After Taste: Cultural Value and the Moving Image

After Taste: Cultural Value and the Moving Image
Author: Julia Vassilieva
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2014-01-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317984684

In the wake of the debates over high/low culture distinction spilling into the effective dismantling of the boundary that once separated them, the past decade has seen the explosion of ‘bad taste’ production on screen. Starting with paracinema or ‘badfilm’ – a movement that has grown up around sleazy, excessive, or poorly executed B-movies and has come to encompass disreputable and unworthy films – this trend has been evident in various formats: on television and in video-art, low-budget and straight to TV films, amateur and home movies. The proliferation of trash on screen can be seen as delivering the final blow to the vexed issue of taste. More importantly, it prompts a reconsideration of some critical issues surrounding production, circulation, understanding and teaching of ‘bad objects’ in the media. This collection of essays, written by international film and television scholars, provides detailed critical analysis of the issues surrounding judgements of cultural value and taste, feeling and affect, cultural morals and politics, research methodologies and teaching strategies in the new landscape of ‘after taste’ media. Addressing global and local developments – from global Hollywood to Australian indigenous film and television, through auteurs Sergei Eisenstein to Jerry Bruckheimer, on to examples such as Twilight to Sukiyaki Western Django – the essays in this book offer a range of critical tools for understanding the recent shifts affecting cultural, aesthetic and political value of the moving image. This book was originally published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies.

B Is for Bad Cinema

B Is for Bad Cinema
Author: Claire Perkins
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2014-03-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 143844995X

Considers films that lurk on the boundaries of acceptability in taste, style, and politics. B Is for Bad Cinema continues and extends, but does not limit itself to, the trends in film scholarship that have made cult and exploitation films and other “low” genres increasingly acceptable objects for critical analysis. Springing from discussions of taste and value in film, these original essays mark out the broad contours of “bad”—that is, aesthetically, morally, or commercially disreputable—cinema. While some of the essays share a kinship with recent discussions of B movies and cult films, they do not describe a single aesthetic category or represent a single methodology or critical agenda, but variously approach bad cinema in terms of aesthetics, politics, and cultural value. The volume covers a range of issues, from the aesthetic and industrial mechanics of low-budget production through the terrain of audience responses and cinematic affect, and on to the broader moral and ethical implications of the material. As a result, B Is for Bad Cinema takes an interest in a variety of film examples—overblown Hollywood blockbusters, faux pornographic works, and European art house films—to consider those that lurk on the boundaries of acceptability.

Film Trilogies

Film Trilogies
Author: C. Perkins
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2012-02-21
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0230371973

Drawing on a wide range of examples, this book – the first devoted to the phenomenon of the film trilogy– provides a dynamic investigation of the ways in which the trilogy form engages key issues in contemporary discussions of film remaking, adaptation, sequelization and serialization.

A Companion to Australian Cinema

A Companion to Australian Cinema
Author: Felicity Collins
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 634
Release: 2019-04-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1118942558

The first comprehensive volume of original essays on Australian screen culture in the twenty-first century. A Companion to Australian Cinema is an anthology of original essays by new and established authors on the contemporary state and future directions of a well-established national cinema. A timely intervention that challenges and expands the idea of cinema, this book brings into sharp focus those facets of Australian cinema that have endured, evolved and emerged in the twenty-first century. The essays address six thematically-organized propositions – that Australian cinema is an Indigenous screen culture, an international cinema, a minor transnational imaginary, an enduring auteur-genre-landscape tradition, a televisual industry and a multiplatform ecology. Offering fresh critical perspectives and extending previous scholarship, case studies range from The Lego Movie, Mad Max, and Australian stars in Hollywood, to transnational co-productions, YouTube channels, transmedia and nature-cam documentaries. New research on trends – such as the convergence of television and film, digital transformations of screen production and the shifting roles of women on and off-screen – highlight how established precedents have been influenced by new realities beyond both cinema and the national. Written in an accessible style that does not require knowledge of cinema studies or Australian studies Presents original research on Australian actors, such as Cate Blanchett and Chris Hemsworth, their training, branding, and path from Australia to Hollywood Explores the films and filmmakers of the Blak Wave and their challenge to Australian settler-colonial history and white identity Expands the critical definition of cinema to include YouTube channels, transmedia documentaries, multiplatform changescapes and cinematic remix Introduces readers to founding texts in Australian screen studies A Companion to Australian Cinema is an ideal introductory text for teachers and students in areas including film and media studies, cultural and gender studies, and Australian history and politics, as well as a valuable resource for educators and other professionals in the humanities and creative arts.

concepts

concepts
Author: Bernd Herzogenrath
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2022-12-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501375318

This book foregrounds that English monolingualism reduces both our linguistic and conceptual resources, presenting concepts from the cultures of 4 continents and 26 languages. Concepts seem to work best when created in the interspace between theory and praxis, and between philosophy, art, and science. Deleuze himself had generated many concepts in this encounter between philosophy and non-philosophy, including his ideas of affects and percepts, of becoming, the stutter, the rhizome, movement-image and time-image, the rhizome. What happens, if instead of "other disciplines," we take other cultures, other languages, other philosophies? Does not the focus on English as a hegemonic language of academic discourse deny us a plethora of possibilities, of possible Denkfiguren, of possible concepts? Each contributor explores ideas that are key to thinking in their language – about sound and silence, voice and image, living and thinking, the self and the world - while simultaneously addressing the issue of translation. Each chapter demonstrates that translation itself is a way of invention, rather than just a rendering of concepts from one system in terms of another. This collection acts as a travelogue. The journey does not follow a particular trajectory-some countries are not on the map; some are visited twice. So, there is no claim to completeness involved here-it is rather an invitation to answer to the call.

Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity

Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity
Author: Nardelli Matilde Nardelli
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2020-09-04
Genre: Electronic books
ISBN: 1474444067

Influential, innovative and aesthetically experimental, the films of Michelangelo Antonioni are widely recognized as both exemplars of cinema and key in ushering in its 'new' or 'modern' incarnation around 1960. Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity offers a radical rethinking of the director's work. It argues against prevalent understandings of it in terms of both cinematic purity and indebtedness to painting. Reconnecting Antonioni's aesthetically audacious films of the 1960s and 1970s to the ferment of their historical time, Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity brings into relief these works' crucial, yet overlooked, affinity with the new, 'impure', art practices - of John Cage, Franco Vaccari, Robert Smithson, Piero Gilardi and Andy Warhol among others - that precipitated the demotion of painting from its privileged position as a paradigm for all the arts. Revealing an Antonioni who embraced both mixed and mass media and reflected on them via cinema, the book replaces auteuristic, if not hagiographic, accounts of the director's work with a new understanding of its critical significance across the modern visual arts and culture more broadly.

Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots

Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots
Author: Amanda Ann Klein
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2016-03-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1477308199

With sequels, prequels, remakes, spin-offs, or copies of successful films or franchises dominating film and television production, it sometimes seems as if Hollywood is incapable of making an original film or TV show. These textual pluralities or multiplicities—while loved by fans who flock to them in droves—tend to be dismissed by critics and scholars as markers of the death of high culture. Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots takes the opposite view, surveying a wide range of international media multiplicities for the first time to elucidate their importance for audiences, industrial practices, and popular culture. The essays in this volume offer a broad picture of the ways in which cinema and television have used multiplicities to streamline the production process, and to capitalize on and exploit viewer interest in previously successful and/or sensational story properties. An impressive lineup of established and emerging scholars talk seriously about forms of multiplicity that are rarely discussed as such, including direct-to-DVD films made in Nigeria, cross-cultural Japanese horror remakes, YouTube fan-generated trailer mash-ups, and 1970s animal revenge films. They show how considering the particular bonds that tie texts to one another allows us to understand more about the audiences for these texts and why they crave a version of the same story (or character or subject) over and over again. These findings demonstrate that, far from being lowbrow art, multiplicities are actually doing important cultural work that is very worthy of serious study.

Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness

Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness
Author: Song Hwee Lim
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2014-01-31
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0824839234

How can we qualify slowness in cinema? What is the relationship between a cinema of slowness and a wider socio-cultural “slow movement”? A body of films that shares a propensity toward slowness has emerged in many parts of the world over the past two decades. This is the first book to examine the concept of cinematic slowness and address this fascinating phenomenon in contemporary film culture. Providing a critical investigation into questions of temporality, materiality, and aesthetics, and examining concepts of authorship, cinephilia, and nostalgia, Song Hwee Lim offers insight into cinematic slowness through the films of the Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang. Through detailed analysis of aspects of stillness and silence in cinema, Lim delineates the strategies by which slowness in film can be constructed. By drawing on writings on cinephilia and the films of directors such as Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, he makes a passionate case for a slow cinema that calls for renewed attention to the image and to the experience of time in film. Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness will speak to readers with an interest in art cinema, queer studies, East Asian culture, and the question of time. In an age of unrelenting acceleration of pace both in film and in life, this book invites us to pause and listen, to linger and look, and, above all, to take things slowly.

Transnational Television Remakes

Transnational Television Remakes
Author: Claire Perkins
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2018-02-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317213351

Providing a cross-cultural investigation of the current phenomenon of transnational television remakes, and assembling an international team of scholars, this book draws upon ideas from transnational media and cultural studies to offer an understanding of global cultural borrowings and format translation. While recognising the commercial logic of global television formats that animates these remakes, the collection describes the traffic in transnational television remakes not as a one-way process of cultural homogenisation, but rather as an interstitial process through which cultures borrow from and interact with one another. More specifically, the chapters attend to recent debates around the transnational flows of local and global media cultures to focus on questions in the televisual realm, where issues of serialisation and distribution are prevalent. What happens when a series is remade from one national television system to another? How is cultural translation handled across series and seasons of differing length and scope? What are the narrative and dramaturgical proximities and differences between local and other versions? How does the ready availability of original, foreign series shape an audience’s reception of a local remake? How does the rhetoric of ‘Quality TV’ impact on how these remakes are understood and valued? In answering these and other questions, this volume at once acknowledges both the historical antecedents to transnational trade in broadcast culture, and the global explosion in, and cultural significance of, transnational television remakes since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This book was originally published as a special issue of Continuum.

Australian Film Theory and Criticism

Australian Film Theory and Criticism
Author: Deane Williams
Publisher: Intellect Books
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2013-07-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1783203242

The first part of a planned three-volume work devoted to mapping the transnational history of Australian film studies, Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Volume 1 provides an overview of the period between 1975 and 1990, during which the discipline first became established in the academy. Tracing critical positions, personnel, and institutions across this formative period, Noel King, Constantine Verevis, and Deane Williams examine a multitude of books and journal articles published in Australia and distributed internationally though such processes as publication in overseas journals, translation, and reprinting. At the same time, they offer important insights about the origins of Australian film theory and its relationship to such related disciplines as English, and cultural studies. Ultimately, Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Volume 1 delineates the historical implications—and reveals the future possibilities—of establishing new directions of inquiry for film studies in Australia and internationally.