|
Showing 1 - 6 of
6 matches in All Departments
In 2008, Waltz with Bashir shocked the world by presenting a
bracing story of war in what seemed like the most unlikely of
formats--an animated film. Yet as Donna Kornhaber shows in this
pioneering new book, the relationship between animation and war is
actually as old as film itself. The world's very first animated
movie was made to solicit donations for the Second Boer War, and
even Walt Disney sent his earliest creations off to fight on
gruesome animated battlefields drawn from his First World War
experience. As Kornhaber strikingly demonstrates, the tradition of
wartime animation, long ignored by scholars and film buffs alike,
is one of the world's richest archives of wartime memory and
witness. Generation after generation, artists have turned to this
most fantastical of mediums to capture real-life horrors they can
express in no other way. From Chinese animators depicting the
Japanese invasion of Shanghai to Bosnian animators portraying the
siege of Sarajevo, from African animators documenting ethnic
cleansing to South American animators reflecting on torture and
civil war, from Vietnam-era protest films to the films of the
French Resistance, from first-hand memories of Hiroshima to the
haunting work of Holocaust survivors, the animated medium has for
more than a century served as a visual repository for some of the
darkest chapters in human history. It is a tradition that continues
even to this day, in animated shorts made by Russian dissidents
decrying the fighting in Ukraine, American soldiers returning from
Iraq, or Middle Eastern artists commenting on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Arab Spring, or the ongoing
crisis in Yemen. Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary: War and the
Animated Film vividly tells the story of these works and many
others, covering the full history of animated film and spanning the
entire globe. A rich, serious, and deeply felt work of
groundbreaking media history, it is also an emotional testament to
the power of art to capture the endurance of the human spirit in
the face of atrocity.
Encompassing the thirty-five year span between the initial
development of film technology in the mid-1890s and the adoption of
synchronized sound in the late 1920s, the cinema's silent era is
both one of the most important epochs of film history and one of
the most misunderstood within the popular imagination. In this
brief and readable account, these formative decades come vividly to
life. Covering the full scope of the silent era-from the invention
of motion pictures to the rise of the Hollywood studios-and
touching on films and filmmakers from every corner of the globe,
Silent Film: A Very Short Introduction offers a window into film's
first years as a worldwide entertainment phenomenon. From
groundbreaking early shorts to the masterpieces of the cinema's
classical era, from street-corner nickelodeons to grand movie
palaces, from slapstick to the avant-garde, the silent era's
artistic abundance and global variety are here put on full display.
In the story of silent film, we see not just the origins of a new
culture industry but also a legacy of imagination and innovation
that continues to profoundly influence the cinema even to this day.
ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford
University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every
subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get
ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts,
analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make
interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
The Grand Budapest Hotel and Moonrise Kingdom have made Wes
Anderson a prestige force. Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums have
become quotable cult classics. Yet every new Anderson release
brings out droves of critics eager to charge him with stylistic
excess and self-indulgent eclecticism. Donna Kornhaber approaches
Anderson's style as the necessary product of the narrative and
thematic concerns that define his body of work. Using Anderson's
focus on collecting, Kornhaber situates the director as the curator
of his filmic worlds, a prime mover who artfully and
conscientiously arranges diverse components into cohesive
collections and taxonomies. Anderson peoples each mise-en-scene in
his ongoing ""Wesworld"" with characters orphaned, lost, and out of
place amidst a riot of handmade clutter and relics. Within, they
seek a wholeness and collective identity they manifestly lack, with
their pain expressed via an ordered emotional palette that, despite
being muted, cries out for attention. As Kornhaber shows,
Anderson's films offer nothing less than a fascinating study in the
sensation of belonging--told by characters who possess it the
least.
Though he was a recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel
Prize for Literature, American novelist John Steinbeck (1902--1968)
has frequently been censored. Even in the twenty-first century,
nearly ninety years after his work first appeared in print,
Steinbeck's novels, stories, and plays still generate controversy:
his 1937 book Of Mice and Men was banned in some Mississippi
schools in 2002, and as recently as 2009, he made the American
Library Association's annual list of most frequently challenged
authors. A Political Companion to John Steinbeck examines the most
contentious political aspects of the author's body of work, from
his early exploration of social justice and political authority
during the Great Depression to his later positions regarding
domestic and international threats to American policies. Featuring
contemporaneous and present-day interpretations of his novels and
essays by historians, literary scholars, and political theorists,
this book covers the spectrum of Steinbeck's writing, exploring
everything from his place in American political culture to his
seeming betrayal of his leftist principles in later years.
Though he was a recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel
Prize for Literature, American novelist John Steinbeck (1902--1968)
has frequently been censored. Even in the twenty-first century,
nearly ninety years after his work first appeared in print,
Steinbeck's novels, stories, and plays still generate controversy:
his 1937 book Of Mice and Men was banned in some Mississippi
schools in 2002, and as recently as 2009, he made the American
Library Association's annual list of most frequently challenged
authors. A Political Companion to John Steinbeck examines the most
contentious political aspects of the author's body of work, from
his early exploration of social justice and political authority
during the Great Depression to his later positions regarding
domestic and international threats to American policies. Featuring
contemporaneous and present-day interpretations of his novels and
essays by historians, literary scholars, and political theorists,
this book covers the spectrum of Steinbeck's writing, exploring
everything from his place in American political culture to his
seeming betrayal of his leftist principles in later years.
Charlie Chaplin was one of the cinema's consummate comic
performers, yet he has long been criticized as a lackluster film
director. In this groundbreaking work--the first to analyze
Chaplin's directorial style--Donna Kornhaber radically recasts his
status as a filmmaker. Spanning Chaplin's career, Kornhaber
discovers a sophisticated "Chaplinesque" visual style that draws
from early cinema and slapstick and stands markedly apart from
later, "classical" stylistic conventions. His is a manner of
filmmaking that values space over time and simultaneity over
sequence, crafting narrative and meaning through careful
arrangement within the frame rather than cuts between frames.
Opening up aesthetic possibilities beyond the typical boundaries of
the classical Hollywood film, Chaplin's filmmaking would profoundly
influence directors from Fellini to Truffaut. To view Chaplin
seriously as a director is to re-understand him as an artist and to
reconsider the nature and breadth of his legacy.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|