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The Art and Politics of Film
by John Orr
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Book Presentation:
The Art and Politics of Film is the final part of a critical trilogy that explores cinema in the latter half of the twentieth century. It fuses analysis of objective form in Cinema and Modernity with a subsequent critique of subjective form in Contemporary Cinema, and reassesses the close ties of the aesthetic and the political right up to the present time.
Film not only engages the question of power. Its narratives also dissect the conflicts between public and personal identity in a changing world. Different filmmakers take on different dimensions of this universal theme. The book examines the cinematic city in Kieslowski and Cronenberg; the cinema of wonder in Tarkovsky and Angelopoulos; the hyper-modern world of science fiction and horror; the time-image in Resnais, Rivette, Lynch and Stone; and the art of identity in Jarman and Jordan. At the turn of the century, film is seen as a component of a hyper-modern culture, which has displaced the modernist aesthetic of the 1960s, and now plays a key role in our mapping of the information age.
Key Features
• Offers a theory of film as an art form framed by social and political change
• Provides a critical assessment of the crisis of modernism, and the role of the information age in the rise of hyper-modern film
• Offers new insights into the rise and fall of the Cold War upon Hollywood genres and upon Eastern European cinema
• Illuminates transformations of time, identity and sexuality in film narrative
• Examines the interlocking roles of speed, space and paranoia in the renewal of the cinematic city
About the Author:
The late John Orr was Emeritus Professor at the University of Edinburgh and published widely in the areas of modern culture, cinema, theatre and literature. He was also a reviewer for a wide number of periodicals and online journals including Screen, Studies in French Cinema, Film International and Senses of Cinema.
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
> From the same author:
The Demons of Modernity (2016)
Ingmar Bergman and European Cinema
by John Orr
Subject: Director > Ingmar Bergman
The Cinema of Roman Polanski (2006)
Dark Spaces of the World
Dir. John Orr and Elżbieta Ostrowska
Subject: Director > Roman Polanski
The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda (2004)
Dir. John Orr and Elżbieta Ostrowska
Subject: Director > Andrzej Wajda
> On a related topic:
The Moving Form of Film (2023)
Historicising the Medium through Other Media
Dir. Lúcia Nagib and Stefan Solomon
Subject: Theory
The Crisis of Political Modernism (1995)
Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Criticism
Subject: Film Analysis
Towards a Film Theory from Below (2025)
Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up
by Jiri Anger
Subject: Theory
The Attractions of the Moving Image (2025)
Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde
by Tom Gunning
Subject: Theory
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