Kategoria BISAC: Performing Arts >> Film - History & Criticism

"We can usually expect something fresh and different to emerge from Australia, and this study is no exception." --American Cinematographer

"An important contribution to cinema history... especially impressive in its analysis of the French cinema industry, in terms of both mode of production and personnel, and in its analysis of the French technological base."--Richard Abel

From 1930 to 1960, France produced some of the most famous films ever made, such as Jean Vigo's Zero de conduite and Jean Cocteau's Orphee. Here Colin Crisp investigates this critical period and details the...

Feminist theory has been at the forefront of critical analysis for more than two decades. With dazzling insight, Maggie Humm highlights and explains feminist issues and offers a fascinating array of original film analyses. Feminism and Film is the first book to apply such a broad range of theory to contemporary film.
Humm begins with an in-depth historical survey of contemporary feminist theory, visual aesthetics and film theory, with a particular focus on the work of Laura Mulvey, Annette Kuhn, E. Ann Kaplan and bell hooks. Subsequent chapters examine the most pressing questions posed...

"White writes with considerable flair, and her arguments are always interesting..." Choice

"Uncovering a massive trove of what she calls 'lesbian representability' images of lesbian desire, love and life in mainstream movies, White provides an insightful look at classic American films.... her myriad examples and finely wrought arguments prove both convincing and engaging." Publishers Weekly

"Conspiratorial and witty, Uninvited is a mischievous invitation to dissect classical cinema by someone who wields the razor with glee." OUT Magazine

Lesbian characters, stories, and...

Struggles for Representation examines over 300 non-fiction films by more than 150 African American film/videomakers and includes an extensive filmography, bibliography, and excerpts from interviews with film/videomakers. In eleven original essays, contributors explore the extraordinary scope of these aesthetic and social documents and chart a previously undiscovered territory: documentaries that examine the aesthetic, economic, historical, political, and social forces that shape the lives of black Americans, as seen from their perspectives.

Until now, scholars and critics have...

"No serious student of film should miss the great work collected in this volume."--W. A. Vincent, Choice

"When so much writing about film is based on overall impressions or shadowy memories, on notes scribbled in the dark or published shot breakdowns that are often overgeneralized or even inaccurate, it is refreshing to be confronted with such scholarly work, characterized by a genuinely attentive eye and a punctilious observation of detail. This long-awaited collection, gathering Bellour's ground breaking studies into one volume, will surely be a crucial source of inspiration for...

How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies
Robert B. Ray
Foreword by James Naremore

Challenges accepted ideas about film and cultural studies.

In the 1920s, when film criticism was as new as the cinema itself, a particular way of thinking about the movies developed in Paris. The cinema, this theory suggested, turns on photography s automatism, the revolutionary fact that for the first time in human history a perfect representation of the world can be produced by accident. Moreover, the camera s gaze has the potential to transform ordinary objects a...

Toward Cinema and Its Double brings together Laleen Jayamanne s discussions of Australian films, Sri Lankan films, European art films, silent film comedy, contemporary American films, and her own films. While some of her essays are based on formal film analysis, others include more theoretically based ways of considering films. In her studies, Jayamanne employs Walter Benjamin s and Theodor Adorno s concept of mimesis, and Gilles Deleuze s theses on cinematic time and movement as tools for thinking about the cinematic experience in new ways.

Toward Cinema and Its Double addresses a...

The Sounds of Early Cinema is devoted exclusively to a little-known, yet absolutely crucial phenomenon: the ubiquitous presence of sound in early cinema. "Silent cinema" may rarely have been silent, but the sheer diversity of sound(s) and sound/image relations characterizing the first 20 years of moving picture exhibition can still astonish us. Whether instrumental, vocal, or mechanical, sound ranged from the improvised to the pre-arranged (as in scripts, scores, and cue sheets). The practice of mixing sounds with images differed widely, depending on the venue (the nickelodeon in Chicago...

European Film Theory and Cinema explores the major film theories and movements within European cinema since the early 1900s. An original and critically astute study, it considers film theory within the context of the intellectual climate of the last two centuries. Ian Aitkin focuses particularly on the two major traditions that dominate European film theory and cinema: the "intuitionist modernist and realist" tradition and the "post-Saussurian" tradition. The first originates in a philosophical lineage that encompasses German idealist philosophy, romanticism, phenomenology, and the...

When Benito Mussolini proclaimed that "Cinema is the strongest weapon," he was telling only half the story. In reality, very few feature films during the Fascist period can be labeled as propaganda. Re-viewing Fascism considers the many films that failed as "weapons" in creating cultural consensus and instead came to reflect the complexities and contradictions of Fascist culture. The volume also examines the connection between cinema of the Fascist period and neorealism-ties that many scholars previously had denied in an attempt to view Fascism as an unfortunate deviation in Italian...

Marcello Mastroianni is considered by many to be the epitome of the Latin lover, the consummate symbol of Italian masculinity. In Beyond the Latin Lover, Jacqueline Reich unmasks the reality behind the myth. In her investigation of many of Mastroianni s most famous characters in Italian cinema, she reveals that beneath the image of hyper-masculinity lies the figure of the inetto, the Italian schlemiel at odds with and out of place in a rapidly changing world. Diverse roles throughout his career the impotent man, the cuckold, and the unruly woman s victim, among others present an anti-hero...

Emphasizing post-independent films released since the 1950s and the burgeoning commercial film production of the last decade, Focus on African Films provides unique and pluralistic perspectives on filmmaking throughout Africa. As a whole, the collection highlights the distinct thematic, stylistic, and socioeconomic circumstances of African filmmaking. Individual essays show how conditions in Africa have generated a broad range of views and techniques, from the stylistically innovative documentaries of Jean-Marie Teno and Abderrahmane Sissako and the "documentary fiction" of Mahamat-Saleh...

The conversion to sound cinema is routinely portrayed as a homogenizing process that significantly reduced the cinema's diversity of film styles and practices. Cinema's Conversion to Sound offers an alternative assessment of synchronous sound's impact on world cinema through a shift in critical focus: in contrast to film studies' traditional exclusive concern with the film image, the book investigates national differences in sound-image practice in a revised account of the global changeover from silent to sound cinema. Extending beyond recent Hollywood cinema, Charles O'Brien undertakes a...

Postcolonial Images is a comprehensive introduction to and resource for cinema of the Maghreb. In clear and accessible prose, Roy Armes examines the political and cultural context of the films and the film industry in the post-independence era. Since the birth of cinema, North Africa has been the site of countless European and U.S. film productions. This book, however, focuses on the postcolonial period, when indigenous filmmaking in each of the three Maghreb countries Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia arose with the newly independent nations. Comparative analyses of each country s filmmaking...

From cinema s beginnings, the film image of the "Jew" has closely followed the fortunes and misfortunes of Jews. Analyzing more than 70 films made in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, East and West Germany, France, Italy, the United States, and Israel from 1920 to the 1990s, noted historian Omer Bartov argues that depictions of the "Jew" in film have been fed by, or have reacted to, certain stereotypical depictions of Jews arising from age-old prejudices. These images, in turn, both reflected public attitudes and helped to shape them. He points to...

"Hillman's groundbreaking study enables both serious and casual film students to approach these works with sharpened vision and improved hearing." -Klaus Phillips, Hollins University

Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, and Ideology examines the use of classical music in film, particularly in the New German Cinema of the 1970s and early 80s. By integrating the music of Beethoven, Mahler, and others into their films, directors such as Fassbinder, Kluge, and Syberberg consciously called attention to its cultural significance. Through this music their films could reference and, in...

Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees is in part a history of cinephilia, in part an attempt to recapture the spirit of cinephilia for the discipline of film studies, and in part an experiment in cinephilic writing.

Cinephiles have regularly fetishized contingent, marginal details in the motion picture image: the gesture of a hand, the wind in the trees. Christian Keathley demonstrates that the spectatorial tendency that produces such cinematic encounters--a viewing practice marked by a drift in visual attention away from the primary visual elements on display--in fact has...

Widely acclaimed as the best animated film of all time, Tale of Tales is a poetic amalgam of Yuri Norstein's memories of his past and hopes and fears for the future: his post-war childhood, remnants of the personal tragedies of war, the little wolf character in the lullaby his mother used to sing, the neighbors in his crowded communal flat, the tango played in the park on summer evenings, and the small working-class boy's longing to emerge from the dark central corridor of the kommunalka into a luminous world of art and poetry. In Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator's Journey,...

In Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema, prominent scholars consider well-known films that seem to stand alone in the history of cinema, without obvious precursors, and without progeny: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, L age d or, and Last Year in Marienbad, to name a few. Such films appear to be sui generis and in some ways incomprehensible; but as these essays demonstrate, they are best understood within contexts beyond the world of cinema. Most were heavily influenced by some aspect of Modernism Symbolism, Dada, Expressionism, Surrealism, Constructivism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, etc....

Tina Chanter resolves a fundamental problem in film theory by negotiating a middle path between "gaze theory" approaches to film and spectator studies or cultural theory approaches that emphasize the position of the viewer and thereby take account of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Chanter argues that abjection is the unthought ground of fetishistic theories. If the feminine has been the privileged excluded other of psychoanalytic theory, fueled by the myth of castration and the logic of disavowal, when fetishism is taken up by race theory, or cultural theory, the multiple and fluid...