daadutch.blogg.se

On this theoretical basis the book devises a new conception of film history: as a history of feeling which can be rewritten up unto the present day.

The book describes a complex interplay between three modes of affectivity – suspense, paranoia, and melancholy – which, each in its own way, entangle viewers in the contradictions of their affective relations with the world. The films of the New Hollywood re-gauge the field of the old poetic divisions – as manifest in the classical genre system – and thereby irrevocably change the way moviegoers are affectively involved in the cinema. Rather, the detailed analysis of representative films makes visible the power of cinematic images to affect their viewers, that is: to confront them with the new. Sacralisations, that is, engaging in the risky type of communication described as religious above, within the otherwise unquestioned plausible and evident environment, are elements of such strategic action.Įnglish: How are the movie screen and the emotions of the audience linked? And how can we write a history of this connection? This monograph tries to answer these questions by conceptualizing the film historical period of the New Hollywood as a moment of crisis which can neither be reduced to economic processes of adaptation nor to a canon of masterpieces. And it is immediately rendered precarious and contested due to the shifting of positions, of prestige, and even of the power produced by success. The high social and material investment involved in the construction of initially less plausible contemporaries (or ‘counterintuitive agents’ in the terminology of evolutionary theories of religion) and in the project of producing relevant communication with them seems to produce, time and again, a surplus of self-stabilisation, power, or the capacity to solve problems. How can religion be described from the individual’s perspective and as practiced by the individual? This fundamental question lies behind any approach to ancient Mediteraenean religion that deals with individual agency in religious contexts, from an elite’s self-styled sacra publica (‘rituals on behalf of the commonwealth’) to groupings centring on a god, secta dei (‘sect of the God’, as Tertullian says).