Transfigurations : : violence, death and masculinity in American cinema / / Asbjrn Grnstad.

• Superior document: Film culture in transition
• Author: Grnstad, Asbjrn.
• Year of Publication: 2008
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Film culture in transition.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (274 pages) :; illustrations

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 1970's 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. Grønstad 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.

Table of Contents

Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Prolegomenon -- Introduction: Film Violence as Figurality -- I Screen Violence: Five Fallacies -- Empiricism -- Aristotelianism -- Aestheticism -- Mythologicism -- Mimeticism -- II Filming Death -- 1 The Transfigured Image -- 2 Narrating Violence, or, Allegories of Dying -- III Male Subjectivities at the Margins -- 3 Mean Streets: Death and Disfiguration in Hawks's Scarface -- 4 Kubrick's The Killing and the Emplotment of Death -- 5 Blood of a Poet: Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch -- 6 As I Lay Dying: Violence and Subjectivity in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs -- 7 One-Dimensional Men: Fincher's Fight Club and the End of Masculinity -- Postscript -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index of Names -- Index of Film Titles -- Index of Subjects -- Film Culture in Transition.