Kategoria BISAC: Performing Arts >> Film - Reference

This study looks at how the movie industry organisation functioned between the late '40s and 1983 when it was originally published. It describes the changing role of domestic exhibition through this time and analyses the wider film industry to provide a model of the exhibition structure in relation to production, distribution and outside factors. It addresses the growing issues of the cable and video markets as competition to the film exhibition business at that time and looks forward into a highly turbulent environment. With particular interest now as the film industry address a new range...

Providing textual analysis of 12 feature films written and directed by filmmakers who explore aspects of the Chicano cultural movement, this book discusses films including Cheech and Chong's Still Smokin' (1983), El Norte (1985), and Break of Dawn (1988). The text analyzes the portrayal of Chicano, or Mexican American, identity in films by chicanos. Part historiography, part film analysis, part ethnography, this book offers a compelling story of how Chicanos challenge, subvert and create their own popular portrayals of Chicanismo.

Historical stereotypical images...

This was the first comprehensive study of film production in Ireland from the silent period to the present day, and of representations of Ireland and 'Irishness' in native, British, and American films. It remains an authority on the topic. The book focuses on Irish history and politics to examine the context and significance of such films as Irish Destiny, The Quiet Man, Ryan's Daughter, Man of Aran, Cal, The Courier, and The Dead.

Of all the pioneers of the cinema, the Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein has exerted the most enduring hold on the popular imagination. This book offers a unique portrait of the director based on the personal recollections of those who knew him. Originally published in 1976, it is illustrated with over forty photographs, stills and drawings, among them Eisenstein's delightful childhood sketches and some of his designs for the theatre and the cinema.

The recollections were mostly originally recorded by Norman Swallow for a film made for the BBC over a period of two years in...

Best known for his documentaries such as Drifters, North Sea, and Housing Problems, John Grierson was the most important figure in the British documentary film movement and one of the most influential of British film theorists.

This major assessment of Grierson and the documentary film movement examines the intellectual and aesthetic influences on his work, focusing on the material he produced in the inter-war years and comparing the idealistic strain of Grierson's social commentary with other social reformists such as the Next Five Years Group and writers like...

Taking the subject chronologically from the 1890s to when the book was initially published in 1989, this book analyses those films specifically concerned with working-class conditions and struggle, and discusses them within the context of the debate on the social significance of the feature film. It concentrates on films which depict labour organizations and political activists, as well as life in working-class communities and actors with working-class identities such as James Cagney.

Reviews of the original edition:

'...fills a gap in film studies...the study of...

Originally published in 1994, this important book traces the rise of film propaganda in the 20th Century, discussing specifically how film can be used to manipulate public perception and opinions. Two distinct areas are covered: war propaganda, including feature and documentary films regarding warfare; and civilian propaganda, including films that address a variety of political subjects. Although the focus is American film and American politics, this book offers insights for all those interested in the affect of film on the minds of citizens of any country or state.

Semiotics offers a systematic approach to analysing the stylistic structure of film. When this study was originally published in 1983 this was a recent addition to the methods of film study and it presents an explanation of film semiotics with direct application to comparative film research. It takes as its representative subject one trilogy of films and applies semiology, with careful textual analysis. The book begins with a basic introduction to semiotics and the ideas of Christian Metz on cinesemiotics. It then presents a syntagmatic analysis of each of the three Dollars films, with an...

Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Vertov: these Soviet film directors are acknowledged to be among the greatest in the history of cinematography. To Eisenstein we owe such films as Battleship Potemkin and October; to Pudovkin Mother and The End of St Petersburg; to Dovzhenko Earth and Zvenigora; and to Vertov The Man With a Movie Camera and The Three Songs of Lenin.

Herbert Marshall knew each of them personally, both as artists and as friends, and shared their cinema world when he was a student at the GIK (The Moscow State...

In 1989 alone, for example, there were some forty-five major motion pictures which were sequels or part of a series. The film series phenomenon crosses all genres and has been around since the silent film era. This reference guide, in alphabetical order, lists some 906 English Language motion pictures, from 1899 to 1990, when the book was initially published. A brief plot description is given for each series entry, followed by the individual film titles with corresponding years, directors and performers. Animated pictures, documentaries and concert films are not included but movies...

Collecting together some of the best thinking about the relationship between movies and politics, this book, originally published in 1993, encourages an awareness of the political dimension of film, both for film scholars and those entering the film industry. Eight essays are grouped into four parts addressing political ideology and movie narrative, political myth in the movies, political history and movie culture, and political communication and the movies. An introductory essay, as well as prefatory remarks to each of the four parts, brings additional insight and perspective and puts the...

This charming classic of film literature was originally published in 1914 and hence represents an early attempt to catalogue the allure of cinema and how the motion picture industry began. This tale of life in the early days of cinema will be of interest to film historians and anyone interested in that period of history. The book outlines the actors, the producers, the studios and the audiences as well as the advertising and regulation at the time with often amusing stories and facts along with the author's own drawings. Overall this serves as a fascinating introduction to the making of...

This study analyses the historical development of South African cinema up to he book's original publication in 1988. It describes the films and comments on their relationship to South African realities, addressing all aspects of the industry, focusing on domestic production, but also discussing international film companies who use South Africa as a location. It explores tensions between English-language and Afrikaans-language films, and between films made for blacks and films made for whites.

Going behind the scenes the author looks at the financial infrastructure, the marketing...

Between 1952 and 1962, when this book was originally published, the number of people visiting British cinemas had fallen by nearly two thirds and was little more than half the pre-war total. Nearly 1500 of the 4500 cinemas functioning in 1955 had closed five years later, and the author here predicts a further substantial fall.

The causes of this drastic decline are traced to the competition of television but also to the dramatic halving of the number of new American films and to the difficulty of transferring a cinema's 'congregation' when it is closed. This decline has few...

As Charlton Heston put it: There s a temptingly simple definition of the epic film: it s the easiest kind of picture to make badly. This book goes beyond that definition to show how the film epic has taken up one of the most ancient art-forms and propelled it into the modern world, covered in twentieth-century ambitions, anxieties, hopes and fantasies. This survey of historical epic films dealing with periods up to the end of the Dark Ages looks at epic form and discusses the films by historical period, showing how the cinema reworks history for the changing needs of its audience, much as...

When this book was originally published in 1987, the American feature film had been colonising the world's imagination for over 75 years and the book studies that experience in Britain, where American films have always dominated cinema screens, both commercially and intellectually.

The timeframe is the decade after the Second World War: this was a time when the British accommodated themselves to a declining role in world affairs and became in many respects a client nation of the United States. Part of this changing status was tied to the manner in which American popular culture was...

This book analyses the teen film as the rare medium able to represent the otherwise chaotic and conflicting experience of youth. The author focuses on six major issues: alienation, deviance and delinquency, sex and gender, the politics of consumption, the apolitics of youth(ful) rebellion, and regression into nostalgia. Despite the many differences within the genre, this book sees all teen films as focused on a single social concern: the breakdown of traditional forms of authority - school, church, family.

Working with the theories of such diverse scholars as Kenneth Keniston,...

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,...