Download or read book Lonely Places Dangerous Ground written by Steven Rybin and published by Suny Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The director of such classic Hollywood films as In a Lonely Place, Johnny Guitar, and Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray nevertheless remained on the margins of the American studio system throughout his career, and despite his cult status among auteurist critics and cinephiles, he has also remained at the margins of film scholarship. Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground offers twenty new essays by international film historians and critics that explore the director's place in the history of the Hollywood industry and in the larger institution of cinema, as well as a 1977 interview with Ray that has never before been published in its entirety in English. In addition to readings of Ray's most celebrated films, the book provides a range of approaches to his life and work, engaging new questions of his cinematic authorship with areas that include history and culture, politics and society, gender and sexuality, style and genre, performance, technology, and popular music. The collection also looks at Ray's lesser-known and underappreciated films, and devotes attention to the highly experimental We Can't Go Home Again, his recently restored final film made in the 1970s with his students at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Rediscovering what Ray means to contemporary film studies, the essays show how his films continue to possess a vital power for film history and criticism, and for film culture.

Download or read book American Stranger written by Will Scheibel and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstructs how Ray became a "rebel auteur" in cinema culture.

Download or read book Street with No Name written by Andrew Dickos and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrew Dickos's Street with No Name traces the film noir genre back to its roots in German expressionist cinema and the French cinema of the interwar years. Dickos describes the development of the film noir in America from 1941 through the 1970s and examines how this development expresses a modern cinema. He argues that, in its most satisfying form, the film noir exists as a series of conventions with an iconography and characters of distinctive significance. Featuring stylized lighting and urban settings, these films tell melodramatic narratives involving characters who commit crimes predicated on destructive passions, corruption, and a submission to human weakness and fate. Unlike other studies of the noir, Street with No Name follows its development in a loosely historical style that associates certain noir directors with those features in their films that helped define the scope of the genre. Dickos examines notable directors such as Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, and Robert Siodmak. He also charts the genre's influence on such celebrated postwar French filmmakers as Jean-Pierre Melville, Francois Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard. Addressing the aesthetic, cultural, political, and social concerns depicted in the genre, Street with No Name demonstrates how the film noir generates a highly expressive, raw, and violent mood as it exposes the ambiguities of modern postwar society.

Download or read book Brechtian Cinemas written by Nenad Jovanovic and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2017-01-30 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Brechtian Cinemas, Nenad Jovanovic uses examples from select major filmmakers to delineate the variety of ways in which Bertolt Brecht's concept of epic/dialectic theatre has been adopted and deployed in international cinema. Jovanovic critically engages Brecht's ideas and their most influential interpretations in film studies, from apparatus theory in the 1970s to the presently dominant cognitivist approach. He then examines a broad body of films, including Brecht's own Mysteries of a Hairdressing Salon (1923) and Kuhle Wampe (1932), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's History Lessons (1972), Peter Watkins's La Commune (2000), and Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac (2013). Jovanovic argues that the role of montage—a principal source of artistic estrangement (Verfremdung) in earlier Brechtian films—has diminished as a result of the technique's conventionalization by today's Hollywood and related industries. Operating as primary agents of Verfremdung in contemporary films inspired by Brecht's view of the world and the arts, Jovanovic claims, are conventions borrowed from the main medium of his expression, theatre. Drawing upon a vast number of sources and disciplines that include cultural, film, literature, and theatre studies, Brechtian Cinemas demonstrates a continued and broad relevance of Brecht for the practice and understanding of cinema.

Download or read book Hitchcock s Moral Gaze written by R. Barton Palmer and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2017-01-27 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers new and compelling perspectives on the deeply moral nature of Hitchcock’s films. In his essays and interviews, Alfred Hitchcock was guarded about substantive matters of morality, preferring instead to focus on discussions of technique. That has not, however, discouraged scholars and critics from trying to work out what his films imply about such moral matters as honesty, fidelity, jealousy, courage, love, and loyalty. Through discussions and analyses of such films as Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Frenzy, the contributors to this book strive to throw light on the way Hitchcock depicts a moral—if not amoral or immoral—world. Drawing on perspectives from film studies, philosophy, literature, and other disciplines, they offer new and compelling interpretations of the filmmaker’s moral gaze and the inflection point it provides for modern cinema.

Download or read book Binghamton Babylon written by Scott M. MacDonald and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2015-08-31 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documents a volatile and productive moment in the development of film studies. In Binghamton Babylon, Scott M. MacDonald documents one of the crucial moments in the history of cinema studies: the emergence of a cinema department at what was then the State University of New York at Binghamton (now Binghamton University) between 1967 and 1977. The department brought together a group of faculty and students who not only produced a remarkable body of films and videos but went on to invigorate the American media scene for the next half-century. Drawing on interviews with faculty, students, and visiting artists, MacDonald weaves together an engaging conversation that explores the academic excitement surrounding the emergence of cinema as a viable subject of study in colleges and universities. The voices of the various participants—Steve Anker, Alan Berliner, Danny Fingeroth, Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, J. Hoberman, Ralph Hocking, Ken Jacobs, Bill T. Jones, Peter Kubelka, Saul Levine, Camille Paglia, Phil Solomon, Maureen Turim, and many others—tell the story of this remarkable period. MacDonald concludes with an analysis of the pedagogical dimensions of the films that were produced in Binghamton, including Larry Gottheim’s Horizons; Jacobs’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son; Gehr’s Serene Velocity; Frampton’s Critical Mass; and Nicholas Ray’s final film, We Can’t Go Home Again. “This is an important episode in film history and in particular the history of the cinematic avant-garde, and it is exciting to have so many voices from the time assembled in one volume. A terrific book!” — Dana Polan, Cinema Studies, New York University “Binghamton Babylon is an enormously important contribution to film, video, and media historiography.” — David Sterritt, author of The Cinema of Clint Eastwood: Chronicles of America

Download or read book Welcome to Fear City written by Nathan Holmes and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-09-26 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2019 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title The early 1970s were a moment of transformation for both the American city and its cinema. As intensified suburbanization, racial division, deindustrialization, and decaying infrastructure cast the future of the city in doubt, detective films, blaxploitation, police procedurals, and heist films confronted spectators with contemporary scenes from urban streets. Welcome to Fear City argues that the location-shot crime films of the 1970s were part of a larger cultural ambivalence felt toward urban life, evident in popular magazines, architectural discourse, urban sociology, and visual culture. Yet they also helped to reinvigorate the city as a site of variegated experience and a positively disordered public life—in stark contrast to the socially homogenous and spatially ordered suburbs. Discussing the design of parking garages and street lighting, the dynamics of mugging, panoramas of ruin, and the optics of undercover police operations in such films as Klute, The French Connection, Detroit 9000, Death Wish, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Nathan Holmes demonstrates that crime genres did not simply mirror urban settings and social realities, but actively produced and circulated new ideas about the shifting surfaces of public culture.

Download or read book Encounters with Godard written by James S. Williams and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2016-05-09 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging and accessible approach to Godard’s later work, and a major intervention in the study of film aesthetics and ethics.

Encounters with Godard takes the reader on a personal voyage into the sensory pleasures and polyphonic rhythms of Jean-Luc Godard’s multimedia work since the late 1970s, from his feature films and video essays to his published writings, art books, and media performances. Godard, suggests James S. Williams, lays ethical claim to the cinematic, defined in the broadest terms as relationality and artistic resistance. An introductory chapter on the extended history of La Chinoise (1967), a film explicitly of montage, is followed by seven different types of critical encounters with Godard, encompassing the fields of art and photography, music and literature, and foregrounding themes of gender and sexuality, race and violence, mystery and emotion. The Godard who emerges here is a restless and radical experimenter who establishes new cinematic thresholds through new technology and expands the creative potential and free exchange of the archives. Williams examines works including Nouvelle vague (1990), Film socialisme (2010), Hélas pour moi (1993), and the magnum opus Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98). Wide-ranging and accessible, Encounters with Godard marks a major intervention in the study of film aesthetics and ethics while forging a vital dialogue with literature, history and politics, art and art history, music and musicology, philosophy, and aesthetics.

“A landmark contribution to our understanding of Godard and of modernist expression as a whole.” — David Sterritt, author of The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible

“Writing with a delirious lucidity, Williams opens Godard to debate and dialogue that informs, extends, opens, and illuminates what may be the greatest and most complex body of cinema of the last half-century.” — Tom Conley, author of Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema

Download or read book Writ on Water written by Charles Warren and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-04-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This eloquent book draws on the author's responses to a wide range of extraordinary films—"long takes" on Altman's Nashville, Godard's Hail Mary, Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism, and von Sternberg's Blonde Venus, as well as "short takes" on films by Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, Ross McElwee, Michelangelo Antonioni, Michael Haneke, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Charles Warren's masterful close readings blend profound philosophical reflections with a treasure trove of literary and artistic references to place film, in its relations to other arts, as one of the greatest aesthetic forms. Collectively, these essays offer an original and powerful statement on the nature of film and the intimate relation of what the author calls "film imagination" to our lives as human beings in the world. This important and much-needed book is no less than a celebration and affirmation of the very discipline of film criticism. One is left with one's appetite for film refreshed.

Download or read book Race and the Suburbs in American Film written by Merrill Schleier and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-07-01 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first anthology to explore the connection between race and the suburbs in American cinema from the end of World War II to the present. It builds upon the explosion of interest in the suburbs in film, television, and fiction in the last fifteen years, concentrating exclusively on the relationship of race to the built environment. Suburb films began as a cycle in response to both America's changing urban geography and the re-segregation of its domestic spaces in the postwar era, which excluded African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinx from the suburbs while buttressing whiteness. By defying traditional categories and chronologies in cinema studies, the contributors explore the myriad ways suburban spaces and racialized bodies in film mediate each other. Race and the Suburbs in American Film is a stimulating resource for considering the manner in which race is foundational to architecture and urban geography, which is reflected, promoted, and challenged in cinematic representations.

Download or read book Gestures of Love written by Steven Rybin and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2017-05-24 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gestures of Love considers the viewer's enchantment with charismatic actors in film as the starting point for closely analyzing the performance of love in movies. Written with a thoughtful adoration for the actors who move us, Steven Rybin examines several of cinema's most beloved on-screen movie couples, including Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, Myrna Loy and William Powell, Carole Lombard and John Barrymore, Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, and Rock Hudson and Dorothy Malone. Using the classical genres of screwball comedy, film noir, and the family melodrama as touchstones, Rybin places the depiction of romance in films into dialogue with the viewer's own emotional bond to the actors on the screen. In doing so, he offers rich new analyses of such classic films as Bringing Up Baby, The Thin Man, Twentieth Century, Laura, To Have and Have Not, Tea and Sympathy, Written on the Wind, and more.

Download or read book Bombay before Bollywood written by Rosie Thomas and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the development of Indian cinema from the 1920s to the mid-1990s, before “Bollywood” erupted onto the world stage. Bombay before Bollywood offers a fresh, alternative look at the history of Indian cinema. Avoiding the conventional focus on India’s social and mythological films, Rosie Thomas examines the subaltern genres of the “magic and fighting films”—the fantasy, costume, and stunt films popular in the decades before and immediately after independence. She explores the influence of this other cinema on the big-budget masala films of the 1970s and 1980s, before “Bollywood” erupted onto the world stage in the mid-1990s. Thomas focuses on key moments in this hidden history, including the 1924 fairy fantasy Gul-e-Bakavali; the 1933 talkie Lal-e-Yaman; the exploits of stunt queen Fearless Nadia; the magical neverlands of Hatimtai and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp; and the 1960s stunt capers Zimbo and Khilari. She includes a detailed ethnographic account of the Bombay film industry of the early 1980s, centering on the beliefs and fantasies of filmmakers themselves with regard to filmmaking and film audiences, and on-the-ground operations of the industry. A welcome addition to the fields of film studies and cultural studies, the book will also appeal to general readers with an interest in Indian cinema. “In this powerful account, Rosie Thomas opens out filmic artifacts to an array of dazzling reflections shedding new light on the movement and circulation of popular culture in India. With a remarkable body of research conducted over a period of time, Bombay before Bollywood decisively challenges certain assumptions about India, its cinemas, and its audiences.” — Ranjani Mazumdar, author of Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City “This is the archaeology of media performed with intellect, wit, and passion. Rosie Thomas pioneered this field and she remains its most brilliantly iridescent critic and advocate. If only all film studies were this revelatory and this enjoyable!” — Christopher Pinney, author of Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs “Rosie Thomas’s body of research over the last twenty-five years has set up key discourses in the study of Indian popular cinema. This book brings together her pioneering fieldwork into film industry categories and practices, and her more recent bid to resurrect a history made well-nigh clandestine by official narratives: the significance of Arabian Nights fantasies, stunt films, and visceral attractions in Bombay cinema. Pleasurably crafted and provocatively argued, Bombay before Bollywood is an important intervention in Indian and world cinema studies.” — Ravi Vasudevan, author of The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema

Download or read book Giallo written by Alexia Kannas and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2020-11-01 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italian giallo films have a peculiar allure. Taking their name from the Italian for "yellow"— reflecting the covers of pulp crime novels—these genre movies were principally produced between 1960 and the late 1970s. These cinematic hybrids of crime, horror, and detection are characterized by elaborate set-piece murders, lurid aesthetics, and experimental soundtracks. Using critical frameworks drawn from genre theory, reception studies, and cultural studies, Giallo! traces this historically marginalized genre's journey from Italian cinemas to the global cult-film canon. Through close textual analysis of films including The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), Blood and Black Lace (1964), The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971), and The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972), Alexia Kannas considers the rendering of urban space in the giallo and how it expresses a complex and unsettling critique of late modernity.

Download or read book A Very Old Machine written by Sudhir Mahadevan and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Very Old Machine, Sudhir Mahadevan shows how Indian cinema's many origins in the technologies and practices of the nineteenth century continue to play a vital and broad function in its twenty-first-century present. He proposes that there has never been a singular cinema in India; rather, Indian cinema has been a multifaceted phenomenon that was (and is) understood, experienced, and present in everyday life in myriad ways. Employing methods of media archaeology, close textual analysis, archival research, and cultural theory, Mahadevan digs into the history of photography, print media, practices of piracy and showmanship, and contemporary everyday imaginations of the cinema to offer an understanding of how the cinema came to be such a dominant force of culture in India. The result is an open-ended and innovative account of Indian cinema's "many origins."

Download or read book The Hard Sell of Paradise written by Jason Sperb and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hard Sell of Paradise examines how mid-twentieth-century Hollywood, negotiating the rhetoric of the tourism industry, offered a complex and contradictory vision of "Hawai'i" for its audiences. From the classic studio system and elite tourism of the 1930s to a postwar era of mass travel, TV, and new leisure markets, the book explores how an eclectic group of populist media reflected the language of tourism not only through its narratives of leisure, but also through its complex engagement with larger cultural and historical questions, such as colonialism, world war, and statehood. Drawing on rare archival research, The Hard Sell of Paradise also explores the valuable role that tourism partners such as United Airlines, Matson Cruise Lines, and the Hawaii Tourist Bureau played in directly and indirectly influencing such films and television shows as Waikiki Wedding, Diamond Head, Blue Hawaii, The Endless Summer, and Hawaii Five-O.

Download or read book The Slapstick Camera written by Burke Hilsabeck and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2020-02-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slapstick film comedy may be grounded in idiocy and failure, but the genre is far more sophisticated than it initially appears. In this book, Burke Hilsabeck suggests that slapstick is often animated by a philosophical impulse to understand the cinema. He looks closely at movies and gags that represent the conditions and conventions of cinema production and demonstrates that film comedians display a canny and sometimes profound understanding of their medium—from Buster Keaton's encounter with the film screen in Sherlock Jr. (1924) to Harpo Marx's lip-sync turn with a phonograph in Monkey Business (1931) to Jerry Lewis's film-on-film performance in The Errand Boy (1961). The Slapstick Camera follows the observation of philosopher Stanley Cavell that self-reference is one way in which "film exists in a state of philosophy." By moving historically across the studio era, the book looks at a series of comedies that play with the changing technologies and economic practices behind film production and describes how comedians offered their own understanding of the nature of film and filmmaking. Hilsabeck locates the hidden intricacies of Hollywood cinema in a place where one might least expect them—the clowns, idiots, and scoundrels of slapstick comedy.

Download or read book Queer Art Camp Superstar written by Ricardo E. Zulueta and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2018-04-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length study of Trecartin’s artistic genealogy, evolving aesthetics, radical approach to digital and Internet culture, and impact on contemporary art, film, and media. Hailed as “the most consequential artist to have emerged since the nineteen-eighties,” American artist and filmmaker Ryan Trecartin has received numerous accolades for his kaleidoscopic, multilayered movies and multimedia installations. However, there exists to date no comprehensive study of this prolific artist’s work. Queer Art Camp Superstar compensates for this absence of sustained critical analysis of Trecartin’s work by looking closely at a selection of his most significant movies in order to discern the artist’s artistic genealogy, evolving aesthetics, radical approach to digital and Internet culture, and impact on contemporary art, film, and media. Examining Trecartin’s substantial body of work, spanning from his early, pre-YouTube era series Early Baggage (2001–2003) to Temple Time (2016), Ricardo E. Zulueta adheres to a faithful chronological order, thus inviting readers to witness the ways thematic and formal concerns have evolved from Trecartin’s earliest movies to his more recent multimedia cinematic installations. Through precisely chosen screen captures extracted directly from the movies, Zulueta demonstrates the serious attention paid to camera angles, mise-en-scène, and shot transitions, thus revealing and reflecting on the concepts that underwrite and are underwritten in these narratives. Giving careful attention to Trecartin’s network of layered references to the grotesque and abject, carnivalesque and ludic, and camp imagery, Zulueta illustrates and explains how the artist takes on reality television, technology, fashion, consumption, and cyberspace.