Scenes from the suburbs : the surburb in contemporary US film and television

In recent years, Hollywood has increasingly suburbanised; US television, too, is progressively suburban. This can hardly be considered surprising, since it mirrors America's changing demographic: by 2000, more than half of all Americans inhabited a suburban dwelling and that number is still steadily increasing. The only thing that is surprising is that it seems to have gone by film and television critics unnoticed. This thesis seeks to address this critical gap. Examining the representation of the suburb across genres and formats, it asks what it means to be 'suburban'. In the first chapter, the thesis examines the ontology of the suburb as fictional entity in Pleasantville. The second and third chapter are concerned with the suburban mise-en-scene. Chapter Two concentrates in particular on the relationship between visual style and geography in Happiness, while the third chapter focuses on technical issues of width, depth, and volume in The Simpsons and King of the Hill. The final two chapters engage with the construction of the suburb as a social space. In the fourth chapter Desperate Housewives is analysed in order to come to an understanding of the relationships between the suburb and gender. Chapter Five, finally, looks at the representation of space and age in three teen noirs - Brick, Chumscrubber, and Alpha Dog - so as to suggest another language via which the cinematic and televisual suburb can be discussed in more complex and rewarding ways. The thesis argues that what makes a suburb suburban is not any particular spatiality, but a variable interplay between forms and meanings that renders an environment at once fixed and radically instable.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Flat Film: Strategies of depthlessness in Pleasantville and La Haine

In this essay I consider the device of depthlessness in film. I am interested in particular in the ways in which this device can determine, or at least raise questions about, the nature of the fictional world. Taking my cue from two films from the turn of the century – Gary Ross' 1998 film Pleasantville and Matthieu Kassovitz' 1995 La Haine – as well as, more broadly, arts historical and cultural theoretical debates, where rather more attention has been devoted to the issue of depthlessness, I focus on moments in which depth, that is, in Andre Bazin's oft-cited words, the “continuity” of the fictional realm, is flattened so as to trace the correlation between depthlessness and the ontology of the fictional world. The two strategies I look at are shallow focus and the dolly zoom. What I intend, here, is to offer some first, superficial (no pun intended), reflections that may allow us to begin thinking about this cinematic notion of the depthless as a device and concept in its own right, with its own rationales and implications, just as art historians and cultural theorists have found it an interesting concept by which to study and categorize artistic and cultural developments. There is so much discussion in film studies about depth – from Bazin's discourse about neorealism's “decisive step forward” re-introducing deep focus, to Gilles Deleuze's talk about Orson Welles' “freeing” of depth, it might be helpful to consider its supposedly backwards, “restrictive” antithesis as well

Authenticity? Observations and Artistic Strategies in the Post-Digital Age

"The everyday connotations of the original, the real, sincere, valid, historical or deep are well-known, and the opposite of the authentic may then be the superficial, false, not-what-it-seems, or just new. Nonetheless 'the real thing’ is still a fruitful starting point to analyze changes in the post-digital society. Digital technology is embedded in almost every personal relationship, in labour conditions, and in aesthetic practices. What does this mean for the 'authentic'? To unfold the nuances of the concept of contemporary authenticity this book aims to bring together different thinkers to reflect on the meaning of the authentic now. As a process and as a fluid and performative scheme to be enacted at any time—not just in terms of art and art making but flowing into every single nook of contemporary life, from the intimate to the public." -- Publisher's website