Contemporary Film Theory

by Antony Easthope

• ISBN13: 9780582090316
• ISBN10: 0582090318
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2014-07-22
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Summary

At the beginning of the twentieth century the extraordinary medium of film presented itself as a new way of understanding the increasing complexity of modern life.
Film theory since 1968 has concerned itself not so much with theme and content as with the deeper question of how the medium works on its viewer. What are the mechanisms of identification and pleasure the moviegoer experiences? How is Hollywood realism to be assessed in comparison with the radical claims of modernist and postmodernist cinema? How does film address the spectator as a gendered subject?
Film theory has been profoundly influenced by the writings of such modern thinkers as Saussure, Freud, Lacan, Althusser, Derrida and Kristeva, combining modes of textual analysis relating to linguistics and semiology, a Marxist reading of ideology, and theories of subjectivity, the spectator and gender redefined by psychoanalysis.
This judicious selection from key work by Stephen Heath, Fredric Jameson, Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane and others represents some of the most important contemporary writing about film. It presents a consistent and developing analysis that will be of interest to students concerned with film and film studies, as well as all those working in cultural, media and communication studies.

Table of Contents

General Editors' Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction	p. 1
Classic film theory	p. 2
Semiotics	p. 5
Politics and ideology	p. 8
Politics and subjectivity	p. 10
Politics and gender	p. 15
Vision and Phantasy
Fetishism	p. 27
The Mirror Stage	p. 33
Ideology and Subjectivity
Cinema/Ideology/Criticism (1)	p. 43
from Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses	p. 53
from Narrative Space	p. 68
from Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film	p. 95
Gender and the Gaze
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema	p. 111
Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946)	p. 125
Double Indemnity	p. 135
from Fantasia	p. 147
Subjectivity and Desire: An(other) Way of Looking	p. 162
From Casablanca to Pretty Woman: the Politics of Romance	p. 179
Glossary	p. 204
Further Reading	p. 207
Index	p. 213
List of Films	p. 217
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