Disaster cinema in historical perspective : mediations of the sublime / Nikita Mathias.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mathias, Nikita, author.

Series:

Film culture in transition.

Film culture in transition

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Disaster films--History and criticism.

Disaster films.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (356 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, 2020.

Summary:

How do we experience disaster films in cinema? And where does disaster cinema come from? The two questions are more closely related than one might initially think. For the framework of the cinematic experience of natural disasters has its roots in the mid-eighteenth century when the aesthetic category of the sublime was re-established as the primary mode for appreciating nature's violent forces. In this book, the sublime is understood as a complex and culturally specific meeting point between philosophical thought, artistic creation, social and technical development, and popular imagination. On the one hand, the sublime provides a receptive model to uncover how cinematic disaster depictions affect our senses, bodies and minds. On the other hand, this experiential framework of disaster cinema is only one of the most recent agents within the historical trajectory of sublime disasters, which is traced in this book among a broad range of media: from landscape and history painting to a variety of pictorial devices like Eidophusikon, Panorama, Diorama, and, finally, cinema.

Contents:

Starting points

The iconography of the sublime

Mediating the sublime

Cinema

a medium of the sublime?

Disaster cinema. A historical overview

The sublime in disaster cinema.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 20 Nov 2020).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-003-69405-5

90-485-6162-0

90-485-5000-9

9781003694052

OCLC:

1181773568