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

..". a model of genre criticism and probably the best overall analysis of the film musical to date."
Journal of Popular Films and Television

"The American Film Musical is a truly admirable book which is well worth making a song and dance about. It will immediately assume biblical authority for all who are seriously interested in the dream-factory's most lavish fantasies, and it may even come to stand as a landmark in our understanding of Hollywood as a whole.... Altman's book is thorough, well informed and warmly good-humored. It has brought the study of musical films out of the...

Indiscretions follows the path of U.S. avant-garde film and video from the underground of the 1960s to the academy of the 1980s. Patricia Mellencamp traces and charts the intersections of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the desiring male subject, Roland Barthes and texts of pleasure, Michel Foucault and the disciplinary society, the grotesque body and Mikhail Bakhtin, the rhizomatic alogic of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the female subject of feminist film theory. She creates a dialogue among theory and popular culture and politics through inventive readings of the films of Owen...

Explorations in Film Theory is a selection of some of the most influential articles which originally appeared in Cine-Tracts one of the journals which helped define contemporary film theory. The articles represent crucial ideas and theories in the areas of film and communications studies, feminist studies, and film history. They challenge the way theoreticians and filmmakers have not come to grips with sexual difference, and they raise questions about image and how images produce meaning. Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Dziga-Vertov, pornography, educational television, and the New German...

Before turning to filmmaking, Francois Truffaut was a film critic writing for Cahiers du Cinema during the 1950s. The Early film Criticism of Francois Truffaut makes available, for the first time in English, articles that originally appeared in French journals such as Cahiers du Cinema and Arts. Truffaut discusses films by such acknowledged masters as Hitchcock, Huston, Dymytryk, and Lang, but also examines the work of such lesser-known directors as Robert Wise, Don Weis, and Roger Vadim.

Amateur film has been seen as the junkheap of private culture. Yet music videos recycle home movies as authenticity; commercials copy its style to sell intimacy; documentaries use it to recount history "from below."

Reel Families is the first historical study of amateur film, the most pervasive of media. Patricia Zimmerman charts the history of this medium from 1897 to the present, examining how ideological, technical, and social constraints have stunted amateur film's potential for extending media production beyond corporate monopolies and into the hands of everyday people. She...

"The Geopolitical Aesthetic is a dazzling... distillation and application of the theoretical system he first presented in The Political Unconscious (1981)." The San Francisco Bay Guardian

Taking contemporary films from the United States, Russia, Taiwan, France, and the Philippines, The Geopolitical Aesthetic offers a reading of some of the most interesting films of the last decade and a general account of filmic representation in the postmodern world. Fredric Jameson poses some essential questions: How does representation function in contemporary film? How does contemporary...

"This anthology of essays on Steven Spielberg's 1993 film is a solid achievement. It is a repository of considerable critical insight and frequently passionate argument." Holocaust and Genocide Studies

"An excellent collection; highly recommended for general readers and students at all levels." Choice

"This collection of essays opens further the debate on how to represent the Holocaust as Holocaust representation and memory move into ever-greater areas of daily American and Jewish American culture." Tikkun

Schindler s List not only afforded director Steven Spielberg a...

"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...