Download or read book In Search of Brightest Africa written by Jeannette Eileen Jones and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades between the Berlin Conference that partitioned Africa and the opening of the African Hall at the American Museum of Natural History, Americans in several fields and from many backgrounds argued that Africa had something to teach them. Jeannette Eileen Jones traces the history of the idea of Africa with an eye to recovering the emergence of a belief in “Brightest Africa”—a tradition that runs through American cultural and intellectual history with equal force to its “Dark Continent” counterpart. Jones skillfully weaves disparate strands of turn-of-the-century society and culture to expose a vivid trend of cultural engagement that involved both critique and activism. Filmmakers spoke out against the depiction of “savage” Africa in the mass media while also initiating a countertradition of ethnographic documentaries. Early environmentalists celebrated Africa as a pristine continent while lamenting that its unsullied landscape was “vanishing.” New Negro political thinkers also wanted to “save” Africa but saw its fragility in terms of imperiled human promise. Jones illuminates both the optimism about Africa underlying these concerns and the racist and colonial interests these agents often nevertheless served. The book contributes to a growing literature on the ongoing role of global exchange in shaping the African American experience as well as debates about the cultural place of Africa in American thought.

Download or read book Beyond observation written by Paul Henley and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Beyond Observation is structured by the argument that the ‘ethnographicness’ of a film should not be determined by the fact that it is about an exotic culture – the popular view – nor because it has apparently not been authored – a long-standing academic view – but rather because it adheres to the norms of ethnographic practice more generally. On these grounds, the book covers a large number of films made in a broad range of styles across a 120-year period, from the Arctic to Africa, from the cities of China to rural Vermont. Paul Henley discusses films made within reportage, exotic melodrama and travelogue genres in the period before the Second World War, as well as more conventionally ethnographic films made for academic or state-funded educational purposes. The book explores the work of film-makers such as John Marshall, Asen Balikci, Ian Dunlop and Timothy Asch in the post-war period, considering ideas about authorship developed by Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner and Colin Young. It also discusses films authored by indigenous subjects themselves using the new video technology of the 1970s and the ethnographic films that flourished on British television until the 1990s. In the final part of the book, Henley examines the recent work of David and Judith MacDougall and the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, before concluding with an assessmentof a range of films authored in a participatory manner as possible future models.

Download or read book Pre Code Hollywood written by Thomas Doherty and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1999-08-27 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pre-Code Hollywood explores the fascinating period in American motion picture history from 1930 to 1934 when the commandments of the Production Code Administration were violated with impunity in a series of wildly unconventional films—a time when censorship was lax and Hollywood made the most of it. Though more unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre than what came afterwards, the films of the period do indeed have the look of Hollywood cinema—but the moral terrain is so off-kilter that they seem imported from a parallel universe. In a sense, Doherty avers, the films of pre-Code Hollywood are from another universe. They lay bare what Hollywood under the Production Code attempted to cover up and push offscreen: sexual liaisons unsanctified by the laws of God or man, marriage ridiculed and redefined, ethnic lines crossed and racial barriers ignored, economic injustice exposed and political corruption assumed, vice unpunished and virtue unrewarded—in sum, pretty much the raw stuff of American culture, unvarnished and unveiled. No other book has yet sought to interpret the films and film-related meanings of the pre-Code era—what defined the period, why it ended, and what its relationship was to the country as a whole during the darkest years of the Great Depression... and afterward.

Download or read book Colonial Cinema in Africa written by Glenn Reynolds and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-06-16 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades historians and film scholars have intensified their study of colonial cinema in Africa. Yet the vastness of the continent, the number of European powers involved and irregular record keeping has made uncovering the connections between imagery, imperialism and indigenous peoples difficult. This volume takes up the challenge, tracing production and exhibition patterns to show how motion pictures were introduced on the continent during the "Scramble for Africa" and the subsequent era of consolidation. The author describes how early actualities, expeditionary footage, ethnographic documentaries and missionary films were made in the African interior and examines the rise of mass black spectatorship. While Africans in the first two decades of the 20th century were sidelined as cinema consumers because of colonial restrictions, social and political changes in the subsequent interwar period--wrought by large-scale mining in southern Africa--led to a rethinking of colonial film policy by missionaries, mining concerns and colonial officials. By World War II, cinema had come to black Africa.

Download or read book Wildlife Films written by Derek Bousé and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-11-29 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If, as many argue, movies and television have become Western culture's premier storytelling media, so too have they become, for most members of society, the primary source of encounters with the natural world—particularly wild animals. The television fare offered nightly by national and cable networks such as PBS and the Discovery Channel provides millions of viewers with their only experience of the wilderness and its inhabitants. The very films that so many viewers take as accurate portrayals of wildlife, however, have evolved primarily as a form of entertainment, following the established codes and conventions of narrative exposition. The result has been not the representation of nature, but its wholesale reconstruction and reconfiguration according to film and television conventions, audience expectations, and the demands of competition in the media marketplace. Wildlife Films traces the genealogy of the nature film, from its origins as the "animal locomotion" studies that mark the very beginnings of motion pictures themselves, to the founding of the Animal Planet cable channel that boasts "all animals, all the time." The narrative and thematic elements that unite wildlife films as a genre have their roots not in the documentary film tradition, but in the older traditions of oral and written animal fables as reflections of human society. Derek Bousé contends that classic wildlife films often portray animal protagonists living in families modeled on an ideal of the human nuclear family and working in communities that resemble an ideal of bucolic human society. In these stories—presented as documentaries—animals are motivated by human emotions and conduct relationships according to human customs. This imposition of culturally satisfying narrative patterns upon the lives of animals has not only led to the misrepresentation of the natural world; it has promoted the notion that our values, our moral vision, our models of society and family structure derive from nature, rather than being cultural formations.

Download or read book What Is Cinema written by André Bazin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These two volumes have been classics of film studies for as long as they've been available and are considered the gold standard in the field of film criticism.

Download or read book Images and Empires written by Paul S. Landau and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-10-28 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume considers the meaning and power of images in African history and culture. It assembles a wide-ranging collection of essays dealing with specific visual forms, including monuments cinema, cartoons, domestic and professional photography, body art, world fairs, and museum exhibits.

Download or read book Box Office written by and published by . This book was released on 1932 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Facing the Music written by Huib Schippers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Facing the Music' provides a rich resource for reflection and practice for all those involved in teaching and learning music in culturally diverse environments, from policy makers to classroom teachers. Schippers gradually unfolds the complexities and potential of learning and teaching music 'out of context'.

Download or read book I Married Adventure written by Osa Johnson and published by Vertical Inc. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A CLASSIC MEMOIR OF TWO PIONEERING ADVENTURERS Before Joy Adamson went to Africa, before Margaret Mead sailed to Samoa, before Dian Fossey was even born, a Kansas teenager named Osa Leighty married Martin Johnson, a pioneering photographer just back from a ‘round-the-world cruise with Jack London. Together the Johnsons flew and sailed to Borneo, to Kenya, and to the Congo, filming Simba and other popular nature movies with Martin behind the camera and Osa holding her rifle at the ready in case the scene’s big game star should turn hostile. This bestselling memoir retraces their careers in rich detail, with precisely observed descriptions and often heart-stopping anecdotes. Illustrated with scores of the dramatic photos that made the Johnsons famous, it’s a book sure to delight every lover of true adventure.

Download or read book Scum Cinema written by W Richard Benash and published by . This book was released on 2020-05-06 with total page 760 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scum Cinema is a social and cultural journey through the 100-year history of America's most critically derided, culturally reviled, and often misunderstood style of filmmaking - exploitation. From the very first feature-length exploitation film, 1913's Traffic in Souls, to Reefer Madness, Mom and Dad, The Immoral Mr. Teas, Blood Feast, It's Alive, Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS, The Toxic Avenger, The Human Centipede, and many other films in between, exploitation films have been alternately called crude, disgusting, trashy, and occasionally brilliant. Their makers were often figures on society's social, cultural, and political margins. Some were hucksters looking to make a quick buck and others were passionate artists attempting to make a deeply-felt personal statement despite having few resources at their disposal. Exploitation films are far from a cultural oddity; they have existed for as long as film itself. Despite their reputation as a form of low culture, they were hardly garbage for the sake of being so; in their crudity and audacity they revealed unique observations about the society that produced them.Scum Cinema is the story of exploitation films and those who made them. Its research was conducted with academic rigor, but it is written in a style that will appeal to both the film student and the casual fan. Scum Cinema is one of the most detailed examinations of an often ignored style of American film, and is an essential addition to any serious library of film literature.

Download or read book Dictionary of Films written by Georges Sadoul and published by Berkeley : University of California Press. This book was released on 1972 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lists significant international films, with brief plot summaries, critical analyses, and listings of producers, directors, and actors

Download or read book Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film written by Barry Keith Grant and published by Schirmer Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This reference source covers all aspects of the cinema, including film history, production, national cinemas, genre theory and criticism, and cultural contexts.

Download or read book Life with Mother written by Howard Lindsay and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 1950-10 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: Most of the familiar figures in LIFE WITH FATHER are here as their characteristic selves: Mother, Father, the children and some others. This play shows the Day family in their summer home entertaining friends and relatives. The basic plo

Download or read book High Class Moving Pictures written by Charles Musser and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-08 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The entrepreneur of phonograph concerts and motion-picture programs Lyman H. Howe was the leading traveling exhibitor of his time and the exemplar of an important but until now little examined aspect of American popular culture. This work, with its numerous and lively illustrations, uses his career to explore the world of itinerant showmen, who exhibited all motion pictures seen outside large cities during the 1890s and early 1900s. They frequently built cultural alliances with genteel city dwellers or conservative churchgoers and in later years favored "high-class" topics appealing to audiences uncomfortable with the plebeian nickelodeons. Bridging the fields of American studies and film history, the book reveals the remarkable sophistication with which exhibitors created their elaborate, evening-length programs to convey powerful ideological messages. Whether depicting the Spanish-American War, the 1900 Paris Exposition, or British colonialism in action, Howe's "cinema of reassurance" had many parallels with the music of John Philip Sousa. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Download or read book Attack of the Leading Ladies written by John Belton and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at such films as "Frankenstein, Svengali, King Kong" and "The Mark of the Vampire," Berenstein argues that classical horror cinema is marked by malleable gender roles, not by entrenched conventional personas.

Download or read book Other Planes of There written by Renée Green and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2014-11-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than two decades, the artist Renée Green has created an impressive body of work in which language is an essential element. Green is also a prolific writer and a major voice in the international art world. Other Planes of There gathers for the first time a substantial collection of the work she wrote between 1981 and 2010. The selected essays initially appeared in publications in different countries and languages, making their availability in this volume a boon to those wanting to follow Green's artistic and intellectual trajectory. Charting this cosmopolitan artist’s thinking through the decades, Other Planes of There brings essays, film scripts, reviews, and polemics together with reflections on Green's own artistic practice and seminal artworks. It immerses the reader in three decades of contemporary art showcasing the art and thought, the incisive critiques and prescient observations of one of our foremost artists and intellectuals. Sound, cinema, literature, time-based media, and the relationship between art forms and other forms of knowledge are just a few of the matters that Green takes up and thinks through. Sixty-four pages of color plates were selected by the artist for this lavishly illustrated volume.