Interpreting Films - Softcover

Staiger, Janet

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691006164 ISBN 13: 9780691006161

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1992

Synopsis

Employing a wide range of examples from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Birth of a Nation to Zelig and Personal Best, Janet Staiger argues that a historical examination of spectators' responses to films can make a valuable contribution to the history, criticism, and philosophy of cultural products. She maintains that as artifacts, films do not contain immanent meanings, that differences among interpretations have historical bases, and that these variations are due to social, political, and economic conditions as well as the viewers' constructed images of themselves. After proposing a theory of reception study, the author demonstrates its application mainly through analyzing the varying responses of audiences to certain films at specific moments in history. Staiger gives special attention to how questions of class, gender, sexual preference, race, and ethnicity enter into film viewers' interpretations. Her analysis reflects recent developments in post-structuralism, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies, and includes a discussion of current reader-response models in literary and film studies as well as an alternative approach for thinking about historical readers and spectators.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Employing a wide range of examples from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Birth of a Nation to Zelig and Personal Best, Janet Staiger argues that a historical examination of spectators' responses to films can make a valuable contribution to the history, criticism, and philosophy of cultural products. She maintains that as artifacts, films do not contain immanent meanings, that differences among interpretations have historical bases, and that these variations are due to social, political, and economic conditions as well as the viewers' constructed images of themselves. Alter proposing a theory of reception study, the author demonstrates its application mainly through analyzing the varying responses of audiences to certain films at specific moments in history. Staiger gives special attention to how questions of class, gender, sexual preference, race, and ethnicity enter into film viewers' interpretations. Her analysis reflects recent developments in post-structuralism, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies, and includes a discussion of current reader-response models in literary and film studies as well as an alternative approach for thinking about historical readers and spectators.

Reviews

Staiger (critical & cultural studies, Univ. of Texas) looks at historical shifts in the interpretation of films to demonstrate that "interpretative strategies do not fall from the skies; they are derived in a material context." This is at odds with many recent scholarly and intellectual trends, which work from assumptions that meaning in a text or film is "text-activated" or "reader-activated" and hence produced in a historical vacuum. Staiger first establishes her critical stance in relation to other major textual and film theories, then handles some case studies of how the receptions of particular films were shaped and later evolved. For film research collections.
- Brian Geary, West Seneca, N.Y.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691006164
• ISBN 13: 9780691006161
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 290