THE CHANGING FACE OF EVIL IN FILM AND TELEVISION

edited by Martin F. Norden

Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2007
At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries, No. 41 (ISSN 1570-7113)
ISBN 978-90-420-2324-6 (paperback), 978-90-420-2325-3 (textbook edition)
244 pages


The popular media of film and television surround us daily with images of evil - images that have often gone critically unexamined. In the belief that people in ever-increasing numbers are turning to the media for their understanding of evil, this lively and provocative collection of essays addresses the changing representation of evil in a broad spectrum of films and television programmes. Written in refreshingly accessible and de-jargonised prose, the essays bring to bear a variety of philosophical and critical perspectives on works ranging from the cinema of famed director Alfred Hitchcock and the preternatural horror films Halloween and Friday the 13th to the understated documentary Human Remains and the television coverage of the immediate post-9/11 period. The Changing Face of Evil in Film and Television is for anyone interested in the moving-image representation of that pervasive yet highly misunderstood thing we call evil.

CONTENTS:

  • Introduction / Martin F. Norden
  • The Bite at the Beginning: Encoding Evil Through Film Title Design / Matthew Soar
  • Screening Evil in History: Rope, Compulsion, Scarface, Richard III / Linda Bradley Salamon
  • The Radical Monism of Alfred Hitchcock / Mike Frank
  • Natural Evil in the Horror Film: Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds / Cynthia Freeland
  • "The Devil Made Me Do It": Representing Evil and Disarticulating Mind/Body in the Supernatural Serial Killer Film / Matt Hills and Steven Jay Schneider
  • Virtue, Vice, and the Harry Potter Universe / Thomas Hibbs
  • Training Day and The Shield: Evil Cops and the Taint of Blackness / Robin R. Means Coleman and Jasmine Nicole Cobb
  • The "Uncanny" Relationship of Disability and Evil in Film and Television / Martin F. Norden
  • Comedy and the Holocaust in Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful/La vita e bella / Carlo Celli
  • On the Void: The Fascinating Object of Evil in Human Remains / Garnet C. Butchart
  • The Perfidious President and "The Beast": Evil in Oliver Stone's Nixon / John F. Stone
  • Televising 9/11 and Its Aftermath: The Framing of George W. Bush's Faith-Based Politics of Good and Evil / Gary R. Edgerton, William B. Hart, and Frances Hassencahl
  • Bibliography
  • Notes on Contributors
  • Index

MARTIN F. NORDEN teaches and writes about film as a Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA. His articles have appeared in such journals as Film & History, Film Criticism, Journal of Film and Video, Paradoxa, and Wide Angle, and in numerous anthologies. He is the author of The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994) and John Barrymore: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995). His most recent books are Lois Weber: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019) and Pop Culture Matters: Proceedings of the 39th Conference of the Northeast Popular Culture Association (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019).

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