SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema
Format
Format
User Rating
User Rating
Release Date
Release Date
Date Added
Date Added
Language
Language
ebook
(0)
Whiteness at the End of the World
Race in Post-Apocalyptic Cinema
by David Venditto
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
The use of Christian apocalyptic myths has changed significantly over the centuries. Initially used by genuinely disenfranchised groups, they are used today as a response to more egalitarian treatment of minorities in American society. The apocalyptic framework allows the patriarchy to frame itself as the victim who must restore America to a past where white male power went uncontested. This kind of white anxiety over increasing minority rights frequently manifests itself in contemporary apocalyptic media, which often depicts a white male hero facing a wide array of threatening "Others." Taking a unique look at the parallels between apocalypticism and American frontier mythology, as well as conspiracy theories and the post-apocalyptic obsession with repurposed objects, Whiteness at the End of the World analyzes many well-known films from the past fifty years, from Planet of the Apes to I Am Mother. It offers unique, clearly presented insights into recurring patterns that appear in an extraordinarily ubiquitous genre that has only increased in popularity, and whose themes of racial anxiety are increasingly pertinent in our increasingly contentious political climate.
ebook
(0)
Writ on Water
The Sources and Reach of Film Imagination
by Charles Warren
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
This eloquent book draws on the author's responses to a wide range of extraordinary films-"long takes" on Altman's Nashville, Godard's Hail Mary, Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism, and von Sternberg's Blonde Venus, as well as "short takes" on films by Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, Ross McElwee, Michelangelo Antonioni, Michael Haneke, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Charles Warren's masterful close readings blend profound philosophical reflections with a treasure trove of literary and artistic references to place film, in its relations to other arts, as one of the greatest aesthetic forms. Collectively, these essays offer an original and powerful statement on the nature of film and the intimate relation of what the author calls "film imagination" to our lives as human beings in the world. This important and much-needed book is no less than a celebration and affirmation of the very discipline of film criticism. One is left with one's appetite for film refreshed.
ebook
(0)
Action, Action, Action
The Early Cinema of Raoul Walsh
by Tom Conley
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Studies the force of action, motion, and vision in the early cinema of Hollywood director Raoul Walsh.
ebook
(0)
Yiddish Cinema
The Drama of Troubled Communication
by Jonah Corne
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
In this book, Jonah Corne and Monika Vrečar offer a conceptually innovative reexamination of Yiddish cinema, a crucial yet little-known diasporic phenomenon that enjoyed its "golden age" in the mid-to late 1930s. Yiddish cinema, they argue, exhibits a distinctive fascination with media forms, technologies, and institutions, and with relationality writ large. What stands behind this communication obsession, as it might be understood, is the films' engagement both with Judaic ideals and with a series of Jewish sociohistorical predicaments of troubled communication (immigration, displacement, the breakdown of tradition, and so on) that the films seek to reflect. Accordingly, the authors create a resonant conversation between Yiddish cinema, populated by an endless procession of disconnected characters ardently striving to rejoin the world of communication, and the brilliant yet underappreciated ideas of pioneering Czech-Jewish media theorist Vilém Flusser (1920—1991), who escaped Nazi persecution and built the first part of his intellectual career in Brazil. Indeed, the authors claim that the popular art of Yiddish cinema articulates in dramatic terms a version of the central Flusserian hypothesis that "the structure of communication is the infrastructure of human reality" and, by doing so, embodies a remarkable Jewish media theory "from below." Films discussed include The Wandering Jew (1933), The Dybbuk (1937), Where is My Child? (1937), A Little Letter to Mother (1938), Kol Nidre (1939), Motel the Operator (1939), Tevye (1939), The Living Orphan (1939), and Long Is the Road (1948).
ebook
(0)
The Human Figure on Film
Natural, Pictorial, Institutional, Fictional
by Seth Barry Watter
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
The Human Figure on Film asks what it is we look for when we look at human beings projected on a screen. People have appeared onscreen since film was invented. Nothing could be more common, and yet nothing confounds us more, than a filmed human being. Scholars and critics have attempted to reduce the mystery, creating methodologies that make this figure legible. Some of their efforts form the subject of this book.
Each chapter is devoted to a single, central concept-the natural, the pictorial, the institutional, and the fictional-that viewers have used to make sense of what they see. Each concept, in turn, is tied to the work and methods of a particular kind of historical observer: the natural historian (Ray L. Birdwhistell), the aesthete or pictorialist (Victor O. Freeburg), the anthropologist of institutions (Hortense Powdermaker), and the critic of fiction (V. F. Perkins). All of these researchers have their own interests and criteria of understanding, ranging from a microscopic look at gestures to a broad view of characters. Using a combination of critical history, biography, and formal analysis, The Human Figure on Film offers a fresh approach to the problem of figuration in an age of digital cinema. It is, at once, a cross-section of the field of film studies, a handbook of methods, and an inquiry into the nature of inquiry itself.
ebook
(0)
Through a Nuclear Lens
France, Japan, and Cinema from Hiroshima to Fukushima
by Hannah Holtzman
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
The Franco-Japanese coproduction Hiroshima mon amour (1959) is one of the most important films for global art cinema and for the French New Wave. In Through a Nuclear Lens, Hannah Holtzman examines this film and the transnational cycle it has inspired, as well as its legacy after the 2011 nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. In a study that includes formal and theoretical analysis, archival research, and interviews, Holtzman shows the emergence of a new kind of nuclear film, one that attends to the everyday effects of nuclear disaster and its impact on our experience of space and time. The focus on Franco-Japanese exchange in cinema since the postwar period reveals a reorientation of the primarily aesthetic preoccupations in the tradition of Japonisme to center around technological and environmental concerns. The book demonstrates how French filmmakers, ever since Hiroshima mon amour, have looked to Japan in part to better understand nuclear uncertainty in France.
ebook
(0)
Is Harpo Free?
And Other Questions of the Metaphysical Screen
by Matthew Cipa
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Is Harpo Free? is a lively appreciation of film and television's ability to artistically explore concepts typical of philosophical metaphysics, such as free will, causality, and personal identity. Rather than using films and television programs as vehicles for philosophical arguments, the book instead celebrates the artistic ways in which they give life to various metaphysical concepts and how the artistic expression of these concepts and ideas helps us understand ourselves, the world, and our place within it. Through close analysis of a varied selection of works and their use of narrative, form, and style, Is Harpo Free? exemplifies a novel approach to appreciating the philosophical substance of films and television programs. Films and television programs discussed include A Night at the Opera; Run, Lola, Run; Shane; Harvey; Three Colours: Blue; The Americans; Dark; and Fargo.
ebook
(0)
Luchino Visconti and the Alchemy of Adaptation
by Brendan Hennessey
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Examines the place of book-to-film adaptations by one of Italy's most famous postwar film directors.
Since the beginning, much of Italian cinema has been sustained by transforming literature into moving images. This tradition of literary adaptation continues today, challenging artistic form and practice by pressuring the boundaries that traditionally separate film from its sister arts. In the twentieth century, director Luchino Visconti is a keystone figure in Italy's evolving art of adaptation. From the tumultuous years of Fascism and postwar Neorealism, through the blockbuster decade of the 1960s, into the arthouse masterpieces of the 1970s, Visconti's adaptations marked a distinct pathway of the Italian cinematic imagination. Luchino Visconti and the Alchemy of Adaptation examines these films together with their literary antecedents. Moving past strict book-to-film comparisons, it ponders how literary texts encounter and interact with a history of cultural and cinematic forms, genres, and traditions. Matching the major critical concerns of the postwar period (realism, political filmmaking, cinematic modernism) with more recent notions of adaptation and intermediality, this book reviews how one of Italy's greatest directors mined literary ore for cinematic inspiration.
Brendan Hennessey is Associate Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
ebook
(0)
Seeing Symphonically
Avant-Garde Film, Urban Planning, and the Utopian Image of New York
by Erica Stein
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Looks at how a group of aesthetically innovative independent films contested and imagined alternatives to urban planning in midcentury New York.
ebook
(0)
The Slapstick Camera
Hollywood and the Comedy of Self-Reference
by Burke Hilsabeck
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Demonstrates that slapstick film comedies display a canny and sometimes profound understanding of their medium.
Slapstick film comedy may be grounded in idiocy and failure, but the genre is far more sophisticated than it initially appears. In this book, Burke Hilsabeck suggests that slapstick is often animated by a philosophical impulse to understand the cinema. He looks closely at movies and gags that represent the conditions and conventions of cinema production and demonstrates that film comedians display a canny and sometimes profound understanding of their medium-from Buster Keaton's encounter with the film screen in Sherlock Jr. (1924) to Harpo Marx's lip-sync turn with a phonograph in Monkey Business (1931) to Jerry Lewis's film-on-film performance in The Errand Boy (1961). The Slapstick Camera follows the observation of philosopher Stanley Cavell that self-reference is one way in which "film exists in a state of philosophy." By moving historically across the studio era, the book looks at a series of comedies that play with the changing technologies and economic practices behind film production and describes how comedians offered their own understanding of the nature of film and filmmaking. Hilsabeck locates the hidden intricacies of Hollywood cinema in a place where one might least expect them-the clowns, idiots, and scoundrels of slapstick comedy.
Burke Hilsabeck is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Northern Colorado.
ebook
(1)
Brute Force
Animal Horror Movies
by Dominic Lennard
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Considers how dangerous beasts in horror films illuminate the human-animal relationship.
It's always been a wild world, with humans telling stories of killer animals as soon as they could tell stories at all. Movies are an especially popular vehicle for our fascination with fierce creatures. In Brute Force, Dominic Lennard takes a close look at a range of cinematic animal attackers, including killer gorillas, sharks, snakes, bears, wolves, spiders, and even a few dinosaurs. Lennard argues that animal horror is not so much a focused genre as it is an impulse, tapping into age-old fears of becoming prey. At the same time, these films expose conflicts and uncertainties in our current relationship with animals. Movies considered include King Kong, Jaws, The Grey, Them!, Arachnophobia, Jurassic Park, Snakes on a Plane, An American Werewolf in London, and many more. Drawing on insights from film studies, art history, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, Brute Force is an engaging critical exploration-and appreciation-of cinema's many bad beasts.
ebook
(0)
A Very Old Machine
The Many Origins of the Cinema in India
by Sudhir Mahadevan
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Argues that Indian cinema's deep nineteenth-century past continues to play a vital role in its twenty-first-century present.
In A Very Old Machine, Sudhir Mahadevan shows how Indian cinema's many origins in the technologies and practices of the nineteenth century continue to play a vital and broad function in its twenty-first-century present. He proposes that there has never been a singular cinema in India; rather, Indian cinema has been a multifaceted phenomenon that was (and is) understood, experienced, and present in everyday life in myriad ways. Employing methods of media archaeology, close textual analysis, archival research, and cultural theory, Mahadevan digs into the history of photography, print media, practices of piracy and showmanship, and contemporary everyday imaginations of the cinema to offer an understanding of how the cinema came to be such a dominant force of culture in India. The result is an open-ended and innovative account of Indian cinema's "many origins."
ebook
(1)
Was It Yesterday?
Nostalgia in Contemporary Film and Television
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Explores how nostalgia operates in contemporary US film and television.
Bringing together prominent transatlantic film and media scholars, Was It Yesterday? explores the impact of nostalgia in twenty-first century American film and television. Cultural nostalgia, in both real and imagined forms, is dominant today, but what does the concentration on bringing back the past mean for an understanding of our cultural moment, and what are the consequences for viewers? This book questions the nature of this nostalgic phenomenon, the politics associated with it, and the significance of the different periods, in addition to offering counterarguments that see nostalgia as prevalent throughout film and television history. Considering such films and television shows as La La Land, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Stranger Things, and American Hustle, the contributors demonstrate how audiences have spent more time over the last decade living in various pasts.
Matthew Leggatt is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Winchester, United Kingdom and the author of Cultural and Political Nostalgia in the Age of Terror: The Melancholic Sublime.
ebook
(0)
Funny How?
Sketch Comedy and the Art of Humor
by Alex Clayton
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Uses comedy skits, from Monty Python to Key and Peele, to probe how humor works.
What makes something funny? This book shows how humor can be analyzed without killing the joke. Alex Clayton argues that the brevity of a sketch or skit and its typical rejection of narrative development make it comedy-concentrate, providing a rich field for exploring how humor works. Focusing on a dozen or so skits and scenes, Clayton shows precisely how sketch comedy appeals to the funny bone and engages our philosophical imagination. He suggests that since humor is about persuading an audience to laugh, it can be understood as a form of rhetoric. Through vivid, highly readable analyses of individual sketches, Clayton illustrates that Aristotle's three forms of appeal-logos, the appeal to reason; ethos, the appeal to communality; and pathos, the appeal to emotion-can form the basis for illuminating the inner workings of humor. Drawing on both popular and lesser-known examples from the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere-Monty Python's Flying Circus, Key and Peele, Saturday Night Live, Airplane!, and Smack the Pony-Clayton reveals the techniques and resonances of humor.
ebook
(0)
Invented Lives, Imagined Communities
The Biopic and American National Identity
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
How Hollywood biopics both showcase and modify various notions of what it means to be an American.
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.
William H. Epstein is Professor of English at the University of Arizona. His previous books include Recognizing Biography and Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biographical Criticism. R. Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature and Director of Film Studies at Clemson University. His previous books include Shot on Location: Postwar American Cinema and the Exploration of Real Place and (with William Robert Bray) Hollywood's Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America.
ebook
(0)
Doing Time
Temporality, Hermeneutics, and Contemporary Cinema
by Lee Carruthers
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Proposes that cinematic time is not a fixed idea, but a dynamic exchange between film and viewer.
Doing Time addresses two areas of interest in recent film study-film temporality and film philosophy-to propose an innovative theorization of cinematic time that sees it as a dynamic process of engagement, or something we do as viewers. This active relation to cinematic time, which discloses a film's temporal character, is called its "timeliness." Here it is traced across a range of fascinating case studies from Hollywood and the global art cinema, uncovering each film's characteristic way of "doing time." Throughout, the ambiguities of filmic time are held as powerful attractions as they modulate film viewing: such pauses, gaps, repetitions, and stretches of time illuminate a living field that extends from viewing activity.
Drawing on the writings of French film critic and theorist André Bazin, as well as the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lee Carruthers forwards a claim about the value of cinematic time for thinking. She also raises the tasks of film analysis and interpretation to renewed visibility. By prioritizing the viewer's experience of filmic temporality, and offering a rich vocabulary for describing this exchange, Carruthers articulates a new sphere of theoretical inquiry that invites film viewers (and readers) to participate.
ebook
(0)
Hollywood's New Yorker
The Making of Martin Scorsese
by Marc Raymond
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
A fresh look at the director's career.
When Martin Scorsese finally won an Academy Award in 2007, for The Departed, it was widely viewed as the crowning achievement of a remarkable film career. But what it also represented was an acceptance by Hollywood of a man who became a prestigious auteur precisely because of his status as an outsider from New York. For someone with a high-culture reputation like Scorsese's, this middlebrow sign of respectability was not about cultural standing; rather, it was about using and even sacrificing his distinctive outsider status for a greater share of industry authority within the world of Hollywood.
In Hollywood's New Yorker, Marc Raymond offers a fresh look at Scorsese's career in relation to the critical and social environment of the past fifty years. He traces Scorsese's career and films through his association with various cultural institutions, from his role as a student and instructor at New York University, to his move to Hollywood and his relationship with the studio system, to his relationship with prestigious institutions like the Museum of Modern Art. This sociological approach to film authorship provides analysis of previously overlooked Scorsese projects, particularly his documentary work, and gives importance to the role his extracurricular activities in the film preservation movement have played in the rise of his reputation.
Hollywood's New Yorker places Scorsese and his films firmly within the various time-periods of his career and compares the director with his peers, from fellow New Yorkers like Brian De Palma and Woody Allen to New Hollywood movie brats such as Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg. The result is a complete picture of Scorsese and the post -World War II American film culture he has both shaped and been shaped by.
ebook
(1)
Are You Watching Closely?
Cultural Paranoia, New Technologies, and the Contemporary Hollywood Misdirection Film
by Seth Friedman
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Identifies a new genre-misdirection films-and explains its appeal to contemporary producers and audiences.
Are You Watching Closely? is the first book to explore the recent spate of "misdirection films," a previously unidentified Hollywood genre characterized by narratives that inspire viewers to reinterpret them retrospectively. Since 1990, Hollywood has backed more of these films than ever before, many of which, including The Sixth Sense (1999), A Beautiful Mind (2001), and Inception (2010), were both commercial and critical successes. Seth Friedman examines this genre in its sociocultural, industrial, and technological contexts to explain why it has become more attractive to producers and audiences.
The recent popularity of misdirection films, Friedman argues, is linked to new technologies that enable repeat viewings and online discussion, which makes it enticing to an industry that depends increasingly on the aftermarket, as well as to historically specific cultural developments. That is, in addition to being well suited for shifting industrial and technological conditions, these films are appealing because they suggest that it remains possible to know what "actually" occurred and who was "really" responsible for events at a time when it is also becoming increasingly recognized that "truth" is relative. Are You Watching Closely? shows how Hollywood's effective strategies for these changing circumstances put it at the forefront of a storytelling trend that has increasingly become important across media. Through close analyses of how misdirection films have been designed, marketed, and received in relation to their contexts, Friedman demonstrates the ways in which they epitomize a kind of narrative experimentation that has become a crucial facet of twenty-first-century audiovisual storytelling.
Seth Friedman is Associate Professor of Communication and Theatre and Director of Film Studies at DePauw University.
ebook
(0)
Hitchcock
The Murderous Gaze
by William Rothman
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
An expanded edition of a classic work of film criticism, with a provocative and eloquent new chapter on Marnie, Hitchcock's most heartfelt--and most controversial--film.
First published in 1982, William Rothman's Hitchcock is a classic work of film criticism. Written in an engaging style that is philosophically sophisticated yet free of jargon, and using over nine hundred images from the films to illustrate and back up its critical claims, the book follows six different Hitchcock films as they unfold, moment by moment, from first shot to last.
In addition to a thoughtful new preface and the original readings of The Lodger (1927), Murder! (1930), The 39 Steps (1935), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and Psycho (1960), this expanded edition includes a groundbreaking new chapter-now the book's longest-on Marnie (1964), Hitchcock's most heartfelt yet most controversial film. Hitchcock never tired of quoting Oscar Wilde's line, "And all men kill the thing they love." Dark moods therefore prevail in the five original chapters, culminating in the reading of Psycho, but in demonstrating how Marnie overcomes, or transcends, the murderous aspect of Hitchcock's art, this new chapter balances the scales and gives an important new dimension to the book.
With exemplary precision, Hitchcock, Second Edition shows how Hitchcock films express, cinematically, serious thoughts about such matters as the nature and relationships of love, murder, sexuality, marriage, and theater-and about their own medium. In so doing, it keeps faith with the idea that Hitchcock was a master, perhaps the master, of what he called the "art of pure cinema." However, insofar as it investigates philosophically the conditions of authorship in the medium of film, it is an auteurist study unlike any other. By attending to the films themselves and to the ways we experience them, rather than allowing some theory to dictate what to say about them, the book proves the fruitfulness of an approach that is open and responsive to the ways serious films are capable of teaching us how to think seriously about them.
William Rothman is Professor of Motion Pictures and Director of the Graduate Program in Film and Media Studies at the University of Miami. His books include Cavell on Film and Three Documentary Filmmakers: Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch, both also published by SUNY Press.
ebook
(0)
John Huston as Adaptor
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Argues that understanding Huston's film adaptations of literary works is essential to understanding his oeuvre as a filmmaker.
John Huston as Adaptor makes the case that adaptation is the salient element in Huston's identity as a filmmaker and that his early and deep attraction to the experience of reading informed his approach to film adaptation. Thirty-four of Huston's thirty-seven films were adaptations of literary texts, and they stand as serious interpretations of literary works that could only be made by an astute reader of literature. Indeed, Huston asserted that a film director should be above all else a reader and that reading itself should be the intellectual and emotional basis for filmmaking.
The seventeen essays in this volume not only address Huston as an adaptor, but also offer an approach to adaptation studies that has been largely overlooked. How an adaptor reads, the works to which he is drawn, and how his literary interpretations can be brought to the screen without relegating film to a subservient role are some of the issues addressed by the contributors. An introductory chapter identifies Huston as the quintessential Hollywood adaptor and argues that his skill at adaptation is the mark of his authorial signature. The chapters that follow focus on fifteen of Huston's most important films, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The African Queen (1951), The Night of the Iguana (1964), Under the Volcano (1984), and The Dead (1987), and are divided into three areas: aesthetics and textuality; history and social context; and theory and psychoanalysis. By offering a more comprehensive account of the centrality of adaptation to Huston's films, John Huston as Adaptor offers a greater understanding of Huston as a filmmaker.
Douglas McFarland is a retired Professor of English at Flagler College. Wesley King is Assistant Professor of English at Flagler College.
ebook
(0)
Rumble and Crash
Crises of Capitalism in Contemporary Film
by Milo Sweedler
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Analyzes six films as allegories of capitalism's precarious state in the early twenty-first century.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as the contradictions of capitalism became more apparent than at any other time since the 1920s, numerous films gave allegorical form to the crises of contemporary capitalism. Some films were overtly political in nature, while others refracted the vicissitudes of capital in stories that were not, on the surface, explicitly political. Rumble and Crash examines six particularly rich and thought-provoking films in this vein. These films, Milo Sweedler argues, give narrative and audiovisual form to the increasingly pervasive sense that the economic system we have known and accepted as inevitable and ubiquitous is in fact riddled with self-destructive flaws. Analyzing four movies from before the global financial crisis of 2008 and two that allegorize the financial meltdown itself, Sweedler explores how cinema responded to one of the defining crises of our time. Films examined include Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006), Stephen Gaghan's Syriana (2005), Fernando Meirelles's The Constant Gardener (2005), Spike Lee's Inside Man (2006), Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (2013).
ebook
(0)
Brechtian Cinemas
Montage and Theatricality in Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, Peter Watkins, and Lars von Trie
by Nenad Jovanovic
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Explores the influence of Bertolt Brecht's ideas on the practice and study of cinema.
In Brechtian Cinemas, Nenad Jovanovic uses examples from select major filmmakers to delineate the variety of ways in which Bertolt Brecht's concept of epic/dialectic theatre has been adopted and deployed in international cinema. Jovanovic critically engages Brecht's ideas and their most influential interpretations in film studies, from apparatus theory in the 1970s to the presently dominant cognitivist approach. He then examines a broad body of films, including Brecht's own Mysteries of a Hairdressing Salon (1923) and Kuhle Wampe (1932), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's History Lessons (1972), Peter Watkins's La Commune (2000), and Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac (2013). Jovanovic argues that the role of montage-a principal source of artistic estrangement (Verfremdung) in earlier Brechtian films-has diminished as a result of the technique's conventionalization by today's Hollywood and related industries. Operating as primary agents of Verfremdung in contemporary films inspired by Brecht's view of the world and the arts, Jovanovic claims, are conventions borrowed from the main medium of his expression, theatre. Drawing upon a vast number of sources and disciplines that include cultural, film, literature, and theatre studies, Brechtian Cinemas demonstrates a continued and broad relevance of Brecht for the practice and understanding of cinema.
Nenad Jovanovic is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Wright State University.
ebook
(0)
Letters From Hollywood
1977-2017
by Bill Krohn
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Engaging essays on a wide spectrum of Hollywood directors and the films they created.
Journalist and filmmaker Bill Krohn has been the Los Angeles correspondent for the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma for over forty years. Letters from Hollywood brings together thirty-four of his essays, many of them appearing in English for the first time. Focusing most pieces on a particular director and film, Krohn uses his inside knowledge of the studio system to illuminate an art that is also a multibillion-dollar business. He connects currents in French film criticism and theory with an unfolding account of American cinema past and present, offering penetrating insights into directors and their work. Beginning with Allan Dwan, who learned how to make movies before Hollywood was born by watching D. W. Griffith, Krohn presents a panorama that encompasses Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick and Sergio Leone, Star Wars and I Love Lucy. He covers everything from gangsters to gremlins, from blockbusters to no-budget cult films like Moon Over Harlem and Plan 9 from Outer Space, in a style that is accessible to anyone who loves movies, or has a passion for writing about them.
Bill Krohn is the Los Angeles correspondent for Cahiers du cinéma. He is the author of Hitchcock at Work, Stanley Kubrick, and Alfred Hitchcock.
ebook
(0)
From El Dorado to Lost Horizons
Traditionalist Films in the Hollywood Renaissance, 1967-1972
by Ken Windrum
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Investigates how musicals, war films, sex comedies, and Westerns dealt with contentious issues during a time of change in Hollywood.
The era known as the Hollywood Renaissance is celebrated as a time when revolutionary movies broke all the rules of the previous "classical" era as part of the ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet many films during this era did not overtly smash the system but provided more traditional entertainment, based on popular genres, for a wider audience than the youth culture who flocked to more transgressive fare. Ken Windrum focuses on four genres of traditionalist movies-big-budget musicals, war spectacles, "naughty" sex comedies, and Westerns. From El Dorado to Lost Horizons shows how even seemingly innocuous, family-oriented films still participated in the progressive aspects of the time while also holding a conservative point of view. Windrum analyzes representations of issues including gender roles, marriage, sexuality, civil rights, and Cold War foreign policy, revealing how these films dealt with changing times and reflected both status quo positions and new attitudes. He also examines how the movies continued or deviated from classical principles of structure and style. Windrum provides a counter-history of the Hollywood Renaissance by focusing on a group of important films that have nevertheless been neglected in scholarly accounts.
Ken Windrum is Assistant Professor of Cinema at Los Angeles Pierce College.
ebook
(0)
Regarding Life
Animals and the Documentary Moving Image
by Belinda Smaill
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Contends that the narrative and aesthetic qualities of the documentary genre enable new understandings of animals and animal/human relationships.
As indicated by the success of such films as March of the Penguins and Food, Inc., the documentary has become the preeminent format for rendering animals and nature onscreen. In Regarding Life, Belinda Smaill brings together examples from a broad array of moving image contexts, including wildlife film and television, advocacy documentary, avant-garde nonfiction, and new media to identify a new documentary terrain in which the representation of animals in the wild and in industrial settings is becoming markedly more complex and increasingly more involved with pivotal ecological debates over species loss, food production, and science.
While attending to some of the most discussed documentaries of the last two decades, including Grizzly Man; Food, Inc.; Sweetgrass; Our Daily Bread; and Darwin's Nightmare, the book also draws on lesser-known film examples, and is one of the first to bring film studies understandings to new media such as YouTube. The result is a study that melds film studies and animal studies to explore how documentary films render both humans and animals, and to what political ends.
Belinda Smaill is Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University in Australia. She is the author of The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture and the coauthor (with Olivia Khoo and Audrey Yue) of Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas.
ebook
(0)
Curtains of Light
Theatrical Space in Film
by George Toles
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Provides a new way of thinking about film's relation to theatre.
ebook
(0)
Encountering the Impossible
The Fantastic in Hollywood Fantasy Cinema
by Alexander Sergeant
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
The first academic explanation for how spectators use their imaginations as part of the experience and appreciation of popular fantasy filmmaking.
ebook
(0)
Welcome to Fear City
Crime Film, Crisis, and the Urban Imagination
by Nathan Holmes
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Analyzes how location-shot crime films of the 1970s reflected and influenced understandings of urban crisis.
The early 1970s were a moment of transformation for both the American city and its cinema. As intensified suburbanization, racial division, deindustrialization, and decaying infrastructure cast the future of the city in doubt, detective films, blaxploitation, police procedurals, and heist films confronted spectators with contemporary scenes from urban streets. Welcome to Fear City argues that the location-shot crime films of the 1970s were part of a larger cultural ambivalence felt toward urban life, evident in popular magazines, architectural discourse, urban sociology, and visual culture. Yet they also helped to reinvigorate the city as a site of variegated experience and a positively disordered public life-in stark contrast to the socially homogenous and spatially ordered suburbs. Discussing the design of parking garages and street lighting, the dynamics of mugging, panoramas of ruin, and the optics of undercover police operations in such films as Klute, The French Connection, Detroit 9000, Death Wish, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Nathan Holmes demonstrates that crime genres did not simply mirror urban settings and social realities, but actively produced and circulated new ideas about the shifting surfaces of public culture.
Nathan Holmes is a New York—based scholar and teacher, with a PhD in film and media studies from the University of Chicago.
ebook
(1)
B Is for Bad Cinema
Aesthetics, Politics, and Cultural Value
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Considers films that lurk on the boundaries of acceptability in taste, style, and politics.
B Is for Bad Cinema continues and extends, but does not limit itself to, the trends in film scholarship that have made cult and exploitation films and other "low" genres increasingly acceptable objects for critical analysis. Springing from discussions of taste and value in film, these original essays mark out the broad contours of "bad"-that is, aesthetically, morally, or commercially disreputable-cinema. While some of the essays share a kinship with recent discussions of B movies and cult films, they do not describe a single aesthetic category or represent a single methodology or critical agenda, but variously approach bad cinema in terms of aesthetics, politics, and cultural value. The volume covers a range of issues, from the aesthetic and industrial mechanics of low-budget production through the terrain of audience responses and cinematic affect, and on to the broader moral and ethical implications of the material. As a result, B Is for Bad Cinema takes an interest in a variety of film examples-overblown Hollywood blockbusters, faux pornographic works, and European art house films-to consider those that lurk on the boundaries of acceptability.
Claire Perkins is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of American Smart Cinema and the coeditor (with Verevis) of Film Trilogies: New Critical Approaches. Constantine Verevis is Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at Monash University. His previous books include Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Volume 1: Critical Positions (coauthored with Noel King and Deane Williams); Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel (coedited with Carolyn Jess-Cooke), also published by SUNY Press; and Film Remakes.
ebook
(0)
The Great War in Hollywood Memory, 1918-1939
by Michael Hammond
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Assesses how America's film industry remembered World War I during the interwar period.
This is the definitive account of how America's film industry remembered and reimagined World War I from the Armistice in 1918 to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Based on detailed archival research, Michael Hammond shows how the war and the sociocultural changes it brought made their way into cinematic stories and images. He traces the development of the war's memory in films dealing with combat on the ground and in the air, the role of women behind the lines, returning veterans, and through the social problem and horror genres. Hammond first examines movies that dealt directly with the war and the men and women who experienced it. He then turns to the consequences of the war as they played out across a range of films, some only tangentially related to the conflict itself. Hammond finds that the Great War acted as a storehouse of motifs and tropes drawn upon in the service of an industry actively seeking to deliver clearly told, entertaining stories to paying audiences. Films analyzed include The Big Parade, Grand Hotel, Hell's Angels, The Black Cat, and Wings. Drawing on production records, set designs, personal accounts, and the advertising and reception of key films, the book offers unique insight into a cinematic remembering that was a product of the studio system as it emerged as a global entertainment industry.
ebook
(0)
Binghamton Babylon
Voices from the Cinema Department, 1967-1977
by Scott M. MacDonald
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Documents a volatile and productive moment in the development of film studies.
In Binghamton Babylon, Scott M. MacDonald documents one of the crucial moments in the history of cinema studies: the emergence of a cinema department at what was then the State University of New York at Binghamton (now Binghamton University) between 1967 and 1977. The department brought together a group of faculty and students who not only produced a remarkable body of films and videos but went on to invigorate the American media scene for the next half-century. Drawing on interviews with faculty, students, and visiting artists, MacDonald weaves together an engaging conversation that explores the academic excitement surrounding the emergence of cinema as a viable subject of study in colleges and universities. The voices of the various participants-Steve Anker, Alan Berliner, Danny Fingeroth, Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, J. Hoberman, Ralph Hocking, Ken Jacobs, Bill T. Jones, Peter Kubelka, Saul Levine, Camille Paglia, Phil Solomon, Maureen Turim, and many others-tell the story of this remarkable period. MacDonald concludes with an analysis of the pedagogical dimensions of the films that were produced in Binghamton, including Larry Gottheim's Horizons; Jacobs's Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son; Gehr's Serene Velocity; Frampton's Critical Mass; and Nicholas Ray's final film, We Can't Go Home Again.
ebook
(0)
The Holiday in His Eye
Stanley Cavell's Vision of Film and Philosophy
by William Rothman
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Presents an original, insightful, and compelling vision of the trajectory of Cavell's oeuvre, one that takes his kinship with Emerson as inextricably bound up with his ever-deepening thinking about movies.
From The World Viewed to Cities of Words, writing about movies was strand over strand with Stanley Cavell's philosophical work. Cavell was one of the first philosopher in the United States to make film a significant focus of his thought, and William Rothman has long been one of his most astute readers. The Holiday in His Eye collects Rothman's writings about Cavell, many of them previously unpublished-to offer a lucid, serious introduction to and overview of Cavell's work, the influence of which has been somewhat limited by both the intrinsic difficulty of his ideas and his challenging prose style. In these engaging and accessible yet philosophically serious and rigorously argued essays, Rothman presents an original, insightful, and compelling vision of the trajectory of Cavell's oeuvre, one that takes Cavell's kinship with Emerson as inextricably bound up with his ever-deepening thinking about movies.
ebook
(0)
Perpetual Movement
Alfred Hitchcock's Rope
by Neil Badmington
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Offers both a production history and a close analysis, with a chapter for each of the film's eleven shots.
ebook
(0)
Hitchcock's Moral Gaze
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Offers new and compelling perspectives on the deeply moral nature of Hitchcock's films.
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.
ebook
(0)
Sounds Like Helicopters
Classical Music in Modernist Cinema
by Matthew Lau
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Explores how modernist films use classical music in ways that restore the music's original subversive energy.
Classical music masterworks have long played a key supporting role in the movies-silent films were often accompanied by a pianist or even a full orchestra playing classical or theatrical repertory music-yet the complexity of this role has thus far been underappreciated. Sounds Like Helicopters corrects this oversight through close interpretations of classical music works in key modernist films by Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog, Luis Buñuel, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Haneke, and Terrence Malick. Beginning with the famous example of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" in Apocalypse Now, Matthew Lau demonstrates that there is a significant continuity between classical music and modernist cinema that belies their seemingly ironic juxtaposition. Though often regarded as a stuffy, conservative art form, classical music has a venerable avant-garde tradition, and key films by important directors show that modernist cinema restores the original subversive energy of these classical masterworks. These films, Lau argues, remind us of what this music sounded like when it was still new and difficult; they remind us that great music remains new music. The pattern of reliance on classical music by modernist directors suggests it is not enough to watch modernist cinema: one must listen to its music to sense its prehistory, its history, and its obscure, prophetic future.
Matthew Lau is Associate Professor of English at Queensborough Community College, City University of New York.
ebook
(0)
Native Recognition
Indigenous Cinema and the Western
by Joanna Hearne
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Offers a new interpretation of the century-long relationship between the Western film genre and Native American filmmaking.
In Native Recognition, Joanna Hearne persuasively argues for the central role of Indigenous image-making in the history of American cinema. Across the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, Indigenous peoples have been involved in cinema as performers, directors, writers, consultants, crews, and audiences, yet both the specificity and range of this Native participation have often been obscured by the on-screen, larger-than-life images of Indians in the Western. Not only have Indigenous images mattered to the Western, but Westerns have also mattered to Indigenous filmmakers as they subvert mass culture images of supposedly "vanishing" Indians, repurposing the commodity forms of Hollywood films to envision Native intergenerational continuity. Through their interventions in forms of seeing and being seen in public culture, Native filmmakers have effectively marshaled the power of visual media to take part in national discussions of social justice and political sovereignty for North American Indigenous peoples.
Native Recognition brings together a wide range of little-known productions, from the silent films of James Young Deer, to recovered prints of the 1928 Ramona and the 1972 House Made of Dawn, to the experimental and feature films of Victor Masayesva and Chris Eyre. Using international archival research and close visual analysis, Hearne expands our understanding of the complexity of Native presence in cinema both on screen and through the circuits of film production and consumption.
ebook
(0)
Orienting Italy
China through the Lens of Italian Filmmakers
by Mary Ann McDonald Carolan
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Orienting Italy explores contemporary Italian filmmakers' fascination with China and the Chinese in both documentary and fictional films. Delineating the contours of this fascination, the book begins with the works of Carlo Lizzani (Behind the Great Wall, 1958) and Michelangelo Antonioni (Chung Kuo-China, 1972), both of whom ventured to China with the aim of documenting new, yet physically and culturally distant, realities. Their documentary investigations yielded to fictional portrayals, from the lavish view of a historical Middle Kingdom by director Bernardo Bertolucci (The Last Emperor, 1987) to the stark consideration of Italian economic exchange with contemporary China by Gianni Amelio (The Missing Star, 2006). The wave of Chinese migration to Italy in the late twentieth century created a new sense of otherness within Italy as Chinese migrants became the subjects of fictional narratives and documentaries in the works of Stefano Incerti (Gorbaciof, 2010) and Andrea Segre (Shun Li and the Poet, 2011) and Riccardo Cremona and Vincenzo De Cecco (Miss Little China, 2009). In the twenty-first century, a new chapter in the relationship between Italy and China has emerged in the form of transnational collaborations in the art and business of filmmaking.
ebook
(0)
Cinema of Discontent
Representations of Japan's High-Speed Growth
by Tomoyuki Sasaki
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, Japan experienced an unprecedented level of economic growth, transforming itself from a war-devastated country to a global economic power. Our image of postwar Japan has been shaped by this event, and we tend to see its history as a story of great national success. Cinema of Discontent challenges this view and details the tensions generated by massive and intense capitalist development through analyses of popular cinema produced during the era of high-speed growth. The films discussed in this book, directed by Kawashima Yūzō, Masumura Yasuzō, Inoue Akira, Ezaki Mio, and Kumashiro Tatsumi, attracted broad audiences yet remain understudied. Cinema of Discontent contextualizes these films in relation to the politics, economy, intellectual discourse, and cultural texts of the time. By doing so, it demonstrates how these films address problems immanent to Japan's postwar capitalism, including uneven development, increasing corporate control over individuals, precarious and contingent work, and militarized peace and prosperity.
ebook
(0)
Nietzsche in Hollywood
Images of the Übermensch in Early American Cinema
by Matthew Rukgaber
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Nietzsche in Hollywood offers a compelling and startling history of Hollywood film in which the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his idea of the Übermensch looms large. Though Nietzsche's philosophy was attacked as egoistic and a sociopathic version of Darwinism in films from the 1910s, it undergoes a series of cinematic and philosophical transformations in the 1920s and 1930s under the eye and pen of some of the most significant names in early Hollywood, including Erich von Stroheim, Josef von Sternberg, Ben Hecht, Howard Hawks, and Ernst Lubitsch. In addition to establishing historical connections between Nietzsche's philosophy and these filmmakers, the book provides philosophical readings of many Hollywood films through the lens of the Nietzschean ideas of "perspectivism" and the critique of morality. Offering a new history of classic Hollywood films as well as a new approach to film philosophy, Nietzsche in Hollywood reveals a reading of the philosopher in American culture that has largely been ignored.
ebook
(0)
No Jurisdiction
Legal, Political, and Aesthetic Disorder in Post-9/11 Genre Cinema
by Fareed Ben-Youssef
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
No Jurisdiction interweaves autobiography and analysis to explore how a disabled American of French-Arab descent justifies his love for the (super)heroes who destroy brown people like himself. Framing Hollywood genre films as a key to understanding a crisis-filled world shaped by the global War on Terror, Fareed Ben-Youssef shows how, in response to 9/11, filmmakers and lawmakers mobilized iconic characters-the cowboy, the femme fatale, and the superhero-to make sense of our traumas and inspire new legal landscapes. The competing visions of power produced in this dialogue between Hollywood entertainment and mainstream politics underscore genre cinema's multivalent purpose: to normalize state violence and also to critique it.
Chapters devoted to the Western, film noir, superhero movies, and global films that deploy and comment on these genres offer compelling readings of films ranging from the more apparent (The Dark Knight, Sicario, and Logan) to the more unexpected (Sin City, Adieu Gary, The Broken Circle Breakdown, and Tokyo Sonata). Through narratives of states of emergency that include vaguely defined enemies, obscured battlefield boundaries, and blurred lines between victims and perpetrators, a new post-9/11 film canon emerges. No Jurisdiction is a deeply personal work of film scholarship, arguing that we can face our complicity and discover opportunities for resistance through our beloved genre movies.
ebook
(0)
White Cottage, White House
Irish American Masculinities in Classical Hollywood Cinema
by Tony Tracy
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
White Cottage, White House examines how Classical Hollywood cinema developed and deployed Irish American masculinities to negotiate, consolidate, and reinforce hegemonic whiteness in midcentury America. Largely confined to discriminatory stereotypes during the silent era, Irish American male characters emerge as a favored identity with the introduction of sound, positioned in a variety of roles as mediators between the marginal and mainstream. The book argues that such characters function to express hegemonic whiteness as ethnicity, a socio-racial framing that kept immigrant origins and normative American values in productive tension. It traces key Irish American male types-the gangster, the priest, the cop, the sports hero, and the returning immigrant-who navigated these tensions in maintenance of an ethnic whiteness that was nonetheless "at home" in America, transforming from James Cagney's "public enemy" to John Wayne's "quiet man" in the process. Whether as figures of Depression-era social disruption, avatars of presidential patriarchy and national manhood, or allegories of postwar white flight and the nuclear family, Irish American masculinities occupied a distinctive and unrivaled visibility and role in popular American film.
ebook
(0)
Hollywood Films in North Africa and the Middle East
A History of Circulation
by Nolwenn Mingant
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Drawing on a broad range of primary sources, from trade and government publications to interviews, Hollywood Films in North Africa and the Middle East traces the circulation of Hollywood films across the region from the early twentieth century to the present. Originally introduced by French distributors, Hollywood films have been a key component of film culture in North Africa and the Middle East. These films became a favored mode of entertainment during the first half of the century as the major US film studios built a strong distribution structure. After World War II, the changing geopolitical context of decolonization pushed US distributors out of the market. Hollywood films, however, have continued to be favored by audiences. Today, in a landscape that also includes Egyptian and Indian films, Hollywood remains a relevant force in the region's film culture, experienced by audiences in myriad ways from the pirate markets of North Africa to state-of-the-art theatres in the United Arab Emirates.
ebook
(0)
Reluctant Sleuths, True Detectives
by Jason Jacobs
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Reluctant Sleuths, True Detectives examines the detective figure in four noir and neo-noir films: Out of the Past (1947), Notorious (1946), Vertigo (1958), and Chinatown (1974). Exploring the way that these characters each move from an initial state of reluctant passivity to one of passionate engagement with the world around them, it questions the cinematic forces required to motivate and move them. In its close examinations of each film, the book meditates on the detectives' hunts and how they interact with the cinematic apparatus that captures and presents them to an audience, and it tracks the receptive experience of these films in relation to these questions of motivation and movement.
ebook
(2)
Distancing Representations in Transgender Film
Identification, Affect, and the Audience
by Lucy J. Miller
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Distancing Representations in Transgender Film explores the representation of transgender identity in several important cinema genres: comedies, horror films, suspense thrillers, and dramas. In a critique that is both deeply personal and theoretically sophisticated, Lucy J. Miller examines how these representations are often narratively and visually constructed to prompt emotions of ridicule, fear, disgust, and sympathy from a cisgender audience. Created by and for cisgender people, these films do not accurately represent transgender people's experiences, and the emotions they inspire serve to distance cisgender audience members from the transgender people they encounter in their day-to-day lives. By helping to increase the distance between cisgender and transgender people, Miller argues, these films make it more difficult for cisgender people to understand the experiences of transgender people and for transgender people to fully participate in public life. The book concludes with suggestions for improving transgender representation in film.
ebook
(0)
Ripping England!
Postwar British Satire from Ealing to the Goons
by Roger Rawlings
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Examines an all too often neglected period of postwar British cinema and popular culture.
Ripping England! Investigates a fertile moment for British satire-the period between 1947 and 1953, which produced the films Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and The Lavender Hill Mob, as well as the seminal radio program The Goon Show. Against the postwar background of fading empire, universal rationing, and the implementation of a welfare state, these satires laid the foundation for a new British cultural identity later fleshed out by the Angry Young Men, the Movement poets, the Social Realists, and those involved in the satire boom of the 1960s, which lives on even to this day.
The peculiarity of these satires and the British identity they shaped is better understood when seen in relief against postwar cinematic cultures of Italy, France, and the United States. Roger Rawlings places postwar British film in the context of contemporaneous European national film movements and contrasts it with Hollywood's comedies and satires of the same period. British satires of the late forties and early fifties held up a mirror to a nation that was in the throes of change, moving from a colonial empire to an inward-turning island culture. Ripping England! Looks at the all too often neglected miracle of postwar British cinema and popular culture.
ebook
(0)
Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors
The Child Villains of Horror Film
by Dominic Lennard
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Examines the complexities and contradictions that arise when the monsters in the movies are children.
Since the 1950s, children have provided some of horror's most effective and enduring villains, from dainty psychopath Rhoda Penmark of The Bad Seed (1956) and spectacularly possessed Regan MacNeil of The Exorcist (1973) to psychic ghost-girl Samara of The Ring (2002) and adopted terror Esther of Orphan (2009). Using a variety of critical approaches, including those of cinema studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and psychoanalysis, Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors offers the first full-length study of these child monsters. In doing so, the book highlights horror as a topic of analysis that is especially pertinent socially and politically, exposing the genre as a site of deep ambivalence toward-and even hatred of-children.
Dominic Lennard is Associate Lecturer in the Centre for University Pathways and Partnerships at the University of Tasmania, Australia.
ebook
(0)
Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination
Georges Méliès's Trip to the Moon
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
An authoritative and comprehensive guide to cinema's first true blockbuster.
"Best moving pictures I ever saw." Thus did one Vaudeville theater manager describe Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon [Le Voyage dans la lune], after it was screened for enthusiastic audiences in October 1902. Cinema's first true blockbuster, A Trip to the Moon still inspires such superlatives and continues to be widely viewed on DVD, on the Internet, and in countless film courses. In Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination, leading film scholars examine Méliès's landmark film in detail, demonstrating its many crucial connecions to literature, popular culture, and visual culture of the time, as well as its long "afterlife" in more recent films, television, and music videos. Together, these essays make clear that Méliès was not only a major filmmaker but also a key figure in the emergence of modern spectacle and the birth of the modern cinematic imagination, and by bringing interdisciplinary methodologies of early cinema studies to bear on A Trip to the Moon, the contributors also open up much larger questions about aesthetics, media, and modernity.
In his introduction, Matthew Solomon traces the convoluted provenance of the film's multiple versions and its key place in the historiography of cinema, and an appendix contains a useful dossier of primary-source documents that contextualize the film's production, along with translations of two major articles written by Méliès himself.
ebook
(0)
American Stranger
Modernisms, Hollywood, and the Cinema of Nicholas Ray
by Will Scheibel
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Reconstructs how Ray became a "rebel auteur" in cinema culture.
How does cinema culture imagine one of its favorite figures, the rebel? The reputation of the American director Nicholas Ray provides a particularly notable example. Most famous for Rebel Without a Cause, Ray has since been canonized as a "rebel auteur" and celebrated for seeking a personal vision and signature style under the industrial pressures of Classical Hollywood during its late studio period. In American Stranger, Will Scheibel reconstructs how Ray's reputation developed over time, analyzing the different historical practices of modernism that set new horizons for artistic rebellion in postwar cinema.
Drawing on biographical legends, interviews, film reviews, articles in both national newspapers and international film magazines, and star promotion and publicity, Scheibel examines the contexts in which Ray's reputation was constructed. These include the consolidation of director-based film criticism and the rise of film studies as an academic discipline; star performances and personifications of the rebel male in Ray's films; the counterculture in which Ray promoted himself as a teacher and worked as a political avant-gardist; and the art cinemas of Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, and Jim Jarmusch, each of whom were influenced by Ray. In addition to Rebel Without a Cause, Scheibel also analyzes such classic films as The Lusty Men and In a Lonely Place, as well as collaborative, less-examined films from his later career outside of Hollywood, We Can't Go Home Again and Lightning Over Water. Reconstructing the evolution of Ray's place in cinema culture, this intellectual history measures the standards for both rebellion and convention, for the vanguard and the establishment, that determine an artistic reputation.
Will Scheibel is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Syracuse University, where he teaches film and screen studies. He is the coeditor (with Steven Rybin) of Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground: Nicholas Ray in American Cinema, also published by SUNY Press.