Blossoms and Blood : : Postmodern Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson / / Jason Sperb.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Texas Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Sperb, Jason,
• Place / Publishing House: Austin : : University of Texas Press, , [2021]; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (296 p.)

From his film festival debut Hard Eight to ambitious studio epics Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s unique cinematic vision focuses on postmodern excess and media culture. In Blossoms and Blood, Jason Sperb studies the filmmaker’s evolving aesthetic and its historical context to argue that Anderson’s films create new, often ambivalent, narratives of American identity in a media-saturated world. Blossoms and Blood explores Anderson’s films in relation to the aesthetic and economic shifts within the film industry and to America’s changing social and political sensibilities since the mid-1990s. Sperb provides an auteur study with important implications for film history, media studies, cultural studies, and gender studies. He charts major themes in Anderson’s work, such as stardom, self-reflexivity, and masculinity and shows how they are indicative of trends in late twentieth-century American culture. One of the first books to focus on Anderson’s work, Blossoms and Blood reveals the development of an under-studied filmmaker attuned to the contradictions of a postmodern media culture.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction White-Noise Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson -- Chapter 1. I Remembered Your Face: Indie Cinema, Neo-noir, and Narrative Ambiguity in Hard Eight (1996) -- Chapter 2. I Dreamed I Was in a Hollywood Movie: Stars, Hyperreal Sounds of the 1970s, and Cinephiliac Pastiche in Boogie Nights (1997) -- Chapter 3 If Th at Was in a Movie, I Wouldn’t Believe It: Melodramatic Ambivalence, Hypermasculinity, and the Autobiographical Impulse in Magnolia (1999) -- Chapter 4. The Art-House Adam Sandler Movie: Commodity Culture and the Ethereal Ephemerality of Punch-Drunk Love (2002) -- Chapter 5 I Have a Competition in Me: Political Allegory, Artistic Collaboration, and Narratives of Perfection in Th ere Will Be Blood (2007) -- Afterword On The Master -- Notes -- Select Bibliography -- Index