Overview

Film, a latecomer to the realm of artistic media, alludes to, absorbs, and undermines the discourses of the other arts--literature and painting especially--in order to carve out a position for itself among them. Exposing the anxiety in film's relation to its rival arts, Brigitte Peucker analyzes central issues involved in generic boundary crossing as they pertain to film and situates them in a theoretical framework. The figure of the human body takes center stage in Peucker's innovative study, for it is through this figure that the conjunction of literary and painterly discourses persistently articulates itself. It is through the human body, too, that film's consciousness of itself as a hybrid text and as a ""machine for simulation"" makes itself deeply felt. In films ranging from Weimar cinema through Griffith, Hitchcock, and Greenaway, Peucker probes issues in aesthetics problematized by Diderot and Kleist, among others. She argues that the introduction of movement into visual representation occasioned by film brings with it an underlying tension suggestive of castration and death.Peucker goes on to demonstrate how the encounter between narrative and image is both gendered and sexualized, rendering film a ""monstrous"" hybrid. In a final section, she explores in specific cinematic texts the permeable boundary between the real and representation, suggesting how effects such as tableau vivant and trompe l'oeil figure sexuality and death. Originally published in 1995. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Full Product Details

Author:   Brigitte Peucker
Publisher:   Princeton University Press
Imprint:   Princeton University Press
Volume:   300
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.40cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.510kg
ISBN:  

9780691630526

ISBN 10:   0691630526
Pages:   240
Publication Date:   19 April 2016
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Language:   English

Table of Contents

"List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Bodies and Boundaries3Ch. 1Movement, Fragmentation, and the Uncanny8Unnatural Conjunctions: The Heterogeneous Text10""Its Strange Mixture of the Natural and the Artificial"": The Presence of Kleist15""Bits of Bodies"": The Fragmented Text17Man and the Cinema Machine: Magician, Psychoanalyst, Scientist: The Case of Dr. Caligari21Fritz Lang, the Apparatus, and the Fissured Text31Magician and Surgeon42""Knife Phobia""44""Doing It with Scissors"": Dismemberment in Hitchcock45Ch. 2Monstrous Births: The Hybrid Text55Miscegenation and the Sister Arts: Griffith's Broken Blossoms57Hitchcock's ""Half-Caste""67Murnau73Cinematic Vampirism73Painting and Repression79Herzog's Unassimilable Bodies88Witchcraft, Vision, and Incest: Dreyer's Day of Wrath94The Phantom of the Cinema: Body and Voice101Ch. 3Incorporation: Images and the Real104Trompe l'Oeil Effects104Cinema and the Real114Body Language: Kleist's and Rohmer's Marquise119Hitchcock as Pygmalion130Wings of Desire: Reality, Text, Embodiment137Kleist, Tableau Vivant, and the Pornographic143Fassbinder's Cinema of Mixed Modes: Tableau Vivant and the Real147Incorporation in Greenaway156Painful Images166Afterword: Ut pictura poesis168Notes175Index215"

Reviews

"""Peuker takes her bearings from the writings of Kleist and Diderot for this agile, wide-ranging reflection on film's intrinsic hybridity and its uneasy relation with the body.""--Sight & Sound"

Peuker takes her bearings from the writings of Kleist and Diderot for this agile, wide-ranging reflection on film's intrinsic hybridity and its uneasy relation with the body. --Sight & Sound

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