The violence of money

The article offers a reading of three recent Hollywood films, There Will Be Blood (Anderson), No Country for Old Men (Coen) and Eastern Promises (Cronenberg), addressing the violence subtending cinematic entactments of creative capitalism. At the same time, the reading of these films is pitted against a critical engagement with Richard Sennett’s discussion of the culture of new capitalism, exposing his own nostalgia for a previous form of old capitalism. Finally, the article also addresses the viscerality of the violent depiction of financial greed, claiming for it an ethics of affective cinematic language.Este artigo oferece uma leitura de três filmes contemporâneos de Hollywood, There will be Blood (Anderson), No Country for Old Men (Coen) e Eastern Promises (Cronenberg), abordando a violência subjacente às criações cinematográficas do capitalismo criativo. Simultaneamente, a leitura destes filmes é confrontada com a discussão de Richard Sennet sobre a cultura do novo capitalismo, expondo a sua própria nostalgia de uma forma prévia de capitalismo antigo. Finalmente, este artigo também aborda a representação visceral e violenta da ganância financeira, reclamando uma ética de uma linguagem cinematográfica afectiva

Monumental Cleopatra: Hollywood's Epic Film as Historical Re-imagination

Taking Nietzsche's discussion of monumental and critical history writing as its theoretical point of departure, this article discusses the double voicing and self-reflexivity of the Hollywood epic film. Even as Scott's Gladiator (2005), DeMille's Cleopatra (1934) and Mankiewicz' Cleopatra (1963) bring grand events of the ancient world to the screen, they appropriate the past for the present. The excessive visual style typical for Hollywood's monumentalism, furthermore, explicitly foregrounds the cinematic medium, exceeding and transcending any verifiable past so as to produce an affective, visceral historical re-imagination. At issue is a re-appraisal of the past through its subsequent cinematic recycling