Overview

With landmark films such as Fargo, O Brother Where art Thou?, Blood Simple, and Raising Arizona, the Coen brothers have achieved both critical and commercial success. Proving the existence of a viable market for ""small"" films that are also intellectually rewarding, their work has exploded generic conventions amid rich webs of trans-textural references. In Joel and Ethan Coen, R. Barton Palmer argues that the Coen oeuvre also forms a central element in what might be called postmodernist filmmaking. Mixing high and low cultural sources and blurring genres like noir and comedy, the use of pastiche and anti-realist elements in films such as The Hudsucker Proxy and Barton Fink clearly fit the postmodernist paradigm. Palmer argues that for a full understanding of the Coen brothers unique position within film culture, it is important to see how they have developed a new type of text within general postmodernist practice that Palmer terms commercial/independent. Analyzing their substantial body of work from this ""generic"" framework is the central focus on this book.

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9780252071850

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Reviews

There is as yet only one book length analysis of any note [about the Coen Brothers] by a film scholar: R. Barton Palrmer's Joel and Ethan Coen (2004). . . . This is a book for those who have already made the acquaintance of the Coens through their films and are now ready to think about their work seriously. --Film International

There is as yet only one book length analysis of any note [about the Coen Brothers] by a film scholar: R. Barton Palrmer's Joel and Ethan Coen (2004). . . . This is a book for those who have already made the acquaintance of the Coens through their films and are now ready to think about their work seriously. -- Film International

""There is as yet only one book length analysis of any note [about the Coen Brothers] by a film scholar: R. Barton Palrmer's Joel and Ethan Coen (2004). . . . This is a book for those who have already made the acquaintance of the Coens through their films and are now ready to think about their work seriously.""--Film International

There is as yet only one book length analysis of any note [about the Coen Brothers] by a film scholar: R. Barton Palrmer's Joel and Ethan Coen (2004)... This is a book for those who have already made the acquaintance of the Coens through their films and are now ready to think about their work seriously. --Film International

Author Information

R. Barton Palmer is a former Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University and the former director of The South Carolina Film Institute. His many books include Hollywood's Dark Cinema: The American Film Noir.

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