Download or read book Classic Questions and Contemporary Film written by Dean A. Kowalski and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-08-24 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring significant revisions and updates, Classic Questions and Contemporary Film: An Introduction to Philosophy, 2nd Edition uses popular movies as a highly accessible framework for introducing key philosophical concepts Explores 28 films with 18 new to this edition, including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Hotel Rwanda, V for Vendetta, and Memento Discusses numerous philosophical issues not covered in the first edition, including a new chapter covering issues of personal identity, the meaningfulness of life and death, and existentialism Offers a rich pedagogical framework comprised of key classic readings, chapter learning outcomes, jargon-free argument analysis, critical thinking and trivia questions, a glossary of terms, and textboxes with notes on the movies discussed Revised to be even more accessible to beginning philosophers

Download or read book On the History of Film Style written by David Bordwell and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bordwell scrutinizes the theories of style launched by various film historians and celebrates a century of cinema. The author examines the contributions of many directors and shows how film scholars have explained stylistic continuity and change.

Download or read book Post Classical Hollywood written by Barry Langford and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of World War II, Hollywood basked in unprecedented prosperity. Since then, numerous challenges and crises have changed the American film industry in ways beyond imagination in 1945. Nonetheless, at the start of a new century Hollywood's worldwide dominance is intact - indeed, in today's global economy the products of the American entertainment industry (of which movies are now only one part) are more ubiquitous than ever. How does today's "e;Hollywood"e; - absorbed into transnational media conglomerates like NewsCorp., Sony, and Viacom - differ from the legendary studios of Hollywood's Golden Age? What are the dominant frameworks and conventions, the historical contexts and the governing attitudes through which films are made, marketed and consumed today? How have these changed across the last seven decades? And how have these evolving contexts helped shape the form, the style and the content of Hollywood movies, from Singin' in the Rain to Pirates of the Caribbean? Barry Langford explains and interrogates the concept of "e;post-classical"e; Hollywood cinema - its coherence, its historical justification and how it can help or hinder our understanding of Hollywood from the forties to the present. Integrating film history, discussion of movies' social and political dimensions, and analysis of Hollywood's distinctive methods of storytelling, Post-Classical Hollywood charts key critical debates alongside the histories they interpret, while offering its own account of the "e;post-classical."e; Wide-ranging yet concise, challenging and insightful, Post-Classical Hollywood offers a new perspective on the most enduringly fascinating artform of our age.

Download or read book 500 Essential Cult Movies written by Jennifer Eiss and published by Ilex Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are distinct qualities that make a movie a cult: a devoted and niche following, popularity based on word-of-mouth enthusiasm, and a tendency to remain in fans memories years after release, as well as many other intricacies, often hotly debated by film buffs. 500 Essential Cult Movies sifts through the greatest movies ever made, to bring together a list of the best cult classics that ever graced the cinema screens or didnt, in some cases! From Carpenter to Lucas, Cronenberg to Lynch, Scorsese to Spielberg the big names in cult are all there, as well as the more obscure films that may have sneaked below the radar. Sorted into chapters based on genre, this vast collection includes plot synopses, reviews and further viewing recommendations for each title. 500 Essential Cult Movies is a must-read for all film aficionados and aspiring buffs alike.

Download or read book The Way Hollywood Tells It written by David Bordwell and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-04-10 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hollywood moviemaking is one of the constants of American life, but how much has it changed since the glory days of the big studios? David Bordwell argues that the principles of visual storytelling created in the studio era are alive and well, even in today’s bloated blockbusters. American filmmakers have created a durable tradition—one that we should not be ashamed to call artistic, and one that survives in both mainstream entertainment and niche-marketed indie cinema. Bordwell traces the continuity of this tradition in a wide array of films made since 1960, from romantic comedies like Jerry Maguire and Love Actually to more imposing efforts like A Beautiful Mind. He also draws upon testimony from writers, directors, and editors who are acutely conscious of employing proven principles of plot and visual style. Within the limits of the "classical" approach, innovation can flourish. Bordwell examines how imaginative filmmakers have pushed the premises of the system in films such as JFK, Memento, and Magnolia. He discusses generational, technological, and economic factors leading to stability and change in Hollywood cinema and includes close analyses of selected shots and sequences. As it ranges across four decades, examining classics like American Graffiti and The Godfather as well as recent success like The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, this book provides a vivid and engaging interpretation of how Hollywood moviemakers have created a vigorous, resourceful tradition of cinematic storytelling that continues to engage audiences around the world.

Download or read book Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema written by James MacDowell and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "e;Hollywood 'happy ending' has long been considered among the most famous and standardised features in the whole of narrative filmmaking. Yet, while ceaselessly invoked, this notorious device has received barely any detailed attention from the field of film studies. This book is thus the first in-depth examination of one of the most overused and under-analysed concepts in discussions of popular cinema. What exactly is the 'happy ending'? Is it simply a cliche, as commonly supposed? Why has it earned such an unenviable reputation? What does it, or can it, mean? Concentrating especially on conclusions featuring an ultimate romantic union - the final couple - this wide-ranging investigation probes traditional associations between the 'happy ending' and homogeneity, closure, 'unrealism', and ideological conservatism, testing widespread assumptions against the evidence offered by a range of classical and contemporary films. "e;

Download or read book Settling the Score written by Kathryn Kalinak and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1992-12-01 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with the earliest experiments in musical accompaniment carried out in the Edison Laboratories, Kathryn Kalinak uses archival material to outline the history of American music and film. Focusing on the scores of several key composers of the sound era, including Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Captain Blood, Max Steiner’s The Informer, Bernard Herrmann’s The Magnificent Ambersons, and David Raksin’s Laura, Kalinak concludes that classical scoring conventions were designed to ensure the dominance of narrative exposition. Her analyses of contemporary work such as John Williams’ The Empire Strikes Back and Basil Poledouris’ RoboCop demonstrate how the traditions of the classical era continue to influence scoring practices today.

Download or read book Best Movie Year Ever written by Brian Raftery and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a veteran culture writer and modern movie expert, a celebration and analysis of the movies of 1999—“a terrifically fun snapshot of American film culture on the brink of the Millennium….An absolute must for any movie-lover or pop-culture nut” (Gillian Flynn). In 1999, Hollywood as we know it exploded: Fight Club. The Matrix. Office Space. Election. The Blair Witch Project. The Sixth Sense. Being John Malkovich. Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. American Beauty. The Virgin Suicides. Boys Don’t Cry. The Best Man. Three Kings. Magnolia. Those are just some of the landmark titles released in a dizzying movie year, one in which a group of daring filmmakers and performers pushed cinema to new limits—and took audiences along for the ride. Freed from the restraints of budget, technology, or even taste, they produced a slew of classics that took on every topic imaginable, from sex to violence to the end of the world. The result was a highly unruly, deeply influential set of films that would not only change filmmaking, but also give us our first glimpse of the coming twenty-first century. It was a watershed moment that also produced The Sopranos; Apple’s AirPort; Wi-Fi; and Netflix’s unlimited DVD rentals. “A spirited celebration of the year’s movies” (Kirkus Reviews), Best. Movie. Year. Ever. is the story of not just how these movies were made, but how they re-made our own vision of the world. It features more than 130 new and exclusive interviews with such directors and actors as Reese Witherspoon, Edward Norton, Steven Soderbergh, Sofia Coppola, David Fincher, Nia Long, Matthew Broderick, Taye Diggs, M. Night Shyamalan, David O. Russell, James Van Der Beek, Kirsten Dunst, the Blair Witch kids, the Office Space dudes, the guy who played Jar-Jar Binks, and dozens more. It’s “the complete portrait of what it was like to spend a year inside a movie theater at the best possible moment in time” (Chuck Klosterman).

Download or read book Narrative and Narration written by Warren Buckland and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From mainstream blockbusters to art house cinema, narrative and narration are the driving forces that organize a film. Yet attempts to explain these forces are often mired in notoriously complex terminology and dense theory. Warren Buckland provides a clear and accessible introduction that explains how narrative and narration work using straightforward language. Narrative and Narration distills the basic components of cinematic storytelling into a set of core concepts: narrative structure, processes of narration, and narrative agents. The book opens with a discussion of the emergence of narrative and narration in early cinema and proceeds to illustrate key ideas through numerous case studies. Each chapter guides readers through different methods that they can use to analyze cinematic storytelling. Buckland also discusses how departures from traditional modes, such as feminist narratives, art cinema, and unreliable narrators, can complicate and corroborate the book’s understanding of narrative and narration. Examples include mainstream films, both classic and contemporary; art house films of every stripe; and two relatively new styles of cinematic storytelling: the puzzle film and those driven by a narrative logic derived from video games. Narrative and Narration is a concise introduction that provides readers with fundamental tools to understand cinematic storytelling.

Download or read book How to Read a Film written by James Monaco and published by New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now thoroughly revised and updated, the book discusses recent breakthroughs in media technology, including such exciting advances as video discs and cassettes, two-way television, satellites, cable and much more.

Download or read book Making Meaning written by David BORDWELL and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Bordwell's new book is at once a history of film criticism, an analysis of how critics interpret film, and a proposal for an alternative program for film studies. It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship. As such Making Meaning should be a landmark book, a focus for debate from which future film study will evolve. Bordwell systematically maps different strategies for interpreting films and making meaning, illustrating his points with a vast array of examples from Western film criticism. Following an introductory chapter that sets out the terms and scope of the argument, Bordwell goes on to show how critical institutions constrain and contain the very practices they promote, and how the interpretation of texts has become a central preoccupation of the humanities. He gives lucid accounts of the development of film criticism in France, Britain, and the United States since World War II; analyzes this development through two important types of criticism, thematic-explicatory and symptomatic; and shows that both types, usually seen as antithetical, in fact have much in common. These diverse and even warring schools of criticism share conventional, rhetorical, and problem-solving techniques--a point that has broad-ranging implications for the way critics practice their art. The book concludes with a survey of the alternatives to criticism based on interpretation and, finally, with the proposal that a historical poetics of cinema offers the most fruitful framework for film analysis.

Download or read book Discussions A Z Advanced written by Adrian Wallwork and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-05-26 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A intermediate and photocopiable resource book of speaking activities for advanced level students.

Download or read book New Hollywood Cinema written by Geoff King and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is "New Hollywood"? The "art" cinema of the Hollywood "Renaissance" or the corporate controlled blockbuster? The introverted world of Travis Bickle or the action heroics of Indiana Jones, Buzz Lightyear, and Maximus the Gladiator? Innovative departures from the "classical" Hollywood style or superficial glitz, special effects, and borrowings from MTV? Wholesale change or important continuities with Hollywood's past? The answer suggested by Geoff King in New Hollywood Cinema is all of these and more. He examines New Hollywood from three main perspectives: film style, industry, and the social-historical context. Each is considered in its own right, sometimes resulting in different ways of defining New Hollywood. But one of the book's central arguments is that a combination of these approaches is needed if we are to understand the latest incarnations of the cinema that continues to dominate the global market. King looks at the Hollywood "Renaissance" from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, industrial factors shaping the construction of the corporate blockbuster, the role of auteur directors, genre and stardom in New Hollywood, narrative and spectacle in the contemporary blockbuster, and the relationship between production for the big and small screens. Case studies considered include Taxi Driver, Godzilla, and Gladiator, tracing the roots of New Hollywood from the 1950s to the start of the twenty-first century.

Download or read book Point of View in the Cinema written by Edward Branigan and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-01-02 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Branigan effectively criticizes the communication model of narration, a task long overdue in Anglo-American circles. The book brings out the extent to which mainstream mimetic theories have relied upon the elastic notion of an invisible, idealized observer, a convenient spook whom critics can summon up whenever they desire to "naturalize" style. The book also makes distinctions among types of subjectivity; after this, we will have much more precise ways of tracing the fluctuations among a character's vision, dreams, wishes, and so forth. Branigan also explains the necessity of distinguishing levels of narration.

Download or read book Film Analysis Handbook written by Thomas Caldwell and published by Insight Publications. This book was released on 2011 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive reference to film analysis available for middle school through to high school. Featuring coloured photographs illustrating key terms and filmic techniques this is a one-stop reference for any genre of ilm studied in English, Media or Film Studies courses.

Download or read book The Dynamic Frame written by Patrick Keating and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The camera’s movement in a film may seem straightforward or merely technical. Yet skillfully deployed pans, tilts, dollies, cranes, and zooms can express the emotions of a character, convey attitude and irony, or even challenge an ideological stance. In The Dynamic Frame, Patrick Keating offers an innovative history of the aesthetics of the camera that examines how camera movement shaped the classical Hollywood style. In careful readings of dozens of films, including Sunrise, The Grapes of Wrath, Rear Window, Sunset Boulevard, and Touch of Evil, Keating explores how major figures such as F. W. Murnau, Orson Welles, and Alfred Hitchcock used camera movement to enrich their stories and deepen their themes. Balancing close analysis with a broader poetics of camera movement, Keating uses archival research to chronicle the technological breakthroughs and the changing division of labor that allowed for new possibilities, as well as the shifting political and cultural contexts that inspired filmmakers to use technology in new ways. An original history of film techniques and aesthetics, The Dynamic Frame shows that the classical Hollywood camera moves not to imitate the actions of an omniscient observer but rather to produce the interplay of concealment and revelation that is an essential part of the exchange between film and viewer.

Download or read book Everything Is Cinema written by Richard Brody and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2008-05-13 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New Yorker film critic Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard presents a "serious-minded and meticulously detailed . . . account of the lifelong artistic journey" of one of the most influential filmmakers of our age (The New York Times). When Jean-Luc Godard wed the ideals of filmmaking to the realities of autobiography and current events, he changed the nature of cinema. Unlike any earlier films, Godard's work shifts fluidly from fiction to documentary, from criticism to art. The man himself also projects shifting images—cultural hero, fierce loner, shrewd businessman. Hailed by filmmakers as a—if not the—key influence on cinema, Godard has entered the modern canon, a figure as mysterious as he is indispensable. In Everything Is Cinema, critic Richard Brody has amassed hundreds of interviews to demystify the elusive director and his work. Paying as much attention to Godard's technical inventions as to the political forces of the postwar world, Brody traces an arc from the director's early critical writing, through his popular success with Breathless, to the grand vision of his later years. He vividly depicts Godard's wealthy conservative family, his fluid politics, and his tumultuous dealings with women and fellow New Wave filmmakers. Everything Is Cinema confirms Godard's greatness and shows decisively that his films have left their mark on screens everywhere.