Who’s That Girl?

Chapter 5 examines Madonna’s film career from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Inspired by the star images of Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, and Mae West, Madonna performed an interpretation of “Classical Hollywood” female glamour, attitude, and sexuality throughout the rise and peak of her music career. She sought to extend this image into distinct commercial film cycles of the 1980s and 1990s, including the downtown indie, the synergistic blockbuster, the sex thriller, and the prestige Oscar film. Madonna offers an illustrative case for the history of cinematic rock stardom at the end of the twentieth century. She pursued a screen career within arguably the final period in which stardom served as a central driving force in Hollywood’s economic logic, and this pursuit was manifested via her cinephilic interpretation of Hollywood’s legacy of platinum blonde sex symbols. At the same time, Madonna aspired to a cinematic star image during the apex of the music video’s economic and cultural power, seeking to translate her anti-censorship and pro-sex efforts established within the media realm into Hollywood filmmaking in the midst of the 1980s–1990s culture wars. Madonna’s film career epitomizes the issues driving this book, as it speaks to the discordance between older (studio-era Hollywood) and newer (the era of MTV and beyond) models of stardom.

Kino pamięci narodowej jako proteza: Filmy o żołnierzach wyklętych

Cinema of national remembrance as a prosthesis: Polish films on cursed soldiersDespite the established position of historical cinema and the huge social expectations revealed by the reception of the long delayed release of Historia Roja (2016, dir. Jerzy Zalewski), Polish cinema, especially feature films, has only slightly contributed to the creation and preservation of the cursed soldiers phenomenon. In the article I focus on the contemporary films on cursed soldiers, both feature ones and documentaries, from the perspective of Alison Landsberg’s prosthetic memory. I will analyze the former using the Amanda Ann Klein’s concept of film cycles. I will describe the latter in the context of historical documentary filmmaking after 1989, referring to Mirosław Przylipiak’s findings. Kino pamięci narodowej jako proteza: Filmy o żołnierzach wyklętychMimo ugruntowanej pozycji kina historycznego i olbrzymich oczekiwań społecznych, które ujawniły reakcje na odwlekaną premierę Historii Roja (2016, reż. Jerzy Zalewski), polskie kino, zwłaszcza fabularne, w niewielkim stopniu przyczyniło się do współtworzenia fenomenu tzw. żołnierzy wyklętych. W artykule skupiam się na współczesnych filmach o żołnierzach wyklętych przez pryzmat koncepcji pamięci protetycznej Alison Landsberg, biorąc pod uwagę zarówno fabuły jak i dokumenty. Te pierwsze charakteryzuję, używając koncepcji cyklu filmowego Amandy Ann Klein. Te drugie opisuję, umieszczając je w nurcie dokumentalnych filmów historycznych po 1989 roku, przy czym odwołuję się do ustaleń Mirosława Przylipiaka.

Dark and gritty/slick and glossy: Genre, Nollywood and Lagos

In this article, I am concerned principally with Taxi Driver (Oriahi, 2015), Gbomo Gbomo Express (Taylaur, 2015), Just Not Married (Patrick, 2016), Ojukokoro (Greed) (Olaitan, 2016) as well as Catch.er (Taylaur, 2017). These films are characterized as much by the depiction of clever criminals as the cultivation of a cynical disposition from which transgressions of this sort appear stylish and violence is rendered 'cool'. Almost all of them turn on a scheme to dupe others of a large sum of money, and are punctuated by backstabbing partners in crime, tables turning by chance, edgy armed standoffs and a surprising number of bodies in car trunks. Given the dark portrait of Lagos these films present, one might be inclined to read the genre cycle as a reiteration of the role Lagos has historically played as embodiment of popular anxieties concerning insecurity, material inequality and social breakdown. And yet, in recent years, conditions within the city have markedly improved over those of the deepest point of urban crisis in the 1990s when Lagos was, indeed, paralysed by a generalized condition of insecurity and dysfunction. New Nollywood's repertoire of film styles has expanded to include international film cycles and genres such as romantic comedies, psychological thrillers, police procedurals, among others. This raises important questions about the nature of correspondences between cinema and the city, such as whether New Nollywood genre films tell us anything about social, cultural or historical circumstances in Lagos, or the place the city occupies in the popular imagination, for instance. Recent upmarket film noirs speak, instead, to the evolution of Lagos as a media capital. I examine the different kinds of work genre performs in New and Old Nollywood films and propose a number of ways to critically interpret genre's various registers.

Deleuze's Three Syntheses Go to Hollywood: The Tripartite Cinema of Time Travel, Many Worlds and Altered States

What is called “time travel” cinema is but one aspect in a tripartite series of interweaving modes of disjunctive narration which is also – simultaneously – a cinema of “many worlds” and “altered states”. Exploiting Gilles Deleuze's three syntheses of time, space, and consciousness from Difference and Repetition (1968) allows a conceptual development of these cinematic series through three popular Hollywood film cycles beginning with Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968), The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), and Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985). In so doing, film and philosophy are deployed as two series which together create inexhaustible atemporal, aspatial, and ahuman disjunctions, ungrounding everyday spatio-temporal identities, and affirming productive images of cinematic thought.

Blood in the Streets

Blood in the Streets investigates the various ways in which 1970s Italian crime films were embedded in their immediate cultural and political contexts. The book analyses the emergence, proliferation and distribution of a range of popular film cycles (or filoni) - from conspiracy thrillers and vigilante films, to mafia and serial killer narratives - and examines what these reveal about their time and place. The engagement in these films with both the contemporary political turmoil of 1970s Italy and the traumas of the nation's recent past offer fascinating insights into wider anxieties of this decade around the Second World War and its on-going political aftermath. Ultimately, these cycles' industrial conditions of rapid production schedules and concentrated release patterns are seen to be the key to understanding their significance, since these conditions allowed for swift responsiveness to political events, cinematic trends and attendant economic opportunities, while demanding the simplified construction of believable contemporary backdrops. The book thus reveals a repetitive accumulation of assumptions around historically constituted corruption, the impact of rapid socio-economic change and the lingering vestiges of wartime conflict.

Girls with Hungry Eyes

Takes up the expansion of the “sexploitation gaze” in the latter half of the sixties decade, pursuing the freedom to look as one bestowed on female lust and desire, in films from roughly 1965-1970. Examines film cycles that took up female and “perverse” sexuality, and that dealt with sadism and masochism, lesbianism, sexual “perversions” and with swinging and the counterculture.

Camp, Verisimilitude, Noir, and Neon: The Historical Evolution towards Stylistic Remediation

This chapter examines the historical, cultural, industrial, and technological contexts of stylistic remediation between comics and film. It traces the evolution of these various contexts in relation to remediation of style by focusing on three film cycles that span from the blockbuster period that began with Jaws in 1975 to the contemporary period. These cycles are exemplified by the Superman films of the 1970s and 1980s, the Batman films of the 1980s and 1990s, and what Bob Rehak has defined as the high fidelity adaptations of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The chapter first provides a brief contextual history of comic books, film, and television before the blockbusters (1934–1968) before discussing the three cycles: Superman cycle (1978–1987), Batman cycle (1989–1997), and high-fidelity cycle (2000–2013). It shows that, during the Superman cycle, realism was essentially favored over the more formally flamboyant trajectory of stylistic remediation.