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Book Cinema of Mediocrity   The Representation of 1920s Mass Culture in King Vidor s The Crowd

Download or read book Cinema of Mediocrity The Representation of 1920s Mass Culture in King Vidor s The Crowd written by Peter Brüstle and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2007-03-19 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, University of Freiburg (Institut für Nordamerikastudien), course: Literature and Culture of the 1920s, language: English, abstract: What is it that cinema-goers anticipate when flocking weekday nights to the Cinemaxxes and Cinestars throughout the world? And what expected the audiences of the 1920s during the heyday of the silent film area, when 100 million people a week were drawn to the movie palaces in America? Bare amusement? Weekend enjoyment? Or rather artistically challenging avant-garde films with politically provocative messages? What we mostly expect of the movies, is to satisfy a longing for something new and extraordinary. Still today and also at the beginning of the classic Hollywood era, movies have been attractive in that they have offered an alternative reality to that of actual ordinary life; be it through romance, action, exotic scenarios or mere entertainment. Especially in the 1920, with the establishment of Hollywood, movie-going became an enormously popular form of modern mass entertainment. King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928), however, is a rare exception. Its main interest is not the unknown or exotic, it does not function as an alternative reality. In contrast to the mainstream Hollywood productions of the 1920s, the film concentrates on ‘normality’ and plainness. Thus, what The Crowd offers is a stylized and satirized portrayal of the everyday lives of exactly the audiences who where watching the film. In doing so, the film does not charm or arouse passionate feelings. On the contrary, it functions as a mirror and leaves the spectators frustrated about the meaninglessness of modern life and their own ambitions for success and consumption. With its depiction of everyday middle class life and its critique of modern mass culture, The Crowd also challenges reductionist perspectives of the ‘roaring twenties’ as a permanent orgy, of wild flappers and frenzied Jazz parties, as is still prevalent in popular discourse today. The alternative view it offers, is that of a decade characterized by rising corporate power, the pressure to adjust and the powerlessness of the individual against an increasing standardization in the work and leisure sphere. Thus, in this paper I will examine, how the The Crowd differs from the mainstream Hollywood productions of the time and in what way Vidor’s film can be interpreted as a critique of 1920s mass culture. [...]

Book Culture of Class

    Book Details:
  • Author : Matthew Benjamin Karush
  • Publisher : Duke University Press
  • Release : 2012-05-15
  • ISBN : 0822352648
  • Pages : 290 pages

Download or read book Culture of Class written by Matthew Benjamin Karush and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the mass arrival of European immigrants to Argentina in the early years of the twentieth century new forms of entertainment emerged including tango, films, radio and theater. While these forms of culture promoted ethnic integration they also produced a new kind of polarization that helped Juan Peron to build the mass movement that propelled him to power.

Book Cinema  The time image

Download or read book Cinema The time image written by Gilles Deleuze and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the theoretical implications of the cinematographic image based on Henri Bergson's theories

Book A Foreign Affair

    Book Details:
  • Author : Gerd Gemünden
  • Publisher : Berghahn Books
  • Release : 2008-04-30
  • ISBN : 0857450662
  • Pages : 206 pages

Download or read book A Foreign Affair written by Gerd Gemünden and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2008-04-30 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With six Academy Awards, four entries on the American Film Institute's list of 100 greatest American movies, and more titles on the National Historic Register of classic films deemed worthy of preservation than any other director, Billy Wilder counts as one of the most accomplished filmmakers ever to work in Hollywood. Yet how American is Billy Wilder, the Jewish émigré from Central Europe? This book underscores this complex issue, unpacking underlying contradictions where previous commentators routinely smoothed them out. Wilder emerges as an artist with roots in sensationalist journalism and the world of entertainment as well as with an awareness of literary culture and the avant-garde, features that lead to productive and often highly original confrontations between high and low.

Book Media  Popular Culture  and the American Century

Download or read book Media Popular Culture and the American Century written by Kingsley Bolton and published by JOHN LIBBEY PUBLISHING. This book was released on 2010 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: Mediated America: Americana as Hollywoodiana / Jan Olsson, Kingsley Bolton -- Italian marionettes meet cinematic modernity / Jan Olsson -- "A red-blooded romance"; or Americanizing early multi-reel feature cinema: the case of The spoilers / Joel Frykholm -- Song of the sonic body: noise, the audience, and early American moving picture culture / Meredith C. Ward -- Constructing the global vernacular: American English and the media / Kingsley Bolton -- You only live once: repetitions of crime as desire in the films of Sylvia Sidney, 1930-1937 / Esther Sonnet -- Punks! Topicality and the 1950s gangster bio-pic cycle / Peter Stanfield -- Importing evil: the American gangster, Swedish cinema, and anti-American propaganda / Ann-Kristin Wallengren -- Sun Yu and the early Americanization of Chinese cinema / Corrado Neri -- If America were really China or how Christopher Columbus discovered Asia / Gregory Lee -- Civil rights on the screen / Michael Renov -- Goodbye rabbit ears: visualizing and mapping the U.S. Digital TV transition / Lisa Parks -- Archival transitions: some digital propositions / Pelle Snickars -- Are Americans human? / Evelyn Ch'ien -- Afterword: Rethinking the American century / William Uricchio.

Book Grand Design

    Book Details:
  • Author : Tino Balio
  • Publisher : Univ of California Press
  • Release : 1995
  • ISBN : 9780520203341
  • Pages : 500 pages

Download or read book Grand Design written by Tino Balio and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The advent of color, big musicals, the studio system, and the beginning of institutionalized censorship made the thirties the defining decade for Hollywood. The year 1939, celebrated as "Hollywood's greatest year," saw the release of such memorable films as Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Stagecoach. It was a time when the studios exercised nearly absolute control over their product as well as over such stars as Bette Davis, Clark Gable, and Humphrey Bogart. In this fifth volume of the award-winning series History of the American Cinema, Tino Balio examines every aspect of the filmmaking and film exhibition system as it matured during the Depression era.

Book Heading towards Equality  An Analysis of the Representation of Ethnicity  Culture and Gender in Disney   s  Mulan  and  Moana  from Postcolonial and Feminist Perspectives

Download or read book Heading towards Equality An Analysis of the Representation of Ethnicity Culture and Gender in Disney s Mulan and Moana from Postcolonial and Feminist Perspectives written by and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2021-11-08 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bachelor Thesis from the year 2019 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Bonn, language: English, abstract: This paper aims to point out how the authenticity of Disney’s depiction of cultures differing from white American culture in Mulan and Moana can influence the perception of represented cultures by analysing raised criticism with respect to the postcolonial concepts of white supremacy, othering and cultural appropriation. At the same time it shall be shown if, by means of Mulan and Moana, Disney manages to promote gender equality with its representation of male and female roles in both films by examining it from a feminist perspective. In order to do so, this paper subdivides into four main parts. The following chapter will offer a brief introduction to feminist theory and gender roles by focusing on feminist theory and intersectionality, the role of women as members of society and family and the representation of women in media. The third chapter will concentrate on the representation of cultures and ethnicities in media and take a look at postcolonial concepts in order to critically analyse the authenticity of the representation of Chinese and Polynesian culture through an American film studio. Chapter four, the first part of the actual analysis, will be provided in three subchapters dealing with aspects of gendered representation. Thereafter, the fifth chapter will scrutinise the authenticity of cultural representations in the two films with the aim of pointing out what has improved and what aspects still require closer research by Disney. The final chapter will then synthesise the findings to draw a comparison of the two movies and find out how the representations of gender, culture and ethnicity in Disney movies have changed from 1998 to 2016. This shall offer a conclusion about the authenticity of the cultural representation and portrayal of gender roles for each movie.

Book Deleuze and Cinema

Download or read book Deleuze and Cinema written by Felicity Colman and published by Berg. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gilles Deleuze published two radical books on film: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Engaging with a wide range of film styles, histories and theories, Deleuze's writings treat film as a new form of philosophy. This ciné-philosophy offers a startling new way of understanding the complexities of the moving image, its technical concerns and constraints as well as its psychological and political outcomes. Deleuze and Cinema presents a step-by-step guide to the key concepts behind Deleuze's revolutionary theory of the cinema. Exploring ideas through key directors and genres, Deleuze's method is illustrated with examples drawn from American, British, continental European, Russian and Asian cinema. Deleuze and Cinema provides the first introductory guide to Deleuze's radical methodology for screen analysis. It will be invaluable for students and teachers of Film, Media and Philosophy.

Book A Short History of Film  Third Edition

Download or read book A Short History of Film Third Edition written by Wheeler Winston Dixon and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-30 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With more than 250 images, new information on international cinema—especially Polish, Chinese, Russian, Canadian, and Iranian filmmakers—an expanded section on African-American filmmakers, updated discussions of new works by major American directors, and a new section on the rise of comic book movies and computer generated special effects, this is the most up to date resource for film history courses in the twenty-first century.

Book Designs on the Past

    Book Details:
  • Author : Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
  • Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
  • Release : 2018-07-13
  • ISBN : 0748675655
  • Pages : 440 pages

Download or read book Designs on the Past written by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-13 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The Shadow and Its Shadow

    Book Details:
  • Author : Paul Hammond
  • Publisher : City Lights Books
  • Release : 2000-11
  • ISBN : 9780872863767
  • Pages : 238 pages

Download or read book The Shadow and Its Shadow written by Paul Hammond and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2000-11 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Shadow and Its Shadow is a classic collection of writings by the Surrealists on their mad love of moviegoing. The forty-odd theoretical, polemical, and poetical re-visions of the seventh art in this anthology document Surrealism's scandalous and nonreductive take on film. Writing between 1918 and 1977, the essayists include such names as Andréeacute; Breton, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Salvador Dalíiacute;, Luis Buñntilde;uel, and man Ray, as well as many of the less famous though equally fascinating figures of the movement. Paul Hammond's introduction limns the history of Surrealist cinemania, highlighting how these revolutionary poets, artists, and philosophers sifted the silt of commercial-often Hollywood-cinema for the odd fleck of gold, the windfall movie that, somehow slipping past the censor, questioned the dominant order. Such prospecting pivoted around the notion of lyrical behavior-as depicted on the screen and as lived in the movie house. The representation of such behavior led the Surrealists to valorize the manifest content of such denigrated genres as silent and sound comedy, romantic melodrama, film noir, horror movies. As to lived experience, moviegoing Surrealists looked to the spectacle's latent meaning, reading films as the unwitting providers of redemptive sequences that could be mentally clipped out of their narrative context and inserted into daily life-there, to provoke new adventures. "Hammond's book is a reminder of the wealth and range of surrealist writings on the cinema. . . . [T]he work represented here is still challenging and genuinely eccentric, locating itself in an 'ethic' of love, reverie and revolt." --Sight & Sound "Hammond, who is the author of the invaluable anthology The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writing on the Cinema (1978), writes about cinema independently of the changing academic and cultural fashions of film theory and abhors the dogmas of contemporary border-patrol thought. His magnetically appealing free-wheeling form of erudite film-critical writing is recognisable for its iconoclastic humour, non-authoritarian verve and playful witty discursivity." --John Conomos, Senses of Cinema Paul Hammond is a writer, editor, and translator living in Barcelona. He is the author of Constellations of Miróoacute;, Breton which was published by City Lights.

Book Dal    Surrealism and Cinema

Download or read book Dal Surrealism and Cinema written by Elliott H. King and published by Oldcastle Books. This book was released on 2010-10-21 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Salvador Dali is one of the most widely recognised and most controversial artists of the twentieth century. He was also an avant-garde filmmaker -- collaborating with such giants as Luis Bunuel, Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock -- though the impetus and endurance of his fascination with film has rarely been given the attention it merits. King surveys the full range of Dali's eccentric activities with(in) the cinema. Influenced by the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton and Stanley Kubrick, Dali used the cinema to bring the 'dream subjects' of his paintings to life, providing the groundwork for revolutionary forays into television, video, photography and holography. Dali's writings continue to be relevant to discourses surrounding film and surrealism, and his embrace of academic technique partnered with contemporary technology and pop culture is a paradox still relevant today. From a movie-going experience that would incorporate all five senses to the tale of a woman's hapless love affair with a wheelbarrow, Dali's hallucinatory vision never fails to leave its indelible mark.

Book The Oxford History of World Cinema

Download or read book The Oxford History of World Cinema written by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 847 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring nearly three thousand film stills, production shots, and other illustrations, an authoritative history of the cinema traces the development of the medium, its filmmakers and stars, and the evolution of national cinemas around the world.

Book A Panorama of American Film Noir  1941 1953

Download or read book A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941 1953 written by Raymond Borde and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first book published on film noir established the genre--a classic, at last in translation.

Book Saul Bass

    Book Details:
  • Author : Jan-Christopher Horak
  • Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
  • Release : 2014-11-18
  • ISBN : 0813147190
  • Pages : 380 pages

Download or read book Saul Bass written by Jan-Christopher Horak and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iconic graphic designer and Academy Award–winning filmmaker Saul Bass (1920–1996) defined an innovative era in cinema. His title sequences for films such as Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959), and Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch (1955) introduced the idea that opening credits could tell a story, setting the mood for the movie to follow. Bass's stylistic influence can be seen in popular Hollywood franchises from the Pink Panther to James Bond, as well as in more contemporary works such as Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can (2002) and television's Mad Men. The first book to examine the life and work of this fascinating figure, Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design explores the designer's revolutionary career and his lasting impact on the entertainment and advertising industries. Jan-Christopher Horak traces Bass from his humble beginnings as a self-taught artist to his professional peak, when auteur directors like Stanley Kubrick, Robert Aldrich, and Martin Scorsese sought him as a collaborator. He also discusses how Bass incorporated aesthetic concepts borrowed from modern art in his work, presenting them in a new way that made them easily recognizable to the public. This long-overdue book sheds light on the creative process of the undisputed master of film title design—a man whose multidimensional talents and unique ability to blend high art and commercial imperatives profoundly influenced generations of filmmakers, designers, and advertisers.

Book Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood

Download or read book Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood written by Kristin Thompson and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first study by an acclaimed American scholar of the artistic interdependencies between the German and the Hollywood cinema in the 1920s.

Book Bakhtin and the Movies

Download or read book Bakhtin and the Movies written by M. Flanagan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-05-29 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martin Flanagan uses Bakhtin's notions of dialogism, chronotope and polyphony to address fundamental questions about film form and reception, focussing particularly on the way cinematic narrative utilises time and space in its very construction.