Film and Television after 9/11 / Edition 3

by Wheeler Winston Dixon, Wheeler W. Dixon

Overview

In Film and Television After 9/11, editor Wheeler Winston Dixon and eleven other distinguished film scholars discuss the production, reception, and distribution of Hollywood and foreign films after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and examine how moviemaking has changed to reflect the new world climate.

While some contemporary films offer escapism, much of mainstream American cinema since 9/11 is centered on the desire for a “just war” in which military reprisals and escalation of warfare appear to be both inevitable and justified. Films of 2002 such as Black Hawk Down, Collateral Damage, and We Were Soldiers demonstrate a renewed audience appetite for narratives of conflict, reminiscent of the wave of filmmaking that surrounded American involvement in World War II.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon galvanized the American public initially, yet film critics wonder how this will play out over time. Film and Television After 9/11 is the first book to provide original insights into topics ranging from the international reception of post-9/11 American cinema, re-viewing films of our shared cinematic past in light of the attacks, and exploring parallels between post-9/11 cinema and World War II-era productions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809325566
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	01/28/2004
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

The James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies, Wheeler Winston Dixon is a filmmaker, professor of English, and coordinator of the film studies program at the University of Nebraska. He is the author or editor of twenty-two books (most recently Visions of the Apocalypse and Collected Interviews: Voices from Twentieth-Century Cinema), the editor-in-chief of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and the series editor for SUNY Press’s Cultural Studies in Cinema/Video series.

Editorial Reviews

“[A] vital anthology. . . . Uniformly excellent, the informed, closely argued, and clearly written essays collected here demonstrate how popular films reflect not just the open issues of their day but its sunken anxieties. . . . Essential [for] all levels.”

—Choice

“Film and Television After 9/11 contributes to a new understanding both of recent American film and our reaction, as a culture, to the events of 9/11. The contributors consider the question of how these very real events were at the same time media spectacles subject to deliberate reconstruction and ideological slanting, and how this spectacle resonated throughout American culture.”

—Steven Shaviro, author of The Cinematic Body and Doom Patrols

“No one book, no one movie has ever been able to capture the Holocaust, World War I, World War II, Vietnam, or even such ‘small’ events as the Hindenburg explosion or the Lindbergh kidnapping. The same will be true of the events of 9/11. The collection of essays in Film and Television After 9/11, however, presents a series of important reflections about the events surrounding that day. By focusing on two television programs and films in process prior to the event, the authors of these essays present us with ‘ways in’ to the horrors of the catastrophic event, aspects of its aftermath, and, maybe, most important, readings of our culture that presage and comment on not only the event but threads woven into the fabric of our culture.”—Gerald Duchovnay, author of Humphrey Bogart: A Bio-Bibliography

From the Publisher