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

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,...

Beloved by his fans and equally praised and derided by the critics many times throughout his long career, Mel Brooks is a creative polymath, a comic talent to be reckoned with - influential, fearless and totally unafraid of his detractors. Yet whether you admire his work or not, one thing remains absolutely certain: this larger-than-life character is a very difficult man to ignore.

Mel Brooks has been immortalised as the definitive maestro of big-screen bad taste, a pioneer of the...

With it’s glorious backdrop of fifties rock and roll, Lemon Popsicle told of the sexual misadventures of three boys in Tel Aviv. The film broke box-office records around the world and helped to establish the producers, Golan and Globus, as a force in Hollywood. Britain’s Popsicle expert, Roy Mitchell, pools his resources with the historian, Paul Sutton, to produce a pictorial celebration of all the Popsicle films and spin-offs, from Eskimo Limon in Israel, and the Eis Am Stiel films co-produced in Germany, to the popular U.S. remake, The Last American Virgin.

Our favorite fictional characters from books and movies often display an impressive and wide range of psychological attributes, both positive and negative. We admire their resilience, courage, humanity, or justice, and we are intrigued by other characters who show signs of personality disorders and mental illness psychopathy, narcissism, antisocial personality, paranoia, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, among many other conditions. This book examines the psychological attributes and motivations of 100 fascinating characters that include examples of both accurate and misleading...

From award-winning actress Illeana Douglas comes a memoir about learning to survive in Hollywood while staying true to her quirky vision of the world.

In 1969 Illeana Douglas' parents saw the film "Easy Rider "and were transformed. Taking Dennis Hopper's words, "That's what it's all about man" to heart, they abandoned their comfortable upper middle class life and gave Illeana a childhood filled with hippies, goats, free spirits, and free love. Illeana writes, "Since it was all out of my control, I began to think of my life as a movie, with a Dennis Hopper-like father at the center of...

Journey back to Jim Henson's Labyrinth in this visually stunning celebration of the enchanting fantasy classic.

Three decades after its release, Labyrinth, starring David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly, continues to enthrall audiences with its winning mixture of fairy-tale magic, fantastical creatures, and unforgettable music. Filled with a wealth of rare and unseen...

Ingmar Bergman's films had a very broad and rich relationship with the rest of European cinema, contrary to the myth that Bergman was a peripheral figure, culturally and aesthetically isolated from the rest of Europe. This book contends that he should be put at the very center of European film history by chronologically comparing Bergman's relationship to key European directors such as Carl Theodor Dreyer, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and also looks at Bergman's critical relationship to key movements in film history such as the French New Wave. In so...

First published in 1974, this book collects interviews with leading Czechslovak filmmakers conducted mostly between 1967 and 1969. This was a period of immense upheaval beginning with the attack of the Czechoslovak establishment on the Union of Writers in 1967, continuing through the liberalisation of the Prague Spring in January 1968 and ended with the Soviet invasion in August and subsequent 'Normalization' process in April 1969. It records the testimony of several generations of filmmakers and their attempts to answer the questions about the purpose and meaning of film before and during...

In a world shrunk by modern transport and communication, Star Trek has maintained the values of western maritime exploration through the discovery of strange new worlds in space. Throughout its fifty-year history, the starry sea has provided a familiar backdrop to an ongoing interrogation of what it means to be human.

This book charts the developing Star Trek story from the 1960s through to the present day. Although the core values and progressive politics of the series earliest episodes have remained at the heart of Star Trek throughout half a century, in other ways the story it tells...

In a world shrunk by modern transport and communication, Star Trek has maintained the values of western maritime exploration through the discovery of strange new worlds in space. Throughout its fifty-year history, the starry sea has provided a familiar backdrop to an ongoing interrogation of what it means to be human.

This book charts the developing Star Trek story from the 1960s through to the present day. Although the core values and progressive politics of the series earliest episodes have remained at the heart of Star Trek throughout half a century, in other ways the...