New Hollywood violence / edited by Steven Jay Schneider.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Schneider, Steven Jay, 1974-

Series:

Inside popular film

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Violence in motion pictures.

Motion pictures--United States--History.

Motion pictures.

United States.

History.

Physical Description:

xvi, 331 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Manchester ; New York : Manchester University Press ; New York : Distributed in the USA by Palgrave, 2004.

Summary:

New Hollywood violence is a groundbreaking collection of essays devoted to an interrogation of various questions and issues - historical, conceptual, empirical, aesthetic, cultural and ideological - relating to the depiction of violence in what has come to be known as New Hollywood filmmaking. The somewhat restricted notion of 'New Hollywood' employed here has been articulated most concisely by Murray Smith (following Thomas Schatz, author of the introduction to this volume), in terms of a return to genre filmmaking following America's flirtation with European art cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but a return 'now marked by greater self-consciousness, as well as supercharged by new special effects, saturation booking, engorged production budgets and, occasionally, even larger advertising budgets'. Thus, the focus is on violence (its motivations, formal and stylistic qualities, cultural politics and effects on viewers) in studio-produced genre films released after 1975. The book is divided into four sections, 'Surveys and schemas', 'Spectacle and style', 'Race and gender' and 'Politics and ideology'. An Afterword by film violence expert Stephen Prince reflects on the various essays and points the way towards areas of future exploration.

Contents:

I Surveys and schemas 11

1 The "film violence" trope: New Hollywood, "the Sixties," and the politics of history / J. David Slocum 13

2 Hitchcock and the dramaturgy of screen violence / Murray Pomerance 34

3 Violence redux / Martin Barker 57

4 The big impossible: action-adventure's appeal to adolescent boys / Theresa Webb, Nick Browne 80

II Spectacle and style 101

5 Aristotle v. the action film / Thomas Leitch 103

6 "Killingly funny": mixing modalities in New Hollywood's comedy-with-violence / Geoff King 126

7 Killing in style: the aestheticization of violence in Donald Cammell's White of the Eye / Steven Jay Schneider 144

8 Terrence Malick's war film sutra: meditating on The Thin Red Line / Fred Pfeil 165

III Race and gender 183

9 From homeboy to Baby Boy: masculinity and violence in the films of John Singleton / Paula J. Massood 185

10 "Once upon the time there were three little girls...": girls, violence, and Charlie's Angels / Jacinda Read 205

11 Playing with fire: women, art, and danger in American movies of the 1980s / Susan Felleman 230

IV Politics and ideology 247

12 From "blood auteurism" to the violence of pornography: Sam Peckinpah and Oliver Stone / Sylvia Chong 249

13 "Too much red meat!" / David Tetzlaff 269

14 Tarantino's deadly homosocial / Todd Onderdonk 286

15 Fight Club and the political (im)potence of consumer era revolt / Ken Windrum 304.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0719067227

0719067235

OCLC:

56465522