Kategoria BISAC: Performing Arts >> Film - General

McAdams provides the first extensive synthesis of American and world history with the war film genre. He demonstrates how the war film reflects the currents of history of the time with actual events portrayed and in dramatic plot points.

Beginning with DEGREESIThe Birth of a Nation DEGREESR in 1915, McAdams weaves the development of Hollywood, the larger socioeconomic and political events of the time with the way war was and is portrayed in American film. In wartime he shows the struggle between propaganda and patriotism on the one side and the desire of many directors and film people...

Motion pictures have been one of the forces that have both shaped and reproduced adolescent femininity. Films not only reflect culture--they help to create it. So it is worth looking at films to see what messages they gave girls--and adults--about what girls were and should be like. Scheiner uses film as a window into the cultural meanings of female adolescence, and explores how those meanings changed over time. She looks at how female adolescence has been constructed in film, focusing on the period from 1920 to 1950. She contextualizes representations of female adolescence by looking at...

Certain films seem to encapsulate perfectly the often abstract ethical situations that confront the media, from truth-telling and sensationalism to corporate control and social responsibility. Using these movies--including Ace in the Hole, All the President's Men, Network, and Twelve Angry Men--as texts, authors Howard Good and Michael Dillon demonstrate that, when properly framed and contextualized, movies can be a powerful lens through which to examine media practices.

Moreover, cinema can present human moral conduct for evaluation and analysis...

"Bound to Bond: Gender, Genre, and the Hollywood Romantic Comedy" looks at gender roles in a unique way--by examining what the last thirty years of romantic comedy films have argued, reflected, and implied. Mark Rubinfeld contends that, essentially, we are what we see, and by identifying four basic plots of the genre, representing four basic love stories, he studies the implications of filmic depictions of male/female relationships. Cultural changes that have transformed our society since 1970 are seen here as we see them on the silver screen, and the author analyzes notable examples of...

Jazz has been associated with crime and immorality since early forms of the music were heard in the brothels of New Orleans and the gangster-owned clubs of the 1920s. This association encouraged the use of jazz in film noir, a genre preoccupied with tales of anxiety and urban decay, which flourished in American cinema during the postwar period. Yet, although the extent and nature of this collaboration has often been alluded to, it has rarely been examined in detail. Making significant use of archival sources and documentation, "Jazz Noir" seeks to correct this oversight, placing the films...

Scorsese's 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ arguably generated more resistance and conflict upon its release than any film before or since, engendering intense debate and even hatred between religious conservative protesters and liberal progressive defenders of the picture. This is the first full examination of the controversy, its participants, and their claims concerning the film's religious meaning.

This debate reflects deep levels of social and cultural insecurity produced by the shifting role of religion and religious language in an increasingly secularized...

The Frankenstein narrative is one of cinema's most durable, and it is often utilized by the studio system and the most renegade independents alike to reveal our deepest aspirations and greatest anxieties. The films have concerned themselves with demarcations of gender, race, and technology, and this new study aims to critique the more traditional interpretations of both the narrative and its sustained popularity. From James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) through Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), the story remains a nuanced and ultimately ambivalent one and is...

The history of cinema, and notably that of post-war Italian cinema, can only be understood adequately in the context of other contiguous cultural disciplines. World literature, including that of France, Germany, and Russia, played a key role in the development of post-war Italian film and the cinematic technique it has come to embody. Moving away from the usual modes of defining this period--a trajectory that begins with neorealism and ends with Bertolucci--author Carlo Testa offers proof that coming to terms with literary texts is an essential step toward understanding the motion pictures...

Given the complexity and expense of making and distributing a film, the process of filmmaking is by its very nature a political process. Moreover, given the power and persuasiveness of the cinema as a medium, film can be a powerful political tool. It should thus come as no surprise that film has had a long and extensive engagement with a variety of political topics, ranging from the actual mechanics of governance to electoral politics, to any number of specific political issues. Through a film-by-film examination of the movies explicitly concerned with American politics and American...

Steven Spielberg once said, "I like ideas, especially movie ideas, that you can hold in your hand. If a person can tell me the idea in twenty-five words or less, it's going to make a pretty good movie." Spielberg's comment embodies the essence of the high concept film, which can be condensed into one simple sentence that inspires marketing campaigns, lures audiences, and separates success from failure at the box office.

This pioneering study explores the development and dominance of the high concept movie within commercial Hollywood filmmaking since the late 1970s. Justin Wyatt...

* What were the first operas filmed?

* Why did they make silent films of operas?

* Why was a pseudo-opera written for Citizen Kane?

* What was the title of Maria Callas's only...

Great Hollywood Wit rollicks with hilarious movie lines and backstage zingers-smart, tart, and (in Sir John Gielgud's case) wicked: "Ingrid Bergman speaks five languages and can't act in any of them." Julia Roberts, fashion buff: "I only put clothes on so that I'm not naked when I go out shopping." Retiring Burt Reynolds: "You can only hold your stomach in for so many years."

Great Hollywood Wit is an unequaled cavalcade of hilarity that you'll laugh through again and again. A wonderful one-of-a-kind gift.

Following in the successful wake of The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres, The Dukes of Hazzard debuted in January 1979 and quickly became a staple of CBS-TV's Friday night lineup. With its wild mix of wacky car chases and spectacular vehicle wrecks, bumbling sheriffs, greedy politicians, and its rambunctious lead players (the Duke boys and curvaceous Daisy Duke), it's little wonder the program developed such a strong and loyal viewership.

This is the first book devoted to the genesis and production of the hit program, tracing its 1970s origin through to its...

From Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Gehring presents a compelling theory of the black comedy film genre. Placing the movies he discusses in a historical and literary context, Gehring explores the genre's obession with death and the characters' failure to be shocked by it. Movies discussed include: Slaughterhouse Five, Catch-2, Clockwork Orange, Harold and Maude, Heathers, and Natural Born Killers.

Parody is the least appreciated of all film comedy genres and receives little serious attention, even among film fans. This study elevates parody to mainstream significance. A historical overview places the genre in context, and a number of basic parody components, which better define the genre and celebrate its value, are examined. Parody is differentiated from satire, and the two parody types, traditional and reaffirmation, are explained. Chapters study the most spoofed genre in American parody history, the Western; pantheon members of American Film Comedy such as The Marx Brothers, W....

One of the most fascinating aspects of film studies is how it can explain more about the nature of closed societies. In Eastern Europe, artists, intellectuals, and entertainers are now free to create film outside the direct control of the state. This unique handbook convincingly shows how much film art was still being produced behind the Iron Curtain even during such repressive periods as those under Stalin and Brezhnev. Thomas J. Slater has compiled a valuable history of cinematic evolution in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe through the use of detailed historiographical essays for...

An annotated filmography of more than 3,000 entries each focusing on the film's Hispanic content, connection, or characters. Four separate indexes, more than 6,000 cross references, and as many film reviews make this work an invaluable reference tool for students, scholars, and individuals interested in studying silver screen stereotyping. This work completes Richard's three-volume documentation of how the domestic and international film industry contributed to stereotyping America's Hispanic community by detailing the contemporary return of the despicable Hispanic character.

Employing...

One hundred years after his creation by Bram Stoker, Dracula is still fascinating us. This study traces the changing nature of film representations of Dracula, from the early silent adaptations to recent popular dramas. Holte suggests that vampire films and Dracula adaptations have become an independent genre, the dark romance, with its own set of narrative conventions and audience expectations combining horror and eroticism. This engaging study provides readers with a natural history of the vampire, an examination of the work of Bram Stoker, a history and analysis of many film...