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Books by Robert Burgoyne
Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media, 2022
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Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media, 2022
Migration in the 21st century is one of the pre-eminent issues of our present historical moment, ... more Migration in the 21st century is one of the pre-eminent issues of our present historical moment, a phenomenon that has acquired new urgency with accelerating climate change, civil wars, and growing economic scarcities. Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media consists of eleven essays that explore how artists have imaginatively engaged with this monumental human drama, examining a range of alternative modes of representation that provide striking new takes on the experiences of these precarious populations. Covering prominent art works by Ai Weiwei and Richard Mosse, and extending the spectrum of representation to refugee film workshops on the island of Lésbos as well as virtual reality installations of Alejandro G. Iñárritu and works by Balkan and Turkish directors, such as Melisa Önel, the chapters included here focus on the power of aesthetic engagement to illuminate the stories of refugees and migrants in ways that overturn journalistic clichés.
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The history film has played an exceptionally powerful role in shaping our culture's understanding... more The history film has played an exceptionally powerful role in shaping our culture's understanding of the past, an influence that derives not simply from the cinema's unequaled ability to re-create the past in sensual, mimetic form, but also from its striking tendency to arouse critical and popular controversy that resonates throughout the public sphere. American films centered on the past have often met with a dramatic public response; they are typically both celebrated for their verisimilitude and decried for their departures from historical facts. Historical films have served as vehicles of artistic ambition and as catalysts of public debate from the beginnings of the art form, as D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) famously illustrates, a tendency that continues into the present day with film such as JFK (1991) and Schindler's List (1993).
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Events of the last decade have dramatically rewritten the American national narrative, bringing t... more Events of the last decade have dramatically rewritten the American national narrative, bringing to light an alternative history of nation, marked since the beginning of the country's origins by competing geopolitical interests, by mobility and migration, and by contending ethnic and racial groups.
In this revised and expanded edition of film Nation, Robert Burgoyne analyzes films that give shape to the counternarrative that has emerged since 9/11 -- one that challenges the traditional myths of the American nation-state. The films examined here reveal the hidden underlayers of nation, from the first interaction between Europeans and North Americans (The New World), to the clash of ethnic groups in nineteenth-century New York (Gangs of New York), to the haunting persistence of war in the national imagination (Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima) and the impact of the events of 9/11 on American identity (United 93 and World Trade Center).
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The Epic Film in World Culture explores new critical approaches to contemporary as well as older ... more The Epic Film in World Culture explores new critical approaches to contemporary as well as older epic films, drawing on ideas from cultural studies, historiography, classics, and film studies. Many of the fifteen original essays in the volume are animated by the central paradox of the epic genre, the contradiction between the traditional messages embedded in epic form -- the birth of a nation, the emergence of a people, the fulfillment of a heroic destiny -- and the long history of the epic film as an international, global narrative apparatus not bound by nation or ethnicity. Truly international in scope, the contributors focus on issues including spectacle, imagined community, national identity, family melodrama, and masculinity that are central to epics from Hong Kong to hollywood and beyond.
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Papers by Robert Burgoyne
Leidschrift : Verleden in beeld. Geschiedenis en mythe in film, 2009
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Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media, 2022
This chapter explores the unprecedented formal experiments of Richard Mosse and Ai Weiwei in thei... more This chapter explores the unprecedented formal experiments of Richard Mosse and Ai Weiwei in their attempts to capture the signature global event of our time, the mass movements of refugees and immigrants across geopolitical boundaries. In Mosse’s Incoming, a thermal camera registers the heat emanating from human bodies from some 30 miles away, providing images of refugees in lifeboats, transport trucks, and refugee camps that are both other-worldly, almost mutant in their strangeness, and deeply moving—images that rivet the gaze. In Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, drone cameras render the vast scale of human displacement around the world—a view from above is interspersed with the close witnessing of cell phone video, using the visual language of spontaneous documentation in counterpoint with a technology associated with military surveillance. In both films, Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life” is articulated within an advanced optical and technological framework that brings new critica...
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A Companion to Steven Spielberg, 2017
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Journal of War and Culture Studies, 2024
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The Routledge Companion to History and the Moving Image, 2023
Essay on They Shall Not Grow Old.
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D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation: Art, Culture and Ethics in Black and White, 2022
The extraordinary political and cultural controversies generated by The Birth of a Nation (1915) ... more The extraordinary political and cultural controversies generated by The Birth of a Nation (1915) over the past 100 years have centred, for the most part, on its extreme stereotypes of Black characters and imagined Black behaviours, set forth in scenes and images perceived to be so toxic that they have largely been bracketed from critical scrutiny. The racist stereotypes repeatedly evoked in the film, which were once a mainstream topic of graphic art and entertainment-regularly featured in publications such as Harper's Weekly, Currier and Ives and in blackface performances-are today seen as manifestations of a social pathology so threatening that the film, and the traditions from which it emerged, have been placed in a kind of critical quarantine, seen as a malignant cultural force with the power to reinfect. 1 Thus the re-emergence of racial stereotype as an aesthetic resource and political provocation in the work of several Black visual artists is a surprising development, a rethinking that challenges our notions of aesthetic value. 2 In the work of the artists I consider here-Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley and Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky, that Subliminal Kid)-racial stereotype is repurposed as a political and aesthetic strategy, a critical tool and a device for reawakening what Walker calls the 'unspeakable past'. 3 Each of these three artists employs stereotype in ways that are deeply historical and critically informed, bringing to the surface the undercurrents of a past that still troubles our historical lives today. Probing eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century art forms for the larger histories concealed within them, Walker, Wiley and Miller conduct a kind of rack-focus reframing of several different artistic and popular visual traditions, including the silhouette, monumental sculpture, heroic painting and classical film. Walker's recasting of the medium of the silhouette engages with a dense cultural history, exposing the racial undercurrents of an art form that has signified in radically different ways in different historical periods. 4 Originally associated mainly with white, European bourgeoisie culture, it later became the emblematic graphic design form for artists of the Harlem Renaissance, a powerful expression of an emergent Black modernism, used on posters, 2
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Txt: Leituras Transdisciplinares de Telas e Textos, 2015
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Enclitic Vol VII No 1, 1983
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Rebeca - Revista Brasileira de Estudos de Cinema e Audiovisual, 2016
A key feature of the epic genre since the appearance of the tinted and stenciled Italian epics of... more A key feature of the epic genre since the appearance of the tinted and stenciled Italian epics of the 1910’s, color technology and design constitutes a direct line of formal innovation that extends from the earliest iterations of the epic film to the exalted color symphonies of the present. The significance of color in the epic, however, has largely been ignored. In this essay, I argue that color design complicates the traditional understanding of epic form as a conservative, nation-centric genre, governed by what Gilles Deleuze calls a critical-ethical horizon. The recent epics Alexander and Hero provide a case in point: in each film, color design articulates a range of messages that provide a new way of understanding these works, and that illuminate the use of color in the long history of the epic genre.2
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Memory and popular film, 2018
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Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media, 2022
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Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media, 2022
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Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media, 2022
Migration in the 21st century is one of the pre-eminent issues of our present historical moment, ... more Migration in the 21st century is one of the pre-eminent issues of our present historical moment, a phenomenon that has acquired new urgency with accelerating climate change, civil wars, and growing economic scarcities. Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media consists of eleven essays that explore how artists have imaginatively engaged with this monumental human drama, examining a range of alternative modes of representation that provide striking new takes on the experiences of these precarious populations. Covering prominent art works by Ai Weiwei and Richard Mosse, and extending the spectrum of representation to refugee film workshops on the island of Lésbos as well as virtual reality installations of Alejandro G. Iñárritu and works by Balkan and Turkish directors, such as Melisa Önel, the chapters included here focus on the power of aesthetic engagement to illuminate the stories of refugees and migrants in ways that overturn journalistic clichés.
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Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
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The history film has played an exceptionally powerful role in shaping our culture's understanding... more The history film has played an exceptionally powerful role in shaping our culture's understanding of the past, an influence that derives not simply from the cinema's unequaled ability to re-create the past in sensual, mimetic form, but also from its striking tendency to arouse critical and popular controversy that resonates throughout the public sphere. American films centered on the past have often met with a dramatic public response; they are typically both celebrated for their verisimilitude and decried for their departures from historical facts. Historical films have served as vehicles of artistic ambition and as catalysts of public debate from the beginnings of the art form, as D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) famously illustrates, a tendency that continues into the present day with film such as JFK (1991) and Schindler's List (1993).
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Events of the last decade have dramatically rewritten the American national narrative, bringing t... more Events of the last decade have dramatically rewritten the American national narrative, bringing to light an alternative history of nation, marked since the beginning of the country's origins by competing geopolitical interests, by mobility and migration, and by contending ethnic and racial groups.
In this revised and expanded edition of film Nation, Robert Burgoyne analyzes films that give shape to the counternarrative that has emerged since 9/11 -- one that challenges the traditional myths of the American nation-state. The films examined here reveal the hidden underlayers of nation, from the first interaction between Europeans and North Americans (The New World), to the clash of ethnic groups in nineteenth-century New York (Gangs of New York), to the haunting persistence of war in the national imagination (Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima) and the impact of the events of 9/11 on American identity (United 93 and World Trade Center).
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Epic Film in World Culture explores new critical approaches to contemporary as well as older ... more The Epic Film in World Culture explores new critical approaches to contemporary as well as older epic films, drawing on ideas from cultural studies, historiography, classics, and film studies. Many of the fifteen original essays in the volume are animated by the central paradox of the epic genre, the contradiction between the traditional messages embedded in epic form -- the birth of a nation, the emergence of a people, the fulfillment of a heroic destiny -- and the long history of the epic film as an international, global narrative apparatus not bound by nation or ethnicity. Truly international in scope, the contributors focus on issues including spectacle, imagined community, national identity, family melodrama, and masculinity that are central to epics from Hong Kong to hollywood and beyond.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Leidschrift : Verleden in beeld. Geschiedenis en mythe in film, 2009
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media, 2022
This chapter explores the unprecedented formal experiments of Richard Mosse and Ai Weiwei in thei... more This chapter explores the unprecedented formal experiments of Richard Mosse and Ai Weiwei in their attempts to capture the signature global event of our time, the mass movements of refugees and immigrants across geopolitical boundaries. In Mosse’s Incoming, a thermal camera registers the heat emanating from human bodies from some 30 miles away, providing images of refugees in lifeboats, transport trucks, and refugee camps that are both other-worldly, almost mutant in their strangeness, and deeply moving—images that rivet the gaze. In Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, drone cameras render the vast scale of human displacement around the world—a view from above is interspersed with the close witnessing of cell phone video, using the visual language of spontaneous documentation in counterpoint with a technology associated with military surveillance. In both films, Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life” is articulated within an advanced optical and technological framework that brings new critica...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
A Companion to Steven Spielberg, 2017
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of War and Culture Studies, 2024
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Routledge Companion to History and the Moving Image, 2023
Essay on They Shall Not Grow Old.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation: Art, Culture and Ethics in Black and White, 2022
The extraordinary political and cultural controversies generated by The Birth of a Nation (1915) ... more The extraordinary political and cultural controversies generated by The Birth of a Nation (1915) over the past 100 years have centred, for the most part, on its extreme stereotypes of Black characters and imagined Black behaviours, set forth in scenes and images perceived to be so toxic that they have largely been bracketed from critical scrutiny. The racist stereotypes repeatedly evoked in the film, which were once a mainstream topic of graphic art and entertainment-regularly featured in publications such as Harper's Weekly, Currier and Ives and in blackface performances-are today seen as manifestations of a social pathology so threatening that the film, and the traditions from which it emerged, have been placed in a kind of critical quarantine, seen as a malignant cultural force with the power to reinfect. 1 Thus the re-emergence of racial stereotype as an aesthetic resource and political provocation in the work of several Black visual artists is a surprising development, a rethinking that challenges our notions of aesthetic value. 2 In the work of the artists I consider here-Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley and Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky, that Subliminal Kid)-racial stereotype is repurposed as a political and aesthetic strategy, a critical tool and a device for reawakening what Walker calls the 'unspeakable past'. 3 Each of these three artists employs stereotype in ways that are deeply historical and critically informed, bringing to the surface the undercurrents of a past that still troubles our historical lives today. Probing eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century art forms for the larger histories concealed within them, Walker, Wiley and Miller conduct a kind of rack-focus reframing of several different artistic and popular visual traditions, including the silhouette, monumental sculpture, heroic painting and classical film. Walker's recasting of the medium of the silhouette engages with a dense cultural history, exposing the racial undercurrents of an art form that has signified in radically different ways in different historical periods. 4 Originally associated mainly with white, European bourgeoisie culture, it later became the emblematic graphic design form for artists of the Harlem Renaissance, a powerful expression of an emergent Black modernism, used on posters, 2
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Txt: Leituras Transdisciplinares de Telas e Textos, 2015
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Enclitic Vol VII No 1, 1983
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Rebeca - Revista Brasileira de Estudos de Cinema e Audiovisual, 2016
A key feature of the epic genre since the appearance of the tinted and stenciled Italian epics of... more A key feature of the epic genre since the appearance of the tinted and stenciled Italian epics of the 1910’s, color technology and design constitutes a direct line of formal innovation that extends from the earliest iterations of the epic film to the exalted color symphonies of the present. The significance of color in the epic, however, has largely been ignored. In this essay, I argue that color design complicates the traditional understanding of epic form as a conservative, nation-centric genre, governed by what Gilles Deleuze calls a critical-ethical horizon. The recent epics Alexander and Hero provide a case in point: in each film, color design articulates a range of messages that provide a new way of understanding these works, and that illuminate the use of color in the long history of the epic genre.2
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Memory and popular film, 2018
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Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media, 2022
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Abstract Abstract Abstract Abstract In this essay, I explore the potential of the epic genre as a... more Abstract Abstract Abstract Abstract In this essay, I explore the potential of the epic genre as a form of transnational cinema, and reconsider its traditional role as a vehicle of national ideology and aspirations. I suggest that the contemporary historical epic conveys a sense of double-voicing by adapting epic themes usually associated with national narratives to collectivities that are not framed by nation. Reading the epic alongside the work of Giorgio Agamben, I draw particular attention to the ways that the contemporary epic foregrounds the potential of "bare life" as a form of historical agency, emphasizing the emergence of the multitude and the mongrel community. I also consider the particular formal characteristics of the epic film-its design-intensive mise-en-scène, its use of spectacle and its style of sensory expansiveness-as producing an affective and emotional relation to the historical past, creating a fullness of engagement and amplitude of consciousness. K...
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Memory and popular film, Edited by Paul Grainge. Manchester University Press, 2003
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Short Film Studies, 2017
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Mediated Terrorism in the 21st Century, 2021
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Film Nation Revised Edition, 2010
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Mediaesthetics, 2019
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Journal of Film and Video, 1990
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Memory, History, Nation: contested pasts, ed. K Hodgkin, S Radstone, 2005
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Global Finance on Screen: From Wall Street to Side Street. Edited by Constantin Parvulescu, 2018
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Robert Burgoyne is Professor of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. Robert specializes ... more Robert Burgoyne is Professor of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. Robert specializes in American cinema and its articulation of, especially, ‘counter narratives’ of nation through topical or historical representation. However, he has also worked on films from other cultures, including Italian cinema. He is the author of very many articles as well as two of the most important and influential books on film and history: The Hollywood Historical Film (Malden: Blackwell, 2008), and Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, originally published in 1997, and in a revised and expanded edition in 2010 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
The conversation deals with questions of the definition and appeal of the historical film, national and transnational address, and the relation of historical film studies to film studies more broadly.
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DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation; Art, Culture and Ethics in Black and White, 2022
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