Suchergebnisse

Pickowicz reviews the book 'Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943' edited by Yingjin Zhang.

This spirited volume explores the history and diversity of improvisation in the cinema, including works by Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, and Nobuhiro Suwa. Gilles Mouëllic examines improvisational practices that can be specifically attributed to the cinema and argues in favors of their powers as instigators of unprecedented forms of expression. Improvising Cinema reflects both on the permanence of attempting improvisation and the relationship between technology and aesthetics. Mouëllic concludes preservation becomes even more invaluable in the case of improvisation, as the creative act exists only within the brief time span of the performance

Introduction. The article is devoted to the consideration of McCarthyism as one of the leading factors that influenced the cultural policy and politics of memory in the United States throughout the entire period of the Cold War. Methods and materials. The ways of representing the atmosphere of conservative ideological control in the United States in the films of the 1950's – 2010's are explored. Films are considered media texts, and the images contained in them are considered symbolic resources used to form and transform a collective identity, legitimize power, its control, and repressive technologies and practices – social mobilization, politicization of everyday life, censorship, and segregation into "their" and "strangers." Analysis. In the course of the historical and imagological analysis, a conditional typology of potential agents of McCarthyism is made. The following are distinguished: institutional conformist careerists, administrators; "soft" conformists – failed oppositionists to political pressure; indoctrinated representatives of mass culture, demonstrating the active complicity of the authorities in imposing ideological labels and encouraging spy mania and exposure. Results. Conclusions are drawn that McCarthyism has become a form of anti-Americanism, moral corrosion, and commemorative trauma in American society, the result of the escalation of the cultural, ideological, and mental "storm," producing a state of intolerance not only to the image of the enemy but also to the Other as a whole. This required more than half a century of overcoming and purifying in the media space.

"Middlebrow Cinema challenges an often uninterrogated hostility to middlebrow culture that frequently dismisses it as conservative, which it often is not, and feminized or middle-class, which it often is. The volume defines the term relationally against shifting concepts of 'high' and 'low', and considers its deployment in connection with text, audience and institution.
In exploring the concept of the middlebrow, this book recovers films that were widely meaningful to contemporary audiences, yet sometimes overlooked by critics interested in popular and arthouse extremes. It also addresses the question of socially-mobile audiences, who might express their aspirations through film-watching; and traces the cultural consequences of the movement of films across borders and between institutions.
The first study of its kind, the volume comprises 11 original essays that test the purchase of the term 'middlebrow' across cultures, including those of Europe, Asia and the Americas, from the 1930s to the present day. Middlebrow Cinema brings into view a popular and aspirational - and thus especially relevant and dynamic - area of film and film culture. Ideal for students and researchers in this area, this book:
Remaps 'Popular' and 'arthouse' approaches
Explores British, Chinese, French, Indian, Mexican, Spanish 'national' cinemas alongside Continental, Hollywood, Queer, Transnational cinemas
Analyses Biopic, Heritage, Historical Film, Melodrama, Musical, Sex Comedy genres."