Rule, Britannia Pettey, Homer B; Palmer, R. Barton
10/2018
eBook
Winner of the 2019 SAMLA Studies Book Award for Edited
Collections presented by the South Atlantic Modern Language
Association Rule, Britannia! surveys the British
biopic, a genre crucial to ...understanding how national cinema
engages with the collective experience and values of its intended
audience. Offering a provocative take on an aspect of filmmaking
with profound cultural significance, the volume focuses on how
screen biographies of prominent figures in British history and
culture can be understood as involved, if unofficially, in the
shaping and promotion of an ever-protean national identity. The
contributors engage with the vexed concept of British nationality,
especially as this sense of collective belonging is problematized
by the ethnically oriented alternatives of English, Scottish,
Welsh, and Irish nations. They explore the critical and
historiographical issues raised by the biopic, demonstrating that
celebration of conventional virtue is not the genre's only natural
subject. Filmic depictions of such personalities as Elizabeth I,
Victoria, George VI, Elizabeth II, Margaret Thatcher, Iris Murdoch,
and Jack the Ripper are covered.
The essays in this collection analyse major film adaptations of twentieth-century American fiction, from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon to Toni Morrison's Beloved. During the century, films ...based on American literature came to play a central role in the history of the American cinema. Combining cinematic and literary approaches, this volume explores the adaptation process from conception through production and reception. The contributors explore the ways political and historical contexts have shaped the transfer from book to screen, and the new perspectives that films bring to literary works. In particular, they examine how the twentieth-century literary modes of realism, modernism, and postmodernism have influenced the forms of modern cinema. Written in a lively and accessible style, the book includes production stills and full filmographies. Together with its companion volume on nineteenth-century fiction, the volume offers a comprehensive account of the rich tradition of American literature on screen.
The unusual document published here for the first time holds interest not only as an early study for the play eventually produced on stage in 1944 as The Glass Menagerie but also as a witness to ...Tennessee Williams’s formulation of a “plastic theater”—and as an illustration of the author’s impatience with film industry practice at the time. ...a final filmscript, then as now, was generally the work of several authors, whose contributions and resulting credits were overseen by the Screenwriters Guild (as of 1939 the official union representation for Hollywood’s writers), which had developed a detailed code of practice. Studio writers were not hired to generate original material: they were assigned their tasks, whether writing, rewriting, or producing a treatment for a presold property—namely, a project (a successful novel or play for the most part) whose filming rights had been purchased or optioned for a specified period of time.1 Williams, though new to screenwriting, would have known well what was expected of him (though he may not have anticipated how much he would dislike his assignments).2 While original scripts (that is, those not based on a preexisting work) were indeed purchased and produced in Hollywood, such scripts were almost always by scriptwriters or playwrights who were established professionals working with studio directors or producers.3 Williams was a younger member of the studio writing department, one who boasted little in the way of reputation when he penned, surely with small hope of success, his film treatment of The Gentleman Caller. ...at least in the early stages of his career, he seems to have been no more comfortable with conventional filmscript structure.
Shot on Location Palmer, R. Barton
2016, 20160218, 2016-02-18
eBook
In the early days of filmmaking, before many of Hollywood's elaborate sets and soundstages had been built, it was common for movies to be shot on location. Decades later, Hollywood filmmakers ...rediscovered the practice of using real locations and documentary footage in their narrative features. Why did this happen? What caused this sudden change?Renowned film scholar R. Barton Palmer answers this question inShot on Locationby exploring the historical, ideological, economic, and technological developments that led Hollywood to head back outside in order to capture footage of real places. His groundbreaking research reveals that wartime newsreels had a massive influence on postwar Hollywood film, although there are key distinctions to be made between these movies and their closest contemporaries, Italian neorealist films. Considering how these practices were used in everything from war movies likeTwelve O'Clock Highto westerns likeThe Searchers, Palmer explores how the blurring of the formal boundaries between cinematic journalism and fiction lent a "reality effect" to otherwise implausible stories.Shot on Locationdescribes how the period's greatest directors, from Alfred Hitchcock to Billy Wilder, increasingly moved beyond the confines of the studio. At the same time, the book acknowledges the collaborative nature of moviemaking, identifying key roles that screenwriters, art designers, location scouts, and editors played in incorporating actual geographical locales and social milieus within a fictional framework. Palmer thus offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how Hollywood transformed the way we view real spaces.
With sequels, prequels, remakes, spin-offs, or copies of successful films or franchises dominating film and television production, it sometimes seems as if Hollywood is incapable of making an ...original film or TV show. These textual pluralities or multiplicities—while loved by fans who flock to them in droves—tend to be dismissed by critics and scholars as markers of the death of high culture. Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots takes the opposite view, surveying a wide range of international media multiplicities for the first time to elucidate their importance for audiences, industrial practices, and popular culture. The essays in this volume offer a broad picture of the ways in which cinema and television have used multiplicities to streamline the production process, and to capitalize on and exploit viewer interest in previously successful and/or sensational story properties. An impressive lineup of established and emerging scholars talk seriously about forms of multiplicity that are rarely discussed as such, including direct-to-DVD films made in Nigeria, cross-cultural Japanese horror remakes, YouTube fan-generated trailer mash-ups, and 1970s animal revenge films. They show how considering the particular bonds that tie texts to one another allows us to understand more about the audiences for these texts and why they crave a version of the same story (or character or subject) over and over again. These findings demonstrate that, far from being lowbrow art, multiplicities are actually doing important cultural work that is very worthy of serious study.
Pettit’s formulation seems right, though the problem to some degree, at least to judge from the reviews, was also that many could not accept Williams as a comic dramatist (see Palmer, “Period of ...Adjustment and Hack Writing” for details). Williams was a queer artist struggling to voice through comic form the discontents of heterosexual monogamy and matrimony, connecting him to a well-established Anglo-American tradition of stage comedy. ...evidence suggests that Williams decided to put a seriocomic critique of conventional marriage at the center of Period precisely because the theme had proved commercially and artistically successful for decades. After the success of The Glass Menagerie in 1944,Williams produced a string of plays that proved to be hits with theatergoers and critics (academic as well as theatrical), who treated his works as significant contributions to American dramatic art.
Upstream open reading frames (uORFs) are tissue-specific cis-regulators of protein translation. Isolated reports have shown that variants that create or disrupt uORFs can cause disease. Here, in a ...systematic genome-wide study using 15,708 whole genome sequences, we show that variants that create new upstream start codons, and variants disrupting stop sites of existing uORFs, are under strong negative selection. This selection signal is significantly stronger for variants arising upstream of genes intolerant to loss-of-function variants. Furthermore, variants creating uORFs that overlap the coding sequence show signals of selection equivalent to coding missense variants. Finally, we identify specific genes where modification of uORFs likely represents an important disease mechanism, and report a novel uORF frameshift variant upstream of NF2 in neurofibromatosis. Our results highlight uORF-perturbing variants as an under-recognised functional class that contribute to penetrant human disease, and demonstrate the power of large-scale population sequencing data in studying non-coding variant classes.
Biopics-films that chronicle the lives of famous and notorious
figures from our national history-have long been one of Hollywood's
most popular and important genres, offering viewers various
...understandings of American national identity. Invented Lives,
Imagined Communities provides the first full-length
examination of US biopics, focusing on key releases in American
cinema while treating recent developments in three fields: cinema
studies, particularly the history of Hollywood; national identity
studies dealing with the American experience; and scholarship
devoted to modernity and postmodernity. Films discussed include
Houdini , Patton , The Great White Hope ,
Bound for Glory , Ed Wood , Basquiat ,
Pollock , Sylvia , Kinsey , Fur ,
Milk , J. Edgar , and Lincoln , and the
book pays special attention to the crucial generic plot along which
biopics traverse and showcase American lives, even as they modify
the various notions of the national character.
Hitchcock's Moral Gaze Palmer, R. Barton; Pettey, Homer B; Sanders, Steven M
2017, 2017-01-30
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In his essays and interviews, Alfred Hitchcock was guarded about substantive matters of morality, preferring instead to focus on discussions of technique. That has not, however, discouraged scholars ...and critics from trying to work out what his films imply about such moral matters as honesty, fidelity, jealousy, courage, love, and loyalty. Through discussions and analyses of such films as Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Frenzy, the contributors to this book strive to throw light on the way Hitchcock depicts a moral—if not amoral or immoral—world. Drawing on perspectives from film studies, philosophy, literature, and other disciplines, they offer new and compelling interpretations of the filmmaker's moral gaze and the inflection point it provides for modern cinema.
Traditions in world cinema Linda Badley, R. Barton Palmer, Steven Jay Schneider
2006., 20051208, 2005, 2005-12-08
eBook
The core volume in the Traditions in World Cinema series, this book brings together a colourful and wide-ranging collection of world cinematic traditions - national, regional and global - all of ...which are in need of introduction, investigation and, in some cases, critical reassessment. Topics include: German expressionism, Italian neorealism, French New Wave, British new wave, Czech new wave, Danish Dogma, post-Communist cinema, Brazilian post-Cinema Novo, new Argentine cinema, pre-revolutionary African traditions, Israeli persecution films, new Iranian cinema, Hindi film songs, Chinese wenyi pian melodrama, Japanese horror, new Hollywood cinema and global found footage cinema. Features *Includes a preface by Toby Miller.
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