First Person Jewish. [Visible Evidence, Vol. 22].

Lebow, Alisa S.:

ISBN 10: 0816643547 / ISBN 13: 9780816643547

Published by University of Minnesota Press, 2008

About this Item

224 p. Very good. Shrink wrapped. / Sehr guter Zustand. In Folie verschweißt. Sprache: Englisch Gewicht in Gramm: 690.

Seller Inventory # 814285

Bibliographic Details

• Title: First Person Jewish. [Visible Evidence, Vol. 22].
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Publication Date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816643547
• ISBN 13: 9780816643547
• Binding: Hardcover/Pappeinband
• Condition: Sehr gut
• Weight: 690 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • Judaica

About this title

Synopsis

Documentaries have increasingly used the first person, with a number of prominent filmmakers finding critical and commercial success with this intimate approach. Jewish filmmakers have particularly thrived in this genre, using it to explore disparate definitions of the self in relation to the larger groups of family and community.

In First Person Jewish, Alisa S. Lebow examines more than a dozen films from Jewish artists to reveal how the postmodern impulse to turn the lens inward intersects provocatively (and at times unwittingly) with historical tropes and stereotypes of the Jew. Focusing her efforts on Jewish filmmakers working on the margins, Lebow analyzes the work of Jonathan Caouette, Chantal Akerman, and Alan Berliner, among others, also including a discussion of her own first person film Treyf (1998), made with Cynthia Madansky. The filmmakers in this study, Lebow argues, are confronting a desire to both define and reimagine contemporary Jewishness.

Using a multidisciplinary approach to first person films, Lebow shows how this form of self-expression is challenging both autobiography and documentary and, in the process, changing the art of cinema and recording the cultural shifts of our time.

Alisa S. Lebow is a filmmaker and lecturer in film and TV studies at Brunel University.