Disaster Movies Research Articles

재난 영화를 통해 본 소방관 이미지에 대한 융·복합적 고찰

재난 영화를 통해 본 소방관 이미지에 대한 융·복합적 고찰

The surgical mask is a bad fit for risk reduction.

When I walk past my waiting room, I see people wearing surgical masks. This scene becomes surreal when my patients are watching pandemic disaster movies on the wall-mounted television screen, movies that feature frightened crowds who wear similar masks in the vain hope of protection. As my eyes move

Straight disasters: the (hetero)sexual geographies of Hollywood disaster movies

Since the silent era, Hollywood has maintained a particular fascination with disasters. Up on the screen buildings collapse, volcanoes erupt and tornadoes destroy all in their path. This article investigates the Hollywood disaster genre for its depiction of sexual and gender identities. Researchers increasingly recognise the significance of sexuality and gender in how ‘real-world’ disasters are experienced. Social marginality linked to lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) identities has specific consequences within the social impacts of a disaster. In Hollywood disaster films, LGBT identities are almost entirely absent. This does not mean, however, that sexuality is positioned as irrelevant to the disaster experience as represented by Hollywood. Instead, these films valorise and naturalise a particular vision of heterosexuality and represent disasters as mechanisms for the creation of heterosexual space.

Depression og/eller apokalypse

The article sets out by investigating how depression is represented in Lars von Trier’s disaster movie Melancholia with the specific intent to detach mental illness from classic, somewhat romantic notions of metaphoric and epistemological connections between psychopathology and deeper “truths” about the world. Employing what one could call a symptomatological view on the depression of the main protagonist Justine, the article concludes that her depression should be seen as a temporal disorder in the sense that she lacks the ability to project and plan a future. From here, the article turns to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of a “reparative praxis” as a possible ethico-practical way out of the depressive situation, arguing that such a reparative praxis is exactly what ends up pulling Justine out of her depression and enabling her to act. In a concluding step, the article relates depression and the reparative praxis to more general questions about temporality, imagination, and disaster based on Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s concept of “loop time”.

The sky is the limit: Feng Xiaoning’s leitmotif cinema, Chinese soft power and ideological fantasy

Abstract This article explores the intersection of politics and popular entertainment in contemporary Chinese leitmotif cinema (zhuxuanlü dianying), a genre that conflates political didacticism with Hollywood-style entertainment. Through my reading of three movies by Feng Xiaoning (馮小寧) – the hero-epos Qingzang xian/A Railway in the Clouds (2006) about the building of a rail link to Tibet; the disaster movie Chaoqiang taifeng/Super Typhoon (2008), about a Chinese metropolis hit by a storm; and the war-action drama Jiawu dahaizhan/Naval Battle (2012), about the Sino-Japanese naval conflict of 1895 – I will illustrate how leitmotif cinema negotiates demands for doctrinal orthodoxy with expectations for box office success. Feng’s cinematic aesthetics are thus symptomatic of the discursive complexity of post-socialist Chinese cinema where multiple temporalities and modes of production coexist in a climate of state-enforced ideological hegemony and revenue-driven market economics.

Audio-description reloaded: An analysis of visual scenes in 2012 and Hero

This article explores whether the so-called new “cinema of attractions”, with its supposed focus on visual effects to the detriment of storytelling, requires a specific approach to audio-description (AD). After some thoughts on film narrative in this type of cinema and the way in which it incorporates special effects, selected scenes with AD from two feature films, 2012 (directed by Emmerich) and Hero (directed by Zhang Yimou), are analysed. 2012 is a disaster movie aiming to thrill the audience with action. Hero is an equally visual movie but its imagery has an aesthetic purpose. The analysis investigates how space, time and action are treated in the films and the ADs, and how the information is presented in terms of focalization, timing and phrasing. The results suggest that effect-driven narratives require carefully timed and phrased ADs that devote much attention to the prosody of the AD script, its interaction with sounds and the use of metaphor.

The meaning of destruction: Definition and contextualization of disaster movies

The disaster movie is one of the most persistent genres in cinematography, but it constantly escapes our attention because it is presented as “easy summer fun”. If we want to understand it as a cultural document of an epoch in which the genre is important and popular, we need to come up with a definition, formula and conventions of a disaster movie. Also, we must propose one of many possible comprehensions of its popularity and religious heritage. The paper uses definitions of genre, conventions and formulae in the attempt to show a way of using popular narratives in the transmission of a world view. Using a narrative structure gives us a glimpse into the deeper cultural, social and political context in which the disaster movie is created, popular or rejected. The paper discusses disaster movies as cultural artifacts, as a ritual we are practicing without remembering its purpose. Also, paper is examining identifying apocalyptic and catastrophic as an product of interposition of Apocalypse to Johan and Great Tribulation. Using apocalyptic literature, end times narratives and disaster movies, the paper shows the fruitfulness of destruction representations and imaginarium of terror. Using fear and shock, the messages of disaster movies seems more urgent and relevant. Through the ideas of Susan Sontag and Maurice Yacowar, the paper presents a way for analyzing the contemporary disaster movie. Conventions and formulae of disaster movies help us to understand the way modern cinematography is used for cultural and political means. The popularity of disaster movies can be seen as a form of ”ritualization of discontent” wherein the viewers experience some sort of catharsis. Also, disaster movie gathers different interests and actualizes thirstness for transformation of order or achieving justice.

Disaster Movies and the ‘Peak Oil’ Movement

Using two large-scale surveys, I argue that the prevalence of apocalyptic popular culture influences apocalyptic beliefs in the United States. I focus especially on Hollywood disaster movies of the 1990s and 2000s, most of which deal with environmental themes, and participants in the ‘peak oil’ movement, a quasi-religious American apocalyptic social movement organized around a vision of energy depletion and social collapse. In these surveys, ‘peakists’ reflect on their relationship with fictional narratives of disaster and destruction. I contend that disaster films influenced major aspects of the ‘peak oil’ ideology, such as the hope for regeneration (or even a better world) as a result of environmental crisis and social collapse; the tendency towards fatalism; and the imagination of social and environmental change as immediate and explosive instead of gradual. This cultural influence is situated in the context of contemporary responses to other environmental issues, such as climate change.

The Upside of Down: Disaster and the Imagination 50 Years On

The Upside of Down: Disaster and the Imagination 50 Years On

Re-packaging Disaster Post 9/11 and Christopher Nolan’s

Disaster movies have been a staple fare of Hollywood since the 1930s. However from the 1980s, it began to assume the categorical imperative of a ‘genre’ having its own structured norms. Typologies of disaster movies vary from the unabashedly pyrotechnical to the cerebral. The aim of this article is to analyze the idea of disaster in Hollywood disaster films as events that are human-constituted. This is done by reading Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy as texts that represent different types of the anarchic world view. Therefore, the focus of this article would be to read ‘anarchy-as-disaster’ in the context of the trilogy. The three films appear to have typologies of the anarchic world view that could be classified into three broad categories: ‘anarchy as cleansing’, ‘anarchy for chaos for the sake of chaos’ and ‘anarchy as emancipation’. This study attempts to read Nolan’s trilogy as cultural products that are able to generate fear of impending disasters brought upon Western industrialized society by certain inscrutable forces. In underscoring the politics of representation, the three films appear to emphasize values that are ‘liberal’ (democracy, capitalism, liberalism) as opposed to ‘conservative’ (socialism, radicalism, religious fundamentalism), the latter being dismissed off as obsolete alternatives. The problematic of urban space, technology fetishism and their role in re-packaging disaster mediated through tools (disaster movies) of popular culture will constitute the major premises of this study.

Representing politics in disaster films

Since its resurgence in the 1990s, the disaster film genre oscillates between the demands of two competing desires, the desire for realism and cultural relevance, and the desire for fantasy and spectacle. The premise of the genre, its narrative dependence on threats, attacks or natural disasters, can be adapted and used to interrogate the meaning of political institutions, but can also occasion purely spectacular narratives that traffic in paranoid nightmares of threat as well as utopian fantasies of patriotic unification. From the shaky camera work and mysterious alien of Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008) to the dramatic intensity and realistic threats of Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011), and the references to current biotechnology research in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011), disaster films operate in a hybrid representational space that combines realistic fears and conditions with their imaginary and exaggerated counterparts. But even when the premise of a disaster film is outrageous or far-fetched, there is important political content in the representational gestures of the genre. Despite the formulaic tendencies of disaster films, their fantasmatic depictions of trauma retain political and emotional connections with historical events and real-world catastrophes (Dixon 2003). In what follows, I outline the ways in which political realities shape the genre’s fantasies, drawing from three films that span the latest waves of disaster movies: Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996), The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and 2012 (2009).

PAUL HAMMOND, The Strangeness of Tragedy. * REBECCA BUSHNELL, Tragedy: A Short Introduction.

REBECCA BUSHNELL’S Tragedy: A Short Introduction is a brisk guide for the student reader. Bushnell’s approach is not only comparative, but even eclectic, as may befit the often rather unwieldy subject of tragedy. Bushnell juxtaposes readings of some of the canonical texts of Greek tragedy with analysis of, inter alia, Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy. Indeed, throughout the book, Bushnell is interested in the possibilities of cinematic tragedy, and here again she is wide-ranging and inclusive. As well as looking at classic cinema, Bushnell is refreshingly unafraid of extending her discussion into aspects of pop culture, including glances at the 1997 disaster movie, Titanic. The book begins arrestingly with a passage in which Bushnell tries to recreate a sense of what the experience of Greek tragedy might have been like for the original audience. From this she moves into a series of comparisons with different performance contexts (Shakespeare’s...

La tomba dell’architettura. Il funerale mediatico dell’edificio e della città

It seems that the process of secularization of our culture has made it impossible for us to legitimate death through its ritualization, thus causing its repression. The article seeks to examine the role played by the media and architecture in a process of re-ritualization of death, especially in their function of filling the void of sacredness, through a symbolic metabolization of the fear of death in our late-modern or post-modern civilization. The relationship between media, death and architecture is particularly frequent, especially in the studies of architecture historians and critics, and it seems to be directly correlated to the media texts' degree of spectacularity. The examination of movies and tv programs reveals the many media discourses that correlate architecture to death: the death of architecture, that is, the death of the building (as in the images of 11/9); the death of urbanism, that is, the death of the cities (in this case, disaster movie genre is the privileged scenario wherein the destruction of the metropolis is spectacularized); and the death of the architect himself (as in Peter Greenaway's movie The Belly of an Architect). The article ends with a brief discussion on the very first corpse of architecture: that is, that of the user, removed from the images of the architectural project, as if it could contaminate the purity of the architect's work of art.

Twisted Film, or: How I Learned to Stop the Movie and Teach the Truth

The 1996 blockbuster Twister both entertained and exasperated geographers. Misrepresentations and unsafe field practices resonated deeply; still, the film possesses relevance for educators. Science-based reviews illuminating on-screen inconsistencies and pseudoscience might surprise students accepting movies at face value. This article uses a disaster movie to teach beneficial concepts, definitions, and insight by identifying, elaborating on, and correcting important ideas, dialogue, and terminology. It includes experienced commentary on storm chasing. Chasers must work together using latest technologies to remotely sense environments of future tornadoes during minutes preceding formation. Unlike movies, the mantra for students chasing should be “safety first.”

<i>Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Millennium</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Millennium Skip Willman Kirsten Moana Thompson. Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Millennium. Albany: SUNY P, 2007. xii + 195 pp. Rather than examining the obvious films of apocalypse in terms of commercial success and cultural influence at the end of the previous century, such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Independence Day (1996), and The Matrix (1999), or the deluge of disaster movies involving meteors, volcanoes, and other cataclysmic phenomena, Apocalyptic Dread investigates the “horror/crime hybrid” that emerged in the 1990s, in which “apocalyptic dread” is figured through a family threatened by a “monstrous figure, the uncanny double of what the family has repressed” (3). Consequently, Kristen Moana Thompson offers an illuminating analysis of an unusual collection of films for a study with “apocalyptic” in the title: Cape Fear (1991), Candyman (1992), Dolores Claiborne (1995), Se7en (1995), Signs (2002), and War of the Worlds (2005). The final two chapters abandon the horror/crime hybrid for the more conventional Hollywood version of apocalypse in the form of alien invasions, but the exploration of the conservative theme of the restoration of the family lends coherence to the study. Thompson contextualizes the emergence of apocalyptic dread as a conservative response to “rapid sociocultural changes over the last forty years” (7). She situates the threatened family trope of the horror/crime hybrid within the context of the culture wars that began with the Reagan presidency and intensified in the era of multiculturalism and political [End Page 331] correctness. She further contends that the rise of Christian fundamentalism in America has encouraged Hollywood to turn to themes of “Christian millennialism and apocalyptic eschatology” (11). Not surprisingly, these films manage “coded anxieties about family, patriarchy, religion, and ‘family values’” (25). While many of the films Thompson analyzes reinforce conservative family values, they have little overt connection to Christian fundamentalism, with the possible exception of Signs, in which the ex-minister Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) saves his family from aliens and returns to the god he renounced after the death of his wife. Rather, Thompson describes the way in which millennialism has insinuated itself into American culture, informing the interpretation of events and speculation on the future. The proliferation of forms of dread in this study occasionally dilutes the principal concept: apocalyptic dread. Thompson offers several definitions of apocalyptic dread, from the general, “that fear and anxiety about the future and about the anticipated end of the world” (3), to the more particular, “a free-floating anxiety and ambivalence about the future that is displaced onto the specific dread embodied by each film’s monster, and that dramatizes a compulsive eschatological need to perceive and decode signs” (3). Drawing upon Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety, she identifies three key components of “apocalyptic dread”: “first, radical freedom (or the moral dread occasioned by absolute choice), which gives rise to a fear of the future and which is mediated by past actions; second, a paradoxical ambivalence that is connected to the uncanny; and third, a connection to the cataclysmic qualities of trauma” (18). Thompson’s formulation of “memorial dread,” or a fear of remembering a traumatic past, works well in her analysis of Dolores Claiborne, in which Selena (Jennifer Jason Leigh) represses her sexual abuse by her father, although the connection to the apocalyptic in this chapter is tenuous. Similarly, “scopic dread,” which she defines as “the ambivalent resistance to seeing what one fears, yet already knows” (124), captures the effect of Se7en with its grisly tableaus of murder staged as a moral lesson. However, the numerous categories of dread that punctuate her chapter on Cape Fear, including “Corporeal Dread” (44), “Dreaded Loss and Dreadful Revenge” (46), “Performative Dread” (47), “Supernatural Dread” (49), and “Legal Dread” (51), belabor the argument and interfere with an otherwise solid analysis of the film. Trauma figures so prominently in several chapters that a more thorough review of theories of trauma, beyond the brief mention of the work of Cathy Caruth, would have been useful. For instance, the work of Kaja Silverman in Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992) would provide Thompson a more sophisticated framework in which to...

Chocks away? Time for a surgical checklist

Battery voltage? Check. Avionics off? Check. Flaps down? Check. Oil level? Check. Ready for first incision? We are all familiar with the disaster movie cliché of the pilot and co-pilot of a doomed airliner earnestly running through the pre-flight checklist only to succumb to food poisoning by both having the fish. But the reality is that the humble checklist has been the mainstay strategy for reducing human error factors in aviation safety since the 1930s.

Doomsday, Past, Present and Future: Kinji Fukasaku's Virus

Based on Fukkatsu No Hi (Day of Resurrection) by Sakyo Komatsu, who had also written a novel later adapted for a 150 minute disaster movie, Tidal Wave (1973), and released in America in a badly dubbed and heavily cut 1975 version, Kinji Fukasaku's Virus (1980), a film whose Japanese title is the same as the original novel, appears to resemble those many ill-conceived international co-productions characterizing the 1970s and 1980s. Virus superficially appears to be just another version of a 1970s genre running out of energy.

DRESDEN (2006), TEAMWORX AND TITANIC (1997): GERMAN WARTIME SUFFERING AS HOLLYWOOD DISASTER MOVIE

ABSTRACTThis article examines the extraordinary success of Roland Suso Richter's recent television mini‐series Dresden (2006), one of a number of major television projects produced by Nico Hofmann's TeamWorx company, with the support of the television mogul Jan Mojto. It explores the way this and other productions have exploited both the recent upsurge of cultural interest in German ‘wartime suffering’ and the rediscovery of the disaster movie as a genre by Hollywood. Of particular interest to the discussion is the fact that Dresden avoided much of the controversy that often accompanies the representation of German wartime suffering. Yet while the film's presentation of the bombing of the city was largely accepted by critics, its use of certain genre conventions proved more troubling. Specifically, the manner in which Dresden employs James Cameron's 1997 epic disaster film Titanic as an intertext is examined, along with a number of films by Steven Spielberg, whose production company, DreamWorks, TeamWorx clearly sees as a role model. The controversy the film did generate, it is suggested, is due to the problematic ideological connotations the film's intertexts bring with them, a cultural context that tests the limits of contemporary German ‘normalisation’.

Age before Beauty: A Comparative Study of Martyrs in American Disaster Movies and Their Medieval Predecessors

Age before Beauty: A Comparative Study of Martyrs in American Disaster Movies and Their Medieval Predecessors

Dying for a laugh: disaster movies and the camp imagination

Dying for a Laugh looks at the evolution of the contemporary disaster film from the 1970s to the present. Ken Feil argues that contemporary culture has influenced and reformed the conventions of the 1970s disaster film, in both its production and reception. The book chronicles how the genre rose to prominence, sank into critical and popular disrepute, and became unintentionally campy. Through close readings of films including The Poseidon Adventure, The Swarm, Ghostbusters, Independence Day, and Mars Attacks!, along with film reviews, entertainment reports and publicity materials as evidence, Feil shows that the renewal of the disaster genre in the 1990s hinged on self-parody, ironic self-consciousness, and state-of-the-art effects. Feil also looks at the impact of 9/11 on the genre's campy, sadistic pleasures through movies such as The Sum of All Fears, The Core, and The Day After Tomorrow. This analysis of high concept camp draws from diverse methodologies and theories, such as historical reception, textual analysis, neoformalism, political economy, genre analysis, feminism, and queer theory.