Transfigurations: Violence, Death and Masculinity in American Cinema (Film Culture in Transition)

by Asbjorn Gronstad

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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. Gronstad 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. This title is available in the OAPEN Library - http://www.oapen.org.
  • ISBN10 9048520592
  • ISBN13 9789048520596
  • Publish Date 18 August 2008
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country NL
  • Imprint Amsterdam University Press