Amy Rust

Amy Rust

Type
Dissertation Fellow
Department
Rhetoric
2007-08

The current events and new cinematographic technologies of the sixties come together in Amy Rust’s dissertation in Rhetoric and Film Studies, Passionate Detachment: Technologies of Vision and Violence in American Cinema, 1967-1974. In the permissive climate of post-Code Hollywood, new technologies such as multiple-speed montage and freeze frames allowed for a newly-graphic depiction of violence. The excesses of these films, Rust argues, must be understood in light of the public’s desire to “see more” in the era of Vietnam, the civil rights and women’s movements, and Watergate.