Lady in the dark Sitton, Robert
2014., 20140401, 2014, 2014-03-11
eBook
Iris Barry (1895–1969) was a pivotal modern figure and one of the first intellectuals to treat film as an art form, appreciating its far-reaching, transformative power. Although she had the bearing ...of an aristocrat, she was the self-educated daughter of a brass founder and a palm-reader from the Isle of Man. An aspiring poet, Barry attracted the attention of Ezra Pound and joined a demimonde of Bloomsbury figures, including Ford Maddox Ford, T. S. Eliot, Arthur Waley, Edith Sitwell, and William Butler Yeats. She fell in love with Pound's eccentric fellow Vorticist, Wyndham Lewis, and had two children by him. In London, Barry pursued a career as a novelist, biographer, and critic of motion pictures. In America, she joined the modernist Askew Salon, where she met Alfred Barr, director of the new Museum of Modern Art. There she founded the museum's film department and became its first curator, assuring film's critical legitimacy. She convinced powerful Hollywood figures to submit their work for exhibition, creating a new respect for film and prompting the founding of the International Federation of Film Archives. Barry continued to augment MoMA's film library until World War II, when she joined the Office of Strategic Services to develop pro-American films with Orson Welles, Walt Disney, John Huston, and Frank Capra. Yet despite her patriotic efforts, Barry's "foreignness" and association with such filmmakers as Luis Buñuel made her the target of an anticommunist witch hunt. She eventually left for France and died in obscurity. Drawing on letters, memorabilia, and other documentary sources, Robert Sitton reconstructs Barry's phenomenal life and work while recasting the political involvement of artistic institutions in the twentieth century.
Based on detailed onsite observation of documentary production, circulation practices and the analysis of film texts, this book identifies independence as a 'tactical practice', contesting the ...normative definitions and functions assigned to culture, cultural production and producers in a neoliberal economic system.
Were brutal American horror movies like the Saw and Hostel films a reaction to the trauma of 9/11? Were they a reflection of 'War on Terror'-era America? Or was something else responsible for the ...rise of these violent and gory films during the first decade of the twenty-first century? Selling the Splat Pack unravels the history of how the emergence of the DVD market changed cultural and industrial attitudes about horror movies and film ratings. These changes made way for increasingly violent horror films, like those produced by the 'Splat Pack', a group of filmmakers who were heralded in the press as subversive outsiders. Taking a different tack, Mark Bernard proposes that the films of the Splat Pack were products of, rather than reactions against, film industry policy. This book includes an overview of the history of the American horror film from an industry studies perspective, an analysis of how the DVD market influenced the production of American horror films, and an examination of films from Splat Pack members such as Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, James Wan, and Alexandre Aja. By re-examining the history of the American horror film from a business perspective and exploring how DVD influenced the production of American horror films in the early twenty-first century, this thought-provoking book provides students and scholars in Film Studies with an alternative perspective on the Splat Pack."
Emphasizing the importance of cultural theory for film history, Giuliana Bruno enriches our understanding of early Italian film as she guides us on a series of "inferential walks" through Italian ...culture in the first decades of this century. This innovative approach---the interweaving of examples of cinema with architecture, art history, medical discourse, photography, and literature --addresses the challenge posed by feminism to film study while calling attention to marginalized artists. An object of this critical remapping is Elvira Notari (1875-1946), Italy's first and most prolific woman filmmaker, whose documentary-style work on street life in Naples, a forerunner of neorealism, was popularly acclaimed in Italy and the United States until its suppression during the Fascist regime. Since only fragments of Notari's films exist today, Bruno illuminates the filmmaker's contributions to early Italian cinematography by evoking the cultural terrain in which she operated. What emerges is an intertextual montage of urban film culture highlighting a woman's view on love, violence, poverty, desire, and death. This panorama ranges from the city's exteriors to the body's interiors. Reclaiming an alternative history of women's filmmaking and reception, Bruno draws a cultural history that persuasively argues for a spatial, corporal interpretation of film language.
The term "art cinema" has been applied to many cinematic projects, including thefilm d'artmovement, the postwar avant-gardes, various Asian new waves, the New Hollywood, and American indie films, but ...until now no one has actually defined what "art cinema" is. Turning the traditional, highbrow notion of art cinema on its head,Theorizing Art Cinemastakes a flexible, inclusive approach that views art cinema as a predictable way of valuing movies as "art" movies-an activity that has occurred across film history and across film subcultures-rather than as a traditional genre in the sense of a distinct set of forms or a closed historical period or movement.
David Andrews opens with a history of the art cinema "super-genre" from the early days of silent movies to the postwar European invasion that brought Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, and the New German Cinema to the forefront and led to the development of auteur theory. He then discusses the mechanics of art cinema, from art houses, film festivals, and the academic discipline of film studies, to the audiences and distribution systems for art cinema as a whole. This wide-ranging approach allows Andrews to develop a theory that encompasses both the high and low ends of art cinema in all of its different aspects, including world cinema, avant-garde films, experimental films, and cult cinema. All of these art cinemas, according to Andrews, share an emphasis on quality, authorship, and anticommercialism, whether the film in question is film festival favorite or a midnight movie.
This book reviews the development and performance of the global film industry during the COVID-19 pandemic and examines new trends in film production, distribution and consumption through a global ...lens. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a substantial impact on the global film industry since the beginning of 2020. There has been significant transformation in terms of film production, distribution and consumption. Hollywood, like many national cinemas across the globe, has suffered the most significant impact at all levels: the interruption of new film productions, shutdowns of movie theatres in many countries and delays in the release of new films, among them. Many movies made for cinemas were forced to move from release in theatres to various streaming platforms, and nontraditional production companies continued to grow their market share. This book places the global film industry in a post-Pandemic context. It provides detailed analyses of specific systems of film production, distribution and consumption in national cinemas, as well as in Hollywood, while also engaging with the key theoretical and methodological questions from the film studies literature. This volume is a critical reference for students and scholars of film studies and general readers who are interested in the new trends and transformation of the global film industry in a post-Pandemic era.
Movie trailers—those previews of coming attractions before the start of a feature film—are routinely praised and reviled by moviegoers and film critics alike: “They give away too much of the movie.” ...“They’re better than the films.” “They only show the spectacular parts.” “They lie.” “They’re the best part of going to the movies.” But whether you love them or hate them, trailers always serve their purpose of offering free samples of a film to influence moviegoing decision-making. Indeed, with their inclusion on videotapes, DVDs, and on the Internet, trailers are more widely seen and influential now than at any time in their history. Starting from the premise that movie trailers can be considered a film genre, this pioneering book explores the genre’s conventions and offers a primer for reading the rhetoric of movie trailers. Lisa Kernan identifies three principal rhetorical strategies that structure trailers: appeals to audience interest in film genres, stories, and/or stars. She also analyzes the trailers for twenty-seven popular Hollywood films from the classical, transitional, and contemporary eras, exploring what the rhetorical appeals within these trailers reveal about Hollywood’s changing conceptions of the moviegoing audience. Kernan argues that movie trailers constitute a long-standing hybrid of advertising and cinema and, as such, are precursors to today’s heavily commercialized cultural forms in which art and marketing become increasingly indistinguishable.
What happens when fictional characters acknowledge our 'presence' as film spectators? By virtue of its eccentricity and surprising frequency as a filmic device, direct address enables us to ask some ...fundamental questions of film theory, history and criticism and tackle, head-on, assumptions about the cinema as a medium. Brown provides a broad understanding of the role of direct address within fiction cinema, with focused analysis of its role in certain strands of avant-garde or experimental cinema, on the one hand, and popular genre traditions (musicals and comedies) on the other.
Hollywood has a growing fascination with America’s past. This is evidenced in the release of a rash of films of this genre in the past 25 years. This book offers an analysis of how and why ...contemporary Hollywood films have sought to mediate American history. It is the first book to explore, comprehensively, the post-Cold War period of film-making, and to consider whether or how far contemporary films have begun to unravel the unifying myths of earlier films and periods. It also considers why such films are becoming increasingly integral to the ambitions of a globally-focused American film industry. The relationship between film and history - the way in which film mediates history and vice versa - is a complex one. In this book, the authors work from two main assumptions. First, that films revision events to challenge or, perhaps more typically, to reaffirm traditional historical interpretations. Second, that this process can only be understood in the context of contemporary debates about identity politics, America’s role in world affairs, and the globalisation of the American film business.
From 1972 to 1976, Hollywood made an unprecedented number of films targeted at black audiences. But following this era known as “blaxploitation," the momentum suddenly reversed for black filmmakers, ...and a large void separates the end of blaxploitation from the black film explosion that followed the arrival of Spike Lee’s She's Gotta Have It in 1986. Illuminating an overlooked era in African American film history, Trying to Get Over is the first in-depth study of black directors working during the decade between 1977 and 1986. Keith Corson provides a fresh definition of blaxploitation, lays out a concrete reason for its end, and explains the major gap in African American representation during the years that followed. He focuses primarily on the work of eight directors—Michael Schultz, Sidney Poitier, Jamaa Fanaka, Fred Williamson, Gilbert Moses, Stan Lathan, Richard Pryor, and Prince—who were the only black directors making commercially distributed films in the decade following the blaxploitation cycle. Using the careers of each director and the twenty-four films they produced during this time to tell a larger story about Hollywood and the shifting dialogue about race, power, and access, Corson shows how these directors are a key part of the continuum of African American cinema and how they have shaped popular culture over the past quarter century.
