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E-book
Author Staiger, Janet

Title Interpreting films : studies in the historical reception of American cinema / Janet Staiger
Published Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1992

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Description 1 online resource (xiv, 274 p.)
Contents The use-value of reception studies -- Reception studies in other disciplines -- Reception studies in film and television -- Toward a historical materialist approach to reception studies -- Rethinking "primitive" cinema: intertextuality, the middle-class audience, and reception studies -- "The handmaiden of villainy": foolish wives, politics, gender orientation, and the other -- The birth of a nation: reconsidering its reception -- The logic of alternative readings: a star is born -- With the compliments of the auteur: art cinema and the complexities of its reading strategies -- Chameleon in the film, chameleons in the audience; or, where is parody? the case of zelig
Summary Employing a wide range of examples from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Birth of a Nation to Zelig and Personal Best, Janet Staiger argues that a historical examination of spectators' responses to films can make a valuable contribution to the history, criticism, and philosophy of cultural products. She maintains that as artifacts, films do not contain immanent meanings, that differences among interpretations have historical bases, and that these variations are due to social
Political, and economic conditions as well as the viewers' constructed images of themselves. Alter proposing a theory of reception study, the author demonstrates its application mainly through analyzing the varying responses of audiences to certain films at specific moments in history. Staiger gives special attention to how questions of class, gender, sexual preference, race, and ethnicity enter into film viewers' interpretations. Her analysis reflects recent
Developments in post-structuralism, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies, and includes a discussion of current reader-response models in literary and film studies as well as an alternative approach for thinking about historical readers and spectators
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (p. [259]-269) and index
Notes Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed
Subject Motion pictures -- Aesthetics.
Reader-response criticism.
Motion pictures -- United States.
PERFORMING ARTS -- Film & Video -- History & Criticism.
Motion pictures.
Motion pictures -- Aesthetics.
Films.
Reader-response criticism.
Receptie.
United States.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2021700925
ISBN 9780691216065
0691216061