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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.
Christopher Nolan is the writer and director of Hollywood
blockbusters like The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, and
also of arthouse films like Memento and Inception. Underlying his
staggering commercial success however, is a darker sensibility that
questions the veracity of human knowledge, the allure of appearance
over reality and the latent disorder in contemporary society. This
appreciation of the sinister owes a huge debt to philosophy and
especially modern thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud
and Jacques Derrida. Taking a thematic approach to Nolan's oeuvre,
Robbie Goh examines how the director's postmodern inclinations
manifest themselves in non-linearity, causal agnosticism, the
threat of social anarchy and the frequent use of the mise en abyme,
while running counter to these are narratives of heroism, moral
responsibility and the dignity of human choice. For Goh, Nolan is a
'reluctant postmodernist'. His films reflect the cynicism of the
modern world, but with their representation of heroic moral
triumphs, they also resist it.
From Eugene Delacroix's interpretation of the 1830 French
revolution to Uli Edel's version of the Baader-Meinhof Gang,
artistic representations of historical subjects are appealing and
pervasive. Movies often adapt imagery from art history, including
paintings of historical events. Films and art shape the past for us
and continue to affect our interpretation of history. While
historical films are often argued over for their adherence to "the
facts," their real problem is realism: how can the past be
convincingly depicted? Realism in the historical film genre is
often nourished and given credibility by its use of painterly
references. This book examines how art-historical images affect
historical films by going beyond period detail and surface design
to look at how profound ideas about history are communicated
through pictures. Art and the Historical Film: Between Realism and
the Sublime is based on case studies that explore the links between
art and cinema, including American independent Western Meek's
Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010), British heritage film Belle (Amma
Asante, 2013), and Dutch national epic Admiral (Roel Reine, 2014).
The chapters create immersive worlds that communicate distinct
ideas about the past through cinematography, production design, and
direction, as the films adapt, reference, and transpose paintings
by artists such as Rubens, Albert Bierstadt, and Jacques-Louis
David.
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
Star Wars: The Blueprints brings together the original technical
drawings from deep within the Lucasfilm Archives. Combined with
commentary from J. W. Rinzler, the collection maps in precise,
vivid, and intricate detail the genesis of one of the most enduring
onscreen stories. Special features: more than 250 blueprints; more
than 500 photographs and illustrations; and, ten gatefolds.
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.
Just as punk created a space for bands such as the Slits and Poly
Styrene to challenge 1970s norms of femininity, through a
transgressive, strident new female-ness, it also provoked
experimental feminist film makers to initiate a parallel,
lens-based challenge to patriarchal modes of film making. In this
book, Rachel Garfield breaks new ground in exploring the
rebellious, feminist Punk audio-visual culture of the 1970s,
tracing its roots and its legacies. In their filmmaking and their
performed personae, film and video artists such as Vivienne Dick,
Sandra Lahire, Betzy Bromberg, Ruth Novaczek, Sadie Benning, Leslie
Thornton, Abigail Child and Anne Robinson offered a powerful,
deliberately awkward alternative to hegemonic conformist
femininity, creating a new "Punk audio visual aesthetic". A vital
aspect of our vibrant contemporary digital audio visual culture,
Garfield argues, can be traced back to the techniques and forms of
these feminist pioneers, who like their musical contemporaries
worked in a pre-digital, analogue modality that nevertheless
influenced the emergent digital audio visual culture of the 1990s
and 2000s.
This new edition of the groundbreaking popular book is a must-have
for both seasoned and new fans of anime. Japanese animation is more
popular than ever following the 2002 Academy Award given to Hayao
Miyazaki's "Spirited Away," It confirmed that anime is more than
just children's cartoons, often portraying important social and
cultural themes. With new chapters on "Spirited Away "and other
recent releases, including "Howl's Moving Castle"--Miyazaki's
latest hit film, already breaking records in Japan--this edition
will be the authoritative source on anime for an exploding market
of viewers who want to know more.
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