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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema > Film theory & criticism
June Allyson (1917-2006) was an American film, television and stage actress, singer, dancer and author. After appearing in movie shorts and on Broadway as a chorus girl and featured player, she became an A-list box office attraction in the 1940s and 1950s in films like The Three Musketeers (1948), Little Women (1949), The Glen Miller Story (1954) and Strategic Air Command (1955). She went on to host and star in her own television anthology series from 1959 to 1961, and made many appearances in films in television shows. This first biography of Allyson covers her life and career, and features an appendix of her work.
Gaza’s long association with resistance and humanitarian need has generated a complex and ever shifting range of visual material, comprising not just news reports and documentaries, but also essay, experimental, and fiction films, militant videos, and solidarity images. Contributors to Gaza on Screen, who include scholars and Gazan filmmakers, explore the practice, production, and impact of film and videos from and about the Gaza Strip. Conceptualizing screens—both large and small—as tools for mediation that are laden with power, the volume explores Gazan film and video in relation to humanitarianism and human rights, care, community, environment, mobility and confinement, and decolonization. The volume includes visual material ranging from solidarity broadcasts on Lebanese television, mid-twentieth-century British Pathé newsreels, and fiction films to breaking news, visuals of contemporary militant resistance, documentaries, and found footage films, arguing for a visual ecosystem in which differing types of film and video affect and inform each other. Throughout, Gaza on Screen demonstrates that screens shape and sustain relationships between Gaza and the world, and help to sustain the possibility of a different future. Contributors. Nayrouz Abu Hatoum, Shahd Abusalama, Samirah Alkassim, Basma Alsharif, Hadeel Assali, Azza El-Hassan, Hatim El-Hibri, Mohamed Jabaly, Ahmed Mansour, Arab Nasser, Tarzan Nasser, Kamran Rastegar, Viviane Saglier, Abdelsalam Shehada, Yaron Shemer, Rebecca L. Stein, Helga Tawil-Souri, Shaira Vadasaria, Nadia Yaqub
Shakespeare and Adaptation Theory reconsiders, after 20 years of intense critical and creative activity, the theory and practice of adapting Shakespeare to different genres and media. Organized around clusters of key metaphors, the book explicates the principal theories informing the field of Shakespearean adaptation and surveys the growing field of case studies by Shakespeare scholars. Each chapter also looks anew at a specific Shakespeare play from the perspective of a prevailing set of theories and metaphors. Having identified the key critics responsible for developing these metaphors and for framing the discussion in this way, Iyengar moves on to analyze afresh the implications of these critical frames for adaptation studies as a whole and for particular Shakespeare plays. Focusing each chapter around a different play, the book contrasts comic, tragic, and tragicomic modes in Shakespeare's oeuvre and within the major genres of adaptation (e.g., film, stage-production, novel and digital media). Each chapter seasons its theoretical discussions with a lively sprinkling of allusions to Shakespeare - ranging from TikTok to tissue-boxes, from folios and fine arts to fan work. To conclude each chapter, the author provides a case-study of three or four significant and interesting adaptations from different genres or media. A glossary of terms compiled by Philip Gilreath and the author completes the book.
Annie Proulx has written some of the most original and brilliant short stories in contemporary literature, and for many readers and reviewers, "Brokeback Mountain" is her masterpiece. "Brokeback Mountain" was originally published in "The New Yorker." It won the National Magazine Award. It also won an O. Henry Prize. Included in this volume is Annie Proulx's haunting story about the difficult, dangerous love affair between a ranch hand and a rodeo cowboy. Also included is the celebrated screenplay for the major motion picture "Brokeback Mountain," written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. All three writers have contributed essays on the process of adapting this critically acclaimed story for film.
Make sense of the world of cinema Want to pull back the curtain on film? This hands-on, friendly guide unravels the complexities of film and helps you put cinema into a cultural context. You'll get an easy-to-follow introduction to different film genres and styles, learn about the history of cinema, get to know who makes up a filmmaking team, explore global cinema from Hollywood to Bollywood and much more. Film Studies For Dummies will open your mind to how the film industry works and help you to discover the impact of film on popular culture. You'll get easy-to-read information on analyzing and critiquing film from a range of theoretical, historical and critical perspectives, and learn how people communicate ideas in film. You'll also be able to shine a light on how stories are developed in movies, understand how a storyline is related to broader issues in society and become a well-versed and insightful film student. * Covers the narrative, artistic, cultural, economic and political implications of cinema * Provides conceptual frameworks for understanding a film's relationship to reality * Explores how people tell stories and communicate ideas in film * Helps you excel as a student of film Whether you're planning to study film, a humanities student with a forthcoming module on film or a film enthusiast wondering if this might be the future for you, Film Studies For Dummies has you covered.
In 1915, American filmmaker D. W. Griffith released a film that went on to become one of the most controversial of all time. Over a century later, The Birth of a Nation continues to stimulate debate on the relationship between Hollywood and racism. This volume reveals new perspectives on Griffith's film across ten original chapters, re-considering it as text, historical milestone and influence. The volume also includes a helpful timeline that lists key publications and events in Birth's ongoing history, revealing the rich and stimulating discourse on its art, its cultural impact and its ethical dimensions. -- .
The burgeoning film industry in the Weimar Republic was, among other things, a major site of German-Jewish experience, one that provided a sphere for Jewish "outsiders" to shape mainstream culture. The chapters collected in this volume deploy new historical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to understanding the significant involvement of German Jews in Weimar cinema. Reflecting upon different conceptions of Jewishness - as religion, ethnicity, social role, cultural code, or text - these studies offer a wide-ranging exploration of an often overlooked aspect of German film history.
As a handsome and popular romantic actor with a fan club rivalling that of Ivor Novello, John Stuart was frequently mobbed by his adoring fans. He starred in films by Alfred Hitchcock and G.W. Pabst, played opposite British stars such as Madeleine Carroll, Fay Compton, Gracie Fields, and German actor Conrad Veidt, and was also the first actor to ever speak on screen in Britain. Yet despite a film career lasting six decades and comprising 172 films, his name and achievement are little known today. With access to Stuart's private archive, his surviving films, press cuttings, film reviews, interviews, profiles, features, and gossip columns, his son Jonathan Croall presents a detailed account of an actor who made a significant contribution to the British film industry of the 20th century.
The figure of the American Adam is a prevalent mythin US cultural history. Defined by R.W.B. Lewis in 1955 as "the hero of newadventure . . .an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique andinherent resources," the figure is discernable in the American renaissancewriters and in the imagery of the frontiersman, cowboy, gangster as well as inthe heroes of US action movies. Focusing on the American Adam as a paradigm of masculine identity formation, this monograph examines how this fantasy of an imaginary ideal identity has held an ideological sway over US identityin the main. Taking in a range of cultural texts, Jonathan Mitchell's study exploresthe complexities and contradictions of Adam's 'real' condition of existence to showhow the paradigm influences both masculinity and subsequently hegemonic USidentity as represented throughout twentieth-century US culture. >
Best known for her roles in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, It's a Wonderful Life, and Make Way for Tomorrow, Beulah Bondi (1889-1981) had a 60-year long acting career and an interesting on-screen life. Despite starting her professional acting career at 30, she made her mark on the film industry as a character actress. Before making a name for herself on-screen, she worked at the Stuart Walker stock company and performed on Broadway. This biography is the first to unpack Bondi's life before and throughout her film career. This work also explores Bondi's early family life in Indiana with a Jewish underwear salesman and a Presbyterian poet for parents.
A comprehensive reassessment of British musical films 1946-1972 including King's Rhapsody, Beat Girl, The Tommy Steele Story, Rock You Sinners, The Golden Disc, and Oliver! Acting as a sequel to Adrian Wright's Cheer Up! British Musical Films, 1929-1945 (Boydell, 2020), Melody in the Dark offers the first major reassessment of the British musical film from the end of Second World War up to the beginning of the 1970s. In the immediate post-war world, British studios sought to reflect fast-changing social attitudes as they struggled to create inventive diversions in an effort to rival American competition. Hollywood stars Errol Flynn, Vera-Ellen, Jayne Mansfield and Judy Garland were among those brought in to provide Hollywood glamour. Embedded in the British consciousness, the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan were represented in three productions. Studios occasionally attempted adaptations of British stage musicals, among them King's Rhapsody and Expresso Bongo, and sexploitation movies turned musical via Secrets of a Windmill Girl and Beat Girl. It was left to minor studios to acknowledge the impact of rock'n'roll on social change in three early films, The Tommy Steele Story, Rock You Sinners and the iconic The Golden Disc. Through the sixties, British cinema seemed intent on flooding the market with entertainments promoting pop singers and rock groups such as Cliff Richard, Billy Fury and The Beatles. Towards the end of the period, it aspired to more grandiose projects such as Oliver! and Oh! What a Lovely War.
Contributions by Aneesh Barai, Clementine Beauvais, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Terri Doughty, Aneta Dybska, Blanka Grzegorczyk, Zoe Jaques, Vanessa Joosen, Maria Nikolajeva, Marek Oziewicz, Ashley N. Reese, Malini Roy, Sabine Steels, Lucy Stone, Bjoern Sundmark, Michelle Superle, Nozomi Uematsu, Anastasia Ulanowicz, Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer, and Jean Webb. Intergenerational solidarity is a vital element of societal relationships that ensures survival of humanity. It connects generations, fostering transfer of common values, cumulative knowledge, experience, and culture essential to human development. In the face of global aging, changing family structures, family separations, economic insecurity, and political trends pitting young and old against each other, intergenerational solidarity is now, more than ever, a pressing need. Intergenerational Solidarity in Children's Literature and Film argues that productions for young audiences can stimulate intellectual and emotional connections between generations by representing intergenerational solidarity. For example, one essayist focuses on Disney films, which have shown a long-time commitment to variously highlighting, and then conservatively healing, fissures between generations. However, Disney-Pixar's Up and Coco instead portray intergenerational alliances - young collaborating with old, the living working alongside the dead - as necessary to achieving goals. The collection also testifies to the cultural, social, and political significance of children's culture in the development of generational intelligence and empathy towards age-others and positions the field of children's literature studies as a site of intergenerational solidarity, opening possibilities for a new socially consequential inquiry into the culture of childhood.
In this latest addition to Oxford's Modernist Literature & Culture series, renowned modernist scholar Michael North poses fundamental questions about the relationship between modernity and comic form in film, animation, the visual arts, and literature. Machine-Age Comedy vividly constructs a cultural history that spans the entire twentieth century, showing how changes wrought by industrialization have forever altered the comic mode. With keen analyses, North examines the work of a wide range of artists - including Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and David Foster Wallace - to show the creative and unconventional ways the routinization of industrial society has been explored in a broad array of cultural forms. Throughout, North argues that modern writers and artists found something inherently comic in new experiences of repetition associated with, enforced by, and made inevitable by the machine age. Ultimately, this rich, tightly focused study offers a new lens for understanding the devlopment of comedic structures during periods of massive social, political, and cultural change to reveal how the original promise of modern life can be extracted from its practical disappointment.
Challenging established views and assumptions about traditions and practices of filmmaking in the African diaspora, this three-volume set offers readers a researched critique on black film. Volume One of this landmark series on African cinema draws together foundational scholarship on its history and evolution. Beginning with the ideological project of colonial film to legitimize the economic exploitation and cultural hegemony of the African continent during imperial rule to its counter-historical formation and theorization. It comprises essays by film scholars and filmmakers alike, among them Roy Armes, Med Hondo, Fèrid Boughedir, Haile Gerima, Oliver Barlet, Teshome Gabriel, and David Murphy, including three distinct dossiers: a timeline of key dates in the history of African cinema; a comprehensive chronicle and account of the contributions by African women in cinema; and a homage and overview of Ousmane Sembène, the "Father" of African cinema.
KinoSputniks closely analyse some key films from the history of Russian and Soviet cinema. Written by international experts in the field, they are intended for film enthusiasts and students, combining scholarship with an accessible style of writing. This KinoSputnik about Fedor Bondarchuk's megahit Stalingrad (2013) examines the production, context and reception of the film, whilst offering a detailed reading of its key themes. Fedor Bondarchuk's 2013 blockbuster film Stalingrad shattered box-office records and dazzled viewers with its use of special effects, enhanced by its 3D IMAX format. The film transported viewers back to 1942 and the bloody battle that would turn the tide of the Second World War. This new study situates the film within the context of ongoing debates about the meanings of the Second World War in Russia and previous films about the Battle of Stalingrad. Primary readership will be among film studies students and film enthusiasts, but will also be of interest to anyone researching or studying the Battle of Stalingrad and the course of the Second World War. A list of all books in the series is here on the Intellect website on the series page KinoSputnik
Madness and Cinema offers a radical approach to the issue of what happens when we watch films. By exploring cinema's relationship to meaning and proposing new ways to read cinema through psychoanalysis, this book develops the idea that the spectator engages in what has previously been described as an act of madness. By considering some of the key concepts from Freud and Lacan, as well as ideas from Derrida and Foucault, we are shown the common features that cinema and madness share. The film spectator is shown as the psychotic, neurotic and hysteric, as the book examines the ways in which the foundations of culture and meaning are challenged when we become the spectator of a film.
Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) marked a transition in American film-making, and its success - as a work of art, as a creative 'property' exploited by its studio, Paramount Pictures; and as a model for aspiring auteurist film-makers - changed Hollywood forever. Jon Lewis's study of The Godfather begins with a close look at the film's audacious visual style (the long, theatrical set pieces; the chiaroscuro lighting, the climactic montage paralleling a family baptism with a series of brutal murders). The analysis of visual style is paired with a discussion of the movie's principal themes: Vito and Michael's attempt to balance the obligations of business and family, their struggle with assimilation, the temptations and pitfalls of capitalist accumulation, and the larger drama of succession from father to son, from one generation to the next. The textual analysis precedes a production history that views The Godfather as a singularly important film in Hollywood's dramatic box-office turnaround in the early 1970s. And then, finally, the book takes a long hard look at the gangster himself both on screen and off. Hollywood publicity attending the gangster film from its inception in the silent era to the present has endeavoured to dull the distinction between the real and movie gangster, insisting that each film has been culled from the day's sordid headlines. Looking at the drama on screen and the production history behind the scenes, Lewis uncovers a series of real gangster backstories, revealing, finally, how millions of dollars of mob money may well have funded the film in the first place, and how, as things played out, The Godfather saved Paramount Studios and the rest of Hollywood as well.
Dealing with some of the major themes in film narratives, this book draws on the theories of French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. It looks at how narratives have changed over time, and considers the sources of our variable reactions to themes and representations of horror, strangers, and love. In addition to a selection of contemporary mainstream films, the major films for analysis are New Zealand "New Wave" films such as Alison Maclean's Kitchen Sink and Crush; Vincent Ward's Vigil; and Jane Campion's Sweety, An Angel at My Table, and The Piano.
An updated and expanded version of this classic study of contemporary American film, the new edition of A Cinema of Loneliness reassesses the landscape of American cinema over the past decade, incorporating discussions of directors like Judd Apatow and David Fincher while offering assessments of the recent, and in some cases final, work from the filmmakers--Penn, Scorsese, Stone, Altman, Kubrick--at the book's core.
Focusing on Netflix's child and family-orientated platform exclusive content, this book offers the first exploration of a controversial genre cycle of dark science-fiction, horror, and fantasy television under Netflix's 'Family Watch Together TV' tag. Using a ground-breaking mix of methods including audience research, interface, and textual analysis, the book demonstrates how Netflix is producing dark family telefantasy content that is both reshaping child and family friendly TV genres and challenging earlier broadcast TV models around child-appropriate, family viewing. It illuminates how Netflix encourages family audiences to "watch together" through intergenerational dynamics that work on and offscreen. Chapters explore how this 'Netflixication' of family television developed across landmark examples including Stranger Things, A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and even Squid Game. The book outlines how Netflix is consolidating a new dark family terrain in the streaming sector which is unsettling older concepts of family viewing leading to considerable audience and critical confusion around target audiences and viewer expectations. This book will be of particular interest to upper level undergraduates, graduates and scholars in the fields of television studies, screen genre studies, childhood studies, and cultural studies.
Women and Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema: Screening Hospitality puts gender at the centre of cinematic representations of contemporary transnational Italian identities. It offers an intersectional feminist analysis of the ways in which transnational migration has been represented, understood, and constructed in the contemporary cinema of Italy. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's notion of hospitality and in dialogue with postcolonial and decolonial theory, queer studies, and feminist critiques, the six chapters of the book focus on a series of exemplary fiction films from the last twenty years, which both reflect and shape the nation's responses to the growing presence of transnational migrants in Italian society. The book shows how questions of gender, sexual difference, and reproductivity have been central to Italian filmmakers' approaches to stories of mobility and displacement. Gender is also enmeshed in the rhetoric and poetic of hospitality that filmmakers propose as a critical framework to condemn Italian border policies and politics. Women and Migration in Contemporary Italian Cinema: Screening Hospitality traces an arc that moves from the embrace of a humanitarian rhetoric of infinite hospitality toward migrants, apparent in films produced in the early 2000s, to a more fluid understanding of Italian identities from a transnational perspective.
The samurai films of legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa are set in the past, but they tell us much about the present, as do his crime stories, romances, military films, medical dramas and art films. His movies are beloved for their ageless protagonists and haunting vistas of old Japan, but we haven't yet fully grasped everything they can teach us about modern Japan. This detailed study of all 30 of Kurosawa's films analyzes the links between the thrilling narratives onscreen and the equally remarkable events that occurred in Japan over his long, productive career. Kurosawa's films evolved as Japan redefined and reinvented itself, from films made for Japan's wartime regime to those made amid the trials of American occupation. Could we change that sentence to the following?: Kurosawa's films also include lavish epics from the "economic miracle" years and searching masterpieces he made with international assistance. This book explores how Kurosawa's classics depict the political, economic, cultural, sexual and environmental upheavals of a nation at the center of a turbulent century, whether directly or through period-piece mythmaking. |
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