Since the days of silent films, music has been integral to the
cinematic experience, serving, variously, to allay audiences' fears
of the dark and to heighten a film's emotional impact. Yet viewers
...are often unaware of its presence. In this bold, insightful book,
film and music scholar and critic Royal S. Brown invites readers
not only to "hear" the film score, but to understand it in relation
to what they "see." Unlike earlier books, which offered historical,
technical, and sociopolitical analyses, Overtones and
Undertones draws on film, music, and narrative theory to
provide the first comprehensive aesthetics of film music. Focusing
on how the film/score interaction influences our response to
cinematic situations, Brown traces the history of film music from
its beginnings, covering both American and European cinema. At the
heart of his book are close readings of several of the best
film/score interactions, including Psycho, Laura, The Sea Hawk,
Double Indemnity, and Pierrot le Fou. In revealing
interviews with Bernard Herrmann, Miklós Rósza, Henry Mancini, and
others, Brown also allows the composers to speak for themselves. A
complete discography and bibliography conclude the volume.
Casting aside the traditional conception of film as an outgrowth of photography, theater, and the novel, the essays in this volume reassess the relationship between the emergence of film and the ...broader culture of modernity. Contributors, leading scholars in film and cultural studies, link the popularity of cinema in the late nineteenth century to emerging cultural phenomena such as window shopping, mail-order catalogs, and wax museums.
This is the first English-language study of internationally acclaimed Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, examining the cultural, production and exhibition contexts of his feature films, shorts and ...video installations.
This extraordinary handbook was inspired by the distinctive
concerns of anthropologists and others who film people in the
field. The authors cover the practical, technical, and theoretical
aspects of ...filming, from fundraising to exhibition, in lucid and
complete detail-information never before assembled in one place.
The first section discusses filmmaking styles and the assumptions
that frequently hide unacknowledged behind them, as well as the
practical and ethical issues involved in moving from fieldwork to
filmmaking. The second section concisely and clearly explains the
technical aspects, including how to select and use equipment, how
to shoot film and video, and the reasons for choosing one or the
other, and how to record sound. Finally, the third section outlines
the entire process of filmmaking: preproduction, production,
postproduction, and distribution. Filled with useful illustrations
and covering documentary and ethnographic filmmaking of all kinds,
Cross-Cultural Filmmaking will be as essential to the
anthropologist or independent documentarian on location as to the
student in the classroom.
In this new collection of reviews and essays, Jonathan Rosenbaum
focuses on the political and social dynamics of the contemporary
movie scene. Rosenbaum, widely regarded as the most gifted
...contemporary American commentator on the cinema, explores the many
links between film and our ideological identities as individuals
and as a society. Readers will find revealing examinations of, for
example, racial stereotyping in the debates surrounding Do the
Right Thing , key films from Africa, China, Japan, and Taiwan,
Hollywood musicals and French serials, and the cultural amnesia
accompanying cinematic treatments of the Russian Revolution, the
civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. From Schindler's
List, Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Piano , and
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective to the maverick careers of
Orson Welles, Jacques Tati, Nicholas Ray, Chantal Akerman, Todd
Haynes, and Andrei Tarkovsky, Rosenbaum offers a polemically
pointed survey that makes clear the high stakes involved in every
aspect of filmmaking and filmgoing.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, longtime contributor to such publications as
Film Quarterly, Sight and Sound, and The Village
Voice , is arguably the most eloquent, insightful film critic
writing in America ...today. Placing Movies , the first
collection of his work, gathers together thirty of his most
distinctive and illuminating pieces. Written over a span of
twenty-one years, these essays cover an extraordinarily broad range
of films-from Hollywood blockbusters to foreign art movies to
experimental cinema. They include not just reviews but perceptive
commentary on directors, actors, and trends; and thoughtful
analysis of the practice of film criticism. It is this last
element-Rosenbaum's reflections on the art of film criticism-that
sets this collection apart from other volumes of film writing. Both
in the essays themselves and in the section introductions,
Rosenbaum provides a rare insider's view of his profession: the
backstage politics, the formulation of critical judgments, the
function of film commentary. Taken together, these pieces serve as
a guided tour of the profession of film criticism. They also serve
as representative samples of Rosenbaum's unique brand of film
writing. Among the highlights are memoirs of director Jacques Tati
and maverick critic Manny Farber, celebrations of classics such as
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and The Manchurian
Candidate , and considered reevaluations of Orson Welles and
Woody Allen.
The nature of comedy has interested many thinkers, from Plato to
Freud, but film comedy has not received much theoretical attention
in recent years. The essays in Comedy/Cinema/Theory use a
range of ...critical and theoretical approaches to explore this
curious and fascinating subject. The result is a stimulating,
informative book for anyone interested in film, humor, and the art
of bringing the two together. Comedy remains a central human
preoccupation, despite the vagaries in form that it has assumed
over the centuries in different media. In his introduction, Horton
surveys the history of the study of comedy, from Aristophanes to
the present, and he also offers a perspective on other related
comic forms: printed fiction, comic books, TV sitcoms, jokes and
gags. Some essays in the collection focus on general issues
concerning comedy and cinema. In lively (and often humorous) prose,
such scholars as Lucy Fischer, Noel Carroll, Peter Lehman, and
Brian Henderson employ feminist, post-Freudian, neo-Marxist, and
Bakhtinian methodologies. The remaining essays bring theoretical
considerations to bear on specific works and comic filmmakers.
Peter Brunette, William Paul, Scott Bukatman, Dana Polan, Charles
Eidsvik, Ruth Perlmutter, Stephen Mamber, and Andrew Horton provide
different perspectives for analyzing The Three Stooges, Chaplin,
Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen, Dusan Makavejev, and Alfred Hitchcock's
sole comedy, Mr. and Mrs. Smith , as well as the peculiar
genre of cynical humor from Eastern Europe. As editor Horton notes,
an over-arching theory of film comedy does not emanate from these
essays. Yet the diversity and originality of the contributions
reflect vital and growing interest in the subject, and both
students of film and general moviegoers will relish the results.
