Cinematic Appeals
Cinematic Appeals

Author: Ariel Rogers

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2013-10-22

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0231159161

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Cinematic Appeals follows the effect of technological innovation on the cinema experience, specifically the introduction of widescreen and stereoscopic 3D systems in the 1950s, the rise of digital cinema in the 1990s, and the transition to digital 3D since 2005. Widescreen films drew the spectator into the world of the screen, enabling larger-than-life close-ups of already larger-than-life actors. The technology fostered the illusion of physically entering a film, enhancing the semblance of realism. Alternatively, the digital era was less concerned with manipulating the viewer’s physical response and more with generating information flow, awe, disorientation, and the disintegration of spatial boundaries. This study ultimately shows how cinematic technology and the human experience shape and respond to each other over time. Films discussed include Elia Kazan’s East of Eden (1955), Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), The Matrix (1999), and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme film The Celebration (1998).

Cinematic Appeals
Cinematic Appeals

Author: Ariel Rogers

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2013-11-19

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0231535783

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Cinematic Appeals follows the effect of technological innovation on the cinema experience, specifically the introduction of widescreen and stereoscopic 3D systems in the 1950s, the rise of digital cinema in the 1990s, and the transition to digital 3D since 2005. Widescreen cinema promised to draw the viewer into the world of the screen, enabling larger-than-life close-ups of already larger-than-life actors. This technology fostered the illusion of physically entering a film, enhancing the semblance of realism. Alternatively, the digital era was less concerned with the viewer's physical response and more with information flow, awe, and the reevaluation of spatiality and embodiment. This study ultimately shows how cinematic technology and the human experience shape and respond to each other over time.

One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema
One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema

Author: George Melnyk

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 9780802084446

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Melnyk argues passionately that Canadian cinema has never been a singular entity, but has continued to speak in the languages and in the voices of Canada's diverse population.

France on Film
France on Film

Author: Lucy Mazdon

Publisher: Wallflower Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9781903364086

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This collection of new essays is a comprehensive introduction to the concerns and styles which characterise contemporary popular French film.

On the Screen
On the Screen

Author: Ariel Rogers

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-07-30

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 0231548036

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Today, in a world of smartphones, tablets, and computers, screens are a pervasive part of daily life. Yet a multiplicity of screens has been integral to the media landscape since cinema’s golden age. In On the Screen, Ariel Rogers rethinks the history of moving images by exploring how experiments with screen technologies in and around the 1930s changed the way films were produced, exhibited, and experienced. Marshalling extensive archival research, Rogers reveals the role screens played at the height of the era of “classical” Hollywood cinema. She shows how filmmakers, technicians, architects, and exhibitors employed a variety of screens within diverse spaces, including studio soundstages, theaters, homes, stores, and train stations. Far from inert, screens served as means of structuring mediated space and time, contributing to the transformations of modern culture. On the Screen demonstrates how particular approaches to the use of screens traversed production and exhibition, theatrical and extratheatrical practice, mainstream and avant-garde modes, and even cinema and television. Rogers’s history challenges conventional narratives about the novelty of the twenty-first-century multiscreen environment, showing how attention to the variety of historical screen practices opens up new ways to understand contemporary media.

Puzzling Stories
Puzzling Stories

Author: Steven Willemsen

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2022-08-12

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 1800735928

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Many films and novels defy our ability to make sense of the plot. While puzzling storytelling, strange incongruities, inviting enigmas and persistent ambiguities have been central to the effects of many literary and cinematic traditions, a great deal of contemporary films and television series bring such qualities to the mainstream—but wherein lies the attractiveness of perplexing works of fiction? This collected volume offers the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and trans-medial approach to the question of cognitive challenge in narrative art, bringing together psychological, philosophical, formal-historical, and empirical perspectives from leading scholars across these fields.

South American Cinema
South American Cinema

Author: Timothy Barnard

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-06-28

Total Pages: 635

ISBN-13: 0292792107

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Originally issued in hardcover in 1996 by Garland Publishing, this important reference work is now available in paperback for a wider audience. A distinguished team of contributors has compiled entries on 140 significant South American feature films from the silent era until 1994. The entries discuss each film's subject matter, critical reception, and social and political contexts, as well as its production, distribution, and exhibition history, including technical credits. The entries are grouped by country and arranged chronologically. Both fiction and documentary films (some no longer in existence) are included, as well as extensive title, name, and subject indexes and glossaries of film and foreign terms.

Close-ups and Long Shots in Modern Chinese Cinemas
Close-ups and Long Shots in Modern Chinese Cinemas

Author: Hsiu-Chuang Deppman

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2020-10-31

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0824885805

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Two of the most stylized shots in cinema—the close-up and the long shot—embody distinct attractions. The iconicity of the close-up magnifies the affective power of faces and elevates film to the discourse of art. The depth of the long shot, in contrast, indexes the facts of life and reinforces our faith in reality. Each configures the relation between image and distance that expands the viewer’s power to see, feel, and conceive. To understand why a director prefers one type of shot over the other then is to explore more than aesthetics: It uncovers significant assumptions about film as an art of intervention or organic representation. Close-ups and Long Shots in Modern Chinese Cinemas is the first book to compare these two shots within the cultural, historical, and cinematic traditions that produced them. In particular, the global revival of Confucian studies and the transnational appeal of feminism in the 1980s marked a new turn in the composite cultural education of Chinese directors whose shot selections can be seen as not only stylistic expressions, but ethical choices responding to established norms about self-restraint, ritualism, propriety, and female agency. Each of the films discussed—Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin, Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew, and Wei Desheng’s Cape No. 7— represents a watershed in Chinese cinemas that redefines the evolving relations among film, politics, and ethics. Together these works provide a comprehensive picture of how directors contextualize close-ups and long shots in ways that make them interpretable across many films as bellwethers of social change.

The Digitization of Cinematic Visual Effects
The Digitization of Cinematic Visual Effects

Author: Rama Venkatasawmy

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0739176218

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The Digitization of Cinematic Visual Effects: Hollywood's Coming of Age, by Rama Venkatasawmy, analyzes how the Hollywood cinema industry's visual effects applications have not only motivated the expansion of filmmaking praxis, they have also influenced the evolution of viewing pleasures and spectatorship experiences. Following the digitization of their associated technologies, VFX have been responsible for multiplying the strategies of representation and storytelling, as well as extending the range of stories that can potentially be told onscreen. By the same token, the visual standards of the Hollywood film's production and exhibition have been growing in sophistication. On the basis of displaying groundbreaking VFX--immaculately realized through the application of cutting-edge technologies and craftsmanship--and of projecting such a significant degree of visual innovation and originality, certain Hollywood movies have established techno-visual trends and industrial standards for subsequent filmmaking practice. Hollywood cinema's entry into the digital realm is intertwined with the intensification of conglomeratic practices within the movie business, the domain of techno-scientific R&D in filmmaking, and the unification of corporate media, information technology, and entertainment. Hence, the standardization of, and convergence toward, the digital medium is emblematic of Hollywood cinema's techno-industrial evolution in the late twentieth century. Accordingly, this volume identifies various synergies and partnerships--between VFX providers, movie studios, graphic designers, and more--that have emerged from a progressive growth of awareness in Hollywood of the digital medium's potential.