Uncanny Histories In Film And Media

Uncanny Histories in Film and Media brings together a stellar lineup of established and emergent scholars who explore the uncanny twists and turns that are often occluded in larger accounts of film and media. Prompted by fresh archival research and new conceptual approaches, the works included here probe the uncanny as a mode of historical analysis that reveals surprising connections and unsettling continuities. The uncanny stands for what often eludes us, for what remains unfamiliar or mysterious or strange. Whether writing about film movements, individual works, or the legacies of major or forgotten critics and theorists, the contributors remind us that at the heart of the uncanny, and indeed the writing of history, is a troubling of definitions, a challenge to our inherited narratives, and a disturbance of what was once familiar in the uncanny histories of our field.

Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media contextualizes historical films in an innovative way - not only relating them to the history of cinema, but also to premodern and early modern media. This philological approach to the (pre)history of cinema engages both old media such as scrolls, illuminated manuscripts, the Bayeux Tapestry, and new digital media such as DVDs, HD DVDs, and computers. Burt examines the uncanny repetitions that now fragment films into successively released alternate cuts and extras (footnote tracks, audiocommentaries, and documentaries) that (re)structure and reframe historical films, thereby presenting new challenges to historicist criticism and film theory. With a double focus on recursive narrative frames and the cinematic paratexts of medieval and early modern film, this book calls our attention to strange, sometimes opaque phenomena in film and literary theory that have previously gone unrecognized.

Recollecting Lotte Eisner provides the first in-depth examination of the remarkable transnational career of film journalist, archivist, and historian Lotte Eisner (1896–1983). From her early years as a film critic in interwar Berlin to her escape from prison in occupied France and from her role as chief curator at the Cinémathèque française to that as the mythic "collective conscience" of New German Cinema, Eisner was a prolific writer and lecturer and a pivotal voice in early film and media studies. Situated at the juncture of feminist media historiography and disciplinary intellectual history, this groundbreaking book is based on extensive multilingual archival research and the excavation of a rich corpus of previously overlooked materials. Introducing samples of Eisner's writing in translation, this volume makes some of the most important contributions of a foundational scholar in the field of film studies accessible for the first time to an English-language readership.

Asian American filmmakers and video artists have created a substantial, diverse, and challenging body of work that reimagines the cultural and political representation of Asian Americans. Yet much of this work remains unknown. Ghostlife of Third Cinema examines such potent issues as diasporic identity, historical memory, and queer sexuality through sophisticated readings of a wide range of film and video projects, includingTrinh T. Minh-ha's experimental documentary Surname Viet Given Name Nam;avant-garde works by Japanese American filmmakers Rea Tajiri, Lise Yasui, andJanice Tanaka; and queer videos exploring the intersection of race, nation, andsexuality by Pablo Bautista, Ming-Yuen Ma, and Nguyen Tan Hoang.

History films were a highly popular genre in the 1990s, as Hollywood looked back at significant and troubling episodes from World War II, the Cold War era, and the techno-war in the Persian Gulf. As filmmakers attempted to confront and manage intractable elements of the American past, such as the trauma of war and the legacy of racism, Susan Linville argues that a surprising casualty occurred-the erasure of relevant facets of contemporary women' history. In this book, Linville offers a sustained critique of the history film and its reduction of women to figures of ambivalence or absence. Historicizing and adapting Freud' concept of the uncanny and its relationship to the maternal body as the first home, she offers theoretically sophisticated readings of the films Midnight Clear, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Nixon, Courage Under Fire, Lone Star, and Limbo. She also demonstrates that the uncanny is not only a source of anxiety but also potentially a progressive force for eroding nostalgic ideals of nation and gender. Linville concludes with a close reading of a recent 9/11 documentary, showing how the patterns and motifs of 1990s history films informed it and what that means for our future.

This comprehensive bibliography covers writings about vampires and related creatures from the 19th century to the present. More than 6,000 entries document the vampire's penetration of Western culture, from scholarly discourse, to popular culture, politics and cook books. Sections by topic list works covering various aspects, including general sources, folklore and history, vampires in literature, music and art, metaphorical vampires and the contemporary vampire community. Vampires from film and television--from Bela Lugosi's Dracula to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood and the Twilight Saga--are well represented.

In 1931 Universal Pictures released Dracula and Frankenstein, two films that inaugurated the horror genre in Hollywood cinema. These films appeared directly on the heels of Hollywood's transition to sound film. Uncanny Bodies argues that the coming of sound inspired more in these massively influential horror movies than screams, creaking doors, and howling wolves. A close examination of the historical reception of films of the transition period reveals that sound films could seem to their earliest viewers unreal and ghostly. By comparing this audience impression to the first sound horror films, Robert Spadoni makes a case for understanding film viewing as a force that can powerfully shape both the minutest aspects of individual films and the broadest sweep of film production trends, and for seeing aftereffects of the temporary weirdness of sound film deeply etched in the basic character of one of our most enduring film genres.

The popular media of film and television surround us daily with images of evil - images that have often gone critically unexamined. In the belief that people in ever-increasing numbers are turning to the media for their understanding of evil, this lively and provocative collection of essays addresses the changing representation of evil in a broad spectrum of films and television programmes. Written in refreshingly accessible and de-jargonised prose, the essays bring to bear a variety of philosophical and critical perspectives on works ranging from the cinema of famed director Alfred Hitchcock and the preternatural horror films Halloween and Friday the 13th to the understated documentary Human Remains and the television coverage of the immediate post-9/11 period. The Changing Face of Evil in Film and Television is for anyone interested in the moving-image representation of that pervasive yet highly misunderstood thing we call evil.ContentsMartin F. NORDEN: Introduction Matthew SOAR: The Bite at the Beginning: Encoding Evil Through Film Title Design Linda BRADLEY SALAMON: Screening Evil in History: Rope, Compulsion, Scarface, Richard III Mike FRANK: The Radical Monism of Alfred Hitchcock Cynthia FREELAND: Natural Evil in the Horror Film: Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds Matt HILLS and Steven Jay SCHNEIDER: ?The Devil Made Me Do It!?: Representing Evil and Disarticulating Mind/Body in the Supernatural Serial Killer Film Thomas HIBBS: Virtue, Vice, and the Harry Potter UniverseRobin R. MEANS COLEMAN and Jasmine Nicole COBB: Training Day and The Shield: Evil Cops and the Taint of Blackness Martin F. NORDEN: The ?Uncanny? Relationship of Disability and Evil in Film and Television Carlo CELLI: Comedy and the Holocaust in Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful/La vita e bella Garnet C. BUTCHART:. On the Void: The Fascinating Object of Evil in Human RemainsJohn F. STONE:. The Perfidious President and ?The Beast?: Evil in Oliver Stone's NixonGary R. EDGERTON, William B. HART, and Frances HASSENCAHL: Televising 9/11 and Its Aftermath: The Framing of George W. Bush's Faith-Based Politics of Good and Evil Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index