Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (Film and Culture Series)
By
Rosalind Galt (Author)
Hardback
Available / dispatched within 1 - 4 weeks
Quantity
Description
Film culture often rejects visually rich images, treating simplicity, austerity, or even ugliness as the more provocative, political, and truly cinematic choice. Cinema may challenge traditional ideas of art, but its opposition to the decorative represents a long-standing Western aesthetic bias against feminine cosmetics, Oriental effeminacy, and primitive ornament. Inheriting this patriarchal, colonial perspective--which treats decorative style as foreign or sexually perverse--filmmakers, critics, and theorists have often denigrated colorful, picturesque, and richly patterned visions in cinema. Condemning the exclusion of the "pretty" from masculine film culture, Rosalind Galt reevaluates received ideas about the decorative impulse from early film criticism to classical and postclassical film theory. The pretty embodies lush visuality, dense mise-en-scene, painterly framing, and arabesque camera movements-styles increasingly central to world cinema. From European art cinema to the films of Wong Kar-wai and Santosh Sivan, from the experimental films of Derek Jarman to the popular pleasures of Moulin Rouge!, the pretty is a vital element of contemporary cinema, communicating distinct sexual and political identities.
Inverting the logic of anti-pretty thought, Galt firmly establishes the decorative image as a queer aesthetic, uniquely able to figure cinema's perverse pleasures and cross-cultural encounters. Creating her own critical tapestry from perspectives in art theory, film theory, and philosophy, Galt reclaims prettiness as a radically transgressive style, shimmering with threads of political agency. 50 illus.
About the Author
Rosalind Galt is senior lecturer in film studies at the University of Sussex. She is the author of The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map and coeditor of Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories.
More Details
- Contributor: Rosalind Galt
- Imprint: Columbia University Press
- ISBN13: 9780231153461
- Number of Pages: 408
- Packaged Dimensions: 152x229mm
- Format: Hardback
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- Release Date: 2011-06-21
- Series: Film and Culture Series
- Binding: Hardback
- Biography: Rosalind Galt is senior lecturer in film studies at the University of Sussex. She is the author of The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map and coeditor of Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories.
Delivery Options
Home Delivery
Store Delivery
Free Returns
We hope you are delighted with everything you buy from us. However, if you are not, we will refund or replace your order up to 30 days after purchase. Terms and exclusions apply; find out more from our Returns and Refunds Policy.