Download or read book The Alexander Medvedkin Reader written by Alexander Medvedkin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-10-19 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an enormously important and long-awaited project in film studies: it is collection of selected writings by the filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin, rendered into English. There is no equivalent volume in Russian or in any other language, so this is an original work. Alexander Medvedkin (1900-89) belongs in the canon of major Soviet filmmakers. He invented a form of total documentary cinema for workers in the early Soviet era that was aimed at bridging the distance between film and life, whereby the target audience of a film would be involved in its making, and then their viewing and discussion of it would become the basis for action to change their work situation and relations. He was also a major satirist at a time when the Soviet authorities feared the ambiguities of satire and tried to confine laughter to narrowly prescribed channels. Medvedkin s work remains a crucial link in the history of documentary cinema, especially in its more engaged or agitational forms. He was a true-believing, card-carrying Communist, but he was also a victim of the Soviet regime. Soviet institutions prevented him from fully achieving what he hoped to accomplish as an artist because he behaved as an individualist who sought to produce artistic projects in defiance of obstacles from the authorities."
Download or read book Alexander Medvedkin written by Emma Widdis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2004-11-26 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first introduction to Medvedkin's film-making career traces his process of developing a unique brand of cinematic satire throughout the period of the Soviet revolutionary experiment. Using original archival material and Medvedkin's writings towards his unfinished autobiography, Widdis explores his films from the 1936 The Miracle Worker, through the unreleased New Moscow of 1938 and the experimental 'film train' - or kinopoezd - up to the rediscovery of his 1934 film Happiness in the 1960s.
Download or read book Beyond Document written by Charles Warren and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 1996-05-31 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critics and writers consider nonfiction film both as document and as creative work with strong artistic, political, and moral implications. In essays by eleven of America's foremost writers, critics, and filmmakers, Beyond Document explores the full spectrum of nonfiction film and its creative possibilities. In addition to Charles Warren's broad introductory history of the genre, the book takes a close look at ethnographic films, cinema-verité, memoir and autobiography, docudramas, essay films, and newsreels, from classics like Night and Fog and Nanook of the North to more recent important work like Film about a Woman Who. . ., Harlan County, U.S.A., Sans Soleil, and Forest of Bliss. Representations of reality are increasingly contested, in courtrooms and in Congress, as well as in art. Asking what the art of film can achieve, Helene Keyssar considers the history of nonfiction films by women; Jay Cantor discusses film investigations of the Holocaust; Patricia Hampl looks at how autobiographical films render experience into narrative; Robert Gardner questions the filmmaker's "impulse to preserve" ; and poet Susan Howe explores structures of mourning in several filmmakers. All the book's essays provide deeply felt understanding of documentary film, and of how we live with, an d within, images. CONTRIBUTORS: Jay Cantor, Robert Gardener, Patricia Hampl, Maureen Howard, Susan Howe, Helene Keyssar, Phillip Lopatte, Vlada Petric, William Rothman, Charles Warren, Eliot Weinberger.
Download or read book In the Studio written by Brian R. Jacobson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studios are, at once, material environments and symbolic forms, sites of artistic creation and physical labor, and nodes in networks of resource circulation. They are architectural places that generate virtual spaces—worlds built to build worlds. Yet, despite being icons of corporate identity, studios have faded into the background of critical discourse and into the margins of film and media history. In response, In the Studio demonstrates that when we foreground these worlds, we gain new insights into moving-image culture and the dynamics that quietly mark the worlds on our screens. Spanning the twentieth century and moving globally, this unique collection tells new stories about studio icons—Pinewood, Cinecittà, Churubusco, and CBS—as well as about the experimental workplaces of filmmakers and artists from Aleksandr Medvedkin to Charles and Ray Eames and Hollis Frampton.
Download or read book Chris Marker written by Sarah Cooper and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 1950s, Chris Marker has embraced different filmmaking styles as readily as he has new technologies, and has broadened conceptions of the documentary in distinctly personal ways. He has travelled around the world, tracking political upheavals and historic events, as well as unearthing the stories buried under official reporting. This globetrotting filmmaker testifies to his six decades on the move through a passionate devotion to the moving image. Yet from the outset, his filmic images reveal a fascination with stillness. It is at this juncture of mobility and immobility that Sarah Cooper situates her comprehensive study of Marker’s films. She pays attention to the central place that photographs occupy in his work, as well as to the emergence in his filming of statuary, painting and other static images, including the film still, and his interest in fixed frame shooting. She engages with key debates in photographic and film theory in order to argue that a different conception of time emerges from his filmic explorations of stasis. In detailed readings of each of his films, including Le souvenir d'un avenir andLa Jetee, Sans soleil and Level 5, Cooper charts Marker’s concern with mortality in varied historical and geographical contexts, which embraces the fragility of the human race, along with that of the planet.
Download or read book Police Aesthetics written by Cristina Vatulescu and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-25 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The documents emerging from the secret police archives of the former Soviet bloc have caused scandal after scandal, compromising revered cultural figures and abruptly ending political careers. Police Aesthetics offers a revealing and responsible approach to such materials. Taking advantage of the partial opening of the secret police archives in Russia and Romania, Vatulescu focuses on their most infamous holdings—the personal files—as well as on movies the police sponsored, scripted, or authored. Through the archives, she gains new insights into the writing of literature and raises new questions about the ethics of reading. She shows how police files and films influenced literature and cinema, from autobiographies to novels, from high-culture classics to avant-garde experiments and popular blockbusters. In so doing, she opens a fresh chapter in the heated debate about the relationship between culture and politics in twentieth-century police states.
Download or read book History and Film written by Eleftheria Thanouli and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines addresses the representation of history in cinema, a much-argued debate on the need to understand cinematic history in its own terms and develop a certain vocabulary for discussing historical films, their relation to public history, and their impact on public historical consciousness. Eleftheria Thanouli does this by changing the agenda altogether - combining a macro-level perspective with a micro-level one in order to argue that cinematic history is the dominant form of historiography in the 20th century, as it succeeded in remediating and repurposing the key formal, rhetorical, and ideological practices of 19th-century professional historiography. With case studies ranging from The Thin Red Line and Life is Beautiful, to The Fog of War and The Last Bolshevik, Thanouli bridges the gap between history and film studies and lays the foundations for a new visual historiography.
Download or read book Cin ma Militant written by Paul Douglas Grant and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This history covers the filmmaking tradition often referred to as cinéma militant, which emerged in France during the events of May 1968 and flourished for a decade. While some films produced were created by established filmmakers, including Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, and William Klein, others were helmed by left-wing filmmakers working in the extreme margins of French cinema. This latter group gave voice to underrepresented populations, such as undocumented immigrants (sans papiers), entry-level factory workers (ouvriers spécialisés), highly intellectual Marxist-Leninist collectives, and militant special interest groups. While this book spans the broad history of this uncharted tradition, it particularly focuses on these lesser-known figures and works and the films of Cinélutte, Les groupes medvedkine, Atelier de recherche cinématographique, Cinéthique, and the influential Marxist filmmaker Jean-Pierre Thorn. Each represent a certain tendency of this movement in French film history, offering an invaluable account of a tradition that also sought to share untold histories.
Download or read book Ranciere and Film written by Paul Bowman and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-31 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first collection of critical essays on the film work of the philosopher Jacques Ranciere. This book offers an exciting range of responses to and assessments of his contributions to film studies and includes a new piece by Ranciere himself on the subje
Download or read book Projected Cities written by Stephen Barber and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2004-02-03 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this illuminating and provocative survey, Stephen Barber examines the historical relationship between film and the urban landscape. Projected Cities looks with particular focus at the cinema of Europe and Japan, two closely linked cinematic cultures which have been foremost in the use of urban imagery, to reveal elements of culture, architecture and history. By examining this imagery, especially at moments of turmoil and experimentation, the author reveals how cinema has used images of cities to influence our perception of everything from history to the human body, and how cinematic images of cities have been fundamental to the ways in which the city has been imagined, formulated and remembered. The book goes on to assess the impact of media culture on the status of film and cinema spaces, and concludes by considering digital renderings of the modern city. Projected Cities will appeal to all readers engaged with the city, film and contemporary culture.
Download or read book The Zero Hour written by Andrew Horton and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1992-07-15 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of the rapid changes in Soviet cinema that have been taking place since 1985 examines the response of filmmakers faced with the "zero hour" created by a new freedom of expression and the dramatic break-up of the Soviet Union.
Download or read book Marxism and Film Activism written by Ewa Mazierska and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Theses on Feuerbach, Marx writes, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is to change it.” This collection examines how filmmakers have tried to change the world by engaging in emancipatory politics through their work, and how audiences have received them. It presents a wide spectrum of case studies, covering both film and digital technology, with examples from throughout cinematic history and around the world, including Soviet Russia, Palestine, South America, and France. Discussions range from the classic Marxist cinema of Aleksandr Medvedkin, Chris Marker, and Jean-Luc Godard, to recent media such as 5 Broken Cameras (2010), the phenomena of video-blogging, and bicycle activism films.
Download or read book Soviet Cinema written by Jamie Miller and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2009-12-18 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Bolsheviks seized power in the Soviet Union during 1917, they were suffering from a substantial political legitimacy deficit. Uneasy political foundations meant that cinema became a key part of the strategy to protect the existence of the USSR. Based on extensive archival research, this welcome book examines the interaction between politics and the Soviet cinema industry during the period between Stalin's rise to power and the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. It reveals that film had a central function during those years as an important means of convincing the masses that the regime was legitimate and a bearer of historical truth. Miller analyses key films, from the classic musical 'Circus' to the political epic "The Great Citizen", and examines the Bolsheviks', ultimately failed, attempts to develop a 'cinema for the millions'. As Denise Youngblood writes, 'this work is indispensable reading not only for specialists in Soviet film and culture, but also for anyone interested in the dynamics of cultural production in an authoritarian society'.
Download or read book Chris Marker written by Catherine Lupton and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical study of the work of film-maker and media artist Chris Marker.
Download or read book Vision and Communism written by Robert Bird and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2011-10-18 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last thirty years of the Soviet Communist project, Viktor Koretsky's art struggled to solve an enduring riddle: how to ensure or restore Communism's moral health through the production of a distinctively Communist vision. In this sense Koretsky's art demonstrates what an “avant-garde late Communist art” would have looked like if we had ever seen it mature. Most striking of all, Koretsky was pioneering the visual languages of Benetton and MTV at a time when the iconography of interracial togetherness was still only a vague rumor on Madison Avenue. Vision and Communism presents a series of interconnected essays devoted to Viktor Koretsky's art and the social worlds that it hoped to transform. Produced collectively by its five editors, this writing also considers the visual art, film, and music included in the exhibition Vision and Communism, opening at the Smart Museum of Art in September 2011.
Download or read book When the World Laughs written by William V. Costanzo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-03 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the World Laughs is a book about the intersection of humor, history, and culture. It explores how film comedy, one of the world's most popular movie genres, reflects the values and beliefs of those who enjoy its many forms, its most enduring characters and stories, its most entertaining routines and funniest jokes. What people laugh at in Europe, Africa, or the Far East reveals important truths about their differences and common bonds. By investigating their traditions of humor, by paying close attention to what kinds of comedy cross national boundaries or what gets lost in translation, this study leads us to a deeper understanding of each other and ourselves. Section One begins with a survey of the theories and research that best explain how humor works. It clarifies the varieties of comic forms and styles, identifies the world's most archetypal figures of fun, and traces the history of the world's traditions of humor from earliest times to today. It also examines the techniques and aesthetics of film comedy: how movies use the world's rich repertoire of amusing stories, gags, and wit to make us laugh and think. Section Two offers a close look at national and regional trends. It applies the concepts set forth earlier to specific films-across a broad spectrum of sub-genres, historical eras, and cultural contexts-providing an insightful comparative study of the world's great traditions of film comedy.
Download or read book Inside the Film Factory written by Ian Christie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-19 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first collection to be inspired and informed by the new films and archival material that glasnost and perestroika have revealed, and the new methodological approaches that are developing in tandem. Film critics and historians from Britain, America, France and the USSR attempt the vital task of scrutinising Soviet film, and re-examining the Cold War assumptions of traditional historiography. Whereas most books on Soviet giants have glorified the directorial giants of the `golden age' of the 1920s, Inside the Film Factory also recognises the achievements of popular cinema from the pre-Revolutionary period through to the 1930s and beyond. It also evaluates the impact of Western cinema on the early experimenters of montage, Russian science fiction's influence on film-making, and the long-suppressed history of Soviet Yiddish productions. Alongside the new perspectives and source material on the much-mythologised figures of Kuleshov and Medvedkin, the book provides the first extended accounts in English of the important but neglected careers of directors Yakov Protazanov and Boris Barnet.
