Geoff King
Biographic Data
| ID | 4184833 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Geoff King |
| GIVEN NAMES | Geoff |
| FAMILY NAME | King |
| SIGNATURE | KING G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Institut de physique du globe de Paris |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1517-6936 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 27 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 20 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Seriously Spectacular
The door of a landing craft opens, exposing the troops inside to a hail of machine-gun bullets. An extremely unsteady hand-held camera puts us in the thick of the mayhem on board, blood spots flecking the lens. Soldiers eventually scramble ashore under unremitting gunfire, cowering behind anti-tank obstacles in a surf that soon runs red with blood. Hollywood action movies are relatively free to indulge in all sorts of death and destruction, often…
Quality Hollywood
What defines quality in contemporary Hollywood film? Although often seen as inhospitable to such work, the studios of the blockbuster-franchise era continue to produce features that make claims to higher status. Films such as The Social Network, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Mystic River are marked as distinctive from the mainstream norm. But how exactly, and how are such qualities mixed with more familiar Hollywo…
Indie’s Continuities
Indie's Continuities
Tandis que certains commentateurs ont affirmé que le cinéma indépendant était mort, ou que ce terme avait perdu tout sens car certaines distinctions se sont estompées, cette contribution soutient qu’il s’agit là d’une simplification abusive de la situation, notamment en passant sous silence un ensemble de caractéristiques identifiables qui perdurent tout au long des dernières décennies. L’article s’appuie sur La dernière piste ( Meek’s Cutoff, Ke…
American Independent Cinema
Introduction Part 1 Introduction Chapter 1 Independent of What? Sorting out differences from Hollywood, Janet Staiger Chapter 2 `Independent', `Indie' and `Indiewood': towards a periodisation of contemporary (post-1980) American independent cinema, Yannis Tzioumakis Chapter 3 Thriving or in Permanent Crisis? Discourses on the state of indie cinema, Geoff King Chapter 4 Quirky: buzzword or sensibility?, James MacDowell Part 2 Introduction Chapter …
Becoming Yesterday
The 1960s was a time of considerable musical change that largely established the shape of the Australian popular music industry until the beginning of the digital era. This article explores seismic shifts in Melbourne's music scene that resulted equally from changes in the local industry and musical developments occurring overseas, and the extent to which careers could be built beyond the brief cycle of commercial success, with extensive intervie…
Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders
The first in the field to focus on the key aspects of videogames themselves as a distinctive medium, this is a rich and original read for gamers as well as students and researchers of popular culture internationally, which reviews the passionate gamer/game relationship viz all types of games from “Doom” to “EverQuest”. Videogames now rival Hollywood cinema in popularity and profits and there are huge followings for titles such as “Tomb Raider” or…
American Independent Cinema
The independent sector has produced many of the most distinctive films to have appeared in the US in recent decades. From ‘Sex, Lies and Videotape’ in the 1980s to ‘The Blair Witch Project’ and New Queer Cinema in the 1990s and the ultra-low budget digital video features of the 2000s, indie films have thrived, creating a body of work that stands out from the dominant Hollywood mainstream. But what exactly is ‘independent’ cinema? This, the first …
Spectacular Narratives
The scientist as pioneer hero
The Thicket of Unreality
Concern about the potency of images as against the reality they were thought to pervert or obscure, rather than accurately to map, became acute during the 1950s and 1960s in the West, particularly in the United States. Some years before the term ‘postmodern’ gained any wide currency the growth of media such as television and advertising seemed to some commentators to result in the swamping of a real that became lost beneath a wave of image, fanta…
Mapping the Void
The postmodern experience has been described as a blurring or fragmentation of the outlines on the map. Yet many existing contours have been blocked in all the more boldly. Religious, cultural and political fundamentalisms continue to thrive. Both modernity and postmodernity have, in various accounts, been depicted as a sweeping away of existing cartographies. In Marx and Engels’ classic phrase, adopted by Marshall Berman as the title of his stud…
The Imperialist Map
If the view from space failed to offer any real escape from earth-bound perspectives as far as superpower relations and ideology were concerned, the same might be said of its impact on a broader philosophical debate. A writer in the Soviet journal International Affairs greeted the launch of Sputnik as a reaffirmation of the correctness of Marxist materialism, refuting ‘idealistic theories that the world is “unknowable”, that the objective world d…
Mapping the Frontier
The desert base from which Chuck Yeager flies to break the sound barrier in The Right Stuff is depicted as lying on the outer edges of civilization. The milieu is that of the western frontier settlement. The pilots drink, ritually, in Pancho’s bar, a flyblown inn owned and run by a tough frontier character with a sharp tongue. The surrounding landscape is of Joshua trees, scrub and barren desert. In the film it is all picked out in elegiac, autum…
The Map that Precedes the Territory
The midwestern community of Lake Wobegone in Garrison Keillor’s novel Lake Wobegone Days (1987) does not exist on the map. Mistakes were made by early cartographers working without the benefit of aerial views or modern technology. The map they produced did not quite fit the territory and a section of central Minnesota had to be erased. The map was meant to be provisional but its lines came to be inked in and Lake Wobegone was lost along with the …
World Views
Christian maps of the Middle Ages depicted the world as a flat disc centred on Jerusalem. Geography was subordinated to theology, while a variety of mythical beasts were shown to inhabit the unknown outer reaches. Maps compiled today with the aid of the latest developments in satellite and computer technology appear to offer a far more objective view, precisely delineating the outlines of the world. The difference between these two forms of mappi…
Maps of Meaning
Maps enable us to gain a sense of our place in the world, to orient ourselves. In this way they are like all socio-cultural frameworks: ‘cultures are maps of meaning through which the world is made intelligible.’2 As Edmund Leach suggests: ‘Our whole social environment is map-like. Whenever human beings construct a dwelling or lay out a settlement they do so in a geometrically ordered way. This seems to be as “natural” to Man [sic] as his capacit…
Deconstructing the Map
Maps such as those imposed by the forces of Western imperialism or patriarchy remain active presences on the territory. They cannot simply be wished away in an immediate act of displacement. An initial moment of inversion is required if existing mappings are to be challenged. The dominant map might simply be turned upside-down, our view of the world defamiliarized and its provisional status recognized. The same kind of operation is required to de…
Mapping Reality
Active tectonics and land-use strategies
Tectonic movements - continuously re-moulding the surface of the earth over the inexorable activity of underlying plate motions - are rarely taken into account when assessing landscape change, except as an exotic hazard to human life or a temporary disruption in longer-term trends. Active tectonics also create and sustain landscapes that can be beneficial to human survival. The tectonic history of northwest Greece shows Palaeolithic sites located…
Mapping Reality
Active tectonics and land-use strategies
Tectonic movements - continuously re-moulding the surface of the earth over the inexorable activity of underlying plate motions - are rarely taken into account when assessing landscape change, except as an exotic hazard to human life or a temporary disruption in longer-term trends. Active tectonics also create and sustain landscapes that can be beneficial to human survival. The tectonic history of northwest Greece shows Palaeolithic sites located…
Active tectonics and land-use strategies
Tectonic movements - continuously re-moulding the surface of the earth over the inexorable activity of underlying plate motions - are rarely taken into account when assessing landscape change, except as an exotic hazard to human life or a temporary disruption in longer-term trends. Active tectonics also create and sustain landscapes that can be beneficial to human survival. The tectonic history of northwest Greece shows Palaeolithic sites located…
The Thicket of Unreality
Concern about the potency of images as against the reality they were thought to pervert or obscure, rather than accurately to map, became acute during the 1950s and 1960s in the West, particularly in the United States. Some years before the term ‘postmodern’ gained any wide currency the growth of media such as television and advertising seemed to some commentators to result in the swamping of a real that became lost beneath a wave of image, fanta…
Mapping the Void
The postmodern experience has been described as a blurring or fragmentation of the outlines on the map. Yet many existing contours have been blocked in all the more boldly. Religious, cultural and political fundamentalisms continue to thrive. Both modernity and postmodernity have, in various accounts, been depicted as a sweeping away of existing cartographies. In Marx and Engels’ classic phrase, adopted by Marshall Berman as the title of his stud…
The Imperialist Map
If the view from space failed to offer any real escape from earth-bound perspectives as far as superpower relations and ideology were concerned, the same might be said of its impact on a broader philosophical debate. A writer in the Soviet journal International Affairs greeted the launch of Sputnik as a reaffirmation of the correctness of Marxist materialism, refuting ‘idealistic theories that the world is “unknowable”, that the objective world d…
Mapping the Frontier
The desert base from which Chuck Yeager flies to break the sound barrier in The Right Stuff is depicted as lying on the outer edges of civilization. The milieu is that of the western frontier settlement. The pilots drink, ritually, in Pancho’s bar, a flyblown inn owned and run by a tough frontier character with a sharp tongue. The surrounding landscape is of Joshua trees, scrub and barren desert. In the film it is all picked out in elegiac, autum…
The Map that Precedes the Territory
The midwestern community of Lake Wobegone in Garrison Keillor’s novel Lake Wobegone Days (1987) does not exist on the map. Mistakes were made by early cartographers working without the benefit of aerial views or modern technology. The map they produced did not quite fit the territory and a section of central Minnesota had to be erased. The map was meant to be provisional but its lines came to be inked in and Lake Wobegone was lost along with the …
World Views
Christian maps of the Middle Ages depicted the world as a flat disc centred on Jerusalem. Geography was subordinated to theology, while a variety of mythical beasts were shown to inhabit the unknown outer reaches. Maps compiled today with the aid of the latest developments in satellite and computer technology appear to offer a far more objective view, precisely delineating the outlines of the world. The difference between these two forms of mappi…
Maps of Meaning
Maps enable us to gain a sense of our place in the world, to orient ourselves. In this way they are like all socio-cultural frameworks: ‘cultures are maps of meaning through which the world is made intelligible.’2 As Edmund Leach suggests: ‘Our whole social environment is map-like. Whenever human beings construct a dwelling or lay out a settlement they do so in a geometrically ordered way. This seems to be as “natural” to Man [sic] as his capacit…
Deconstructing the Map
Maps such as those imposed by the forces of Western imperialism or patriarchy remain active presences on the territory. They cannot simply be wished away in an immediate act of displacement. An initial moment of inversion is required if existing mappings are to be challenged. The dominant map might simply be turned upside-down, our view of the world defamiliarized and its provisional status recognized. The same kind of operation is required to de…
Mapping Reality
Spectacular Narratives
The scientist as pioneer hero
American Independent Cinema
The independent sector has produced many of the most distinctive films to have appeared in the US in recent decades. From ‘Sex, Lies and Videotape’ in the 1980s to ‘The Blair Witch Project’ and New Queer Cinema in the 1990s and the ultra-low budget digital video features of the 2000s, indie films have thrived, creating a body of work that stands out from the dominant Hollywood mainstream. But what exactly is ‘independent’ cinema? This, the first …
Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders
The first in the field to focus on the key aspects of videogames themselves as a distinctive medium, this is a rich and original read for gamers as well as students and researchers of popular culture internationally, which reviews the passionate gamer/game relationship viz all types of games from “Doom” to “EverQuest”. Videogames now rival Hollywood cinema in popularity and profits and there are huge followings for titles such as “Tomb Raider” or…
Becoming Yesterday
The 1960s was a time of considerable musical change that largely established the shape of the Australian popular music industry until the beginning of the digital era. This article explores seismic shifts in Melbourne's music scene that resulted equally from changes in the local industry and musical developments occurring overseas, and the extent to which careers could be built beyond the brief cycle of commercial success, with extensive intervie…
American Independent Cinema
Introduction Part 1 Introduction Chapter 1 Independent of What? Sorting out differences from Hollywood, Janet Staiger Chapter 2 `Independent', `Indie' and `Indiewood': towards a periodisation of contemporary (post-1980) American independent cinema, Yannis Tzioumakis Chapter 3 Thriving or in Permanent Crisis? Discourses on the state of indie cinema, Geoff King Chapter 4 Quirky: buzzword or sensibility?, James MacDowell Part 2 Introduction Chapter …
Indie’s Continuities
Indie's Continuities
Tandis que certains commentateurs ont affirmé que le cinéma indépendant était mort, ou que ce terme avait perdu tout sens car certaines distinctions se sont estompées, cette contribution soutient qu’il s’agit là d’une simplification abusive de la situation, notamment en passant sous silence un ensemble de caractéristiques identifiables qui perdurent tout au long des dernières décennies. L’article s’appuie sur La dernière piste ( Meek’s Cutoff, Ke…
Quality Hollywood
What defines quality in contemporary Hollywood film? Although often seen as inhospitable to such work, the studios of the blockbuster-franchise era continue to produce features that make claims to higher status. Films such as The Social Network, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Mystic River are marked as distinctive from the mainstream norm. But how exactly, and how are such qualities mixed with more familiar Hollywo…
Seriously Spectacular
The door of a landing craft opens, exposing the troops inside to a hail of machine-gun bullets. An extremely unsteady hand-held camera puts us in the thick of the mayhem on board, blood spots flecking the lens. Soldiers eventually scramble ashore under unremitting gunfire, cowering behind anti-tank obstacles in a surf that soon runs red with blood. Hollywood action movies are relatively free to indulge in all sorts of death and destruction, often…
Art (13 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Art history (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Literature (7 works) · History (6 works) · Hollywood (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works)