Film and Television After 9/11 [Paperback]

Wheeler Winston Dixon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 23, 2004

In Film and Television After 9/11, editor Wheeler Winston Dixon and eleven other distinguished film scholars discuss the production, reception, and distribution of Hollywood and foreign films after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and examine how moviemaking has changed to reflect the new world climate.

 

While some contemporary films offer escapism, much of mainstream American cinema since 9/11 is centered on the desire for a “just war” in which military reprisals and escalation of warfare appear to be both inevitable and justified. Films of 2002 such as Black Hawk Down, Collateral Damage, and We Were Soldiers demonstrate a renewed audience appetite for narratives of conflict, reminiscent of the wave of filmmaking that surrounded American involvement in World War II.

 

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon galvanized the American public initially, yet film critics wonder how this will play out over time. Film and Television After 9/11 is the first book to provide original insights into topics ranging from the international reception of post-9/11 American cinema, re-viewing films of our shared cinematic past in light of the attacks, and exploring parallels between post-9/11 cinema and World War II-era productions.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“[A] vital anthology. . . . Uniformly excellent, the informed, closely argued, and clearly written essays collected here demonstrate how popular films reflect not just the open issues of their day but its sunken anxieties. . . . Essential [for] all levels.”

—Choice

“Film and Television After 9/11 contributes to a new understanding both of recent American film and our reaction, as a culture, to the events of 9/11. The contributors consider the question of how these very real events were at the same time media spectacles subject to deliberate reconstruction and ideological slanting, and how this spectacle resonated throughout American culture.”

—Steven Shaviro, author of The Cinematic Body and Doom Patrols

“No one book, no one movie has ever been able to capture the Holocaust, World War I, World War II, Vietnam, or even such ‘small’ events as the Hindenburg explosion or the Lindbergh kidnapping. The same will be true of the events of 9/11. The collection of essays in Film and Television After 9/11, however, presents a series of important reflections about the events surrounding that day. By focusing on two television programs and films in process prior to the event, the authors of these essays present us with ‘ways in’ to the horrors of the catastrophic event, aspects of its aftermath, and, maybe, most important, readings of our culture that presage and comment on not only the event but threads woven into the fabric of our culture.”—Gerald Duchovnay, author of Humphrey Bogart: A Bio-Bibliography

About the Author

The James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies, Wheeler Winston Dixon is a filmmaker, professor of English, and coordinator of the film studies program at the University of Nebraska. He is the author or editor of twenty-two books (most recently Visions of the Apocalypse and Collected Interviews: Voices from Twentieth-Century Cinema), the editor-in-chief of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and the series editor for SUNY Press’s Cultural Studies in Cinema/Video series.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press; 1st edition (January 23, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080932556X
• ISBN-13: 978-0809325566
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,147,284 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies, Coordinator of the UNL Film Studies Program, Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Editor-in-Chief of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. His newest books include A History of Horror (Rutgers University Press, 2010); Film Noir and The Cinema of Paranoia (Rutgers University Press and Edinburgh University Press, 2009); A Short History of Film, written with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, (Rutgers University Press and I.B. Tauris, 2008), which has gone through five printings, was issued in a Spanish translation from Ediciones Robinbook in November, 2009 as Breve historia del cine, and is forthcoming as an audio book from University Press Audiobooks in 2010; Film Talk: Directors at Work (Rutgers University Press, 2007); Visions of Paradise: Images of Eden in the Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2006); American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations (Rutgers University Press, 2006); and Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood (Southern Illinois UP, 2005). In 2003, Dixon was honored with a retrospective of his films at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and his films were acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum, in both print and original format.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Good for what it is, August 1, 2010

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S. Sherman "lefteyeonbooks.org" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Film and Television After 9/11 (Paperback)

When I saw the title of this book and ordered it, I thought (as implied by the title) that it was using 9-11 to mark off a time period, and would offer some essays about television and film since then. This is not really what this text is. Published in 2004, but probably written mostly a good deal earlier, the event of 9-11 itself weighs very heavily in virtually all of the essays. I would say 'Film and Television in light of 9-11' would probably be a better title. A couple of the essays in fact deal with how films (specifically 'Manhatta' and 'King Kong', as well as Holocaust documentaries) made before 9-11 appear afterward.

Most of the essays subvert the aura of American exceptionalism (i.e. the mentality that this is the most awful thing to happen to anyone) that surrounds 9-11. Some look at the ways 9-11 was projected into culture, for example the effort to cut the Twin Towers from several projects in the pipeline on 9-11. Whether the towers were cut (incurring the wrath of those who claimed that therefore 'the terrorists won') or not (and thereby eliciting disruptive cheers from audiences when they appeared, as in Glitter) their presence was deeply felt. Another essay describes the way the most disturbing footage filmed on 9-11 has not been screened, and how this footage is slowly emerging on the internet. The author suggests that this will help demystify the event. Relevant, but relatively unknown, foreign films, such as the European collaborative film 9'11''01 (which compared 9-11 to a number of events around the world, practically a taboo in the US) are also described. In the aforementioned essay discussing Manhatta, the way in which the twin towers embodied a sort of monumental modernity that quashed what stood in its way, replacing it with a flat, mathematical order, is noted. This sort of modernity produces targets of terrorism (we might add it finds its opposite in the geography of Afghanistan, where, as Donald Rumsfeld noted, the US military quickly ran out of targets to bomb). The now almost forgotten thriller 'The Sum of All Fears' shows up in several essays, since its depiction of a nuclear bomb detonating in Baltimore makes it relevant. This film made little lasting impact on American culture, suggesting the perils of trying to produce this sort of book so quickly after the event in question. An essay on Malkmalbaf's 'Khandahar' makes an odd reference to NATO troops in Afghanistan as 'peacekeepers' (they are not, by practically any definition of that term), suggesting unintentionally possible complicity of this film with this liberal imperialist mission. One essay describes 24, but only the first season. The show really focused more aggressively on 9-11 themes from the second season on, although the writer's suggestion that the alliance between Jack Bauer and presidential candidate David Palmer echoes the alliance between fire fighters and upper middle class financial workers in the offices attacked on 9-11 is intriguing. The essay comparing the mythology of King Kong-the return of the repressed of the third world, coming to Manhattan, and, in the 1970s version, scaling the Twin Towers--and its relation to Bin Laden was quite good.

The essays in this book are generally interesting. This is a topic it would be worth returning to, now that a good deal of time has past and more perspective can be brought to bear.

2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars my son used this book for a social studies project on 9/11, April 17, 2005

By 

Judith L. Ott Allen (savannah, ga. area) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Film and Television After 9/11 (Paperback)

and he took finalist honors in the state competition....this book is very impressive with it's breadth and depth of study....definitely worthwhile reading