Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema (Short Cuts)

You've always been the caretaker here." At the end of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, while Jack Torrence sits frozen in the center of the hotel's hedge maze, he also exists in another time, and the center of another maze. Among the photos on a white wall, the borders of which form a series of right-angle turns that recalls the hedge maze, Jack appears in picture from 1921, taking the narrative back to (before) its beginning. This recursive structure seems to indicate that the plot's contours and its ultimate outcome were determined from the outset, and plays on a family of anxieties that cinema is uniquely effective at evoking. In Fate in Film, Thomas M. Puhr sets out to identify and analyze some of the ways that film, especially the horror genre, has dealt with the tension between fate and free will. From narratives of stymied identity crises (as in Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin), to retellings of classical myth like Scorsese's take on Sisyphus in After Hours, to the biological determinism of Ari Aster's Hereditary, genre cinema has a long tradition of mobilizing cinema's capacity to evoke deterministic anxiety. In denying plots and characters any ability to choose alternative paths, these films mirror both film itself and moviegoing: viewers can only sit and watch, and only what has already been recorded, evoking a sense of stasis or entrapment alongside the standard cinema effect of movement in time. This book will collect a variety of contemporary examples of this effect, from stories of Doppelgangers (Enemy), to ones of extreme cultural displacement (Zama) and familial "eternal returns" (Us)"--

• | Author: Thomas M. Puhr
• | Publisher: Wallflower Press
• | Publication Date: Oct 18, 2022
• | Number of Pages: 168 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0231203918
• | ISBN-13: 9780231203913