Overview
- Concise review of key ideas on the social meaning of cinema
- Unique historical narrative traces analyses of film content
- Exploration of major mythic themes such as the lone hero, apocalyptic visions, redemption, chaos, war
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About this book
This book demonstrates how social distress or anxiety is reflected, modified, and evolves through the medium of the motion picture. Tracing cinema from its earliest forms, the authors show how film is a perfect medium for generating and projecting dreams, fantasies, and nightmares, on the individual as well as the societal level. Arising at the same time as Freud’s influential ideas, cinema has been intertwined with the wishes and fears of the greater culture and has served as a means of experiencing those feelings in a communal and taming environment. From Munsterberg’s original pronouncements in the early 20th century about the psychology of cinema, through the pioneering films of Melies, the works of the German expressionists, to James Bond and today’s superheroes this book weaves a narrative highlighting the importance of the social dream. It develops the idea that no art form goes beyond the ordinary process of consciousness in the same way as film, reflecting, as it does, the cognitive, emotional, and volitional aspects of human nature.
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Keywords
Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
From the reviews:
"...any treatise on film or television themes is necessarily psychological. This is true of the book Film, Television and the Psychology of the Social Dream by Robert W. Rieber and Robert J. Kelly, and its title appears to emphasize the social psychology of film and television as shared experiences."
Lauren S. Seifert
PsycCRITIQUES
September 8, 2014, Vol. 59, No. 36, Article 6
Authors and Affiliations
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Film, Television and the Psychology of the Social Dream
Authors: Robert W. Rieber, Robert J. Kelly
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7175-2
Publisher: Springer New York, NY
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science, Behavioral Science and Psychology (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4614-7174-5Published: 17 November 2013
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-4939-4770-6Published: 17 September 2016
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4614-7175-2Published: 18 November 2013
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VII, 181
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations
Topics: History of Psychology, Cultural Studies, Psychology Research