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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema > Film theory & criticism
This book is about the emigration, film careers and socio-cultural
influence of British filmmakers moving to Hollywood in the studio
era. It deals with some of the unknown and neglected emigres, as
well as the leading lights who founded, initiated and ensured that
American film became the leading national cinema of the twentieth
century.
The unification of the two German states changed the geo-political, economic, social, and cultural borders of Germany and Europe. This volume in three parts researches how East German and West German authors and directors reacted to these radical changes. The basis of this research are fictional, autobiographical, journalistic, and cinematic texts. The authors and directors presented in this volume not only comment on the changes which they themselves experienced but also voice their changing attitudes to their own past within the divided Germany.
In "Selfless Cinema?", Sarah Cooper maps out the power relations of making, and viewing, documentaries in ethical terms. The ethics of filmmaking are often examined on largely legalistic terms, dominated by issues of consent, responsibility, and participants' or film-makers' rights, but Cooper approaches four representative French film-makers - Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Raymond Depardon, and Agnes Varda - in a far less juridical way, drawing on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. She argues that, in spite of Levinas' iconoclastic, anti-ocular thinking, his concept of visage is richly applicable to film, and especially to documentary.
Martin Dines explores the relationship between the physical & metaphorical spaces of suburbia & the evolution of modern gay identities across a range of British & American film & fiction, looking at the work of Dennis Cooper, Quentin Crisp, Todd Haynes, Christopher Isherwood, Kevin Killian, David Leavitt, Oscar Moore & Edmund White.
Before the film industry arrived, Hollywood was filled with quaint bungalows, millionaires' estates, and churches dedicated to teetotalism. Movies shattered Hollywood's tranquillity, and brought wealth, fame and glamorous movie stars. The giants of the movie industry invented klieg-lighted movie premieres and the Academy Awards in Hollywood. You can go beyond the star-studded surface to the district's days of union busting, gangsters, and scandal, foreshadowing Hollywood's seedy decline. The book concludes with Hollywood's redevelopment that continues today. The book features the famous faces and places that made the town legendary, offering a unique perspective on celebrity nightlife and the behind-the-scenes stories of day-to-day life. Lavishly illustrated with over 800 vintage images from the author's private collection, "The Story of Hollywood" brings new insights to readers with a passion for Hollywood and its place in the history of film, radio, and television.
What can film tell us about enjoyment and sexual difference? Can cinematic fiction be more Real than reality? Fabio Vighi looks at Jacques Lacans theory of sexuality alongside some of the best-known works of European cinema, including films by Fellini, Truffaut, Antonioni and Bergman.
"Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media" contextualizes historical films in an innovative way--not only relating them to the history of cinema, but also to premodern and early modern media. This philological approach to the (pre)history of cinema engages both old media such as scrolls, illuminated manuscripts, the Bayeux Tapestry, and new digital media such as DVDs, HD DVDs, and computers. Burt examines the uncanny repetitions that now fragment films into successively released alternate cuts and extras (footnote tracks, audiocommentaries, and documentaries) that (re)structure and reframe historical films, thereby presenting new challenges to historicist criticism and film theory. With a double focus on recursive narrative frames and the cinematic paratexts of medieval and early modern film, this book calls our attention to strange, sometimes opaque phenomena in film and literary theory that have previously gone unrecognized.
Environmentalism and ecology are areas of rapid growth in academia and society at large. Screening Nature is the first comprehensive work that groups together the wide range of concerns in the field of cinema and the environment, and what could be termed "posthuman cinema." It comprises key readings that highlight the centrality of nature and nonhuman animals to the cinematic medium, and to the language and institution of film. The book offers a fresh and timely intervention into contemporary film theory through a focus on the nonhuman environment as principal register in many filmic texts. Screening Nature offers an extensive resource for teachers, undergraduate students, and more advanced scholars on the intersections between the natural world and the worlds of film. It emphasizes the cross-cultural and geographically diverse relevance of the topic of cinema ecology.
The Mad Max Effect provides an in-depth analysis of the Mad Max series, and how it began as an inventive concoction of a number of influences from a range of exploitation genres (including the biker movie, the revenge film, and the car chase cinema of the 1970s), to eventually inspiring a fresh cycle of international low budget 'road warrior' movies that appeared on home video in the 1980s. The Mad Max Effect is the first detailed academic study of the most famous and celebrated post-apocalypse film series, and examines how a humble Australian action movie came from the cultural margins of exploitation cinema to have a profound impact on the broader media landscape.
Films are full of words on the screen. There are letters that come in the post, written and printed papers, and epitaphs. They can be declarations of love, or the words that tell us where we are or what is happening, varying from the most intimate confessions to straightforward signs. We do not often pause to think about our own interpretation of them, yet our response to reading and writing can be an important part of how we understand films. This book looks in detail at five films - Letter from an Unknown Woman; All This, and Heaven Too; The Man who Shot Liberty Valance; Into the Wild; and The Reader - and reveals how words work on screen, and the importance of literacy in their worlds. It sheds new light on some classic films and explores the uses of this form of expression in the work of modern film makers.
Boaz Hagin carries out a philosophical examination of the issue of death as it is represented and problematized in Hollywood cinema of the classical era (1920s-1950s) and in later mainstream films, looking at four major genres: the Western, the gangster film, melodrama and the war film.
From the perspective of cultural conservatives, Hollywood movies are cesspools of vice, exposing impressionable viewers to pernicious sexually-permissive messages. Offering a groundbreaking study of Hollywood films produced since 2000, Abstinence Cinema comes to a very different conclusion, finding echoes of the evangelical movement's abstinence-only rhetoric in everything from Easy A to Taken. Casey Ryan Kelly tracks the surprising sex-negative turn that Hollywood films have taken, associating premarital sex with shame and degradation, while romanticizing traditional nuclear families, courtship rituals, and gender roles. As he demonstrates, these movies are particularly disempowering for young women, concocting plots in which the decision to refrain from sex until marriage is the young woman's primary source of agency and arbiter of moral worth. Locating these regressive sexual politics not only in expected sites, like the Twilight films, but surprising ones, like the raunchy comedies of Judd Apatow, Kelly makes a compelling case that Hollywood films have taken a significant step backward in recent years. Abstinence Cinema offers close readings of movies from a wide spectrum of genres, and it puts these films into conversation with rhetoric that has emerged in other arenas of American culture. Challenging assumptions that we are living in a more liberated era, the book sounds a warning bell about the powerful cultural forces that seek to demonize sexuality and curtail female sexual agency.
The 1960s was a decade of massive political and cultural change in Western Europe, as seismic shifts took place in in attitudes towards sexuality, gender, and motherhood in everyday life. Through case studies of British and French films, Pepsi and the Pill offers a fresh vision of a pivotal moment in European culture, exploring the many ways in which political activity and celebrated film movements mutually shaped each other in their views on gender, sexuality, and domesticity. As the specter of popular nationalism once again looms across Europe, this book offers a timely account of the legacy of crucial debates over issues including reproductive rights, migration, and reproductive nationalism at the intersection of political discourse, protest, and film.
This new collection of writings on Alfred Hitchcock celebrates the remarkable depth and scope of his artistic achievement in film. It explores his works in relationship both to their social context and to the traditions of critical theory they continue to inspire. The collection draws on the best of current Hitchcock scholarship, featuring the work of both new and established scholars. It displays the full diversity of critical methods that have characterized the study of this director's films in recent years. The articles are grouped into four thematic sections: "Authorship and Aesthetics" examines Hitchcock as auteur and investigates central topics in Hitchcockian aesthetics. "French Hitchcock" looks at Hitchcock's influence on filmmakers such as Chabrol, Truffaut and Rohmer, and how film critics such as Bazin and Deleuze have engaged with Hitchcock's work. "Poetics and Politics of Identity" explores the representation of personal and political in Hitchcock's work, and the final section, "Death and Transfiguration" addresses the manner in which the spectacle and figuration of death haunts the narrative universe of Hitchcock's films, in particular his subversive masterpiece "Psycho,"
This collection examines two recent phenomena: the return of realist tendencies and practices in world cinema and television, and the rehabilitation of realism in film and media theory. The contributors investigate these two phenomena in detail, querying their origins, relations, divergences and intersections from a variety of perspectives.
This is a scholarly study of cinematic emotions, highlighting the relationship between spectator and film, and thematically divided into chapters including Love, Hate, Shame and Fear. There is an upsurge of interest in contemporary film theory towards cinematic emotions. Tarja Laine's innovative study proposes a methodology for interpreting affective encounters with films, not as objectively readable texts, but as emotionally salient events. Laine argues convincingly that film is not an immutable system of representation that is meant for (one-way) communication, but an active, dynamic participant in the becoming of the cinematic experience. Through a range of chapters that include Horror, Hope, Shame and Love - and through close readings of films such as "The Shining", "American Beauty" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", Laine demonstrates that cinematic emotions are more than mere indicators of the properties of their objects. They are processes that are intentional in a phenomenological sense, supporting the continuous, shifting, and reciprocal exchange between the film's world and the spectator's world. Grounded in continental philosophy, this provocative book explores the affective dynamics of cinema as an interchange between the film and the spectator in a manner that transcends traditional generic patterns.
Considered a notorious subset of horror in the 1970s and 1980s, there has been a massive revitalization and diversification of rape-revenge in recent years. This book analyzes the politics, ethics, and affects at play in the filmic construction of rape and its responses.
This volume examines Mary Poppins as a 1960s film reflecting and invested in its radically changing times, a largely but not unmitigatedly antiestablishment musical resonant with conditions and issues powerfully affecting baby boomers. Among the explosion of baby boomer films that rocked the 1960s, the most stirring early work was likely Mary Poppins. This 1964 film captivated young audiences, earning top-grossing ticket sales, multiple Oscars, and landmark status as a cultural phenomenon. The book illuminates Mary Poppins as a musical teeming with preoccupations of American youth in the early-to-mid-1960s, including antiestablishment desires, anxieties, and pleasures. Reading against the dominant grain, this book deciphers Mary Poppins as a mid-century reflection that spans the generation gap, dysfunctional nuclear family, youth unrest, activism including feminist advocacy, counterculturalism, capitalist imperialism, race relations, socially conscious music, and hallucinogenic consciousness expansion. Conjunctively, the book explores tensions inherent in this studio production as a mainstream Disney release evoking imperatives of 1960s American youth while sanitizing figures and values representing radical change. Further, examining the film's collective authorship, this volume traces Mary Poppins' origins in the writings and life of nonconformist author P.L. Travers as well as in Disney cinema and the studio's adaptation processes. Analysis extends to diverse facets of Mary Poppins' reception, including the shifting image of its star, Julie Andrews, the film's influence on popular culture and controversy among some as an adaptation, its appropriation by drug culture, association with the teenpic, and status as cinema of social consciousness. This book is ideal for students, researchers, and scholars of cinema studies and youth culture.
Most people are too busy to keep up with all the good movies they'd like to see, so why should anyone spend their precious time watching the bad ones? In Why It's OK to Love Bad Movies, philosopher and cinematic bottom feeder Matthew Strohl enthusiastically defends a fondness for disreputable films. Combining philosophy of art with film criticism, Strohl flips conventional notions of "good" and "bad" on their heads and makes the case that the ultimate value of a work of art lies in what it can add to our lives. By this measure, some of the worst movies ever made are also among the best. Through detailed discussions of films such as Troll 2, The Room, Batman & Robin, Twilight, Ninja III: The Domination, and a significant portion of Nicolas Cage's filmography, Strohl argues that so-called "bad movies" are the ones that break the rules of the art form without the aura of artistic seriousness that surrounds the avant-garde. These movies may not win any awards, but they offer rich opportunities for creative engagement and enable the formation of lively fan communities, and they can be a key ingredient in a fulfilling aesthetic life. Key Features: Written in a humorous, approachable style, appealing to readers with no background in philosophy. Elaborates the rewards of loving bad movies, such as forming unlikely social bonds and developing refinement without narrowness. Discusses a wide range of beloved bad movies, including Plan 9 from Outer Space, The Core, Battlefield Earth, and Freddy Got Fingered. Contains the most extensive discussion of Nicolas Cage ever included in a philosophy book.
"Frontiers of Screen History" provides an insightful exploration
into the depiction and imagination of European borders in cinema
after World War II. While films have explored national and
political borders, they have also attempted to identify, challenge,
and imagine frontiers of another kind: social, ethnic, religious,
and gendered. The book investigates all these perspectives. Its
unique focus on the representation of European borders and
frontiers via film is groundbreaking, opening up a new field of
research and scholarly discussion. The exceptional variety of
national and cultural perspectives provides a rewarding
investigation of borders and frontiers.
Interdisciplinary and engaging, Masculinities in Contemporary Argentine Popular Cinema is the first scholarly work to link visual representations of heterosexual masculinities to the neo-liberal transformations in Argentina. Rocha critically examines contemporary cinematic representations of Argentine masculinities produced after the crucial changes of the 1990s affected both the social construction of gender and the financing of domestic film productions. Theoretically innovative, this study provides detailed analysis of six Argentine blockbusters. |
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