Affect Poetics of the New Hollywood - Suspense, Paranoia, and Melancholy

How is affective experience produced in the cinema? And how can we write a history of this experience? By asking these questions, this study by Hauke Lehmann aims at rethinking our conception of a critical period in US film history - the New Hollywood: as a moment of crisis that can neither be reduced to economic processes of adaption nor to a collection of masterpieces. Rather, the fine-grained analysis of core films reveals the power of cinematic images to affect their audiences - to confront them with the new. The films of the New Hollywood redefine the divisions of the classical genre system in a radical way and thereby transform the way spectators are addressed affectively in the cinema. The study describes a complex interplay between three modes of affectivity: suspense, paranoia, and melancholy. All three, each in their own way, implicate spectators in the deep-seated contradictions of their own feelings and their ways of being in the world: their relations to history, to society, and to cultural fantasy. On this basis, Affect Poetics of the New Hollywood projects an original conception of film history: as an affective history which can be re-written up to the present day.

About the author

Hauke Lehmann, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany.

Product details

• Authors: Hauke Lehmann
• Assisted by: James Lattimer (Translation)
• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.02.2022
• EAN: 9783110776812
• ISBN: 978-3-11-077681-2
• No. of pages: 276
• Dimensions: 157 mm x 20 mm x 234 mm
• Weight: 486 g
• Illustrations: 75 b/w and 10 col. ill.
• Series: Cinepoetics - English edition; ISSN; Cinepoetics - English edition, 7
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Art > Photography, film, video, TV