Description
Book SynopsisFrederic Jameson and Film Theory is the first collection of its kind, it assesses and critically responds to Fredric Jameson’s remarkable contribution to film theory. The essays assembled explore key Jamesonian concepts—such as totality, national allegory, geopolitics, globalization, representation, and pastiche—and his historical schema of realism, modernism, and postmodernism, considering, in both cases, how these can be applied, revised, expanded and challenged within film studies. Featuring essays by leading and emerging voices in the field, the volume probes the contours and complexities of neoliberal capitalism across the globe and explores world cinema's situation within these forces by deploying and adapting Jamesonian concepts, and placing them in dialogue with other theoretical paradigms. The result is an innovative and rigorously analytical effort that offers a range of Marxist-inspired approaches towards cinemas from Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America in the spirit of Jameson's famous rallying cry: 'always historicize!'.
Trade Review"This exciting volume explicates the Jamesonian project while also extending and—sometimes—taking issue with it. It will be regarded as a major landmark in film studies." -- Carl Freedman * author of Critical Theory and Science Fiction *
"This collection offers a thoughtful reckoning with the impact of Jameson's work on film studies to date while also charting a critical agenda for a Jamesonian film studies to come. Drawing on an international range of scholars
Fredric Jameson and Film Theory answers Jameson's call to map the relation of individual films to the world-system of capitalism, illuminating along the way exciting new avenues for film theory and criticism." -- Derek Nystrom * author of Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men: Class in 1970s American Cinema *
"The excellent essays collected here revisit some of Jameson’s explicit filmic engagements before scaling out to explore the wider utility of Jamesonian theoretical models in contexts that he did not necessarily address. In so doing,
Fredric Jameson and Film Theory exemplifies one of its central claims, the importance of Jameson’s work for thinking about the 'global turn' in film studies." -- Joseph Jonghyun Jeon * author of Vicious Circuits: Korea's IMF Cinema and the End of the American Century *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Always Historicize the Moving Image! Fredric Jameson’s Place in Film Studies
MICHAEL CRAMER, JEREMI SZANIAWSKI, AND KEITH B. WAGNER
1 Feeling Film as the Pulse of the Postmodern Condition: On Jameson’s “On
Diva”
DUDLEY ANDREW
2 Allegory and Accommodation: Vertov’s
Three Songs of Lenin (1934) as a Stalinist Film
JOHN MACKAY
3 Nostalgia, Melancholy, and the Persistence of Stalin in Polish Cinema
JEREMI SZANIAWSKI
4 Jameson, Angelopoulos, and the Spirit of Utopia
PAUL COATES
5 Jameson and Japanese Media Theory: A Virtual Dialogue
NAOKI YAMAMOTO
6 Where Jameson Meets Queer Theory: Queer Cognitive Mapping in 1990s Sinophone Cinema
ALVIN K. WONG
7 A Jamesonian Reading of
Parasite (2019): Homes, Real Estate Speculation, and Bubble Markets in Seoul
KEITH B. WAGNER
8 Strategies of Containment in Middle-Class Films from Mexico and Brazil
MERCEDES VÁZQUEZ
9 The Neoliberal Conspiracy: Jameson, New Hollywood, and
All the President’s Men MICHAEL CRAMER
10 The Conspiracy Film, Hollywood’s Cultural Paradigms, and Class Consciousness
MIKE WAYNE
11 A Theory of the Medium Shot: Affective Mapping and the Logic of the Encounter in Fredric Jameson’s
The Geopolitical Aesthetic PANSY DUNCAN
12 “An American Utopia” and the Politics of Military Science Fiction
DAN HASSLER-FOREST
Afterword
FREDRIC JAMESON
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Index
