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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema > Film theory & criticism
Imagine you learn that your lover has had you erased from their memory and, in a moment of despair, you have your lover erased from your memory too. Imagine that as you lose your recollections of the bad times together, you realise that you don't want to forget them after all. That's the premise for Charlie Kaufman's Oscar-winning script for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. An instant cult classic, the film's distinctive ambiguity and tangled narrative demands audience engagement and repeated watching. Delving into the central themes of the film, Andrew M. Butler foregrounds its play with genre and audience expectations, its psychoanalytic underpinnings and its debt to Philip K. Dick. Also examining its production processes, Butler explores the against-type casting of Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet in lead roles and the intertwined careers of Kaufman and director Michel Gondry. This special edition features original cover artwork by Patricia Derks.
This book presents an incisive analysis of how fundamental issues in education are portrayed in film. Focusing on recent films, the author draws on a wide range of educational thinkers and fields of research to examine issues not discussed before. Resnick challenges our assumptions and enriches our general knowledge on critical issues like funding for arts education, what we mean by successful civic education, and the educational value of sports. This project, which includes topics such as the gender gap in civic education, religious education, and what animated films have to say about human education, can serve as a "viewer's guide" to selected educational issues in film and may spur the intelligent use of films in public debate.
Stanley Kubrick died on 7 March 1999 at his Hertfordshire home, having finished the editing of his last film. Eyes Wide Shut was released later that year. Adapted from Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 Viennese novel Dream Story, relocated and updated to contemporary Manhattan, Eyes Wide Shut stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a prosperous couple whose marriage is tested in the aftermath a series of sinister events. The film baffled many of its first audiences. It had all the lavish attention to detail of a Kubrick film but it seemed slow, enigmatic, too much of a dream. Michel Chion's extraordinary study of Eyes Wide Shut makes the case that it is one of Kubrick's masterpieces and a fitting testament. To appreciate this, though, it is necessary to look at what happens on the screen without bringing preconceptions to bear. The film needs to be taken at face value. Looked at this way, Eyes Wide Shut reveals itself to be a deeply moving film about characters who are not so different from real people, a film about life in which questions of meaning and motive lose their value.
This book proposes new methodological tools and approaches in order to tease out and elicit the different facets of urban fragmentation through the medium of cinema and the moving image, as a contribution to our understanding of cities and their topographies. In doing so it makes a significant contribution to the literature in the growing field of cartographic cinema and urban cinematics, by charting the many trajectories and points of contact between film and its topographical context. Under the influence of new technologies, the opening and the availability of previously unexplored archives but also the contribution of new scholars with novel approaches in addition to new work by experienced academics, Cinematic Urban Geographies demonstrates how we can reread the cinematic past with a view to construct the urban present and anticipate its future.
"A New Guide to Italian Cinema,"" "with co-author Carlo Celli, is a complete reworking and update of Marga Cottino-Jones' popular "A Student's Guide to Italian Film "(1983, 1993). This guide retains earlier editions' interest in renowned films and directors but is also attentive to popular cinema, the films which actually achieved box office success among the Italian public. The "Guide" introduces the Italian cinema not just as a 20th century phenomenon but as an expression of the deeper roots of Italy's historic, cultural and literary past. Chapters offer historical timelines and commentary on political and cultural events and trends, followed by discussion of the Italian cinema industry and key films. Appendices offer guides to writing about film, statistical data of Italian box office history and short biographies and filmographies of important directors. The aim of the book is to provide the cinephile, student, teacher, or fan with a guide where points of interest may be identified and studied with clarity.
When a writer produces a novel that is both denounced as Communist
propaganda and extolled as the ideal travelling companion for
hearty venture capitalists looking to conquer the untapped markets
of Southeast Asia, one would expect to see a troupe of
post-modernist scholars scrambling to be the first to point out the
textual ironies at play.
Since the golden era of silent movies stars have been described as screen gods, goddesses and idols. But why did Hollywood, that most modernity industry, first look back to antiquity as it built its stars? This book presents a unique insight into the origins of screen stardom in the 1910s and 20s to explore how the myth and iconography of ancient Greece and Rome was deployed to create modern Apollo and Venuses of the screen. Drawing from extensive research into studio production files, fan-magazines and the popular reception of stars in America and Britain, this study explores how the sculptural gods of the past enabled the flickering shadows on the screen to seem more present and alive. Classicism permitted films to encode different sexualities for their audience, and present stars who embodied traditions of the Grand Tour for a post-war context where the ruins of past civilisations had become strangely resonant. The book presents detailed discussion of leading players such as Ramon Novarro, Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino, and major films such as Ben-Hur and Flesh and the Devil to show how classicism enabled star discourse to transform actors into icons. This is the story of how Olympus moved to Hollywood to divinise stars as icons for a modern age and defined a model of stardom that is still with us today.
How does film affect the way we understand crises of the body and mind and how does it manifest other kinds of crises levelled at the spectator? This book offers vital scholarly analysis of the embodied nature of film viewing and the ways in which film deals with the question of loss, the healing body and its material registering of trauma.
This bio-bibliography was designed to present a combined biographical, critical, and bibliographical portrait of the Marx Brothers. It examines their significance in film comedy in particular, and as popular culture figures in general. The book is divided into five sections, beginning with a biography which explores the public and private sides of the Marx Brothers. The second section is concerned with the influences of the Marx Brothers as icons of anti-establishment comedy, as contributors to developments in American comedy, as early examples of "saturation comedy," and as a crucial link between silent films and the "talkies." Three original articles, two by Groucho and one by Gummo, comprise part three. A bibliographical essay, which assesses key reference materials and research collections, is followed by two bibliographical checklists. Appendices containing a chronological biography with a timeline, a filmography, and a selected discography complete the work.
This is the first full-length exploration of the relationship between Gothic fiction and Modernism in fiction and film. The Gothic's fascination with images of the fragmented self is echoed in the Modernist concern with the psyche and the paranoia of the everyday. The contributors explore how the Gothic influences arange of writers including James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, May Sinclair, Elizabeth Bowen, and Djuna Barnes.
Can the stories people tell influence the way they see the world? This book seeks to address that question through a study of the viability of movie making as a critical pedagogy activity. Positioned at the intersection of education and communication for social change, it explores the relationship between the generation of subjective knowledge through storytelling and analysis, and systemic change. Central to the book is a case study from Nepal. By using video as the action element and analytical material of coursework, youth participants generated a new critical awareness, engendered by themes arising from group discussion. Through the analysis of these themes participants initiated an emergence known as conscientization. Led by two critical educators, participants used the production, screening, and analysis of their own movies to propel the course, or praxis, forward. This book seeks to inform the practice of critical pedagogy both practically and theoretically, and also offers a contribution to the fields of participatory action-research and communication for social change.
Lambasted by critics as a sign of censorial failure and even social decline, the horror subgenre known as 'torture porn' has generated a great deal of controversy during the last decade. Although torture porn films such as Saw, Hostel and The Human Centipede were highly successful and have become cultural touchstones, the term 'torture porn' remains synonymous with misogyny, obscenity and moral depravity. Arguing primarily in defense of these popular torture-themed horror films, this is the first book to offer a detailed critical examination of the 'torture porn' phenomenon, outlining the subgenre's lineage, scrutinizing responses to the sub-genre, and offering narrative analyses of the sub-genre's central box-office hits as well as the multitude of independent direct-to-DVD films that have followed in their footsteps. In doing so, this book seeks to unpick the relationships between 'porn', 'horror', 'immorality', and 'extremity'.
This essay collection offers a new approach to the representation of Paris on screen. Bringing together a wide range of renowned French and Anglophone specialists in film, television, history, architecture and literature, Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau introduce, challenge and extend ideas about the city as the locus of screen modernity. Through a range of concrete and historically-specific case studies, this unique text demonstrates how the cinematic city of Paris now constitutes a major archive of French cultural history and memory. This is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, French Studies, European or Transnational Studies, Visual Studies, and Urban Studies. Fresh and engaging, this fascinating text will also appeal to lovers of French cinema and the capital city that comprises its major home.
The essays in A Moving Picture Feast discuss every Hollywood film made from a Hemingway work and represent the most diverse response yet to the Hemingway-Hollywood relationship. The contributors examine the popular public image Hollywood created of Hemingway the man and offer a provocative look at the esthetic relationship between fiction and cinema. They criticize the films themselves as art, in many cases with scene-by-scene analysis, and explore the process by which films are adapted from novels and short stories. Their research includes inside decisions made by producers and directors that affected the final versions of specific films. With its valuable bibliography, listing nearly 400 articles, reviews, and screenplay typescripts, A Moving Picture Feast will be an important resource for film buffs as well as any student or scholar of Hemingway. Oliver's collection of 15 articles about film versions of Ernest Heminway's works conducts an interesting and worthwhile conversation about the possible relationships between art in one media and the work it inspires in another. "Choice" This collection of 15 chapters by Hemingway film scholars discusses every Hollywood film made from a Hemingway work and represents the most diverse response yet to the Hemingway-Hollywood relationship. The contributors go beyond discussing the failure of the film medium to be worthy of Hemingway to criticize the films themselves as art and in one case with scene-by-scene analysis. They explore the process by which films are adapted from novels and short stories. Their research includes inside decisions made by producers and directors that affected the final versions of specific films. Their analysis is of diverse subjects--from the dichotomy of Hemingway as private person and celebrity, to the prevailing film morality of revising original stories to fit Hollywood standards. This important addition to the small body of literature on Hemingway films will shed light on a neglected area of Hemingway studies. With its valuable bibliography listing nearly 400 titles--articles, reviews, and screenplay typescripts--"A Moving Picture Feast" will be an important resource for film buffs as well as for any student or scholar of Hemingway. The book is divided into three sections. The chapters in the first section explore the similarities and vast differences between Hemingway's style and general cinematic techniques. The contributors examine the popular public image Hollywood created of Hemingway and offer a provocative look at the esthetic relationship between fiction and cinema. The chapters in the second section examine the films made from Hemingway novels. One chapter compares three different versions of "To Have and Have Not"; another discusses Hemingway's extensive collaboration on the documentary film "The Spanish Earth." The third section examines the films made from the short stories. This section includes a compelling discussion of film noir and how this technique applies to the film versions of "The KillerS." Another chapter offers a fascinating comparison of the esthetics of the short stories of "In Our Time" and the classic D. W. Griffith film "The Birth of a Nation."
A critical survey of Hollywood film musicals from the 1960s to the present. This book examines how, in the post-studio system era, cultural, industrial and stylistic circumstances transformed this once happy-go-lucky genre into one both fluid and cynical enough to embrace the likes of "Rocky Horror" and pave the way for "Cannibal!" and "Moulin Rouge!."
Scholarly approaches to the relationship between literature and film, ranging from the traditional focus upon fidelity to more recent issues of intertextuality, all contain a significant blind spot: a lack of theoretical and methodological attention to adaptation as an historical and transnational phenomenon. This book argues for a historically informed approach to American popular culture that reconfigures the classically defined adaptation phenomenon as a form of transnational reception. Focusing on several case studies- including the films Sense and Sensibility (1995) and The Portrait of a Lady (1997), and the classics The Third Man (1949) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)-the author demonstrates the ways adapted literary works function as social and cultural events in history and how these become important sites of cultural negotiation and struggle.
This book explores the ideas of the neglected English aesthetician
and art historian, Adrian Stokes. Stokes's Kleinian-based concepts
of carving and modelling are analyzed in relation to film, arguing
that they replace the traditional notions of realism and montage in
film theory and provide a set of aesthetics which encompasses
mainstream and "art" cinema. This Kleinian psychoanalytic approach
is applied to the films of Eisenstein, Rossellini, Hitchcock and
others.
Social realism has been a vital element of British culture over the
past seventy years, yet it has not gained anywhere near the
critical attention its impact warrants. It can be a highly
responsive genre, one that confronts its contemporaneous social,
economic and political contexts with visceral immediacy, while at
the same time retaining a focus on the individual, the domestic and
the private. This fascinating analysis of the intertwined histories
and legacies of British social realism across disciplines
reveals
A must-read for scholars of visuality, gender and sexuality.
Denisoff's study explores the ways in which gothic, sensation and
"noir" literature and cinema manipulated common notions of the
visual in order to challenge sex- and gender-based assumptions that
marginalized certain people and desires. Addressing authors and
directors such as Mary Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, Vernon
Lee, Virigina Woolf, Daphne du Maurier, Alfred Hitchcock, Otto
Preminger and Fritz Lang, this study shows that what a society gets
is often what it tries hardest not to see. |
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