Download or read book Classical Hollywood Film Cycles written by Zoe Wallin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-07 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the ways in which Hollywood film cycles from the 1930s to the 1960s were shaped by their surrounding industrial contexts and market environments, to build an inclusive conception of the form, operation, and function of film cycles. By foregrounding patterns of distribution, spaces of exhibition, and modes of consumption as key components of the form and mechanics of cycles, this book develops a methodology for defining cycles based on an analysis of the industry and trade discourse. Applying her unique framework to six case studies of different cycles, Zoe Wallin blends a wide range of historical sources to analyze the many cultural, social, political, aesthetic, and industrial contexts relevant to these films. This book makes an important contribution to the literature in the area of film historiography, and will be of interest to any scholars of film studies, history and media studies.

Download or read book Classic Hollywood written by Veronica Pravadelli and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of "Classic Hollywood" typically treat Hollywood films released from 1930 to 1960 as a single interpretive mass. Veronica Pravadelli complicates this idea. Focusing on dominant tendencies in box office hits and Oscar-recognized classics, she breaks down the so-called classic period into six distinct phases that follow Hollywood's amazingly diverse offerings from the emancipated females of the "Transition Era" and the traditional men and women of the conservative 1930s that replaced it to the fantastical Fifties movie musicals that arose after anti-classic genres like film noir and women's films. Pravadelli sets her analysis apart by paying particular attention to the gendered desires and identities exemplified in the films. Availing herself of the significant advances in film theory and modernity studies that have taken place since similar surveys first saw publication, she views Hollywood through strategies as varied as close textural analysis, feminism, psychoanalysis, film style and study of cinematic imagery, revealing the inconsistencies and antithetical traits lurking beneath Classic Hollywood's supposed transparency.

Download or read book American Film Cycles written by Amanda Ann Klein and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A series of movies that share images, characters, settings, plots, or themes, film cycles have been an industrial strategy since the beginning of cinema. While some have viewed them as "subgenres," mini-genres, or nascent film genres, Amanda Ann Klein argues that film cycles are an entity in their own right and a subject worthy of their own study. She posits that film cycles retain the marks of their historical, economic, and generic contexts and therefore can reveal much about the state of contemporary politics, prevalent social ideologies, aesthetic trends, popular desires, and anxieties. American Film Cycles presents a series of case studies of successful film cycles, including the melodramatic gangster films of the 1920s, the 1930s Dead End Kids cycle, the 1950s juvenile delinquent teenpic cycle, and the 1990s ghetto action cycle. Klein situates these films in several historical trajectories—the Progressive movement of the 1910s and 1920s, the beginnings of America's involvement in World War II, the "birth" of the teenager in the 1950s, and the drug and gangbanger crises of the early 1990s. She shows how filmmakers, audiences, film reviewers, advertisements, and cultural discourses interact with and have an impact on the film texts. Her findings illustrate the utility of the film cycle in broadening our understanding of established film genres, articulating and building upon beliefs about contemporary social problems, shaping and disseminating deviant subcultures, and exploiting and reflecting upon racial and political upheaval.

Download or read book A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema 1930 1980 written by Robert B. Ray and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert B. Ray examines the ideology of the most enduringly popular cinema in the world--the Hollywood movie. Aided by 364 frame enlargements, he describes the development of that historically overdetermined form, giving close readings of five typical instances: Casablanca, It's a Wonderful Life, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Godfather, and Taxi Driver. Like the heroes of these movies, American filmmaking has avoided commitment, in both plot and technique. Instead of choosing left or right, avant-garde or tradition, American cinema tries to have it both ways. Although Hollywood's commercial success has led the world audience to equate the American cinema with film itself, Hollywood filmmaking is a particular strategy designed to respond to specific historical situations. As an art restricted in theoretical scope but rich in individual variations, the American cinema poses the most interesting question of popular culture: Do dissident forms have any chance of remaining free of a mass medium seeking to co-opt them?

Download or read book The 1990s Teen Horror Cycle written by Alexandra West and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-06-08 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many critics and fans refer to the 1990s as the decade that horror forgot, with few notable entries in the genre. Yet horror went mainstream in the '90s by speaking to the anxieties of American youth during one of the country's most prosperous eras. No longer were films made on low budgets and dependent on devotees for success. Horror found its way onto magazine covers, fashion ads and CD soundtrack covers. "Girl power" feminism and a growing distaste for consumerism defined an audience that both embraced and rejected the commercial appeal of these films. This in-depth study examines the youth subculture and politics of the era, focusing on such films as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), Scream (1996), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), Idle Hands (1999) and Cherry Falls (2000).

Download or read book The Last Great American Picture Show written by Alexander Horwath and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This publication is a major evaluation of the 1970s American cinema, including cult film directors such as Bogdanovich Altman and Peckinpah.

Download or read book American Disaster Movies of the 1970s written by Scott Freer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-10-19 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Disaster Movies of the 1970s is the first scholarly book dedicated to the disaster cycle that dominated American cinema and television in the 1970s. Through examining films such as Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Two-Minute Warning (1976) and The Swarm (1978), alongside their historical contexts and American contemporaneous trends, the disaster cycle is treated as a time-bound phenomenon. This book further contextualises the cycle by drawing on the longer cultural history of modernist reactions to modern anxieties, including the widespread dependence on technology and corporate power. Each chapter considers cinematic precursors, such as the 'ark movie', and contemporaneous trends, such as New Hollywood, vigilante and blaxploitation films, as well as the immediate American context: the end of the civil rights and countercultural era, the Watergate crisis, and the defeat in Vietnam.As Scott Freer argues, the disaster movie is a modern, demotic form of tragedy that satisfies a taste for the macabre. It is also an aesthetic means for processing painful truths, and many of the dramatized themes anticipate present-day monstrosities of modernity.

Download or read book The Changing Vampire of Film and Television written by Tim Kane and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-01-09 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vampires have been a fixture of film since Bela Lugosi brought Bram Stoker's Dracula to life on the big screen in 1931. Over the decades the genre has been far from static, as vampire narratives changed and evolved with the appetites of their viewing public. First depicted as formally dressed villains, vampires would later be portrayed as supernatural beings with some human characteristics, and still later as sympathetic figures. Focusing on 19 representative films and television productions, this critical study tracks the evolutionary changes of the screen vampire. It explores the factors that cause a genre to change and examines the alternating cycles of audience expectation. The author identifies three distinct modes of depiction: the Malignant Cycle (1931-1948), comprised primarily of the Universal films; the Erotic Cycle (1957-1985), which encompasses Hammer films and popular television shows such as Dark Shadows; and the Sympathetic Cycle (1987-present) including recent offerings such as The Lost Boys, Interview with the Vampire and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Each film is evaluated in seven key areas including the act of the vampire biting the victim; process of the victim's infection; physical appearance and demeanor of the vampire and the vampire expert; and the eventual destruction of the vampire. Appendices include a complete filmography of the films examined. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Download or read book Postmodern Chick Flicks written by R. Garrett and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-04-12 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this extensive analysis of the renewed popularity of the 'woman's film' in the 1990s, Roberta Garrett examines melodrama, romantic comedy, costume drama and female-led noirs , revealing the way they blend classical and contemporary themes and formal devices.

Download or read book What Ought to Scare You written by H. Marshall Leicester and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2024-07-09 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the Hollywood studio system (1931-1960) as a historical center, this book performs close readings of classic horror films (such as Frankenstein and Cat People) while asking the following three questions: What about this movie is weird? What does this movie think ought to scare you? If there weren't monsters in this movie, what would be wrong with these people's lives? These questions guide readers toward the uniqueness of horror films in relation to the way they are classified and the feeling of "horror" that they offer. The horror genre is a collection of culturally-shared elements--words, images, or themes used to signify or evoke horror, because they have been used that way before. Instead of treating movies as examples of the horror genre through how they evoke feelings from viewers, this book locates the meaning of horror within individual films and shows how movies make their own genealogies and complicate their own scares in an evolution of the genre. It argues that classic horror movies are forms of reception of--and resistance to--the ideas of horror that were current in their historical period. Working historically, the author traces movies' interactions with their precursors and co-conspirators to show how they are the agents of historical changes in the genre and in what we take to be horror.

Download or read book The Limits of Auteurism written by Nicholas Godfrey and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-10 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Hollywood era of the late 1960s and early 1970s has become one of the most romanticized periods in motion picture history, celebrated for its stylistic boldness, thematic complexity, and the unshackling of directorial ambition. The Limits of Auteurism aims to challenge many of these assumptions. Beginning with the commercial success of Easy Rider in 1969, and ending two years later with the critical and commercial failure of that film’s twin progeny, The Last Movie and The Hired Hand, Nicholas Godfrey surveys a key moment that defined the subsequent aesthetic parameters of American commercial art cinema. The book explores the role that contemporary critics played in determining how the movies of this period were understood and how, in turn, strategies of distribution influenced critical responses and dictated the conditions of entry into the rapidly codifying New Hollywood canon. Focusing on a small number of industrially significant films, this new history advances our understanding of this important moment of transition from Classical to contemporary modes of production.

Download or read book The New Hollywood Historical Film written by Tom Symmons and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-13 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Hollywood of the late 1960s and 1970s is among the most exciting and influential periods in the history of film. This book explores how the new wave of historical films were profoundly shaped by the controversies and concerns of the present.

Download or read book Reconstructing American Historical Cinema written by J.E. Smyth and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2006-10-27 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane, J. E. Smyth dramatically departs from the traditional understanding of the relationship between film and history. By looking at production records, scripts, and contemporary reviews, Smyth argues that certain classical Hollywood filmmakers were actively engaged in a self-conscious and often critical filmic writing of national history. Her volume is a major reassessment of American historiography and cinematic historians from the advent of sound to the beginning of wartime film production in 1942. Focusing on key films such as Cimarron (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), Scarface (1932), Ramona (1936), A Star Is Born (1937), Jezebel (1938), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939), Stagecoach (1939), and Citizen Kane (1941), Smyth explores historical cinema's connections to popular and academic historigraphy, historical fiction, and journalism, providing a rich context for the industry's commitment to American history. Rather than emphasizing the divide between American historical cinema and historical writing, Smyth explores the continuities between Hollywood films and history written during the first four decades of the twentieth century, from Carl Becker's famous "Everyman His Own Historian" to Howard Hughes's Scarface to Margaret Mitchell and David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind. Hollywood's popular and often controversial cycle of historical films from 1931 to 1942 confronted issues as diverse as frontier racism and women's experiences in the nineteenth-century South, the decline of American society following the First World War, the rise of Al Capone, and the tragic history of Hollywood's silent era. Looking at rarely discussed archival material, Smyth focuses on classical Hollywood filmmakers' adaptation and scripting of traditional historical discourse and their critical revision of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history. Reconstructing American Historical Cinema uncovers Hollywood's diverse and conflicted attitudes toward American history. This text is a fundamental challenge the prevailing scholarship in film, history, and cultural studies.

Download or read book Hollywood Remembrance and American War written by Andrew Rayment and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-31 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hollywood Remembrance and American War addresses the synergy between Hollywood war films and American forms of war remembrance. Subjecting the notion that war films ought to be considered ʻthe war memorials of today’ to critical scrutiny, the book develops a theoretical understanding of how Hollywood war films, as rhetorical sites of remembering and memory, reflect, replicate and resist American modes of remembrance. The authors first develop the framework for, and elaborate on, the co-evolution of Hollywood war cinema and American war memorialization in the historical, political and ideological terms of remembrance, and the parallel synergic relationship between the aesthetic and industrial status of Hollywood war cinema and the remembering of American war on film. The chapters then move to analysis of Hollywood war films – covering The Great War, World War II, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, The Cold War, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – and critically scrutinize the terms upon which a film could be considered a memorial to the war it represents. Bringing together the fields of film studies and memory studies, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in not just these areas but those in the fields of history, media and cultural studies more broadly, too.

Download or read book The Drive In written by Guy Barefoot and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-11-16 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Drive-In meaningfully contributes to the complex picture of outdoor cinema that has been central to American culture and to a history of US cinema based on diverse viewing experiences rather than a select number of films. Drive-in cinemas flourished in 1950s America, in some summer weeks to the extent that there were more cinemagoers outdoors than indoors. Often associated with teenagers interested in the drive-in as a 'passion pit' or a venue for exploitation films, accounts of the 1950s American drive-in tend to emphasise their popularity with families with young children, downplaying the importance of a film programme apparently limited to old, low-budget or independent films and characterising drive-in operators as industry outsiders. They retain a hold on the popular imagination. The Drive-In identifies the mix of generations in the drive-in audience as well as accounts that articulate individual experiences, from the drive-in as a dating venue to a segregated space. Through detailed analysis of the film industry trade press, local newspapers and a range of other primary sources including archival records on cinemas and cinema circuits in Arkansas, California, New York State and Texas, this book examines how drive-ins were integrated into local communities and the film industry and reveals the importance and range of drive-in programmes that were often close to that of their indoor neighbours.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History written by Daniel Biltereyst and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 589 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History presents the most recent approaches and methods in the study of the social experience of cinema, from its origins in vaudeville and traveling exhibitions to the multiplexes of today. Exploring its history from the perspective of the cinemagoer, the study of new cinema history examines the circulation and consumption of cinema, the political and legal structures that underpinned its activities, the place that it occupied in the lives of its audiences and the traces that it left in their memories. Using a broad range of methods from the statistical analyses of box office economics to ethnography, oral history, and memory studies, this approach has brought about an undisputable change in how we study cinema, and the questions we ask about its history. This companion examines the place, space, and practices of film exhibition and programming; the questions of gender and ethnicity within the cinematic experience; and the ways in which audiences gave meaning to cinemagoing practices, specific films, stars, and venues, and its operation as a site of social and cultural exchange from Detroit and Laredo to Bandung and Chennai. Contributors demonstrate how the digitization of source materials and the use of digital research tools have enabled them to map previously unexplored aspects of cinema’s business and social history and undertake comparative analysis of the diversity of the social experience of cinema across regional, national, and continental boundaries. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History enlarges and refines our understanding of cinema’s place in the social history of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Flashbacks in Film written by Adriana Gordejuela and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-26 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flashbacks in Film examines film flashback as a rich multimodal narrative device, analyzing the cognitive underpinnings of film flashbacks and the mechanisms that lead viewers to successfully comprehend them. Combining a cognitive film theory approach with the theoretical framework proposed by blending theory, which claims that human beings’ general ability for conceptual integration underlies most of our daily activities, this book argues that flashbacks make sense to the viewer, as they are specifically designed for the viewer’s cognitive understanding. Through a mixture of analysis and dozens of case studies, this book demonstrates that successful film flashbacks appeal to the spectator’s natural perceptual and cognitive abilities, which spectators exercise daily. This book will serve as a valuable resource for scholars interested in film studies, media studies, and cognitive linguistics.