|
|
Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema
In the early twentieth century, female performers regularly
appeared on the stages and screens of American cities. Though
advertised as dancers, mimics, singers, or actresses, they often
exceeded these categories. Instead, their performances adopted an
aesthetic of intermediality, weaving together techniques and
elements drawn from a wide variety of genres and media, including
ballet, art music, photography, early modern dance, vaudeville
traditions, film, and more. Onstage and onscreen, performers
borrowed from existing musical scores and narratives, referred to
contemporary shows, films, and events, and mimicked fellow
performers, skating neatly across various media, art forms, and
traditions. Behind the scenes, they experimented with
cross-promotion, new advertising techniques, and various
technologies to broadcast images and tales of their performances
and lives well beyond the walls of American theaters, cabarets, and
halls. The performances and conceptions of art that emerged were
innovative, compelling, and deeply meaningful. Body Knowledge:
Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn
of the Twentieth Century examines these performances and the
performers behind them, highlighting the Ziegfeld Follies and The
Passing Show revues, Salome dancers, Isadora Duncan's Wagner
dances, Adeline Genee and Bessie Clayton's "photographic" danced
histories, Hazel Mackaye and Ruth St. Denis's pageants, and Anna
Pavlova's opera and film projects. By destabilizing the boundaries
between various media, genres, and performance spaces, each of
these women was able to create performances that negotiated
turn-of-the-century American social and cultural issues:
contemporary technological developments and the rise of mass
reproduction, new modes of perception, the commodification of art
and entertainment, the evolution of fan culture and stardom,
changing understandings of the body and the self, and above all,
shifting conceptions of gender, race, and sexual identity. Tracing
the various modes of intermediality at work on- and offstage, Body
Knowledge re-imagines early twentieth-century art and entertainment
as both fluid and convergent.
Through a career that spanned decades and included dozens of
films-among them such American masterpieces asThe Searchers, The
Grapes of Wrath, The Quiet Man, Stagecoach, and How Green Was My
Valley-John Ford managed to leave as his legacy a body of work that
few filmmakers will ever equal. Yet as bold as the stamp of his
personality was on each film, he was reticent about his personal
life. Basically shy, and intensely private, he was known to enjoy
making up stories about himself, some of them based loosely on fact
but many of them pure fabrications. Ford preferred instead to let
his films speak for him. What mattered to Ford was always what was
up there on the screen. Now, in this definitive look at the life
and career of one of America's true cinematic giants, noted
biographer and critic Scott Eyman, working with the full
participation of the Ford estate, has managed to document and
delineate both aspects of John Ford's life-the human and the
legend.
When we bury our secrets, they always come back to haunt us...Their
rise was meteoric. Only a few years before, they had been three
friends from Glasgow, just trying to survive tough lives of danger
and dysfunction. But on one Hollywood evening in 1993, they were on
the world's biggest stage, accepting their Oscar in front of the
watching world. That night was the beginning of their careers. But
it was also the end of their friendship. Over the next twenty
years, Mirren McLean would become one of the most powerful writers
in the movie industry. Zander Leith would break box-office records
as cinema's most in-demand action hero. And Davie Johnson would
rake in millions as producer of some of the biggest shows on TV.
For two decades they didn't speak, driven apart by a horrific
secret. Until now... Their past is coming back to bite them, and
they have to decide whether to run, hide, or fight. Because when
you rise to the top, there's always someone who wants to see you
fall. An exciting new glam thriller for the fans of Taylor Jenkins
Reid, Liane Moriarty and Jo Spain Previously published in the UK as
TAKING HOLLYWOOD by Shari King. 'Brilliant, a white-knuckle ride of
a novel. Gripping and wildly glamorous' Tilly Bagshawe 'It's a real
slice of Hollywood and a brilliant read' Gerard Butler 'A glam,
edgy thriller, just the way I like them' Martina Cole 'Sex, scandal
and secrets galore' Jackie Collins 'A high-stakes thriller with a
dark, moving story at its core. Page-turning entertainment at its
very best' - TJ Emerson 'It's a thriller that's gritty, sexy and a
sensational page turner. You won't be able to put it down. I loved
it!' Lorraine Kelly 'I loved this Hollywood tale with deep Scottish
roots. It's dark, sinful, glittering and thrilling. An absolute
adventure from the very first page' Carmen Reid 'The mean streets
of Glasgow meet the glitz of Hollywood. A riveting read!' - Evie
Hunter
Alejandro Jodorowsky is a theatre director, writer of graphic
novels and comics, novelist, poet, and an expert in the Tarot. He
is also an auteur filmmaker who garnered attention with his
breakthrough film El Topo in 1970. He has been called a "cult"
filmmaker, whose films are surreal, hallucinatory, and provocative.
The Transformative Cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky explores the ways
in which Jodorowsky's films are transformative in a psychologically
therapeutic way. It also examines his signature style, which
includes the symbolic meaning of various colors in which he clothes
his actors, the use of his own family members in the films, and his
casting of himself in leading roles. This total involvement of
himself and his family in his auteur films led to his
psycho-therapeutic theories and practices: metagenealogy and
psychomagic. This book is the only the second book in the English
language in print that deals with all of Jodorowsky's films,
beginning with his earliest mime film in 1957 and ending with his
2019 film on psychomagic. It also connects his work as a writer and
therapist to his films, which themselves attempt to obliterate the
line between fantasy and reality.
Rewatching on the Point of the Cinematic Index offers a
reassessment of the cinematic index as it sits at the intersection
of film studies, trauma studies, and adaptation studies. Author
Allen H. Redmon argues that far too often scholars imagine the
cinematic index to be nothing more than an acknowledgment that the
lens-based camera captures and brings to the screen a reality that
existed before the camera. When cinema's indexicality is so
narrowly defined, the entire nature of film is called into question
the moment film no longer relies on a lens-based camera. The
presence of digital technologies seemingly strips cinema of its
indexical standing. This volume pushes for a broader understanding
of the cinematic index by returning to the early discussions of the
index in film studies and the more recent discussions of the index
in other digital arts. Bolstered by the insights these discussions
can offer, the volume looks to replace what might be best deemed a
diminished concept of the cinematic index with a series of more
complex cinematic indices, the impoverished index, the indefinite
index, the intertextual index, and the imaginative index. The
central argument of this book is that these more complex indices
encourage spectators to enter a process of ongoing adaptation of
the reality they see on the screen, and that it is on the point of
these indices that the most significant instances of rewatching
movies occur. Examining such films as John Lee Hancock's Saving Mr.
Banks (2013); Richard Linklater's oeuvre; Paul Greengrass's United
93 (2006); Oliver Stone's World Trade Center (2006); Stephen
Daldry's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011); and
Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017), Inception (2010), and Memento
(2000), Redmon demonstrates that the cinematic index invites
spectators to enter a process of ongoing adaptation.
A stunning showcase of the art behind Walt Disney Animation
Studio's magical film, Encanto! With never-before-seen production
art, character designs, storyboards, and colorscripts, The Art of
Encanto celebrates the art of this stunning animated film,
alongside exclusive interviews with the filmmakers and
behind-the-scenes details into the creative development process.
Encanto tells the tale of an extraordinary family, the Madrigals,
who live hidden in the mountains of Colombia, in a magical house,
in a vibrant town, in a wondrous, charmed place called an Encanto.
The magic of the Encanto has blessed every child in the family with
a unique gift from super strength to the power to heal-every child
except one, Mirabel. But when she discovers that the magic
surrounding the Encanto is in danger, Mirabel decides that she, the
only ordinary Madrigal, might just be her exceptional family's last
hope. * EXCLUSIVE BEHIND-THE-SCENES: Fans will want to delve into
and explore this new Walt Disney Animation film through character
designs, filmmaker stories, and making-of details exclusive to this
book. * PART OF THE FAN-FAVORITE SERIES: The collectible Art of
series from Disney and Pixar is perfect for animation enthusiasts,
filmmakers, students, art buffs, and fans of Disney alike. Add this
to the shelf alongside The Art of Raya and the Last Dragon, The Art
of Frozen 2, and The Art of Soul. (c)2021 Disney Enterprises, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
The years following the signing of the Armistice saw a
transformation of traditional attitudes regarding military conflict
as America attempted to digest the enormity and futility of the
First World War. During these years popular film culture in the
United States created new ways of addressing the impact of the war
on both individuals and society. Filmmakers with direct experience
of combat created works that promoted their own ideas about the
depiction of wartime service-ideas that frequently conflicted with
established, heroic tropes for the portrayal of warfare on film.
Those filmmakers spent years modifying existing standards and
working through a variety of storytelling options before achieving
a consensus regarding the fitting method for rendering war on
screen. That consensus incorporated facets of the experience of
Great War veterans, and these countered and undermined previously
accepted narrative strategies. This process reached its peak during
the Pre-Code Era of the early 1930s when the initially prevailing
narrative would be briefly supplanted by an entirely new approach
that questioned the very premises of wartime service. Even more
significantly, the rhetoric of these films argued strongly for an
antiwar stance that questioned every aspect of the wartime
experience. For No Reason at All: The Changing Narrative of the
First World War in American Film discusses a variety of Great
War-themed films made from 1915 to the present, tracing the
changing approaches to the conflict over time. Individual chapters
focus on movie antecedents, animated films and comedies, the
influence of literary precursors, the African American film
industry, women-centered films, and the effect of the Second World
War on depictions of the First. Films discussed include Hearts of
the World, The Cradle of Courage, Birthright, The Big Parade, She
Goes to War, Doughboys, Young Eagles, The Last Flight, Broken
Lullaby, Lafayette Escadrille, and Wonder Woman, among many others.
Hollywood Independent dissects the Mirisch Company, one of the most
successful employers of the package-unit system of film production,
producing classic films like The Apartment (1960), West Side Story
(1961), The Great Escape (1963) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
as irresistible talent packages. Whilst they helped make the names
of a new generation of stars including Steve McQueen and Shirley
MacLaine, as well as banking on the reputations of established
auteurs like Billy Wilder, they were also pioneers in dealing with
controversial new themes with films about race (In the Heat of the
Night), gender (Some Like it Hot) and sexuality (The Children's
Hour), devising new ways of working with film franchises (The
Magnificent Seven, The Pink Panther and In the Heat of the Night
spun off 7 Mirisch sequels between them) and cinematic cycles,
investing in adaptations of bestsellers and Broadway hits,
exploiting frozen funds abroad and exploring so-called runaway
productions. The Mirisch Company bridges the gap between the end of
the studio system by about 1960 and the emergence of a new cinema
in the mid-1970s, dominated by the Movie Brats.
|
|