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

Hi. I'm Libby Gelman-Waxner, and I'm an assistant buyer in juniors' activewear. While I find my work both rewarding and creative, especially with the new knits coming in, I want more. And so I decided to become a film critic....

Move over, Siskel & Ebert. Watch out, Leonard Maltin. And just forget saving that aisle seat, Mr. Medved. Libby Gelman-Waxner has arrived -- in the critic's circle, that is -- and the silver screen may never be the same again. Witty, wicked, and scathingly honest -- If You Ask Me is a hilarious collection of her columns from Premiere magazine. Just listen to Libby...

A longtime industry insider and acclaimed Hollywood historian goes behind the scenes to tell the stories of 15 of the most spectacular movie megaflops of the past 50 years, such as Cleopatra, The Cotton Club, and Waterworld. He recounts, in every gory detail, how enormous hubris, unbridled ambition, artistic hauteur, and bad business sense on the parts of Tinsel Town wheeler-dealers and superstars such as Elizabeth Taylor, Clint Eastwood, and Francis Ford Coppola, conspired to engender some of the worst films ever.

A longtime industry insider and acclaimed Hollywood historian goes behind the scenes to tell the stories of 15 of the most spectacular movie megaflops of the past 50 years, such as Cleopatra, The Cotton Club, and Waterworld. He recounts, in every gory detail, how enormous hubris, unbridled ambition, artistic hauteur, and bad business sense on the parts of Tinsel Town wheeler-dealers and superstars such as Elizabeth Taylor, Clint Eastwood, and Francis Ford Coppola, conspired to engender some of the worst films ever.

As Cyndy Hendershot demonstrates, the Gothic is more a mode than a rigid historical period, an "invasive" tendency that reveals the imaginative limits of social realities and literary techniques far beyond its origins in late eighteenth century Britain. And as she demonstrates in this first scholarly treatment of its kind, one of the continuing obsessions of the Gothic mode is masculinity. Masculinity is in some sense a Gothic castle of the imagination, haunted by fears of the body, science, and angry colonial subjects.
The book's keen critical insight, meticulous close readings and...

The original Movies and Methods volume (1976) captured the dynamic evolution of film theory and criticism into an important new discipline, incorporating methods from structuralism, semiotics, and feminist thought. Now there is again ferment in the field. Movies and Methods, Volume II, captures the developments that have given history and genre studies imaginative new models and indicates how feminist, structuralist, and psychoanalytic approaches to film have achieved fresh, valuable insights.

In his thoughtful introduction, Nichols provides a context for the paradoxes that...

This volume is the first fully comprehensive account of film production in the Third World. Although they are usually ignored or marginalized in histories of world cinema," Third World countries now produce well over half of the world's films. Roy Armes sets out initially to place this huge output in a wider context, examining the forces of tradition and colonialism that have shaped the Third World--defined as those countries that have emerged from Western control but have not fully developed their economic potential or rejected the capitalist system in favor of some socialist alternative. He...

"Let me tell you a story," each film seems to offer silently as its opening frames hit the screen. But sometimes the film finds a voice--an off-screen narrator--for all or part of the story. From Wuthering Heights and Double Indemnity to Annie Hall and Platoon, voice-over narration has been an integral part of American movies.

Through examples from films such as How Green Was My Valley, All About Eve, The Naked City, and Barry Lyndon, Sarah Kozloff examines and analyzes voice-over narration. She refutes the assumptions that words...

Do women in classical Hollywood cinema ever truly speak for themselves? In Echo and Narcissus, Amy Lawrence examines eight classic films to show how women's speech is repeatedly constructed as a "problem," an affront to male authority. This book expands feminist studies of the representation of women in film, enabling us to see individual films in new ways, and to ask new questions of other films.

Using Sadie Thompson (1928), Blackmail (1929), Rain (1932), The Spiral Staircase, Sorry, Wrong Number, Notorious, Sunset Boulevard (1950)...

Noel Burch's singularly perceptive view of film and its origins will interest all who care about film theory and history. Life to Those Shadows presents a critique of "classical" approaches to film: the assumptions that what we call the language of film was a natural, organic development, and that it lay latent from the outset in the basic technology of the camera, waiting for the prescient pioneers to bring it into being. The view that film language was a universal, neutral medium, innocent of any social or historical meaning in itself, is also challenged here.

Burch's major...

Blaise Cendrars, one of twentieth-century France's most gifted men of letters, came to Hollywood in 1936 for the newspaper Paris-Soir. Already a well-known poet, Cendrars was a celebrity journalist whose perceptive dispatches from the American dream factory captivated millions. These articles were later published as Hollywood: Mecca of the Movies, which has since appeared in many languages. Remarkably, this is its first translation into English.

Hollywood in 1936 was crowded with stars, moguls, directors, scouts, and script girls. Though no stranger to filmmaking (he had...

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was arguably the most complex director of postwar Italian cinema. His films--Accattone, The Canterbury Tales, Medea, Salo--continue to challenge and entertain new generations of moviegoers. A leftist, a homosexual, and a distinguished writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism, Pasolini once claimed that "a certain realism" informed his filmmaking.

Masterfully combining analyses of Pasolini's literary and theoretical writings and of all his films, Maurizio Viano offers the first thorough study of Pasolini's cinematic realism, in...

Orson Welles considered The Magnificent Ambersons the crucial turning point in his career. He said, "They destroyed Ambersons and it destroyed me." In 1942, while Welles was away, RKO Studios drastically recut the completed film. None of that deleted footage is known to survive.

Now film scholar Robert Carringer has reconstructed Welles's own version of Ambersons, using all available surviving evidence including rare studio documents and the recollections of Welles himself and other original participants in the film.

Carringer reaches startling...

Can films about black characters, produced by white filmmakers, be considered "black films"? In answering this question, Mark Reid reassesses black film history, carefully distinguishing between films controlled by blacks and films that utilize black talent, but are controlled by whites. Previous black film criticism has "buried" the true black film industry, Reid says, by concentrating on films that are about, but not by, blacks.

Reid's discussion of black independent films--defined as films that focus on the black community and that are written, directed, produced, and distributed by...

This sequel to A Critical Cinema offers a new collection of interviews with independent filmmakers that is a feast for film fans and film historians. Scott MacDonald reveals the sophisticated thinking of these artists regarding film, politics, and contemporary gender issues.

The interviews explore the careers of Robert Breer, Trinh T. Minh-ha, James Benning, Su Friedrich, and Godfrey Reggio. Yoko Ono discusses her cinematic collaboration with John Lennon, Michael Snow talks about his music and films, Anne Robertson describes her cinematic diaries, Jonas Mekas and Bruce Baillie...

Richard Abel's magisterial new book radically rewrites the history of French cinema between 1896 and 1914, particularly during the years when Pathe-Freres, the first major corporation in the new industry, led the world in film production and distribution. Based on extensive investigation of rare archival films and documents, and drawing on recent social and cultural histories of turn-of-the-century France and the United States, his book provides new insights into the earliest history of the cinema.
Abel tells how early French film entertainment changed from a cinema of attractions to the...

Filmed images dominate our time, from the movies and TV that entertain us to the news and documentary that inform us and shape our cultural vocabulary. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, Fields of Vision is a path-breaking collection that inquires into the power (and limits) of film and photography to make sense of ourselves and others. As critics, social scientists, filmmakers, and literary scholars, the contributors converge on the issues of representation and the construction of visual meaning across cultures.

From the dismembered bodies of horror film to the exotic bodies of...

The concept of intertextuality has proven of inestimable value in recent attempts to understand the nature of literature and its relation to other systems of cultural meaning. In The Memory of Tiresias, Mikhail Iamposlki presents the first sustained attempt to develop a theory of cinematic intertextuality.

Building on the insights of semiotics and contemporary film theory, Iampolski defines cinema as a chain of transparent, mimetic fragments intermixed with quotations he calls "textual anomalies." These challenge the normalization of meaning and seek to open reading out onto the...

Eileen Bowser chronicles the history of the American film business from the days of storefront nickelodeons to the premiere of D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. The effect of the surroundings--the size of the hall; whether the film was shown alone or along with vaudeville entertainment; and the size, quality, and relevance of the musical background--are all examined for their impact on the filmgoing experience.

The silent cinema was America's first modern entertainment industry, a complex social, cultural, and technological phenomenon that swept the country in the early years of the twentieth century. Richard Koszarski examines the underlying structures that made the silent-movie era work, from the operations of eastern bankers to the problems of neighborhood theater musicians. He offers a new perspective on the development of this major new industry and art form and the public's response to it.

D.N. Rodowick offers a critical analysis of the development of film theory since 1968. He shows how debates concerning the literary principles of modernism--semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and feminism--have transformed our understanding of cinematic meaning. Rodowick explores the literary paradigms established in France during the late 1960s and traces their influence on the work of diverse filmmaker/theorists including Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Gidal, Laura Mulvey, and Peter Wollen. By exploring the "new French feminisms" of Irigaray and Kristeva, he investigates the...