Joel and Ethan Coen (Contemporary Film Directors) - Softcover

Palmer, R. Barton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252071859 ISBN 13: 9780252071850

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2004

Synopsis

With landmark films such as Fargo, O Brother Where art Thou?, Blood Simple, and Raising Arizona, the Coen brothers have achieved both critical and commercial success. Proving the existence of a viable market for small films that are also intellectually rewarding, their work has exploded generic conventions amid rich webs of trans-textural references. In Joel and Ethan Coen, R. Barton Palmer argues that the Coen oeuvre also forms a central element in what might be called postmodernist filmmaking. Mixing high and low cultural sources and blurring genres like noir and comedy, the use of pastiche and anti-realist elements in films such as The Hudsucker Proxy and Barton Fink clearly fit the postmodernist paradigm. Palmer argues that for a full understanding of the Coen brothers unique position within film culture, it is important to see how they have developed a new type of text within general postmodernist practice that Palmer terms commercial/independent. Analyzing their substantial body of work from this generic framework is the central focus on this book.

About this title

About the Author:

R. Barton Palmer is the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University, where he also directs the Film Studies program. He is the author, editor or general editor of more than 40 volumes on various literary and cinematic subjects, and a leading figure in the field of adaptation studies. Among other publications in this area, Palmer is the editor of two previous volumes for Cambridge University Press: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction on Screen (2007) and Twentieth-Century American Fiction on Screen (2007).

Review:

"There is as yet only one book length analysis of any note [about the Coen Brothers] by a film scholar: R. Barton Palrmer's Joel and Ethan Coen (2004). . . . This is a book for those who have already made the acquaintance of the Coens through their films and are now ready to think about their work seriously."--Film International

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0252071859
• ISBN 13: 9780252071850
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224