Rumble and crash : crises of capitalism in contemporary film / Milo Sweedler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sweedler, Milo, 1963- author.

Series:

SUNY series, horizons of cinema

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures--History--21st century.

Motion pictures.

Capitalism in motion pictures.

Politics in motion pictures.

History.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xxxii, 186 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, [2019]

Summary:

Analyzes six films as allegories of capitalism's precarious state in the early twenty-first century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as the contradictions of capitalism became more apparent than at any other time since the 1920s, numerous films gave allegorical form to the crises of contemporary capitalism. Some films were overtly political in nature, while others refracted the vicissitudes of capital in stories that were not, on the surface, explicitly political. Rumble and Crash examines six particularly rich and thought-provoking films in this vein. These films, Milo Sweedler argues, give narrative and audiovisual form to the increasingly pervasive sense that the economic system we have known and accepted as inevitable and ubiquitous is in fact riddled with self-destructive flaws. Analyzing four movies from before the global financial crisis of 2008 and two that allegorize the financial meltdown itself, Sweedler explores how cinema responded to one of the defining crises of our time. Films examined include Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006), Stephen Gaghan's Syriana (2005), Fernando Meirelles's The Constant Gardener (2005), Spike Lee's Inside Man (2006), Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (2013). Milo Sweedler is Associate Professor of French, Cultural Analysis, and Social Theory at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. He is the author of The Dismembered Community: Bataille, Blanchot, Leiris, and the Remains of Laure .

Contents:

Introduction

Exceptions and rules: states of emergency in Children of men

Mapping Syriana

Corporate murder in The constant gardener

Secrets of primitive accumulation: Inside man

Fictitious capital and narrative spin in The wolf of Wall Street

The meltdown and the bailout without the recovery: Blue jasmine

Conclusion: allegories for the present.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781438472799

143847279X

OCLC:

1043954289