Inaug.-Diss.--Köln. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Liberty University, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references.

Dissertation--Dresden--Universität, 2004. / Notes bibliogr.

Stuttgart, FH, Diplomarb., 2002.

Close association with, and proximity to, a culture of commercialism means film trailers are often overlooked in academic analyses of cinema. Trailers are, for many audiences, simply adverts: disposable, consumable and not 'worthy' of the critical attention paid to the their feature-length antecedents. Yet trailers' undeniable impact on spectators generates a spectrum of reactions which contradicts the often dismissive and negative reception with which they are met. Trailers receive intense popular and critical scrutiny and are constantly compared to the films they represent. Despite negative associations with commercialism and advertising culture, trailers are archived, exhibited and produced and discussed in contexts very similar to film and seem to share more than just a receptive connection. This thesis explores the artistic qualities of the trailer and examines its position as part of a wider cinematic culture. I will demonstrate the trailer's artistic status by arguing for a redefinition of the field of film studies and examining the trailer through a number existing theoretical discourses, including auteur-theory and Deleuze's ideas for the Movement and Time Image. My study will focus on Hollywood film trailers from a number of eras and cover an extensive body of case studies. Each era will be used demonstrate that trailers are artistic texts and members of a cinematic - as opposed to advertisement - culture. The first era focuses on the trailers of Alfred Hitchcock, which exhibit the early signs of innovation and artistic expression in a format still viewed overwhelmingly as an advertising context. Hitchcock himself intervenes in his trailers as an auteur - producing memorable and undeniably cinematic film texts. Hitchcock’s trailers are spaces in which Deleuzean film theory is eminently visible and the trailers discussed offer the opportunity for greater understanding of Gilles Deleuze’s work. Following Hitchcock, the ‘blockbuster’ era covers high-budget, highly commercial films from the seventies and eighties. Blockbuster trailers see strong codification of convention and style - and a re-presentation of the affect as a unit of commercial and artistic value. Martine Beugnet’s Cinema of Sensation is embodied in this group, in examples which fuse the artistic and commercial aspects of trailer identity. The final chapter examines the ‘postmodern’ trailer. In this era, the trailer moves beyond its commercial origins to the point they are often no longer applicable. Examples include 'spoof' trailers with no feature film antecedent and no detectable commercial intent. Postmodern trailers, I will argue, can be pure artistic expressions - and even work in reverse, generating commercial interest after the original instance of artistic exhibition.

No description available.

Diss. Univ. Zürich, 2004/05. - Ref.: Elisabeth Bronfen. / Im Buchh.: Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press. Register. Literaturverz.

This dissertation examines the motif of idolatry in the work of two modernist authors, Oscar Wilde and Joseph Conrad, and one modernist filmmaker, Alfred Hitchcock. The idols in these texts serve a contradictory role, signifying both increasing commodification under capitalism and an attempt to formulate a new ethics of image-making in response to this global transition. Chapter 1 analyzes Wilde’s play Salomé. Attending to the original French and to biblical allusion, I demonstrate that the text’s key generative trope is idolatry, which occupies a position both sacred and profane. The play superimposes two moments of historical rupture, positing Salomé as the embodiment of a new artistic potential of idolatry under monopoly capitalism. Chapter 2 analyzes Conrad’s early fiction, particularly The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” “The Return,” “Karain,” and Nostromo. I track a three-stage development in Conrad’s representations of idols, whereby the idol is associated with utopian fantasy, false ideals, and the artistic process. I also identify a new image-making technique, “retroactive modification,” which attempts to destabilize the image and thus counter problems of narrative representation, particularly reification and historical inauthenticity. Chapter 3 analyzes Hitchcock’s Blackmail, Saboteur, and Shadow of a Doubt, and challenges the notion of Hitchcock as auteur. The first two films culminate in sequences featuring monumental and iconic statuary. In the earlier British film, this process signifies a reckoning with history; in the later American film, it signifies the threat of history’s erasure and the degradation of art. Shadow of a Doubt signals a shift to a post-modern global-capitalist paradigm and a focus on the celebrity idol. My methodology builds on the work of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek to elucidate cultural fantasies underlying the texts and the ways in which the texts perform the psychical maneuver of disavowal, whereby a proposition is simultaneously asserted and denied. This double movement in Wilde, Conrad, and Hitchcock’s texts bespeaks a striving, through the motif of idolatry, to represent the image in motion. Though this desire is finally realized in the technology of film, the authenticity of that realization is undermined by the historical contradictions that enable its production. / 2020-12-11T00:00:00Z

In this thesis I investigate the nature of noir subjectivity, and the degree to which it can be described as heroic. To investigate these issues, I have chosen to illustrate my argument by analysing my novel, Viper, and two films that renew the noir cycle at different socio-political crossroads in America: in 1958, Alfred Hitchcock???s late noir, Vertigo, and in 1974, Frances Ford Coppola???s neo-noir, The Conversation. Because these texts present an extreme theorisation of deception in terms of the assembling and erasure of subjective identity, they will serve as a basis to explore the question of noir subjectivity. In proceeding thus, I argue in the dissertation that film noir???s most innovative borrowing can be described as a monstrous stitching together of incompatible parts???the real and the imaginary, the past and the present, the living and the dead???which accounts for a cut both between, and within, the image. It is this prosthetic approach to representation that takes the noir mode beyond its existential, individualist limits, and accounts for the subjective wound in noir: the heroic conflict between the singular and the multiple. In my analytic procedure then, I extend the idea of monstrosity beyond its current boundaries in contemporary theory. I do this by fusing Marie H??l??ne Huet???s conception of the monstrous imagination, which is a theory of art, with Gilles Deleuze???s powers of the false, which belongs to a philosophy of time. I posit a dialogic exchange across these analyses and my novel to suggest that the cinematic cut not only accounts for what Deleuze has termed the time-image but also is symptomatic of the chronic wounding of the riven noir hero. These analyses suggest that, while sustaining the aura of authorship through technical innovation and stylistic mastery, film noir serves paradoxically to challenge the mastery of the model designated as masculine. In my novel I continue to deal with the issues raised in the dissertation, through a rearticulation of a subjectivity that irrevocably alters its relation to representation in its affinity with the image, its serial movement through interstitial space, and its novel powers of falsification.

In this thesis I investigate the nature of noir subjectivity, and the degree to which it can be described as heroic. To investigate these issues, I have chosen to illustrate my argument by analysing my novel, Viper, and two films that renew the noir cycle at different socio-political crossroads in America: in 1958, Alfred Hitchcock???s late noir, Vertigo, and in 1974, Frances Ford Coppola???s neo-noir, The Conversation. Because these texts present an extreme theorisation of deception in terms of the assembling and erasure of subjective identity, they will serve as a basis to explore the question of noir subjectivity. In proceeding thus, I argue in the dissertation that film noir???s most innovative borrowing can be described as a monstrous stitching together of incompatible parts???the real and the imaginary, the past and the present, the living and the dead???which accounts for a cut both between, and within, the image. It is this prosthetic approach to representation that takes the noir mode beyond its existential, individualist limits, and accounts for the subjective wound in noir: the heroic conflict between the singular and the multiple. In my analytic procedure then, I extend the idea of monstrosity beyond its current boundaries in contemporary theory. I do this by fusing Marie H??l??ne Huet???s conception of the monstrous imagination, which is a theory of art, with Gilles Deleuze???s powers of the false, which belongs to a philosophy of time. I posit a dialogic exchange across these analyses and my novel to suggest that the cinematic cut not only accounts for what Deleuze has termed the time-image but also is symptomatic of the chronic wounding of the riven noir hero. These analyses suggest that, while sustaining the aura of authorship through technical innovation and stylistic mastery, film noir serves paradoxically to challenge the mastery of the model designated as masculine. In my novel I continue to deal with the issues raised in the dissertation, through a rearticulation of a subjectivity that irrevocably alters its relation to representation in its affinity with the image, its serial movement through interstitial space, and its novel powers of falsification.