Cinema Pessimism PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Cinema Pessimism PDF full book. Access full book title Cinema Pessimism by Joshua Foa Dienstag. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Joshua Foa Dienstag
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190067748
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Get Book
Book Description
Aesthetic and political representation are often treated separately, but this book argues that film offers a unique perspective through which to understand the dangers to equality and freedom that lurk in representative politics. The potential problems of representative democracy have long been debated: does it cultivate apathy and discourage citizen participation? What does it mean to be faithfully or well represented in a democracy? And how can appropriate, meaningful representation be achieved? Here, these questions are addressed from a new perspective. Representation, Joshua Foa Dienstag argues, can create the illusion of freedom and reciprocity in place of the real thing, and in both cinema and politics, what gives us pleasure is not the same as what secures or supports our existence as free and equal citizens. As this book shows, there are political dangers not visible within the current debates around democratic representation, dangers we can better understand and help to minimize by considering the way that human beings interact, emotionally, with their filmic representations. Dienstag looks at a series of films that directly confront issues of representation (Her, Blade Runner, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Melancholia, and the Up documentary series) to diagnose these hazards and consider how best to respond to them. Each chapter looks at a specific film as emblematic of a different conception or problem of representation often ignored by mainstream political debates (such as reciprocity, happiness, boundaries, evil) to show that the relationship between representation and freedom is fraught with tension. This book continues Dienstag's earlier groundbreaking work on philosophical pessimism, understood not as something despairing, but as a rejection of the idea that these necessary tensions can be cured. Ultimately, Dienstag seeks to defend a kind of pessimistic politics that might produce a better sort of democratic representation than what we have today.
Author: Joshua Foa Dienstag
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190067748
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Get Book
Book Description
Aesthetic and political representation are often treated separately, but this book argues that film offers a unique perspective through which to understand the dangers to equality and freedom that lurk in representative politics. The potential problems of representative democracy have long been debated: does it cultivate apathy and discourage citizen participation? What does it mean to be faithfully or well represented in a democracy? And how can appropriate, meaningful representation be achieved? Here, these questions are addressed from a new perspective. Representation, Joshua Foa Dienstag argues, can create the illusion of freedom and reciprocity in place of the real thing, and in both cinema and politics, what gives us pleasure is not the same as what secures or supports our existence as free and equal citizens. As this book shows, there are political dangers not visible within the current debates around democratic representation, dangers we can better understand and help to minimize by considering the way that human beings interact, emotionally, with their filmic representations. Dienstag looks at a series of films that directly confront issues of representation (Her, Blade Runner, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Melancholia, and the Up documentary series) to diagnose these hazards and consider how best to respond to them. Each chapter looks at a specific film as emblematic of a different conception or problem of representation often ignored by mainstream political debates (such as reciprocity, happiness, boundaries, evil) to show that the relationship between representation and freedom is fraught with tension. This book continues Dienstag's earlier groundbreaking work on philosophical pessimism, understood not as something despairing, but as a rejection of the idea that these necessary tensions can be cured. Ultimately, Dienstag seeks to defend a kind of pessimistic politics that might produce a better sort of democratic representation than what we have today.
Author: Joshua Foa Dienstag
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400827485
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 313
Get Book
Book Description
Pessimism claims an impressive following--from Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, to Freud, Camus, and Foucault. Yet "pessimist" remains a term of abuse--an accusation of a bad attitude--or the diagnosis of an unhappy psychological state. Pessimism is thought of as an exclusively negative stance that inevitably leads to resignation or despair. Even when pessimism looks like utter truth, we are told that it makes the worst of a bad situation. Bad for the individual, worse for the species--who would actually counsel pessimism? Joshua Foa Dienstag does. In Pessimism, he challenges the received wisdom about pessimism, arguing that there is an unrecognized yet coherent and vibrant pessimistic philosophical tradition. More than that, he argues that pessimistic thought may provide a critically needed alternative to the increasingly untenable progressivist ideas that have dominated thinking about politics throughout the modern period. Laying out powerful grounds for pessimism's claim that progress is not an enduring feature of human history, Dienstag argues that political theory must begin from this predicament. He persuasively shows that pessimism has been--and can again be--an energizing and even liberating philosophy, an ethic of radical possibility and not just a criticism of faith. The goal--of both the pessimistic spirit and of this fascinating account of pessimism--is not to depress us, but to edify us about our condition and to fortify us for life in a disordered and disenchanted universe.
Author: Frank B. Wilderson III
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631496158
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 246
Get Book
Book Description
“Wilderson’s thinking teaches us to believe in the miraculous even as we decry the brutalities out of which miracles emerge”—Fred Moten Praised as “a trenchant, funny, and unsparing work of memoir and philosophy” (Aaron Robertson,?Literary Hub), Frank B. Wilderson’s Afropessimism arrived at a moment when protests against police brutality once again swept the nation. Presenting an argument we can no longer ignore, Wilderson insists that we must view Blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Radical in conception, remarkably poignant, and with soaring flights of memoir, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit.“Wilderson’s ambitious book offers its readers two great gifts. First, it strives mightily to make its pessimistic vision plausible. . . . Second, the book depicts a remarkable life, lived with daring and sincerity.”—Paul C. Taylor, Washington Post
Author: Kenneth R. Morefield
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443874981
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 190
Get Book
Book Description
Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, Volume III continues the work presented in the first two volumes of this title, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2008 and 2011. It provides informed yet accessible articles that will provide readers with an introduction to masters of world cinema whose works explore the themes of human spirituality and religious faith. Volume III contains essays dealing with canonical directors notably absent from the first two entries of the series, such as De Sica and Hitchcock, while also including examinations of contemporary auteurs who are still actively working, like Asghar Farhadi and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. While retaining an international emphasis similar to the first two volumes, it also includes a focused look at a few American auteurs not yet considered in the series. Volume III also acts as an important contribution to canon formation, illustrating the complexity and variety in the films of those who are truly the masters of world cinema. Built solidly around close, formal readings of selective films, the essays in Volume III also demonstrate familiarity with film history and bring insight from varied disciplines. Framed by the question “What makes movies material?”, Volume III continues the series’ endeavour to have faith and spirituality provide a context for considering what makes cinema significant.
Author: Anuradha Dingwaney Needham
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135021341
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222
Get Book
Book Description
Shyam Benegal is an Indian director and screenwriter whose work is considered central to New Indian cinema. By closely analysing several of Benegal’s films, this book provides an understanding of India’s post-independence history. The book examines the filmmaker’s focus on women by highlighting his subtle and critical engagement with a truism of Indian nationalism: women’s centrality to the (nation-) state’s negotiation with modernity. It looks at the importance Benegal accords to history – its little known, contested, or iconic events and figures – in crafting national culture and identities, and goes on to discuss the filmmaker’s nuanced representation of the developmental agendas of the nation-state. The book presents an account of the relationship of historical film and fiction to official history, and provides a fuller understanding of Indian cinema, and how it is shaped by as well as itself shapes national imperatives. Filling a gap in the literature, the book offers an analysis of cinematic treatment of post-independence narratives and gives important insights into the imagination of the time. It is a useful contribution for students and scholars of Film Studies, South Asian History and South Asian Culture.
Author: Brad Prager
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 190567418X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 229
Get Book
Book Description
More than any other director, Werner Herzog is renowned for pushing the boundaries of conventional cinema, especially those between the fictional and the factual, the fantastic and the real. Drawing on over 35 films, this book explores his continuing search for what he has described as the 'ecstatic truth'
Author: Denise J. Youngblood
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292761112
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Get Book
Book Description
The golden age of Soviet cinema, in the years following the Russian Revolution, was a time of both achievement and contradiction, as reflected in the films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov. Tensions ran high between creative freedom and institutional constraint, radical and reactionary impulses, popular and intellectual cinema, and film as social propaganda and as personal artistic expression. In less than a decade, the creative ferment ended, subjugated by the ideological forces that accompanied the rise of Joseph Stalin and the imposition of the doctrine of Socialist Realism on all the arts. Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918–1935 records this lost golden age. Denise Youngblood considers the social, economic, and industrial factors that influenced the work of both lesser-known and celebrated directors. She reviews all major and many minor films of the period, as well as contemporary film criticism from Soviet film journals and trade magazines. Above all, she captures Soviet film in a role it never regained—that of dynamic artform of the proletarian masses.
Author: Flannery Wilson
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474408141
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages :
Get Book
Book Description
In the Taiwanese film industry, the dichotomy between 'art-house' and commercially viable films is heavily emphasized. However, since the democratization of the political landscape in Taiwan, Taiwanese cinema has become internationally fluid. As the case studies in this book demonstrate, filmmakers such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, and Ang Lee each engage with international audience expectations. New Taiwanese Cinema in Focus therefore presents the Taiwanese New Wave and Second Wave movements with an emphasis on intertextuality, citation and trans-cultural dialogue. Wilson argues that the cinema of Taiwan since the 1980s should be read emblematically; that is, as a representation of the greater paradox that exists in national and transnational cinema studies. She argues that these unlikely relationships create the need for a new way of thinking about 'transnationalism' altogether, making this an essential read for advanced students and scholars in both Film Studies and Asian Studies.
Author: Serge Daney
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1635901618
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 617
Get Book
Book Description
The writings of one of the greatest film critics of his generation on the auteur approach of the French New Wave to a more structural examination of film. One of the greatest film critics of his generation, Serge Daney wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma before becoming a journalist for the daily newspaper Libération. The writings collected in this volume reflect Daney’s evolving interests, from the auteur approach of the French New Wave to a more structural examination of film, psychoanalysis, and popular culture. Openly gay throughout his lifetime, Daney rarely wrote explicitly about homosexuality but his writings reflect a queer sensibility that would influence future generations. In regular intellectual exchanges with Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Roland Barthes, Daney wrote about cinema autobiographically, while lyrically analyzing the transition from modern cinema to postmodern media. A noted polymath, Daney also published books about tennis and Haiti’s notorious Duvalier regime. His criticism is open and challenging, polyvocal and compulsively readable.
Author: Adele Reinhartz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415677203
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Get Book
Book Description
Bible and Cinema: Fifty Key Films introduces a wide range of those movies - among the most important, critically-acclaimed and highest-grossing films of all time - which have drawn inspiration, either directly or indirectly, from the Bible.
