Search results for ""Author Sam B. Girgus""

The steady rise of Clint Eastwood’s career parallels a pressing desire in American society over the past five decades for a figure and story of purpose, meaning, and redemption. Eastwood has not only told and filmed that story, he has come to embody it for many in his public image and film persona. Eastwood responds to a national yearning for a vision of individual action and initiative, personal responsibility, and potential for renewal. An iconic director and star for his westerns, urban thrillers, and adventure stories, Eastwood has taken film art to new horizons of meaning in a series of masterpieces that engage the ethical and moral consciousness of our times, including Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, and Mystic River. He revolutionized the war film with the unprecedented achievement of filming the opposing sides of the same historic battle in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, using this saga to present a sharply critical representation of the new America that emerged out of the war, a society of images and spectacles. This timely examination of Clint Eastwood’s oeuvre against the backdrop of contemporary America will be fascinating reading for students of film and popular culture, as well as readers with interests in Eastwood’s work, American film and culture.

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In his philosophy of ethics and time, Emmanuel Levinas highlighted the tension that exists between the "ontological adventure" of immediate experience and the "ethical adventure" of redemptive relationships-associations in which absolute responsibility engenders a transcendence of being and self. In an original commingling of philosophy and cinema study, Sam B. Girgus applies Levinas's ethics to a variety of international films. His efforts point to a transnational pattern he terms the "cinema of redemption" that portrays the struggle to connect to others in redeeming ways. Girgus not only reveals the power of these films to articulate the crisis between ontological identity and ethical subjectivity. He also locates time and ethics within the structure and content of film itself. Drawing on the work of Luce Irigaray, Tina Chanter, Kelly Oliver, and Ewa Ziarek, Girgus reconsiders Levinas and his relationship to film, engaging with a feminist focus on the sexualized female body. Girgus offers fresh readings of films from several decades and cultures, including Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Federico Fellini's La dolce vita (1959), Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura (1960), John Huston's The Misfits (1961), and Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988).

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In 'Time, Existential Presence and the Cinematic Image', Sam B. Girgus relates Laura Mulvey's theory of delayed cinema to ideas on time and the relationship to the other in the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas and Julia Kristeva, among others.

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The steady rise of Clint Eastwood’s career parallels a pressing desire in American society over the past five decades for a figure and story of purpose, meaning, and redemption. Eastwood has not only told and filmed that story, he has come to embody it for many in his public image and film persona. Eastwood responds to a national yearning for a vision of individual action and initiative, personal responsibility, and potential for renewal. An iconic director and star for his westerns, urban thrillers, and adventure stories, Eastwood has taken film art to new horizons of meaning in a series of masterpieces that engage the ethical and moral consciousness of our times, including Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, and Mystic River. He revolutionized the war film with the unprecedented achievement of filming the opposing sides of the same historic battle in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, using this saga to present a sharply critical representation of the new America that emerged out of the war, a society of images and spectacles. This timely examination of Clint Eastwood’s oeuvre against the backdrop of contemporary America will be fascinating reading for students of film and popular culture, as well as readers with interests in Eastwood’s work, American film and culture.

Read more less