Download or read book King Vidor American written by Raymond Durgnat and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hollywood director King Vidor (1894-1982) was acknowledged as a master by movie showmen and cinema critics alike, but the range of his films made him impossible to pigeonhole. With The Big Parade (1925), he created the first modern war film and MGM's first major hit. The Crowd (1928) looked at "ordinary people" in city jungles. Hallelujah (1929) was the first all-black major-studio feature. To the Great Depression, Vidor responded with Our Daily Bread (1934), the politically intricate saga of a rural cooperative. Other Vidor films spoke directly to the moviegoing public: that three-handkerchief male weepie, The Champ (1931); and that key women's drama, Stella Dallas (1937). His high-passion postwar melodramas, spurned by contemporary reviewers, have gained champions each year: the epic western Duel in the Sun (1946); Ayn Rand's ultra-right-wing The Fountainhead (1949); and the violent and morbid Beyond the Forest (1949) and Ruby Gentry (1952). This book is the first in-depth story of Vidor's half-century-long career, from his first attempts to rival Hollywood in his home state of Texas through the complex interplay of his independent spirit with "classic" Hollywood's rules about public taste. The title King Vidor, American, celebrates Vidor as a representative man, full of the conflicting generosity and ferocity in the national ethos: with his violent mixture of pioneering optimism and noir torments, of transcendentalism and puritanism, of spiritual verve and physical practicality, of liberal conscience and Social Darwinist savagery, of male dominance and female conciliation. Like Whitman, he contains multitudes. Never narrowly auteurist, this book is a wide ranging integration of film history, political thought, and popular culture.--Adapted from dust jacket.
Download or read book King Vidor American written by Raymond E. Durgnat and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 856 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Tree is a Tree written by King Vidor and published by Samuel French , Incorporated. This book was released on 1989 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Follows King Vidor from his childhood, his move to Hollywood, the building of his studio, and his time at MGM.
Download or read book Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood s Golden Age at the American Film Institute written by George Stevens, Jr. and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-05-27 with total page 734 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER'S 100 GREATEST FILM BOOKS OF ALL TIME • The first book to bring together interviews of master moviemakers from the American Film Institute’s renowned seminars, Conversations with the Great Moviemakers, offers an unmatched history of American cinema in the words of its greatest practitioners. Here are the incomparable directors Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, King Vidor, David Lean, Fritz Lang (“I learned only from bad films”), William Wyler, and George Stevens; renowned producers and cinematographers; celebrated screenwriters Ray Bradbury and Ernest Lehman; as well as the immortal Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini (“Making a movie is a mathematical operation. It’s absolutely impossible to improvise”). Taken together, these conversations offer uniquely intimate access to the thinking, the wisdom, and the genius of cinema’s most talented pioneers.
Download or read book Killing the Indian Maiden written by M. Marubbio and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2006-12-15 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Killing the Indian Maiden examines the fascinating and often disturbing portrayal of Native American women in film. M. Elise Marubbio examines the sacrificial role in which a young Native woman allies herself with a white male hero and dies as a result of that choice. In studying thirty-four Hollywood films from the silent period to the present, she draws upon theories of colonization, gender, race, and film studies to ground her analysis in broader historical and sociopolitical context and to help answer the question, “What does it mean to be an American?” The book reveals a cultural iconography embedded in the American psyche. As such, the Native American woman is a racialized and sexualized other. A conquerable body, she represents both the seductions and the dangers of the American frontier and the Manifest Destiny of the American nation to master it.
Download or read book Hollywood Be Thy Name written by Judith Weisenfeld and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-06-08 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a ground-breaking book. The text is remarkable in its use of MPAA files and studio archives; Weisenfeld uncovers all sorts of side stories that enrich the larger narrative. The writing is clear and concise, and Weisenfeld makes important theoretical interpretations without indulging in difficult jargon. She incorporates both film theory and race theory in graceful, non-obtrusive ways that deepen understanding. This is an outstanding work."—Colleen McDannell, author of Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression
Download or read book A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies written by Martin Scorsese and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This account of American films is balanced between subjective enthusiasm and objective analysis. Scorsese starts from his own childhood love affair with the cinema, when he discovered King Vidor's Dual in the Sun as a boy.
Download or read book Hollywood and the Great Depression written by Iwan Morgan and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-31 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how Hollywood responded to and reflected the political and social changes that America experienced during the 1930sIn the popular imagination, 1930s Hollywood was a dream factory producing escapist movies to distract the American people from the greatest economic crisis in their nations history. But while many films of the period conform to this stereotype, there were a significant number that promoted a message, either explicitly or implicitly, in support of the political, social and economic change broadly associated with President Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal programme. At the same time, Hollywood was in the forefront of challenging traditional gender roles, both in terms of movie representations of women and the role of women within the studio system. With case studies of actors like Shirley Temple, Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, as well as a selection of films that reflect politics and society in the Depression decade, this fascinating book examines how the challenges of the Great Depression impacted on Hollywood and how it responded to them.Topics covered include:How Hollywood offered positive representations of working womenCongressional investigations of big-studio monopolization over movie distributionHow three different types of musical genres related in different ways to the Great Depression the Warner Bros Great Depression Musicals of 1933, the Astaire/Rogers movies, and the MGM akids musicals of the late 1930sThe problems of independent production exemplified in King Vidors Our Daily BreadCary Grants success in developing a debonair screen persona amid Depression conditionsContributors Harvey G. Cohen, King's College LondonPhilip John Davies, British LibraryDavid Eldridge, University of HullPeter William Evans, Queen Mary, University of LondonMark Glancy, Queen Mary University of LondonIna Rae Hark, University of South CarolinaIwan Morgan, University College LondonBrian Neve, University of BathIan Scott, University of ManchesterAnna Siomopoulos, Bentley UniversityJ. E. Smyth, University of WarwickMelvyn Stokes, University College LondonMark Wheeler, London Metropolitan University
Download or read book Beyond the Illusion written by Antonia Vidor and published by . This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Spiritual autobiography from the daughter of Hollywood director King Vidor. The intriguing story of her early life lived amongst the 'royalty' of Old Hollywood, and her later life and path in the extraordinary company of the American-born spiritual master, Adi Da Samraj.
Download or read book Victor Fleming written by Michael Sragow and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2013-12-10 with total page 694 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best remembered for the iconic classics Gone with the Wind (1939) and The Wizard of Oz (1939) to the silver screen, Victor Fleming also counted successful films such as Red Dust (1932), Captains Courageous (1937), Test Pilot (1939), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), and the groundbreaking Joan of Arc (1948) among his more than forty directing credits. One of the most sought-after directors in Hollywood's golden age, Fleming (1889--1949) was renowned for his ability to make films across a wide range of genres. In Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master, author Michael Sragow paints a comprehensive portrait of the talented and charismatic man who helped create enduring screen personas for stars such as Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Gary Cooper.
Download or read book Northwest Passage written by Kenneth Roberts and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2016-12-19 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exciting and fast paced adventure story based in colonial America. Written from the viewpoint of a fictional friend of the Historic Robert Rodgers, famed in America as the leader of 'Rodgers' Rangers' a guerrilla squadron harassing the English forces throughout the American War of Independence. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
Download or read book Hollywood s African American Films written by Ryan Jay Friedman and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1929 and 1930, during the Hollywood studios' conversion to synchronized-sound film production, white-controlled trade magazines and African American newspapers celebrated a "vogue" for "Negro films." "Hollywood's African American Films" argues that the movie business turned to black musical performance to both resolve technological and aesthetic problems introduced by the medium of "talking pictures" and, at the same time, to appeal to the white "Broadway" audience that patronized their most lucrative first-run theaters. Capitalizing on highbrow associations with white "slumming" in African American cabarets and on the cultural linkage between popular black musical styles and "natural" acoustics, studios produced a series of African American-cast and white-cast films featuring African American sequences. Ryan Jay Friedman asserts that these transitional films reflect contradictions within prevailing racial ideologies--arising most clearly in the movies' treatment of African American characters' decisions to migrate. Regardless of how the films represent these choices, they all prompt elaborate visual and narrative structures of containment that tend to highlight rather than suppress historical tensions surrounding African American social mobility, Jim Crow codes, and white exploitation of black labor.
Download or read book King Vidor in Focus written by Kevin L. Stoehr and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2024-08-12 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: King Vidor (1894-1982) had the longest career of any Hollywood director, and his works include some of the most dramatic, sublime moments in the history of American cinema. Regarded by many film historians as one of the greatest of silent era filmmakers--especially for masterworks The Big Parade, The Crowd, and Show People--Vidor is nonetheless one of the most underrated of Hollywood's "old masters" in terms of his overall career. His sound era films include Hallelujah, Street Scene, The Champ, The Stranger's Return, Our Daily Bread, Stella Dallas, The Citadel, Northwest Passage, Duel in the Sun, Beyond the Forest, The Fountainhead, Ruby Gentry and War and Peace. He also helped to establish the Screen Directors Guild and served as its first president. This book charts the ways in which Vidor's vast, complex body of work ranges over diverse genres and styles while also expressing his recurring personal interests in spirituality (especially Christian Science), aesthetics, metaphysics, social realism, and the myth of America. The first book since 1988 to give a comprehensive view of Vidor's career, it discusses his artistic evolution in a way that appeals to the general reader as well as to the film scholar.
Download or read book The Mass Ornament written by Siegfried Kracauer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mass Ornament today remains a refreshing tribute to popular culture, and its impressively interdisciplinary writings continue to shed light not only on Kracauer's later work but also on the ideas of the Frankfurt School, the genealogy of film theory and cultural studies, Weimar cultural politics, and, not least, the exigencies of intellectual exile.
Download or read book America First written by Mandy Merck and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when the expanded projection of US political, military, economic and cultural power draws intensified global concern, understanding how that country understands itself seems more important than ever. This collection of new critical essays tackles this old problem in a new way, by examining some of the hundreds of US films that announce themselves as titularly 'American'. From early travelogues to contemporary comedies, national nomination has been an abiding characteristic of American motion pictures, heading the work of Porter, Guy-Blaché, DeMille, Capra, Sternberg, Vidor, Minnelli and Mankiewicz. More recently, George Lucas, Paul Schrader, John Landis and Edward James Olmos have made their own contributions to Hollywood's Americana. What does this national branding signify? Which versions of Americanism are valorized, and which marginalized or excluded? Out of which social and historical contexts do they emerge, and for and by whom are they constructed? Edited by Mandy Merck, the collection contains detailed analyses of such films as The Vanishing American, American Madness, An American in Paris, American Graffiti, American Gigolo, American Pie and many more.
Download or read book John Wayne s America written by Garry Wills and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lincoln at Gettysburg brings his eloquence, wit, and on-target perceptions of American life and politics to this fascinating, well-drawn protrait of a twentieth-century hero. In this work of great originality—the biography of an idea—Garry Wills shows how John Wayne came to embody Amercian values and influenced our cultoure to a degree unmatched by any other public figure of his time. In Wills's hands, Waynes story is tranformed into a compelling narrative about the intersection of popular entertainment and political realities in mid-twentieth-century America.
Download or read book Skyscraper Cinema written by Merrill Schleier and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the silent era until the advent of the Cinemascope--the skyscraper as movie star. Whether tall office buildings, high-rise apartments, or lofty hotels, skyscrapers have been stars in American cinema since the silent era. Cinema's tall buildings have been variously represented as unbridled aspiration, dens of iniquity and eroticism, beacons of democracy, and well-oiled corporate machines. Considering their intriguing diversity, Merrill Schleier establishes and explains the impact of actual skyscrapers on America's ideologies about work, leisure, romance, sexual identity, and politics as seen in Hollywood movies.
