While Indigenous media have gained increasing prominence around the world, the vibrant Aboriginal media world on the Canadian West Coast has received little scholarly attention. As the first ...ethnography of the Aboriginal media community in Vancouver,Sovereign Screensreveals the various social forces shaping Aboriginal media production including community media organizations and avant-garde art centers, as well as the national spaces of cultural policy and media institutions.
Kristin L. Dowell uses the concept of visual sovereignty to examine the practices, forms, and meanings through which Aboriginal filmmakers tell their individual stories and those of their Aboriginal nations and the intertribal urban communities in which they work. She explores the ongoing debates within the community about what constitutes Aboriginal media, how this work intervenes in the national Canadian mediascape, and how filmmakers use technology in a wide range of genres-including experimental media-to recuperate cultural traditions and reimagine Aboriginal kinship and sociality. Analyzing the interactive relations between this social community and the media forms it produces,Sovereign Screensoffers new insights into the on-screen and off-screen impacts of Aboriginal media.
How can a film engage a viewer's senses? How do directors combine images and sounds to create a sensuous quality in their films? What can the use of sensuous film aesthetics contribute to a film's ...story? The Sense of Film Narration examines films that combine different types of images and sounds in a way that brings out their sensuous qualities in an especially vivid manner. It demonstrates that a film's sensuous qualities can be intimately connected to its storytelling processes. Through close textual analysis of films such as Amores Perros, Double Take, Toy Story 2, Palindromes and Magnolia, this book highlights how films can make viewers particularly aware of their senses in order to help them understand the events, behaviours and attitudes within a film's fictional world. An insightful and thought-provoking read, The Sense of Film Narration brings a fresh perspective to film aesthetics which will be welcomed by film students and scholars.
Hollywood Vaultis the story of how the business of film libraries emerged and evolved, spanning the silent era to the sale of feature libraries to television. Eric Hoyt argues that film libraries ...became valuable not because of the introduction of new technologies but because of the emergence and growth of new markets, and suggests that studying the history of film libraries leads to insights about their role in the contemporary digital marketplace.The history begins in the mid-1910s, when the star system and other developments enabled a market for old films that featured current stars. After the transition to films with sound, the reissue market declined but the studios used their libraries for the production of remakes and other derivatives. The turning point in the history of studio libraries occurred during the mid to late 1940s, when changes in American culture and an industry-wide recession convinced the studios to employ their libraries as profit centers through the use of theatrical reissues. In the 1950s, intermediary distributors used the growing market of television to harness libraries aggressively as foundations for cross-media expansion, a trend that continues today. By the late 1960s, the television marketplace and the exploitation of film libraries became so lucrative that they prompted conglomerates to acquire the studios.The first book to discuss film libraries as an important and often underestimated part of Hollywood history,Hollywood Vaultpresents a fascinating trajectory that incorporates cultural, legal, and industrial history.
Roots of the New Arab Film deals with the generation of filmmakers from across North Africa and the Middle East who created an international awareness of Arab film from the mid-1980s onwards. These ...seminal filmmakers experienced the moment of national independence first-hand in their youth and retained a deep attachment to their homeland. Although these aspiring filmmakers had to seek their training abroad, they witnessed a time of filmic revival in Europe – Fellini and Antonioni in Italy, the French New Wave, and British Free Cinema. Returning home, these filmmakers brought a unique insider/outsider perspective to bear on local developments in society since independence, including the divide between urban and rural communities, the continuing power of traditional values and the status of women in a changing society. As they made their first films back home, the feelings of participation in a worldwide movement of new, independent filmmaking was palpable. Roots of the New Arab Film is a necessary and comprehensive resource for anyone interested in the foundations of Arab cinema.
As well as offering an in-depth analysis of Brazilian film culture, this book engages with well-known international films and directors and sheds light on cinematic traditions that are less familiar ...to the non-specialist.
Rising Sun and Divided Landprovides a comprehensive, scholarly examination of the historical background, films, and careers of selected Korean and Japanese film directors. It examines eight ...directors: Fukasaku Kinji, Im Kwon-teak, Kawase Naomi, Miike Takashi, Lee Chang-dong, Kitano Takeshi, Park Chan-wook, and Kim Ki-duk and considers their work as reflections of personal visions and as films that engage with globalization, colonialism, nationalism, race, gender, history, and the contemporary state of Japan and South Korea. Each chapter is followed by a short analysis of a selected film, and the volume as a whole includes a cinematic overview of Japan and South Korea and a list of suggestions for further reading and viewing.
The Hollywood ‘happy ending’ has long been considered among the most famous and standardised features in the whole of narrative filmmaking. Yet, while ceaselessly invoked, this notorious device has ...received barely any detailed attention from the field of film studies. This book is thus the first in-depth examination of one of the most overused and under-analysed concepts in discussions of popular cinema. What exactly is the 'happy ending'? Is it simply a cliché, as commonly supposed? Why has it earned such an unenviable reputation? What does it, or can it, mean? Concentrating especially on conclusions featuring an ultimate romantic union – the final couple – this wide-ranging investigation probes traditional associations between the 'happy ending' and homogeneity, closure, ‘unrealism’, and ideological conservatism, testing widespread assumptions against the evidence offered by a range of classical and contemporary films. Key Features: Defines key features of the Hollywood ‘happy ending’ through detailed textual analysis and theoretical debate. Traces the historical development of the scholarly approaches taken towards the cinematic ‘happy ending’ Reassesses the concept of cinematic closure and its relationship to genre, ideology and ‘unrealism’
With American cinema facing intense technological and financial challenges both at home and abroad, and with Indian media looking to globalize, there have been numerous high-profile institutional ...connections between Hollywood and Bombay cinema in the past few years. Many accounts have proclaimed India's transformation in a relatively short period from a Hollywood outpost to a frontier of opportunity.
Orienting Hollywoodmoves beyond the conventional popular wisdom that Hollywood and Bombay cinema have only recently become intertwined because of economic priorities, instead uncovering a longer history of exchange. Through archival research, interviews, industry sources, policy documents, and cultural criticism, Nitin Govil not only documents encounters between Hollywood and India but also shows how connections were imagined over a century of screen exchange. Employing a comparative framework, Govil details the history of influence, traces the nature of interoperability, and textures the contact between Hollywood and Bombay cinema by exploring both the reality and imagination of encounter.
Although overlooked by most narratives of American cinema history, films made for purposes outside of theatrical entertainment dominated twentieth-century motion picture production. This volume adds ...to the growing study of nontheatrical films by focusing on the way filmmakers developed and audiences encountered ideas about race, identity, politics, and community outside the borders of theatrical cinema. The contributors to Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film examine the place and role of race in educational films, home movies, industry and government films, anthropological films, and church films, as well as other forms of nontheatrical filmmaking.
