The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television

The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television
Author: Kirk Boyle
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2013-10-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0739180649

The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television: Twenty-First-Century Bust Culture sheds light on how imaginary works of fiction, film, and television reflect, refract, and respond to the recessionary times specific to the twenty-first century, a sustained period of economic crisis that has earned the title the “Great Recession.” This collection takes as its focus “Bust Culture,” a concept that refers to post-crash popular culture, specifically the kind mass produced by multinational corporations in the age of media conglomeration, which is inflected by diminishment, influenced by scarcity, and infused with anxiety. The multidisciplinary contributors collected here examine mass culture not typically included in discussions of the financial meltdown, from disaster films to reality TV hoarders, the horror genre to reactionary representations of women, Christian right radio to Batman, television characters of color to graphic novels and literary fiction. The collected essays treat our busted culture as a seismograph that registers the traumas of collapse, and locate their pop artifacts along a spectrum of ideological fantasies, social erasures, and profound fears inspired by the Great Recession. What they discover from these unlikely indicators of the recession is a mix of regressive, progressive, and bemused texts in need of critical translation.

After "Happily Ever After"

After
Author: Maria San Filippo
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2021-05-18
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0814346758

This volume is intended for all readers with an interest in film, media, and gender studies.

Screening the Crisis

Screening the Crisis
Author: Hilaria Loyo
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2022-07-14
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1501388134

The financial collapse of 2008 extended and deepened a prolonged, multilayered crisis that has transformed, often in unexpected ways, how we think about all aspects of social life. Amid these turbulent times, film studies scholars have begun to ask new questions and create fresh strategies in order to integrate intellectual and political work in ways that directly address our current predicament. This timely volume reconsiders the relationships between cinema and society at a time when neoliberal policies threaten not only civic culture but also nearly every aspect of human life. Screening the Crisis brings together established authors as well as brilliant young scholars in the field of film studies to explore the ways in which new tendencies in US cinema enhance awareness of the complexity of the problems facing contemporary society. The issues addressed include economic inequality, shifts in gender roles, racial conflicts, immigration, surveillance practices, the environmental crisis, the politics of housing, and the fragility of nationhood. These questions are explored through in-depth studies and contextualized analyses of a wide variety of recent films, genres, and filmmakers. With its ample range of topics and perspectives, this collection provides an essential reference work for those who want to research how US cinema has responded to the manifold interconnected crises that characterize our current times.

Performing Hysteria

Performing Hysteria
Author: Johanna Braun
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2020-11-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 946270211X

We seem to be living in hysterical times. A simple Google search reveals the sheer bottomless well of “hysterical” discussions on diverse topics such as the #metoo movement, Trumpianism, border wars, Brexit, transgender liberation, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, and climate change, to name only a few. Against the backdrop of such recent deployments of hysteria in popular discourse––particularly as they emerge in times of material and hermeneutic crisis––Performing Hysteria re-engages the notion of “hysteria”. Performing Hysteria rigorously mines late 20th- and early 21st-century (primarily visual) culture for signs of hysteria. The various essays in this volume contribute to the multilayered and complex discussions that surround and foster this resurgent interest in hysteria––covering such areas as art, literature, theatre, film, television, dance; crossing such disciplines as cultural studies, political science, philosophy, history, media, disability, race and ethnicity, and gender studies; and analysing stereotypical images and representations of the hysteric in relation to cultural sciences and media studies. Of particular importance is the volume's insistence on taking the intersection of hysteria and performance seriously.

White Terror

White Terror
Author: Russell Meeuf
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2022-04-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0253060400

What kinds of terror lurk beneath the surface of White respectability? Many of the top-grossing US horror films between 2008 and 2016 relied heavily on themes of White, patriarchal fear and fragility: outsiders disrupting the sanctity of the almost always White family, evil forces or transgressive ideas transforming loved ones, and children dying when White women eschew traditional maternal roles. Horror film has a long history of radical, political commentary, and Russell Meeuf reveals how racial resentments represented specifically in horror films produced during the Obama era gave rise to the Trump presidency and the Make America Great Again movement. Featuring films such as The Conjuring and Don't Breathe, White Terror explores how motifs of home invasion, exorcism, possession, and hauntings mirror cultural debates around White masculinity, class, religion, socioeconomics, and more. In the vein of Jordan Peele, White Terror exposes how White mainstream fear affects the horror film industry, which in turn cashes in on that fear and draws voters to candidates like Trump.

Allegories of the End of Capitalism

Allegories of the End of Capitalism
Author: Milo Sweedler
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2020-01-31
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1785358634

In Allegories of the End of Capitalism, Milo Sweedler deconstructs the events of films Melancholia; Cosmopolis; Suffragette; Django Unchained; Elysium and Snowpiercer, the socio-political contexts they arise from and enter into, and their impact on contemporary culture and life. He examines how filmmakers from six different countries, across four continents, give narrative and audio-visual form to the frustration and anger that burst into public view in 2011, the ongoing class war between the super-rich and the rest of the world's population, and the insurrection that it yet to come.

Dark Forces at Work

Dark Forces at Work
Author: Cynthia J. Miller
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2019-11-06
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1498588565

Dark Forces at Work examines the role of race, class, gender, religion, and the economy as they are portrayed in, and help construct, horror narratives across a range of films and eras. These larger social forces not only create the context for our cinematic horrors, but serve as connective tissue between fantasy and lived reality, as well. While several of the essays focus on “name” horror films such as IT, Get Out, Hellraiser, and Don’t Breathe, the collection also features essays focused on horror films produced in Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and on American classic thrillers such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Key social issues addressed include the war on terror, poverty, the housing crisis, and the Time’s Up movement. The volume grounds its analysis in the films, rather than theory, in order to explore the ways in which institutions, identities, and ideologies work within the horror genre.

Global Finance on Screen

Global Finance on Screen
Author: Constantin Parvulescu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2017-12-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351696645

Global Finance on Screen is the first collection exclusively dedicated to a growing body of multi-format and multimedia audiovisual work that this book designates as the finance film. Finance film provides critical visualizations of the secretive, elitist, PR firewalled, and gender and race-biased world of finance, and its mysterious characters, jargon and products. It reconstructs for the screen and for broader audiences finance’s logics, responsibilities, practices, and ethos, and traces the effects of money, markets, investment, credit, debt, bubbles, and crashes on our well-being, desires, values, and actions. The chapters for this interdisciplinary collection are written by European and North American scholars in film studies, anthropology, business ethics, cultural studies, political economy, and sociology. They reveal and evaluate the ability of film to document financial cultures; reflect economic, cultural and political transformations related to financialization; indicate the alienating and exploitative consequences of the growing role played by financial services in the global economy; mobilize social action against finance’s excesses; as well as spread finance and capitalist mythology. The collection offers in-depth investigations of feature films such as Wall Street, Freefall, Margin Call, Justice&Co, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Big Short, and documentaries such as Inside Job, Capitalism: A Love Story and In a Strange Land.

Hybrid Images and the Vanishing Point of Digital Visual Effects

Hybrid Images and the Vanishing Point of Digital Visual Effects
Author: Tom Livingstone
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2024-07-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1399523333

Tackling digital effects such as colourisation, time-ramping, compositing and photo-realistic rendering, this monograph explores how the growing use of these post-photographic procedures shapes our relationship with the image and the world that the image represents. At stake is the ability to critically engage with the digital techniques that mediate perceptions of reality. Through a series of case-studies the book connects the dominant techniques of hybridisation with emergent ways of being in our increasingly hybrid physical-digital world. Pointing at the relationship between mainstream visual culture and the manifold imperatives of digital technology and digital culture, Hybrid Images and the Vanishing Point of Digital Visual Effects highlights how a handful of digital visual effects are coming to shape the way we live.

Contemporary Horror on Screen

Contemporary Horror on Screen
Author: Sarah Baker
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2023-10-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9819949653

This book highlights how horror in film and television creates platforms to address distinct areas of modern-day concern. In examining the prevalence of dark tropes in contemporary horror films such as Get Out, Annabelle: Creation, A Quiet Place, Hereditary and The Nun, as well as series such as Stranger Things, American Horror Story and Game of Thrones, amongst numerous others, the authors contend that we are witnessing the emergence of a ‘horror renaissance’. They posit that horror films or programmes, once widely considered to be a low form of popular culture entertainment, can contain deeper meanings or subtext and are increasingly covering serious subject matter. This book thus explores how horror is utilised as a tool to explore social and political anxieties of the cultural moment and is thus presented as a site for contestation, exploration and expansion to discuss present-day fears. It demonstrates how contemporary horror reflects the horror of modern-day life, be it political, biological, social or environmental. A vital contribution to studies of the horror genre in contemporary culture, and the effect it has on social anxieties in a threatening and seemingly apocalyptic time for the world, this is a vital text for students and researchers in popular culture, film, television and media studies.