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.
Advancing the current state of film audience research and of our knowledge of sexuality in transnational contexts,French and Spanish Queer Filmanalyses how French LGBTQ films are seen in Spain and ...Spanish ones in France.
The Long Century’s Long Shadow approaches German Romanticism and Weimar cinema as continuous developments, enlisting both in a narrative of reciprocal illumination. The author investigates different ...moments and media as connected phenomena, situated at alternate ends of the long nineteenth century but joined by their mutual rejection of the neo-classical aesthetic standard of placid and weightless poise in numerous media, including film, painting, sculpture, prose, poetry, and dance.
Connecting Weimar filmmaking to Romantic thought and practice, Kenneth S. Calhoon offers a non-technological, aesthetic genealogy of cinema. He focuses on well-known literary and artistic works, including films such as Nosferatu , Metropolis, Frankenstein , and Fantasia ; the writings of Conrad, Kafka, Goethe, and Novalis; and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, one of the leading artists of German Romanticism. With an eye to the modernism of which Weimar filmmaking was a part, The Long Century’s Long Shadow employs the Romantic landscape in poetry and painting as a mirror in which to regard cinema.
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.
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.
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.
Rebecca Prime documents the untold story of the American directors, screenwriters, and actors who exiled themselves to Europe as a result of the Hollywood blacklist. During the 1950s and 1960s, these ...Hollywood émigrés directed, wrote, or starred in almost one hundred European productions, their contributions ranging from crime film masterpieces likeDu rififi chez les hommes(1955, Jules Dassin, director) to international blockbusters likeThe Bridge on the River
Kwai(1957, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, screenwriters) and acclaimed art films likeThe Servant(1963, Joseph Losey, director).
At once a lively portrait of a lesser-known American "lost generation" and an examination of an important transitional moment in European cinema, the book offers a compelling argument for the significance of the blacklisted émigrés to our understanding of postwar American and European cinema and Cold War relations. Prime provides detailed accounts of the production and reception of their European films that clarify the ambivalence with which Hollywood was regarded within postwar European culture. Drawing upon extensive archival research, including previously classified material,Hollywood Exiles in Europesuggests the need to rethink our understanding of the Hollywood blacklist as a purely domestic phenomenon. By shedding new light on European cinema's changing relationship with Hollywood, the book illuminates the postwar shift from national to transnational cinema.
The practice of morality and the formation of identity among an indigenous Latin American culture are framed in a pioneering ethnography of sight that attempts to reverse the trend of anthropological ...fieldwork and theory overshadowing one another. In this vital and richly detailed work, methodology and theory are treated as complementary partners as the author explores the dynamic Mayan customs of the Q'eqchi' people living in the cultural crossroads of Livingston, Guatemala. Here, Q'eqchi', Ladino, and Garifuna (Caribbean-coast Afro-Indians) societies interact among themselves and with others ranging from government officials to capitalists to contemporary tourists. The fieldwork explores the politics of sight and incorporates a video camera operated by multiple people—the author and the Q'eqchi' people themselves—to watch unobtrusively the traditions, rituals, and everyday actions that exemplify the long-standing moral concepts guiding the Q'eqchi' in their relationships and tribulations. Sharing the camera lens, as well as the lens of ethnographic authority, allows the author to slip into the world of the Q'eqchi' and capture their moral, social, political, economic, and spiritual constructs shaped by history, ancestry, external forces, and time itself. A comprehensive history of the Q'eqchi' illustrates how these former plantation laborers migrated to lands far from their Mayan ancestral homes to co-exist as one of several competing cultures, and what impact this had on maintaining continuity in their identities, moral codes of conduct, and perception of the changing outside world. With the innovative use of visual methods and theories, the author's reflexive, sensory-oriented ethnographic approach makes this a study that itself becomes a reflection of the complex set of social structures embodied in its subject.
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.
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.
