Expresiones audiovisuales

Tracing the rise and development of the Ghanaian video film industry between 1985 and 2110, Sensational Movies examines video movies as seismographic devices recording a culture and society in turmoil. This book captures the dynamic process of popular filmmaking in Ghana as a new medium for the imagination and tracks the interlacing of the medium’s technological, economic, social, cultural, and religious aspects. Stepping into the void left by the defunct state film industry, video movies negotiate the imaginaries deployed by state cinema on the one hand and Christianity on the other.

Birgit Meyer analyzes Ghanaian video as a powerful, sensational form. Colliding with the state film industry’s representations of culture, these movies are indebted to religious notions of divination and revelation. Exploring the format of “film as revelation,” Meyer unpacks the affinity between cinematic and popular Christian modes of looking and showcases the transgressive potential haunting figurations of the occult. In this brilliant study, Meyer offers a deep, conceptually innovative analysis of the role of visual culture within the politics and aesthetics of religious world making.

The antihero prevails in recent American drama television series. Characters such as mobster kingpin Tony Soprano (The Sopranos), meth cook and gangster-in-the-making Walter White (Breaking Bad) and serial killer Dexter Morgan (Dexter) are not morally good, so how do these television series make us engage in these morally bad main characters? And what does this tell us about our moral psychological make-up, and more specifically, about the moral psychology of fiction?

Vaage argues that the fictional status of these series deactivates rational, deliberate moral evaluation, making the spectator rely on moral emotions and intuitions that are relatively easy to manipulate with narrative strategies. Nevertheless, she also argues that these series regularly encourage reactivation of deliberate, moral evaluation. In so doing, these fictional series can teach us something about ourselves as moral beings―what our moral intuitions and emotions are, and how these might differ from deliberate, moral evaluation.

¿Es la imagen que de la política ofrecen las series de televisión cínica o utópica? Este libro nace con la pretensión de dar cuenta de las series pertenecientes al drama político y, gracias al análisis de los autores que conforman esta obra, describir la representación de lo político en el imaginario televisivo de ficción c ontemporáneo. Para hacerlo, se ha dado cierta e inevitable primacía a la producción estadounidense (House of Cards, The Good Wife, The Newsroom, Louie, The Kennedys), seguida de la ficción anglosajona y europea (Borgen, The Hour, The Thick of It, The Red Riding Trilogy, Crematorio). Uno de los ejes que trata este monográfico es si la imagen política ofrecida en dichas representaciones audiovisuales es utópica o más bien distópica y cínica. La función de cuarto poder del periodismo en la era de la convergencia mediática y la llamada nueva política es también un tema importante en este volumen.

Cine e ideología no son conceptos mutuamente extraños que se repelan entre sí. El autor nos desvela en este libro algunas de las alianzas que ideología y cine han protagonizado en las últimas dos décadas. Veremos de qué forma pervive el marxismo tras la caída del Muro de Berlín y el tan cacareado “fin de las ideologías”, de qué manera la ideología new age ha impregnado los planteamientos metafísicos de muchas películas y cómo se ha expandido en el séptimo arte la ideología de género. Pero a la vez el autor también repasará como contrapunto lo mejor del cine no ideológico sobre cada uno de esos temas.

Rádio em Portugal e no Brasil: trajetória e cenários

This book explores a hybrid model of broadcasting and takes a close look at public TV broadcasting operating in a market-driven environment. While media and media institutions play an important role in democratic societies, their management is a complex process and has to coordinate the various demands of the public, the owners, advertisers and society. Managing media institutions also has to take into account technological developments, changes in the regulatory framework and social trends. Whereas media performance reflects social developments, their management often represents catching the uncatchable: providing for the public good and offering attractive market products.

Modern views of the First World War have long been shaped by literature, film and television. However, the interactive nature of computer games is changing how such events are portrayed. The First World War in Computer Games examines analyses the world of combat and what it means for a player to be a soldier or a general in the First World War. It also examines the depiction and landscape of the trenches, and concepts of how the war ended and what it was for. Most importantly it investigates the different stories that computer games tell about the war, where these stories came from, and how they are shaped by wider social and historical knowledge. This book shows how computer games are at the forefront of new representations of the war.

Melodrama manipulates us to feel deeply about the structures that ground our experience of the world: our bodies, the family, the home, and the nation. For this reason, melodrama is a narrative and aesthetic form employed to sustain the national imagination. Globalization is a phenomenon that has profoundly changed how we live and connect to others, transforming our spatio-temporal parameters. Global Melodrama analyzes the ways in which melodrama addresses this new geopolitical reality and examines how contemporary films ask us to rethink how we organize, and tell stories about, our sense of identity and community. Through case-studies and close readings of films that emerge from different national and aesthetic traditions, Carla Marcantonio demonstrates how global melodramas, far from championing the borderless landscape that the term "global" might index, map new temporal, spatial, and embodied territories.

The 1951s saw perhaps the largest number of American films set on and around the US-Mexico border of any period of the twentieth century. Many of these films engaged with Cold War politics as they explored the relationship between the US and Mexico through ideas of romance, revolution, and regulation. With an analysis of Cold War era films including Border Incident, Where Danger Lives, and Touch of Evil, Stephanie Fuller illustrates how cinema across genres developed an understanding of what the US-Mexico border meant within the American cultural imaginary and the ways in which it worked to produce the border. Fuller illustrates how a particular cinematic location provides a new way of investigating cultural politics.

Media depictions of community are enormously influential on wider popular opinion about how people would like to live. In this study, Stephen Rowley examines depictions of ideal communities in Hollywood films and television and explores the implications of attempts to build real-world counterparts to such imagined places. He focuses on the ideals of small towns and suburbs featured during and shortly after World War II, tracking how these were an inspiration for post-World War II suburban development.