"An entertaining, action-packed addition to the TCM program that celebrates an essential, but often overlooked or disregarded part of the film industry: stunts. Offering readers a unique perspective as well as history of the impact and evolution of stunt work, and behind-the-scenes stories from the stunt professionals who risked life and limb to make the magic happen"--
Savior on the Silver Screen examines nine movies about the life of Jesus - ranging from the traditional to the provocativeand explores how the image of Jesus in each reflects the time and culture in which the film was produced. The selections encompass silent, foreign, epic, and musical films. Both entertaining and insightful, Savior on the Silver Screen is structured for easy use in classroom, small group, and individual settings and includes rental information and practical tips for using the book. For each film there is an introduction, pre-viewing and post-viewing questions, and a discussion of its major features. -- Provided by publisher.
"Between 1995 and 1999, Patton Oswalt lived with an unshakable addiction. It wasn't drugs, alcohol or sex: it was film. After moving to L.A., Oswalt became a huge film buff (or as he calls it, a sprocket fiend), absorbing classics, cult hits, and new releases at the New Beverly Cinema. Silver screen celluloid became Patton's life schoolbook, informing his notion of acting, writing, comedy, and relationships. Set in the nascent days of L.A.'s alternative comedy scene, Oswalt's memoir chronicles his journey from fledgling stand-up comedian to self-assured sitcom actor, with the colorful New Beverly collective and a cast of now-notable young comedians supporting him all along the way"--
Illustrating the cultural significance of film and its power as a vehicle for social change, this book reveals the intricacies of the cultural movement and explores its connections to other art forms such as photography, drama, and literature.
From the New York Times bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor comes an indispensable analysis of our most celebrated medium, film. No art form is as instantly and continuously gratifying as film. When the house lights go down and the lion roars, we settle in to be shocked, frightened, elated, moved, and thrilled. We expect magic. While we’re being exhilarated and terrified, our minds are also processing data of all sorts—visual, linguistic, auditory, spatial—to collaborate in the construction of meaning. Thomas C. Foster’s Reading the Silver Screen will show movie buffs, students of film, and even aspiring screenwriters and directors how to transition from merely being viewers to becoming accomplished readers of this great medium. Beginning with the grammar of film, Foster demonstrates how every art form has a grammar, a set of practices and if-then propositions that amount to rules. He goes on to explain how the language of film enables movies to communicate the purpose behind their stories and the messages they are striving to convey to audiences by following and occasionally breaking these rules. Using the investigative approach readers love in How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Foster examines this grammar of film through various classic and current movies both foreign and domestic, with special recourse to the “AFI 100 Years-100 Movies” lists. The categories are idiosyncratic yet revealing. In Reading the Silver Screen, readers will gain the expertise and confidence to glean all they can from the movies they love.
An era has ended. After one hundred and twenty-five years, a change has taken place in cinemas. The thousands of figures formed by silver and coloured pigments can no longer be viewed through transparent film, instead, everything has become digital, compressed, virtual and built into the rapid alternation of millions (hopefully, for quality's sake) of dots, or pixels within a very neat and minuscule grid. But projection is just the last link in a chain that is transforming the most direct language invented by humanity over the centuries. The other links – shooting, editing, special effects, re-elaboration and sound reproduction – have by now undergone radical transformations that have often signified progress. Perhaps, it is worth the trouble, then, having accepted this transformation-revolution once and for all, to understand where we started out from, how cinematographic language was born and how its grammar first and later its syntax evolved thanks to technological development. Without lightweight equipment for sound recording, sensitive emulsions, portable and compact lighting, it would not have been possible, at the end of the 50s, for example, to create identifiable "currents" of experimentation and concept under such titles as free cinema or nouvelle vague, which were largely based on footage from life and no longer reconstructed in the studio. That which filmmakers today can achieve even more effectively thanks to a range of digital technologies, paradoxically, involves working with even more-minimal equipment such as a smartphone in front of green or blue screens, against absolutely virtual backgrounds. In short: no more silver and more and more pixels.
Richard Nixon and the film industry arrived in Southern California in the same year, 1913. In Nixon and the Silver Screen, Mark Feeney offers a new and often revelatory way of thinking about one of our most controversial presidents: by looking not just at Nixon's career—but Hollywood's. Nixon viewed more movies while in office than any other president, and Feeney argues that Nixon’s story, both in politics and in his personal life, is nothing if not quintessentially American. Bearing in mind the events that shaped his presidency from 1969 to 1974, Feeney sees aspects of Nixon’s character—and the nation’s—refracted and reimagined in the more than 500 films Nixon watched during his tenure in the White House. The verdict? Nixon’s legacy, for better or worse, is forever representative of the “Silver Age” in Hollywood, shaping and being shaped by that flickering silver screen.
More so than any other medium, cinema has shaped our expectations of potential alien life and visitation. From The Day the Earth Stood Still and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, to Battleship, Prometheus and beyond, our hopes and fears of alien contact have been fuelled by the silver screen. But what messages does Hollywood impart to us about our possible otherworldly neighbours, from where do UFO movies draw their inspiration, and what other factors - cultural or conspiratorial - might influence their production and content? Silver Screen Saucers is a timely and revealing examination of the interplay between Hollywood's UFO movies and the UFO phenomenon itself, from 1950 to present day. The book grants the reader a rare, close-up examination of the DNA that builds our perceptions of the UFO mystery: one strand of this DNA weaves real events, stories and people from the historical record of UFOlogy, while the other spins and twists with the film and TV products they have inspired. With our alien dreams and nightmares now more fully visualized onscreen than ever before, Silver Screen Saucers asks the question: what does it all mean? Are all UFO stories just fever dreams from LA screenwriters, or are they based in something else? Could any of them be real and are they part of a bigger message? From interviews with screenwriters and directors whose visions have been shaped by their lifelong UFO obsessions; to Presidents Carter and Reagan talking aliens with Spielberg at the White House; to CIA and Pentagon manipulation of UFO-themed productions; to movie stars and producers being stalked by real Men in Black, Silver Screen Saucers provides fresh perspective on the frequently debated but little understood subject of UFOs & Hollywood. The book addresses questions such as: Does Hollywood fuel the UFO mythos, or vice versa? In other words, are our beliefs about alien visitation shaped by UFO movies, or are UFO movies shaped by our beliefs about alien visitation? Do Hollywood's UFO movies fictionalize the UFO phenomenon in the public mind, actualize it, or both? If and when humanity makes full and open contact with an unearthly intelligence, would we, as cinemagoers, be able to divorce Hollywood's historical imaginings from the reality with which we are presented? Indeed... Should we? After all, a great deal of Hollywood's UFO movie content has been closely informed by supposedly factual UFOlogical literature, events and debates. Perhaps, then, there is more truth to be found in Hollywood's UFO movies than we might imagine - which raises the question: Just how has so much dense UFOlogical theory (by its very nature 'fringe' and subcultural) managed find its way into Hollywood's populist science fiction narratives? Is Hollywood's incorporation of UFO lore attributable to a "Hollywood UFO conspiracy" designed to acclimate us to a UFO/alien reality, or is it merely the result of a natural cultural process? Silver Screen Saucers is bursting with ideas and information that will excite and intrigue any reader with a passing or serious interest in UFOs and/or science-fiction cinema."
Martial Culture, Silver Screen analyzes war movies, one of the most popular genres in American cinema, for what they reveal about the narratives and ideologies that shape U.S. national identity. Edited by Matthew Christopher Hulbert and Matthew E. Stanley, this volume explores the extent to which the motion picture industry, particularly Hollywood, has played an outsized role in the construction and evolution of American self-definition. Moving chronologically, eleven essays highlight cinematic versions of military and cultural conflicts spanning from the American Revolution to the War on Terror. Each focuses on a selection of films about a specific war or historical period, often foregrounding recent productions that remain understudied in the critical literature on cinema, history, and cultural memory. Scrutinizing cinema through the lens of nationalism and its “invention of tradition,” Martial Culture, Silver Screen considers how movies possess the power to frame ideologies, provide social coherence, betray collective neuroses and fears, construct narratives of victimhood or heroism, forge communities of remembrance, and cement tradition and convention. Hollywood war films routinely present broad, identifiable narratives—such as that of the rugged pioneer or the “good war”—through which filmmakers invent representations of the past, establishing narratives that advance discrete social and political functions in the present. As a result, cinematic versions of wartime conflicts condition and reinforce popular understandings of American national character as it relates to violence, individualism, democracy, militarism, capitalism, masculinity, race, class, and empire. Approaching war movies as identity-forging apparatuses and tools of social power, Martial Culture, Silver Screen lays bare how cinematic versions of warfare have helped define for audiences what it means to be American.
For more than thirty years, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody entertained audiences across the United States and Europe with his Wild West show. Scores of books have been written about Cody’s fabled career as a showman, but his involvement in the film industry—following the dissolution of his traveling show—is less well known. In Buffalo Bill on the Silver Screen, Sandra K. Sagala chronicles the fascinating story of Cody’s venture into filmmaking during the early cinema period. In 1894 Thomas Edison invited Cody to bring some of the Wild West performers to the inventor’s kinetoscope studio. From then on, as Sagala reveals, Cody was frequently in the camera’s eye, eager to participate in the newest and most popular phenomenon of the era: the motion picture. In 1910, promoter Pliny Craft produced The Life of Buffalo Bill, a film in which Cody played his own persona. After his Wild West show disbanded, Cody fully embraced the film business, seeing the technology as a way to recoup his financial losses and as a new vehicle for preserving America’s history and his own legacy for future generations. Because he had participated as a scout in some of the battles and skirmishes between the U.S. Army and Plains Indians, Cody wanted to make a film that captured these historical events. Unfortunately for Cody, The Indian Wars (1913) was not a financial success, and only three minutes of footage have survived. Long after his death, Cody’s legacy lives on through the many movies that have featured his character. Sagala provides a useful appendix listing all of these films, as well as those for which Cody himself took an active role as director, producer, or actor. Published on the eve of the centennial anniversary of The Indian Wars, this engaging book offers readers new insights into the legendary figure’s life and career and explores his lasting image in film.
