This study analyses the historical development of South African cinema up to he book's original publication in 1988. It describes the films and comments on their relationship to South African realities, addressing all aspects of the industry, focusing on domestic production, but also discussing international film companies who use South Africa as a location. It explores tensions between English-language and Afrikaans-language films, and between films made for blacks and films made for whites.
Going behind the scenes the author looks at the financial infrastructure, the marketing...
This study analyses the historical development of South African cinema up to he book's original publication in 1988. It describes the films and com...
Between 1952 and 1962, when this book was originally published, the number of people visiting British cinemas had fallen by nearly two thirds and was little more than half the pre-war total. Nearly 1500 of the 4500 cinemas functioning in 1955 had closed five years later, and the author here predicts a further substantial fall.
The causes of this drastic decline are traced to the competition of television but also to the dramatic halving of the number of new American films and to the difficulty of transferring a cinema's 'congregation' when it is closed. This decline has few...
Between 1952 and 1962, when this book was originally published, the number of people visiting British cinemas had fallen by nearly two thirds and w...
This book argues that serious misreadings of Freud and Lacan on sexual difference have characterized prevailing models of psychoanalytic film criticism. In critiquing theories of identification and female spectatorship, the author maintains that early film theorists and feminist critics are equally guilty of imposing a binary conception of sexual difference on Freud's thought. By embracing such a rigid definition of male/female difference, they fail to understand the fundamentally complex and fluid process of sexual identification as it is articulated in Freud's writing, constructed in...
This book argues that serious misreadings of Freud and Lacan on sexual difference have characterized prevailing models of psychoanalytic film criti...
As Charlton Heston put it: There s a temptingly simple definition of the epic film: it s the easiest kind of picture to make badly. This book goes beyond that definition to show how the film epic has taken up one of the most ancient art-forms and propelled it into the modern world, covered in twentieth-century ambitions, anxieties, hopes and fantasies. This survey of historical epic films dealing with periods up to the end of the Dark Ages looks at epic form and discusses the films by historical period, showing how the cinema reworks history for the changing needs of its audience, much as...
As Charlton Heston put it: There s a temptingly simple definition of the epic film: it s the easiest kind of picture to make badly. This book goes ...
Given Herzog's own pronouncement that 'film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates, ' it is not surprising that his work has aroused ambivalent and contradictory responses. Visually and philosophically ambitious and at the same time provocatively eccentric, Herzog's films have been greeted equally by extreme adulation and extreme condemnation.
Even as Herzog's rebellious images have gained him a reputation as a master of the German New Wave, he has been attacked for indulging in a romantic naivete and wilful self-absorption. To his hardest critics, Herzog's films appear as...
Given Herzog's own pronouncement that 'film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates, ' it is not surprising that his work has aroused ambiva...
When this book was originally published in 1987, the American feature film had been colonising the world's imagination for over 75 years and the book studies that experience in Britain, where American films have always dominated cinema screens, both commercially and intellectually.
The timeframe is the decade after the Second World War: this was a time when the British accommodated themselves to a declining role in world affairs and became in many respects a client nation of the United States. Part of this changing status was tied to the manner in which American popular culture was...
When this book was originally published in 1987, the American feature film had been colonising the world's imagination for over 75 years and the bo...
This book analyses the teen film as the rare medium able to represent the otherwise chaotic and conflicting experience of youth. The author focuses on six major issues: alienation, deviance and delinquency, sex and gender, the politics of consumption, the apolitics of youth(ful) rebellion, and regression into nostalgia. Despite the many differences within the genre, this book sees all teen films as focused on a single social concern: the breakdown of traditional forms of authority - school, church, family.
Working with the theories of such diverse scholars as Kenneth Keniston,...
This book analyses the teen film as the rare medium able to represent the otherwise chaotic and conflicting experience of youth. The author focuses...
Film is an important source of social history, as well as having been a popular art form from the early twentieth century. This study shows how a society, consciously or unconsciously, is mirrored in its cinema. It considers the role of the cinema in dramatizing popular beliefs and myths, and takes three case studies American populism, British imperialism, German Nazism to explain how a nation s pressures, tensions and hopes come through in its films. Examining the American cinema is accomplished by analysing the careers of three great directors, John Ford, Frank Capra and Leo McCarey,...
Film is an important source of social history, as well as having been a popular art form from the early twentieth century. This study shows how a s...
Originally published in 1964, this book tells the history of the British cinematograph industry for the first time. It describes moments of splendid triumph and others of shattering failure. The mood switches from reckless optimism to demoralising pessimism, from years in which British films won the highest international awards to those when they were dismissed with scorn. It recalls a score of productions still ranked among the world's best, and the stars whose reputation was established in them. Attention is focused on the directors, those who kept to the fore during two and three decades...
Originally published in 1964, this book tells the history of the British cinematograph industry for the first time. It describes moments of splendid t...
The Mass Observation social research organisation (1937 to early 1950s), a pioneering independent effort aimed at education, specialised in material about everyday life in Britain and recorded material through a panel of around 500 volunteer observers who maintained diaries or replied to open-ended questionnaires known as directives.
The collection of papers on film is one of the largest collections on a single theme produced by Mass-Observation but before this book was originally published in 1987 very little of the film material had been put into print. This anthology presents a...
The Mass Observation social research organisation (1937 to early 1950s), a pioneering independent effort aimed at education, specialised in materia...
