Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film: The Uses of Nostalgia

by Vera Dika

• ISBN13: 9780521815680
• ISBN10: 0521815681
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-06-09
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The reuse of images, plots and genres from film history has become prominent in contemporary culture. In this study, Vera Dika explores this phenomenon from a broad range of critical perspectives, examining works of art and film that resist the pull of the past. Dika provides an in-depth analysis of works in several media, including performance, photography, Punk film, and examples from mainstream American and European cinema. Proclaiming the renewed importance of the image and of genre, she investigates works as diverse as Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, Amos Poe's The Foreigner, Terence Malick's Badlands, and Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart. Her study positions avant-garde art work within the context of contemporary mainstream film practice, as well as in relationship to their historical moment.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
The Returned Image	1	(23)
The Photographic/Film Image	4	(3)
Attacks on the Image	7	(1)
The New Image	8	(1)
The Nostalgia Film	9	(2)
Strategies of Resistance	11	(3)
Mainstream Film in the 1970s	14	(2)
A Cinema of Loneliness	16	(2)
The MOCA Show	18	(2)
Conclusion	20	(4)
Art and Film: New York City in the Late 1970s	24	(31)
The Structural Film	24	(2)
Pictures	26	(1)
Jack Goldstein	26	(5)
Two Fencers	31	(5)
Robert Longo	36	(5)
Cindy Sherman	41	(6)
Amos Poe	47	(8)
Returned Genres: The Dream Has Ended	55	(34)
Badlands	56	(9)
The Return of the Real	65	(1)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre	66	(12)
The Shootist	78	(5)
The Last Waltz	83	(6)
Reconsidering the Nostalgia Film	89	(33)
American Graffiti	89	(6)
The Conformist	95	(8)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show	103	(19)
A Return to the 1950s: The Dangers in Utopia	122	(34)
Grease	124	(18)
Utopia Rejected	142	(3)
Last Exit to Brooklyn	145	(11)
Coppola and Scorsese: Authorial Views	156	(41)
Apocalypse Now	158	(12)
One from the Heart	170	(18)
The Last Temptation of Christ	188	(9)
To Destroy the Sign	197	(28)
The Loss of the Real	197	(5)
Television	202	(3)
Serialized Forms	205	(2)
The Return of the Classical Film Genres	207	(1)
The Stalker Film	207	(8)
The Western	215	(4)
The Gangster/Crime Film	219	(4)
Conclusion	223	(2)
Notes	225	(6)
Bibliography	231	(6)
Index	237