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Beckett's novels and plays). With this in mind, I ask why Beckett chose the concept of the ‘angle of immunity’ for his exploration of perception and being. We may start by stating that ‘angle of immunity’ is a technical term in neither cinematography nor in film studies. Moreover, to name the threshold at which O's face remains invisible to E, Beckett could have chosen a number of terms other than ‘angle of immunity’, for instance ‘angle of freedom’, ‘angle of amnesty’ or ‘angle of release’. Thus, Beckett's choice calls for comment
pedigree in philosophy, sociology and art history, among them Béla Balázs, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Erwin Panofsky. They all enthusiastically elaborated on the link (or contrast) between film and the Middle Ages. 1 The central idea of early film studies – that (silent) film is a purely visual medium that opens up a new way of seeing – was based on the analogous assumption of medieval art as
medieval films while also emphasising their relevance for film studies and medievalism in general. In this, it makes possible a move away from the frequent critical dismissal of medieval film, which is justified by its perceived failure to measure up in terms of content to academic standards of historical veracity, or (often in terms of genre) to a sufficiently sophisticated or up-to-date standard of entertainment
The question of language is at once perennially present and strangely absent within film studies, which has tended as a discipline to think of film as language, rather than as a medium which incorporates language as an expressive resource. 1 This chapter is part of a larger project discussing the problems posed to film, since the advent of sound film, by foreign language (that is
the arguments I have developed elsewhere about period films with British connections. 1 I work from the perspectives of film studies rather than medieval studies (so, for instance, when I refer to the epic, it is the epic film genre rather than the literary genre that I have in mind). As a film historian I am more interested in historical specificity than grand theory, and seek to examine textuality
dissemination. The industrial background that led to the creation of generic cycles in the Hollywood studio era is well known and extensively discussed in historical film studies. The social and economic factors of the 1990s, however, were equally significant in bringing about a cinematic boom worldwide, and creating a new wave of screen Shakespeares along the way. Yet what Part II of the book argued is that beside this shared industrial background, certain aesthetic features characterising post-1990s adaptations in the revived new genres allow us to see them as a coherent
and upholds generic concepts – did not result in a complete dismissal of genre study. 5 Even if partly out of habit, reference to genres is still commonplace practice in all three pillars of film study (production, reception and criticism), and whether this means that genres have always been here, or that they are here to stay – or possibly neither – it makes them eminently useful in general descriptions and classifications of films. At the same time, it is also important to acknowledge that twenty-first-century film and media theory has moved beyond traditional
creatures (zombies or vampires), also most appreciated by young audiences, irrespective of whether the films’ protagonists are teenagers or not; and finally, a seemingly very different, but no less significant group: biopics, that is, biographical films depicting some aspect or period of William Shakespeare’s life and work. This group is particularly interesting as it offers perfect examples of how recent filmmaking thrives on generic hybridity while maintaining well-known genre frameworks. It has, of course, long been a commonplace of film studies that the genre
character who dies is the one who was not even supposed to be there. This alteration in turn makes the mother figure a symbolic saviour of the traditions of the family, the whole of the diasporic community and even the cinematic conventions of the melodrama. Notes 1 See F. Leibowitz, ‘Apt Feelings, or Why “Women’s Films” Aren’t Trivial’, in D. Bordwell and N. Carroll (eds), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 219–29 . 2 Stephen, ‘ Men Are Not Gods Review’, Letterboxd (8 October 2016), www