Steffen Hantke's Books

Monsters in the Machine

Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America after World War II

By: Steffen Hantke

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Monsters in the Machine

Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America after World War II

By: Steffen Hantke

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the American film industry produced a distinct cycle of films situated on the boundary between horror and science fiction. Using the familiar imagery of science fiction--from alien invasions to biological mutation and space travel--the vast majority of these films subscribed to the effects and aesthetics of horror film, anticipating the dystopian turn of many science fiction films to come. Departing from projections of American technological awe and optimism, these films often evinced paranoia, unease, fear, shock, and disgust. Not only did these movies address technophobia and its psychological, social, and cultural corollaries; they also returned persistently to the military as a source of character, setting, and conflict. Commensurate with a state of perpetual mobilization, the US military comes across as an inescapable presence in American life. Regardless of their genre, Steffen Hantke argues that these films have long been understood as allegories of the Cold War. They register anxieties about two major issues of the time: atomic technologies, especially the testing and use of nuclear weapons, as well as communist aggression and/or subversion. Setting out to question, expand, and correct this critical argument, Hantke follows shifts and adjustments prompted by recent scholarly work into the technological, political, and social history of America in the 1950s. Based on this revised historical understanding, science fiction films appear in a new light as they reflect on the troubled memories of World War II, the emergence of the military-industrial complex, the postwar rewriting of the American landscape, and the relative insignificance of catastrophic nuclear war compared to America's involvement in postcolonial conflicts around the globe.

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Page Count

243

Publisher

Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published Date

ISBN 10

1496805682

ISBN 13

9781496805683

Cloverfield

Creatures and Catastrophes in Post-9/11 Cinema

By: Steffen Hantke

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Cloverfield

Creatures and Catastrophes in Post-9/11 Cinema

By: Steffen Hantke

Upon its release in 2008, Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield revitalized the giant creature, a cinematic trope that had languished for over a decade. The film addressed the attacks of September 11, 2001, trading the jingoistic rhetoric of retributive military aggression for serious engagement with personal and collective trauma. It applied the horror genre’s fascination with personal stories captured by found footage to the grand violence of history. Innovative and intense, Cloverfield represented blockbuster filmmaking at its best. Cloverfield’s franchising followed the path of high-profile Hollywood properties. This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the franchise, measuring how it steers precariously between the commercial potential, creative risks, and political challenges in Hollywood. As 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) and The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) struggled to sustain and update the franchise’s original concept, both films’ strengths and weaknesses come into focus by comparison with the original, just as the historical sequence of all three films allows for a reassessment of Cloverfield itself. Author Steffen Hantke examines how, in the broader context of postmillennial Hollywood, the Cloverfield franchise remains both a harbinger of the way Hollywood does business and a test case for the cinematic fantasies of apocalyptic disaster that continue to dominate global box office, long after the Cold War that gave rise to giant creatures has ended and 9/11 has lost its hold on the global imagination. As an inspiration for the next stage of blockbuster filmmaking, in which franchises have replaced the singular cinematic masterpiece and marketing plays to fans as critics and scholars, Cloverfield remains as relevant today as when it first unleashed its giant creature onto New York City over a decade ago.

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Page Count

129

Publisher

Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published Date

ISBN 10

1496846761

ISBN 13

9781496846761

Monsters in the Machine

Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America after World War II

By: Steffen Hantke

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Monsters in the Machine

Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America after World War II

By: Steffen Hantke

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Page Count

252

Publisher

Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published Date

ISBN 10

1496805666

ISBN 13

9781496805669

Cloverfield

Creatures and Catastrophes in Post-9/11 Cinema

By: Steffen Hantke

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Cloverfield

Creatures and Catastrophes in Post-9/11 Cinema

By: Steffen Hantke

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Page Count

129

Publisher

Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published Date

ISBN 10

1496846761

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9781496846761

The Anthropocene and the Undead

Cultural Anxieties in the Contemporary Popular Imagination

By: Simon Bacon

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The Anthropocene and the Undead

Cultural Anxieties in the Contemporary Popular Imagination

By: Simon Bacon

The Anthropocene and the Undead describes how our experience of an increasingly erratic environment and the idea of the undead are more closely linked than the obvious zombie horde signaling the end of the world. In fact, as described here, much of how we understand the anthropocene both conceptually and in practice involves undead entities from the past that will not die, undead traumas that rise up and consume the world, and undead temporalities that can never end. Fifteen original essays by cultural and anthropological experts such as Kyle William Bishop, Nils Bubandt, Johan Höglund, and Steffen Hantke, among others, study the nature of humanity’s ongoing complicated relationship to the environment via the concept of the undead. In doing so, The Anthropocene and the Undead sheds invaluable light on adjacent concepts such as the Capitalocene, Necrocene, Disanthropocene, Post-anthropocene, and the Symbiocene to trace real and imagined trajectories of our more-than-human selves into undead and undying futures.

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Page Count

277

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield

Published Date

ISBN 10

1793625832

ISBN 13

9781793625830

Book's by Steffen Hantke

Monsters in the Machine

Monsters in the Machine

Cloverfield

Cloverfield

Monsters in the Machine

Monsters in the Machine

Cloverfield

Cloverfield

The Anthropocene and the Undead

The Anthropocene and the Undead

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