Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography / Edition 1

by Leslie Devereaux, Roger Hillman

Overview

Filmed images dominate our time, from the movies and TV that entertain us to the news and documentary that inform us and shape our cultural vocabulary. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, Fields of Vision is a path-breaking collection that inquires into the power (and limits) of film and photography to make sense of ourselves and others. As critics, social scientists, filmmakers, and literary scholars, the contributors converge on the issues of representation and the construction of visual meaning across cultures.

From the dismembered bodies of horror film to the exotic bodies of ethnographic film and the gorgeous bodies of romantic cinema, Fields of Vision moves through eras, genres, and societies. Always asking how images work to produce meaning, the essays address the way the "real" on film creates fantasy, news, as well as "science," and considers this problematic process as cultural boundaries are crossed. One essay discusses the effects of Hollywood's high-capital, world-wide commercial hegemony on local and non-Western cinemas, while another explores the response of indigenous people in central Australia to the forces of mass media and video. Other essays uncover the work of the unconscious in cinema, the shaping of "female spectatorship" by the "women's film" genre of the 1920s, and the effects of the personal and subjective in documentary films and the photographs of war reportage.

In illuminating dark, elided, or wilfully neglected areas of representation, these essays uncover new fields of vision.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520085244
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	05/15/1995
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Leslie Devereaux is Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, and Roger Hillman is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern European Languages, both at the Australian National University, Canberra.

Table of Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1
An Introductory Essay
Leslie Devereaux

THEMES

2
The National
Paul Willemen

3
The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic
Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage
George E. Marcus

4
Experience, Re-presentation, and Film
Leslie Devereaux

CASE STUDIES: PHOTOGRAPHY

5
Photography and Film: Figures in/of History
Anne-Marie Willis

6
Modernism and the Photographic Representation of
War and Destruction
Bernd Hiippauf

CASE STUDIES: FILM

7
Horror and the Carnivalesque: The Body-monstrous
Barbara Creed

8
Barrymore, the Body, and Bliss: Issues of Male
Representation and Female Spectatorship in the 1920s
Gaylyn Studlar

9
Narrative, Sound, and Film: Fassbinder's The Marriage
of Maria Braun
Roger Hillman

10
Novel into Film: The Name of the Rose
Gino Moliterno

THE SUBJECT(IVE) VOICE

11
The Subjective Voice in Ethnographic Film
David MacDougall

12
Mediating Culture: Indigenous Media, Ethnographic
Film, and the Production of ldentity
Faye Ginsburg

13
The Pressure of the Unconscious upon the Image:
The Subjective Voice in Documentary
Susan Dermody

14
Robert Gardner's Rivers of Sand: Toward a Reappraisal
Peter Loizos

A LAST WORD

15
Cultures, Disciplines, Cinemas
Leslie Devereaux

CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX