![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema
Screenplay and Narrative Theory draws attention to the notion that in order to comprehend complex narrative dynamics, which are encountered in a great variety of narrative genres, forms, and formats, a more comprehensive theory of narrative is required. George Varotsis explains how a work of narrative functions synergistically and systemically, as well as elucidates the heuristic problem-solving mechanisms that are employed in various structural levels of thought processes, which allow the coherent accumulative derivative we call a story to emerge. The transition from an empirical to theoretical perspective is achieved by introducing characteristics of complex narrative systems: a network of narrative components, i.e. characters, structure, goals, motivations, theme, plot and subplots, narrative action, etc., which are arranged hierarchically over three fundamental levels of structure, i.e. deep, intermediate, and surface structure, that interact parallel to one another in non-linear ways. Varotsis tackles questions about how stories semantically emerge in the underlying dynamics that allow a work of narrative to function as a unified whole.
During World War II Poland lost more than six million people, including about three million Polish Jews who perished in the ghettos and extermination camps built by Nazi Germany in occupied Polish territories. This book is the first to address the representation of the Holocaust in Polish film and does so through a detailed treatment of several films, which the author frames in relation to the political, ideological, and cultural contexts of the times in which they were created. Following the chronological development of Polish Holocaust films, the book begins with two early classics: Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage (1948) and Aleksander Ford's Border Street (1949), and next explores the Polish School period, represented by Andrzej Wajda's A Generation (1955) and Andrzej Munk's The Passenger (1963). Between 1965 and 1980 there was an "organized silence" regarding sensitive Polish-Jewish relations resulting in only a few relevant films until the return of democracy in 1989 when an increasing number were made, among them Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue 8 (1988), Andrzej Wajda's Korczak (1990), Jan Jakub Kolski's Keep Away from the Window (2000), and Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002). An important contribution to film studies, this book has wider relevance in addressing the issue of Poland's national memory.
As in western cinema, cross-dressing is a recurrent theme in Turkish film. But what do these films, whose characters typically cross-dress in order to escape enemies or other threats, tell us about the modern history of the Turkish Republic? This book examines cross-dressing in Turkish films in the context of formative events in modern Turkish political history, arguing that this trope coincides with and is illustrative of trauma induced by Turkey's multiple coup d'etats, periods of authoritarianism, enforced secularism and 'modernization'. Burcu Dabak Ozdemir analyses five case study films wherein she reveals that cross-dressing characters are able to escape persecutors and surveillance - key instruments of oppression during Turkey's coups. She shows how cross-dressing in the films examined become a destabilising force, a form of implicit resistance against state power, both political and in terms of binaries of gender and identity, and a means to register moments of national trauma. The book historicises the concept of cross-dressing in modern Turkey by examining what the author argues is a formative trauma worked through in the films examined: the westernization policies of the Kemalist regime whose most immediate symbolic presence was worn - the enforced adoption of western dress by citizens. Of interest to scholars of gender, queer, film and trauma studies, the book will also appeal to students and scholars of contemporary Turkish culture and society.
For 100s of years, scientists at Weyland-Yutani Corp. have been monitoring the behaviour of an alien life-form whose potential for military application appears limitless. Though all attempts to harness its abilities have ended in bloodshed, acquisition of the Xenomorph remains a priority. As such, Weyland-Yutani has granted you access to their files on the alien in the hope that you will be able to help capture this fascinating, deadly creature.
This is the first full-length study devoted to the films of Wes Anderson, one of the most distinctive filmmakers working today. This first full-length consideration of this noted director's work, Wes Anderson: Why His Movies Matter is organized chronologically to encompass all of Anderson's films, from 1996's Bottle Rocket to Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and the 2009 release, The Fantastic Mr. Fox. The study includes analysis of Anderson's work in commercials, his representation of race and class, his main stylistic influences, and his innovations in the use of frame. Beyond that, author Mark Browning considers whether Anderson's allusions create resonance or simply play a game with an audience keen to spot references. He argues that, in Anderson's films, the style is the substance, and the apparent comedic superficiality is what actually provides depth. Chapters covering the individual films are followed by an examination of Anderson as set designer, author, and stylist. The conclusion explains how his films can be viewed as relevant, exploring links to events and figures in the real world. A bibliography
Michel Chion's study of the film and television work of David Lynch has become, since its first English publication in 1995, the definitive book on one of America's finest contemporary directors. In this new edition Chion brings the book up-to-date to take into account Lynch's work in the past ten years, including the major features "Lost Highway, The Straight Story," and "Mulholland Drive. "Newly redesigned and re-illustrated, "David Lynch "is an indispensable companion.
This book presents a historical overview of the Indonesian film industry, the relationship between censorship and representation, and the rise of Islamic popular culture. It considers scholarship on gender in Indonesian cinema through the lens of power relations. With key themes such as nationalism, women's rights, polygamy, and terrorism which have preoccupied local filmmakers for decades, Indonesia cinema resonates with the socio-political changes and upheavals in Indonesia's modern history and projects images of the nation through the debates on gender and Islam. The text also sheds light on broader debates and questions about contemporary Islam and gender construction in contemporary Indonesia. Offering cutting edge accounts of the production of Islamic cinema, this new book considers gendered dimensions of Islamic media creation which further enrich the representations of the 'religious' and the 'Islamic' in the everyday lives of Muslims in South East Asia.
Celebrate Christmas and discover 25 hidden surprises with Hedwig the owl, in this beautiful advent calendar and pop-up book inspired by the Harry Potter films! This must-have collectible designed by renowned paper engineer Matthew Reinhart brings Hedwig's lovable spirit to your holiday celebrations. Count down to Christmas with 25 days of exclusive Harry Potter gifts and watch as delightful presents from the Wizarding World magically transform into a beautiful pop-up tree centerpiece! This advent calendar also includes a booklet of fun behind-the-scenes facts from the films. Festive and interactive, Harry Potter: Hedwig Pop-Up Advent Calendar is the ideal way to ring in the holidays with one of the Wizarding World's most adored magical companions! EXCLUSIVE SURPRISES AND COLLECTIBLES: Discover 25 one-of-a-kind keepsakes inspired by the beloved Harry Potter films. MAGICAL HOLIDAY CENTERPIECE: Watch as the central pop-up gradually transforms into a gorgeous Christmas tree that you can reuse as a unique holiday decoration year after year. FROM RENOWNED DESIGNER MATTHEW REINHART: Designed by the paper engineer behind best-selling titles like Harry Potter: A Pop-Up Guide to Hogwarts, Harry Potter: Hedwig Pop-Up Advent Calendar boasts striking detail and stunning illustrations. COUNTDOWN TO CHRISTMAS: Uncover a new gift each day between December 1st and Christmas! GREAT FOR FANS OF ALL AGES: Every Harry Potter fan will love this advent calendar's beautiful illustrations and behind-the-scenes details. COMPLETE YOUR HARRY POTTER HOLIDAY COLLECTION: Harry Potter: Hedwig Pop-Up Advent Calendar joins Harry Potter: A Hogwarts Christmas Pop-Up and Harry Potter: Holiday Magic: The Official Advent Calendar in Insight Editions' fan-favorite line of festive Harry Potter holiday titles.
In "The Producers," Luke Ford profiles major players in entertainment including Edgar J. Scherick, creator of "ABC's Wide World of Sports," Stephen J. Cannell, whose television programs have grossed over $1 billion, and Jay Bernstein, former manager of Farrah Fawcett and Linda Evans. The life of a typical Hollywood producer is a "profile in frustration." What drives these middlemen to subjugate their own egos for more than a decade, at times, to make a movie or TV show?
This is the first study that employs a materialist framework to discuss the political implications of form in the films of Lars von Trier. Focusing mainly on early films, "Politics as Form in Lars von Trier "identifies recurring formal elements in von Trier's oeuvre and discusses the formal complexity of his films under the rubric of the post-Brechtian. Through an in depth formal analysis, the book shows that Brecht is more important to von Trier's work than what most critics seem to acknowledge and deems von Trier as a dialectical filmmaker. This study draws on many untranslated resources and features an interview with Lars von Trier, and another one with his mentor - the great Danish director Jorgen Leth.
This book explores the idea that while we see the vampire as a hero of romance, or as a member of an oppressed minority struggling to fit in and acquire legal recognition, the vampire has in many ways changed beyond recognition over recent decades due to radically shifting formations of the sacred in contemporary culture. The figure of the vampire has captured the popular imagination to an unprecedented extent since the turn of the millennium. The philosopher Rene Girard associates the sacred with a communal violence that sacred ritual controls and contains. As traditional formations of the sacred fragment, the vampire comes to embody and enact this 'sacred violence' through complex blood bonds that relate the vampire to the human in wholly new ways in the new millennium.
At the heart of this volume is the assertion that Sartrean existentialism, most prominent in the 1940s, particularly in France, is still relevant as a way of interpreting the world today. Film, by reflecting philosophical concerns in the actions and choices of characters, continues and extends a tradition in which art exemplifies the understanding of existentialist philosophy. In a scholarly yet accessible style, the contributors exploit the rich interplay between Sartre's philosophy, plays and novels, and a number of contemporary films including No Country for Old Men, Lost in Translation and The Truman Show, with film-makers including the Dardenne brothers, Michael Haneke, and Mike Leigh. This volume will be of interest to students who are coming to Sartre's work for the first time and to those who would like to read films within an existentialist perspective.
Satire is often defined as a moral and rhetorical art that engages in social critique through wit and ridicule. During its long history it has come in many forms and genres as well as in different types of media (verse, drama, rhetorical performance, prose, cartoons, journalism, film, TV, internet). Here, Nilsson examines American film satire produced during the 1990s and how its style and form cue viewers towards constructing satirical meaning. The study offers an explanation for how a particular selection of films turned material circulating in American culture of the 1990s into satirical experiences for viewers and finds that there are elements of resistance to mainstream culture in the original material: resistance to norms and conventions in politics, to mainstream news channels and Hollywood, and to official American history.
Here is the astonishing true story of Bollywood, a sweeping portrait about a country finding its identity, a movie industry that changed the face of India, and one man's struggle to become a star. Shah Rukh Khan's larger than life tale takes us through the colorful and idiosyncratic Bollywood movie industry, where fantastic dreams and outrageous obsessions share the spotlight with extortion, murder, and corruption. Shah Rukh Khan broke into this $1.5 billion business despite the fact that it has always been controlled by a handful of legendary film families and sometimes funded by black market money. As a Muslim in a Hindu majority nation, exulting in classic Indian cultural values, Shah Rukh Khan has come to embody the aspirations and contradictions of a complicated culture tumbling headlong into American style capitalism. His story is the mirror to view the greater Indian story and the underbelly of the culture of Bollywood. "A bounty for cinema lovers everywhere."
This volume analyses the role of Bram Stoker's Dracula and its sequels in the evolution of the Gothic. As well as the transformation of the Gothic location-from castles, cemeteries and churches to the modern urban gothic-this volume explores the evolution of the undead considering a range of media from the 19th century protagonist to sympathetic contemporary vampires of teen Gothic. Based on an interdisciplinary approach (literature, tourism, and film), the book argues that the development of the Dracula myth is the result of complex international influences and cultural interactions. Offering a multifarious perspective, this volume is a reference work that will be useful to both academic and general readers.
Golden Age Movie Actors as Writers 'Hollywood Lives' is about the movies in the Golden Age (1930-1950). It reviews some 175 star autobiographies distilling out of them the actor's accounts of the Communist Witch Hunt, racial prejudice, studio pressures, the glamour of movie stardom, the bosses, fellow actors and much else. This is the first ever book about movie actors as writers and contains many surprises. Graham Bannock, a British author now in his seventies, has been watching movies and reading about them since he was in his teens. He has authored or co-authored some 30 books, mostly on economics and business.
Analyzing a sample of 25 films, including such notables as "Red River," "Shane," "Unforgiven," "The Wild Bunch," "Wyatt EarP," and "Dances with Wolves," this work examines traditional leadership theories as reflected in the western film genre. The western vividly portrays a variety of leadership styles, motifs, and characteristics giving perspective on several traditional leadership theories. The different leadership styles the films exhibit are categorized and described through content analysis. Some of the concepts and underlying theories and styles reveal a universal quality about leadership that transcends theoretical research. As a cultural study that traces the relative popularity of leadership styles, this work provides new insight toward studying leadership effectiveness. Through the lens of leadership theory, this unique look at the western films from 1945 to 1995 and the American culture they depict will appeal not only to leadership, film, and popular culture scholars but to leaders in business, government, and the military. Chapters group films by their similar depiction of leadership styles. Within each chapter the films are separately described, then each is explored within the context of leadership theory. Films prior to 1980 are included on the basis of their critical or commercial success, while films after 1980 are included on the basis of their box office success or their individual portrayals of gender or cultural leadership.
This is the first book to critically examine Hollywood films that focus on male partner violence against women. These films include Gaslight, Sleeping with the Enemy, What's Love Got to Do with It, Dolores Claiborne, Enough, and Safe Haven. Shaped by the contexts of postfeminism, domestic abuse post-awareness, and familiar genre conventions, these films engage in ideological "gaslighting" that reaffirms our preconceived ideas about men as abusers, women as victims, and the racial and class politics of domestic violence. While the films purport to condemn abuse and empower abused women, this study proposes that they tacitly reinforce the very attitudes that we believe we no longer tolerate. Shoos argues that films like these limit not only popular understanding but also social and institutional interventions.
This volume explores film and television sources in problematic conversation with classical antiquity, to better understand the nature of artistic reception and classical reception in particular. Drawing inspiration from well-theorized fields like adaptation studies, comparative literature, and film, the essays in this collection raise questions fundamental to the future of reception studies. The first section, 'Beyond Fidelity', deals with idiosyncratic adaptations of ancient sources; the second section, 'Beyond Influence', discusses modern works purporting to adapt ancient figures or themes that are less straightforwardly ancient than they may at first appear; while the last section, 'Beyond Original', uses films that lack even these murky connections to antiquity to challenge the notion that studying reception requires establishing historical connections between works. As questions of audience, interpretation, and subjectivity are central to most contemporary fields of study, this is a collection that is of interest to a wide variety of readers in the humanities.
One of the most colourful, innovative and controversial film directors of the 60s and 70s, Sam Peckinpah is best known for the challenging classic western The Wild Bunch. Garner Simmons, television and screenwriter who served on the set of two Peckinpah films, spent ten years researching the definitive biography of his sometime mentor. He interviewed Peckinpah himself at great length, and talked candidly with such co-workers as Jason Robards, Steve McQueen, Ali McGraw, Charlton Heston, Dustin Hoffman and Kris Kristofferson, as well as with various film executives and technicians. Their words enhance Simmon's vivid portrait of a complex, intuitive near-genius who, believing that creativity can be born only out of turmoil, was always prepared to cause it.
This is a beautifully written study, mixing film studies with cultural studies, of how the Hollywood film industry has treated the 'Other' throughout its history. In "Otherness in Hollywood Cinema", Michael Richardson argues that the Hollywood system has been the only national cinema with the resources and inclination to explore images of others through stories set in exotic and faraway places. He traces many of the ways in which Hollywood has constructed otherness, and discusses the extent to which those images have persisted and conditioned today's understanding. Hollywood was from the beginning teeming with people who had experienced cultural displacement. Coaxing the finest talents from around the world and needing to produce films with an almost universal appeal, Hollywood confounded American insularity while simultaneously presenting a vision of 'America' to the world. The book examines a range of genres from the perspective of otherness, including the Western, film noir, and zombie movies. Films discussed include "Birth of a Nation", "The New World", "The Searchers", "King Kong", "Apocalypse Now", "Blade Runner", "Jaws", and "Dead Man". Erudite and highly informed, this is a sweeping survey of how the American film industry has portrayed the foreign and the exotic.
A New History of British Documentary is the first comprehensive overview of documentary production in Britain from early film to the present day. It covers both the film and television industries and demonstrates how documentary practice has adapted to changing institutional and ideological contexts.
This book presents three interrelated essays about cinematography which offer a theoretical understanding of the ways that film practitioners orchestrate light in today's post-digital context. Cinematography is a practice at the heart of film production which traditionally involves the control of light and camera technologies to creatively capture moving imagery. During recent years, the widespread adoption of digital processes in cinematography has received a good deal of critical attention from practitioners and scholars alike, however little specific consideration about evolving lighting practices can be found amongst this discourse. Drawing on new-materialist ideas, actor-network theory and the concept of co-creativity, these essays examine the impact of changing production processes for the role and responsibilities of a cinematographer with a specific focus on lighting. Each essay advances a new perspective on the discipline, moving from the notion of light as vision to light as material, from technology as a tool to technology as a network, and from cinematography as an industry to cinematography as a collaborative art. |
![]() ![]() You may like...
Creativity, Inc. - Overcoming The Unseen…
Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace
Hardcover
Harry Potter: A Pop-Up Guide To Hogwarts
Matthew Reinhart
Hardcover
|