The Multi-Protagonist Film E-Book

María del Mar Azcona

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: New Approaches to Film Genre
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 323

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The Multi-Protagonist Film is an insightful and provocative introduction to this important new genre. 

• Explores the origins and history of one of the most exciting new developments in contemporary film worldwide
• Guides readers through the genre’s central characteristics and conventions, as well as it's evolution and cultural relevance
• Provides a theoretical framework that is developed through the analysis several films, including Grand Hotel, Singles,  American Pie, Short Cuts, and Syriana. 
• Reveals the duality of the genre's contemporary preoccupations:  the impact of globalization on human lives versus the current state of intimate affairs, the crisis of marriage, and the proliferation of sexual choices

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Plates

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MULTI-PROTAGONIST FILM

Ensemble and Mosaic Films

2 THEORIZING THE MULTI-PROTAGONIST FILM

More Connected Than We Thought: The Multi-Protagonist Film in Action

Raining Frogs: The Visual Style of Multi-Protagonist Films

3 AN EARLY EXPERIMENT

Grand Hotel

Through the Revolving Doors

Bright Stars and Broken Dreams

4 SHORT CUTS AND THE CONSOLIDATION OF A GENRE

The Community of the Isolated: Short Cuts

5 ADOLESCENT TAPESTRIES

1990s Teenpic Comedy: American Pie

6 INTIMACY MULTIPLIES

Intimacy at the End of the Millennium: Singles

7 GLOBAL THRILLS

The Multi-Protagonist Thriller Goes Global: Syriana

Conclusion

References

Index

NEW APPROACHES TO FILM GENRE

Series Editor: Barry Keith Grant

New Approaches to Film Genre provides students and teachers with original, insightful, and entertaining overviews of major film genres. Each book in the series gives an historical appreciation of its topic, from its origins to the present day, and identifies and discusses the important films, directors, trends, and cycles. Authors articulate their own critical perspective, placing the genre's development in relevant social, historical, and cultural contexts. For students, scholars, and film buffs alike, these represent the most concise and illuminating texts on the study of film genre.

1 From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western, Patrick McGee

2 The Horror Film, Rick Worland

3 Hollywood and History, Robert Burgoyne

4 The Religious Film, Pamela Grace

5 The Hollywood War Film, Robert Eberwein

7 The Fantasy Film, Katherine A. Fowkes

8 The Multi-Protagonist Film, Maria del Mar Azcona

Forthcoming:

6 FilmNoir, William Luhr

For my family

This edition first published 2010

© 2010 María del Mar Azcona

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell's publishing program has been merged with Wiley's global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Azcona, María del Mar.

The multi-protagonist film / María del Mar Azcona.

p. cm. – (New approaches to film genre)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4443-3393-0 (hardcover: alk. paper)

1. Protagonists (Persons) in motion pictures. I. Title.

PN1995.9.P765A93 2010

791.43'652–dc22

2010009542

LIST OF PLATES

All images are the author's own screen shots:

1 The single protagonist enjoys the company of the group in Hatari!

2 A traitor in the barracks: Multiple protagonists and suspense in Stalag 17

3 Blending in and standing out: Stars aid characterization in The Towering Inferno

4 The Big Chill: Assorted groups begin to gather in multi-protagonist films of the 1980s

5 Ensemble or mosaic? Playing by Heart challenges critical classifications

6 The ending of Grand Canyon: Looking at life from a different perspective

7-8 Penny for your thoughts: Editing and marital crisis in Lantana

9 What's Cooking?: Closer and more connected than we thought

10 Innovative storytelling: Anonymous telephone operators punctuate the narrative of Grand Hotel

11 Beautiful geometries: Visual experimentation in Grand Hotel

12 Framing and reframing: The pattern of random friendships in the film's choreography

13 "Grand Hotel. Always the same. People come, people go. Nothing ever happens"

14 Simultaneous plot threads and collapsing planes in the framingof Gosford Park

15 Through a glass darkly: The distant perspective on Doreen and Earl's relationship

16 The tapestry of chance: Stormy Weathers and Ann Finnigan accidentally cross paths

17 "How about some tequila?": No endings, life goes on

18 The celebration of diversity in Revenge of the Nerds

19 Oz in love: The jock and the choirgirl find romance in American Pie

20 "With a little help from my friends": The male bond eases Kevin's rite of passage

21 The woman in the mirror: Adulthood hits Vicky the morning after prom

22 Siblings discuss love in the multiple intimate landscape ofThe Brothers McMullen

23 "Being alone, there's a certain dignity to it"

24 Fabricated bliss: Nostalgia for an nonexistent past in the multi-protagonist new romance

25 "I'll tell you what happened": Blurring narrative levels inSingles

26 I'll be there for you: Cross-sex friendship in Singles

27 Cruel perpetrator and sacrificial victim: Exit Bob from the implacable network of Syriana

28 Disempowered individuals: The overhead long shot dwarfs Bryan in the lavish surroundings of the luxury hotel

29 "We are a family": Unemployed and beaten-up Wasim finds food and solace at the madrasah

30 Welcome to Mickey's world: The circularity of corruption inFast Food Nation

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Research towards this book was funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (research projects nos HUM2004-00418 and HUM2007-61183) and the Diputación General de Aragón (refs BO24/ 2000 and H12). I would like to thank Laura Turégano at the KingJuan Carlos I of Spain Center for facilitating my access to the Bobst University Library at New York University, where I carried out part of my research. I am very much indebted to Glenn Man, of whose interest in multi-protagonist films I learnt in the most random of ways and who has always been supportive and encouraging. Thanks are also due to Margrit Tröhler, who very kindly shared with me her manuscript Plurale Figurenkonstellationen im Spielfilm before it was published as a book. I would also like to thank Barry Grant for his interest in this project and his insightful comments on a previous version of the manuscript. My gratitude extends to the staff at Wiley-Blackwell (especially to Jayne Fargnoli, Margot Morse, and Justin Dyer) for their editorial help.

My most special thanks go to Celestino Deleyto. I have no words to describe his enduring support, his interest in the topic, and his invaluable help throughout the different stages of this project. His scholarly excellence and relentless enthusiasm are the main reason why I am working on and writing about movies today. On a more personal level, I also want to thank him for his friendship. It is a relief to know that he is always an e-mail message away.

I owe most to my friends and family. I am especially grateful to my parents, Marcelino and María Teresa, for their unconditional love and devotion, to Maite, Marce, Manolo, and Mónica, for their emotional support, and to my nephews Pablo and Sergio for their boundless affection. Finally, I want to thank Jaime, a great movie fan who counts Robert Altman's Short Cuts among his favorite films of all time and who, by now, has probably seen far more multi-protagonist films than he bargained for.

INTRODUCTION

What do Short Cuts (1993), American Pie (1999), Love Actually (2003), and Syriana (2005) have in common? If we think of them respectively as an auteur film, a gross-out movie for and about teenagers, a romantic comedy, and a political thriller, the first answer that comes to mind is, "not much; at least, not at first sight." In this book, however, I claim that, together with many other filmic texts, these four movies partake of a contemporary tendency to abandon the single-protagonist structure on which most film narratives have traditionally relied and replace it by a wider assortment of characters with more or less independent narrative lines. This storytelling pattern, which from now on will be referred to as multi-protagonist, is anything but new in the history of cinema. Yet, it was not until the last two decades of the twentieth century that it started to make a significant impact. Since this time, multi-protagonist movies have developed a versatile and multi-faceted narrative structure, as a wide array of recent and not so recent examples demonstrate. When in the course of this process the films began to accrue a number of common narrative and stylistic characteristics, attached to a specific perspective on certain contemporary social issues, what started as a narrative structure gradually acquired the status of a genre. A crucial factor in this transformation was the growing visibility of the term as a generic label in critical discourse.

This book originates from an awareness of the large amount of US films with multiple protagonists that have appeared in recent decades, as has recently been noticed, among others, by David Bordwell, who claims that nearly 150 films using this type of narrative structure have been released since 1990 (2008: 191). The beginning of this trend can be placed in the early 1980s, with the release of films like (1980), (1982), (1983), or (1985). It escalated through the 1990s and it has continued to grow during the first decade of the twenty-first century, as can be seen in the following more or less random selection of films: (2000), (2000), (2001), (2001), (2001), (2001), (2002), (2003), (2004), , Heights (2004), Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), Babel (2006), Bobby (2006), The Dead Girl (2006), Fast Food Nation (2006), Friends with Money (2006), The Groomsmen (2006), Little Miss Sunshine (2006), Shortbus (2006), Southland Tales (2006), Lions for Lambs (2007), My Blueberry Nights (2007), Vantage Point (2008), The Women (2008), and Crossing Over (2009). The trend has not been restricted to the USA. The Australian Look Both Ways (2005), the Spanish Tapas (2005), the Italian Manuale d'amore (2004), the French–British (2005), the British (2005), the Israeli (2005), the Spanish–Argentinian (2007), the French–Lebanese (2007), and the Mexican (2008), among many others, amply confirm Margrit Tröhler's view of the genre as a transcultural phenomenon (2007). This is not to say that the multi-protagonist movie is the dominant narrative paradigm in contemporary cinema, but its increasing popularity in recent years has turned it into a phenomenon worthy of careful examination.