Terry Gilliam has been making movies for more than forty years, and this volume analyzes a selection of his thrilling directorial work, from his early films with Monty Python to
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnussus (2009). The frenetic genius, auteur, and social critic continues to create indelible images on screen–if, that is, he can get funding for his next project. Featuring eleven original essays from an international group of scholars, this collection argues that when Gilliam makes a movie, he goes to war: against Hollywood caution and convention, against American hyper-consumerism and imperial militarism, against narrative vapidity and spoon-fed mediocrity, and against the brutalizing notion and cruel vision of the ‘American Dream.’
Table of Content
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction, by Jeff Birkenstein, Anna Froula, and Karen Randell
Terry Gilliam Interview, by Karen Randell
1. Steampunked: The Animated Aesthetics of Terry Gilliam in Jabberwocky and Beyond, by Anna Froula
2. Grail Tales: The Preoccupations of Terry Gilliam, by Tony Hood
3. ‘And Now for Something Completely Different’: Pythonic Arthuriana and the Matter of Britain, by Jim Holte
4. The Baron, the King and Terry Gilliam’s Approach to ‘the Fantastic’, by Keith James Hamel
5. The Subversion of Happy Endings in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, by Jeffrey Melton and Eric Sterling
6. The Fissure King: Terry Gilliam’s Psychotic Fantasy Worlds, by Jacqueline Furby
7. ‘You can’t change anything’: Freedom and Control in Twelve Monkeys, by Gerry Canavan
8. ‘It shall be a nation’: Terry Gilliam’s Exploration of National Identity, Between Rationalism and Imagination, by Ofir Haivry
9. ‘Won’t somebody please think of the children?’: The Case for Terry Gilliam’s Tidelands, by Kathryn A. Laity
10. Divorced from Reality: Time Bandits in Search of Fulfilment, by Jeff Birkenstein
11. Celebrity Trauma: The Death of Heath Ledger and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, by Karen Randell
Filmography
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Jeff Birkenstein is associate professor of English at Saint Martin’s University. With Anna Froula and Karen Randell, he is coeditor of Reframing 9/11: Film, Pop Culture, and the ‘War on Terror.’ Anna Froula is assistant professor of film studies at East Carolina University and associate editor of Cinema Journal. She has published on war trauma and gender in such journals as Changing English, Cinema Journal, and The Journal of War and Culture Studies, and in the collection Iraq War Cultures. Karen Randell is professor of film and culture at Southampton Solent University. She is coeditor of five books including The War Body on Screen and Screening the Dark Side of Love: From Euro-Horror to American Cinema. She has also been published in Screen and Cinema Journal.
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