Download or read book Aesthetics and the Cinematic Narrative written by Michael Peter Bolus and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2019-08-26 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the inception of cinema in the late nineteenth century, filmmakers have employed a wide array of precursory aesthetic strategies in the conception and creation of their disparate works. The existence of these traditional antecedents have afforded filmmakers a diverse range of technical and artistic applications towards the construction of their respective cinematic narratives. Furthermore, the socio-political and cultural contexts in which films are conceived often inform the manner in which particular aesthetic sensibilities are selected and deployed. ‘Aesthetics and the Cinematic Narrative’ provides a concise historical survey of Aesthetics as a practical philosophical discipline and applies several of its underlying principles to the examination of filmic storytelling.
Download or read book Aesthetics and Film written by Katherine Thomson-Jones and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2008-10-23 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aesthetics and Film is a philosophical study of the art of film. Its motivation is the recent surge of interest among analytic philosophers in the philosophical implications of central issues in film theory and the application of general issues in aesthetics to the specific case of film. Of particular interest are questions concerning the distinctive representational capacities of film art, particularly in relation to realism and narration, the influence of the literary paradigm in understanding film authorship and interpretation, and our imaginative and affective engagement with film. For all of these questions, Katherine Thomson-Jones critically compares the most compelling answers, driving home key points with a wide range of film examples including Wiene's The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Eisenstein's October, Hitchcock's Rear Window, Kubrick's The Shining and Sluizer's The Vanishing. Students and scholars of aesthetics and cinema will find this an illuminating, accessible and highly enjoyable investigation into the nature and power of a technologically evolving art form.
Download or read book The Light in the Dark written by Michael Peter Bolus and published by . This book was released on 2019-12-04 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through an engaging and enlightening selection of readings and articles, The Light in the Dark: The Evolution, Mechanics, and Purpose of Cinema investigates cinema from a variety of diverse perspectives. The anthology explores the technical aspects of the filmmaking process, the ways in which certain elements of cinema are creatively combined toward emotional and intellectual effect, and the myriad ways cinema both interacts with and reflects culture. The opening chapter is comprised of readings that examine the nature and origin of cinematic technique, speaking to its early development as both a commercial and artistic endeavor. The second chapter reviews the core components of filmmaking, including mise-en-scène, editing, sound design, acting, and shot composition. In the final chapter, students explore film in cultural context. The readings examine particular stages in cinema's evolution, the role and implications of complex gender constructs, and the manner in which race and racial tensions have manifested themselves in filmic narratives. A highly contemporary and accessible anthology, The Light in the Dark is an excellent resource for courses in filmmaking and film studies. Michael Peter Bolus is the CEO of MEANSTREET Productions, a founding partner of the educational consulting firm CampusPro Group, the department chair of the Liberal Arts Program at The Los Angeles Film School, and a professor of film studies at Santa Monica College. He holds a Ph.D. in theatre studies from the City University of New York Graduate Center and a master's degree in creative writing from Boston University. He is the author of Aesthetics and the Cinematic Narrative: An Introduction (Anthem Press), and his articles, interviews, and criticism have appeared in a wide array of academic and scholarly journals.
Download or read book An Aesthetics of Injury written by Ian Fleishman and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Aesthetics of Injury exposes wounding as a foundational principle of modernism in literature and film. Theorizing the genre of the narrative wound—texts that aim not only to depict but also to inflict injury—Ian Fleishman reveals harm as an essential aesthetic strategy in ten exemplary authors and filmmakers: Charles Baudelaire, Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Hélène Cixous, Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek, Werner Schroeter, Michael Haneke, and Quentin Tarantino. Violence in the modernist mode, an ostensible intrusion of raw bodily harm into the artwork, aspires to transcend its own textuality, and yet, as An Aesthetics of Injury establishes, the wound paradoxically remains the essence of inscription. Fleishman thus shows how the wound, once the modernist emblem par excellence of an immediate aesthetic experience, comes to be implicated in a postmodern understanding of reality reduced to ceaseless mediation. In so doing, he demonstrates how what we think of as the most real object, the human body, becomes indistinguishable from its “nonreal” function as text. At stake in this tautological textual model is the heritage of narrative thought: both the narratological workings of these texts (how they tell stories) and the underlying epistemology exposed (whether these narrativists still believe in narrative at all). With fresh and revealing readings of canonical authors and filmmakers seldom treated alongside one another, An Aesthetics of Injury is important reading for scholars working on literary or cinematic modernism and the postmodern, philosophy, narratology, body culture studies, queer and gender studies, trauma studies, and cultural theory.
Download or read book Hollywood Aesthetic written by Todd Berliner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hollywood makes the most widely successful pleasure-giving artworks the world has ever known. The industry operates under the assumption that pleasurable aesthetic experiences, among huge populations, translate into box office success. With that goal in mind, Hollywood has systematized the delivery of aesthetic pleasure, packaging and selling it on a massive scale. In Hollywood Aesthetic, Todd Berliner accounts for the chief attraction of Hollywood cinema worldwide: its entertainment value. The book examines films such as City Lights and Goodfellas that have earned aesthetic appreciation from both fans and critics. But it also studies some curious outliers, cult films, and celebrated Hollywood experiments, such as The Killing and Starship Troopers. And it demonstrates that even ordinary popular films, from Tarzan and His Mate to Rocky III, as well as action blockbusters, like Die Hard and The Dark Knight, offer aesthetic pleasure to mass audiences. Hollywood Aesthetic explains how Hollywood engages viewers by satisfying their aesthetic desires. Visit the companion website at www.oup.com/us/hollywoodaesthetic
Download or read book Forms of Being written by Leo Bersani and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In each of the films discussed in this study - 'Le Mepris', 'All About My Mother', 'The Thin Red Line' - something extraordinary is proposed. Or if not proposed, then shown, visually, by stranger and more powerful means than narrative or argument.
Download or read book What s the Story The Director Meets Their Screenplay written by Peter Markham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-07 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A structured perspective on the crucial interface of director and screenplay, this book encompasses twenty-two seminal aspects of the approach to story and script that a director needs to understand before embarking on all other facets of the director’s craft. Drawing on seventeen years of teaching filmmaking at a graduate level and on his prior career as a director and in production at the BBC, Markham shows how the filmmaker can apply rigorous analysis of the elements of dramatic narrative in a screenplay to their creative vision, whether of a short or feature, TV episode or season. Combining examination of such fundamental topics as story, premise, theme, genre, world and setting, tone, structure, and key images with the introduction of less familiar concepts such as cultural, social, and moral canvas, narrative point of view, and the journey of the audience, What’s The Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay applies the insights of each chapter to a case study—the screenplay of the short film Contrapelo, nominated for the Jury Award at Tribeca in 2014. This book is an essential resource for any aspiring director who wants to understand exactly how to approach a screenplay in order to get the very best from it, and an invaluable resource for any filmmaker who wants to understand the important creative interplay between the director and screenplay in bringing a story to life.
Download or read book Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema written by Sulgi Lie and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-08 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film is a contribution to an aesthetics of cinema rooted in Marxist theory. Rather than focusing on the role that certain films, or the cinema as an institution, might play in political consciousness, the book asks a different question: how can the subject of politics in film be thought? This problem is presented in a systematic-theoretical rather than historical manner. The main aim of this book is a retrospective rehabilitation of the psychoanalytical concept of "suture," whose political core is progressively revealed. In a second step, this rereading of "suture"-theory is mediated with the Marxist aesthetics of Fredric Jameson. From the perspective of this reconfigured aesthetics of negativity, films by Hitchcock, Antonioni, Haneke and Kubrick are analyzed as articulations of a political unconscious.
Download or read book Film Worlds written by Daniel Yacavone and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-23 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film Worlds unpacks the significance of the "worlds" that narrative films create, offering an innovative perspective on cinema as art. Drawing on aesthetics and the philosophy of art in both the continental and analytic traditions, as well as classical and contemporary film theory, it weaves together multiple strands of thought and analysis to provide new understandings of filmic representation, fictionality, expression, self-reflexivity, style, and the full range of cinema's affective and symbolic dimensions. Always more than "fictional worlds" and "storyworlds" on account of cinema's perceptual, cognitive, and affective nature, film worlds are theorized as immersive and transformative artistic realities. As such, they are capable of fostering novel ways of seeing, feeling, and understanding experience. Engaging with the writings of Jean Mitry, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Christian Metz, David Bordwell, Gilles Deleuze, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, among other thinkers, Film Worlds extends Nelson Goodman's analytic account of symbolic and artistic "worldmaking" to cinema, expands on French philosopher Mikel Dufrenne's phenomenology of aesthetic experience in relation to films and their worlds, and addresses the hermeneutic dimensions of cinematic art. It emphasizes what both celluloid and digital filmmaking and viewing share with the creation and experience of all art, while at the same time recognizing what is unique to the moving image in aesthetic terms. The resulting framework reconciles central aspects of realist and formalist/neo-formalist positions in film theory while also moving beyond them and seeks to open new avenues of exploration in film studies and the philosophy of film.
Download or read book Film Art and the Third Culture written by Murray Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Murray Smith presents an original approach to understanding film. He brings the arts, humanities, and sciences together to illuminate artistic creation and aesthetic experience. His 'third culture' approach roots itself in an appreciation of scientific innovation and how this has shaped the moving media.
Download or read book Transactions with the World written by Adam O’Brien and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-02-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In their bold experimentation and bracing engagement with culture and politics, the “New Hollywood” films of the late 1960s and early 1970s are justly celebrated contributions to American cinematic history. Relatively unexplored, however, has been the profound environmental sensibility that characterized movies such as The Wild Bunch, Chinatown, and Nashville. This brisk and engaging study explores how many hallmarks of New Hollywood filmmaking, such as the increased reliance on location shooting and the rejection of American self-mythologizing, made the era such a vividly “grounded” cinematic moment. Synthesizing a range of narrative, aesthetic, and ecocritical theories, it offers a genuinely fresh perspective on one of the most studied periods in film history.
Download or read book The Shape of Motion written by Jordan Schonig and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Cinematic motion has long been celebrated as an emblem of change and fluidity or claimed as the source of cinema's impression of reality. But such general claims undermine the sheer variety of forms that motion can take onscreen-the sweep of a gesture, the rush of a camera movement, the slow transformations of a natural landscape. What might we learn about the moving image when we begin to account for the many ways that movements move? In The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement, Jordan Schonig provides a new way of theorizing cinematic motion by examining cinema's "motion forms:" structures, patterns, or shapes of movement unique to the moving image. From the wild and unpredictable motion of flickering leaves and swirling dust that captivated early spectators, to the pulsing abstractions that emerge from rapid lateral tracking shots, to the bleeding pixel-formations caused by the glitches of digital video compression, each motion form opens up the aesthetics of movement to film theoretical inquiry. By pairing close analyses of onscreen movement in narrative and experimental films with concepts from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Bergson, and Immanuel Kant, Schonig rethinks longstanding assumptions within film studies, such as indexical accounts of photographic images and analogies between the camera and the human eye. Arguing against the intuition that cinema reproduces our natural perception of motion, The Shape of Motion shows how cinema's motion forms do not merely transpose the movements of the world in front of the camera; they transform them"
Download or read book Directing written by Michael Rabiger and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2013-04-02 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Directing: Film Techniques and Aesthetics is a comprehensive manual that teaches the essentials of filmmaking from the perspective of the director. Ideal for film production and directing classes, as well as for aspiring and current directors, Directing covers all phases of preproduction and production, from idea development to final cut. Thoroughly covering the basics, Directing guides the reader to professional standards of expression and control, and goes to the heart of what makes a director. The book outlines a great deal of practical work to meet this goal, with projects, exercises. The third edition emphasizes the connection between knowing and doing, with every principle realizable through projects and exercises. Much has been enhanced and expanded, notably: aspects of dramaturgy; beats and dramatic units; pitching stories and selling one's work; the role of the entrepreneurial producer; and the dangers of embedded moral values. Checklists are loaded with practical recommendations for action, and outcomes assessment tables help the reader honestly gauge his or her progress. Entirely new chapters present: preproduction procedures; production design; script breakdown; procedures and etiquette on the set; shooting location sound; continuity; and working with a composer. The entire book is revised to capitalize on the advantages offered by the revolutionary shift to digital filmmaking.
Download or read book Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema written by A. Cameron and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-07-11 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 1990s there has been a trend towards narrative complexity within popular cinema. This book examines a number of contemporary films that play overtly with narrative structure, raising questions of chance and destiny, memory and history, simultaneity and the representation of time.
Download or read book The Orientation of Future Cinema written by Bruce Isaacs and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-02-14 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the fate of cinema in an age of new technologies, new aesthetic styles, new modes of cultural production and consumption? What becomes of cinema and a century-long history of the moving image when the theatre is outmoded as a social and aesthetic space, as celluloid gives over to digital technology, as the art-house and multiplex are overtaken by a proliferation of home entertainment systems? The Orientation of Future Cinema offers an ambitious and compelling argument for the continued life of cinema as image, narrative and experience. Commencing with Lumière’s Arrival of a Train at a Station, Bruce Isaacs confronts the threat of contemporary digital technologies and processes by returning to cinema’s complex history as a technological and industrial phenomenon. The technology of moving images has profoundly changed; and yet cinema materialises ever more forcefully in digital capture and augmentation, 3-D perception and affect, High Frame Rate cinema, and the evolution of spectacle as the dominant aesthetic mode in contemporary studio production.
Download or read book The Horror Film written by Stephen Prince and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2004-02-09 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, Stephen Prince has collected essays reviewing the history of the horror film and the psychological reasons for its persistent appeal, as well as discussions of the developmental responses of young adult viewers and children to the genre. The book focuses on recent postmodern examples such as The Blair Witch Project. In a daring move, the volume also examines Holocaust films in relation to horror. Part One features essays on the silent and classical Hollywood eras. Part Two covers the postWorld War II era and discusses the historical, aesthetic, and psychological characteristics of contemporary horror films. In contrast to horror during the classical Hollywood period, contemporary horror features more graphic and prolonged visualizations of disturbing and horrific imagery, as well as other distinguishing characteristics. Princes introduction provides an overview of the genre, contextualizing the readings that follow. Stephen Prince is professor of communications at Virginia Tech. He has written many film books, including Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 19301968, and has edited Screening Violence, also in the Depth of Field Series.
Download or read book Telling Stories written by Jane Tormey and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trespassing disciplines and binding together practice and theory, Telling Stories: Visual Practice, Theories and Narrative crosses strange territories and occupies liminal spaces. It addresses a contemporary preoccupation with narrative and narration, which is being played out across the arts, humanities and beyond, and considers how visual and performative encounters contribute to thinking. How might they tell theories? Telling Stories results from a series of symposia, held at Loughborough University School of Art and Design in 2007. The programme included papers, screenings and performances and was based around the convenors’ shared interests in Peggy Phelan’s notion of ‘performative writing’ and in the examination of inter-disciplinary forms of narrative and counter-narrative. It specifically focused on three aspects - experimental forms of Theories and Criticism, Objects and Narrative and the particular form of the Cinematic Essay and explored how the performative move could also be said to apply to forms of contemporary art practice: to what photography, film, objects wish to say. This resulting edited collection presents contemporary making and writing practices as multi-faceted, interdisciplinary and trans-medial and is indicative of an attitude that sets out to encounter the world, its social conditions, its global perspectives and the nature of aesthetic discussion that is no longer confined by formalism.
