Description
Book SynopsisA groundbreaking collection of original essays, Stages of Reality establishes a new paradigm for understanding the relationship between stage and screen media. This comprehensive volume explores the significance of theatricality within critical discourse about cinema and television.
Stages of Reality connects the theory and practice of cinematic theatricality through conceptual analyses and close readings of films including The Matrix and There Will be Blood. Contributors illuminate how this mode of address disrupts expectations surrounding cinematic form and content, evaluating strategies such as ostentatious performances, formal stagings, fragmentary montages, and methods of dialogue delivery and movement. Detailing connections between cinematic artifice and topics such as politics, gender, and genre, Stages of Reality allows readers to develop a clear sense of the multiple purposes and uses of theatricality in film.
Trade Review
'This is a lively and stimulating collection of essays that will appeal to both theatre and film scholars and students alike, and ably demonstrate that a discussion of cinematic theatricality can facilitate productive reflection on the nature and function of filmic realities.' -- Victoria Lowe Screen vol 55:01:2014
Table of Contents
Introduction ANDRE LOISELLE and JEREMY MARON Part One Traces of Theatricality: Stage-to-Screen Adaptations * Self-Adaptation: Queer Theatricality in Brad Fraser's Leaving Metropolis and Robert Lepage's La face cachee de la lune SYLVAIN DUGUAY * Brechtian Television: Theatricality and Adaptation of the Stage Play BILLY SMART Part Two Cinematic Theatricality, Genre, and Gender * Cinema du Grand Guignol: Theatricality in the Horror Film ANDRE LOISELLE * 'I'll Show Them!' Creating Legal Spectacles in Revenge Cinema R.J. TOUGAS * The Ethics of Murder: Trial as Performance in the Maternal Melodrama BRENDA AUSTIN-SMITH * Theatricality in the Cleopatra Films: Women (or We Men?) of Power SARAH HATCHUEL Part Three The Politics of Cinematic Theatricality * Committed Theatricality SYLVIE BISSONNETTE * Theatrical Games and the Gift of a Fable: Performance vs. Reality in Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful JEREMY MARON Part Four Performance, Voice, Movement, and the Theatricality of Cinema * Playing to the Balcony: Screen Acting, Distance, and Cavellian Theatricality AARON TAYLOR * Bullet-Time, Becoming, and the Sway of Theatricality: Performance and Play in The Matrix BRUCE BARTON Selected Bibliography Contributors
