Transfigurations : violence, death and masculinity in American cinema / Asbjrn Grnstad.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Grnstad, Asbjrn.

Series:

Film culture in transition.

Film culture in transition

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Violence in motion pictures.

Death in motion pictures.

Masculinity in motion pictures.

Motion pictures, American.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (274 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, 2008.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

text file

Summary:

In many senses, viewers have cut their teeth on the violence in American cinema: from Anthony Perkins slashing Janet Leigh in the most infamous of shower scenes; to the 1970's 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. Transfigurations brings our cultural obsession with film violence into a renewed dialogue with contemporary theory. Grønstad argues that the use of violence in Hollywood films should be understood semiotically rather than viewed realistically; Tranfigurations thus 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 as a convoluted network of our own cultural ideologies and beliefs.

Contents:

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prolegomenon

Introduction: Film Violence as Figurality

I Screen Violence: Five Fallacies

Empiricism

Aristotelianism

Aestheticism

Mythologicism

Mimeticism

II Filming Death

1 The Transfigured Image

2 Narrating Violence, or, Allegories of Dying

III Male Subjectivities at the Margins

3 Mean Streets: Death and Disfiguration in Hawks's Scarface

4 Kubrick's The Killing and the Emplotment of Death

5 Blood of a Poet: Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch

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

7 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

Film Culture in Transition.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. [221]-260) and indexes.

CC BY-NC

Description based on print record, CIP data from the publisher, and e-publication e-publication, viewed on November 20, 2020.

ISBN:

9786612171413

9781282171411

1282171410

9789048508501

9048508509

OCLC:

503446407

Publisher Number:

https://doi.org/10.5117/9789089640109