a history of narrative film fifth edition

An important departure from prevailing trends in many fields, Blurred Boundaries offers new directions for the study of visual culture.If you want to explore the world of cinema, this is as good an atlas as you can have. Simultaneously, Blurred Boundaries radically alters the interpretive frameworks offered by neo-formalism and psychoanalysis: Comprehension itself becomes a social act of transformative understanding rather than an abstract mental process while the use of psychoanalytic terms like desire, lack, or paranoia to make social points metaphorically yields to a vocabulary designed expressly for historical interpretation such as project, intentionality and the social imaginary. Examining work from Eisenstein's Strike to the Rodney King videotape, Nichols interrelates issues of formal structure, viewer response and historical consciousness. Nichols proposes a new goal: to examine how specific works, old and new, promote or suppress a sense of historical consciousness.

Traditionally, film history and cultural studies sought to place films in a historical context. Nichols argues that a history of social representation in film, television and video requires an understanding of the fate of both contemporary and older work. A New History of Japanese Cinema takes a genuinely innovative approach to the subject, and should prove an essential resource for many years to come.īlurred Boundaries explores decisive moments when the traditional boundaries of fiction/nonfiction, truth and falsehood blur. In grappling with Japanese film history and criticism, most western commentators have concentrated on offering interpretations of what have come to be considered 'classic' films. The book concludes with an investigation of genre and gender in mainstream films of recent years. Avant-garde directors came to the fore during the 1960s and early seventies, and their work is discussed in depth. The book's coverage of the post-occupation period looks at 'romance' films in particular. Moving into the late thirties and early forties, Standish analyses cinema's relationship with the state-focusing in particular on the war and occupation periods. After an introduction outlining the earliest years of cinema in Japan, Standish demonstrates cinema's symbolic position in Japanese society in the 1930s - as both a metaphor and a motor of modernity. Adopting a thematic, exploratory approach, Standish links the concept of Japanese cinema as a system of communication with some of the central discourses of the twentieth century: modernism, nationalism, humanism, resistance, and gender. She details an industry and an art form shaped by the competing and merging forces of traditional culture and of economic and technological innovation. In A New History of Japanese Cinema Isolde Standish focuses on the historical development of Japanese film.

A history of narrative film fifth edition