Political Theory and Film

Political Theory and Film PDF

Author: Ian Fraser

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2018-01-15

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 178348165X

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Critically examines how radical political theory and its application to film analysis can provide insight to the aesthetic self during political upheaval and conflict

Philosophical Theories of Political Cinema

Philosophical Theories of Political Cinema PDF

Author: Angelo Emanuele Cioffi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-10-31

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1000468658

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This book utilizes philosophical tools to build up a framework for the classification, analysis and assessment of political cinema. The author first maps the category of political cinema, clarifying what it means for a film to be ‘political’, and then analyzes the relation between the value of a film as a political film and its value as art. Through philosophical enquiry, Angelo Emanuele Cioffi builds up a framework that could be of use in art-critical practice and that can help with the classification and assessment of political films. Grounded in analytic philosophy of art and cognitivist film theory, with insights from political science, political philosophy, epistemology and cognitive science, the book presents a unique analysis of the relation between films and the ‘political’. This theory is tested with detailed case studies, and the author uses specific films as examples of the applicability and explanatory power of this theoretical framework. As such, this book will be of interest not just to film studies, film theory and political philosophy scholars, but to anyone with an interest in political film, aesthetic practice and philosophy of art.

The Interplay Between Political Theory and Movies

The Interplay Between Political Theory and Movies PDF

Author: Ulrich Hamenstädt

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-10-01

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 331990731X

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This book presents essays and scientific contributions examining the link between popular media and politics. The essays focus on the question of how political and social change, concepts of power, and utopian elements are reflected in selected films and television series. The book applies a political science perspective, covering theories from political philosophy, political sociology and international relations, and examines a wide range of movies and TV series, such as The Godfather, Fight Club, The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. It will appeal to anyone interested in studying how political ideas, concepts and messages can be illustrated and visualized using the complex media of movies and TV series.

The Politics of Hollywood Cinema

The Politics of Hollywood Cinema PDF

Author: R. Rushton

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-12

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1137316160

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The Politics of Hollywood Cinema radically transforms our understanding of cinema's potential to be politically engaging and challenging. Examining several films from Hollywood's classical era, including Marked Woman, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Born Yesterday, On the Waterfront and It Should Happen to You, alongside contemporary theories of democracy advanced by Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Claude Lefort, Étienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière, Richard Rushton argues that popular films can offer complex subtle, relevant and controversial approaches to democracy and politics.

The Cinematic Political

The Cinematic Political PDF

Author: Michael J. Shapiro

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-11-01

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0429947321

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In this book, Michael J. Shapiro stages a series of pedagogical encounters between political theory, represented as a compositional challenge, and cinematic texts, emphasizing how to achieve an effective research paper/essay by heeding the compositional strategies of films. The text’s distinctiveness is its focus on the intermediation between two textual genres. It is aimed at providing both a conceptual introduction to the politics of aesthetics and a guide to writing strategies. In its illustrations of encounters between political theory and cinema, the book’s critical edge is its emphasis on how to intervene in cinematic texts with innovative conceptual frames in ways that challenge dominant understandings of life worlds. The Cinematic Political is designed as a teaching resource that introduces students to the relationship between film form and political thinking. With diverse illustrative investigations, the book instructs students on how to watch films with an eye toward writing a research paper in which a film (or set of films) constitutes the textual vehicle for political theorizing.

Politics, Theory, and Film

Politics, Theory, and Film PDF

Author: Bonnie Honig

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-08-26

Total Pages: 470

ISBN-13: 0190600209

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Lars von Trier's intense, disturbing, and sometimes funny films have led many to condemn him as misogynist or misanthropic. The same films inspire this collection's reflections on how our fears and desires regarding gender, power, race, finitude, family, and fate often thwart -- and sometimes feed -- our best democratic aspirations. The essays in this volume attend to von Trier's role as provocateur, as well as to his films' techniques, topics, and storytelling. Where others accuse von Trier of being clichéd, the editors argue that he intensifies the "clichés of our times" in ways that direct our political energies towards apprehending and repairing a shattered world. The book is certainly for von Trier lovers and haters but, at the same time, political, critical, and feminist theorists entirely unfamiliar with von Trier's films will find this volume's essays of interest. Most of the contributors tarry with von Trier to develop new readings of major thinkers and writers, including Agamben, Bataille, Beauvoir, Benjamin, Deleuze, Euripides, Freud, Kierkegaard, Ranciére, Nietzsche, Winnicott, and many more. Von Trier is both central and irrelevant to much of this work. Writing from the fields of classics, literature, gender studies, philosophy, film and political theory, the authors stage an interdisciplinary intervention in film studies.

Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics

Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics PDF

Author: Gordon B. Arnold

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2008-09-30

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1567207227

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Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, motion pictures and television productions-some based on historical fact and conjecture, others clearly fanciful-have embraced the idea that conspiracies shape many events, hide others, and generally dictate much of the course of modern life, often to the disadvantage of the average person. As a result, conspiracy theories have developed into a potent undercurrent in American politics. By the 1990s, it was not unusual to find conspiracies used as explanations for a wide range of political events that would otherwise seem to have quite ordinary explanations. Thus, a vast right-wing conspiracy was suggested as the source of Bill Clinton's troubles, just as conspiracy-like machinations of the liberal media were used to explain why the picture of world events did not coincide with conservative views. And this is to say nothing of the bitter arguments that still erupt over varying explanations for the attacks of 9/11. Regardless of a person's opinion about such claims, what these and many other examples clearly show is that conspiracy-theory explanations have penetrated mainstream American thought. Here, author Gordon Arnold examines the evolution of this cultural climate in the United States. Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics examines the intersection of various film and television productions in the context of unfolding political developments. The chapters follow this story chronologically, showing how screen media have both reflected and shaped the cultural milieu in which traumatic events and political controversies have been interpreted with increasing cynicism. The work also reviews the original contexts in which film, television, and political manifestations of conspiracy ideas first appeared.

Politics, Theory, and Film

Politics, Theory, and Film PDF

Author: Bonnie Honig

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-08-26

Total Pages: 470

ISBN-13: 0190600195

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Lars von Trier's intense, disturbing, and sometimes funny films have led many to condemn him as misogynist or misanthropic. The same films inspire this collection's reflections on how our fears and desires regarding gender, power, race, finitude, family, and fate often thwart -- and sometimes feed -- our best democratic aspirations. The essays in this volume attend to von Trier's role as provocateur, as well as to his films' techniques, topics, and storytelling. Where others accuse von Trier of being clichéd, the editors argue that he intensifies the "clichés of our times" in ways that direct our political energies towards apprehending and repairing a shattered world. The book is certainly for von Trier lovers and haters but, at the same time, political, critical, and feminist theorists entirely unfamiliar with von Trier's films will find this volume's essays of interest. Most of the contributors tarry with von Trier to develop new readings of major thinkers and writers, including Agamben, Bataille, Beauvoir, Benjamin, Deleuze, Euripides, Freud, Kierkegaard, Ranciére, Nietzsche, Winnicott, and many more. Von Trier is both central and irrelevant to much of this work. Writing from the fields of classics, literature, gender studies, philosophy, film and political theory, the authors stage an interdisciplinary intervention in film studies.

Cinema Pessimism

Cinema Pessimism PDF

Author: Joshua Foa Dienstag

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-11-04

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 019006773X

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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.

International Politics and Film

International Politics and Film PDF

Author: Klaus Dodds

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-05-14

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 023185059X

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International Politics and Film introduces readers to the representational qualities of film but also draws attention to how the relationship between the visual and the spatial is constitutive of international politics. Using four themes—borders, the state of exception, homeland and distant others—the territorial and imaginative dimensions of international affairs in particular are highlighted. But this volume also makes clear that international politics is not just something "out there"; film helps us better understand how it is also part of everyday life within the state—affecting individuals and communities in different ways depending on axes of difference such as gender, race, class, age, and ethnicity.