Download or read book Artificial Darkness written by Noam M. Elcott and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-05-30 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ambitious study explores how important darkness--artificial darkness--was, as an actual technology, in producing not just photographs but visual novelties and experiments in cinema in the nineteenth century. The study plays out against a backdrop of urban history, where most scholars have focused on the growth of artificial light and the electrification of cities. Elcott’s study challenges that approach. In considering zones of darkness, it ranges from the sites of production (darkrooms, studios) to those of reception (theaters/cinemas/arcades) that shaped modern media and perceptions. He argues that, in the nineteenth century, the avant-garde was often less interested in the filmed image than in everything surrounding it: the screen, the projected light, the darkness, the experience of disembodiment. He argues that darkness has a history separate from night, evil, or the color black, and has a specifically modern manifestation as a media technology. We are all aware of the "velvet light trap” in photography, but at the heart of this book are technologies of darkness crucial to cinema that were commonly known as "the black screen,” but have, over time, faded from the storied discourse.
Download or read book After Uniqueness written by Erika Balsom and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Images have never been as freely circulated as they are today. They have also never been so tightly controlled. As with the birth of photography, digital reproduction has created new possibilities for the duplication and consumption of images, offering greater dissemination and access. But digital reproduction has also stoked new anxieties concerning authenticity and ownership. From this contemporary vantage point, After Uniqueness traces the ambivalence of reproducibility through the intersecting histories of experimental cinema and the moving image in art, examining how artists, filmmakers, and theorists have found in the copy a utopian promise or a dangerous inauthenticity—or both at once. From the sale of film in limited editions on the art market to the downloading of bootlegs, from the singularity of live cinema to video art broadcast on television, Erika Balsom investigates how the reproducibility of the moving image has been embraced, rejected, and negotiated by major figures including Stan Brakhage, Leo Castelli, and Gregory Markopoulos. Through a comparative analysis of selected distribution models and key case studies, she demonstrates how the question of image circulation is central to the history of film and video art. After Uniqueness shows that distribution channels are more than neutral pathways; they determine how we encounter, interpret, and write the history of the moving image as an art form.
Download or read book Pretty written by Rosalind Galt and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film culture often rejects visually rich images, valuing simplicity, austerity, or even ugliness as more provocative, political, and truly cinematic. Although cinema challenges traditional ideas of art, this opposition to the decorative continues a long-standing aesthetic antipathy to feminine cosmetics, Oriental effeminacy, and primitive ornament. Inheriting this patriarchal and colonial perspective along with the preference for fine over decorative art, filmmakers, critics, and theorists tend to denigrate cinema's colorful, picturesque, and richly patterned visions. Condemning this exclusion of the "pretty" from masculine film culture, Rosalind Galt reevaluates received ideas about the decorative impulse from early film criticism to classical and postclassical film theory. The pretty embodies lush visuality, dense mise-en-scène, painterly framing, and arabesque camera movements—styles increasingly central to world cinema. From European art house cinema to the films of Wong Kar-wai and Santosh Sivan, from handmade experimental films to the popular pleasures of Moulin Rouge! and Amelie, pretty is a vital element of contemporary cinema, using visual exuberance to communicate distinct sexual and political identities. Inverting the logic of anti-pretty thought, Galt firmly establishes the decorative image as a queer aesthetic, a singular representation of cinema's perverse pleasures and cross-cultural encounters. Creating her own critical tapestry from perspectives in art and film theory and philosophy, Galt reclaims prettiness as a radically transgressive style, woven with the threads of political agency.
Download or read book Art Cinema and India s Forgotten Futures written by Rochona Majumdar and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Co-Winner, 2023 Chidananda Dasgupta Award for the Best Writing on Cinema, Chidananda Dasgupta Memorial Trust Shortlisted, 2022 MSA Book Prize, Modernist Studies Association Longlisted, 2022 Moving Image Book Award, Kraszna-Krausz Foundation The project of Indian art cinema began in the years following independence in 1947, at once evoking the global reach of the term “art film” and speaking to the aspirations of the new nation-state. In this pioneering book, Rochona Majumdar examines key works of Indian art cinema to demonstrate how film emerged as a mode of doing history and that, in so doing, it anticipated some of the most influential insights of postcolonial thought. Majumdar details how filmmakers as well as a host of film societies and publications sought to foster a new cinematic culture for the new nation, fueled by enthusiasm for a future of progress and development. Good films would help make good citizens: art cinema would not only earn global prestige but also shape discerning individuals capable of exercising aesthetic and political judgment. During the 1960s, however, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak—the leading figures of Indian art cinema—became disillusioned with the belief that film was integral to national development. Instead, Majumdar contends, their works captured the unresolvable contradictions of the postcolonial present, which pointed toward possible, yet unrealized futures. Analyzing the films of Ray, Sen, and Ghatak, and working through previously unexplored archives of film society publications, Majumdar offers a radical reinterpretation of Indian film history. Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures offers sweeping new insights into film’s relationship with the postcolonial condition and its role in decolonial imaginations of the future.
Download or read book Philosophy of the Film written by Ian Jarvie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the overlap between film and philosophy in three distinct ways: epistemological issues in film-making and viewing; aesthetic theory and film; and film as a medium of philosophical expression.
Download or read book The Challenge of American History written by Louis P. Masur and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1999-05-20 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Challenge of American History, Louis Masur brings together a sampling of recent scholarship to determine the key issues preoccupying historians of American history and to contemplate the discipline's direction for the future. The fifteen summary essays included in this volume allow professional historians, history teachers, and students to grasp in a convenient and accessible form what historians have been writing about.
Download or read book Working class Hollywood written by Steven J. Ross and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2000-01-03 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The outcome of these battles was critical to our own times, for the victors got to shape the meaning of class in twentieth-century America.
Download or read book Banned in Kansas written by Gerald R. Butters and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This first book-length study of state film censorship examines the unique political, social, and economic factors that led to its implementation in Kansas, taking a look at why censorship legislation was enacted, what the attitudes of Kansans were toward censorship, and why it lasted for half a century"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Fade In Crossroads written by Robert Jackson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-23 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the US South contribute to the development of film? And how did film shape the modern South? In Fade In, Crossroads, Robert Jackson tells the story of the relationships between southerners and motion pictures from the silent era through the golden age of Hollywood. Jackson reveals the profound consequences of the coincidence of the rise and fall of the American film industry with the rise and fall of the South's most important modern product and export: Jim Crow segregation. He considers southern historical legacies on film, from popular Civil War films and comparably popular lynching films emerging in a time of prolific lynching in the South, to the resilient race film industry whose African American filmmakers forged an independent cinematic movement in defiance of the racial restrictions of both the South and Hollywood. He also traces the influence of film on future participants in the Civil Rights Movement, from prominent leaders such as Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall to film-industry veterans like Lena Horne and Paul Robeson to the millions of ordinary people, black and white, who found themselves caught up in the struggle for racial equality in the modern United States.
Download or read book Translating America written by Peter Conolly-Smith and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the turn of the century, New York City's Germans constituted a culturally and politically dynamic community, with a population 600,000 strong. Yet fifty years later, traces of its culture had all but disappeared. What happened? The conventional interpretation has been that, in the face of persecution and repression during World War I, German immigrants quickly gave up their own culture and assimilated into American mainstream life. But in Translating America, Peter Conolly-Smith offers a radically different analysis. He argues that German immigrants became German-Americans not out of fear, but instead through their participation in the emerging forms of pop culture. Drawing from German and English newspapers, editorials, comic strips, silent movies, and popular plays, he reveals that German culture did not disappear overnight, but instead merged with new forms of American popular culture before the outbreak of the war. Vaudeville theaters, D.W. Griffith movies, John Philip Sousa tunes, and even baseball games all contributed to German immigrants' willing transformation into Americans. Translating America tackles one of the thorniest questions in American history: How do immigrants assimilate into, and transform, American culture?
Download or read book Democracy the Arts written by Arthur M. Melzer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, some of our most prominent cultural critics explore the relationships between culture and politics as played out in the world of novels, television, museums, and even fashion. The authors - John Simon, Greil Marcus, Arthur C. Danto, and other well-known commentators from across the political spectrum - examine the arts in their relation to democracy and consider whether and how they serve one another.
Download or read book Hollywood s Cold War written by Tony Shaw and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-19 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hollywood's Cold War
Download or read book Shared Pleasures written by Douglas Gomery and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gomery (The coming of sound to the American cinema, 1975; The Hollywood studio system, 1986) draws upon his earlier work and that of other scholars to address the broader social functions of the film industry, showing how Hollywood adapted its business policies to diversity and change within American society. Includes 31 bandw photographs. Paper edition (unseen), $15.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Screen Stories written by Carl Plantinga and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-06 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The way we communicate with each other is vital to preserving the cultural ecology, or wellbeing, of a place and time. Do we listen to each other? Do we ask the right questions? Do we speak about each other with respect or disdain? The stories that we convey on screens, or what author Carl Plantinga calls 'screen stories,' are one powerful and pervasive means by which we communicate with each other. Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement argues that film and media studies needs to move toward an an approach to ethics that is more appropriate for mass consumer culture and the lives of its citizens. Primarily concerned with the relationship between media and viewers, this book considers ethical criticism and the emotional power of screen stories that makes such criticism necessary. The content we consume--from television shows and movies to advertisements--can significantly affect our welfare on a personal and societal level, and thus, this content is subject to praise and celebration, or questioning and even condemnation. The types of screen stories that circulate contribute to the cultural ecology of a time and place; through shared attention they influence what individuals think and feel. Plantinga develops a theory of the power of screen stories to affect both individuals and cultures, asserting that we can better respond ethically to such media if we understand the sources of its influence on us.
Download or read book Hollywood and the Box Office written by John Izod and published by Springer. This book was released on 1988-07-20 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Changing business circumstances have put pressure on film studios and changed the nature of films they produce. This book examines the reaction of the corporations who have found themselves in danger or have perceived new ways of adding to their profitability, influencing the films they produce.
Download or read book Cecil B DeMille and American Culture written by Sumiko Higashi and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994-12-02 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Cecil B. de Mille - his life and works.
Download or read book Parallel Tracks written by Lynne Kirby and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In wide-ranging and provocative analyses of dozens of silent films - icons of film history like The General and The Great Train Robbery as well as many that are rarely discussed - Kirby examines how trains and rail travel embodied concepts of spectatorship and mobility grounded in imperialism and the social, sexual, and racial divisions of modern Western culture.
