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Author Grønstad, Asbjørn, author.

Title Transfigurations : violence, death and masculinity in American cinema / Asbjørn Grønstad.

Publication Info. Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, [2008]
©2008

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Description 1 online resource (274 pages) : illustrations.
Series Film culture in transition
Film culture in transition.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-260) and indexes.
Contents Introduction: film violence as figurality -- Screen violence: five fallacies. Empiricism ; Aristotelianism ; Aestheticism ; Mythologicism ; Mimeticism -- Filming death. The transfigured image -- Narrating violence, or, allegories of dying -- Male subjectivities at the margins. Mean streets: death and disfiguration in Hawks's Scarface -- Kubrick's The killing and the emplotment of death -- Blood of a poet: Peckinpah's The wild bunch -- As I lay dying: violence and subjectivity in Tarantino's Reservoir dogs -- One-dimensional men: Fincher's Fight club and the end of masculinity.
Summary "Transfigurations: Violence, Death and Masculinity in American Cinema suggests a fundamental rethinking of the notion of violence in Hollywood cinema, and discloses the methodological and theoretical inadequacies of a series of common approaches to screen violence. More specifically, the book challenges the traditional understanding of the concept of memesis with regard to film fiction in general and film violence in particular. Transfigurations deconstructs the idea that the film image is a transparent entity, and proposes instead that filmicity is always opaque. In turn, this argument leads to the conclusion that all film fiction is amimetic, and that it entails processes of transfiguration rather representation, aesthetic theorization rather than mimetic reflection. By considering film violence not as a mirror but as a trope, this book shows how the violence in films may be interpreted as a discourse on death and masculinity."--Jacket.
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 1970s 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.
Note Print version record.
Access Use copy. MiAaHDL
Reproduction Electronic reproduction. [S.l.] : HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010. MiAaHDL
System Details Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
Processing Action digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Language English.
Subject Violence in motion pictures.
Death in motion pictures.
Masculinity in motion pictures.
Motion pictures, American.
PERFORMING ARTS -- Film& Video -- Reference.
The arts.
Film, TV and radio.
Films, cinema.
Film theory and criticism.
Society and social sciences.
Society and culture: general.
PERFORMING ARTS -- Film& Video -- General.
Death in motion pictures. (OCoLC)fst00888701
Masculinity in motion pictures. (OCoLC)fst01011041
Motion pictures, American. (OCoLC)fst01027478
Violence in motion pictures. (OCoLC)fst01167293
Gewalt Motiv.
Tod Motiv.
Männlichkeit Motiv.
Film.
United States.
Indexed Term Culture and institutions
Motion pictures
Women: historical, geographic, persons treatment
Culture and instituten
Film
Vrouwenstudies
Other Form: Print version: Grønstad, Asbjørn. Transfigurations. Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, ©2008 908964010X (DLC) 2008464900 (OCoLC)249078112
ISBN 9789048508501 (electronic book)
9048508509 (electronic book)
1282171410
9781282171411
9789089640307 (hardcover)
9089640304 (hardcover)
9789089640109 (paperback)
908964010X (paperback)
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