Set against the backdrop of New York City, the narrative intertwines a fantasy adventure featuring three women embodying The Amazons in Central Park with poignant reflections on real-life female figures who have shaped the author’s journey. Richard Dyer explores themes of identity, empowerment, and the impact of women on personal growth, inviting readers to contemplate their own aspirations and influences.
La dolce vita has been a phenomenon since before it was made, a scandal in the making and on release and a reference point ever since. This study will consider each of these aspects of the film - phenomenon, document, aesthetic - and argue that they are connected
Brief Encounter (1945), adapted from Noel Coward's play Still Life, is a classic of British cinema – a tale of impossible love between a married woman and a man she meets while waiting for a train. Though it's a film made by men, it is the woman's voice we hear recounting the story of a small-town love affair and her renunciation of it. In his lucid analysis of the film, Richard Dyer explores how its depiction of powerful feelings kept under wraps is a definitive example of a particularly English style of emotional restraint, but also how it spoke to a gay audience for whom this subject – forbidden love between ordinary people – had a special resonance. This reissued edition features original cover artwork by Rania Moudaress and a substantial new foreword that revisits the film and recent readings of it, covering its enduring legacy and adaptation for theatre and television.
German-born photographer Matthias Schaller discovered the architectural phenomenon of the controfacciata (counter-façade)--a sort of hall or corridor built out from the first floor of a building--while exploring the palaces along the edges of Venice's canals. From 2004 to 2007, he centered his lens on the twilit windows inside these spaces, which imbue the musty elegance of the busts, furniture and paintings that fill them with an ethereal glow, while simultaneously muting all color. In this series, made in the quarter between Ponte di Rialto and Piazza San Marco, Schaller captures the faded grandeur of earlier days, offering tantalizing glimpses of passages that lead to unknown rooms and silent histories. The photographs were made from a direct elevation perspective, highlighting the length of space between Schaller's camera and the light-flooded windows that lead to the water's edge. Controfacciata presents an original view of this city, imbued with the haunting tension and the bittersweet paradox that is Venice.
The second edition offers a comprehensive analysis of culture, exploring a wide range of topics from royalty to serial killers. Dyer delves into themes of political correctness and examines the influence of films, providing insights into the complexities of societal norms and behaviors. This edition enriches the discussion with updated perspectives, making it a thought-provoking read for those interested in cultural critique.
White people are not literally or symbolically white; nor are they uniquely virtuous and pure. Racial imagery and racial representation are central to the organisation of the contemporary world but, while there are many studies of images of black and Asian people, whiteness is an invisible racial position. At the level of racial representation, whites are not of a certain race. They are just the human race, a 'colour' against which other ethnicities are always examined. In White , Richard Dyer looks beyond the apparent unremarkability of whiteness and argues for the importance of analysing images of white people. Dyer traces the representation of whiteness by whites in Western visual culture, focusing on the mass media of photography, advertising, fine art, cinema and television. Dyer examines the representation of whiteness and the white body in the contexts of Christianity, 'race' and colonialism. In a series of absorbing case studies, he discusses the representations of whiteness in muscle-man action cinema, from Italian 'peplum' movies to the Tarzan and Rambo series; shows the construction of whiteness in photography and cinema in the lighting of white and black faces, and analyses the representation of white women in end-of-empire fictions such as The Jewel in the Crown , and traces the disturbing association of whiteness with death, in vampire narratives and dystopian films such as Blade Runner and the Aliens trilogy.