Introduction Why we need a theory of video culture |
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Chapter 1: Video and Interpretation Explains why we need a
theory of video, and outlines some of the basic history and features of the genre, from its birth in the 1960s to its full-scale emergence in the Hong Kong, horror film and telejournalism genres of the 1970s, all the way to its complex debt to (and reciprocal influence upon) modernist and postmodernist
theater and cinema. |
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Chapter 2: Mapping the Global Village
Explores how Patrick McGoohan's 17-part series The Prisoner (the greatest send-up of the James Bond spy thriller ever) created many of the basic categories of video in the fields of shot selection, scripting, sound-track, and editing etc.; also looks at the formative role of the Cold War media culture and the Anglo-American film industry, the influence of high modernist theater (especially Beckett), and the role of mapping strategies in video aesthetics. |
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Chapter 3: The Information Uprising Continues analysis of The Prisoner, showing how the vocabulary of
video forms introduces new types of multinational content, turning
a subversive micropolitics against the categories of Cold War allegory,
and thereby creating a politics of information capable of navigating the
new social spaces of multinational capitalism. |
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Chapter 4: Krzysztof Kieslowski's Eurovideo Analyzes
episodes 1-4 of Kieslowski's legendary ten-part TV series The Decalogue, produced for Polish television in 1987-88 and
only recently released in the US. Focuses on the specific features of Eastern
European and Polish media culture, Kieslowski's earlier works, Polish film
in the 1970s, and the creation of the basic visual categories of
Eurovideo, and then illustrates the series' specific innovations in
scriptwriting, lighting and framing. |
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Chapter 5: Velvet Television Analyzes episodes 5-10 of The Decalogue, looks at how Kieslowski
constructs genuinely European characters and plot themes out of a
broad assortment of national, international and Cold War materials, creating
the mediatic equivalent of the Velvet Revolutions of Eastern Europe;
pays especial attention to the micropolitics of gender. |
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Chapter 6: Neon
Genesis: Evangelion Shows how Hideaki Anno reappropriated
the Japanese mecha, the Hong Kong action thriller, the Godzilla
monster epics and the US sci-fi blockbuster to create genuinely
East Asian narrative forms in episodes 1-14 of Evangelion. |
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Chapter 7: Dawn of the East Asian Metropole Analyzes episodes 15-26
of Evangelion, and shows how Anno transforms the service-sector,
gender and information revolutions sweeping across Japan and the core
economies of East Asia into new types of multinational narrative content. |
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Bibliography |
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