Rethinking Genre In Contemporary Global Cinema

Rethinking Genre in Contemporary Global Cinema offers a unique, wide-ranging exploration of the intersection between traditional modes of film production and new, transitional/transnational approaches to film genre and related discourses in a contemporary, global context. This volume’s content—the films, genres, and movements explored, as well as methodologies used in their analysis—is diverse and, crucially, up-to-date with contemporary film-making practice and theory. Significantly, the collection extends existing scholarly discourse on film genre beyond its historical bias towards a predominant focus on Hollywood cinema, on the one hand, and a tendency to treat “other” national cinemas in isolation and/or as distinct systems of production, on the other. In view of the ever-increasing globalisation and transnational mediation of film texts and screen media and culture worldwide, the book recognises the need for film genre studies and film genre criticism to cast a broader, indeed global, scope. The collection thus rethinks genre cinema as a transitional, cross-cultural, and increasingly transnational, global paradigm of film-making in diverse contexts.

With case studies of the cinemas of India, Iran and Hong Kong, and with contributors addressing the most challenging questions it poses, this important anthology addresses established notions about Third Cinema theory, and the cinema practice of developing and postcolonial nations

Aestheticization of evil is a frequently used formula in cinema and television. However, the representation of evil as an aesthetic object pushes it out of morality. Moral judgments can be pushed aside when evil is aestheticized in movies or TV series because there is no real victim. Thus, situations such as murder or war can become a source of aesthetic pleasure. Narratives in cinema and television can sometimes be based on a simple good-evil dichotomy and sometimes they can be based on individual or social experiences of evil and follow a more complicated method. Despite the various ways evil is depicted, it is a moral framework in film and television that must be researched to study the implications of aestheticized evil on human nature and society. International Perspectives on Rethinking Evil in Film and Television examines the changing representations of evil on screen in the context of the commonness, normalization, aestheticization, marginalization, legitimization, or popularity of evil. The chapters provide an international perspective of the representations of evil through an exploration of the evil tales or villains in cinema and television. Through looking at these programs, this book highlights topics such as the philosophy of good and evil, the portrayal of heroes and villains, the appeal of evil, and evil’s correspondence with gender and violence. This book is ideal for sociologists, professionals, researchers and students working or studying in the field of cinema and television and practitioners, academicians, and anyone interested in the portrayal and aestheticization of evil in international film and television.

This book brings genre back to the forefront of the current transmedia trend. Genres are perhaps the most innately transmedial of media constructs, formed as they are from all kinds of industrial, technological and discursive phenomena. Yet, few have considered how genre works in a multiplatform context. This book does precisely that, making a uniquely transmedial contribution to the study of genre in the age of media convergence. The book interrogates how industrial, technological and participatory transformations of digital platforms and emerging technologies reshape workings of genre. The authors consider franchises such as Star Wars, streaming platforms such as Netflix, catch-up services such as ITV Hub, creative technologies such as virtual reality, and beyond. In setting the stage for the revival of genre theory in contemporary transmedia scholarship, this book pushes forward understandings of multiplatform media and the emerging form and function of genre across contemporary culture.

Although it has only been in the last decade that the planet’s population balance tipped from a predominantly rural makeup towards an urban one, the field of cinema history has demonstrated a disproportionate skew toward the urban. Within audience studies, however, an increasing number of scholars are turning their attention away from the bright lights of the urban, and towards the less well-lit and infinitely more variegated history of rural cinema-going. Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in A Global Context is the first volume to consider rural cinema-going from a global perspective. It aims to provide a rich and wide-ranging introduction to this growing field, and to further develop some of its key questions. It brings together eighteen international scholars or teams, all representatives of a dynamic, new field. Moving beyond a Western focus is essential for thinking through questions of rural exhibition, distribution and cinema experience, since over the relatively short history of cinema it is the rural that has dominated cinema-goers’ lives in much of the developing world. To this end, the volume also innovates by bringing discussions of North American and European ruralities into dialogue with contributions on Kenya, Brazil, China, Thailand, South Africa and Australia.

The Cultural Industries of India is the first book length study dedicated to the Indian cultural and creative industries. By covering specific aspects of the cultural and creative sectors in India– from film festivals to music and performing arts, from cinema to tourism, including a policy review on innovation in the creative industries – the various chapters offer a comprehensive overview of the relationship between the cultural and creative industries and the wider economic, social, cultural and political processes taking place within India and its diaspora. The study of cultural and creative industries in India is important not only for their potential for economic growth and its knock-on effect on social and cultural development, but also because their analysis reveal the ways in which cultural production shapes politics and identities, income generation and urban renewal. This volume focuses on questions of structural inequalities within the sector at the local level, and to account for asymmetries in economic power and the possibility to circulate and access symbolic content within and beyond the boundaries of the Indian nation. This book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of creative and cultural studies, economics, history, development studies and media studies in India. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Cultural Trends.

Troubling Masculinities: Terror, Gender, and Monstrous Others in American Film Post-9/11 is the first multigenre study of representations of masculinity following the emergence of violent terror as a plot element in American cinema after September 11, 2001. Across a broad range of subgenres—including disaster melodrama, monster movies, postapocalyptic science fiction, discovered footage and home invasion horror, action-thrillers, and frontier westerns—author Glen Donnar examines the impact of “terror-Others,” from Arab terrorists to giant monsters, especially in relation to cinematic representations in earlier periods of national turmoil. Donnar demonstrates that the reassertion of masculinity and American national identity in post-9/11 cinema repeatedly unravels across genres. Taking up critical arguments about Hollywood’s attempts to resolve male crisis through Orientalizing figures of terror, he shows how this failure reflects an inability to effectively extinguish the threat or frightening difference of terror. The heroes in these movies are unable to heal themselves or restore order, often becoming as destructive as the threats they are supposed to be fighting. Donnar concludes that interrelated anxieties about masculinity and nationhood continue to affect contemporary American cinema and politics. By showing how persistent these cultural fears are, the volume offers an important counternarrative to this supposedly unprecedented moment in American history.

Haunted Histories and Troubled Pasts speaks to how a transnational array of recent screen entertainments participate, through horror, in public discourses of history, the social and creative work of reshaping popular understanding of our world through the lens of the past. Contemporary film and television – and popular screen cultures more generally – are distinguished by their many and varied engagements with history, including participation in worldwide movements to reconcile past losses and injuries with present legacies. The chapters in this collection address themselves to 21st-century screen horror's participation in this widespread fascination with and concern for the historical - its recurrent reimagining of the relation between the past and present, which is part of its inheritance from the Gothic. They are concerned with the historical work of horror's spectral occupations, its visceral threats of violence and its capacity for exploring repressed social identities, as well as the ruptures and impositions of colonization and nationhood. Trauma is a key theme in this book, examined through themes of war and genocide, ghostly invasions, institutionalized abuse, apocalyptic threat and environmental destruction. These persistent, fearful reimaginings of the past can take many lurid – sometimes tritely generic – forms. Together, these chapters explore and reflect upon horror's ability to speak through them to the unspoken of history, to push the boundaries and probe the fault-lines and ideological impositions of received historical narratives – while reminding us that history and the historical imagination persist as sites of contention.