Screening Violence (Depth of Film Series)

Screening Violence (Depth of Film Series)
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Screening Violence (Depth of Film Series)
Stephen Prince
Manufacturer: Rutgers University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0813528186

I Wake up Screening: What to Do Once You've Made That Movie
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Very helpful, quick read

A Career in Film? Read I Wake Up Screening Now!

Holy Good Book!

MUST READ - If you make a film you must read this book

A kick-ass and informative look at marketing indie films.

I Wake up Screening: What to Do Once You've Made That Movie
John Anderson , and Laura Kim
Manufacturer: Billboard Books
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Binding: Paperback

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Fast, Cheap, and Under Control: Lessons from the Greatest Low-Budget Movies of All Time

ASIN: 0823088987
Release Date: 2006-04-01

Book Description

• Every film student needs this book • Insights from top industry executives, critics, and filmmakers • Perfect for film festivals or anywhere independent films are shown or discussed

The explosion of independent cinema over the past fifteen years has created thousands of would-be filmmakers, all dreaming of becoming the next Quentin Tarantino or Steven Soderbergh—and all working away like beavers, making thousands of independent films. But what do they do once the movie is made? In I Wake Up Screening, powerhouse authors John Anderson and Laura Kim tell emerging filmmakers how to (and how not to) get their movies talked about, written about, sold, and seen. The authors' advice is supported by insightful interviews with more than sixty top industry insiders, all offering priceless behind-the-scenes tips and tricks. Making a film isn't the end anymore—it's only the beginning. I Wake Up Screening can make the difference between a movie that gets into theaters and one that ends up on the floor of the director's bedroom closet.

Customer Reviews:

Very helpful, quick read.......2007-01-04

Lots of important insights from industry leaders. Topics are very well planned out. Transitions from one quote to the next become a bit cumbersome and redundant, but authors cover what should be remembered most.

A Career in Film? Read I Wake Up Screening Now!.......2006-07-31

This gem of a book needs to be absorbed long before a filmmaker makes their first or next movie. Filled with tips and do's and don't from interviews with more than 60 veteran insiders and filmmakers, a few things became clear to me right off: (1) no single person harbors all the answers, (2) the competition is fierce, (3) quality films deserve a better shot than they're getting, (4) never alienate NY Times Critic Manohla Dargis, translation: know how each journalist works, how-to approach them, & spell their name right, and (5) cultivate link(s) to respected industry contact(s) who will champion your film with you.

Holy Good Book!.......2006-04-09

This is a really good book, hard to stop reading, because it's so lively and well written by two respected indie pros -- a film critic and a publicity whiz -- giving advice and interviewing other pros. Great for anyone who wants to know who the players are and understand the reality and mystery of how independent films get to the big screen, and how they're handled on their way there by the filmmakers, press, publicists, reps, agents, festivals and distributors. It's a page turner you'll want to read straight through and go back to later for reference. Full of information you don't get in film school, with lots of specifics, even a section on legal issues and what to include in a press kit -- everything except how to raise money, shoot footage and edit dailies. It's also nicely printed, lightweight, affordable and good looking in paperback.

MUST READ - If you make a film you must read this book.......2006-04-08

Think of yourself running in a mile-long race - you kill yourself to finish the mile, and when you can see the tape, you find out you have four more miles to go!

That's exactly how the authors frame the problem for a filmmaker. You got the money scraped together, you shot your film, you've been in post cutting the film, and then (and perhaps only then) do you become aware of the millions of details, hurdles, and pitfalls that lie between you and bliss - a theatrical release. The authors love film, and want nothing more than for your film to find an audience...but how? This is where the step-by-step analysis of dealing with PR, producer-reps, attorneys, media and buyers all get outed in fascinating detail. The tone of the book is encouraging overall, but stern in its advice when necessary, i.e. "Don't ask a film critic what they thought of a particular film." The juicy vignettes are funny and poignant. They have been around the block a few times, from LA to Cannes and everywhere inbetween, and the experience shines through in their examples of how things good and bad happen to unsuspecting filmmakers. The Sundance stories are a hoot!

First-time filmmakers who have already made their film should be forewarned - you may be deeply depressed by how tiny and incestuous the business is, especially for the top sales and producer rep talent. And there are some very unhappy endings for a lot of films, truth be told. But even at the end of the line, as our faithful authors tell us, there is still self-distribution. About the only ones in the business who get short shrift in this book are actors - notably the ones who don't support their film during festivals.

Ultimately, this book captures the vibe of indie film admirably. This book should be read alongside "The Big Picture", and the comparison/contrast will make you never want to see a blockbuster again. If there is an Independent Spirit Award for how-to books about film, this should be a nominee. Read it, and you will be much more prepared to reach the real finish line - your world premier at the film festival of your dreams.

Picky detail - this edition needs copyedited and proofread. There are too many repetitions of who's who (after the 59th reference you *know* Kenneth Turan is a film critic for the LA Times) and the chapters are too discrete - too close to a textbook assignment. The flow is there, though, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A good scrubbing is all it needs, not surgery.

A kick-ass and informative look at marketing indie films. .......2006-04-02

This book appeared in my mailbox recently, I'm not sure how. But I'm glad it did. (And I wish it had appeared in my mailbox three years ago.)

"I Wake Up Screening" is an excellent guide to the ups and downs & ins and outs of getting a film out of your bedroom and into the world. It covers, with humor and aplomb, the details of fixing mistakes BEFORE you start shooting, how to get into festivals (and why you shouldn't rush to do so), and how to keep your sanity and humility in a world that is heavily populated with large budgets and larger egos.

A lot of people recommend that anyone wanting to "get into Hollywood" study films and read books like "The Kid Stays in the Picture", "The Art of War" and Machiavelli's "The Prince". While stuff like that is good for dreaming and scheming of becoming a cross between Cecil B. DeMille and Montgomery Burns, I'd recommend that for every two books like that, you read a book like this. And I'd especially recommend that you read THIS book.

Michael W. Dean
Author, "$30 Film School"

Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film

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A standard listing on Sci-fi bibliographies, but an odd hybrid of a book
Film criticism the way that it should be done.
Worth reading if you enjoy Science Fiction and its phyche.

Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film
Vivian Sobchack
Manufacturer: Rutgers University Press
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ASIN: 081352492X

Amazon.com

Screening Space, the reprint classic from Rutger's University Press, has been significantly enlarged to update the science fiction film since the early 1980s, examining classic and contemporary sci-fi films as a significant genre. Winner of the 1995 Pilgrim Award, the book examines the differences between the religious themes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the clinical random evil depicted in Event Horizon. Vivian Sobchack's detailed analysis of a wide range of films and inclusion of black-and-white movie stills allows a better understanding of science fiction films as an art form that can often present its characters, a la Blade Runner, as "more human than human."

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A standard listing on Sci-fi bibliographies, but an odd hybrid of a book.......2006-10-16

Vivian Sobchack's survey of the Sci-fi film from its beginnings in the silent era through the 1970s remains a standard reference work on the genre. It was originally published in 1980 though later revised and expanded in 1987. Unfortunately, rather than attempt to rewrite the book, she left the 1980 text largely unchanged and instead added a long, new chapter that was different both in methodology and orientation than the three original chapters. The result is a book in which the new chapter has the feel of a not completely successful graft. The final chapter has a "stuck on" feel to it and doesn't really feel compatible with what went on before.

When the original edition of this book was published, it was important for two reasons. First, the genre studies approach to film, which is far more appropriate the evaluation of many films than the auteur criticism that had dominated from the 1950s even to the present, was still in its relative infancy. My own take on matters is that for certain directors with strong personalities, auteur criticism carries a great deal of validity, but that the weaker the director or the less predominant the director, the less help it is. Many film genres require less on the vision of a particular director than the dependence of the director and writer and producer on the history of that genre. Other films in the genre shape and mold and limit what can happen in other examples of the genre. Whether one considers the Western, the Mafia film, film noir, or Sci-fi, a discussion of the genre as a whole can provide considerable insight into any individual example of the genre. This was one of the first academic discussions of Sci-fi within that context. Second, the book was important for being one of the first academic studies that took the Sci-fi film seriously. In the late 1970s, when the original edition of the book was being prepared, Sci-fi was among the least respected genres in the movies. Though 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, STAR WARS, and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND was beginning to change things, Sci-fi was neither critically nor economically successful. Today we are used to the box office dominance of Sci-fi films, but with only two or three major exceptions in the late seventies, this was not the case then. Sobchack's book played a small but definite role in making the Sci-fi film more relevant to film studies.

The first three chapters of the book remain exceptionally helpful in analyzing the crucial nature of Sci-fi films before their emergence as big box office in the eighties and beyond. Many of the films she discusses were staples of Saturday afternoon TV movie slots, which is where I first saw many of them. THE THING, THEM!, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, DESTINATION MOON, WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, and a host of other classics get extensive coverage in the book and she spends a great deal of time not only analyzing their essential characteristics but contrasting them with and comparing them to the creature films that were showing at the same time. In doing this Sobchack did her part in helping to establish a canon of Sci-fi films. The discussion takes her in the three original chapters through other classics such as WESTWORLD, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, PLANET OF THE APES, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, SILENT RUNNING, and THX 1138. I had only one quibble with these original three chapters: an artificial decision to discuss only American made films. A number of significant and influential (and their influentiality along made their exclusion arbitrary) British films were left out, including the Quatermass films, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE, and others, as well as Jean Luc Goddard's ALPHAVILLE. It also meant that Andrei Tarkovsky's great 1972 Soviet masterpiece, SOLARIS, received no discussion. It also left the very low quality but exceptionally large body of Japanese films out of consideration.

The chapter added in the late 1980s is simply odd. For one thing, she seems to have read and not completely digested the work of Fredric Jameson. I have no complaints with her interest in Jameson, who is perhaps the most important academic of the past thirty years to have shown a sustained interest in Sci-fi. Both THE POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS and POSTMODERNISM OR, THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF LATE CAPITALISM are well-thumbed volumes on my bookshelf. The problem is how dissonant this chapter is with the earlier chapters. It almost feels like the work of an entirely different author. Marxist ideas were completely absent from the first chapter, but predominant in the final one. Moreover, it is as if she hadn't completely interiorized Jameson and Mandel's ideas, but was instead almost parroting Jameson. Another problem here is that the first three chapters were models of clarity. Jameson is not an especially easy to read writer, and is very much a product of the European tradition of writing in which authors tend to encrust their ideas in difficult to decade jargon (a tradition opposed to other writers who strove for clarity of expression and lack of academic jargon and included writers such as David Hume, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein, as opposed to Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Marx [who could write beautifully and simply when he wanted to], and Derrida who cannot be read so much as interpreted). This seems to have infected Sobchack and the final chapter is a chore to read. A number of additional films are discussed, including the STAR WAR films, E.T., BLADE RUNNER, and REPO MAN. I do not, however, believe that this was a successful chapter. It attempts to apply Jameson to the most recent changes in Sci-fi film in an effort to capture the movement of history. As a whole, I felt that this chapter significantly weakened the book as a whole.

Nonetheless, this is a must read book for anyone wishing to study the Sci-fi film. It definitely has its weaknesses, but it just as surely has its strengths. I would perhaps caution readers to focus mainly on the first three chapters and to consider skipping the last one.

Film criticism the way that it should be done........2005-11-02

Would-be film critics could take lessons in readability from Sobchack. She makes her point clearly, without excessively convoluted text. In addition to being thought-inspiring, it is genuinely well-written and often a pleasure to read.

Sobchack divides the books into chapters that address issues of definition, image, dialogue and sound in the science fiction film. It is the definitive book on the subject, and students of the genre should definitely begin here.

Note: I read the second edition of the book, rather than the third that is for sale at the time of writing this review. If the book has a serious flaw, it is simply that any take on futurism in science fiction goes out of date astoundingly quickly.

Worth reading if you enjoy Science Fiction and its phyche........2004-04-23

I recommend anyone who is interested in Science Fiction to at least glance at this book. Yes, glance. What I enjoy most from this book is how it provides pictures of movie scenes, corresponding them with the points and theories presented. It does it in a way to make what may seem overbearing (to some people mind you) rather interesting and insightful. The visualizations help things 'click' so well. The reading becomes more and more bareable as you read on once you get used to the structure. It's great. Even if you don't like reading, buy it for the pictures it presents; just by looking at them and the small, bold explainations below will help you gain a whole new outlook on Science Fiction. Besides the visuals, I would say it is the best critical response of the Science Fiction film I have read. Other books I checked out seemed boring and unattractive. This book caught me when I looked at it. In fact, I was doing a paper in college for a History through Film class and my Instructor asked for the Catalog information. So I guess I'm not the only one. Other then that, the seriousness of the book gives the genre what it diserves while retaining your interest to read on. Most importantly, though, it helps clear up thoughts I've had for years and makes it presentable in words. Very gratifying. Check it out.

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Health Assessment Through The Life Span
Mildred O. Hogstel , and Linda Curry
Manufacturer: F. A. Davis Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0803612931

Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film

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A Review of "Screening the Sacred"

Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film
Joel W. Martin
Manufacturer: Westview Press
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Binding: Paperback

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Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies
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Religion and Film: An Introduction

ASIN: 0813388309

Book Description

What are the religious impulses in the 1976 film Rocky, and how can they work to shape one's social identity? Do the films Alien and Aliens signify the reemergence of the earth goddess as a vital cultural power? What female archetypes, borne out of male desire, inform the experience of women in Nine and a Half Weeks? These are among the several compelling questions the authors of this volume consider as they explore the way popular American film relates to religion. Oddly, religion and film-two pervasive elements of American culture-have seldom been studied in connection with each other. In this first systematic exploration, the authors look beyond surface religious themes and imagery in film, discovering a deeper, implicit presence of religion. They employ theological, mythological, and social and political criticism to analyze the influence of religion, in all its rich variety and diversity, on popular film. Perhaps more importantly, they consider how the medium of film has helped influence and shape American religious culture, secular or otherwise. More than a random collection of essays, this volume brings to the study of religion and film a carefully constructed analytic framework that advances our understanding of both. Screening the Sacred provides fresh and welcome insight to film criticism; it also holds far-reaching relevance for the study of religion. Progressive in its approach, instructive in its analyses, this book is written for students, scholars, and other readers interested in religion, popular film, and the impact of each on American culture.

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A Review of "Screening the Sacred".......2000-11-26

Martin, Joel and Conrad Ostwalt Jr., Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.

In a general sense, Screening the Sacred, as indicated by the Library of Congress classification found on page iv, is a book about the religious aspects of motion pictures. More specifically, as the subtitle indicates, it is a book concerning religion, myth and ideology of popular American film.

The thesis of Screening the Sacred can be found on page 4 of the "Introduction" where Joel Martin writes that there needs to be a rethinking of "the relations of religion and film, of religious studies and film criticism, and of religion and contemporary culture" with the hopes that their anthology will convince, on one hand, "students of film that they should take religion seriously and, on the other, convince students of religion that they need to take popular films seriously."

As noted above, the book is subdivided into three thematic units, theological criticism, mythological criticism, and ideological criticism. At this point, I would like to explore the author's meaning and use of these approaches.

Theological criticism tends to analyze how religious texts and thinkers have talked about God and try to relate these representations to modern and postmodern realms. While primarily concerned with Judeo-Christian scriptures, theological criticism studies the "cathedrals" of classic religious concerns, sensibilities and themes and how they are expressed in films. The basic assumption behind such criticism is that certain films can be understood as an elaboration on or the questioning of a particular "cathedral."

The means by which to explore these "cathedrals" can occur in at least two ways. In the first, criticism draws on traditional concepts of good and evil, redemption, grace, home, forgiveness and uses them as windows to understanding. In the second, there is a reliance on allegorical interpretation where it is assumed that God has caused history to happen in a way that always points to Judeo-Christian traditions. In this type of interpretation, critics study and gloss for signs of the prophetic message.

Unlike the narrow scope of theological criticism, myth criticism employs a much broader definition of religion which asserts that religion manifests itself through cross-cultural forms, including myths, rituals, systems of purity and gods. Thus, it is possible to glean from any such film a culture's bedrock assumptions and aspirations. Myth critics, therefore, focus on our psychological quest for meaning and aspects of our world not normally accessible through the conscious mind. Or as Albanese might say, seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Whereas meaning is an important focus of myth criticism, ideological critics study the relationship of religion and society, with the underlying notion that culture and art shape and are shaped by politics. These critics interpret film as a system of representations, and ask how films and film genres shape social subjects and reveal how the ideologies of social subjects shape films and their interpretations. To reach these ends, race, class, gender and the postmodern are some of the central interpretative categories explored. (Interestingly, while it may appear that this type of inquiry is rather weak in the analysis of religion--because religion no longer holds the power it once did to perform ideologically--the editors hope to call into question this assumption.)

The vehicle by which the authors explore the three themes of the book is through articles by different authors--approximately 3 to 4 per section. Articles run anywhere from 8 to 14 pages, with each author permitted liberal room for a complete listing of sources and needed additional notes.

Joel Martin and Conrad Ostwalt deserve praise for this book on three fronts. They have, as intended, produced a respectable academic book pertaining to religion and films, without embracing typical, emotional, Christian reactions. (I was particularly impressed that they had courage enough to include articles dealing with such sexually explicit films as Blue Velvet and Nine and a Half Weeks.) Second, the editors have a keen sense of what they wanted to do and obviously thought long and hard about the three themes they would explore. I liked very much how each theme was briefly discussed in the Introduction, and then in a short introduction leading into each section. It was also in those short introductions that the editors introduced the writers and a little about their philosophies--but not so much that it prejudices the reader from his/her own reactions to each article. Third, while I don't know how widely this book has been read by students of religion or film, the book, due to its well thought out and serious nature, should advance the primary goal the editors have of helping both groups of students rethink (or more likely the case, realize) the relationship between religion and film in their criticisms and writings.

Screening Asian Americans
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Screening Asian Americans

Manufacturer: Rutgers University Press
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0813530253

Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil
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Absolutely essential reading for film scholars

Why do we like gangster films?

Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil
Jonathan Munby
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0226550338

Book Description

In this study of Hollywood gangster films, Jonathan Munby examines their controversial content and how it was subjected to continual moral and political censure.

Beginning in the early 1930s, these films told compelling stories about ethnic urban lower-class desires to "make it" in an America dominated by Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideals and devastated by the Great Depression. By the late 1940s, however, their focus shifted to the problems of a culture maladjusting to a new peacetime sociopolitical order governed by corporate capitalism. The gangster no longer challenged the establishment; the issue was not "making it," but simply "making do."

Combining film analysis with archival material from the Production Code Administration (Hollywood's self-censoring authority), Munby shows how the industry circumvented censure, and how its altered gangsters (influenced by European filmmakers) fueled the infamous inquisitions of Hollywood in the postwar '40s and '50s by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Ultimately, this provocative study suggests that we rethink our ideas about crime and violence in depictions of Americans fighting against the status quo.

Customer Reviews:

Absolutely essential reading for film scholars.......2006-01-13

Munby's book examines the gangster film in relation to industrial and cultural history and particularly the forces of censorship or moralism in Hollywood. This brilliant book tackles difficult questions of cultural analysis and film history and is eloquent to boot. Stellar reading, really inspiring for film--especially gangster genre--scholars.

Why do we like gangster films?.......2000-05-10

This is a very exciting book about why many people find gangster films appealing and why at the same time lots of institutions of authority have found them to be threatening, right from the very beginning. For example, it provides a detailed background of the gangster film's origins in the early '30s, exploring matters such as the motivations for Prohibition, anti-immigration movements, and what was taken to be "proper" American speech, in order to provide a sense of the feelings of resentment these films tapped into and why their early viewers were so excited by them.

This sense of how gangster films have continually spoken for those otherwise ignored marks one of the book's most important themes. It also helps to provide an explanation of how the gangster film changed over the decades in response to attacks, both direct and indirect. The book describes and explains the gangster film's continual battles with various censors, within and without Hollywood, to show how these films continually evolved in ways that enabled them to cater again and again to those who would dissent with an oppressive status quo. Of especial interest is the chapter on German _film noir_ directors, which provides a very plausible account of why much _noir_ should be subsumed under the gangster genre. Dealing with the same issues of subversiveness and critical perspectives of existing power structures, much standard _film noir_ is more a continuation of the gangster film tradition than a break with it. Lots of other critics have noted this connection between these two types of films, but few have argued for it as forcefully, as clearly, or in as much detail as Munby. A tantalizing epilogue links these films to gangsta movies of the 1990s, a connection that one hopes will be worked out in more detail in the future.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about _Public Enemies, Public Heroes_, however, is that it explains how the violence and crime of gangster films appeals to us in ways that largely avoid the jargon-heavy vocabulary of much film studies scholarship today. The style, while dense, is not overlayed with extensive theoretical termimology. One can tell that Munby has reflected deeply on these matters and how to explain them to an audience that isn't necessarily a part of current theoretical discussions of film.

Book Description

Screening Ireland examines a century of screen representations of Ireland from a cultural studies perspective. Skillfully analyzing historical and contemporary examples from both film and television, this innovative book provides a clear, theoretically-informed synthesis of the most influential research on Irish audio-visual culture in the last decade.

Screening the Holocaust: Cinema's Images of the Unimaginable (Jewish Literature and Culture)

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Screening the Holocaust: Cinema's Images of the Unimaginable (Jewish Literature and Culture)
Ilan Avisar
Manufacturer: Indiana Univ Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0253303761

Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India

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Reality well described
One of the best ethnographies I have ever read
Interesting study of television

Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India
Purnima Mankekar , and Purnima Mankekar
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0822323907

Book Description

In Screening Culture, Viewing Politics Purnima Mankekar presents a cutting-edge ethnography of television-viewing in India. With a focus on the responses of upwardly-mobile, yet lower-to-middle class urban women to state-sponsored entertainment serials, Mankekar demonstrates how television in India has profoundly shaped women’s place in the family, community, and nation, and the crucial role it has played in the realignment of class, caste, consumption, religion, and politics.
Mankekar examines both “entertainment” narratives and advertisements designed to convey particular ideas about the nation. Organizing her study around the recurring themes in these shows—Indian womanhood, family, community, constructions of historical memory, development, integration, and sometimes violence—Mankekar dissects both the messages televised and her New Delhi subjects’ perceptions of and reactions to these messages. In the process, her ethnographic analysis reveals the texture of these women’s daily lives, social relationships, and everyday practices. Throughout her study, Mankekar remains attentive to the tumultuous historical and political context in the midst of which these programs’ integrationalist messages are transmitted, to the cultural diversity of the viewership, and to her own role as ethnographer. In an enlightening epilogue she describes the effect of satellite television and transnational programming to India in the 1990s.
Through its ethnographic and theoretical richness, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics forces a reexamination of the relationship between mass media, social life, and identity and nation formation in non-Western contexts. As such, it represents a major contribution to a number of fields, including media and communication studies, feminist studies, anthropology, South Asian studies, and cultural studies.

Customer Reviews:

Reality well described.......2004-12-21

I especially liked this book because the author went to the normal people and interviewed them. She does not try to judge them, but rather just honestly describes her experiences. I like her style of writing. Having lived in the place, I would recommend anyone to believe what the author describes.

One of the best ethnographies I have ever read.......2002-05-02

This is great work. Mankekar is one of the only authors that I have read to clearly express her thoughts about postcoloniality and its influence on cultural production. This book is full of great insights about the construction of Indian identity and the homogenization of differences that particpates in that construction. While, like in many ethnographic work, we don't have a clear sense of how she reached her analysis, Mankekar certainly bases her insights on very detailed fieldwork in Delhi's suburbs. I only wish I had written this book myself.

Interesting study of television.......2001-06-11

This book provides an indepth look into the effect of television on Indian people, esp women. I thought the book was easy to read and understand, yet still provided insightful commentary and information. The book is based off of research the author did, viewing television programs with lower middle class families. I would recomend this book to anyone interested in India, politics, or the history of communications.

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