With more than 250 images, new information on international cinema—especially Polish, Chinese, Russian, Canadian, and Iranian filmmakers—an expanded section on African-American filmmakers, updated discussions of new works by major American directors, and a new section on the rise of comic book movies and computer generated special effects, this is the most up to date resource for film history courses in the twenty-first century.
This is an analysis of what has been called the seventh art. It traces the development of film from its scientific origins through to cinema today, covering the key elements and players that have contributed to its artistic and technical development.
Winner of a prestigious Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Book Award in 1996, "Film: An International History of the Medium," now in its second edition, presents the entire history of motion pictures, from pre-cinema to the present. Providing a complete analysis of the principal films, directors, and national cinemas, it supplies a thorough grounding in the social, economic, and political circumstances critical to an understanding of film as both art and industry. In a highly readable narrative, Robert Sklar, one of the field's most eminent scholars, covers all significant periods and styles--not only commercial films and classical Hollywood cinema but also animation, documentaries, international art cinema, and the cinematic avant-garde. With emphasis on the international relationships among film communities, chapters are devoted to such critical nodes of film history as early cinema, Soviet silent cinema, Hollywood genres, Italian neorealism, and the French New Wave. Substantial sections are also devoted to the films of Eastern Europe, Latin America, Japan, China, Africa, the Middle East, and India. Informative sidebars complement the main text, and cross-cultural timelines introduce the book's seven main parts. Four totally new chapters on English-language art cinema, new European film, world cinema, and Hollywood bring the book's content up to the present. "Film: An International History of the Medium" is beautifully designed and illustrated by more than 750 film stills, frame enlargements, production shots, and diagrams. The 212 color plates include rare examples of early hand tinting, pre-cinema technology, two- and three-color Technicolor, as well as almost 100 new imagesfrom contemporary films. These stunning and instructive illustrations further illuminate the author's cogent analyses and wide-ranging perspective. Chapter endnotes, a selected bibliography, a filmography, and a complete glossary of terms complete this extraordinary volume.
"Technological advances and regulatory changes have created both investment opportunity and challenge for participants in today's international capital markets. The existence and use of diverse international accounting procedures poses one such challenge: How can analysts determine the true investment value of global firms?" "This issue and related concerns are thoroughly examined in International Capital Markets in a World of Accounting Differences. Inside this thought-provoking volume, financial practitioners and scholars debate the impact of international accounting differences (accounting measurement rules, financial disclosure requirements, and/or differences in auditing standards) on decision-making in today's capital markets." "You'll find insightful analyses of such topics as international GAAP differences and their effects on firms; accounting differences and securities markets regulations; international regulatory initiatives; and policy alternatives and strategic options for minimizing global accounting diversity." "Concerns about the effect of accounting diversity on capital markets have sparked a renewed interest in harmonizing accounting and reporting standards worldwide. International Capital Markets in a World of Accounting Differences challenges and analyzes the validity of these concerns and offers strategic alternatives for making more informed decisions in the world's capital markets."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The ability to view recorded moving pictures has had a major impact on human culture since the development of the necessary technologies over a century ago. For most of this time people have gone to the movies to be entertained and perhaps edified, but in the meantime television, the videocassette recorder (VCR), the digital versatile disk (DVD) player, the personal computer (desktop and laptop), the internet and other technologies have made watching moving pictures possible at home, in the classroom and just about anywhere else. Today, moving images are everywhere in our culture. Every day, moving picture cameras record millions of hours of activity, human and otherwise, all over the world: your cell phone makes a little video of your friends at a party; the surveillance camera at the bank keeps on eye on customers; journalists’ shoulder-carried cameras record the latest from the war zone; and across the world film artists work on all kinds of movies, from low-budget independent projects to the next big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. Moving pictures have had a great influence on human culture, and this book focuses on using moving images as historical evidence. Studying history means examining evidence from the past to understand, interpret and present what has happened in different times and places. We talk and write about what we have learned, hoping to establish credibility both for what we have determined to be the facts and for whatever meaning or significance we may attach to our reconstruction of the past. Studying history is a scientific process, involving a fairly set methodology. We tend to favor written sources, and we have tended to favor writing as a means of presenting our views of the past. But historians also use all kinds of other documents and artifacts in their work of interpreting the past, including moving pictures.
Bordwell scrutinizes the theories of style launched by various film historians and celebrates a century of cinema. The author examines the contributions of many directors and shows how film scholars have explained stylistic continuity and change.
Fictional films tell true historical stories... Film and History is a compelling and unique overview of the cinema and its relationship with history, ranging from the ancient world to the modern day. This is the first book of its kind to offer such a broad historical and theoretical portrayal of the rapidly-growing sub field of history and film. Rosenstone introduces the varieties, types and traditions of historical films made worldwide and sets this against the changing ways in which historians and other public critics debate the portrayal of history in modern film.
The immediacy and perceived truth of the visual image, as well as film and television's ability to propel viewers back into the past, place the genre of the historical film in a special category. War films--including antiwar films--have established the prevailing public image of war in the twentieth century. For American audiences, the dominant image of trench warfare in World War I has been provided by feature films such as All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory. The image of combat in the Second World War has been shaped by films like Sands of Iwo Jima and The Longest Day. And despite claims for the alleged impact of widespread television coverage of the Vietnam War, it is actually films such as Apocalypse Now and Platoon which have provided the most powerful images of what is seen as the "reality" of that much disputed conflict. But to what degree does history written "with lightning," as Woodrow Wilson allegedly said, represent the reality of the past? To what extent is visual history an oversimplification, or even a distortion of the past? Exploring the relationship between moving images and the society and culture in which they were produced and received, World War II, Film, and History addresses the power these images have had in determining our perception and memories of war. Examining how the public memory of war in the twentieth century has often been created more by a manufactured past than a remembered one, a leading group of historians discusses films dating from the early 1930s through the early 1990s, created by filmmakers the world over, from the United States and Germany to Japan and the former Soviet Union. For example, Freda Freiberg explains how the inter-racial melodramatic Japanese feature film China Nights, in which a manly and protective Japanese naval officer falls in love with a beautiful young Chinese street waif and molds her into a cultured, submissive wife, proved enormously popular with wartime Japanese and helped justify the invasion of China in the minds of many Japanese viewers. Peter Paret assesses the historical accuracy of Kolberg as a depiction of an unsuccessful siege of that German city by a French Army in 1807, and explores how the film, released by Hitler's regime in January 1945, explicitly called for civilian sacrifice and last-ditch resistance. Stephen Ambrose contrasts what we know about the historical reality of the Allied D-Day landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, with the 1962 release of The Longest Day, in which the major climactic moment in the film never happened at Normandy. Alice Kessler-Harris examines The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, a 1982 film documentary about women defense workers on the American home front in World War II, emphasizing the degree to which the documentary's engaging main characters and its message of the need for fair and equal treatment for women resonates with many contemporary viewers. And Clement Alexander Price contrasts Men of Bronze, William Miles's fine documentary about black American soldiers who fought in France in World War I, with Liberators, the controversial documentary by Miles and Nina Rosenblum which incorrectly claimed that African-American troops liberated Holocaust survivors at Dachau in World War II. In today's visually-oriented world, powerful images, even images of images, are circulated in an eternal cycle, gaining increased acceptance through repetition. History becomes an endless loop, in which repeated images validate and reconfirm each other. Based on archival materials, many of which have become only recently available, World War II, Film, and History offers an informative and a disturbing look at the complex relationship between national myths and filmic memory, as well as the dangers of visual images being transformed into "reality."
Cinema was the first, and is arguably still the greatest, of the industrialized art forms that came to dominate the cultural life of the twentieth century. Today, it continues to adapt and grow as new technologies and viewing platforms become available, and remains an integral cultural and aesthetic entertainment experience for people the world over. Cinema developed against the backdrop of the two world wars, and over the years has seen smaller wars, revolutions, and profound social changes. Its history reflects this changing landscape, and, more than any other art form, developments in technology. In this Very Short Introduction, Nowell-Smith looks at the defining moments of the industry, from silent to sound, black and white to colour, and considers its genres from intellectual art house to mass market entertainment. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introduction series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
