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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema
Delmer Daves (1904-1977) was an American screenwriter, director,
and producer known for his dramas and Western adventures, most
notably Broken Arrow and 3:10 to Yuma. Despite the popularity of
his films, there has been little serious examination of Daves's
work. Filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier has called Daves the most
forgotten of American directors, and to date no scholarly monograph
has focused on his work. In The Films of Delmer Daves: Visions of
Progress in Mid-Twentieth-Century America, author Douglas Horlock
contends that the director's work warrants sustained scholarly
attention. Examining all of Daves's films, as well as his
screenplays, scripts that were not filmed, and personal papers,
Horlock argues that Daves was a serious, distinctive, and
enlightened filmmaker whose work confronts the general conservatism
of Hollywood in the mid-twentieth century. Horlock considers
Daves's films through the lenses of political and social values,
race and civil rights, and gender and sexuality. Ultimately,
Horlock suggests that Daves's work-through its examination of
bigotry and irrational fear and depiction of institutional and
personal morality and freedom-presents a consistent, innovative,
and progressive vision of America.
A detailed interpretation of nine of the Spanish director's films
focuses on the style, technique and themes of his work.
In Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind, some of the scholars who
have become essential for our understanding of Stanley Cavell's
writing on film gather to use his landmark contributions to help us
read new films-from Hollywood and elsewhere-that exist beyond his
immediate reach and reading. In extending the scope of Cavell's
film philosophy, we naturally find ourselves contending with it and
amending it, as the case may be. Through a series of interpretive
vignettes, the group effort situates, for the expert and novitiate
alike, how Cavell's writing on film can profitably enrich one's
experience of cinema generally and also inform how we might
continue the practice of serious philosophical criticism of
specific films mindful of his sensibility. The resulting
conversations between texts, traditions, disciplines, genres, and
generations creates propitious conditions for discovering what it
means to watch and listen to movies with Stanley Cavell in mind.
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