Despite a career spanning over forty years, filmmaker Alan Rudolph has flown largely under the radar of independent film scholars and enthusiasts, often remembered as Robert Altman’s protégé. Through ...a reading of his 1985 film Trouble in Mind, Caryl Flinn demonstrates that Rudolph is long overdue for critical re-evaluation. Exploring Trouble in Mind’s influence on indie filmmaking, Rudolph’s dream-like style, and the external political influences of the Reagan era, Flinn effectively conveys the originality of Rudolph’s work through this multifaceted film. Utilizing archival materials and interviews with Rudolph himself and his collaborators, Flinn argues for this career-defining film’s relevance to American independent cinema and the decade of the 1980s. Amply illustrated with frame enlargements and set photographs, this book uncovers new production stories and reception contexts of a film that Flinn argues deserves a place in the limelight.
In the words of Richard Maltby . . . "Maximum Movies--Pulp Fictions describes two improbably imbricated worlds and the piece of cultural history their intersections provoked." One of these worlds ...comprises a clutch of noisy, garish pulp movies--Kiss Me Deadly, Shock Corridor, Fixed Bayonets!, I Walked with a Zombie, The Lineup, Terror in a Texas Town, Ride Lonesome--pumped out for the grind houses at the end of the urban exhibition chain by the studios' B-divisions and fly-by-night independents. The other is occupied by critics, intellectuals, cinephiles, and filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Manny Farber, and Lawrence Alloway, who championed the cause of these movies and incited the cultural guardians of the day by attacking a rigorously policed canon of tasteful, rarified, and ossified art objects. Against the legitimate, and in defense of the illegitimate, in an insolent and unruly manner, they agitated for the recognition of lurid sensational crime stories, war pictures, fast-paced Westerns, thrillers, and gangster melodramas were claimed as examples of the true, the real, and the authentic in contemporary culture--the foundation upon which modern film studies sits.
The first filmed prizefight, Veriscope'sCorbett-Fitzsimmons Fight(1897) became one of cinema's first major attractions, ushering in an era in which hugely successful boxing films helped transform a ...stigmatized sport into legitimate entertainment. Exploring a significant and fascinating period in the development of modern sports and media,Fight Picturesis the first work to chronicle the mostly forgotten story of how legitimate bouts, fake fights, comic sparring matches, and more came to silent-era screens and became part of American popular culture.
The Decline of Sentiment seeks to characterize the radical shifts in taste that transformed American film in the jazz age. Based upon extensive reading of trade papers and the popular press of the ...day, Lea Jacobs documents the films and film genres that were considered old-fashioned, as well as those dubbed innovative and up-to-date, and looks closely at the works of filmmakers such as Erich von Stroheim, Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, and Monta Bell, among many others. Her analysis--focusing on the influence of literary naturalism on the cinema, the emergence of sophisticated comedy, and the progressive alteration of the male adventure story and the seduction plot--is a comprehensive account of the modernization of classical Hollywood film style and narrative form.
While there are numerous film studies that focus on one particular grouping of films-by nationality, by era, or by technique-here is the first single volume that incorporates all of the above, ...offering a broad overview of experimental Latin American film produced over the last twenty years.
Analyzing seventeen recent films by eleven different filmmakers from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Paraguay, and Peru, Cynthia Tompkins uses a comparative approach that finds commonalities among the disparate works in terms of their influences, aesthetics, and techniques. Tompkins introduces each film first in its sociohistorical context before summarizing it and then subverting its canonical interpretation. Pivotal to her close readings of the films and their convergences as a collective cinema is Tompkins's application of Deleuzian film theory and the concept of the time-image as it pertains to the treatment of time and repetition. Tompkins also explores such topics as the theme of decolonization, the consistent use of montage, paratactically structured narratives, and the fusion of documentary conventions and neorealism with drama. An invaluable contribution to any dialogue on the avant-garde in general and to filmmaking both in and out of Latin America,Experimental Latin American Cinemais also a welcome and insightful addition to Latin American studies as a whole.
Offering a variety of case studies in which films have been remade across national borders,Transnational Film Remakesprovides an analysis of cinematic remaking that moves beyond Hollywood to address ...the truly global nature of this phenomenon. From Hong Kong remakes of Japanese cinema to Bollywood remakes of Australian television, this book interrogates the fluid and dynamic ways in which texts are adapted and reworked across national borders to provide a distinctive new model for understanding these global cultural borrowings.
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013
To what extent has cinema been transformed by the advent of digital imaging? Have digital solutions to production challenges begun to change our ...experience of films, and their characters, action and narratives? And what impact does the inclusion of digital imaging in the film frame have on our interpretation and analysis of film texts?
Digital Imaging in Popular Cinemaexplores these issues through analysis of specific film moments and extended case studies of films includingMinority Report, King Kong, 300andHugo. It discusses how digital imaging can mimic, transform, shape and generate both fantastical and mundane objects and phenomena from scratch, and what the implications are for how we 'read' films, and explores how cultural ideas about digital imaging can influence meaning within a film, a scene or even a single shot.
The increasingly widespread use of digital imaging in cinema means that we can no longer afford to ignore it when critically analysing and interpreting film texts. This innovative and engaging book provides a blueprint for approaching digital imaging in contemporary film, and is therefore essential reading for all those working in the field of Film Studies.
