Film, Media, and Cultural Studies

The first comprehensive inquiry into the origin and growth of regional language cinema in India, this book traces the development of Kannada cinema from the 1940s to the new millennium. Focusing on the role regional language cinema plays, the book examines the conflict between the ‘region’ and the ‘nation’ in the regional consciousness. It explores how its origin in a princely state under indirect British rule had an impact on the shaping of Kannada cinema, and inquiries into the effect of the linguistic reorganization of the states in the 1950s upon regional identity. Exploring the influence of national developments—from the ascendancy of Indira Gandhi in the 1960s to economic liberalization in the 1990s—on regional identity, the book provides first-time assessments of the Kannada star Rajkumar as a regional icon and the changing meaning of Bangalore city to the Kannada-speaking public.

This book examines the phenomenon of ‘yoof’ television programmes such as Network 7, The Word, The Big Breakfast, Snub TV, and Gamesmaster. Between 1987 and 1995 these and other related programmes formed part of a high-profile genre that in terms of both the personnel involved and their visual style continue to be influential in British television today. Examining these programmes the author reflects on the way in which the contemporary youth audience – Generation X – were being addressed. The author identifies an ambivalent viewing sensibility – ‘cynicism and enchantment’ – which encapsulates the attitude expressed by both the programmes and the audience. The distinctive aspect of the book is the way in which the author concentrates on the spatial and visual aspects of television. In particular her concern is to re-evaluate television as a specific experience, and one which has a central importance in young people's formation of identity and their sense of being in the world. Her central thesis also suggests that while television must necessarily be related to other visual media, it should be understood as having distinct aesthetic and phenomenological qualities of its own.

This book discusses the impact of mechanical recording on modern art and literature. Recording media, including photography and film, seemed to offer entirely new means of representation, neither linguistic nor pictorial, with both the usefulness of writing and the immediacy of sight. In particular, this book traces some of the more utopian projects to arise from this hope, including the Readie machine of Bob Brown, which was to turn stories and poems into strips of linguistic film. The influence of photography and film on the transatlantic avant garde is traced through three stages, from the early days of Camera Work, through the enthusiasm of Eugene Jolas and the contributors to his magazine transition, to the crisis created by the introduction of sound in the late 1920s, experienced with particular bitterness by the editors of the early film magazine, Close Up. Subsequent chapters describe the entirely new kind of sensory enjoyment brought into modern American fiction by the new media. What Fitzgerald calls spectroscopic gayety — the enjoyable disorientation of the senses by machine perception — turns out to be a powerful force in much American fiction, even that commonly celebrated for its hard-nosed realism. The revolutionary possibilities of this new spectatorship and its inevitable limitations are pursued through a number of examples, including Dos Passos, James Weldon Johnson, and Hemingway.

This book remaps the history of British war culture by insisting on the centrality and importance of the literature of the Second World War. Offering an account of the emergence of modern war culture, it explores how writers like Ford Madox Ford, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, T.E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, James Hanley, Rex Warner, Alexander Baron, Keith Douglas, Henry Green, and Graham Greene challenged and contested the dominant narratives of war projected by an enormously powerful mass media and culture industry. Modern war cultures, the book contends, are defined by their drive to normalize conflict and war making, by their struggle to colonize the entire wartime cultural field, and by claims to monopolize representations and interpretation of the conflict. The book argues that the Great War failed to produce an official war culture, famously producing instead a war literature of protest, marked by modernist tropes of alienation and disintegration. Challenging conventional maps of modern culture, it contends that the interwar period saw a parallel logic of consolidation and reconstruction as the imperial war machine struggled to reinvent itself, culminating in the emergence of a fully mobilized and persuasive official war culture during the Second World War. The book reads war literature as one element in an expanded cultural field, which also includes popular culture and mass communications, the productions of war planners and military historians, projections of new technologies of violence, the fantasies and theories of strategists, and the material culture of total war.

That the idea of Dickens and the adjective ‘Dickensian’ continue to have a cultural resonance which extends beyond the book‐buying public almost two centuries after Dickens's birth is testimony to his sense of himself as a mass cultural artist. This book contends that Dickens's popularity is unique, different even from that of Shakespeare because, writing in ‘the first age of mass culture’, Dickens was instinctively aware of the changed context of art, or of the need for popular art to find its place in an age of mechanical reproduction. The book describes the ways in which he envisioned and engineered his cultural pervasiveness, the media that enabled it, and the posthumous processes — technological, commercial, ideological, and emotional — that have perpetuated it. The first part examines Dickens's cultural vision and practice — his model of authorship, his journalism, his public readings, his relationship with America and the machine — and the second part explores Dickens's screen and ‘heritage’ afterlives, as well as the Dickens visitor attraction, ‘Dickens World’. Dickens's one‐time presence on the ten‐pound note symbolizes the book's guiding interest in the relationship between the commercial, cultural, and political aspects of Dickens's populist vision and legacy. The book argues that the aspects of Dickens's art that have underscored critical ambivalence about Dickens — his relationship with money, mechanical reproduction, and the mass market in particular — have ultimately ensured both his iconic cultural status and his centrality to the academic canon.

Why can none of us hear our own recorded voice without wincing? Why is the telephone still full of such spookiness and erotic possibility? Why does the metaphor of ventriloquism, the art of ‘seeming to speak where one is not’, speak so resonantly to our contemporary technological condition? These are the kind of questions which impel this inquisitive history of ventriloquism and the disembodied voice. This book tracks the subject from its first recorded beginnings in ancient Israel and Greece, through the fulminations of early Christian writers against the unholy (and, they believed, obscenely produced) practices of pagan divination, the aberrations of the voice in mysticism, witchcraft and possession, and the strange obsession with the vagrant figure of the ventriloquist, newly conceived as male rather than female, during the Enlightenment. It retrieves the stories of some of the most popular and versatile ventriloquists and polyphonists of the 19th century, and investigates the survival of ventriloquial delusions and desires in spiritualism and the ‘vocalic uncanny’ of technologies like telephone, radio, film, and internet.

This book approaches the problems raised by the media via a set of arguments with post-modernism and Information Society theory. It argues that the media are important because they raise a set of questions central to social and political theory. It focuses on the problem raised by what Kant called the unsocial sociability of human kind. Then, it examines the implications for emancipation of seeing the media as cultural industries within the capitalist market economy; of seeing the media as technologies; of the specialisation of intellectual production and of the separation and increasing social distance between the producers and consumers of symbols. The problem of how the symbolic forms that the media circulate can be assessed is provided. It is argued that evaluation is in practice unavoidable and without some standards that are more than just subjective any criticism of the media's performance is impossible. Via an examination of the debate between the sociology of art and aesthetics the book argues for the ethical foundations of aesthetic judgement and for the establishment of agreed standards of aesthetic judgement via the discourse ethic that underlies the argument of the entire book. Next the book gives a discussion of the media and politics. Hereafter the book returns to the roots of public sphere theory.

This book provides analysis of how human biology, as well as human culture, determines the ways films are made and experienced. This new approach is called “bioculturalism.” The book shows how important formats, such as films for children, romantic films, pornography, fantasy films, horror films, and sad melodramas, appeal to an array of different emotions that have been ingrained in the human embodied brain by the evolutionary process. The book also discusses how these biological dispositions are molded by culture. It explains why certain themes and emotions fascinate viewers all over the globe at all times, and how different cultures invest their own values and tastes in the universal themes.The book further uses the breakthroughs of modern brain science to explain central features of film aesthetics and to construct a general model of aesthetic experience, the PECMA flow model, which explains how the flow of information and emotions in the embodied brain provides a series of aesthetic experiences. The combination of film theory, cognitive psychology, neurology, and evolutionary theory provides explanations for why narrative forms are appealing and how and why art films use different mental mechanisms than those that support mainstream narrative films, as well as how film evokes images of inner, spiritual life and feelings of realism.Embodied Visions provides a new synthesis in film and media studies and aesthetics that combines cultural history with the long history of the evolution of our embodied brains.