What is the work of film in the age of transnational production? To answer that question, Randall Halle focuses on the film industry of Germany, one of Europe's largest film markets and one of the ...world's largest film-producing nations. In the 1990s Germany experienced an extreme transition from a state-subsidized mode of film production that was free of anxious concerns about profit and audience entertainment to a mode dominated by private interest and big capital. At the same time, the European Union began actively drawing together the national markets of Germany and other European nations, sublating their individual significances into a synergistic whole. This book studies these changes broadly, but also focuses on the transformations in their particular national context. It balances film politics and film aesthetics, tracing transformations in financing along with analyses of particular films to describe the effects on the film object itself. Halle concludes that we witness currently the emergence of a new transnational aesthetic, a fundamental shift in cultural production with ramifications for communal identifications, state cohesion, and national economies.
To continue doing business in Germany, Hollywood studios agreed not to make films attacking Nazis or condemning persecution of Jews. Ben Urwand reveals this collaboration and the cast of characters ...it drew in, ranging from Goebbels to Louis B. Mayer. At the center was Hitler himself--obsessed with movies and their power to shape public opinion.
Traditional interpretations of the 1950s have emphasized how American anti-communists deployed censorship and the blacklist to silence dissent, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. Yet those ...efforts at
repression did not always succeed. Throughout the early years of the Cold War, a significant number of writers and performers continued to express controversial views about international relations in Hollywood films, through the new medium of televi-sion,
on the Broadway stage, and from behind the scenes.
By promoting superpower cooperation, decolonization, nuclear disarmament, and other taboo causes, dissident artists such as Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Rod Serling, Dalton Trumbo, Reginald Rose, and Paddy Chayefsky managed both to stretch the boundaries of Cold War ideology and to undermine some of its basic assumptions. Working at times under assumed names and in some cases outside the United States, they took on the role of informal diplomats who competed with Washington in repre-senting America to the world.
Ironically, the dissidents’ international appeal eventually persuaded the U.S. foreign policy establishment that their unconventional views could be an asset in the Cold War contest for “hearts and minds,” and their artistic work an effective means to sell Ameri-can values and culture abroad. By the end of the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration not only appropriated the work of these talented artists but enlisted some of them to serve as official voices of Cold War cultural diplomacy.
Reynold Humphries provide a history of the political and cultural factors underpinning the why and the how of the various investigations of alleged Communist infiltration of Hollywood.
This ground-breaking collection, the first sustained examination of the work of female practitioners within American independent cinema, reclaims the difference of female indie filmmaking.
Hanan Al-Cinema Marks, Laura U
2015, 2015-09-25, 2015-10-16
eBook
An examination of experimental cinema and media art from the Arabic-speaking world that explores filmmakers' creative and philosophical inventiveness in trying times.
Preparing independent or guerrilla filmmakers for the legal, financial, and organizational questions that can doom a project if unanswered, this guide demystifies issues such as developing a concept, ...founding a film company, obtaining financing, securing locations, casting, shooting, granting screen credits, distributing, exhibiting, and marketing a film. Updated to include digital marketing and distribution strategies through YouTube or webisodes, it also anticipates the "problems" generated by a blockbuster hit: sound tracks, merchandizing, and licensing. Six appendices provide sample contracts, copyright forms and circulars, Writer's Guild of America definitions for writing credits, and studio contact information.
InNot According to Plan, Maria Belodubrovskaya reveals the limits on the power of even the most repressive totalitarian regimes to create and control propaganda. Belodubrovskaya's revisionist account ...of Soviet filmmaking between 1930 and 1953 highlights the extent to which the Soviet film industry remained stubbornly artisanal in its methods, especially in contrast to the more industrial approach of the Hollywood studio system. Not According to Plan shows that even though Josef Stalin recognized cinema as a "mighty instrument of mass agitation and propaganda" and strove to harness the Soviet film industry to serve the state, directors such as Eisenstein, Alexandrov, and Pudovkin had far more creative control than did party-appointed executives and censors.
The Stalinist party-state, despite explicit intent and grandiose plans to build a "Soviet Hollywood" that would release a thousand features per year, failed to construct even a modest mass propaganda cinema. Belodubrovskaya's wealth of evidence shows that the regime's desire to disseminate propaganda on a vast scale was consistently at odds with its compulsion to control quality and with Stalin's intolerance of imperfection.Not According to Planis a landmark in Soviet cultural history and the global history of cinema.
From Bombay to Bollywood analyzes the transformation of the national film industry in Bombay into a transnational and multi-media cultural enterprise, which has come to be known as Bollywood. ...Combining ethnographic, institutional, and textual analyses, Aswin Punathambekar explores how relations between state institutions, the Indian diaspora, circuits of capital, and new media technologies and industries have reconfigured the Bombay-based industry's geographic reach. Providing in-depth accounts of the workings of media companies and media professionals, Punathambekar has produced a timely analysis of how a media industry in the postcolonial world has come to claim the global as its scale of operations. Based on extensive field research in India and the U.S., this book offers empirically-rich and theoretically-informed analyses of how the imaginations and practices of industry professionals give shape to the media worlds we inhabit and engage with. Moving beyond a focus on a single medium, Punathambekar develops a comparative and integrated approach that examines four different but interrelated media industries--film, television, marketing, and digital media. Offering a path-breaking account of media convergence in a non-Western context, Punathambekar's transnational approach to understanding the formation of Bollywood is an innovative intervention into current debates on media industries, production cultures, and cultural globalization.Aswin Punathambekaris Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He is the co-editor ofGlobal Bollywood(NYU Press, 2008).In thePostmillenial Popseries
