Theory of the Image: Capitalism, Contemporary Film, and Women

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Indiana University Press, 2005 - Performing Arts - 240 pages

"Just about everything in this book is fresh and exciting." --Carol Siegel

Ann Kibbey's Theory of the Image is based on a concept of the image as a dynamic relation rather than a thing. In three essays Kibbey contends that the image itself is an ideological construct. "The Capitalist Theory of the Image" argues that capitalism enforces social identity and fetishism through religious iconoclastic beliefs about the commodity as image. "Liberating a Woman from Her Image" creates a new feminist approach to women in film, breaking the symbiosis of woman and image at the heart of previous theory. "Relief from the Production of Certainties" challenges conservative and racist agendas informing the assumption that a photograph records an image. The book draws on extensive personal interviews and also provides detailed explications of important films in recent transnational cinema to demonstrate new theories of the image for a global society.

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Contents

Introduction
1
The Capitalist Theory of the Image
5
The Iconoclastic Theory of the Image and the Corporation
6
Congruence with the Capitalist Economy
17
Critique of Baudrillard
20
Critique of Barthes
24
Debord and the Social Production of the Image
32
Lagans Mirror Stage and the Cinematic Apparatus
34
The Stabbing
98
Exit the Black Screen Suitcase
115
Relief from the Production of Certainties
133
The Icon as a Set of Relations
134
The Natural Image Racism and Photography
145
Why Eisenstein Has Been a Threat
160
An Iconic Film
164
Women Time Photos
180

Mulveys Symbiosis of Woman and Image
38
Liberating a Woman from Her Image
45
Persian Narrative Structure and Activating the Audience
50
The Story of the Veil
55
The Story of the Sheep
65
How Images Move the Story Around
74
Character and the Mutable Image of the Veil
85
Have a Nice War Take Pictures
194
Linear Narrative Cubist Narrative
196
Notes
204
Selected Bibliography
225
Index
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About the author (2005)

Ann Kibbey is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado and editor of Genders. She is author of The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.

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