Overview

The financial collapse of 2008 extended and deepened a prolonged, multilayered crisis that has transformed, often in unexpected ways, how we think about all aspects of social life. Amid these turbulent times, film studies scholars have begun to ask new questions and create fresh strategies in order to integrate intellectual and political work in ways that directly address our current predicament. This timely volume reconsiders the relationships between cinema and society at a time when neoliberal policies threaten not only civic culture but also nearly every aspect of human life. Screening the Crisis brings together established authors as well as brilliant young scholars in the field of film studies to explore the ways in which new tendencies in US cinema enhance awareness of the complexity of the problems facing contemporary society. The issues addressed include economic inequality, shifts in gender roles, racial conflicts, immigration, surveillance practices, the environmental crisis, the politics of housing, and the fragility of nationhood. These questions are explored through in-depth studies and contextualized analyses of a wide variety of recent films, genres, and filmmakers. With its ample range of topics and perspectives, this collection provides an essential reference work for those who want to research how US cinema has responded to the manifold interconnected crises that characterize our current times.

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9781501388125

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Examining the dynamic interplay between screen cultures and various crises underpinning American society - poverty, homelessness, racism, ecological disaster, terrorism, war, and more - this book suggests ways in which mainstream and independent cinema alike have been exploring multiple intersecting dark undersides of contemporary American society. Contributors adopt a cultural studies approach to consider a wide variety of 21st-century films as archives of precarity, barometers of the affective experience of crisis, and, potentially, harbingers of change. * Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Professor in the Department of Film, TV, and Theatre, University of Notre Dame, USA *

Author Information

Hilaria Loyo is Associate Professor at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. She has written mainly on Hollywood film stars, the cultural reception of Marlene Dietrich, the representation of whiteness and Hollywood female blondes, trauma studies and transnational exchanges in Isabel Coixet’s films, and on the politics of space in cinema. Her work has appeared in various anthologies and journals. Her most recent publication can be found in The Velvet Light Trap (2019). Juan A. Tarancón is Lecturer at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. He has written on film genre theory, on representations of immigration and Mexican American culture, and on the work of John Sayles and Carlos Saura. His work has appeared in CineAction, Cultural Studies, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, New Cinemas, and varied Spanish scholarly journals. He is co-editor of Global Genres, Local Films: The Transnational Dimension of Spanish Cinema (2016).

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