Transfigurations : Violence, Death and Masculinity in American Cinema (Amsterdam University Press - Film Culture in Transition)

Bij veel mensen en vooral filmliefhebbers is het geweld in Amerikaanse cinema er met de paplepel ingegoten: van Anthony Perkins die Janet Leigh aan stukken rijt in een van de meest beruchte douchescenes, via de meesterwerken uit de jaren zeventig van Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah en Francis Ford Coppola, tot de hedendaagse verbeeldingen van de alg Bron: Flaptekst, uitgeversinformatie. "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 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 Contents - 6 Acknowledgements - 8 Prolegomenon - 10 Introduction: Film Violens as Figurality - 14 Part 1. Screen Violence: Five Fallacies - 24 Part 2. Filming Death - 64 1. The Transfigured Image - 66 2. Narrating Violence, or, Aleegories of Dying - 81 Part 3. Male Subjectivities at the Margins - 96 3. Mean Streets: Death and Disfiguration in Hawks's Scarface - 98 4. Kubrick's The Killing and the Emplotment of Death - 117 5. Blood of a Poet: Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch - 131 6. As I Lay Dying Violence and Subjectivity in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs - 156 7. One-Dimensional Men: Fincher s Fight Club and the end of Masculinity - 173 Postscript - 188 Notes - 192 Bibliography - 222 Index of Names - 262 Index of Film Titles - 268 Index of Subjects - 272