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

By:

Grønstad, Asbjørn [author.]

Material type: Text

text

Media type:

computer

Carrier type:

online resource

ISBN:

1282171410
9048508509
9781282171411
9789048508501

Subject(s): Genre/Form:

Additional physical formats: Print version:: Transfigurations.DDC classification:

791.43/6552 22

LOC classification:

PN1995.9.V5 G76 2008eb

Online resources:

Digital version

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.

Action note:

digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve

Summary: 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.Review: "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.

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Title notes ( 12 )

Holdings
Item type	Current library	Call number	URL	Status	Notes	Date due	Barcode
E-books	Hugenote College Main Campus		Digital version	Not for loan	Only accessible on campus.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-260) and indexes.

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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.

"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.

Electronic reproduction. [Place of publication not identified] : HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010. MiAaHDL

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English.

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