Book Description
Since its original publication in 1987, Channels of Discourse has provided the most comprehensive consideration of commercial television, drawing on insights provided by the major strands of contemporary criticism: semiotics, narrative theory, reception theory, genre theory, ideological analysis, psychoanalysis, feminist criticism, and British cultural studies.
The second edition features a new introduction by Robert Allen that includes a discussion of the political economy of commercial television. Two new essays have been added—one an assessment of postmodernism and television, the other an analysis of convergence and divergence among the essays—and the original essays have been substantially revised and updated with an international audience in mind. Sixty-one new television stills illustrate the text.
Each essay lays out the general tenets of its particular approach, discusses television as an object of analysis within that critical framework, and provides extended examples of the types of analysis produced by that critical approach. Case studies range from Rescue 911 and Twin Peaks to soap operas, music videos, game shows, talk shows, and commericals.
Channels of Discourse, Reassembled suggests new ways of understanding relationships among television programs, between viewing pleasure and narrative structure, and between the world in front of the television set and that represented on the screen. The collection also addresses the qualities of popular television that traditional aesthetics and quantitative media research have failed to treat satisfactorily, including its seriality, mass production, and extraordinary popularity.
The contributors are Robert C. Allen, Jim Collins, Jane Feuer, John Fiske, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, James Hay, E. Ann Kaplan, Sarah Kozloff, Ellen Seiter, and Mimi White.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent Overview of Media Studies Methodologies.......2002-07-04
In a critical writing course I taught in Spring 2002, I used Channels of Discourse, Reassembled as the core text for the course readings. The many chapters within are written by the best of the best in the fields of media studies and cultural studies, and the methodologies are presented in an easy-to-read manner which is informative and full of examples and case studies. This is an excellent book for media studies students, as its chapters lay out the basic information they should know about many of the methodologies often used in media criticism.
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Distorted Images: British National Identity and Film in the 1920s (Cinema and Society)
Kenton Bamford
Manufacturer: I. B. Tauris
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ASIN: 1860643582 |
Book Description
The 1920s is a neglected period in British film history, yet this is a fascinating period in the cinema when, confronted with audiences' preference for the American cinema of Griffith and deMille, the British cinema-going public was being encouraged to "buy British." In this rigorous, illuminating exploration of the cultural construction of "Britishness" by the British film industry, Kenton Bamford investigates the image of nation and of British men and women that films projected, the class attitudes and values that underpinned those images, and the realities of the reception of British and American films across classes. Using an exciting array of original source materials, he looks at the culture of the stage and popular fiction on which the cinema fed and demonstrates the stultifying aura of middle-class gentility that stifled creativity, innovation and democracy in British films. He also uncovers some unsung heroes of British cinema, including British star Betty Balfour and director George Pearson.
Book Description
Series like "The Avengers" and "Danger Man", with their professional secret agents, or "The Saint" and "The Persuaders", featuring flamboyant crime-fighters, still inspire mainstream and cult followings. Saints and Avengers explores and celebrates this unique television genre for the first time. James Chapman uses case studies to look at the thrillers' representations of national identity, and the world of the '60's and '70's. Chapman also asserts that this particular type of thriller was a historically and culturally defined generic type, with enduring appeal, as the current vogue for remaking them as big budget films attests.
Customer Reviews:
The Other British Invasion.......2005-09-05
In Saints & Avengers, author James Chapman profiles nine TV series. He says that all but one are available on home video, but he must mean in the U.K., because a quick search shows that only about half are easily available in the U.S. Some of these shows never aired in the U.S., so the American reader may not be as interested in some parts of this book.
The subtitle is British Adventure Series of the 1960s and that is an accurate description of the purpose of this book. Chapman examines how the British TV series differed from the American shows of the same time and how these shows in particular typified the decade.
Even in the 60s, American television was a dominant cultural force, but British series such as The Avengers and The Champions were still able to capture a large American audience. For one thing, there were few spy series in the U.S., with westerns and detective drama more common. When Brit spy shows came to America, we were ready for them. (Come to think of it, I can't even think of any American spy heroes, fictional or not.)
Chapman also looks at how the shows belonged to the Sixties and couldn't succeed beyond the end of the decade. He points out the failure of The New Avengers and The Return of the Saint. On the other hand, it seemes that viewers in the Seventies were receptive to a completely different type of series, as The Prisoner showed.
Chapman's writing is clear and engaging, except in the introduction, when he gets bogged down in academic jargon. Don't let that keep you from moving right on to the rest of this thoughtful and entertaining look at some of the best television there has ever been.
An excellent book for anyone interested in these shows!.......2004-02-14
This book works on three levels:
1. Read as a whole, it provides a fascinating account of the rise and fall of the British TV export market in the 1960s. I always wondered why there are all these great British shows that aired on American network TV back then, but none do now. This book provides the answers.
2. Chapman provides very interesting and well-cited academic insight into these series, examining their themes and cultural implications, and how they fit into their time, without ever becoming dry or boring. This book is not a text book; it's very readable.
3. Read in pieces, the book provides solid backgrounds and analysises of each program it discusses. The most pages are devoted to Secret Agent (Danger Man), The Avengers, The Saint, and The Persuaders, which should make sense to an American reader, since these are the shows most commonly available here on DVD. It is worth buying this book even if you are just into ONE of these shows and want to know more about it. However, I found myself reading every chapter, and becoming interested in the other shows discussed as well, and trying to track them down.
Overall, this book is an excellent overview of Sixties British adventure/spy series (as its apt title suggests) written in a very accessible manner. Highly recommended!
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Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film (Cinema and Society)
James Chapman
Manufacturer: I. B. Tauris
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1850438080
Release Date: 2005-11-24 |
Book Description
This groundbreaking book by one of Britain's leading film historians is the first to take on this major genre in all its complexity. It takes to heart Ken Loach's view that "the only reason to make films that are a reflection on history is to talk about the present." With this proposition as his starting point, James Chapman examines the place of historical films in British cinema history and film culture. Through in-depth case studies of fourteen key films, from Henry V and Zulu to Chariots of Fire and Elizabeth, he analyzes the themes they present, including gender, ethnicity, militarism and and imperialism--throughout exploring their dialectical relationship between past and present and how they project images and ideologies of "Britishness" to audiences in the UK and North America.
Book Description
In this remarkable new study, the renowned historian and theorist of early cinema turns his attention to the work of Fritz Lang, proposing new readings of the entire output of one of cinema's foremost directors. Gunning examines the films not only as a stylistically coherent body of work, but as an attempt to portray the modern world through cinema. The world of modernity in which systems replace individuals is conveyed by Lange's mastery of cinematic set design, composition, and editing. Lang presents not only a decades-long vision of cinematic narrative that can be compared to that of Alfred Hitchcock or Jean Renoir, but a view of modernity that relates strongly to the ideas of Adorno, Brecht, Benjamin, and Kracauer.
From the sweeping allegorical films of the '20s to the chilly and abstract thrillers of the '50s, Fritz Lang's films, Gunning claims, are among the most precious records of the twentieth century. The Films of Fritz Lang immeasurably enriches our understanding of a great artist who fades away even in being recognized and interpreted, an enigmatic figure at the junction of aesthetics, history, biography and theory.
Customer Reviews:
Great book on Lang.......2006-09-25
Occasionally quirky and idiosyncratic, this rich and thought-provoking book uses wide variety of sources and methodologies to analyse the work of one of the true geniuses of cinema.
Recomended to all students of cinema.
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Britain Colonized: Hollywood's Appropriation of British Literature
Jennifer M. Jeffers
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
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ASIN: 1403972761
Release Date: 2006-07-20 |
Book Description
This study explores the most popular, and hence most enduring, forms of Hollywood's invention of Britain through the adaptation of its literature.Utilizing Jacque Derrida's Margins of Philosophy and various texts by Gilles Deleuze, as well as Deleuze's work with Felix Guattari, this text identifies the phenomena portending the future of British and Anglophone literary and cultural studies as a group of citations appropriated for American ends.
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Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism
Manufacturer: Wallflower Press
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ASIN: 1904764711 |
Book Description
Fires Were Started is a provocative analysis of the responses of British film to the policies and political ideology of the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and it represents an original and stimulating contribution to our knowledge of British cinema. This second edition includes revised and updated contributions from some of the leading scholars of British cinema, including Thomas Elsaesser, Peter Wollen and Manthia Diawara. The book discuss prominent filmmakers such as Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Ken Russell, Nicolas Roeg and Stephen Frears, it also explores some lesser known but equally important territory such as the work of Black British filmmakers, the Leeds Animation Workshop and Channel 4's Film on Four. Films discussed include Distant Voices, Still Lives, My Beautiful Launderette, Chariots of Fire and Drowning by Numbers.
Book Description
How did the imperial logic underlying British and Indian film policy change with the British Empire’s loss of moral authority and political cohesion? Were British and Indian films of the 1930s and 1940s responsive to and responsible for such shifts? Cinema at the End of Empire illuminates this intertwined history of British and Indian cinema in the late colonial period. Challenging the rubric of national cinemas that dominates film studies, Priya Jaikumar contends that film aesthetics and film regulations were linked expressions of radical political transformations in a declining British empire and a nascent Indian nation. As she demonstrates, efforts to entice colonial film markets shaped Britain’s national film policies, and Indian responses to these initiatives altered the limits of colonial power in India. Imperially themed British films and Indian films envisioning a new civil society emerged during political negotiations that redefined the role of the state in relation to both film industries.
In addition to close readings of British and Indian films of the late colonial era, Jaikumar draws on a wealth of historical and archival material, including parliamentary proceedings, state-sponsored investigations into colonial filmmaking, trade journals, and intra- and intergovernmental memos regarding cinema. Her wide-ranging interpretations of British film policies, British initiatives in colonial film markets, and genres such as the Indian mythological film and the British empire melodrama reveal how popular film styles and controversial film regulations in these politically linked territories reconfigured imperial relations. With its innovative examination of the colonial film archive, this richly illustrated book presents a new way to track historical change through cinema.
Book Description
Lindsay Anderson's provocative, savage and wickedly funny 1968 masterpiece, If...., deals fundamentally--and controversially--with England and quintessential "Englishness." If.... was the first film ever with a British setting and cast to win the Palme d'Or for Best Film at Cannes. The fruit of Anderson's first-hand studies of the Czech, Polish and Indian New Waves led by Milos Forman, Andrzej Wajda and, most famously, Satyajit Ray, it prophesied--and then mirrored--an international outbreak of youthful rebellion. An authority on Lindsay Anderson and his films, Sutton here draws on massive quantities of original material: Anderson's private archive, which illuminates the film's autobiographical elements; the original script Crusaders; the sequel on which he was working at the time of his death; interviews with key members of cast and crew including lead Malcolm McDowell, all are here explored to unravel the mysteries of a film which continues to delight, enrage and inspire.
Book Description
Required reading for anyone interested in how style and the power of image dominate every aspect of our lives. A special millennium edition of the 1988 classic with a compelling new forward by the author.
When All Consuming Images first appeared ten years ago, it quickly established itself as a classic in the field of American visual culture, with its textured historical analysis and lucid discussion of the power of style in contemporary society. All Consuming Images has profoundly influenced the fields of art, architecture, and graphic design, insightfully exploring how a sensibility for style has shaped the consumerist culture in which we live.
In his new introduction, Ewen scrutinizes the social thought that brought the image to prominence as a primary tool of public address, and presents revealing new autobiographical testimonies which illuminate the problematic place that images occupy in young peoples sense of themselves and their world.
Customer Reviews:
Derivative.......2007-06-15
The writing here may be interesting, but the theory is old--still correct, but old. If you want to read theories of simulation, start with Karl Marx on commodity fetishism, then go to Adorno and Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry," Jean Baudrillard's "The Precession of Simulacra," and Marshall McLuhan, especially _Understanding Media_. The idea that media and images have become the real, that life not only imitates art but is art--and really bad, commercial, ethically vapid art at that--is the foundational insight of postmodern theory.
Four and a half -- Groundbreaking Examination of Consumer Culture.......2006-05-16
This book is eye-opening and will cause you to question the extent to which your needs are manipulated by advertising and transformed into desires. Pretty dense research and dissection of the power of visual images to create and sustain a market economy.
A perfect complement to the BBC documentary series by Adam Curtis, A Century of the Self.
Confusing, very intellectual.......2001-12-19
When I first read this book, I was 18, a freshman in college. I had spent the entirety of my existence under the fishbowl of advertising. Although I had seen styles come and go, I really didn't understand enough to truly fathom what Ewen was saying.
This, I think is Ewens's primary weakness. He comes off as attacking something that most people don't really see as existing. Fashion and style are too easily made straw men. Especially important is that fashion and style are usually under some sort of attack, either for using sex to interest people, for promoting an unrealistic standard of beauty, or even as the ultimate cause of violence and poverty when people murder others for their shoes or their coats.
It is far too easy to mistake Ewen's attack on style as an attack on having aesthetic values at all. His use of fascist and proto-fascist sources as examples of the evil of style also weakens his work, as it looks like he is trying to create a "slippery slope" argument between Vogue and Mien Kampf.
Ultimately, I would say the book is worth reading, but only if one is looking for a way to better express what one already feels. If you are looking for something that will change minds, this is not the book.
A weapon you can use for your own advantage........2001-06-05
This book is a powerful tool. It is eye-opening and thought-provoking. While giving you some insight and a point of view to look around you with a better focus, it lets you better know yourself.
The author examines the power of the image in our society, showing how, with the birth of photography, the image of an object became more important than the object itself. Ewen reminds us how style, images and propaganda affect our lives, by making people dissatisfied with the things they have (houses, cars, razors, sweatshirts), still good and useful and efficient, but lacking in the newest touch -- to make you buy what you don't need.
There are a few ads discussed, so you can learn how to analyze ads on your own.
You'll find how appearances work, so you can get rid of them.
Use your critical thought and read this book with a grain of salt. As an example, the author - to make his point - quotes Karl Marx three times. While Marx, the father of Communism, certainly influenced the lives (and especially the deaths) of millions of people, much research shows that he deliberately collected false data to write his book...
Also (see pages 186-187) the author somewhat condems the spread and use of computers and machines. I just don't agree, here. The advent of computer, for example, made my job as a pharmacist much easier. And I have to thank the Internet and the computing power of machines if I can run my publishing house and if I'm able to get in touch with people around the world who share my interests.
Please remember that this book is a history of the role of image and style in western societies - especially the USA one - and that the author is a Professor: in my opinion, a few chapters are not much interesting, because they don't give the reader information he can use.
I usually underline the books' parts I find more interesting, and I write down in a separate sheet the page number where the underlining occurred and why I did it. This is one of my most underlined books!
A few quotations from the book follow. I think they shed light on its value.
"Every element of politicians' public lives, every utterance, every countenance, every policy statement, every carefully chosen background setting is routinely passed through the image mill. Focus groups are staged, public perceptions painstakingly monitored, chiefly for the purpose of generating what one knowing "New York Times" reporter has termed "more potent propaganda."".
"Crowds have always undergone the influence of illusions. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master."
"To (...) modern architects of persuasion, independent public deliberation was something to be avoided at all cost. In its apparent capacity to advance a worldview in a bedazzling moment, and to stun the public mind into submission, the image was conceived to be an effective antidote to critical thought."
"In a highly mobile society, where first impressions are important and where selling oneself is the most cultivated "skill", the construction of appearances becomes more and more imperative. If style offers a representation of self defined by surfaces and commodities, the media by which style is transmitted tend to reinforce this outlook in intimate detail. They continually offer us visible guideposts, reference points to draw upon, against which to measure ourselves."
"As style becomes information, information becomes style. Nowhere is this trend more evident than in television news. "Newsroom" sets are styled to create the look of a command center, to offer an imagistic sense of being "plugged-in" to what is happening, to convey authority. Television journalists are selected and cultivated for their looks, their screen presence. From an authoritative, medium-shot vantage point, sitting behind a formidable desk, the anchorperson is constructed to transmit an appearance of incorruptibility, and of omniscience. On occasion, the camera moves in for a close-up, to impress a connotation of gravity upon a story, to show the audience that this newsperson "cares". From opening logo to sign-off, all information, all stories are filtered through a veil of appearances."
Dry.......2001-03-12
Ewen's research may have been extensive, but this doesn't make up for the fact that this book reads like he had to put in a SAT word every five lines just to prove that he can "write." Don't get me wrong, I've heard him speak, and his speech is not what this book is: dry, intellectual boredom.
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- Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place (Documenting the Image)
- Comedy Quotes from the Movies: Over 4,000 Bits of Humorous Dialogue from All Film Genres, Topically Arra Nged and Indexed (McFarland Classics)
- Contracts for the Film & Television Industry
- Cycle of Hatred (World of Warcraft) (World of Warcraft)
- Dickens on Screen (On Screen)
- Directing Film: The Director's Art from Script to Cutting Room
Books Index
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