Film Cultures – serie

Les co-éditeurs de cet ouvrage, Ludovic Cortade (New York University) et Guillaume Soulez (Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3), rassemblent un ensemble de contributions rédigées par des spécialistes de l’écrit et de l’écran permettant de penser l’écosystème formé par l’espace, le cinéma et la littérature. A partir des oeuvres d’écrivains et réalisateurs, parmi lesquels Emile Zola, Alfred Jarry, Julien Gracq, Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, Marguerite Duras, Ousmane Sembène ou Edouard Glissant, les problématiques abordées dans ce volume inscrivent l’esthétique de la forme et de la réception dans une stratigraphie de méthodes et de concepts associant la géocritique, la poétique, l’esthétique et la géopolitique. Les auteurs analysent l’espace et les métafi ctions géographiques, le transhumanisme, la critique de l’espace anthropocentré, la dimension scalaire de la réception et la signifi cation politique et mémorielle des limites de la représentation de l’espace dans le cinéma et la littérature. Ils interrogent également l’espace à travers le prisme de l’hybridité transculturelle des formes, des récits et de l’esthétique de la réception, participant à la recherche de l’éthique du lieu commun par la parole et l’image partagées à l’ère de l’Anthropocène.Cet ouvrage paraît en complément de Littérature et cinéma : la culture visuelle en partage (co-édité par les mêmes auteurs). Les deux volumes s’inscrivent dans la nouvelle série « Studies in Film & Literature Cultures » consacrée à l’étude des rapports entre le cinéma et la littérature au sein de la collection Film Cultures de Peter Lang.

Twenty years after Universal horror movies, the Hammer studio brought back to life the great mythical figures inspired from British literature as well as French and European folklore (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Werewolf, the Phantom of the Opera, etc.). It invented new incarnations rooted in a precise historical context and revisited according to the evolution of British society. This independent studio constitutes a notable stage in the history of the genre between the Gothic horror of the 1930s and the more radical productions of the 1970s, which eventually contributed to its demise. Focusing on the peculiar balance between Hammer’s inventiveness and classicism, this volume mainly explores the lesser-known productions, examining as well its contradictions, paradoxes and limitations. The book raises the question of the paradoxical modernity of films that are innovative in various respects (themes, modes of representation challenging censorship, aesthetics), but are also trying to resurrect a dying tradition, mostly offering a rather surprisingly conservative discourse despite their efforts to comply with the expectations of new audiences. The films born from the recent Hammer renaissance are still referring to this bygone Golden Age of the horror film. One may wonder whether the Hammer studio was a mere factory churning out mostly conventional horror films now buried in the dust of a gothic dungeon, or a true laboratory of modern cinematic horror whose past glory still inspires contemporary filmmakers. This volume will provide some answers and raise quite a few questions.

Si les pratiques festivalières mobilisent depuis longtemps la recherche scientifi que, il semble qu’un tournant ait été opéré à la fi n du XXe siècle avec l’émergence des Film Festival Studies. Depuis une vingtaine d’années, face à l’essor constant des manifestations festivalières en Europe et à l’international, de plus en plus de chercheur. e.s se sont en effet focalisé.e.s sur l’objet « festival de cinéma » en l’envisageant à la fois comme la construction d’un regard spécifi que sur le cinéma (et à travers lui sur le réel), un lieu de transactions professionnelles intenses et un espace de mediation avec les publics et la critique de cinéma.L’ambition de cette publication collective est de contribuer à l’identifi cation d’une nouvelle période festivalière caractéristique des années 2000 d’un point de vue cette fois français. La démarche des auteur.e.s ici réuni.e.s a consisté à penser l’émergence des sociétés festivalières du XXIe siècle dans une perspective anthropologique, en s’attachant à leurs modes d’existence d’une part et en interrogeant la manière dont, par leurs actes de programmation, les festivals pensent et fondent la representation des mondes contemporains d’autre part. La question de fond qui anime les quinze présentes contributions porte sur la façon dont se crée et circule l’altérité dans ces cultures festivalières dont la nature complexe se situe à l’intersection de la sociologie, de l’économie, de la géopolitique et de l’esthétique.

More than Fifteen Minutes of Fame tracks screen performance’s trajectory from dominant discourses of realism and authenticity towards increasingly acute degrees of self-referentiality and self-reflexivity. Exploring the symbiotic relationship between changing forms of onscreen representation and our shifting status as social subjects, the book provides an original perspective through international examples from cinema, experimental production, documentary, television, and the burgeoning landscape of online screen performance. In an emerging culture of participatory media, the creation of a screen-based presence for our own performances of identity has become a currency through which we validate ourselves as subjects of the contemporary, hyper-mediatized world. In this post-dramatic, post-Warhol climate, the author’s contention is that we are becoming increasingly wedded to screen media – not just as consumers but as producers and performers.

In the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, all five of the Chief Ministers since 1967 have been former actors. This provocative book debunks the notion of Bollywood as the synecdoche of Indian cinema to explore the hitherto less studied, yet highly influential cinema in South Asia. Developing the concept of the politics of sentiment, the author examines the ways in which actor-politicians constructed their cinematic charisma, projecting themselves as messiahs saving the people from injustices, to create a political appeal to voters. The resilience of cinematic charisma, as Indian society undergoes massive socio-economic changes, provides a compelling study of modern politics, cinema, celebrity and the culture of the subcontinent.

This volume examines representations and explorations of travel ideals in contemporary international cinema. It assembles work from a diverse range of academic fields including anthropology, sociology, ethnography, cinema, culture, tourism, communication and language studies, with contributions from international experts such as Mary Louise Pratt of New York University, whose work on contact zones continues to provide the framework for scholarship on travel writing around the world. The volume explores the link between filmed spaces and real locations, with one of the fundamental dynamics being the investigation of filmmaking itself, and in particular the notion that cultural authenticity may be sought and found by filming on location. Also examined are the notions of fantasy and exoticism that arise through an idealisation of the locations themselves and their transformational impact on the protagonists who travel there. Such is the impact of motion pictures on contemporary culture that these travel ideals in film will inevitably influence our understanding of cities, regions, nations and cultures; indeed, the world around us and our role in it.

Written and produced under martial law in 1980’s Communist Poland, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Decalogue presents a collective portrait of a demoralized nation populated by gloomy individualists" who respond to other people with antagonism or indifference. Feeling betrayed by a history of brutal invasions, the series’ characters struggle to cast off a legacy of a bitterness that has arisen because their national hopes have been so frequently shattered. Yet the central questions that animate The Decalogue are not political but ethical and ontological: How should one live? And why should one live at all in an atomized civilization? In exploring these questions in relation to the Ten Commandments, the series’ unifying principle is, paradoxically, disintegration: Kieślowski’s protagonists break the Commandments in a fractured world drained of meaning. Disintegration functions as a multidimensional principle—moral, historical, social, and psychological—informing The Decalogue’s conception, organization, and style. In analyzing these features the study draws on a wide range of philosophical, literary and psychoanalytic inter-texts.