A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam
In an intriguing and highly readable book, Corrigan ( Writing About Film ) argues that in the past 25 years the increased conglomerization of film production/distribution companies and the rise of VCR, satellite and cable television technologies have altered the way films are made and how we view them. The result is a "growing internationalization of national cinema cultures" and an increasing fragmentation of the audience. Moreover, people no longer experience films with the immediacy that characterized the moviegoing experience previously; video has reduced the movie to private, domestic performance, and a film is no longer the culmination of an evening out. At the same time, Corrigan writes, audiences are bombarded with a surfeit of images that leaves them with a battered sense of their place in history and culture. Combined with what many critics have recognized as a crisis of "legibility"--a growing incoherence in film texts--Corrigan notes, these facts make it more meaningful to discuss films not as texts but "as multiple cultural and commercial processes" constructed by increasingly specialized audiences, a practice he likens to cult practices. Illustrations not seen by PW.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.