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  1. A grammar of murder : violent scenes and film form

    Oeler, Karla
    Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2009.

    The dark shadows and offscreen space that force us to imagine violence we cannot see. The real slaughter of animals spliced with the fictional killing of men. The missing countershot from the murder victim's point of view. Such images, or absent images, Karla Oeler contends, distill how the murder scene challenges and changes film. Reexamining works by such film-makers as Renoir, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Jarmusch, and Eisenstein, Oeler traces the murder scene's intricate connections to the great breakthroughs in the theory and practice of montage and the formulation of the rules and syntax of Hollywood genre. She argues that murder plays such a central role in film because it mirrors, on multiple levels, the act of cinematic representation. Death and murder at once eradicate life and call attention to its former existence, just as cinema conveys both the reality and the absence of the objects it depicts. But murder shares with cinema not only this interplay between presence and absence, movement and stillness: unlike death, killing entails the deliberate reduction of a singular subject to a disposable object. Like cinema, it involves a crucial choice about what to cut and what to keep.

  2. Mother Russia: The Politics of Gender and Childbearing in Russian Combat Films

    Kline, Jacqueline
    June 9, 2023; June 9, 2023; June 9, 2023

    WWII has been harnessed by the Putin government as an internally-facing national myth -- a story of Russian national becoming, in which women play a narrow and unimportant role. This is accomplished via monuments which shut women out of combat roles, parades which fail to count women among the dead, and films which: 1) Identify childbearing as women’s natural and greatest possible contribution to the war effort; 2) Use rape and sexual violence to convey coercive information about sexual purity and the societal role of women; 3) Portray women and soldiering as incompatible (and thus confine women symbolically to a domestic sphere, at a remove from power and profile); 4) Define Russian womanhood via the persistent use of two filmic tropes: the femme fatale and the sympathetic "good girl." Russia uses patriotic war films to disseminate WWII as an origin story, and to portray the West as aggressive, threatening, and Russophobic. Russian combat films are widely propagandistic in nature. Situated as they are in a highly controlled creative environment, individual filmmakers have little agency. Their films reflect a top-down political agenda of natalism, anti-Westernism, all-Russianism, and ‘traditional values,’ a euphemism for homophobia and misogyny.

  3. Sp16-FILMSTUD-102-01 : Theories of the Moving Image. 2016 Spring

    Oeler, Karla
    Stanford (Calif.), 2016

    Major theoretical arguments and debates about cinema: realism,formalism, poststructuralism, feminism, postmodernism, and phenomenology. Prerequisites: FILMSTUD 4.

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