Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens

Video Spectatorship From VHS to File Sharing

Add to my list

by Caetlin Benson-Allott

Type

Studies

Subject

Sociology

Keywords

home video, viewer, evolution

Publishing date

2013

Publisher

University of California Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 312 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-0-520-27512-6

User Ratings

(0 vote)

X

Average rating:

0	rating	= We can do without
0	rating	= Good book
0	rating	= Excellent book
0	rating	= Unique / a reference

Your rating: -

Book Presentation:
Since the mid-1980s, US audiences have watched the majority of movies they see on a video platform, be it VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, Video On Demand, or streaming media. Annual video revenues have exceeded box office returns for over twenty-five years. In short, video has become the structuring discourse of US movie culture. Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens examines how prerecorded video reframes the premises and promises of motion picture spectatorship. But instead of offering a history of video technology or reception, Caetlin Benson-Allott analyzes how the movies themselves understand and represent the symbiosis of platform and spectator. Through case studies and close readings that blend industry history with apparatus theory, psychoanalysis with platform studies, and production history with postmodern philosophy, Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens unearths a genealogy of post-cinematic spectatorship in horror movies, thrillers, and other exploitation genres. From Night of the Living Dead (1968) through Paranormal Activity (2009), these movies pursue their spectator from one platform to another, adapting to suit new exhibition norms and cultural concerns in the evolution of the video subject.

About the Author:
Caetlin Benson-Allott is Assistant Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Georgetown University.

Press Reviews:
"Insightful and original. . . . [A] genuinely significant study."— Times Higher Education

"Exquisitely argued and researched work." 10 Best Film-Studies Books of 2013.— Slant Magazine "Intriguing."— CHOICE

"We have needed a book like this for decades: a new understanding of film spectatorship in light of home video. Caetlin Benson-Allott offers a smart and often unexpected reconsideration of watching movies on small screens that ingeniously brings together film theory, industrial history, and horror flicks, weaving a complex yet crystalline account. This ambitious book deserves to be a new foundational text. " —Lucas Hilderbrand, author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright

"...Incredibly engaging and compelling in its grappling with an underrepresented area of study that richly deserves the kind of full-bodied treatment this author gives it. Hats off."—Barbara Klinger, author of Beyond The Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home

See the publisher website: University of California Press