Author Archive for: ‘Richard Rushton’
From Christian Metz to Life of Pi: Thoughts on Ideology and Cinema
My purpose in this paper is to argue that scholars have for the most part been mistaken with regard to Christian Metz’s arguments in ‘The Imaginary Signifier’[1] . Commentators seem automatically to assume that, by designating the cinema signifier ‘imaginary’, Metz is thereby being critical of that imaginariness. Against such claims, I instead argue that if the cinema signifier is …
Read MoreDouglas Sirk’s Theatres of Imitation
In her book on the reception history of Douglas Sirk’s Hollywood films, Barbara Klinger explores the disjunction between the way Sirk’s films were derided by critics upon their first release, only subsequently to be rescued by academic-orientated film scholars during the late 1960s and beyond. The split between the two positions is clear: contemporary critics found the films soppy and …
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