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4 Why popular films are popular: identification, imitation and critical mortification David Platten T Projections of reality o the intrepid film critic the term ‘popular French cinema’ might suggest an awkward taxonomy; in the bars and restaurants around town it would strike many as an oxymoron. Conventionally, France (and Paris especially) is seen as a hub of art-house cinema, a treasure trove of films of aesthetic and ethical superiority and a protected, national industry that epitomises the ‘European way’. The stereotype may obscure a diverse body of film
As a technology able to picture and embody the temporality of the past, cinema has become central to the mediation of memory in modern cultural life. The memory of film scenes and movies screens, cinema and cinema-going, has become integral to the placement and location of film within the cultural imagination of this century and the last. This book is a sustained, interdisciplinary perspective on memory and film from early cinema to the present. The first section examines the relationship between official and popular history and the constitution of memory narratives in and around the production and consumption of American cinema. The second section examines the politics of memory in a series of chapters that take as their focus three pivotal sites of national conflict in postwar America. This includes the war in Vietnam, American race relations and the Civil Rights Movement, and the history of marginality in the geographic and cultural borderlands of the US. The book explores the articulation of Vietnam. The final section concentrates on the issue of mediation; it explores how technological and semiotic shifts in the cultural terrain have influenced the coding and experience of memory in contemporary cinema. It considers both the presence of music and colour in nostalgia films of the 1990s and the impact of digital and video technologies on the representational determinants of mediated memory. The book also examines the stakes of cultural remembering in the United States and the means by which memory has been figured through Hollywood cinema.
9 Popular film and literature: textual analyses Any discussion of working-class taste should take into account the nature of the products being consumed. I have borne this in mind throughout, particularly in the chapters assessing working-class film and literature popularity. However, in order to more fully understand the nature of working-class taste, this chapter will conduct some close textual analyses of a number of films and novels known to have been popular with working-class consumers during the 1930s. Of course, the range of popular texts is vast, and
This essay considers how the boxing story enabled some filmmakers to politicise and individualise a popular film cycle. These mostly left-wing Jewish filmmakers understood that the boxing story offered a particularly viable vehicle for broad social commentary, a vehicle that could also be personalised by evoking a nostalgic vision of a ghetto community.
In this study we have established the multiple roots of commercially successful cinema in Brazilian popular culture, such as the teatro de revista, the circus and carnival. We have identified a number of key elements that link popular Brazilian cinema through the decades since the advent of sound. Popular film in Brazil has historically been characterised by a city-countryside dialectic, to give
Brazilian popular cinema, at least until the 1980s, can be seen as a direct descendant of other shared cultural experiences. Just as a line can be traced from British music hall, via saucy picture postcards, radio comedy and holidays at the seaside to the Carry On films with their contemporary references, so too is it possible to read the special intimacy which popular films in Brazil achieved with their
Conclusion: thoughts on heroes, villains, and love-interests beyond 1939 T his monograph has highlighted the existence of a persistent ideology about gender, the economy, and the nation within the film and fiction most popular with British audiences between World War I and the outset of World War II. Over and over again, popular film and fiction narratives worked to buttress the role of the male breadwinner and soldier as the centre of the nation and economy. These chapters have charted the multiple paths through which this ideology was shaped: in villainous
Conclusion The main objective of this study has been to explore Richard Attenborough’s work as a significant producer and director in British cinema. By directing twelve films and by producing a further five, over a long period of five decades, he has shown that he has been able to adapt to both the far-reaching changes within the film industry and in the nature of ttenborough has popular film culture. While it would be fair to say that A experienced mixed critical and popular success, the critical discourse around his films has been dominated by their often
form of commercial reruns, generic recycling, critical retrospectives or popular reminiscence, the memory of film scenes and movies screens, cinema and cinema-going, has become integral to the placement and location of film within the cultural imagination of this century and the last. This volume uses memory as a specific framework for the study of popular film, intervening in growing debates about the status and function of
gradually discovers a sharper grasp of history or even discovers a history one had not anticipated (Jacobs, 2000: 17; my italics). To some extent, this book is the product of “chancing it”. My first foray into the television archives was when undertaking doctoral research into the 1950s British cinema programme, and I repeatedly found that my own expectations of BBC television from this time (elitist, dismissive of popular film culture?) were reshaped and challenged. Having read about the institutional background to the early co-existence of BBC and ITV, ranging across