Pulling Focus. Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film, and Ethics

Stadler,Jane

ISBN 10: 0826429734 / ISBN 13: 9780826429735

Published by Continuum,2008, 2008

About this Item

As New in Hardcover.

Seller Inventory # 800615

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Pulling Focus. Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film, and Ethics
• Publisher: Continuum,2008
• Publication Date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0826429734
• ISBN 13: 9780826429735
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Seller catalogs:
  • FILM

About this title

Synopsis

The most powerful films have an afterlife. Their sensory appeal and their capacity to elicit involvement in story, character and conflict reaches beyond the screen to subtly reframe the way spectators view ethical issues and agents within the narrative, and in the world outside the cinema. Pulling Focus: Intersubjective Experience and Narrative Film questions how cinematic narratives relate to and affect ethical life. Extending Martha Nussbaum and Wayne Booth's work on moral philosophy and literature to consider cinema, Dr. Stadler shows that film spectatorship can be understood as a model for ethical attention that engages the audience in an affective relationship with characters and their values. Building on Vivian Sobchack's Address of the Eye and Carnal Thoughts, she uses a phenomenological approach to analyse ethical dimensions of film extending beyond narrative content, arguing that the camera describes experience and views screen characters with an evaluative form of perception: an ethical gaze in which spectators participate. Films discussed include Dead Man Walking, Lost Highway, Batman Begins, Nil By Mouth, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

About the Author

Dr Stadler is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Queensland, Australian, and is on the editorial advisory board of the online journal IM: Interactive Media. She was Convenor of the Film Studies Major at the University of Cape Town (2002-2005), and is the recipient of the Murdoch University Vice Chancellor's Teaching Excellence Award (2000) and the University of Cape Town Teaching Merit Award (2004, 2005). She is co-author of Media and Society, Oxford University Press: 2005 (with Michael O'Shaughnessy).