[PDF] Martial Culture Silver Screen eBook

Author : Matthew Christopher Hulbert
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 47,35 MB
Release : 2020-11-04
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 080717470X

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Martial Culture, Silver Screen analyzes war movies, one of the most popular genres in American cinema, for what they reveal about the narratives and ideologies that shape U.S. national identity. Edited by Matthew Christopher Hulbert and Matthew E. Stanley, this volume explores the extent to which the motion picture industry, particularly Hollywood, has played an outsized role in the construction and evolution of American self-definition. Moving chronologically, eleven essays highlight cinematic versions of military and cultural conflicts spanning from the American Revolution to the War on Terror. Each focuses on a selection of films about a specific war or historical period, often foregrounding recent productions that remain understudied in the critical literature on cinema, history, and cultural memory. Scrutinizing cinema through the lens of nationalism and its “invention of tradition,” Martial Culture, Silver Screen considers how movies possess the power to frame ideologies, provide social coherence, betray collective neuroses and fears, construct narratives of victimhood or heroism, forge communities of remembrance, and cement tradition and convention. Hollywood war films routinely present broad, identifiable narratives—such as that of the rugged pioneer or the “good war”—through which filmmakers invent representations of the past, establishing narratives that advance discrete social and political functions in the present. As a result, cinematic versions of wartime conflicts condition and reinforce popular understandings of American national character as it relates to violence, individualism, democracy, militarism, capitalism, masculinity, race, class, and empire. Approaching war movies as identity-forging apparatuses and tools of social power, Martial Culture, Silver Screen lays bare how cinematic versions of warfare have helped define for audiences what it means to be American.

Author : Zhang Zhen
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 534 pages
File Size : 48,51 MB
Release : 2005
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226982373

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Illustrating the cultural significance of film and its power as a vehicle for social change, this book reveals the intricacies of the cultural movement and explores its connections to other art forms such as photography, drama, and literature.

Author : Joel R. Campbell
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 409 pages
File Size : 45,47 MB
Release : 2022-03-14
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 179363517X

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Movies and television series are excellent tools for teaching political science and international relations. Understanding how stories in various film and television genres illustrate political ideas can better assist students and fans understand and appreciate the political subtext of these media products. This book examines politics through five film genres and their variants. Gangster movies focus on American and other organized crime. They reached their zenith in the films of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. Political thrillers express paranoia about secrecy and political conspiracies, while action movies channel anger at foreign and domestic threats to order. Superhero films and TV present modern characters who seek to serve society as they face personal struggles about their individual identities. War movies promote positive images of wars when conflicts are perceived as successful, but often include antiwar messages when wars turn out badly. Western movies fell out of favor in the 1970s and 1980s but have undergone a renaissance since the 1990s. Westerns can be taken as either political parables, or as meditations on policing, anarchy, community organization. The author argues that while these genres all offer escape, they also offer important political lessons.

Author : Clémentine Tholas
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 49,72 MB
Release : 2019-09-14
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 3030230961

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New Perspectives on the War Film addresses the gap in the representation of many forgotten faces of war in mainstream movies and global mass media. The authors concentrate on the untold narratives of those who fought in combat and were affected by its brutal consequences. Chapters discuss the historically under-represented stories of individuals including women, African-American and Indigenous Soldiers. Issues of homosexuality and gender relations in the military, colonial subjects and child soldiers, as well as the changing nature of war via terrorism and bioterrorism are closely analyzed. The contributors demonstrate how these viewpoints have been consistently ignored in mainstream, blockbuster war sagas and strive to re-integrate these lost perspectives into current and future narratives.

Author : Patrick A. Lewis
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 309 pages
File Size : 28,69 MB
Release : 2024-09-19
Category : Games & Activities
ISBN : 0807183466

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Playing at War offers an innovative focus on Civil War video games as significant sites of memory creation, distortion, and evolution in popular culture. With fifteen essays by historians, the collection analyzes the emergence and popularity of video games that topically engage the period surrounding the American Civil War, from the earliest console games developed in the 1980s through the web-based games of the twenty-first century, including popular titles such as Red Dead Redemption 2 and War of Rights. Alongside discussions of technological capabilities and advances, as well as their impact on gameplay and content, the essays consider how these games engage with historical scholarship on the Civil War era, the degree to which video games reflect and contribute to popular understandings of the period, and how those dynamics reveal shifting conceptions of martial identity and historical memory within U.S. popular culture. Video games offer productive sites for extending the analysis of Civil War memory into the post–Confederates in the Attic era, including the political and cultural moments of Obama and Trump, where overt expressions of Lost Cause memory were challenged and removed from schools and public spaces, then embraced by new manifestations of white supremacist organizations. Edited by Patrick A. Lewis and James Hill Welborn III, Playing at War traces the drift of Civil War memory into digital spaces and gaming cultures, encouraging historians to engage more extensively with video games as important cultural media for examining how contemporary Americans interact with the nation’s past.

Author : Liz Clarke
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 185 pages
File Size : 45,11 MB
Release : 2022-01-14
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1978810172

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During the 1910s, films about war often featured a female protagonist. The films portrayed women as spies, cross-dressing soldiers, and athletic defenders of their homes—roles typically reserved for men and that contradicted gendered-expectations of home-front women waiting for their husbands, sons, and brothers to return from battle. The representation of American martial spirit—particularly in the form of heroines—has a rich history in film in the years just prior to the American entry into World War I. The American Girl Goes to War demonstrates the predominance of heroic female characters in in early narrative films about war from 1908 to 1919. American Girls were filled with the military spirit of their forefathers and became one of the major ways that American women’s changing political involvement, independence, and active natures were contained by and subsumed into pre-existing American ideologies.

Author : Zhang Zhen
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 525 pages
File Size : 30,61 MB
Release : 2005
Category : History
ISBN : 0226982386

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Shanghai in the early twentieth century was alive with art and culture. With the proliferation of popular genres such as the martial arts film, the contest among various modernist filmmakers, and the advent of sound, Chinese cinema was transforming urban life. But with the Japanese invasion in 1937, all of this came to a screeching halt. Until recently, the political establishment has discouraged comprehensive studies of the cultural phenomenon of early Chinese film, and this momentous chapter in China's history has remained largely unexamined. The first sustained historical study of the emergence of cinema in China, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen is a fascinating narrative that illustrates the immense cultural significance of film and its power as a vehicle for social change. Named after a major feature film on the making of Chinese cinema, only part of which survives, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen reveals the intricacies of this cultural movement and explores its connections to other art forms such as photography, architecture, drama, and literature. In light of original archival research, Zhang Zhen examines previously unstudied films and expands the important discussion of how they modeled modern social structures and gender roles in early twentieth-century China. The first volume in the new and groundbreaking series Cinema and Modernity, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen is an innovative—and well illustrated—look at the cultural history of Chinese modernity through the lens of this seminal moment in Shanghai cinema.

Author : Kam Louie
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 34,39 MB
Release : 2008-06-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0521863228

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A wide-ranging and accessibly written guide to the key aspects of elite and popular culture in contemporary China.

Author : Sharon A. Suh
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 229 pages
File Size : 47,32 MB
Release : 2015-01-29
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1474217842

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How do contemporary films depict Buddhists and Buddhism? What aspects of the Buddhist tradition are these films keeping from our view? By repeatedly romanticizing the meditating monk, what kinds of Buddhisms and Buddhists are missing in these films and why? Silver Screen Buddha is the first book to explore the intersecting representations of Buddhism, race, and gender in contemporary films. Sharon A. Suh examines the cinematic encounter with Buddhism that has flourished in Asia and in the West in the past century – from images of Shangri-La in Frank Capra's 1937 Lost Horizon to Kim Ki-Duk's 2003 international box office success Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring. The book helps readers see that representations of Buddhism in Asia and in the West are fraught with political, gendered, and racist undertones. Silver Screen Buddha draws significant attention to ordinary lay Buddhism, a form of the tradition given little play in popular film. By uncovering the differences between a fictionalized, commodified, and exoticized Buddhism, Silver Screen Buddha brings to light expressions of the tradition that highlight laity and women, on the one hand, and Asian and Asian Americans, on the other. Suh engages in a re-visioning of Buddhism that expands the popular understanding of the tradition, moving from the dominance of meditating monks to the everyday world of raced, gendered, and embodied lay Buddhists.

Author : Kyle Barrowman
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 243 pages
File Size : 50,77 MB
Release : 2024-09-05
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1350365769

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Fighting Stars provides a rich and diverse account of the emergence and legacies of Hong Kong martial arts cinema stars. Tracing the meanings and influence of stars such as Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh, Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi , and Donnie Yen against the shifting backdrops of the Hong Kong film industry, the contributors to this important volume highlight martial arts stars' cultural reach, both on a local and global scale. Each of the chapters, written by a host of renowned international scholars, focuses on an individual film star, considering issues such as martial arts practices and philosophies, gender and age, national identities and conflicts, cinematic genres and aesthetic choices in order to understand their local and transnational cultural influence.