Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema
Author: Ted Perry
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 707
ISBN-13: 0253347718
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNoted film scholars analyze some of the most challenging films of the 20th century
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Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema
Author: Hamid Dabashi
Publisher: Mage Publishers
Published: 2023-05-23
Total Pages: 462
ISBN-13: 1949445550
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn academically acclaimed and globally celebrated cultural critic, Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of a number of highly acclaimed books and articles on Iran, Islam, comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art, among them Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future; Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (editor), Iran: A People Interrupted, and Iran without Borders: Towards a Critique of the Postcolonial Nation. He lives with his family in New York City.
Giallo!
Author: Alexia Kannas
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2020-11-01
Total Pages: 226
ISBN-13: 1438480342
DOWNLOAD EBOOKItalian giallo films have a peculiar allure. Taking their name from the Italian for "yellow"— reflecting the covers of pulp crime novels—these genre movies were principally produced between 1960 and the late 1970s. These cinematic hybrids of crime, horror, and detection are characterized by elaborate set-piece murders, lurid aesthetics, and experimental soundtracks. Using critical frameworks drawn from genre theory, reception studies, and cultural studies, Giallo! traces this historically marginalized genre's journey from Italian cinemas to the global cult-film canon. Through close textual analysis of films including The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), Blood and Black Lace (1964), The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971), and The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972), Alexia Kannas considers the rendering of urban space in the giallo and how it expresses a complex and unsettling critique of late modernity.
A Modernist Cinema
Author: Scott W. Klein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-10-01
Total Pages: 337
ISBN-13: 0190912138
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn A Modernist Cinema, sixteen distinguished scholars in the field of the New Modernist Studies explore the interrelationships among modernism, cinema, and modernity. Focusing on several culturally influential films from Europe, America, and Asia produced between 1914 and 1941, this collection of essays contends that cinema was always a modernist enterprise. Examining the dialectical relationship between a modernist cinema and modernity itself, these essays reveal how the movies represented and altered our notions and practices of modern life, as well as how the so-called crises of modernity shaped the evolution of filmmaking. Attending to the technical achievements and formal qualities of the works of several prominent directors - Giovanni Pastrone, D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, F. W. Murnau, Carl Theodore Dreyer, Dziga Vertov, Luis Buñuel, Yasujiro Ozu, John Ford, Jean Renoir, Charlie Chaplin, Leni Riefenstahl, and Orson Welles - these essays investigate several interrelated topics: how a modernist cinema represented and intervened in the political and social struggles of the era; the ambivalent relationship between cinema and the other modernist arts; the controversial interconnection between modern technology and the new art of filmmaking; the significance of representing the mobile human body in a new medium; the gendered history of modernity; and the transformative effects of cinema on modern conceptions of temporality, spatial relations, and political geography.
Seven Masterpieces of 1940s Cinema
Author: Inga Karetnikova
Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 212
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSeven Masterpieces of 1940s Cinema is the rare book about the cinema, which teaches you to love and understand films. - Agnieszka Holland, director and screenwriter, Oliver, Olivier Enormously important...outstanding. It expanded my horizons as a writer, scholar, and viewer of film. - Richard Walter, screenwriting Chairman, University of California, Los Angeles The most remarkable, tragic, and heroic decade of the twentieth century, the 1940s were defined by both the horrors of fighting World War II and the exhilaration and complexity of waging the subsequent peace. Filmmakers reacted to the tumult by creating films that reflected the disturbances of their time-enduring motion pictures that still serve as models of perfection for directors today. Seven Masterpieces of 1940s Cinema guides you through influential international movies that remain favorites to this day. Bringing together Bicycle Thieves, The Great Dictator, Notorious, It's a Wonderful Life, Rashmon, Ivan the Terrible, and Children of Paradise, Inga Karetnikova shows you how, in spite of their cultural and stylistic differences, these films have thematic and philosophical commonalities that complement one another and together re-create the spirit of their time. Each chapter of the book is dedicated to a specific film, describing how it was made, discussing its narrative scene by scene, tracing how the plot and the characters are developed, and revealing which cinematic devices are used and why. In addition the creative biography of each director and a cinematic history of each country are woven seamlessly into the text to help you understand the personal and cultural forces behind the movie. Whether you&rsqup;re a movie-house regular, a DVD hound, or just someone who likes to watch a good story, with a roster of films that combines foreign gems and well-known Hollywood classics, Seven Masterpieces of 1940s Cinema brings you closer to the vibrant, groundbreaking films of yesteryear that continue to resonate with directors and film watchers today.
Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy
Author: H. Ford
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2012-10-29
Total Pages: 384
ISBN-13: 1137283521
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA unique study of four major post-war European films by four key 'auteurs', which argues that these films exemplify film modernism at the peak of its philosophical reflection and aesthetic experimentation.
History of a Shiver
Author: Jed Rasula
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-02-26
Total Pages: 600
ISBN-13: 0199396310
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn abrupt break in the prevailing modes of artistic expression, for many, marks the advent of modernism in the early twentieth century, but revisionary attempts to pin down a precise moment of its emergence remain disputed. History of a Shiver proffers a different approach, tracing the first inkling of modernism instead to the nineteenth century's fascination with music. As Jed Rasula deftly shows, melomania--the passion for music--gave rise to concepts like Richard Wagner's "endless melody" and the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, which in turn infused the arts of the fin de siècle with an aura of expectancy, challenging them to induce musical effects by their own means. With each art aspiring to produce the effects of another artistic medium, a synesthetic yearning ran like a shiver through the body of art that would emerge over the next half century. Rasula traces this pan-arts polyphony from German Romantic theory to early experiments in "visual music," encompassing such diverse phenomena as American fixation on Arcadia, early film theory, and the lure of the fourth dimension. All the while, he keeps focus on the paramount historical consequence in elevating music to a new universal aesthetic standard, arguing that Wagnerism was first among modern "isms." In surveying this momentous interplay among arts, History of a Shiver ranges from literature, music and painting to theatre, cinema, dance, photography, and civic pageantry. It retells the story of modernism by recovering not an idea, but a feeling--the hair-raising potential for each painting, literary text, or musical composition to herald an unprecedented domain of human enterprise.
Practices of Projection
Author: Gabriel Menotti
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-02-05
Total Pages: 305
ISBN-13: 0190934131
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTo many, the technological aspects of projection often go unnoticed, only brought to attention during moments of crisis or malfunction. For example, when a movie theater projector falters, the audience suddenly looks toward the back of the theater to see a sign of mechanical failure. The history of cinema similarly shows that the attention to projection has been most focused when the whole medium is hanging in suspension. During Hollywood's economic consolidation in the '30s, projection defined the ways that sync-sound technologies could be deployed within the medium. Most recently, the digitization of cinema repeated this process as technology was reworked to facilitate mobility. These examples show how projection continually speaks to the rearrangement of media technology. Projection therefore needs to be examined as a pivotal element in the future of visual media's technological transition. In Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies, volume editors Gabriel Menotti and Virginia Crisp address the cultural and technological significance of projection. Throughout the volume, chapters reiterate that projection cannot, and must not, be reduced to its cinematic functions alone. Borrowing media theorist Siegfried Zielinksi's definition, Menotti and Crisp refer to projection as the "heterogeneous array of artefacts, technical systems, and particularly visual praxes of experimentation and of culture." From this, readers can understand the performative character of the moving image and the labor of the different actors involved in the utterance of the film text. Projection is not the same everywhere, nor equal all the time. Its systems are in permanent interaction with environmental circumstances, neighboring structures, local cultures, and social economies. Thus the idea of projection as a universal, fully autonomous operation cannot hold. Each occurrence of projection adds nuance to a wider understanding of film screening technologies.
James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film
Author: Cleo Hanaway-Oakley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-06-30
Total Pages: 185
ISBN-13: 0192534181
DOWNLOAD EBOOKJames Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film reappraises the lines of influence said to exist between Joyce's writing and early cinema and provides an alternative to previous psychoanalytic readings of Joyce and film. Through a compelling combination of historical research and critical analysis, Cleo Hanaway-Oakley demonstrates that Joyce, early film-makers, and phenomenologists (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in particular) share a common enterprise: all are concerned with showing, rather than explaining, the 'inherence of the self in the world'. Instead of portraying an objective, neutral world, bereft of human input, Joyce, the film-makers, and the phenomenologists present embodied, conscious engagement with the environment and others: they are interested in the world-as-it-is-lived and transcend the seemingly-rigid binaries of seer/seen, subject/object, absorptive/theatrical, and personal/impersonal. This book re-evaluates the history of body- and spectator-focused film theories, placing Merleau-Ponty at the centre of the discussion, and considers the ways in which Joyce may have encountered such theories. In a wealth of close analyses, Joyce's fiction is read alongside the work of early film-makers such as Charlie Chaplin, Georges Méliès, and Mitchell and Kenyon, and in relation to the philosophical dimensions of early-cinematic devices such as the Mutoscope, the stereoscope, and the panorama. By putting Joyce's literary work--Ulysses above all--into dialogue with both early cinema and phenomenology, this book elucidates and enlivens literature, film, and philosophy.
Cinematic Chronotopes
Author: Pepita Hesselberth
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2014-06-19
Total Pages: 241
ISBN-13: 1623566479
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe site of cinema is on the move. The extent to which technologically mediated sounds and images continue to be experienced as cinematic today is largely dependent on the intensified sense of being 'here,' 'now' and 'me' that they convey. This intensification is fundamentally rooted in the cinematic's potential to intensify our experience of time, to convey time's thickening, of which the sense of place, and a sense of self-presence are the correlatives. In this study, Pepita Hesselberth traces this thickening of time across four different spatio-temporal configurations of the cinematic: a multi-media exhibition featuring the work of Andy Warhol (1928-1987); the handheld aesthetics of European art-house films; a large-scale media installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer; and the usage of the trope of the flash-forward in mainstream Hollywood cinema. Only by juxtaposing these cases by looking at what they have in common, this study argues, can we grasp the complexity of the changes that the cinematic is currently undergoing.
