1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910788314703321

Autore

Sperb Jason <1978->

Titolo

Blossoms and blood : postmodern media culture and the films of Paul Thomas Anderson / / Jason Sperb

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Austin : , : University of Texas Press, , [2013]

©2013

ISBN

0-292-75290-3

0-292-75291-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (297 p.)

Classificazione

PER004030

Disciplina

791.4302/33092

Soggetti

Motion picture producers and directors

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Machine generated contents note: Acknowledgments -- Introduction. White-Noise Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson -- Chapter 1. I Remembered Your Face: Indie Cinema, Neo-noir, and -- Narrative Ambiguity in Hard Eight (1996) -- Chapter 2. I Dreamed I Was in a Hollywood Movie: Stars, Hyperreal Sounds of the 1970s, and Cinephiliac Pastiche in Boogie Nights (1997) -- Chapter 3. If That Was in a Movie, I Wouldn't Believe It: Melodramatic Ambivalence, Hypermasculinity, and the Autobiographical Impulse in Magnolia (1999) -- Chapter 4. The Art-House Adam Sandler Movie: Commodity Culture and the Ethereal Ephemerality of Punch-Drunk Love (2002) -- Chapter 5. I Have a Competition in Me: Political Allegory, Artistic Collaboration, and Narratives of Perfection in There Will Be Blood (2007) -- Afterword. On The Master -- Notes -- Select Bibliography -- Index.

Sommario/riassunto

From his film festival debut Hard Eight to ambitious studio epics Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s unique cinematic vision focuses on postmodern excess and media culture. In Blossoms and Blood, Jason Sperb studies the filmmaker’s evolving aesthetic and its historical context to argue that Anderson’s films create new, often ambivalent, narratives of American identity in a media-saturated world. Blossoms and Blood explores Anderson’s films in relation to the aesthetic and economic shifts within the film industry



and to America’s changing social and political sensibilities since the mid-1990s. Sperb provides an auteur study with important implications for film history, media studies, cultural studies, and gender studies. He charts major themes in Anderson’s work, such as stardom, self-reflexivity, and masculinity and shows how they are indicative of trends in late twentieth-century American culture. One of the first books to focus on Anderson’s work, Blossoms and Blood reveals the development of an under-studied filmmaker attuned to the contradictions of a postmodern media culture.