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

Film and television have been accepted as having a pervasive influence on how people understand the world. An important aspect of this is the relationship of history and film. The different views of the past created by film, television, and video are only now attracting closer attention from historians, cultural critics, and filmmakers. This volume seeks to advance the critical exploration scholars have recently begun.

Barta begins by addressing the various ways the past is screened for our understanding and relates the art of film to other media. The essays that follow deal...

Rosi's films consistently and directly address the themes of political and institutional corruption and the complex relationship between the individual, the mafia, and the state. Whether evoking the multiple facets of Sicilian banditry in Salvatore Giuliano (1962), exposing right-wing killing squads in Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses) (1976), or courageously debating the roots of Italian terrorism in DEGREESITre fratelli (Three Brothers) DEGREESR (1981), his gripping political-documentary works have managed to combine factual and intellectual rigor with box office...

Despite its rise in the global market, recent political progress, and a surging interest worldwide, Korean films are relatively unknown and rarely studied. This new work begins by investigating the history, industry structure, and trends of filmmaking in Korea, going on to examine how Hollywood films have affected both Korean mainstream and nonmainstream film industries in terms of both means of production and narrative. Moreover, the authors analyze the ways in which Korean films of recent years have represented the modernization process in Korea itself, as well as the ideological...

Historically, the mass media have marginalized women's sports by devoting more coverage to men's sports and trying to appeal to a male audience. This volume analyzes the mass media's portrayal of women's sports. The Olympic Games are highlighted because they provide one of the few sports arenas where women's participation is heavily covered, promoted, and celebrated. The author suggests the media are recognizing the significance of female spectatorship and are attempting to respond to this growing audience by adopting some of the rhetorical and textual characteristics of soap opera and...

Novels and films record and codify the cultural experiences of their people. This book explores the relationship between contemporary literature and film of the past fifty years and the ancient myths of Judeo-Christian, Greek, Celtic, and Eastern origin. Following a detailed description and explanation of both literary and film devices, stories that inform to a mythic tradition are analyzed to identify what they reveal about modern culture. This work explores such diverse subjects as heroism, coming of age, and morality. This approach to literature and film explores how contemporary...

Films have been a part of U.S. society for a century--a source of great enjoyment for the audience and of great profit to filmmakers. How does a mass entertainment medium deal with some of the great sources of dramatic real-life political and economic conflict--the Great Depression, the Cold War--in a way that attracts an audience without making it angry? How does an industry, which has from its beginnings been the subject of attacks from social, political and religious groups deal with political issues and conflicts? This book is an attempt to examine these questions; it is also an...

Novels and films record and codify the cultural experiences of their people. This book explores the relationship between contemporary literature and film of the past fifty years and the ancient myths of Judeo-Christian, Greek, Celtic, and Eastern origin. Following a detailed description and explanation of both literary and film devices, stories that inform to a mythic tradition are analyzed to identify what they reveal about modern culture. This work explores such diverse subjects as heroism, coming of age, and morality. This approach to literature and film explores how contemporary...

The novel and the film are two modes of representation based on different aesthetic tools, but both are capable of articulating narrative discourses. In "Spanish Film and the Postwar Novel," author Norberto Minguez-Arranz offers a comparative analysis of the methods and mechanisms with which the novel and the film build their stories. A theoretical framework that that puts into perspective such concepts as specificity, representation, and point of view gives way to a comparative study of five Spanish postwar novels and their respective film adaptations: "The Family of Pascual Duarte,"...

With films such as "Muriel's Wedding" and "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" finding recent success in American theaters, Australian cinema has never been as popular in North America as it is today. This new study argues that post-1970 Australian film is best described not as exhibiting phenomenal variety but as focused on a conception of heroism characterized by the love of freedom, the resentment of authority, and attachment to the land, along with anti-intellectualism, fatalism, and occasional sexism. Tracing these themes through one hundred films, Scheckels explores the...

Between the release of "Henry V" in 1989 and "Love's Labour's Lost" in 2000, Kenneth Branagh directed eight major films in a wide variety of genres, ranging from film noir to horror to comedy, and continually startled audiences around the world with his audacious and energetic film style. Initially following in the footsteps of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier, Branagh has placed himself among the small collection of actors who have transformed themselves into award-winning directors as well. In this, the first comprehensive English-language treatment of Branagh's feature films, Crowl...

Though movies have remained our foremost cultural pastime for over 100 years, many of us still know very little about the tools used to create them. In this groundbreaking new book, Vincent LoBrutto provides an enjoyable and accessible education in the art of cinema: using 50 landmark films spanning the history of the medium, LoBrutto illustrates such important concepts as editing, production design, cinematography, sound, screen acting, narrative structure, and various genres, nationalities, and film eras. Each concept is illustrated by the selection of a film that epitomizes its use, so...

The genre of legal cinema is an extensive and revealing one: it is a body of films that depicts lawyers, clients, criminals, judges, and juries, often not as they actually are, but as we would like them to be. The idealized courtroom of many legal movies tells us a great deal about what we think of our justice system and what we want it to reflect about America, but the films in the genre vary widely in how they do this. From "To Kill a Mockingbird" to "Liar, Liar," from "A Time to Kill" to "Twelve Angry Men," we see certain stereotypes repeating themselves again and again: the judge as...

Movie audiences seem drawn, almost compelled, toward tales of the horrific and the repulsive. Partly because horror continues to evolve radically--every time the genre is deemed dead, it seems to come up with another twist--it has been one of the most often-dissected genres. Here, author Kendall Phillips selects ten of the most popular and influential horror films--including Dracula, Night of the Living Dead, Halloween, The Silence of the Lambs, and Scream, each of which has become a film landmark and spawned countless imitators, and all having...

The triple crown of Oscars awarded to Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, and Sidney Poitier on a single evening in 2002 seemed to mark a turning point for African Americans in cinema. Certainly it was hyped as such by the media, eager to overlook the nuances of this sudden embrace. In this new study, author David Leonard uses this event as a jumping-off point from which to discuss the current state of African-American cinema and the various genres that currently compose it. Looking at such recent films as "Love and Basketball, Antwone Fisher, Training Day," and the two "Barbershop" films--all...

The image in Hollywood movies of savage Indians attacking white settlers represents only one side of a very complicated picture. In fact sympathetic portrayals of Native Americans stood alongside those of hostile Indians in the silent films of D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, and flourished during the early 1930s with Hollywood's cycle of pro-Indian adventures. Decades later, the stereotype became even more complicated, as films depicted the savagery of whites ("The Searchers") in contrast to the more peaceful Indian ("Broken Arrow"). By 1990 the release of "Dances with Wolves"...

From Cecil B. DeMille's production of King of Kings in 1927, to Mel Gibson's recent The Passion of the Christ, films that discuss the meaning of Jesus have provoked interest, discussion, and reevaluation on a large scale. Hollywood films that deal with this subject have consistently managed to augment their inherent power by commenting simultaneously on political and cultural matters, and drawing from alternative cultural and mythological sources. The Greatest Story Ever Told, for instance, uses a landscape similar to that of the American West, while The Last...

Most criticism of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy emphasizes the most likely heroes in the tales: Aragorn, Frodo, Gandalf, and even Sam. From popular to scholarly literature, the women and smaller characters often go overlooked. But our notions of what makes a hero have altered since September 11, and sometimes the most unlikely people can come to embody all that we look up to and admire in a person. Here, Lynnette Porter examines what we mean when we talk about heroes, and for the first time illustrates the heroic qualities that can be found in the women and other beloved, though...

Political documentaries are more popular now than ever-- Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" (2004), the top-grossing documentary film of all time, is one of many such recent films. In this incisive book, James McEnteer parses the politics of nonfiction films of recent decades, which together constitute an alternative history to many official stories offered by the government and its media minions.

Tracing the origins of an oppositional documentary movement to the Vietnam era, McEnteer shows how a strong independent documentary tradition grew from television's failure to sustain a...