This module investigates cinema in global context, using critical and theoretical models surrounding global production, film texts, distribution and reception. Addressing ways films have been made and seen worldwide, the module locates aspects of global cinema within historical contexts of production and consumption. This year’s focus is global action cinema. We will study the ways viewers receive action films’ meanings as well as the action mode’s position within globalized film industries. The module will also examine action films’ representation of gender, race and ethnicity, social class, nationalism and colonialism, and political ideology. We will work not to reproduce longstanding interpretive paradigms (e.g. regarding the male gaze, or spectacle vs. narrative) but will seek original frameworks for analysis of a popular-cinema mode with a long history and dynamic contemporary manifestations. Crucially too, to illuminate emerging, marginal and other non-dominant traditions, we’ll emphasize films and filmmaking outside Hollywood studios’ and US production.
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