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within Hollywood did have an impact on Stone in the 2000s. In World Trade Center and W., the perspectives on 9/11 and the Bush administration were remarked on for their lack of polemical bite. More visceral and acerbic critiques including War on Terror and Jawbreaker were developed, but ultimately faltered for want of available funding. This was certainly evidence of what Stone and many other observers saw as the prevailing neo-conservative cultural narrative about the necessity and justification of the ‘War on Terror’. However, the mothballed scripts also provided
1990s, a sophisticated media genre. Dramatising the incursions of a colour present into a black and white past, Pleasantville creates a narrative based on the cultural apotheosis, ‘not everything is as simple as black and white’. Tapping into the spectacular growth of nostalgia networks on cable television during the 1990s, the film uses digital techniques of colour conversion to affect a political
fashion.12 The space for polemical drama contracted for a time after 9/11, and Stone concluded that documentary might offer the best opportunity to make his institutional point.13 Yet his own experience offered clear evidence of a growing problem for the USA as a functioning democracy: how to service the need for competing views and narratives –the ‘marketplace of ideas’ –in an environment where news and entertainment executives did not want to appear to be on the ‘wrong side’ of the administration’s ‘War on Terror’. Recognising, much less saying something of that
and forgetting in American culture – what is remembered, by who and for who – has in recent years become entwined in hegemonic struggles fought and figured around the negotiation of America’s national past. These struggles sharpened significantly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a moment of reported ‘culture war’ where consensual narratives of American identity were (seen to be) challenged by an emergent
circulating icons clearly enhance the soft power of monarchy. Within this landscape, films about royals also have their role to play. Two major commercial releases of the years 2000 map this change in opinion in Britain and Australia, and stand out as contemporary narrative explorations of the legitimacy of the British monarchy: The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006) and The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010
spectacle in the cinema. Indeed, the success of the film drew other theatrical stars to film, helping to develop the longer playing narrative film. As the Italian Enciclopedia dello spettacolo notes, however, Bernhardt’s indirect participation in the development of Paramount is one of the ‘most paradoxical cases in the history of the film industry’. 6 Her cinema performances are criticised for being
extrapolates, observing Beckett's own practice, that ‘if a work is to be effectively transplanted into a new medium, it must be adapted; otherwise distinction between genres is lost and confusion ensues’ (14; emphasis in original). This adaptation of Play depended on identifying what the virtual medium is truly about, making an argument that it is about truly opening narrative to the user's control, engaging the user in the ‘game’ of the actor and the director, moving from the sequential to the simultaneous. In his 2019 essay ‘Digitizing Beckett’ for The New Samuel
As a technology able to picture and embody the temporality of the past, cinema has become central to the mediation of memory in modern cultural life. The memory of film scenes and movies screens, cinema and cinema-going, has become integral to the placement and location of film within the cultural imagination of this century and the last. This book is a sustained, interdisciplinary perspective on memory and film from early cinema to the present. The first section examines the relationship between official and popular history and the constitution of memory narratives in and around the production and consumption of American cinema. The second section examines the politics of memory in a series of chapters that take as their focus three pivotal sites of national conflict in postwar America. This includes the war in Vietnam, American race relations and the Civil Rights Movement, and the history of marginality in the geographic and cultural borderlands of the US. The book explores the articulation of Vietnam. The final section concentrates on the issue of mediation; it explores how technological and semiotic shifts in the cultural terrain have influenced the coding and experience of memory in contemporary cinema. It considers both the presence of music and colour in nostalgia films of the 1990s and the impact of digital and video technologies on the representational determinants of mediated memory. The book also examines the stakes of cultural remembering in the United States and the means by which memory has been figured through Hollywood cinema.
research into the memory narratives of a particular local city press, the study argues that personal memory of cinema is socially constructed by its context to create certain culturally sanctioned discourses, in this case figured around age, community, and city identity. If the last two chapters raised issues of history and memory through particular historical and commemorative texts and events in the 1920s
point towards its ambitions, especially in the narrative (where ‘cinematic’ sometimes refers to disruptions to the causal chain of conventional naturalist plotting, or a more overt use of montage) or use of space (where it may denote a more fluid use of multiple fictional locations). ‘Cinematic’ may also refer to overt theatrical references to film genres (see, for example, the plays of David Hare). 5