Speculating about Spectatorship

Projections ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-80
Author(s):  
Janet Staiger
Keyword(s):  
American Cinema ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure

Todd Berliner’s Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema (2017) offers useful broad theoretical arguments about how to understand our pleasures in viewing cinema. Yet, moving to individual cases requires recognizing the historical conditions of spectatorship including contemporaneous ideological issues, levels and types of knowledges, and cooperation (or non-cooperation) by a spectator.

Goldilocks Aesthetics

Projections ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 66-74
Author(s):  
James E. Cutting
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Responses ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure

Much of aesthetics is based in psychological responses. Yet seldom have such responses—couched in empirically based psychological terms—played a central role in the discussion of movie aesthetics. Happily, Todd Berliner’s Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema does just that. This commentary discusses some history and some twists and turns behind Berliner’s analysis.

Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-152
Author(s):  
Grant Wiedenfeld
Keyword(s):  
American Cinema ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure

Hollywood Aesthetic

Projections ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-55
Author(s):  
Todd Berliner
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
Intrinsic Properties ◽  
Aesthetic Design ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Affective Processes ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
Hollywood Movies

Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema investigates the Hollywood film industry’s chief artistic accomplishment: providing aesthetic pleasure to mass audiences. Grounded in film history and supported by research in psychology and philosophical aesthetics, the book explains (1) the intrinsic properties characteristic of Hollywood cinema that induce aesthetic pleasure; (2) the cognitive and affective processes, sparked by Hollywood movies, that become engaged during aesthetic pleasure; and (3) the exhilarated aesthetic experiences afforded by an array of persistently entertaining Hollywood movies. Hollywood Aesthetic addresses four fundamental components of Hollywood’s aesthetic design—narrative, style, ideology, and genre—aiming for a comprehensive appraisal of Hollywood cinema’s capacity to excite aesthetic pleasure. This article outlines the book’s main points and themes. As a précis, it is heavy on ideas and light on evidence, which is to be found in the book itself.

Book Reviews

Projections ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 121-141
Author(s):  
Christopher Blake Evernden ◽  
Cynthia A. Freeland ◽  
Thomas Schatz ◽  
Frank P. Tomasulo
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
University Of Chicago Press ◽  
Oxford University Press

Rikke Schubart, Mastering Fear: Women, Emotions, and Contemporary Horror (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 384 pp., $117 (hardback), ISBN: 9781501336713.Xavier Aldana Reyes, Horror Film and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership (New York: Routledge, 2016), xii + 206 pp., $49.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9781138599611.David Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 592 pp., $30.00 (paperback), ISBN: 9780226639550.Todd Berliner, Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 320 pp., $39.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9780190658755.

Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema

Projections ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-101
Author(s):  
Todd Berliner
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Research ◽  
Film Analysis ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
The Relationship

In this reply to four commentaries on my book, Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema, I address several conceptual and methodological issues raised by the respondents. Those issues include the book’s focus on aesthetic pleasure; the functions of narrative, style, ideology, and genre in Hollywood cinema; the relationship between ideology and aesthetics; the use of scientific research in the humanities; normative aesthetic evaluations; real versus hypothetical spectators; and the practices of aesthetic film analysis.

Ken Russell's Wartime Imagery

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 539-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin M. Flanagan
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
War Films ◽  
Personal Style ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second World ◽  
Wartime Experience ◽  
National Experience

This article traces Ken Russell's explorations of war and wartime experience over the course of his career. In particular, it argues that Russell's scattered attempts at coming to terms with war, the rise of fascism and memorialisation are best understood in terms of a combination of Russell's own tastes and personal style, wider stylistic and thematic trends in Euro-American cinema during the 1960s and 1970s, and discourses of collective national experience. In addition to identifying Russell's recurrent techniques, this article focuses on how the residual impacts of the First and Second World Wars appear in his favoured genres: literary adaptations and composer biopics. Although the article looks for patterns and similarities in Russell's war output, it differentiates between his First and Second World War films by indicating how he engages with, and temporarily inhabits, the stylistic regime of the enemy within the latter group.

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