Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic
Author(s): Belén B. Vidal (Author)
Publisher: Routledge
Publication Date: 9 Feb. 2014
Edition: 1st
Language: English
Print length: 256 pages
ISBN-10: 908964282X
ISBN-13: 9789089642820
Book Description
This definitive work offers a new approach to the period film at the turn of the twenty-first century, examining the ways in which contemporary cinema recreates the historical past. This book explores the relation between visual motifs and cultural representation in a range of key films by James Ivory, Martin Scorsese and Jane Campion, among others. Looking at the mannerist taste for citation, detail and stylisation, the author argues for an aesthetic of fragments and figures central to the period film as an international genre. Three key figures – the house, the tableau and the letter – structure a critical journey through a selection of detailed case studies, in relation to changing notions of visual style, melodrama, and gender. This seeks to place this popular but often undervalued genre in a new light and to rethink its significance in the context of key debates in film studies.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Figuring the Past gives us a fresh look at the period film. This is not a typical genre study for fans of Jane Austen, or an auteurist concern with the work of James Ivory or Jane Campion, however. Rather, Belen Vidal lifts recent period films from both their national and generic confines. They become travelling cultural forms that weave an international pattern of -film formats,� a -cinema of quality� that is appropriated locally in a convergent global environment. In the process, the modern period film’s preoccupation with the past turns into a -post� phenomenon: post-national, post-quality, post-heritage and postmodern. Vidal shows with clarity and sophistication that the shared mannerist aesthetic of this international cluster of films, far from simply evading politics in the present, is an eminently contemporary platform for conjuring up the present-in-the-past, with wide implications for cultural analysis. –Aniko Imre, Associate Professor, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California
From the Inside Flap
Figuring the Past geeft een nieuwe kijk op kostuumdrama’s die aan het begin van deze eeuw gemaakt zijn en onderzoekt de manieren waarop de hedendaagse cinema het historische verleden herschept. De auteur verkent de relatie tussen visuele motieven en culturele representaties in een aantal belangrijke films van onder anderen James Ivory, Martin Scors
From the Back Cover
Figuring the Past geeft een nieuwe kijk op kostuumdrama’s die aan het begin van deze eeuw gemaakt zijn en onderzoekt de manieren waarop de hedendaagse cinema het historische verleden herschept. De auteur verkent de relatie tussen visuele motieven en culturele representaties in een aantal belangrijke films van onder anderen James Ivory, Martin Scors
About the Author
Belén Vidal is lecturer in film studies at King’s College London, co-editor (with Dina Iordanova and David Martin-Jones) of Cinema at the Periphery (Wayne State University Press, 2010) and author of Heritage Film: Nation Genre and Representation (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, forthcoming).
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