Blossoms and Blood

<p>From his film festival debut <i>Hard Eight</i> to ambitious studio epics <i>Boogie Nights</i> <i>Magnolia</i> and <i>There Will Be Blood</i> Paul Thomas Anderson's unique cinematic vision focuses on postmodern excess and media culture. In <i>Blossoms and Blood</i> Jason Sperb studies the filmmaker's evolving aesthetic and its historical context to argue that Anderson's films create new often ambivalent narratives of American identity in a media-saturated world.</p> <p><i>Blossoms and Blood</i> explores Anderson's films in relation to the aesthetic and economic shifts within the film industry and to America's changing social and political sensibilities since the mid-1990s. Sperb provides an auteur study with important implications for film history media studies cultural studies and gender studies. He charts major themes in Anderson's work such as stardom self-reflexivity and masculinity and shows how they are indicative of trends in late twentieth-century American culture. One of the first books to focus on Anderson's work <i>Blossoms and Blood</i> reveals the development of an under-studied filmmaker attuned to the contradictions of a postmodern media culture.</p>