Download or read book Hollywood Incoherent written by Todd Berliner and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1970s, Hollywood experienced a creative surge, opening a new era in American cinema with films that challenged traditional modes of storytelling. Inspired by European and Asian art cinema as well as Hollywood's own history of narrative ingenuity, directors such as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, William Friedkin, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, and Francis Ford Coppola undermined the harmony of traditional Hollywood cinema and created some of the best movies ever to come out of the American film industry. Critics have previously viewed these films as a response to the cultural and political upheavals of the 1970s, but until now no one has explored how the period's inventive narrative design represents one of the great artistic accomplishments of American cinema. In Hollywood Incoherent, Todd Berliner offers the first thorough analysis of the narrative and stylistic innovations of seventies cinema and its influence on contemporary American filmmaking. He examines not just formally eccentric films—Nashville; Taxi Driver; A Clockwork Orange; The Godfather, Part II; and the films of John Cassavetes—but also mainstream commercial films, including The Exorcist, The Godfather, The French Connection, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Dog Day Afternoon, Chinatown, The Bad News Bears, Patton, All the President's Men, Annie Hall, and many others. With persuasive revisionist analyses, Berliner demonstrates the centrality of this period to the history of Hollywood's formal development, showing how seventies films represent the key turning point between the storytelling modes of the studio era and those of modern American cinema.

Download or read book Hollywood Incoherent written by Todd Berliner and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Most books about American film in the 1970s tell stories about iconoclastic auteurs working in the shadow of the Vietnam War. Stepping away from this tradition, Todd Berliner gives us a bold and compelling study of the strange, paradoxical narrative style of seventies films, which seemed to flout the canonical structure of the well-made film. Berliner sheds new light on a well-studied period. His lively prose and the delight he takes in explicaring the classics of that era make this book a real pleasure to read."---Stephen Prince, Professor of Cinema at Virginia Tech and author of Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism "The wave of innovative filmmaking that surged in 1970s Hollywood has come to be cherished as dearly by many cineastes as the earlier `golden age' of studio filmmaking. American filmmaking of this period has been much discussed in relation to the crisis of the film industry and the sociopolitical currents of the time, Todd Berliner's important study focuses on what is usually taken for granted in such work: the form, texture, and tone of the films themselves, and the experiences that they create for spectators. His exacting and wide-ranging study explores the interplay between narrative unity and `incongruity,' as it is manifested in different ways in acknowledged classics directed by Coppola, Friedkin, Scorsese, and Cassavetes, as well as in many less well-known films. Berliner also shows how these films have had a lasting impact on Hollywood filmmaking. Hollywood Incoherent provides the sustained and systematic exploration of the aesthetics of the `Hollywood Renaissance' that the films deserve and the field of film studies needs."---Murray Smith, Professor of Film Studies, University of Kent

Download or read book Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling written by Mark Minett and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling reveals an Altman barely glimpsed in previous critical accounts of the filmmaker. This re-examination of his seminal work during the "Hollywood Renaissance" or "New Hollywood" period of the early 1970s (including M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Images, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, California Split, and Nashville) sheds new light on both the films and the filmmaker, reframing Altman as a complex, pragmatic innovator whose work exceeds, but is also grounded in, the norms of classical Hollywood storytelling rather than someone who rejected those norms in favor of modernist art cinema. Its findings and approach hold important implications for the study of cinematic authorship. Largely avoiding thematic exegesis, it employs an historical poetics approach, robust functionalist frameworks, archival research, and formal and statistical analysis to demystify the essential features of the standard account of Altman's filmmaking history and profile-lax narrative form, heavy reliance on the zoom, sound design replete with overlapping dialogue, improvisational infidelity to the screenplay, and a desire to subvert based in his time in the training grounds of industrial filmmaking and filmed television. The book provides a clear example of how a filmmaker might work collaboratively and pragmatically within and across media institutions to elaborate upon their sanctioned practices and aims. We misunderstand Altman's work, and the creative work of Hollywood filmmakers in general, when we insist on describing innovation as opposition to institutional norms and on describing those norms as simply assimilating innovation.

Download or read book Affect Poetics of the New Hollywood written by Hauke Lehmann and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-12-02 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is affective experience produced in the cinema? And how can we write a history of this experience? By asking these questions, this study by Hauke Lehmann aims at rethinking our conception of a critical period in US film history – the New Hollywood: as a moment of crisis that can neither be reduced to economic processes of adaption nor to a collection of masterpieces. Rather, the fine-grained analysis of core films reveals the power of cinematic images to affect their audiences – to confront them with the new. The films of the New Hollywood redefine the divisions of the classical genre system in a radical way and thereby transform the way spectators are addressed affectively in the cinema. The study describes a complex interplay between three modes of affectivity: suspense, paranoia, and melancholy. All three, each in their own way, implicate spectators in the deep-seated contradictions of their own feelings and their ways of being in the world: their relations to history, to society, and to cultural fantasy. On this basis, Affect Poetics of the New Hollywood projects an original conception of film history: as an affective history which can be re-written up to the present day.

Download or read book Other Hollywood Renaissance written by Lennard Dominic Lennard and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-09 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1960s, the collapse of the classic Hollywood studio system led in part, and for less than a decade, to a production trend heavily influenced by the international art cinema. Reflecting a new self-consciousness in the US about the national film patrimony, this period is known as the Hollywood Renaissance. However, critical study of the period is generally associated with its so-called principal auteurs, slighting a number of established and emerging directors who were responsible for many of the era's most innovative and artistically successful releases.With contributions from leading film scholars, this book provides a revisionist account of this creative resurgence by discussing and memorializing twenty-four directors of note who have not yet been given a proper place in the larger history of the period. Including filmmakers such as Hal Ashby, John Frankenheimer, Mike Nichols, and Joan Micklin Silver, this more expansive approach to the auteurism of the late 1960s and 1970s seems not only appropriate but pressing - a necessary element of the re-evaluation of 'Hollywood' with which cinema studies has been preoccupied under the challenges posed by the emergence and flourishing of new media.

Download or read book Hollywood Aesthetic written by Todd Berliner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hollywood makes the most widely successful pleasure-giving artworks the world has ever known. The industry operates under the assumption that pleasurable aesthetic experiences, among huge populations, translate into box office success. With that goal in mind, Hollywood has systematized the delivery of aesthetic pleasure, packaging and selling it on a massive scale. In Hollywood Aesthetic, Todd Berliner accounts for the chief attraction of Hollywood cinema worldwide: its entertainment value. The book examines films such as City Lights and Goodfellas that have earned aesthetic appreciation from both fans and critics. But it also studies some curious outliers, cult films, and celebrated Hollywood experiments, such as The Killing and Starship Troopers. And it demonstrates that even ordinary popular films, from Tarzan and His Mate to Rocky III, as well as action blockbusters, like Die Hard and The Dark Knight, offer aesthetic pleasure to mass audiences. Hollywood Aesthetic explains how Hollywood engages viewers by satisfying their aesthetic desires. Visit the companion website at www.oup.com/us/hollywoodaesthetic

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 Hollywood Renaissance written by Peter Krämer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-06-28 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In December 1967, Time magazine put Bonnie and Clyde on its cover and proudly declared that Hollywood cinema was undergoing a 'renaissance'. For the next few years, a wide range of formally and thematically challenging films were produced at the very centre of the American film industry, often (but by no means always) combining success at the box office with huge critical acclaim, both then and later. This collection brings together acknowledged experts on American cinema to examine thirteen key films from the years 1966 to 1974, starting with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a major studio release which was in effect exempted from Hollywood's Production Code and thus helped to liberate American filmmaking from (self-)censorship. Long-standing taboos to do with sex, violence, race relations, drugs, politics, religion and much else could now be broken, often in conjunction with extensive stylistic experimentation. Whereas most previous scholarship has examined these developments through the prism of auteurism, with its tight focus on film directors and their oeuvres, the contributors to this collection also carefully examine production histories and processes. In doing so they pay particular attention to the economic underpinnings and collaborative nature of filmmaking, the influence of European art cinema as well as of exploitation, experimental and underground films, and the connections between cinema and other media (notably publishing, music and theatre). Several chapters show how the innovations of the Hollywood Renaissance relate to further changes in American cinema from the mid-1970s onwards.

Download or read book Quality Hollywood written by Geoff King and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-30 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What defines 'quality' in contemporary Hollywood film? Although often seen as inhospitable to such work, the studios of the blockbuster-franchise era continue to produce features that make claims to higher status. Films such as The Social Network, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Mystic River are marked as distinctive from the mainstream norm. But how exactly, and how are such qualities mixed with more familiar Hollywood ingredients, as found in larger doses in other examples such as Blood Diamond and the blockbuster-scale Inception? Quality Hollywood is the first book to address these issues, featuring close analysis of case study films, critical responses and the wider notions of cultural value on which these draw. Geoff King argues that such films retain a presence as a minority strand of studio output. The reasons for this combine factors relating to economics, the power of certain filmmakers and Hollywood's investment in its own prestige.

Download or read book The Classical Hollywood Reader written by Stephen Neale and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2012. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Download or read book New Wave New Hollywood written by Nathan Abrams and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-09-23 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a period of film history, The American New Wave (ordinarily understood as beginning in 1967 and ending in 1980) remains a preoccupation for scholars and audiences alike. In traditional accounts, it is considered to be bookended by two periods of conservatism, and viewed as a (brief) period of explosive creativity within the Hollywood system. From Bonnie and Clyde to Heaven's Gate, it produced films that continue to be watched, discussed, analysed and poured over. It has, however, also become rigidly defined as a cinema of director-auteurs who made a number of aesthetically and politically significant films. This has led to marginalization and exclusion of many important artists and filmmakers, as well as a temporal rigidity about what and who is considered part of the 'New Wave proper'. This collection seeks to reinvigorate debate around this area of film history. It also looks in part to demonstrate the legacy of aesthetic experimentation and political radicalism after 1980 as part of the 'legacy' of the New Wave. Thanks to important new work that questions received scholarly wisdom, reveals previously marginalised filmmakers (and the films they made), considers new genres, personnel, and films under the banner of 'New Wave, New Hollywood', and reevaluates the traditional approaches and perspectives on the films that have enjoyed most critical attention, New Wave, New Hollywood: Reassessment, Recovery, Legacy looks to begin a new discussion about Hollywood cinema after 1967.

Download or read book Hollywood and War The Film Reader written by J. David Slocum and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discussing such classic films as Sergeant York, Air Force, and All Quiet on the Western Front, as well as more modern blockbusters like Apocalypse Now and Saving Private Ryan, this outstanding volume focuses on Hollywood and its production of war films. Topics covered include: the early formation of war cinema the apotheosis of the Hollywood war film the ascendancy of ambivalence Hollywood and the war since Vietnam war as a way of seeing. For any student of film studies or American cultural studies, this is a valuable companion.

Download or read book Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film written by Wickham Clayton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-10-12 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film fills a broad scholastic gap by analysing the elements of narrative and stylistic construction of films in the slasher subgenre of horror that have been produced and/or distributed in the Hollywood studio system from its initial boom in the late 1970s to the present.

Download or read book The Political Economy of Hollywood written by James McMahon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-02-25 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Hollywood, the goals of art and business are entangled. Directors, writers, actors, and idealistic producers aspire to make the best films possible. These aspirations often interact with the dominant firms that control Hollywood film distribution. This control of distribution is crucial as it enables the firms and other large businesses involved, such as banks that offer financing, to effectively stand between film production and the market. This book analyses the power structure of the Hollywood film business and its general modes of behaviour. More specifically, the work analyses how the largest Hollywood firms attempt to control social creativity such that they can mitigate the financial risks inherent in the art of filmmaking. Controlling the ways people make or watch films, the book argues, is a key element of Hollywood’s capitalist power. Capitalist power—the ability to control, modify, and, sometimes, limit social creation through the rights of ownership—is the foundation of capital accumulation. For the Hollywood film business, capitalist power is about the ability of business concerns to set the terms that will shape the future of cinema. For the major film distributors of Hollywood, these terms include the types of films that will be distributed, the number of films that will be distributed, and the cinematic alternatives that will be made available to the individual moviegoer. Combining theoretical analysis with detailed empirical research on the financial performance of the major Hollywood film companies, the book details how Hollywood’s capitalist goals have clashed with the aesthetic potentials of cinema and ultimately stymied creativity in the pursuit of limiting risk. This sharp critique of the Hollywood machine provides vital reading for students and scholars of political economy, political theory, film studies, and cinema.

Download or read book New York City and the Hollywood Musical written by Martha Shearer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-26 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In examining the relationship between the spectacular, iconic and vibrant New York of the musical and the off-screen history and geography of the real city—this book explores how the city shaped the genre and equally how the genre shaped representations of the city. Shearer argues that while the musical was for many years a prime vehicle for the idealization of urban density, the transformation New York underwent after World War II constituted a major challenge to its representation. Including analysis of 42nd Street, Swing Time, Cover Girl, On the Town, The Band Wagon, Guys and Dolls, West Side Story and many other classic and little-known musicals—this book is an innovative study of the relationship between cinema and urban space.

Download or read book Fifty Hollywood Directors written by Suzanne Leonard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty Hollywood Directors introduces the most important, iconic and influential filmmakers who worked in Hollywood between the end of the silent period and the birth of the blockbuster. By exploring the historical, cultural and technological contexts in which each director was working, this book traces the formative period in commercial cinema when directors went from pioneers to industry heavyweights. Each entry discusses a director’s practices and body of work and features a brief biography and suggestions for further reading. Entries include: Frank Capra Cecil B DeMille John Ford Alfred Hitchcock Fritz Lang Orson Welles DW Griffith King Vidor This is an indispensible guide for anyone interested in film history, Hollywood and the development of the role of the director.

Download or read book Darkness in the Bliss Out written by James Kendrick and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-05-29 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While there has been a significant outpouring of scholarship on Steven Spielberg over the past decade, his films are still frequently discussed as being paternalistic, escapist, and reliant on uncomplicated emotions and complicated special effects. Even those who view his work favorably often see it as essentially optimistic, reassuring, and conservative. James Kendrick takes an alternate view of Spielberg's cinema and proposes that his films-even the most popular ones that seem to trade in easy answers and comforting, reassuring notions of cohesion and narrative resolution-are significantly darker and more emotionally and ideologically complex than they are routinely given credit for. Darkness in the Bliss-Out demonstrates, through close analysis of a wide range of Spielberg's films, that they are only reassuring on the surface, and that their depths embody a complex and sometimes contradictory view of the human condition.