Muscles, six-pack abs, skin, and sweat fill the screen in the tawdry and tantalizing peplum films associated with epic Italian cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Using techniques like slow motion and stopped time, these films instill the hero's vitality with timeless admiration and immerse the hero's body in a world that is lavishly eroticized but without sexual desire. These "sword and sandal" films represent a century-long cinematic biopolitical intervention that offers the spectator an imagined form of the male body--one free of illness, degeneracy, and the burdens of poverty--that defends goodness with brute strength and perseverance, and serves as a model of ideal citizenry. Robert A. Rushing traces these epic heroes from Maciste in Cabiria in the early silent era to contemporary transnational figures like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian, and to films such as Zach Snyder's 300. Rushing explores how the very tactile modes of representation cement the genre's ideological grip on the viewer.
Biopolitics and the Muscled Male Body on Screen
Hardback
Publication Date: 15/10/2016
- ISBN:
- 9780253022462
- 9780253022462
- Category:
- Film theory & criticism
- Format:
- Hardback
- Publication Date:
- 15-10-2016
- Language:
- English
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
- Country of origin:
- United States
- Dimensions (mm):
- 228.6x152.4mm
- Weight:
- 0.47kg
Click 'Notify Me' to get an email alert when this item becomes available
Great!
Click on Save to My Library / Lists
Click on Save to My Library / Lists
Select the List you'd like to categorise as, or add your own
Here you can mark if you have read this book, reading it or want to read
Awesome! You added your first item into your Library
Great! The fun begins.
Click on My Library / My Lists and I will take you there
Click on My Library / My Lists and I will take you there
Reviews
Be the first to review Descended from Hercules.
Share This Book: