technology of the camera, waiting for the prescient pioneers to bring it into being; and the assumption that this language was a universal, neutral medium, innocent of any social or historical meaning in itself." "His major thesis is that, on the contrary, film language has a social and economic history, that it evolved in the way it did because of when and where it was constructed -- in the capitalist and imperialist west between 1892 and 1929." "The ...
When a filmmaker makes a film with herself as a subject, she is already divided as both the subject matter of the film and the subject making the film. The two senses of the word are immediately in play - the matter and the maker--thus the two ways of being subjectified as both subject and object. Subjectivity finds its filmic expression, not surprisingly, in very personal ways, yet it is nonetheless shaped by and in relation to collective expressions of identity that can transform the cinema of 'me' into the cinema of 'we'. Leading scholars and practitioners of first-person film are brought together in this groundbreaking collection to consider the theoretical, ideological, and aesthetic challenges wrought by this form of filmmaking in its diverse cultural, geographical, and political contexts.
This book takes a new look at the 'spatial turn' in French cultural and critical theory since 1968. It examines how key thinkers (inc. Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Jean Baudrillard, Marc Augé, Paul Virilio, Bruno Latour and Etienne Balibar) reconsider the experience of space in the midst of considerable political and economic turmoil.