The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth- Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art

The experience of grief is one of history’s most universal yet elusive themes, ever present even in peacetime but generated with almost intolerable intensity and frequency by wars. The practice of mourning, both public and private, provided essential consolation for those bereaved as a result of the Great War. Jay Winter admits that \"how healing occurs, and what quietens embitterment and alleviates despair can never be fully known\". Yet \"not to ask the question . . . is both to impoverish the study of history and to evade our responsibility as historians\" (116). If directed to every scholar individually, this injunction would indeed be outrageous – some of us must be allowed to indulge other interests in, say, laughter, labour, railways, sex, incunabula, or diplomacy. In fact, Winter is addressing historians of the Great War as if they were a team, an ideal rarely achieved in scholarship but to some extent realised in the conferences and collaborations associated with the Historial de la Grande Guerre at Péronne, which he helped establish. The collaborative approach suffuses this book, and the endnotes are strewn with warm and deserved acknowledgements of help from numerous colleagues. The effect is to suggest a series of lively and speculative seminars, complete with sometimes indistinct and half-explored images flashing onto the whiteboard from an overheated projector: the 31 illustrations are often dark and dim, in contrast to the splendidly sharp reproductions in Winter’s The Experience of World War I (1988). This is history in the making: inconclusive, uneven, but consistently exhilarating.

Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture

Feminist Film Studies is a readable, yet comprehensive textbook for introductory classes in feminist film theory and criticism. 
Karen Hollinger provides an accessible overview of women’s representation and involvement in film, complemented by analyses of key texts that illustrate major topics in the field. Key areas include:


a brief history of the development of feminist film theory 


the theorization of the male gaze and the female spectator 


women in genre films and literary adaptations 


the female biopic 


feminism and avant-garde and documentary film 


women as auteurs 


lesbian representation 


women in Third Cinema.

Each chapter includes a "Films in Focus" section, which analyzes key texts related to the chapter’s major topic, including examples from classical Hollywood, world cinema, and the contemporary period.
This book provides students in both film and gender/women’s studies with a clear introduction to the field of feminist film theory and criticism.

Feminist Film Studies

Introduction * The Dischord of the Elders * The Impiety of War * The Kultur War * The Controversy over Kant * The Classicist Revival *\"Toujours la Science\" Epilogue * Note on Primary Sources * Notes * Index

The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers during the Great War.

Rites of Realism rethinks cinematic realism, shifting discussion away from the usual focus on the faithfulness of record or the illusory effects of verisimilitude towards a notion of "performative realism," a realism that does not simply represent a given reality but enacts actual social tensions. These essays by a range of film theorists propose stimulating new approaches to the critical evaluation of modern realist films and such referential genres as reenactment, historical film, adaptation, portrait films, documentary, and realist depictions of urban life. By providing close readings of classic and contemporary works, Rites of Realism signals the need to return to a focus on films as the main provocateurs and innovators of realist representation. Inspired by the pioneering thought of Andre Bazin, the book features two new translations: of Bazin's 1958 essay "Death Every Afternoon," examining the filming of a bullfight and of Serge Daney's essay reinterpreting imagery invoked by Bazin. These pieces evince key concerns-particularly the link between cinematic realism and representations of the body-that the other essays explore further. Among the topics addressed are the provocative mimesis of Luis Bunuel's Land Without Bread; the adaptation of trial documents in Carl Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc; the use of the tableaux vivant by Wim Wenders and Peter Greenaway; the way Pasolini transposed The Gospel According to Matthew from Palestine to southern Italy; and the variables in urban representation in contemporary Chinese cinema. Contributors also look at the resistance to visibility posed by images of possession in Maya Deren's work and the historical contingencies of identity representation in avant-garde and documentary films of the 1960s, as well as the social geography presented in Mike Leigh's oeuvre and the exemplary dimension of reenactment in films by Antonioni, Cesare Zavattini, Zhang Yuan, and Abbas Kiarostami. Rites of Realism will appeal not only to cinema studies specialists but also to those interested in performance theory and art history. Contributors: Paul Arthur, Andre Bazin, Mark A. Cohen, Serge Daney, Mary Ann Doane, James Lastra, Ivone Margulies, Abe Mark Normes, Brigitte Peucker, Richard Porton, Philip Rosen, Catherine Russell, James Schamus, Noa Steimatsky, and Xiaobing Tang.

Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema

Through films that alternate between containment, order, and symmetry on the one hand, and obsession, explosiveness, and a lack of control on the other, Chantal Akerman has gained a reputation as one of the most significant filmmakers working today. Her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is widely regarded as the most important feminist film of that decade. In Nothing Happens, Ivone Margulies presents the first comprehensive study of this influential avant-garde Belgian filmmaker. Margulies grounds her critical analysis in detailed discussions of Akerman's work from Saute ma ville, a 13-minute black-and-white film made in 1968, through Jeanne Dielman and Je tu il elle to the present. Focusing on the real-time representation of a woman's everyday experience in Jeanne Dielman, Margulies brings the history of social and progressive realism and the filmmaker's work into perspective. Pursuing two different but related lines of inquiry, she investigates an interest in the everyday that stretches from postwar neorealist cinema to the feminist rewriting of women's history in the seventies. She then shows how Akerman's ocorporeal cinema' is informed by both American experiments with performance and duration and the layerings present in works by European modernists Bresson, Rohmer, and Dreyer. This analysis revises the tired opposition between realism and modernism in the cinema, defines Akerman's minimal-hyperrealist aesthetics in contrast to Godard's anti-illusionism, and reveals the inadequacies of popular characterizations of Akerman's films as either simply modernist or feminist. An essential book for students of Chantal Akerman's work, Nothing Happens will also interest international film critics and scholars, filmmakers, art historians, and all readers concerned with feminist film theory.

Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday

Bodies Too Much

Exemplary Bodies: Reenactment in Love in the City, Sons, and Close Up

(2004). Chronicle of a Summer (1960) as Autocritique (1959): A Transition in the French Left. Quarterly Review of Film and Video: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 173-185.

Ivone Margulies

Papers

Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema

Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday

Bodies Too Much

Exemplary Bodies: Reenactment in Love in the City, Sons, and Close Up

Chronicle of a Summer (1960) as Autocritique (1959): A Transition in the French Left