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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema > Film theory & criticism
Whether you judge by box office receipts, industry awards, or
critical accolades, science fiction films are the most popular
movies now being produced and distributed around the world. Nor is
this phenomenon new. Sci-fi filmmakers and audiences have been
exploring fantastic planets, forbidden zones, and lost continents
ever since George Melies' 1902 film A Trip to the Moon. In this
highly entertaining and knowledgeable book, film historian and pop
culture expert Douglas Brode picks the one hundred greatest sci-fi
films of all time. Brode's list ranges from today's blockbusters to
forgotten gems, with surprises for even the most informed fans and
scholars. He presents the movies in chronological order, which
effectively makes this book a concise history of the sci-fi film
genre. A striking (and in many cases rare) photograph accompanies
each entry, for which Brode provides a numerical rating, key
credits and cast members, brief plot summary, background on the
film's creation, elements of the moviemaking process, analysis of
the major theme(s), and trivia. He also includes fun outtakes,
including his top ten lists of Fifties sci-fi movies, cult sci-fi,
least necessary movie remakes, and "so bad they're great"
classics-as well as the ten worst sci-fi movies ("those highly
ambitious films that promised much and delivered nil"). So climb
aboard spaceship Brode and journey to strange new worlds from
Metropolis (1927) to Guardians of the Galaxy (2014).
Beyond the Silver Screen tells the history of women's engagement
with filmmaking and film culture in twentieth-century Australia. In
doing so, it explores an array of often hidden ways women in
Australia have creatively worked with film. Beyond the Silver
Screen examines film in a broad sense, considering feature
filmmaking alongside government documentaries and political films.
It also focuses on women's work regulating films and supporting
film culture through organising film societies and workshops to
encourage female filmmakers. As such, it tells a new narrative of
Australian film history. Beyond the Silver Screen reveals the
variety of roles film has in Australian society. It presents film
as a medium of creative and political expression, which women have
engaged with in diverse ways throughout the twentieth century.
Gender roles and gendered ideologies operating within society at
large have influenced women's opportunities to work with film and
how their filmwork is recognised. Beyond the Silver Screen shows
women's sustained involvement with film is best understood as
political and cultural action.
This book examines American screen culture and its power to create
and sustain values. Looking specifically at the ways in which
nostalgia colors the visions of American life, essays explore
contemporary American ideology as it is created and sustained by
the screen. Nostalgia is omnipresent, selling a version of America
that arguably never existed. Current socio-cultural challenges are
played out onscreen and placed within the historical milieu through
a nostalgic lens which is tempered by contemporary conservatism.
Essays reveal not only the visual catalog of recognizable motifs
but also how these are used to temper the uncertainty of
contemporary crises. Media covered spans from 1939's Gone with the
Wind, to Stranger Things, The Americans, Twin Peaks, the Fallout
franchise and more.
Reality, Magic, and Other Lies: Fairy-Tale Film Truths explores
connections and discontinuities between lies and truths in
fairy-tale films to directly address the current politics of fairy
tale and reality. Since the Enlightenment, notions of magic and
wonder have been relegated to the realm of the fanciful, with
science and reality understood as objective and true. But the
skepticism associated with postmodern thought and critiques from
diverse perspectives - including but not limited to anti-racist,
decolonial, disability, and feminist theorizing - renders this
binary distinction questionable. Further, the precise content of
magic and science has shifted through history and across location.
Pauline Greenhill offers the idea that fairy tales, particularly
through the medium of film, often address those distinctions by
making magic real and reality magical. Reality, Magic, and Other
Lies consists of an introduction, two sections, and a conclusion,
with the first section, "Studio, Director, and Writer Oeuvres",
addressing how fairy-tale films engage with and challenge
scientific or factual approaches to truth and reality, drawing on
films from the stop-motion animation company LAIKA, the independent
filmmaker Tarsem, and the storyteller and writer Fred Pellerin. The
second section, "Themes and Issues from Three Fairy Tales", shows
fairy-tale film magic exploring real-life issues and experiences
using the stories of "Hansel and Gretel", "The Juniper Tree\2, and
"Cinderella". The concluding section, "Moving Forward?" suggests
that the key to facing the reality of contemporary issues is to
invest in fairy tales as a guide, rather than a means of escape, by
gathering your community and never forgetting to believe. Reality,
Magic, and Other Lies-which will be of interest to film and
fairy-tale scholars and students-considers the ways in which fairy
tales in their mediated forms deconstruct the world and offer
alternative views for peaceful, appropriate, just, and
intersectionally multifaceted encounters with humans, non-human
animals, and the rest of the environment.
Focusing on films from Chile since 2000 and bringing together
scholars from South and North America, Chilean Cinema in the
Twenty-First-Century World is the first English-language book since
the 1970s to explore this small, yet significant, Latin American
cinema. The volume questions the concept of "national cinemas" by
examining how Chilean film dialogues with trends in genre-based,
political, and art-house cinema around the world, while remaining
true to local identities. Contributors place current Chilean cinema
in a historical context and expand the debate concerning the
artistic representation of recent political and economic
transformations in contemporary Chile. Chilean Cinema in the
Twenty-First-Century World opens up points of comparison between
Chile and the ways in which other national cinemas are negotiating
their place on the world stage. The book is divided into five
parts. "Mapping Theories of Chilean Cinema in the Worl"" examines
Chilean filmmakers at international film festivals, and political
and affective shifts in the contemporary Chilean documentary. "On
the Margins of Hollywood: Chilean Genre Flicks" explores on the
emergence of Chilean horror cinema and the performance of martial
arts in Chilean films. "Other Texts and Other Lands: Intermediality
and Adaptation Beyond Chile(an Cinema)" covers the intermedial
transfer from Chilean literature to transnational film and from
music video to film. "Migrations of Gender and Genre" contrasts
films depicting transgender people in Chile and beyond.
"Politicized Intimacies, Transnational Affects: Debating
(Post)memory and History" analyzes representations of Chile's
traumatic past in contemporary documentary and approaches mourning
as a politicized act in postdictatorship cultural production.
Intended for scholars, students, and researchers of film and Latin
American studies, Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World
evaluates an active and emergent film movement that has yet to
receive sufficient attention in global cinema studies.
When the head of Columbia Pictures, David Begelman, got caught forging Cliff Robertson's name on a $10,000 check, it seemed, at first, like a simple case of embezzlement. It wasn't. The incident was the tip of the iceberg, the first hint of a scandal that shook Hollywood and rattled Wall Street. Soon powerful studio executives were engulfed in controversy; careers derailed; reputations died; and a ruthless, take-no-prisoners corporate power struggle for the world-famous Hollywood dream factory began. First published in 1982, this now classic story of greed and lies in Tinseltown appears here with a stunning final chapter on Begelman's post-Columbia career as he continued to dazzle and defraud...until his last hours in a Hollywood hotel room, where his story dramatically and poignantly would end.
In September 1941, a handful of isolationist senators set out to
tarnish Hollywood for warmongering. The United States was largely
divided on the possibility of entering the European War, yet the
immigrant moguls in Hollywood were acutely aware of the conditions
in Europe. After Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), the
gloves came off. Warner Bros. released the first directly anti-Nazi
film in 1939 with Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Other studios followed
with such films as The Mortal Storm (MGM), Man Hunt (Fox), The Man
I Married (Fox), and The Great Dictator (United Artists). While
these films represented a small percentage of Hollywood's output,
senators took aim at the Jews in Hollywood who were supposedly
"agitating us for war" and launched an investigation that resulted
in Senate Resolution 152. The resolution was aimed at both radio
and movies that "have been extensively used for propaganda purposes
designed to influence the public mind in the direction of
participation in the European War". When the Senate approved a
subcommittee to investigate the intentions of these films, studio
bosses were ready and willing to stand up against the government to
defend their beloved industry. What followed was a complete
embarrassment of the United States Senate and a large victory for
Hollywood as well as freedom of speech. Many works of American film
history only skim the surface of the 1941 investigation of
Hollywood. In Hollywood Hates Hitler! Jew-Baiting, Anti-Nazism, and
the Senate Investigation into Warmongering in Motion Pictures,
author Chris Yogerst examines the years leading up to and through
the Senate Investigation into Motion Picture War Propaganda,
detailing the isolationist senators' relationship with the America
First movement. Through his use of primary documents and lengthy
congressional records, Yogerst paints a picture of the
investigation's daily events both on Capitol Hill and in the
national press.
Examines the role that parenting, as a theme and practice, plays in
film and media cultures. Mothers of Invention: Film, Media, and
Caregiving Labor constructs a feminist genealogy that foregrounds
the relationship between acts of production on the one hand and
reproduction on the other. In this interdisciplinary collection,
editors So Mayer and Corinn Columpar bring together film and media
studies with parenting studies to stake out a field, or at least a
conversation, that is thick with historical and theoretical
dimension and invested in cultural and methodological plurality. In
four sections and sixteen contributions, the manuscript reflects on
how caregiving shapes the work of filmmakers, how parenting is
portrayed on screen, and how media contributes to radical new forms
of care and expansive definitions of mothering. Featuring an
exciting array of approaches-including textual analysis, industry
studies, ethnographic research, production histories, and personal
reflection-Mothers of Invention is a multifaceted collection of
feminist work that draws on the methods of both the humanities and
the social sciences, as well as the insights borne of both
scholarship and lived experience. Grounding this inquiry is
analysis of a broad range of texts with global reach-from the films
Bashu, The Little Stranger (Bahram Beyzai, 1989), Prevenge (Alice
Lowe, 2016), and A Deal with the Universe (Jason Barker, 2018) to
the television series Top of the Lake(2013-2017) and Jane the
Virgin (2014-2019), among others-as well as discussion of the
creative practices, be they related to production, pedagogy,
curation, or critique, employed by a wide variety of film and media
artists and/or scholars. Mothers of Invention demonstrates how the
discourse of parenting and caregiving allows the discipline to
expand its discursive frameworks to address, and redress, current
theoretical, political, and social debates about the interlinked
futures of work and the world. This collection belongs on the
bookshelves of students and scholars of cinema and media studies,
feminist and queer media studies, labor studies, filmmaking and
production, and cultural studies.
How do we approach a figure like Mario Bava, a once obscure figure
promoted to cult status? This book takes a new look at Italy's
'maestro of horror' but also uses his films to address a broader
set of concerns. What issues do his films raise for film
authorship, given that several of them were released in different
versions and his contributions to others were not always credited?
How might he be understood in relation to genre, one of which he is
sometimes credited with having pioneered? This volume addresses
these questions through a thorough analysis of Bava's shifting
reputation as a stylist and genre pioneer and also discusses the
formal and narrative properties of a filmography marked by an
emphasis on spectacle and atmosphere over narrative coherence and
the ways in which his lauded cinematic style intersects with
different production contexts. Featuring new analysis of cult
classics like Kill, Baby ... Kill (1966) and Five Dolls for an
August Moon (1970), Mario Bava: The Artisan as Italian Horror
Auteur sheds light on a body of films that were designed to be
ephemeral but continue to fascinate us today.
This book argues for a durational cinema that is distinct from slow
cinema, and outlines the history of its three main waves: the New
York avant-garde of the 1960s, the European art cinema in the years
after 1968, and the international cinema of gallery spaces as well
as film festivals since the 1990s. Figures studied include Andy
Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Chantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras, Claude
Lanzmann, James Benning, Kevin Jerome Everson, Lav Diaz, and Wang
Bing.Durational cinema is predominantly minimal, but has from the
beginning also included a more encompassing or encyclopedic kind of
filmmaking. Durational cinema is characteristically
representational, and converges on certain topics (the Holocaust,
deindustrialization, the experience of the working class and other
marginalized people), but has no one meaning, signifying
differently at different moments and in different hands. Warhol's
durational cinema of subtraction is quite different from Jacobs's
durational cinema of social disgust, while Lav Diaz' durational
sublime is quite different from Kevin Jerome Everson's unblinking
studies of African-American working people.
This book retells the history of Israeli film in the 1960s and
1970s in sex scenes. Through close readings of the first sex scenes
in mainstream Israeli movies from this period, it explores the
cultural and social contexts in which these movies were made. More
specifically, it discusses how notions of collective identity,
individual agency, and the public and private spheres are inscribed
into and negotiated in sex scenes, especially in light of the
historical events that marked these decades. This study thus pushes
away from the traditional academic perception of Israeli film and
opens up new ways of understanding how it has developed in recent
decades. It draws on a growing international body of academic
literature on the cinematic representation of sex in order to
illuminate the particularities of the Israeli context in the 1960s
and 1970s. Apart from film scholars and scholars of Israeli film,
this study also addresses readers interested in Israeli cultural
history more broadly.
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