My name is Donna, and I am an outsider in Vidor. It has a lot of twisted turns in the way that people look at you since their town has a lot of secrets, and you end up in it. When I got there, there was no way of knowing what I was in for. It just seemed like a small town. The paper said people lived to a ripe old age there, never mentioning that only a select few made it. As you read this, you'll find out a lot about the backwoods of Vidor you would never know, and no locals would say a word to warn you.
My name is Donna, and I am an outsider in Vidor. It has a lot of twisted turns in the way that people look at you since their town has a lot of secrets, and you end up in it. When I got there, there was no way of knowing what I was in for. It just seemed like a small town. The paper said people lived to a ripe old age there, never mentioning that only a select few made it. As you read this, youll find out a lot about the backwoods of Vidor you would never know, and no locals would say a word to warn you.
King Vidor (1894-1982) had the longest career of any Hollywood director, and his works include some of the most dramatic, sublime moments in the history of American cinema. Regarded by many film historians as one of the greatest of silent era filmmakers--especially for masterworks The Big Parade, The Crowd, and Show People--Vidor is nonetheless one of the most underrated of Hollywood's "old masters" in terms of his overall career. His sound era films include Hallelujah, Street Scene, The Champ, The Stranger's Return, Our Daily Bread, Stella Dallas, The Citadel, Northwest Passage, Duel in the Sun, Beyond the Forest, The Fountainhead, Ruby Gentry and War and Peace. He also helped to establish the Screen Directors Guild and served as its first president. This book charts the ways in which Vidor's vast, complex body of work ranges over diverse genres and styles while also expressing his recurring personal interests in spirituality (especially Christian Science), aesthetics, metaphysics, social realism, and the myth of America. The first book since 1988 to give a comprehensive view of Vidor's career, it discusses his artistic evolution in a way that appeals to the general reader as well as to the film scholar.
Traces the recent history of the Ku Klux Klan, looks at the viewpoints of individual men and women active in the Klan, and describes the reasons for the Klan's decline
With the same style and insight he brought to his previous studies of American cinema, acclaimed critic David Thomson masterfully evokes the history of America’s love affair with the movies and the tangled history of Hollywood in The Whole Equation. Thomson takes us from D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and the first movies of mass appeal to Louis B. Mayer, who understood what movies meant to America–and reaped the profits. From Capra to Kidman and Hitchcock to Nicholson, Thomson examines the passion, vanity, calculation and gossip of Hollywood and the films it has given us. This one-volume history is a brilliant and illuminating overview of “the wonder in the dark”–and the staggering impact Hollywood and its films has had on American culture.
For over a decade, syndicated columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson has been spending several months a year in Southwest Louisiana, deep in the heart of Cajun Country. Unlike many other writers who have parachuted into the swampy paradise for a few days or weeks, Rheta fell in love with the place, bought a second home and set in planting doomed azaleas and deep roots. She has found an assortment of beautiful people in a homely little town called Henderson, right on the edge of the Atchafalaya Swamp. These days, much is labeled Cajun that is not, and the popularity of the unique culture’s food, songs and dance has been a mixed blessing. The revival of French Louisiana’s traditional music and cuisine often has been cheapened by counterfeits. Confused pilgrims sometimes look to New Orleans for a sampler platter of all things Cajun. Close, but no cigar. Poor Man’s Provence helps define what’s what through lively characters and stories. The book is both personal odyssey and good reporting, travelogue and memoir, funny and frank. This beguiling place is as exotic as it gets without a passport. The author shares what keeps her coming home to French Louisiana. And as NPR commentator Bailey White observes in her foreword, "Both Rheta's readers and the people she writes about will be comfortable, well fed, highly entertained, and happy they came to Poor Man's Provence."
From the beginning of the 20th century, Hollywood filmmakers have shaped public beliefs about and attitudes toward African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos. Challenging and updating the historical record, ethnic minority filmmakers have been re-presenting their histories, cultures, and literature from the perspectives of their own experience. The resulting films offer teachers an effective means for teaching ethnic diversity in today's media-saturated culture. This work details rationales and methods for incorporating readily available films into the high school and college undergraduate curriculum, particularly in history, social studies, literature, and film studies courses. It includes definitions of race and ethnicity and essays on the film history of African American, Asian American, American Indian, and Latino representation. Subsequent chapters, organized by disciplines, describe specific ways to teach visual and multicultural literacy with films, including suggestions for topics, methods, and films, and ending with four discipline-specific curriculum units for high school students. Film terminology and a list of resources to help teachers create their own curriculum units complete the work.
The Big Screen tells the enthralling story of the movies: their rise and spread, their remarkable influence over us, and the technology that made the screen—smaller now, but ever more ubiquitous—as important as the images it carries. The Big Screen is not another history of the movies. Rather, it is a wide-ranging narrative about the movies and their signal role in modern life. At first, film was a waking dream, the gift of appearance delivered for a nickel to huddled masses sitting in the dark. But soon, and abruptly, movies began transforming our societies and our perceptions of the world. The celebrated film authority David Thomson takes us around the globe, through time, and across many media—moving from Eadweard Muybridge to Steve Jobs, from Sunrise to I Love Lucy, from John Wayne to George Clooney, from television commercials to streaming video—to tell the complex, gripping, paradoxical story of the movies. He tracks the ways we were initially enchanted by movies as imitations of life—the stories, the stars, the look—and how we allowed them to show us how to live. At the same time, movies, offering a seductive escape from everyday reality and its responsibilities, have made it possible for us to evade life altogether. The entranced audience has become a model for powerless and anxiety-ridden citizens trying to pursue happiness and dodge terror by sitting quietly in a dark room. Does the big screen take us out into the world, or merely mesmerize us? That is Thomson's question in this grand adventure of a book. Books about the movies are often aimed at film buffs, but this passionate and provocative feat of storytelling is vital to anyone trying to make sense of the age of screens—the age that, more than ever, we are living in.
