Cinema Beyond the City
Cinema Beyond the City

Author: Judith Thissen

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-07-25

Total Pages: 427

ISBN-13: 1838715029

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Cinema is often perceived as a metropolitan medium – an entertainment product of the big city and for the big city. Yet film exhibitors have been bringing moving pictures to towns and villages since the early days of itinerant shows. This volume presents for the first time an exploration of the social, cultural and economic dynamics of film culture in the European countryside. Spanning more than a century of film exhibition from the early twentieth-century to the present day, Cinema Beyond the City examines the role that movie-going has played in small-town and rural communities across Europe. It documents an amazing diversity of sites and situations that are relevant for understanding historical and current patterns in film consumption. In chapters written by leading scholars and young academics, interdisciplinary research is used to address key questions about access, economic viability, audience behaviour, film programming and the cultural flows between cities and hinterlands. With its wide range of regional studies and innovative methodological approaches, the collection will be of interest not only to film historians, but also to scholars in the fields of urban history, rural studies and cultural geography.

Cinema and the City
Cinema and the City

Author: Mark Shiel

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2011-07-15

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 144439973X

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This book brings together the literature of urban sociology and film studies to explore new analytical and theoretical approaches to the relationship between cinema and the city, and to show how these impact on the realities of life in urban societies.

Paris in the Cinema
Paris in the Cinema

Author: Alastair Phillips

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-07-25

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 1838717544

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'Paris in the Cinema' offers a new approach to the representation of Paris on screen. Bringing together a wide range of renowned French and Anglophone specialists in film, television, history, architecture and literature, the volume introduces, challenges and extends ideas about the city as the locus of screen modernity. Through a range of concrete and historically-specific case studies, ranging from particular districts such as Saint-Germain-des-Pres and les banlieues (the suburbs) in French cinema, to iconic figures such as the detective Maigret and the lovers, and from locations such as the hotel, the building site and the Eiffel Tower to filmmakers such as Agnes Varda and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, this unique text demonstrates how the cinematic city of Paris now constitutes a major archive of French cultural history and memory.

The American City in the Cinema
The American City in the Cinema

Author: James A. Clapp

Publisher: Transaction Publishers

Published: 2013-07-31

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 1412850533

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The American city and the American movie industry grew up together in the early decades of the twentieth century, making film an ideal medium through which to better understand urban life. Exploiting the increasing popularity of large metropolitan cities and urban lifestyle, movies chronicled the city and the stories it generated. In this volume, urbanist James A. Clapp explores the reciprocal relationship between the city and the cinema within the dimensions of time and space. A variety of themes and actualizations have been repeated throughout the history of the cinema, including the roles of immigrants, women, small towns, family farms, and suburbia; and urban childhoods, family values, violent crime, politics, and dystopic futures. Clapp examines the different ways in which the city has been characterized as well as how it has been portrayed as a "character" itself. Some of the films discussed include Metropolis, King Kong, West Side Story, It’s a Wonderful Life, American Beauty, Rebel without a Cause, American Graffiti, Blade Runner, Gangs of New York, The Untouchables, LA Confidential, Sunrise, Crash, American History X, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Deer Hunter, and many more. This work will be enjoyed by urban specialists, moviegoers, and those interested in American, cultural, and film studies.

Black City Cinema
Black City Cinema

Author: Paula Massood

Publisher: Temple University Press

Published: 2011-01-19

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1439905657

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In Black City Cinema, Paula Massood shows how popular films reflected the massive social changes that resulted from the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North, West, and Mid-West during the first three decades of the twentieth century. By the onset of the Depression, the Black population had become primarily urban, transforming individual lives as well as urban experience and culture.Massood probes into the relationship of place and time, showing how urban settings became an intrinsic element of African American film as Black people became more firmly rooted in urban spaces and more visible as historical and political subjects. Illuminating the intersections of film, history, politics, and urban discourse, she considers the chief genres of African American and Hollywood narrative film: the black cast musicals of the 1920s and the "race" films of the early sound era to blaxploitation and hood films, as well as the work of Spike Lee toward the end of the century. As it examines such a wide range of films over much of the twentieth century, this book offers a unique map of Black representations in film.

Somewhere in the Night
Somewhere in the Night

Author: Nicholas Christopher

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2010-05-11

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1439137617

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Film noir is more than a cinematic genre. It is an essential aspect of American culture. Along with the cowboy of the Wild West, the denizen of the film noir city is at the very center of our mythological iconography. Described as the style of an anxious victor, film noir began during the post-war period, a strange time of hope and optimism mixed with fear and even paranoia. The shadow of this rich and powerful cinematic style can now be seen in virtually every artistic medium. The spectacular success of recent neo-film noirs is only the tip of an iceberg. In the dead-on, nocturnal jazz of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, the chilled urban landscapes of Edward Hopper, and postwar literary fiction from Nelson Algren and William S. Burroughs to pulp masters like Horace McCoy, we find an unsettling recognition of the dark hollowness beneath the surface of the American Dream. Acclaimed novelist and poet Nicholas Christopher explores the cultural identity of film noir in a seamless, elegant, and enchanting work of literary prose. Examining virtually the entire catalogue of film noir, Christopher identifies the central motif as the urban labyrinth, a place infested with psychosis, anxiety, and existential dread in which the noir hero embarks on a dangerously illuminating quest. With acute sensitivity, he shows how technical devices such as lighting, voice over, and editing tempo are deployed to create the film noir world. Somewhere in the Night guides us through the architecture of this imaginary world, be it shot in New York or Los Angeles, relating its elements to the ancient cultural archetypes that prefigure it. Finally, Christopher builds an explanation of why film noir not only lives on but is currently enjoying a renaissance. Somewhere in the Night can be appreciated as a lucid introduction to a fundamental style of American culture, and also as a guide to film noir's heyday. Ultimately, though, as the work of a bold talent adeptly manipulating poetic cadence and metaphor, it is itself a superb aesthetic artifact.

Beyond the Screen
Beyond the Screen

Author: Marta Braun

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2012-08-22

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0861969138

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This scholarly anthology presents a new framework for understanding early cinema through its usage outside the realm of entertainment. From its earliest origins until the beginning of the twentieth century, cinema provided widespread access to remote parts of the globe and immediate reports on important events. Reaching beyond the nickelodeon theatres, cinema became part of numerous institutions, from churches and schools to department stores and charitable organizations. Then, in 1915, the Supreme Court declared moviemaking a “busines, pure and simple,” entrenching the film industry’s role as a producer of “harmless entertainment.” In Beyond the Screen, contributors shed light on how pre-1915 cinema defined itself through institutional interconnections and publics interested in science, education, religious uplift, labor organizing, and more.

How to Read a Film
How to Read a Film

Author: James Monaco

Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press

Published: 1981

Total Pages: 568

ISBN-13:

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Now thoroughly revised and updated, the book discusses recent breakthroughs in media technology, including such exciting advances as video discs and cassettes, two-way television, satellites, cable and much more.