Toward a new film aesthetic /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Isaacs, Bruce.
Imprint:New York : Continuum, c2008.
Description:vi, 234 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
Language:English
Subject:Motion pictures -- Aesthetics.
Motion pictures -- Aesthetics.
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/6670667
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9780826428707 (hardcover : alk. paper)
0826428703 (hardcover : alk. paper)
9780826428714 (pbk. : alk. paper)
0826428711 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Notes:Includes bibliographical references (p. 201-215) and index.
Includes filmography: p. 217-225.
Review by Choice Review

Isaacs (Univ. of Sydney) contends that postmodern narrative cinema no longer conforms to the hierarchical gradations of high art, mediocre art, and trash. His intention here is to displace these traditional modes of discourse with a "spectacle aesthetic"--defined here as a performance cinema--that privileges consumption of visual texts rather than searches for their narrative meanings. Moving beyond Andre Bazin's notions of the "myth of total cinema"--the image as reproduced reality--Isaacs argues that the only true ontological "real" resides in the simulacrum, the hyperreal, i.e., the representation of the real without origin or antecedent object. This argument centers on the emergence in the 1990s of a hybridity, a genericity, an intertextual cinema that he locates in the Matrix franchise and the work of "pop culture flaneurs" like the Wachowski Brothers and Quentin Tarantino. This is a valuable, thought-provoking attempt to aestheticize the deployment of prior cinematic representations. Unfortunately, despite his avowed intention to make film theory meaningful for contemporary viewers ("Film theory should be for people other than theorists"), Isaacs deploys abstruse jargon, problematic arguments, and frequent allusions to theorists such as Baudrillard, Lyotard, Eco, et al., thus putting the book out of reach of undergraduates. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers. J. C. Tibbetts University of Kansas

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review