1,720,990 research outputs found
Imaginary Men: Genre, Masculinity, and National Identity in Canadian and New Zealand Cinemas
No full textThis thesis explores the use of genre formulas in Canadian and New Zealand national cinemas. Specifically, this thesis asks whether utilizing generic storytelling conventions undermines the cultural goals of both countries’ national cinemas or whether these strategies successfully inflect genre formulas with national narratives to tell stories for and about the nation that are distinct from what is routinely called Global Hollywood. I argue that Canadian and New Zealand directors that create genre films inflect Hollywood formulas and in the process question national myths about national identity and masculinity. As historian Christopher Dummit underlines, “in the history of masculinity, men’s gendered identities [have been] equated not with themselves as men but with a larger, seemingly ungendered category . . . the nation.” The connection between masculinity and the nation predates the advent of cinema and has been a common theme in films since the early days of cinema and continues to receive attention in the present. The three directors from Canada (David Cronenberg, Bruce McDonald, and Jean-Marc Vallée) and three from New Zealand (Peter Jackson, Geoff Murphy, and Taika Waititi,) that are included in this thesis engage with concerns about the cohesion of the nation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and likewise deal with the inconsistencies of gender, masculinity more specifically.
Through their use of film genre these directors look at the ways masculinity and identities are connected to the nation as a shared culture. Film scholar Susan Hayward’s concept of centers and peripheries in national cinema, French cinema in particular, creates a useful framework for analysing the marginal place of Canadian and New Zealand cinemas in relation to Global Hollywood and the ways different ideas about masculinity and national identity come to be imagined in their films. Particular attention has been paid to representations of masculinity and national identity by analysing six films, three each from Canada and from New Zealand, in order to gauge how the above filmmakers have approached depictions of the nation through different film genres over time.
The six films in this thesis have been paired by genre; these include the horror film, the road film, and the coming-of-age film. The two horror films explored are Shivers (Cronenberg, 1975) and Braindead (Jackson, 1992). Critical responses to both films in their respective national contexts informs my discussion around taste and genre cinema. The road films Goodbye Pork Pie (Murphy, 1981) and Highway 61 (McDonald, 1991) are examined for their individual approaches to the familiar formula of travellers attempting to reach their destination at all costs. While Murphy’s film presents a more traditionalist view of masculinity, McDonald’s film deals with gender roles in a more playful manner. Boy (Waititi, 2010) and C.R.A.Z.Y. (Vallée, 2005) tell semi-autobiographical stories set during the period of their respective director’s childhood. Both directors re-write the coming-of-age narrative within specific national and bi-cultural contexts and brighten up the lives of their young protagonists through popular culture.
The close reading of these films offered by this thesis demonstrates how Canadian and New Zealand national cinemas negotiate traditional, stereotypical, and contemporary depictions of masculinity and national identity through the inflection of genre formulas to arrive at distinct representations of the nation. Canada and New Zealand thus offer significant case studies for the exploration of the role of national cinema and its persistent cultural relevance
Imaginary Men: Genre, Masculinity, and National Identity in Canadian and New Zealand Cinemas
No full textThis thesis explores the use of genre formulas in Canadian and New Zealand national cinemas. Specifically, this thesis asks whether utilizing generic storytelling conventions undermines the cultural goals of both countries’ national cinemas or whether these strategies successfully inflect genre formulas with national narratives to tell stories for and about the nation that are distinct from what is routinely called Global Hollywood. I argue that Canadian and New Zealand directors that create genre films inflect Hollywood formulas and in the process question national myths about national identity and masculinity. As historian Christopher Dummit underlines, “in the history of masculinity, men’s gendered identities [have been] equated not with themselves as men but with a larger, seemingly ungendered category . . . the nation.” The connection between masculinity and the nation predates the advent of cinema and has been a common theme in films since the early days of cinema and continues to receive attention in the present. The three directors from Canada (David Cronenberg, Bruce McDonald, and Jean-Marc Vallée) and three from New Zealand (Peter Jackson, Geoff Murphy, and Taika Waititi,) that are included in this thesis engage with concerns about the cohesion of the nation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and likewise deal with the inconsistencies of gender, masculinity more specifically.
Through their use of film genre these directors look at the ways masculinity and identities are connected to the nation as a shared culture. Film scholar Susan Hayward’s concept of centers and peripheries in national cinema, French cinema in particular, creates a useful framework for analysing the marginal place of Canadian and New Zealand cinemas in relation to Global Hollywood and the ways different ideas about masculinity and national identity come to be imagined in their films. Particular attention has been paid to representations of masculinity and national identity by analysing six films, three each from Canada and from New Zealand, in order to gauge how the above filmmakers have approached depictions of the nation through different film genres over time.
The six films in this thesis have been paired by genre; these include the horror film, the road film, and the coming-of-age film. The two horror films explored are Shivers (Cronenberg, 1975) and Braindead (Jackson, 1992). Critical responses to both films in their respective national contexts informs my discussion around taste and genre cinema. The road films Goodbye Pork Pie (Murphy, 1981) and Highway 61 (McDonald, 1991) are examined for their individual approaches to the familiar formula of travellers attempting to reach their destination at all costs. While Murphy’s film presents a more traditionalist view of masculinity, McDonald’s film deals with gender roles in a more playful manner. Boy (Waititi, 2010) and C.R.A.Z.Y. (Vallée, 2005) tell semi-autobiographical stories set during the period of their respective director’s childhood. Both directors re-write the coming-of-age narrative within specific national and bi-cultural contexts and brighten up the lives of their young protagonists through popular culture.
The close reading of these films offered by this thesis demonstrates how Canadian and New Zealand national cinemas negotiate traditional, stereotypical, and contemporary depictions of masculinity and national identity through the inflection of genre formulas to arrive at distinct representations of the nation. Canada and New Zealand thus offer significant case studies for the exploration of the role of national cinema and its persistent cultural relevance
Cine-Literacy and Contemporary American Cinema: Reflexive Authorship and Fragmented Audiences Under Conglomerate Hollywood
No full textIn the twenty-first century, American independent films made by auteur directors have been transformed by the dual forces of populist cinephilia and technological innovations. The influence, within the movie industry, of home entertainment, the internet, media consolidation, and the proliferation of film festivals can be seen in the emergence of new genres, some of which strategically occupy the space previously accorded the mid-tier or middle film. By and large, however, with conglomerates largely controlling the film industry, the sharp division between blockbusters and the smaller “indie” productions continues to grow. Both Hollywood’s speciality “crossover” outputs, with their mid-level budgets, and the low-cost works produced independently of the majors, share aesthetic and thematic elements, suggesting that these screen narratives are products of wider industry trends. By displaying reflexive and ironic sensibilities that target cine-literate audiences, and frequently reviving dormant genres, contemporary cinema reflects the industry’s structure and viewers’ shifting relationship to film. This thesis seeks to explore how the industry shapes the contemporary auteur tendency through an examination of two case histories. While one is a little-seen independent film and the other is an Oscar-winning indie film, both Robinson Devor’s The Woman Chaser (1999) and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) are deliberately critically divisive films which provide a site for particular audiences to test their arcane knowledge. Appealing to a niche audience, these films, with their provocative difference from the Hollywood mainstream blockbuster, and the other forms of the middle film such as the romantic comedy, signal the development of new genre films for the cine-literate from an emerging generation of American auteur directors. These works afford viewers a form of knowledge which could enhance their sub-cultural capital, and their targeted appeal speaks to shifts in generational tastes and film’s position as a niche art form in the twenty-first century
Imaging/Imagining a History of Violence:Red Road and This is England
No full textBoth This is England (Shane Meadows, 2006) and Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006) utilise a combination of violence and memory (public and personal) to construct a vision of British national identity. The former is set during the Falklands War/Guerra de las Malvinas, and redraws our understanding ofskinhead subculture as a contested space, not a cohesive racist grouping. I will argue that by re-imaging/imagining Britain of the 1980s, it straddles a nostalgic gaze and a critical distance to produce parallels with contemporary Britain. The latter film takes place in the present, but engages with the central character’s mourning for her murdered husband and daughter. Her personal history issituated within a contemporary public framework of observation: she is a CCTV operator, and the film’s visual style suggests a Britain dominated by surveillance. I will assert that although these films employ distinctiverelationships with history (one at the level of narrative setting, the other of character), they approach a comparable articulation of how re-imagining a violent past is vital for coming to terms with loss, thus suggesting a pliability ofhistory. In doing so though, uncomfortable relationships with the past are resolved through reconciliation based on individual rather than collective histories
The Postfeminist Biopic: Narrating the Lives of Plath, Kahlo, Woolf and Austen
No full textThis thesis explores the influence of postfeminist culture on cinematic representations of female biographies. It does so by analysing four case studies of films that represent the lives of creative women who are established members of the second-wave feminist canon: Sylvia (Christine Jeffs, 2003), which depicts the life of the American poet Sylvia Plath; Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002), about the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo; The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002), which includes a biographical narrative about the English novelist and critic Virginia Woolf; and Becoming Jane (Julian Jarrold, 2006), a fictionalised interpretation of the coming of age of the English novelist Jane Austen. Earlier research describes two sub-genres of the female biopic: the classical female biopic, which portrays its woman protagonist as a suffering victim on a downward trajectory, and the feminist biopic, which deliberately applies a feminist perspective to the protagonist. This thesis proposes a third sub-genre, the postfeminist biopic, which has appeared as part of a broader trend, dating back to the 1980s, of reviving and reconfiguring classical genre forms aimed at women.
Unlike either the classical female biopic or the feminist biopic, the postfeminist biopic appropriates the conventions of the male biopic in order to portray the life of the creative woman, blurring the distinction between the female and male biopic traditions. Films such as Sylvia, Frida, The Hours, and Becoming Jane explore a diversity of ideas regarding the historical and cultural importance of the female protagonist, including explicitly feminist constructions, playing out the pluralistic and conflicting interpretations that surround the creative woman. The postfeminist biopic invites multiple spectatorial positions in order that the targeted female audience is able to experience a range of contradictory identifications and viewing pleasures. The sub-genre can take an explicitly self-reflexive and deconstructive approach, foregrounding the biopic as a subjective act of historical reconstruction and presenting an anti-essentialist construction of the biopic protagonist.
This thesis argues that the sub-genre of the postfeminist biopic cannot be adequately explained in terms of a definition of postfeminism as an overt or insidious backlash against feminism. Defining postfeminism as an epistemological shift from earlier second-wave feminist theorising, enables a more constructive approach to these films as postfeminist. The sub-genre addresses the feminist narratives of Plath, Kahlo, Woolf and Austen, while presenting an anti-foundational and pluralistic conception of feminism to evoke the unresolved tensions between competing historical, feminist and postfeminist constructions of the creative woman. The representation of the lives of the canonical feminist figures Plath, Kahlo, Woolf and Austen in the postfeminist biopic suggests the ongoing significance of these women's lives and work, the debate over the meaning of their legacies, and the contested position of the creative woman in contemporary culture
Cine-Literacy and Contemporary American Cinema: Reflexive Authorship and Fragmented Audiences Under Conglomerate Hollywood
No full textIn the twenty-first century, American independent films made by auteur directors have been transformed by the dual forces of populist cinephilia and technological innovations. The influence, within the movie industry, of home entertainment, the internet, media consolidation, and the proliferation of film festivals can be seen in the emergence of new genres, some of which strategically occupy the space previously accorded the mid-tier or middle film. By and large, however, with conglomerates largely controlling the film industry, the sharp division between blockbusters and the smaller “indie” productions continues to grow. Both Hollywood’s speciality “crossover” outputs, with their mid-level budgets, and the low-cost works produced independently of the majors, share aesthetic and thematic elements, suggesting that these screen narratives are products of wider industry trends. By displaying reflexive and ironic sensibilities that target cine-literate audiences, and frequently reviving dormant genres, contemporary cinema reflects the industry’s structure and viewers’ shifting relationship to film. This thesis seeks to explore how the industry shapes the contemporary auteur tendency through an examination of two case histories. While one is a little-seen independent film and the other is an Oscar-winning indie film, both Robinson Devor’s The Woman Chaser (1999) and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) are deliberately critically divisive films which provide a site for particular audiences to test their arcane knowledge. Appealing to a niche audience, these films, with their provocative difference from the Hollywood mainstream blockbuster, and the other forms of the middle film such as the romantic comedy, signal the development of new genre films for the cine-literate from an emerging generation of American auteur directors. These works afford viewers a form of knowledge which could enhance their sub-cultural capital, and their targeted appeal speaks to shifts in generational tastes and film’s position as a niche art form in the twenty-first century
Film Theory and the Body
No full textThis thesis explores the role of the body in film theory. While past film theory yielded a variety of productive insights into numerous aspects of cinema as an art form, the issue of the body was largely neglected by theoretical explorations of film until around two decades ago. Approaches to the body by film theorists since then have included the fields of phenomenology and haptic visuality, which have been important in introducing notions such as embodiment and sensation into the study of film. These approaches remain unsatisfactory, however, in providing a strong theoretical framework that fully accounts for the highly visceral and emotionally charged experiences that a wide variety of films can generate in viewers.
Over the course of the thesis I will evaluate and reassess the strengths and weaknesses of accounts of the body in film theory, ultimately arguing that the concept of “embodied simulation”, drawn from recent developments in neuroscience surrounding the nature of the body, mental processes, and interaction between subjects, provides a more compelling and useful way of interpreting the relationship between cinema and the body. What I will call, for want of a better term, “embodied simulation theory,” posits that the empathetic function of “mirror neurons” in the cerebral cortex causes a subject to replicate the actions and emotions of others in the brain resulting in a bodily simulation of the actions witnessed. This thesis argues that embodied simulation theory has striking implications for the study of narrative forms such as cinema as it has been discovered that the process of bodily simulation occurs the same way in the brain in response to fictional recreations of events as it does to actual events.
I will explore the possibilities of embodied simulation theory, as a means of furthering our understanding of how cinema engages the body, through an analysis of the recent post-apocalyptic action film Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller 2015), which has been noted for the supposedly highly powerful bodily viewing experience it offers. Through analyzing Fury Road, I will argue that the potential of embodied simulation for developing an understanding of the body’s relationship to film extends to the domain of digital cinema, in which the role of the body has proved persistently theoretically troublesome
Film Theory and the Body
No full textThis thesis explores the role of the body in film theory. While past film theory yielded a variety of productive insights into numerous aspects of cinema as an art form, the issue of the body was largely neglected by theoretical explorations of film until around two decades ago. Approaches to the body by film theorists since then have included the fields of phenomenology and haptic visuality, which have been important in introducing notions such as embodiment and sensation into the study of film. These approaches remain unsatisfactory, however, in providing a strong theoretical framework that fully accounts for the highly visceral and emotionally charged experiences that a wide variety of films can generate in viewers.
Over the course of the thesis I will evaluate and reassess the strengths and weaknesses of accounts of the body in film theory, ultimately arguing that the concept of “embodied simulation”, drawn from recent developments in neuroscience surrounding the nature of the body, mental processes, and interaction between subjects, provides a more compelling and useful way of interpreting the relationship between cinema and the body. What I will call, for want of a better term, “embodied simulation theory,” posits that the empathetic function of “mirror neurons” in the cerebral cortex causes a subject to replicate the actions and emotions of others in the brain resulting in a bodily simulation of the actions witnessed. This thesis argues that embodied simulation theory has striking implications for the study of narrative forms such as cinema as it has been discovered that the process of bodily simulation occurs the same way in the brain in response to fictional recreations of events as it does to actual events.
I will explore the possibilities of embodied simulation theory, as a means of furthering our understanding of how cinema engages the body, through an analysis of the recent post-apocalyptic action film Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller 2015), which has been noted for the supposedly highly powerful bodily viewing experience it offers. Through analyzing Fury Road, I will argue that the potential of embodied simulation for developing an understanding of the body’s relationship to film extends to the domain of digital cinema, in which the role of the body has proved persistently theoretically troublesome
The Postfeminist Biopic: Narrating the Lives of Plath, Kahlo, Woolf and Austen
No full textThis thesis explores the influence of postfeminist culture on cinematic representations of female biographies. It does so by analysing four case studies of films that represent the lives of creative women who are established members of the second-wave feminist canon: Sylvia (Christine Jeffs, 2003), which depicts the life of the American poet Sylvia Plath; Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002), about the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo; The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002), which includes a biographical narrative about the English novelist and critic Virginia Woolf; and Becoming Jane (Julian Jarrold, 2006), a fictionalised interpretation of the coming of age of the English novelist Jane Austen. Earlier research describes two sub-genres of the female biopic: the classical female biopic, which portrays its woman protagonist as a suffering victim on a downward trajectory, and the feminist biopic, which deliberately applies a feminist perspective to the protagonist. This thesis proposes a third sub-genre, the postfeminist biopic, which has appeared as part of a broader trend, dating back to the 1980s, of reviving and reconfiguring classical genre forms aimed at women.
Unlike either the classical female biopic or the feminist biopic, the postfeminist biopic appropriates the conventions of the male biopic in order to portray the life of the creative woman, blurring the distinction between the female and male biopic traditions. Films such as Sylvia, Frida, The Hours, and Becoming Jane explore a diversity of ideas regarding the historical and cultural importance of the female protagonist, including explicitly feminist constructions, playing out the pluralistic and conflicting interpretations that surround the creative woman. The postfeminist biopic invites multiple spectatorial positions in order that the targeted female audience is able to experience a range of contradictory identifications and viewing pleasures. The sub-genre can take an explicitly self-reflexive and deconstructive approach, foregrounding the biopic as a subjective act of historical reconstruction and presenting an anti-essentialist construction of the biopic protagonist.
This thesis argues that the sub-genre of the postfeminist biopic cannot be adequately explained in terms of a definition of postfeminism as an overt or insidious backlash against feminism. Defining postfeminism as an epistemological shift from earlier second-wave feminist theorising, enables a more constructive approach to these films as postfeminist. The sub-genre addresses the feminist narratives of Plath, Kahlo, Woolf and Austen, while presenting an anti-foundational and pluralistic conception of feminism to evoke the unresolved tensions between competing historical, feminist and postfeminist constructions of the creative woman. The representation of the lives of the canonical feminist figures Plath, Kahlo, Woolf and Austen in the postfeminist biopic suggests the ongoing significance of these women's lives and work, the debate over the meaning of their legacies, and the contested position of the creative woman in contemporary culture
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