World Cinema And Cultural Memory

Cinema has long played a crucial role in the way that societies represent themselves. Hedges discusses the role of cinema in creating cultural memory within a global perspective that spans five continents. The book's innovative approach and approachable style should transform the way that we think of film and its social effects.

Taking Hollywood as its focus, this timely book provides a sustained, interdisciplinary perspective on memory and film from early cinema to the present. Considering the relationship between official and popular memory, the politics of memory, and the technological and representational shifts that have come to effect memory's contemporary mediation, the book contributes to the growing debate on the status and function of the past in cultural life and discourse. By gathering key critics from film studies, American studies and cultural studies, Memory and Popular Film establishes a framework for discussing issues of memory in film and of film as memory. Together with essays on the remembered past in early film marketing, within popular reminiscence, and at film festivals, the book considers memory films such as Forrest Gump, Lone Star, Pleasantville, Rosewood and Jackie Brown.

Film itself is an artifact of memory. A blend of all the other fine arts, film portrays and preserves human memory, someone's memory, faulty or not, dramatically or comically, in a documentary, feature film or short. Hollywood may dominate 80 percent of cinema production but it is not the only voice. World cinema is about those other voices. Drawn initially from presentations from a series of film conferences held at the University of Texas at San Antonio, this collection of essays covers multiple geographical, linguistic, and cultural areas worldwide, emphasizing the historical and cultural interpretation of films. Appendices list films focusing on memory and invite readers to explore the films and issues raised.

Provocative polemic on digital media; Features foreword by Martin Scorsese, extract overleaf; It is estimated that about one and a half billion hours of moving images were produced in 1999, twice as many as a decade before. If that rate of growth continues, one hundred billion hours of moving images will be made in the year 2025. In 1895 there was just above forty minutes of moving images to be seen, and most of them are now preserved. Today, for every film made, thousands of them disappear forever without leaving a trace. Meanwhile, public and private institutions are struggling to save the film heritage with largely insufficient resources and ever increasing pressures from the commercial world. Are they wasting their time? Is the much feared and much touted Death of Cinema already occurring before our eyes? Is digital technology the solution to the problem, or just another illusion promoted by the industry? In a provocative essay designed as a collection of aphorisms and letters, the author brings an impassioned scrutiny to bear on these issues with a critique of film preservation, an indictiment of the crimes perpetuated in its name, and a proposal to give a new analytical framework to a major cultural phenomenon of our time.

Since its inception, cinema has evolved into not merely a ‘reflection’ but an indispensable index of human experience – especially our experience of time’s passage, of the present moment, and, most importantly perhaps, of the past, in both collective and individual terms. In this volume, Kilbourn provides a comparative theorization of the representation of memory in both mainstream Hollywood and international art cinema within an increasingly transnational context of production and reception. Focusing on European, North and South American, and Asian films, Kilbourn reads cinema as providing the viewer with not only the content and form of memory, but also with its own directions for use: the required codes and conventions for understanding and implementing this crucial prosthetic technology — an art of memory for the twentieth-century and beyond.

Surviving Images explores the prominent role of cinema in the development of cultural memory around war and conflict in colonial and postcolonial contexts. It does so through a study of three historical eras: the colonial period, the national-independence struggle, and the postcolonial. Beginning with a study of British colonial cinema on the Sudan, then exploring anti-colonial cinema in Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia, followed by case studies of films emerging from postcolonial contexts in Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, and Israel, this work aims to fill a gap in the critical literature on both Middle Eastern cinemas, and to contribute more broadly to scholarship on social trauma and cultural memory in colonial and postcolonial contexts. This work treats the concept of trauma critically, however, and posits that social trauma must be understood as a framework for producing social and political meaning out of these historical events. Social trauma thus sets out a productive process of historical interpretation, and cultural texts such as cinematic works both illuminate and contribute to this process. Through these discussions, Surviving Images illustrates cinema's productive role in contributing to the changing dynamics of cultural memory of war and social conflict in the modern world.

One of the leading voices in cultural studies today examines the habits of British cinema audiences in the 1930s to reveal the role that cinema played in shaping their lives.

This work explores cinema-going in the 1930s, when it was a favourite leisure activity. Kuhn discovers how cinema provided a much-appreciated touch of glamour, and examines the influences of screen heroes and heroines.