Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture
Blurred Boundaries explores decisive moments when the traditional boundaries of fiction/nonfiction, truth and falsehood blur. Nichols argues that a history of social representation in film, television and video requires an understanding of the fate of both contemporary and older work. Traditionally, film history and cultural studies sought to place films in a historical context. Nichols proposes a new goal: to examine how specific works, old and new, promote or suppress a sense of historical consciousness. Examining work from Eisenstein's Strike to the Rodney King videotape, Nichols interrelates issues of formal structure, viewer response and historical consciousness. Simultaneously, Blurred Boundaries radically alters the interpretive frameworks offered by neo-formalism and psychoanalysis: Comprehension itself becomes a social act of transformative understanding rather than an abstract mental process while the use of psychoanalytic terms like desire, lack, or paranoia to make social points metaphorically yields to a vocabulary designed expressly for historical interpretation such as project, intentionality and the social imaginary. An important departure from prevailing trends in many fields, Blurred Boundaries offers new directions for the study of visual culture.

1112389855
Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture
Blurred Boundaries explores decisive moments when the traditional boundaries of fiction/nonfiction, truth and falsehood blur. Nichols argues that a history of social representation in film, television and video requires an understanding of the fate of both contemporary and older work. Traditionally, film history and cultural studies sought to place films in a historical context. Nichols proposes a new goal: to examine how specific works, old and new, promote or suppress a sense of historical consciousness. Examining work from Eisenstein's Strike to the Rodney King videotape, Nichols interrelates issues of formal structure, viewer response and historical consciousness. Simultaneously, Blurred Boundaries radically alters the interpretive frameworks offered by neo-formalism and psychoanalysis: Comprehension itself becomes a social act of transformative understanding rather than an abstract mental process while the use of psychoanalytic terms like desire, lack, or paranoia to make social points metaphorically yields to a vocabulary designed expressly for historical interpretation such as project, intentionality and the social imaginary. An important departure from prevailing trends in many fields, Blurred Boundaries offers new directions for the study of visual culture.

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Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture

Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture

by Bill Nichols
Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture

Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture

by Bill Nichols

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Overview

Blurred Boundaries explores decisive moments when the traditional boundaries of fiction/nonfiction, truth and falsehood blur. Nichols argues that a history of social representation in film, television and video requires an understanding of the fate of both contemporary and older work. Traditionally, film history and cultural studies sought to place films in a historical context. Nichols proposes a new goal: to examine how specific works, old and new, promote or suppress a sense of historical consciousness. Examining work from Eisenstein's Strike to the Rodney King videotape, Nichols interrelates issues of formal structure, viewer response and historical consciousness. Simultaneously, Blurred Boundaries radically alters the interpretive frameworks offered by neo-formalism and psychoanalysis: Comprehension itself becomes a social act of transformative understanding rather than an abstract mental process while the use of psychoanalytic terms like desire, lack, or paranoia to make social points metaphorically yields to a vocabulary designed expressly for historical interpretation such as project, intentionality and the social imaginary. An important departure from prevailing trends in many fields, Blurred Boundaries offers new directions for the study of visual culture.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780253209009
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Publication date: 01/22/1995
Pages: 208
Product dimensions: 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

BILL NICHOLS is Professor of Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University. He has edited two widely used anthologies, Movies and Methods I and II, and is the author of Ideology and the Image and Representing Reality.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

I. Embodied Knowledge and the Politics of Location
An Evocation
II. The Trials and Tribulations of Rodney King
III. At the Limits of Reality (TV)
IV. The Ethnographer's Tale
V. Performing Documentary
VI. Eisenstein's Strike and the Genealogy of Documentary
VII. Please, All you Good and Honest People
Film Form and Historical Consciouness

Notes
Index

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