IndieFilm

I’m delighted to be able to report that I’ve managed to get the original title restored for my forthcoming book on art cinema, which will now be called Positioning Art Cinema: Film and Cultural Value, which represents the focus of the book much better than the bland ‘Art Cinema’ main title that was previously insisted on the publisher. This was the rather fortunate fall-out, for me, of the recent take-over of I B. Tauris by Bloomsbury.

What follows is a draft cover blurb for the book, which is due out at the end of October. Should be able to post a cover image soon.

Positioning Art Cinema: Film and Cultural Value offers a unique examination of the way art cinema is positioned in the film landscape and how its cultural value is established. It explores a range of types of art cinema and its framing within critical and academic discourse, seeking to explain the broader socio-cultural basis of its appeal to particular audiences.

Geoff King argues that there is no single definition of art cinema, but a number of distinct and recurrent tendencies are identified. At one end of the spectrum are films accorded the most ‘heavyweight’ status, offering the greatest challenges to viewers. Others mix aspects of art cinema with more accessible dimensions such as uses of popular genre frameworks and ‘exploitation’ elements involving explicit sex and violence. Including case studies of films such as Michael Haneke’s Hidden, Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse and PedroAlmodóvar’s All About My Mother, this is a crucial contribution to understanding both art cinema itself and the usually taken-for-granted bases on which it is accorded cultural value.

A new collection I’ve edited, A Companion to American Indie Film is out soon from Wiley Blackwell (due 6 December). I’m really pleased with the way this has worked out. You can read the intro and find a full list of chapters and contributors on this site here.

The aim of this collection, for me, was to offer a more concerted approach to the territory than is the norm for many edited collections. That’s always quite hard to pull off, given the various different orientations and interests of any group of contributors, but I think it does generally succeed in this (it starts with an emphasis on broader aspects of indie culture before examining various individual manifestations that can be situated within these kinds of frameworks). I am, of course, hugely grateful to all of those who have contributed. Editing any collection can be quite a slog, and this one is larger than usual (more than 500 pages), but it went really smoothly and has been more of a pleasure than I’d expected.

The only downside is that the book’s eye-wateringly expensive: just under £125 in the UK for the Kindle edition ($152 in the US), with the hardback going to be even more. So looks like a library-only prospect for now.

It’s clearly the season for indie collections, as my book is joined by the excellent Indie Reframed: Women’s Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema, edited by Linda Badley, Claire Perkins and Michele Schreiber (Edinburgh University Press). This is the first volume to address the specific role of women in the indie sector in a sustained manner. I’m delighted to be one of the contributors, details of all of which are available here.

Nice to see also that this one is immediately available in paperback at an affordable price (not exactly cheap at £25), something that seems ever-rarer these days. I haven’t had the chance to read all the chapters yet but this looks like a really useful addition to the field (and I love the cover image).

The final cover has now been agreed for my new book, Quality Hollywood: Markers of Distinction in Contemporary Studio Film, which of course necessitates a plug! Will update when it hits the shops, which shouldn’t be too far away.

Below is the cover blurb. A slightly longer and more personal description of the book is available on its new entry in the list of my works in these pages, here.

What defines ‘quality’ in contemporary Hollywood film? Although often seen as inhospitable to such work, the studios of the blockbuster-franchise era continue to produce features that make claims to higher status. Films such as The Social Network, The Assassination of Jesse James and Mystic River are marked as distinctive from the mainstream norm. But how exactly, and how are such qualities mixed with more familiar Hollywood ingredients, as found in larger doses in other examples such as Blood Diamond and the blockbuster-scale Inception?

Quality Hollywood is the first book to address these issues, featuring close analysis of case study films, critical responses and the wider notions of cultural value on which these draw. Geoff King argues that such films retain a presence as a minority strand of studio output. The reasons for this combine factors relating to economics, the power of certain filmmakers and Hollywood’s investment in its own prestige.

I’m grateful for Prof. Tom Schatz for providing a kind endorsement for the cover, as follows:

With Quality Hollywood, Geoff King provides yet another astute assessment of contemporary cinema and contemporary culture. In incisive case studies of films such as Inception and The Social Network, King demonstrates how issues of authorship, style and storytelling still matter – and how quality filmmaking has somehow persisted – in the current age of formulaic blockbusters and dumbed-down billion-dollar franchises.

Just wanted to give a mention to two new edited collections either about or relevant to American indies (OK, I’m also plugging the fact that I’ve got an essay in each of them!).

First is US Independent Film After 1989: Possible Films, edited by Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis, from Edinburgh UP. This collection differs from most in having a particular focus on single-film chapters about generally smaller and lesser-known indies. My contribution is a chapter on Primer, which I see as in many ways a model example of the ultra-low-budget first-time indie feature. Haven’t got around to reading the rest yet, but it looks like a very useful addition to the literature.

The other is a volume with a broader focus on independence across the media, Media Independence: Working with Freedom or Working for Free?, edited by James Bennett and Niki Strange. My chapter in this is, unsurprisingly, about American indie film, but I’ve tried also to situate it within some of the broader dimensions of media independence around which the book is organized. Other chapters range across a wide variety of media terrain and dimensions of independence.

One annoying feature of both books, however, is that they’re out initially only in hardback at eye-watering prices (£75 and £85 respectively – also Kindle edition for Bennett and Strange, but that’s £80) that seem designed to exploit academic libraries, which are their only remotely likely buyers at that extortionate rate. Hate this policy of some publishers, which prevents any normal individual from buying such titles when they come out. My inclination is not to order for my university library until out in paperback, to avoid complicity in such a rip-off.

Just finished a terrific book on issues relating to gender and American culture, particularly in relation to the so-called’ ‘war on terror’: Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror, by Bonnie Mann (Oxford UP, 2014). Mann offers a very convincing reading of the role of gender, especially as it functions as an underpinning discourse in American foreign policy and notions of the American state, in a book that ranges widely – starting with perspectives on the nature of gender rooted particularly in the work of Simone de Beauvoir and including readings of a number of films, including The Hurt Locker. It’s hard to do it justice in a brief review-ette, but I’d really recommend this for anyone seeking to dig into some of the underlying institutionalised discourses that play a huge part in shaping American policies, as well as the way they’re manifested in films.

Mann begins with a very useful way of characterising the status of gender more generally, something that fits with the way I’ve recently being trying to put this in a chapter I’m writing for a collection about indie films by women filmmakers. What she stresses is what she, as a feminist philosopher, terms the ‘ontological weight’ of gender (as what I’d see as a social construct): an approach that avoids reducing gender to some notion of fixed biological essence while also seeing it as much more substantial, in its daily impact on our lives, that any construct that can easily be wished away.

The way this works in American culture, Mann suggests, involves a process of reassertion of national/sovereign masculinity through the denigration of women and all that is associated with them – including various forms of macho foreign policy posing. One of her central examples is the treatment of prisoners in the likes of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, a process of sexualised shaming against which the constructed edifice of American/male power is articulated. If GW Bush represents one cartoon version of this – cowboy-style moronic direct action – Mann finds different aspects of the same syndrome in the positioning of Obama as more rational ‘father’ figure (and rampant deployer of murderous drones).

A book of real substance and depth, combined with a strong sense of outrage against the impact such discursive framings have upon the world.