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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Films, cinema
Crossover Stardom: Popular Male Stars in American Cinema focuses on
male music stars who have attempted to achieve film stardom.
Crossover stardom can describe stars who cross from one medium to
another. Although 'crossover' has become a popular term to describe
many modern stars who appear in various mediums, crossover stardom
has a long history, going back to the beginning of the cinema.
Lobalzo Wright begins with Bing Crosby, a significant Hollywood
star in the studio era; moving to Elvis Presley in the 1950s and
1960s, as the studio system collapsed; to Kris Kristofferson in the
New Hollywood period of the 1970s; and ending with Will Smith and
Justin Timberlake, in the contemporary era, when corporate
conglomerates dominate Hollywood. Thus, the study not only explores
music stardom (and music genres) in various eras, and masculinity
within these periods, it also surveys the history of American
cinema from industrial and cultural perspectives, from the 1930s to
today.
Fans and critics alike perceive Wong Kar-wai (b. 1958) as an
enigma. His dark glasses, his nonlinear narrations, and his high
expectations for actors all contribute to an assumption that he
only makes art for a few high-brow critics. However Wong's
interviews show this Hong Kong auteur is candid about the art of
filmmaking, even surprisinghis interlocutors by suggesting his
films are commercial and made for a popular audience. Wong's
achievements nevertheless feel like arthouse cinema.His third film,
Chungking Express, introduced him to a global audience captivated
by the quick and quirky editing style. His Cannes award-winning
films Happy Together and In the Mood for Love confirmed an audience
beyond the greater Chinese market. His latest film, The
Grandmaster, depicts the life of a kung fu master by breaking away
from the martial arts genre. In each of these films, Wong Kar-wai's
signature style-experimental, emotive, character-driven, and
timeless-remains apparent throughout. This volume includes
interviews that appear in English for the first time, including
some that appeared in Hong Kong magazines now out of print. The
interviews cover every feature film from Wong's debut As Tears Go
By to his 2013 The Grandmaster.
U?pon its release in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho divided
critical opinion, with several leading film critics condemning
Hitchcock's apparent encouragement of the audience's identification
with the gruesome murder that lies at the heart of the film. Such
antipathy did little to harm Psycho's box-office returns, and it
would go on to be acknowledged as one of the greatest film
thrillers, with scenes and characters that are among the most
iconic in all cinema. In his illuminating study of Psycho, Raymond
Durgnat provides a minute analysis of its unfolding narrative,
enabling us to consider what happens to the viewer as he or she
watches the film, and to think afresh about questions of
spectatorship, Hollywood narrative codes, psycho-analysis, editing
and shot composition. In his introduction to the new edition, Henry
K. Miller presents A Long Hard Look at 'Psycho' as the culmination
of Durgnat's decades-long campaign to correct what he called film
studies' 'Grand Error'. In the course of expounding Durgnat's
root-and-branch challenge to our inherited shibboleths about
Hollywood cinema in general and Hitchcock in particular, Miller
also describes the eclectic intellectual tradition to which Durgnat
claimed allegiance. This band of amis inconnus, among them William
Empson, Edgar Morin and Manny Farber, had at its head Durgnat's
mentor Thorold Dickinson. The book's story begins in the early
1960s, when Dickinson made the long hard look the basis of his
pioneering film course at the Slade School of Fine Art, and Psycho
became one of its first objects.
Bringing together the human story of care with its representation
in film, fiction and memoir, this book combines an analysis of care
narratives to inform and inspire ideas about this major role in
life. Alongside analysis of narratives drawn from literature and
film, the author sensitively interweaves the story of his wife's
illness and care to illuminate perspectives on dealing with human
decline. Examining texts from a diverse range of authors such as
Leo Tolstoy, Edith Wharton and Alice Munro, and filmmakers such as
Ingmar Bergman and Michael Haneke, it addresses questions such as
why caregiving is a dangerous activity, the ethical problems of
writing about caregiving, the challenges of reading about
caregiving, and why caregiving is so important. It serves as a fire
starter on the subject of how we can gain insight into the
challenges and opportunities of caregiving through the creative
arts.
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