Diseased Cinema

Diseased Cinema
Author: Robert Alpert
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2023-09-29
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1399521683

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Discusses how the depiction of diseases in movies has changed over the last century and what these changes reveal about American culture Examines disease movies as a genre that has emerged over the last century and includes pandemic and zombie films Reveals the changes to the genre’s narratives over three broad time periods: the beginning of film through the 1980s, the 1990s through the mid-2000s, and the late 2000s and afterward Investigates the evolution of disease movies through three perspectives: historically notable films, remakes, and franchises Analyses disease movies in the context of the development of American, global capitalism and the fragmentation of the social contract Explains the role of disease movie narratives in the American experience of Covid American movies about infectious diseases have reflected and driven dominant cultural narratives during the past century. These movies – both real pandemics and imagined zombie outbreaks – have become wildly popular since the beginning of the 21st century. They have shifted from featuring a contained outbreak to an imagined containment of a known disease to a globalized, uncontainable pandemic of an unknown origin. Movie narratives have changed from identifying and solving social problems to a despair and acceptance of America’s failure to fulfil its historic social contract. Movies reflect and drive developments in American capitalism that increasingly advocates for individuals and their families, rather than communities and the public good. Disease movies today minimize human differences and envisage a utopian new world order to advance the needs of contemporary American capitalism. These movie narratives shaped reactions to the outbreak of Covid and reinforced individual responsibility as the solution to end the pandemic.

Cinematic Prophylaxis

Cinematic Prophylaxis
Author: Kirsten Ostherr
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2005-11-16
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0822387387

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A timely contribution to the fields of film history, visual cultures, and globalization studies, Cinematic Prophylaxis provides essential historical information about how the representation of biological contagion has affected understandings of the origins and vectors of disease. Kirsten Ostherr tracks visual representations of the contamination of bodies across a range of media, including 1940s public health films; entertainment films such as 1950s alien invasion movies and the 1995 blockbuster Outbreak; television programs in the 1980s, during the early years of the aids epidemic; and the cyber-virus plagued Internet. In so doing, she charts the changes—and the alarming continuities—in popular understandings of the connection between pathologized bodies and the global spread of disease. Ostherr presents the first in-depth analysis of the public health films produced between World War II and the 1960s that popularized the ideals of world health and taught viewers to imagine the presence of invisible contaminants all around them. She considers not only the content of specific films but also their techniques for making invisible contaminants visible. By identifying the central aesthetic strategies in films produced by the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and other institutions, she reveals how ideas about racial impurity and sexual degeneracy underlay messages ostensibly about world health. Situating these films in relation to those that preceded and followed them, Ostherr shows how, during the postwar era, ideas about contagion were explicitly connected to the global circulation of bodies. While postwar public health films embraced the ideals of world health, they invoked a distinct and deeply anxious mode of representing the spread of disease across national borders.

Infectious Inequalities

Infectious Inequalities
Author: Qijun Han
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2021-12-24
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000540804

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This book explores societal vulnerabilities highlighted within cinema and develops an interpretive framework for understanding the depiction of societal responses to epidemic disease outbreaks across cinematic history. Drawing on a large database of twentieth- and twenty-first-century films depicting epidemics, the study looks into issues including trust, distrust, and mistrust; different epidemic experiences down the lines of expertise, gender, and wealth; and the difficulties in visualizing the invisible pathogen on screen. The authors argue that epidemics have long been presented in cinema as forming a point of cohesion for the communities portrayed, as individuals and groups “from below” represented as characters in these films find solidarity in battling a common enemy of elite institutions and authority figures. Throughout the book, a central question is also posed: “cohesion for whom?”, which sheds light on the fortunes of those characters that are excluded from these expressions of collective solidarity. This book is a valuable reference for scholars and students of film studies and visual studies as well as academic and general readers interested in topics of films and history, and disease and society. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Representations of Illness in Literature and Film

Representations of Illness in Literature and Film
Author: Bennett Kravitz
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2010-03-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1443820903

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This book examines the ways that various syndromes, disorders and diseases appear in modern literature and film. What is especially interesting is that rather than be portrayed as an insurmountable handicap, limitation becomes the hero of the novels and films under discussion. What once would have been rejected as flawed, ill, diseased or unworthy has now earned the opportunity to be included into mainstream society. By accepting the other, these works of art allow previous outcasts of society into the mainstream to affirm their moral worth, skill and intelligence. Representations of Illness in Literature and Film analyzes the deconstruction of the above mentioned syndromes, disorders and diseases to describe their reception in the 21st-century, postmodern world.

Cinema, MD

Cinema, MD
Author: Eelco F. M. Wijdicks
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2020
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0190685794

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Cinema, MD follows the intersection of medicine and film and how filmmakers wrote a history of medicine over time, analyzing not only changing practices, changing morals, and changing expectations but also medical stereotypes, medical activism, and violations of patients' integrity and autonomy. Examining over 400 films with medical themes over a century of cinema, this book establishes the cultural, medical, and historical importance of the artform.

The AIDS Movie

The AIDS Movie
Author: Kylo-Patrick R Hart
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 135
Release: 2014-06-03
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1317956974

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Are people with HIV/AIDS treated fairly in films? Here is a compelling book that provides you with a thorough examination of how HIV/AIDS is characterized and portrayed in film and how this portrayal affects American culture. The AIDS Movie: Representing a Pandemic in Film and Television uncovers the primary ways that films about HIV/AIDS influence American ideology and contribute to society's view of the disease. In The AIDS Movie, professors and scholars in the areas of popular culture, film, sociology, and gay and lesbian studies will discover cross-cultural approaches that can be used to analyze the representation of AIDS in American films made in the first two decades of the pandemic. Giving you insight into the production and circulation of social meanings pertaining to HIV/AIDS, this study explores the social ramifications of such representations for gay men in American society, as well as for the rest of the population. Interesting and informative, The AIDS Movie: Representing a Pandemic in Film and Television examines the ways that AIDS has been represented in American movies over the past two decades, defines and proposes criteria for identifying an “AIDS movie” and explores how these images shape social opinions about AIDS and gay men. The AIDS Movie discusses several character types such as “innocent victims” and “guilty villains” and the process of victim-blaming that occurs in AIDS movies. Defining an “AIDS movie” as a film with at least one character who either has been infected with HIV, has developed AIDS, or is grieving the recent death of a loved one from AIDS, this guide bases standards for these movies on several works, including: Chocolate Babies It's My Party Jeffrey The Living End Grief An Early Frost Men in Love A Place for Annie Philadelphia The Ryan White Story Gia Boys on the Side The AIDS Movie: Representing a Pandemic in Film and Television is compelling and insightful as it cleverly reveals how AIDS is portrayed in cinema and television, and how that portrayal affects American culture.

Cinematic Representations of Alzheimer’s Disease

Cinematic Representations of Alzheimer’s Disease
Author: Raquel Medina
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2018-08-09
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137533714

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This book offers a cross-cultural approach to cinematic representations of Alzheimer’s disease in non-mainstream cinema. Even though Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, is a global health issue, it is not perceived or represented homogenously around the world. Contrary to very well-known mainstream films, the films discussed do not focus on the negative aspects normally associated with Alzheimer’s disease, but on the importance of portraying the perspective of the persons living with Alzheimer’s and their personhood. Similarly, this book analyses how the films use Alzheimer’s as a trope to address issues relating to different areas of life and society such as, for example, family matters, intergenerational relationships, gender issues, national traditions versus global modernity, and caring for people with dementia. By examining an array of films, from crime fiction to documentary, that each present non-stigmatising representations of Alzheimer’s disease, this in-depth study ultimately demonstrates the power of culture in shaping meaning.

Psychiatry and the Cinema

Psychiatry and the Cinema
Author: Glen O. Gabbard
Publisher: American Psychiatric Pub
Total Pages: 444
Release: 1999
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780880489645

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Psychiatry and the Cinema explores this complementary relationship from two angles, psychiatrists who have studied the movies and movies that have depicted psychiatry. This second edition has updated this definitive text with a discussion of new trends in psychoanalytically oriented film theory, and an expanded list of movies is analyzed.