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

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...

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...