Screening the Tortured Body: The Cinema as Scaffold

de Valk, Mark

Inspired by Michel Foucault’s examination of state subjugation and control, this book considers post-structuralist notions of the ‘political technology of the body’ and 'the spectacle of the scaffold' as a means to analyse cinematic representations of politically-motivated persecution and bodily repression. Through a critique of sovereign power and its application of punishment ‘for transgressions against the state’, the collected works, herein, assess the polticised-body via a range of cinematic perspectives. Imagery, character construction and narrative devices are examined in their account of hegemonic-sanctioned torture and suppression as a means to a political outcome. Screening The Tortured Body: The Cinema as Scaffold elicits philosophical and cultural accounts of the ‘restrained’ body to deliberate on a range of politicised films and filmmakers whose narratives and mise-en-scène techniques critique corporeal subjugation by authoritarian factions.

Details

Published by: Palgrave Macmillan

Publication Date: 2016-11-16

Format: Hardcover

ISBN-13: 9781137399175

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-39918-2

Dimensions: 210cm x148cm

Pages: 342