Description
The contemporary study of film is dominated by narrative theory - yet films include scenes and images which do not perform a narrative task but nevertheless provoke an emotional response.
About the Author
Stella Hockenhull is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, based at the Wolverhampton City Campus. Prior to working at Wolverhampton, she taught at Chester Art College, Liverpool University and Staffordshire University. She is the author of Neo-Romantic Landscapes: An Aesthetic Approach to the Films of Powell and Pressburger (2008).
Reviews
'Stella Hockenhull brings an art historian's knowledge and a visually sensitive eye to the often lamented pictorialism of British cinema. Examining the relationship between a crop of recent British films and contemporary paintings, she demonstrates the continuing pertinence of Romanticism and the 'sublime' to understanding the emotional impact and significance of their narratively unmotivated attention to landscape. By these means this study leads us on a journey that not only remaps the dominant modes and generic practices of British cinema but deepens understanding of the affectivity of the cinematic experience itself.' Professor Christine Gledhill, Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland 'This book demonstrates how important landscape remains as a signifying feature of British cinema, uniting a group of very different kinds of filmmakers working across a variety of genres... Stella Hockenhull reveals how British contemporary cinema depicts landscapes and figures in landscapes, establishing some intriguing correlations with recent and contemporary British art. This interdisciplinary approach uses concepts and structures of feeling associated with (Neo-) Romanticism, demonstrating the pervasiveness and versatility of such forms as they adapt to new historical and cultural contexts. Notions of pure and impure landscape, prospect views and the ruckenfugur reveal not only how landscape has been repeatedly used by filmmakers in Britain but used with some degree of consistency... The benefit of the approach taken by Hockenhull... enables readers to better judge the potential of an aesthetic approach to film study and analysis, maintaining the questions of how films create meanings and feelings rather than why. As Hockenhull has shown throughout the rich and diverse chapters of her book, these are considerable questions to pose, providing a rich set of issues for us to reflect upon.' Dr Martin Shingler, Senior Lecturer in Film and Radio Studies, University of Sunderland
Book Information
ISBN 9781848859012
Author Stella Hockenhull
Format Hardback
Page Count 248
Imprint I.B. Tauris
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Weight(grams) 452g