Cinema & Cultural Modernity

by Gill Branston, Branston

Overview

This volume carves a lucid path through the central debates of film and cinema studies and explores these in their social and political contexts. The book includes histories of the ways in which we view Hollywood's global dominance, up to the development of late modernity and the declaration of postmodernity. In an accessible fashion, it discusses changing theorizations of the economics, audiences, and fascinations of cinema, addressing concepts such as agency, negotiation and identification, and global popularity within contemporary cultures of celebrity, consumption and the visual. Gill Branston outlines the need for cinema study that is both sensitive to the formal textiness of films, but also less anxious about arguing for its position within broad agendas of representation. At the same time, the author links such areas to both the pleasures of consumption, which cinema so often evokes and embodies, and to the need for a new, critical politics to address the persistent inequalities of modernity, inequalities which still fuel lively interest in questions of representation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780335200764
Publisher:	McGraw-Hill Companies, The
Publication date:	12/02/2000
Series:	Issues in Cultural and Media Studies Series
Pages:	222
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.47(d)

Editorial Reviews

Branston (film studies, Cardiff U., UK) addresses the social and political contexts of film and cinema studies, addressing topics such as Hollywood's histories and how authorship, stardom, and globalized blockbuster cinema, its pleasures and disappointments, might be evaluated. She argues for the need for cinema study that is both sensitive to the formal "textiness" of films but also less anxious about arguing for its position within broad agendas of representation. She also shows how such debates and histories might connect both the pleasures of "consuming" cinema with the need for a critical politics to address the persistent social and cultural inequalities of modernity. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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