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When dealing in this chapter with certain principal questions of film art, we are primarily doing so because it is also here that a strange case of double reflection exists. This – abstract – fact of the matter links it with the other problem-complexes already dealt with. This abstract commonality would, however, prove misleading, if we do not, at the
Chapter 1 . Filmer: his life and cultural interests A part from Peter Laslett, no scholar has taken any significant heed of the background in which Filmer grew up, nor of what this environment was really like. sir robert has simply been pinned down either as a traditionalist representative of a backward patriarchal society unworthy of exploration1 or as ‘a byword for obscurity’.2 For this reason, he has never received any attention as a seventeenth-century controversialist writing about widely debated philosophical topics and important social issues. In fact
Film noir Film noir derives essentially from popular noir literature: the writings of Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett and others. It is the reverse of the American dream whose promises of happiness, prosperity and security are confronted by a sordid reality conditioned by money and the amorality of it, weighed down at every level by cynicism, despair, violence, murder and hopelessness. Film noir is essentially a style, a night-time film where shadows and murky greys predominate. Dim reflections and shimmering electric lights create an unstable
Introduction This chapter examines how film audience policy intervenes in seeking to develop regional film provision, in particular how the BFI's audience development strategies have worked since 2010 towards shaping how audiences form. By tracing the recent trajectory of UK film audience policy, the chapter details the different emphases that have been placed on the cultural and economic values of film and film-watching. Furthermore, it highlights the ways in which these cultural and economic values have been supported
Where and how we watch films Here is a moment from the start of The Moviegoer (1961), a novel by the American writer Walker Percy: It reminds me of a movie I saw last month out by Lake Pontchartrain. Linda and I went out to a theater in a new suburb. It was evident somebody had miscalculated, for the suburb had quit growing and here was the theater, a pink stucco cube, sitting out in a field all by itself. A strong wind whipped the waves against the sea-wall; even inside you could hear the racket. (Percy, 1998 : 4) Binx Bolling
For the distinguished pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, hearing, as a sense, lacks prestige. In a world of multiple, heterogeneous visual stimuli, we tend, he says, to ‘neglect the ear’ ( 2009 : 39). Given his own area of expertise, Barenboim is especially vexed by inattention to music even as it achieves ‘a cacophonous omnipresence in restaurants, aeroplanes and the like’ (3). However, his thesis of inequality between the senses can be productively extended to film, where, historically, the ear has been outranked by the eye. The very names
Where should film studies direct its focus or place its emphasis? Historically, the discipline has devoted its greatest energy to analysis of the particularities of film texts themselves. More recently, however, some scholars in the field have sought to distance themselves from this critical practice, with the co-authors of Global Hollywood 2 even characterising it as ‘textual reductionism’ (Miller et al., 2005 : 43). A text more likely to cite the F.T. than E.T. , this book on the export drive of contemporary Hollywood argues that, while attention
In starting to think about film’s distinctiveness as a medium, it might seem perverse to take instruction from study of another art form. However, the American New Critics, influential in mid-twentieth-century literary scholarship, are valuable to us in identifying a sin they call ‘heresy of paraphrase’. New Critics have in mind here readings of a piece of poetry or prose which attempt prematurely to say what it means and show, by contrast, little interest in or even knowledge of precisely how it means. Thus the paraphrasing heretic asserts what a
Fantasy cinema in France: from long neglect to new blood The privileging of director over genre in French film criticism – most explicitly in the politique des auteurs (see chapter 1 ) – has mitigated against the habitually formulaic genres that make up fantasy film: horror, fairy-tale and science fiction. Moreover, despite the pioneering work of Georges Méliès, and later of
Spaniard’ played to horrific excellence by Catalan actor Sergi López. This ‘dramatic thriller’ does not discriminate along lines of race, gender or national affiliation in doling out the suffering. Even ‘Mr Sneaky’ (Sergi López) gets his in the end! For many, the film in its treatment of ‘peripheral collectivities’ contributes to a field of academic research and criticism known as ‘European’ or