The Epic Film in World Culture

From Ridley Scott's Gladiator to John Woo's Red Cliff, from Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, the epic has reemerged as a major form in contemporary cinema. The Epic Film in World Culture explores new critical approaches to contemporary as well as older epic films, drawing on ideas from cultural studies, historiography, classics, and film studies. Many of the fifteen original essays in the volume are animated by the central paradox of the epic genre, the contradiction between the traditional messages embedded within epic form---the birth of a nation, the emergence of a people, the fulfillment of a heroic destiny---and the long history of the epic film as an international, global narrative apparatus not bound by nation or ethnicity. Truly international in scope, the contributors focus on issues including spectacle, imagined community, national identity, family melodrama, and masculinity that are central to epics from Hong Kong to Hollywood and beyond.