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While post-war popular cinema has traditionally been excluded from accounts of national cinemas, the last fifteen years have seen the academy’s gradual rediscovery of cult and, more, generally, popular films. Why, many years after their release, do we now deem these films worthy of study? The book situates ‘low’ film genres in their economic and culturally specific contexts (a period of unstable ‘economic miracles’ in different countries and regions) and explores the interconnections between those contexts, the immediate industrial-financial interests sustaining the films, and the films’ aesthetics. It argues that the visibility (or not) of popular genres in a nation’s account of its cinema is an indirect but demonstrable effect of the centrality (or not) of a particular kind of capital in that country’s economy. Through in-depth examination of what may at first appear as different cycles in film production and history – the Italian giallo, the Mexican horror film and Hindi horror cinema – Capital and popular cinema lays the foundations of a comparative approach to film; one capable of accounting for the whole of a national film industry’s production (‘popular’ and ‘canonic’) and applicable to the study of film genres globally.
Lear and Duval were theoretically appealing to children in a very direct and innovative way. Their drawings could be copied by children, as could the verse. This was, essentially, a mode of address, and one that allowed for agency on the part of children. It also opened new perspectives on how such picture books might function in children's everyday lives, in other words, as one aspect of a broader landscape. According to literary scholar Robin Bernstein: When we view children's literature as
recognise that, in practice, ‘visualising’ and ‘talking’ are combined and not separate in many of their effects, but I think they can benefit from individual attention here, provided that their combinatory nature is also acknowledged. ‘Reason and affect’ will look at the terms of the playoff, frequently the subject of dispute, between the cognitive and the emotional offer that documentaries make. ‘Addressing audiences’ will explore assumptions and strategies concerning addressees and modes of address, together with the character of documentaries as agents of change in
The hybrid television form of docudrama, blending documentary and drama conventions and modes of address, poses interesting methodological problems for an analysis of performance. Its topics, mise-en-scène and performers invite a judgement in relation to the real events and situations, settings and personae represented, and also in relation to the ways the viewer has perceived them in other media
, exploring the expression of subjectivity – the dreams and nightmares of central characters – conveyed through a depiction of domestic life, and specifically through a combination of realist and melodramatic modes of address. Melodramatic excess and its corresponding dramatic visual style was often discussed as ‘novelettish’ or worthy of women’s magazines by contemporary critics more inclined towards praising British cinema’s realist qualities. 3 However, I explore how melodramatic modes of address, with their emphasis on an ‘individual, personal and affective
mode of address that shaped the depiction of domestic life in 1940s films: modes balancing realism and romanticism, pastoralism and preservation, escapism and restraint, and melodrama and modernism. By focusing closely on these visual modes of address, the chapters build on Napper’s ground-breaking work on British cinema and middlebrow culture as I argue that the pictorial depiction of domestic life in films in this period conveys their middlebrow status by visually demonstrating a sense of balance and ‘in-between-ness’. 8 Furthermore, I contend that this sense of
structured societies that makes it necessary. 6 This chapter argues that Dennis Potter’s drama, and particularly The Singing Detective, contributes to experimental television through systematic comment on, and elaboration of, the medium’s inherent polysemic nature. This mode of address allows and encourages an active viewer to distil a plethora of meanings that implicitly celebrate the ‘bliss’ of textual indeterminism. Potter deploys this mode of address, in combination with his ‘nonnaturalistic’ techniques (characters directly addressing the camera, child characters
positive reports of both Titan A. E. and Final Fantasy by critics and academics alike. The difference in critical estimation of the cartoon-style comedies and science fiction animations, I would suggest, has much to do with the divergent modes of address and performance styles associated with the two genres. Certainly, Titan A. E. and Final Fantasy also featured star voices, although these tended to belong to actors new to
have cast the backwards-looking stance of This Happy Breed in a negative light. Robert Murphy suggests that it was the ‘most successful British film of 1944 despite its nostalgic view of the thirties’; and as Coward ‘heartily endorses the complacent self-satisfaction of English suburbia’, he suggests that ‘one can feel the bonds holding together its conservative consensus creaking loudly’. 35 Similarly, Higson characterises This Happy Breed as ‘adopting a self-consciously populist mode of address and […] working within the traditions of a conservative and
book I explore the possibilities of locating an image of both the reception context of television and the identity and concerns of the television viewer, by analysing the television text itself. Therefore, I construct what Umberto Eco might call a ‘model viewer’ by reading the Gothic television drama’s modes of address and by scrutinising its semantic and syntactic elements. The term ‘model viewer’ is