Title

A Return to Commercial Cinema in a Digital Age: Rerouting the Affective Impulse Under Neoliberalism

Author

Corey CouchFollow

Date of Award

Fall 8-17-2018

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Film, Video & Digital Imaging

First Advisor

Angelo Restivo

Second Advisor

Jennifer Barker

Third Advisor

Ethan Tussey

Abstract

I return to Siegfried Kracauer’s questions regarding cinema’s capacity to illuminate the state of our political environment through film aesthetics, now within the context of neoliberal economic policy. During Industrialization, norms for the urban center and its technologies were not yet set in stone. Kracauer tracked aesthetic variations and mass interest as commercial cinema eventually settled into traditional Hollywood form. Now, traditional aesthetic boundaries between art and Hollywood cinema begin to blur amidst the “anything goes” media environment derived from rampant deregulation and the era of digital media. I am therefore interested in whether there remains a difference between commercial and art cinema and how we might define revolutionary cinema under postmodernism. For this, I propose an affective genre of politically resistant cinema and explore the process of tracking it in the age of digital media.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.57709/12832010

Recommended Citation

Couch, Corey, "A Return to Commercial Cinema in a Digital Age: Rerouting the Affective Impulse Under Neoliberalism." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2018.
doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/12832010