Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens

Video Spectatorship From VHS to File Sharing
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-520-27512-6
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 312 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 149 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 421 g

Since the mid-1980s, US audiences have watched the majority of movies they see on a video platform, be it VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, Video On Demand, or streaming media. Annual video revenues have exceeded box office returns for over twenty-five years. In short, video has become the structuring discourse of US movie culture. Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens examines how prerecorded video reframes the premises and promises of motion picture spectatorship. But instead of offering a history of video technology or reception, Caetlin Benson-Allott analyzes how the movies themselves understand and represent the symbiosis of platform and spectator. Through case studies and close readings that blend industry history with apparatus theory, psychoanalysis with platform studies, and production history with postmodern philosophy, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens unearths a genealogy of post-cinematic spectatorship in horror movies, thrillers, and other exploitation genres. From Night of the Living Dead (1968) through Paranormal Activity (2009), these movies pursue their spectator from one platform to another, adapting to suit new exhibition norms and cultural concerns in the evolution of the video subject.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Benson-Allott, Caetlin

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmgattungen, Filmgenre
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften Film, Video, Foto
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften Medientheorie, Medienanalyse

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Opening Up to Home Video

1. Distributing the Dead: Video Spectatorship in the Films of George A. Romero

2. Addressing the “New Flesh”: Videodrome’s Format War

3. Reprotechnophobia: Putting an End to Analog Abjection with The Ring

4. Going, Going, Grindhouse: Simulacral Cinematicity and Postcinematic Spectatorship

5. Paranormal Spectatorship: Faux Footage Horror and the P2P Spectator

Conclusion: Power Play

Notes

Bibliography

Filmography, Videography, and Gameography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Caetlin Benson-Allott is Assistant Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Georgetown University.