Blossoms and Blood: Postmodern Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson - Softcover

Sperb, Jason

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1477302212 ISBN 13: 9781477302217

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2013

Synopsis

From his film festival debut Hard Eight to ambitious studio epics Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s unique cinematic vision focuses on postmodern excess and media culture. In Blossoms and Blood, Jason Sperb studies the filmmaker’s evolving aesthetic and its historical context to argue that Anderson’s films create new, often ambivalent, narratives of American identity in a media-saturated world.

Blossoms and Blood explores Anderson’s films in relation to the aesthetic and economic shifts within the film industry and to America’s changing social and political sensibilities since the mid-1990s. Sperb provides an auteur study with important implications for film history, media studies, cultural studies, and gender studies. He charts major themes in Anderson’s work, such as stardom, self-reflexivity, and masculinity and shows how they are indicative of trends in late twentieth-century American culture. One of the first books to focus on Anderson’s work, Blossoms and Blood reveals the development of an under-studied filmmaker attuned to the contradictions of a postmodern media culture.

About this title

About the Author

Jason Sperb is a lecturer in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1477302212
• ISBN 13: 9781477302217
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296