Milo Sweedler's Books

Rumble and Crash

Crises of Capitalism in Contemporary Film

By: Milo Sweedler

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Rumble and Crash

Crises of Capitalism in Contemporary Film

By: Milo Sweedler

Analyzes six films as allegories of capitalisms precarious state in the early twenty-first century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as the contradictions of capitalism became more apparent than at any other time since the 1920s, numerous films gave allegorical form to the crises of contemporary capitalism. Some films were overtly political in nature, while others refracted the vicissitudes of capital in stories that were not, on the surface, explicitly political. Rumble and Crash examines six particularly rich and thought-provoking films in this vein. These films, Milo Sweedler argues, give narrative and audiovisual form to the increasingly pervasive sense that the economic system we have known and accepted as inevitable and ubiquitous is in fact riddled with self-destructive flaws. Analyzing four movies from before the global financial crisis of 2008 and two that allegorize the financial meltdown itself, Sweedler explores how cinema responded to one of the defining crises of our time. Films examined include Alfonso Cuaróns Children of Men (2006), Stephen Gaghans Syriana(2005), Fernando Meirelless The Constant Gardener (2005), Spike Lees Inside Man (2006), Martin Scorseses The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and Woody Allens Blue Jasmine (2013). Milo Sweedler has produced what are surely the most original, provocative, and downright dazzling readings of a handful of socially significant and potent films released during the tumultuous years from 2005 to 2013. This is a fine book. David Desser, former editor, Cinema Journal

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Page Count

222

Publisher

SUNY Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

143847279X

ISBN 13

9781438472799

The Dismembered Community

Bataille, Blanchot, Leiris, and the Remains of Laure

By: Milo Sweedler

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The Dismembered Community

Bataille, Blanchot, Leiris, and the Remains of Laure

By: Milo Sweedler

This book examines the intersecting communitarian endeavors of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Colette Peignot, known post-humously as Laure. Through detailed analysis of a series of interlocking texts that the four authors wrote on, for, and to one another on such topics as love, friendship, and fraternity, it explores these authors' theoretical elaborations of community, their actual communities, and the relation between the two.

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Page Count

215

Publisher

University of Delaware Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0874130522

ISBN 13

9780874130522

Allegories of the End of Capitalism

Six Films on the Revolutions of Our Times

By: Milo Sweedler

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Allegories of the End of Capitalism

Six Films on the Revolutions of Our Times

By: Milo Sweedler

In Allegories of the End of Capitalism, Milo Sweedler deconstructs the events of films Melancholia; Cosmopolis; Suffragette; Django Unchained; Elysium and Snowpiercer, the socio-political contexts they arise from and enter into, and their impact on contemporary culture and life. He examines how filmmakers from six different countries, across four continents, give narrative and audio-visual form to the frustration and anger that burst into public view in 2011, the ongoing class war between the super-rich and the rest of the world's population, and the insurrection that it yet to come.

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Page Count

191

Publisher

John Hunt Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1785358634

ISBN 13

9781785358630

The Dialectic of Truth and Fiction in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing

By: Milo Sweedler

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The Dialectic of Truth and Fiction in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing

By: Milo Sweedler

The Act of Killing is a documentary film on the Indonesian genocide that took place between October 1965 and March 1966, during which time an estimated 500,000 to 2.5 million accused communists, including landless farmers, unionized workers, labour organizers, intellectuals and ethnic Chinese Indonesians, were killed. However, much of the film is dedicated to fictional re-enactments of the 1965–66 killings. Oppenheimer’s approach is to bring into relief the contours of the extermination of communists in Indonesia by inviting former death-squad leaders and paramilitary gangsters to re-enact the killings in whatever ways they choose. They opt at times for a realist aesthetic and at other times for genres as diverse as Hollywood westerns, film noir gangster movies, and glitzy musicals. The text explores the aesthetic and political consequences springing from this modality of representation while comparing the film to other representative testimonial documentaries of genocides and extermination.

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