Transfigurations

by Gronstad, Asbjorn

• ISBN13: 9789089640307
• ISBN10: 9089640304
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-12-15
• Publisher: Amsterdam Univ Pr

Summary

In many senses, viewers have cut their teeth on the violence in American cinema: from Anthony Perkins slashing Janet Leigh in our most infamous of shower scenes; to the 1970s masterpieces of Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah, and Francis Ford Coppola; to our present-day undertakings in imagining global annihilations through terrorism, war, and alien grudges. Transfigurationsbrings our cultural obsession with film violence into a renewed dialogue with contemporary theory, challenging the orthodoxies of previous research on film violence and contributing a fresh perspective to how we might reconceptualize fictional forms of this particular kind of aggressive cinema. Asbjorn Gronstad argues that the use of violence in Hollywood films should be understood semiotically rather than viewed realistically; Tranfigurationsthus alters both our methodology of reading violence in films and the meanings we assign to them, depicting violence not as a self-contained incident, but a convoluted network of our own cultural ideologies and beliefs.

Author Biography

Asbjørn Grønstad is professor of visual culture at the University of Stavanger, Norway.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Prolegomenon

Introduction: Film Violence as Figurality

Screen Violence: Five Fallacies

Empiricism

Aristotelianism

Aestheticism

Mythologicism

Mimeticism

Filming Death

The Transfigured Image

Narrating Violence, or, Allegories of Dying

Male Subjectivities at the Margins

Mean Streets: Death and Disfiguration in Hawk's Scarface

Kubrick's The Killing and the Emplotment of Death

Blood of a Poet: Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch

As I Lay Dying: Violence and Subjectivity in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs

One-Dimensional Men: Fincher's Fight Club and the End of Masculinity

Postscript

Notes

Bibliography

Index of Names

Index of Film Titles

Index of Subjects

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