Image Power

Seriality, Iconicity and The Mask of Fu Manchu
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dc.bibliographicCitation.firstPage398en_US
dc.bibliographicCitation.issue4en_US
dc.bibliographicCitation.lastPage417en_US
dc.bibliographicCitation.volume53en_US
dc.contributor.authorMayer, Ruth
dc.date.accessioned2022-07-15T14:16:45Z
dc.date.available2022-07-15T14:16:45Z
dc.date.issued2012en_US
dc.description.abstractThis essay explores the workings of popular seriality with respect to the evolution of an ideologically fraught serial figure – Fu Manchu. It focuses on the function of iconicity in this context, taking its point of departure from the pre-Code film The Mask of Fu Manchu of 1932. The film features Boris Karloff in the title role and forges Fu Manchu's iconic image several decades after the figure's literary inception and ensuing crossmedial gestation. I shall investigate the interrelated processes of serialization and iconization by probing the film's ‘image power’ – its employment of intense visual arrangements and melodramatic tableaux which explode the individual film's diegesis yet figure as nodal instances of serial concatenation. To illustrate the serial dynamics of this development, the essay will finally turn to the popular film serial Drums of Fu Manchu (1940), which improvised freely on the film of 1932, drawing heavily not only on the plotline mapped out almost ten years before, but also on the film's suspense management and narrative structure. Combining various approaches to seriality and the serial, ranging from popular culture studies, semiotics, film studies, to political theory, I argue that powerful ideological figurations (such as the imagery of the yellow peril) are serial in nature.en_US
dc.identifier.doi10.1093/screen/hjs036
dc.identifier.urihttp://resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl?fidaac-11858/2162
dc.language.isoengen_US
dc.relation.issn0036-9543en_US
dc.relation.journalScreenen_US
dc.rightsL::CC BY-NC 4.0en_US
dc.subject.ddcddc:700en_US
dc.subject.fieldamericanstudiesen_US
dc.subject.fieldmediastudiesen_US
dc.subject.fieldfilmstudiesen_US
dc.subject.fieldculturalstudiesen_US
dc.subject.fieldpopularcultureen_US
dc.titleImage Poweren_US
dc.title.alternativeSeriality, Iconicity and The Mask of Fu Manchuen_US
dc.typearticleen_US
dc.type.versionacceptedVersionen_US
dspace.entity.typePublication
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