Crime Films Investigating The Scene

Download or read book Crime Films written by Thomas Leitch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-15 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book surveys the entire range of crime films, including important subgenres such as the gangster film, the private eye film, film noir, as well as the victim film, the erotic thriller, and the crime comedy. Focusing on ten films that span the range of the twentieth century, Thomas Leitch traces the transformation of the three leading figures that are common to all crime films: the criminal, the victim and the avenger. Analyzing how each of the subgenres establishes oppositions among its ritual antagonists, he shows how the distinctions among them become blurred throughout the course of the century. This blurring, Leitch maintains, reflects and fosters a deep social ambivalence towards crime and criminals, while the criminal, victim and avenger characters effectively map the shifting relations between subgenres, such as the erotic thriller and the police film, within the larger genre of crime film that informs them all.

Download or read book Crime Films written by Kirsten Moana Thompson and published by Wallflower Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Crime Films' analyses the wide body of films that fall under the rubric of crime, from the gangster film to the film noir, and from the classic whodunnit to TV series like 'Law and Order' and 'CSI'.

Download or read book Arthouse Crime Scenes written by Geoff King and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-11-14 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arthouse Crime Scenes is the first book to address the relationship between art cinema and crime, contributing to the study of both categories. Case studies are provided of works by celebrated filmmakers including Lucretia Martell, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Bong Joon Ho, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Hirokazu Koreeda, Jia Zhangke, Andrey Zvyagintsez and Lee Chang-dong. How is crime represented in art cinema? And how can this be understood in the context of global sociopolitical and film-industrial trends? Arthouse crime scenes draw on variable combinations of elements associated with art cinema and crime genres. Crime might be shown or lurk only at the edges. It might be left unresolved or unexplained. Crime can be petty and small scale or raise big questions associated with the arthouse sector: political issues, the nature of humanity, truth and knowability. In this book, close textual analysis is combined with focus on social and industrial contexts. A recurring theme is the situation of arthouse crime films within differing manifestations of broader processes of late-modern neoliberal globalization and cultural hybridity. Approaches examined range from the oblique to social realism and other mixtures of crime and arthouse tendencies.

Download or read book The Introspective Realist Crime Film written by Luis M. García-Mainar and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-10 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the formal and thematic conventions of crime film, the contexts in which these have flourished and their links with the social issues of a globalized world. The crime film has traditionally been identified with suspense, a heterogeneous aesthetic and a tacit social mind. However, a good number of the crime films produced since the early 2000s have shifted their focus from action or suspense and towards melodrama in narratives that highlight the social dimension of crime, intensify their realist aesthetics and dwell on subjectivity. With the 1940s wave of Hollywood semi-documentary crime films and 1970s generic revisionism as antecedents, these crime films find inspiration in Hollywood cinema and constitute a transnational trend. With a close look at Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000), David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète (2009) and Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), this book sets out the stylistic and thematic conventions, contexts and cultural significance of a new transnational trend in crime film.

Download or read book The New American Crime Film written by Matthew Sorrento and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2012-09-18 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American crime film has recently enjoyed a surge in popularity and proliferation, making it the most pervasive genre in contemporary cinema. Though it now tackles current issues, it continues to reference the classic narratives and archetypes established in the great crime pictures of past decades. The titles explored in this critical survey feature a variety of themes and show that the crime film genre has fused with other genres to create fascinating hybrids. Focusing on character and plot construction, the author highlights the gangster and film noir traditions that still run strongly through recent American cinema. Among the many filmmakers analyzed within these pages are David Lynch, Gus Van Sant, David Mamet, Werner Herzog, Sam Raimi, David Cronenberg and the Coen Brothers. Stuart Gordon, director of the cult classic Re-Animator, provides the lively and incisive foreword.

Download or read book Studying the British Crime Film written by Paul Elliott and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since its inception, British cinema has been obsessed with crime and the criminal. One of the first narrative films to be produced in Britain, the Hepworth's 1905 short Rescued by Rover, was a fast-paced, quick-edited tale of abduction and kidnap, and the first British sound film, Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail (1930), centered on murder and criminal guilt. For a genre seemingly so important to the British cinematic character, there is little direct theoretical or historical work focused on it. The Britain of British cinema is often written about in terms of national history, ethnic diversity, or cultural tradition, yet very rarely in terms of its criminal tendencies and dark underbelly. This volume assumes that, to know how British cinema truly works, it is necessary to pull back the veneer of the costume piece, the historical drama, and the rom-com and glimpse at what is underneath. For every Brief Encounter (1945) there is a Brighton Rock (2010), for every Notting Hill (1999) there is a Long Good Friday (1980).

Download or read book Detecting Men written by Philippa Gates and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Detecting Men examines the history of the Hollywood detective genre and the ways that detective films have negotiated changing social attitudes toward masculinity, heroism, law enforcement, and justice. Genre film can be a site for the expression and resolution of problematic social issues, but while there have been many studies of such other male genres as war films, gangster films, and Westerns, relatively little attention has been paid to detective films beyond film noir. In this volume, Philippa Gates examines classical films of the thirties and forties as well as recent examples of the genre, including Die Hard, the Lethal Weapon films, The Usual Suspects, Seven, Devil in a Blue Dress, and Murder by Numbers, in order to explore social anxieties about masculinity and crime and Hollywood's conceptions of gender. Up until the early 1990s, Gates argues, the primary focus of the detective genre was the masculinity of the hero. However, from the mid-1990s onward, the genre has shifted to more technical portrayals of crime scene investigation, forensic science, and criminal profiling, offering a reassuring image of law enforcement in the face of violent crime. By investigating the evolution of the detective film, Gates suggests, perhaps we can detect the male.