Figuring the Past - 2[-]Table of Contents - 6[-]Acknowledgements - 8[-]Introduction - Period Film and the Mannerist Moment - 10[-]Chapter 1 - A Poetics of Figuration - 28[-]Chapter 2 - Present in the Past: The House - 66[-]Chapter 3 - Time and the Image: The Tableau - 112[-]Chapter 4 - The Scene of Writing: The Letter - 164[-]Conclusion - Second Sight: Reviewing th e Past, Figuring the Present - 202[-]Notes - 206[-]Bibliography - 232[-]Index of Film Titles - 246[-]Index of Names and Subjects - 251
Bel�n Vidal is lecturer in film studies at King's College London, co-editor (with Dina Iordanova and David Martin-Jones) of Cinema at the Periphery (Wayne State University Press, 2010) and author of Heritage Film: Nation Genre and Representation (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, forthcoming).
Figuring the Past gives us a fresh look at the period film. This is not a typical genre study for fans of Jane Austen, or an auteurist concern with the work of James Ivory or Jane Campion, however. Rather, Belen Vidal lifts recent period films from both their national and generic confines. They become travelling cultural forms that weave an international pattern of -film formats,� a -cinema of quality� that is appropriated locally in a convergent global environment. In the process, the modern period film's preoccupation with the past turns into a -post� phenomenon: post-national, post-quality, post-heritage and postmodern. Vidal shows with clarity and sophistication that the shared mannerist aesthetic of this international cluster of films, far from simply evading politics in the present, is an eminently contemporary platform for conjuring up the present-in-the-past, with wide implications for cultural analysis. --Aniko Imre, Associate Professor, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California
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