ISBN:
1282171410
,
9089640304
,
908964010X
,
9048508509
,
9781282171411
,
9789089640307
,
9789089640109
,
9789048508501
Language:
English
Pages:
1 Online-Ressource (274 pages)
,
illustrations
Edition:
Online-Ausg.
Series Statement:
Film culture in transition
Parallel Title:
Print version Grønstad, Asbjørn Transfigurations
Keywords:
Violence in motion pictures
;
Death in motion pictures
;
Masculinity in motion pictures
;
Motion pictures, American
;
Violence in motion pictures
;
Death in motion pictures
;
Masculinity in motion pictures
;
Motion pictures, American
;
PERFORMING ARTS ; Film & Video ; Reference
;
The arts
;
Film, TV and radio
;
Films, cinema
;
Film theory and criticism
;
Society and social sciences
;
Society and culture: general
;
PERFORMING ARTS ; Film & Video ; General
;
Death in motion pictures
;
Masculinity in motion pictures
;
Motion pictures, American
;
Violence in motion pictures
;
Gewalt
;
Tod
;
Männlichkeit
;
Film
;
Film
;
Music, Dance, Drama & Film
;
USA
;
Electronic book
Abstract:
"Transfigurations: Violence, Death and Masculinity in American Cinema suggests a fundamental rethinking of the notion of violence in Hollywood cinema, and discloses the methodological and theoretical inadequacies of a series of common approaches to screen violence. More specifically, the book challenges the traditional understanding of the concept of memesis with regard to film fiction in general and film violence in particular. Transfigurations deconstructs the idea that the film image is a transparent entity, and proposes instead that filmicity is always opaque. In turn, this argument leads to the conclusion that all film fiction is amimetic, and that it entails processes of transfiguration rather representation, aesthetic theorization rather than mimetic reflection. By considering film violence not as a mirror but as a trope, this book shows how the violence in films may be interpreted as a discourse on death and masculinity."--Jacket
Abstract:
In many senses, viewers have cut their teeth on the violence in American cinema: from Anthony Perkins slashing Janet Leigh in the most infamous of shower scenes; to the 1970s masterpieces of Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah and Francis Ford Coppola; to our present-day undertakings in imagining global annihilations through terrorism, war, and alien grudges. Transfigurations brings our cultural obsession with film violence into a renewed dialogue with contemporary theory. Grønstad argues that the use of violence in Hollywood films should be understood semiotically rather than viewed realistically; Tranfigurations thus alters both our methodology of reading violence in films and the meanings we assign to them, depicting violence not as a self-contained incident, but as a convoluted network of our own cultural ideologies and beliefs
Description / Table of Contents:
Introduction: film violence as figurality -- Screen violence: five fallacies. Empiricism ; Aristotelianism ; Aestheticism ; Mythologicism ; Mimeticism -- Filming death. The transfigured image -- Narrating violence, or, allegories of dying -- Male subjectivities at the margins. Mean streets: death and disfiguration in Hawks's Scarface -- Kubrick's The killing and the emplotment of death -- Blood of a poet: Peckinpah's The wild bunch -- As I lay dying: violence and subjectivity in Tarantino's Reservoir dogs -- One-dimensional men: Fincher's Fight club and the end of masculinity.
Note:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-260) and indexes
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