Download or read book Martin Scorsese and the American Dream written by Jim Cullen and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-18 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than perhaps any other major filmmaker, Martin Scorsese has grappled with the idea of the American Dream. His movies are full of working-class strivers hoping for a better life, from the titular waitress and aspiring singer of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore to the scrappy Irish immigrants of Gangs of New York. And in films as varied as Casino, The Aviator, and The Wolf of Wall Street, he vividly displays the glamour and power that can come with the fulfillment of that dream, but he also shows how it can turn into a nightmare of violence, corruption, and greed. This book is the first study of Scorsese’s profound ambivalence toward the American Dream, the ways it drives some men and women to aspire to greatness, but leaves others seduced and abandoned. Showing that Scorsese understands the American dream in terms of a tension between provincialism and cosmopolitanism, Jim Cullen offers a new lens through which to view such seemingly atypical Scorsese films as The Age of Innocence, Hugo, and Kundun. Fast-paced, instructive, and resonant, Martin Scorsese and the American Dream illuminates an important dimension of our national life and how a great artist has brought it into focus.
Download or read book Martin Scorsese s America written by Ellis Cashmore and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-08 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over four decades, Martin Scorsese has been the chronicler of an obsessive society, where material possessions and physical comfort are valued, where the pursuit of individual improvement is rewarded and where male prerogative is respected and preserved. Scorsese has often described his films as sociology and he has a point: his storytelling condenses complex information into comprehensible narratives about society. In this sense, he has been a guide through a dark world of nineteenth century crypto-fascism to a fetishistic twentieth century in which goods, fame, money and power are held to have magical power. Author of Tyson: Nurture of the Beast and Beckham, Ellis Cashmore turns his attention to arguably the most influential living film- maker to explore how Scorsese envisions America. Greed, manhood, the city and romantic love feature on Scorsese's landscape of secular materialism. They are among the themes Cashmore argues have driven and inform Scorsese's work. This is America, as seen through the eyes of Martin Scorsese and it is a deeply unpleasant place. Cashmore's book discloses how, collectively, Scorsese's films present an image of America. It's an image assembled from the perspectives of obsessive people, whether burned-out paramedics, compulsive entrepreneurs, tortured lovers, or celebrity-fixated comedians. It's collected from pool halls, taxicabs, boxing rings and jazz clubs. It's an image that's specific, yet ubiquitous. It is Martin Scorsese's America.
Download or read book The Construction of Race and Nation in Martin Scorsese s Gangs of New York written by Boris Kirfel and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2004-03-21 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 2,3 (B), University of Cologne (Institute for the English Language and its Didactic), course: Seminar: The Cultural Analysis of Contemporary American Films, language: English, abstract: „I believe in America. America has made my fortune.“ These are the very first two sentences in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather from 1972 - exactly the same year when director Martin Scorsese decided to film Herbert Asbury’s non-fiction book The Gangs of New York. “Asbury (1891-1963) was a journalist and a pioneer historian of low life, whose Gangs of New York originally appeared in 1928, subtitled an informal history of the underworld.” (Christie 2003, p. 250) At the beginning of The Godfather: Part II, a film which is about the life of an Italian who immigrates to the United States in the 1920s, the film depicts the arrival of Italian immigrants at the New York harbor. All the passengers of the ship are full of expectation. They are looking at the famous Statue of Liberty, which welcomes America’s new citizens. “Bring us your homeless and your poor”, is written in a poem by Emma Lazarus that is graven on a tablet within the pedestal on which the statue stands. (Cf. Christie 2003, p. 253) This sequence portrays the fulfilment of the American Dream. In 2002, after nearly 30 years of preparation, Martin Scorsese’s epic Gangs of New York which is also set in New York one century before the action of The Godfather takes place, finally was released in the United States. Scorsese’s film covers a period of New York City's history, from the 1840's through to the bloody Draft Riots of 1863, when graft and corruption permeated every level of government including the police department. The Statue of Liberty had not been built at the time in which Gangs of New York is set (Cf. Metzger 2000, p. 23), and there aren’t any Italians in the film. The movie concentrates on the struggle between the so called Native Americans and a huge number of Irish immigrants who arrive with ships every day. The picture describes America’s birth from violence and the development of the country into the state which is presented in Coppola’s The Godfather and former pictures by Martin Scorsese like Goodfellas or Casino. Gangs of New York is in a way the foundation of which all the other movies by Scorsese are based on.
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 The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese written by Mark Conard and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2007-05-31 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Academy Award–winning director Martin Scorsese is one of the most significant American filmmakers in the history of cinema. Although best known for his movies about gangsters and violence, such as Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, and Taxi Driver, Scorsese has addressed a much wider range of themes and topics in the four decades of his career. In The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese, an impressive cast of contributors explores the complex themes and philosophical underpinnings of Martin Scorsese’s films. The essays concerning Scorsese’s films about crime and violence investigate the nature of friendship, the ethics of vigilantism, and the nature of unhappiness. The authors delve deeply into the minds of Scorsese’s tortured characters and explore how the men and women he depicts grapple with moral codes and their emotions. Several of the essays explore specific themes in individual films. The authors describe how Scorsese addresses the nuances of social mores and values in The Age of Innocence, the nature of temptation and self-sacrifice in The Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out the Dead, and the complexities of innovation and ambition in The Aviator. Other chapters in the collection examine larger philosophical questions. In a world where everything can be interpreted as meaningful, Scorsese at times uses his films to teach audiences about the meaning in life beyond the everyday world depicted in the cinema. For example, his films touching on religious subjects, such as Kundun and The Last Temptation of Christ, allow the director to explore spiritualism and peaceful ways of responding to the chaos in the world.Filled with penetrating insights on Scorsese’s body of work, The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese shows the director engaging with many of the most basic questions about our humanity and how we relate to one another in a complex world.
Download or read book Martin Scorsese written by Martin Scorsese and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1999 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected interviews with the man who has been called the greatest living American film director
Download or read book Projecting the End of the American Dream written by Gordon B. Arnold and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative book reveals how Hollywood films reflect our deepest fears and anxieties as a country, often recording our political beliefs and cultural conditions while underscoring the darker side of the American way of life. Long before the war in Iraq and the economic crises of the early 21st century, Hollywood has depicted a grim view of life in the United States, one that belies the prosperity and abundance of the so-called American Dream. While the country emerged from World War II as a world power, collectively our sense of security had been threatened. The result is a cinematic body of work that has America's decline and ruin as a central theme. The author draws from popular films across all genres and six decades to illustrate how the political climate of the times influenced their creation. Projecting the End of the American Dream: Hollywood's Visions of U.S. Decline combines film history, social history, and political history to reveal important themes in the unfolding American narrative. Discussions focus on a wide variety of films, including Rambo, Planet of the Apes, and Easy Rider.
Download or read book The American Dream written by Jim Cullen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-02-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The American Dream" is one of the most familiar and resonant phrases in our national lexicon, so familiar that we seldom pause to ask its origin, its history, or what it actually means. In this fascinating short history, Jim Cullen explores the meaning of the American Dream, or rather the several American Dreams that have both reflected and shaped American identity from the Pilgrims to the present. Cullen notes that the United States, unlike most other nations, defines itself not on the facts of blood, religion, language, geography, or shared history, but on a set of ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and consolidated in the Constitution. At the core of these ideals lies the ambiguous concept of the American Dream, a concept that for better and worse has proven to be amazingly elastic and durable for hundreds of years and across racial, class, and other demographic lines. The version of the American Dream that dominates our own time--what Cullen calls "the Dream of the Coast"--is one of personal fulfillment, of fame and fortune all the more alluring if achieved without obvious effort, which finds its most insidious expression in the culture of Hollywood.
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 Sports Movies and the American Dream written by Grant Wiedenfeld and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Through the heart of Hollywood cinema runs a surprising current of progressive politics. Sports movies, a genre that has flourished since the mid-seventies, evoke the American dream and represent the nation to itself. Once considered mere credos for Reaganism, on closer view, movies from Rocky (1976) to Ali (2001) dream of democratic participation and recognition more than individual success. In every case, off-field relationships take precedence over on-field competition. Arranged chronologically, this critical study of six major sports films also tells the story of multiculturalism's gradual adoption. The mainstream's first minority heroes are paradoxically white ethnic, rural, working-class men, exemplified by Rocky, Slap Shot (1977) and The Natural (1984); Black, brown, and women characters follow in White Men Can't Jump (1992), A League of Their Own (1992), and Ali. But despite their insistence on community and diversity these popular dramas show limited faith in civic institutions. Hannah Arendt, Jeffrey Alexander, and others inform original analysis and commentary on the political significance of popular culture. Reading these familiar movies from another angle paints a fresh picture of how the United States has imagined democracy since its bicentennial"--
Download or read book Christian Zen written by William Johnston and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Christian Zen was first published in the early 1970's, it was reviewed enthusiastically in many parts of the world. A subsequent edition added new material from the author's experience. This latest edition, from Fordham University Press, includes a new Preface by the author and a letter to the author from the Christian mystic Thomas Merton, written shortly before Merton's untimely death. William Johnston presents a study of Zen meditation in the light of Christian mysticism.
Download or read book A Companion to Martin Scorsese written by Aaron Baker and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Martin Scorsese A Companion to Martin Scorsese “This valuable book brings the exceptional scale of Martin Scorsese’s film work into clear view. His achievements are monumental, and the essays collected in this work provide wonderfully detailed and vivid analyses of his oeuvre. A comprehensive study of the most exciting filmmaker working today.” Robert Burgoyne, University of St Andrews A Companion to Martin Scorsese, Revised Edition is a comprehensive collection of original essays assessing the career of one of America’s most prominent contemporary filmmakers. The first reference work of its kind, this book contains contributions from influential scholars in North America and Europe. The essays use a variety of analytic approaches to study numerous aspects of Scorsese’s work, from his earliest films to his place within the history of American and world cinema. They consider his work in relation to auteur theory, the genres in which he has worked, his use of popular music, and his recent involvement with film preservation. Several of the essays offer fresh interpretations of some of Scorsese’s most influential films, including Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, Gangs of New York, Hugo, and The Irishman. Others take a broader approach and discuss the representation of violence, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender, race, and other themes across his work. With insights that will interest film scholars as well as movie enthusiasts, this is an important contribution to the scholarship of contemporary American cinema.
Download or read book Restless in the Promised Land written by Jim Cullen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2001 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From early settlers to urbanites, indigenous peoples to immigrants, citizens to consumers, and politicians to popular culture icons, the American Dream means many things to many people. Inherent in its story is the complex tale of the rise of Catholicism in this country and its relationship to the American Dream.
Download or read book The Columbia Companion to American History on Film written by Peter C. Rollins and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-24 with total page 695 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American history has always been an irresistible source of inspiration for filmmakers, and today, for good or ill, most Americans'sense of the past likely comes more from Hollywood than from the works of historians. In important films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915), Roots (1977), Apocalypse Now (1979), and Saving Private Ryan (1998), how much is entertainment and how much is rooted in historical fact? In The Columbia Companion to American History on Film, more than seventy scholars consider the gap between history and Hollywood. They examine how filmmakers have presented and interpreted the most important events, topics, eras, and figures in the American past, often comparing the film versions of events with the interpretations of the best historians who have explored the topic. Divided into eight broad categories—Eras; Wars and Other Major Events; Notable People; Groups; Institutions and Movements; Places; Themes and Topics; and Myths and Heroes—the volume features extensive cross-references, a filmography (of discussed and relevant films), notes, and a bibliography of selected historical works on each subject. The Columbia Companion to American History on Film is also an important resource for teachers, with extensive information for research or for course development appropriate for both high school and college students. Though each essay reflects the unique body of film and print works covering the subject at hand, every essay addresses several fundamental questions: What are the key films on this topic? What sources did the filmmaker use, and how did the film deviate (or remain true to) its sources? How have film interpretations of a particular historical topic changed, and what sorts of factors—technological, social, political, historiographical—have affected their evolution? Have filmmakers altered the historical record with a view to enhancing drama or to enhance the "truth" of their putative message?
Download or read book The Last Waltz of The Band written by Neil Minturn and published by Pendragon Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Vol. 2 of the series CMS Sourcebooks in American Music, Neil Minturn acknowledges the phenomenon of rock and roll with a serious examination of Martin Scorsese's film, THE LAST WALTZ (1978), the celebrated "rockumentary" that so artfully captured for posterity the final performance of The Band. From 1861 to 1976, this partnership of one American and four Canadians produced an impressive body of popular song in the rock idiom between 1961 and 1976. Joining its members for their farewell performance are a variety of guests, who, like The Band itself, reflected the rich array of traditions that have nourished rock and roll since its emergence. Minturn approaches the substance of the performances and the film itself in terms of intimacy and tradition. He presents the San Francisco concert as a summation of an extraordinary musical journey and prefaces his "scene-by-scene" analysis with a cogent introduction to documentary filmmaking. Selected performances are discussed in detail.
Download or read book Hollywood Under Siege written by Thomas R Lindlof and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2008-08-08 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1988, director Martin Scorsese fulfilled his lifelong dream of making a film about Jesus Christ. Rather than celebrating the film as a statement of faith, churches and religious leaders immediately went on the attack, alleging blasphemy. At the height of the controversy, thousands of phone calls a day flooded the Universal switchboard, and before the year was out, more than three million mailings protesting the film fanned out across the country. For the first time in history, a studio took responsibility for protecting theaters and scrambled to recruit a "field crisis team" to guide The Last Temptation of Christ through its contentious American openings. Overseas, the film faced widespread censorship actions, with thirteen countries eventually banning the film. The response in Europe turned violent when opposition groups sacked theaters in France and Greece and caused injuries to dozens of moviegoers. Twenty years later, author Thomas R. Lindlof offers a comprehensive account of how this provocative film came to be made and how Universal Pictures and its parent company MCA became targets of the most intense, unremitting attacks ever mounted against a media company. The film faced early and determined opposition from elements of the religious Right when it was being developed at Paramount during the last year the studio was run by the celebrated troika of Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, and Jeffrey Katzenberg. By the mid-1980s, Scorsese's film was widely regarded as unmakeable—a political stick of dynamite that no one dared touch. Through the joint efforts of two of the era's most influential executives, CAA president Michael Ovitz and Universal Pictures chairman Thomas P. Pollock, this improbable project found its way into production. The making of The Last Temptation of Christ caught evangelical Christians at a moment when they were suffering a crisis of confidence in their leadership. The religious right seized on the film as a way to rehabilitate its image and to mobilize ordinary citizens to attack liberalism in art and culture. The ensuing controversy over the film's alleged blasphemy escalated into a full-scale war fought out very openly in the media. Universal/MCA faced unprecedented calls for boycotts of its business interests, anti-Semitic rhetoric and death threats were directed at MCA chairman Lew Wasserman and other MCA executives, and the industry faced the specter of violence at theaters. Hollywood Under Siege draws upon interviews with many of the key figures—Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Michael Ovitz, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Jack Valenti, Thomas P. Pollock, and Willem Dafoe—to explore the trajectory of the film from its conception to the subsequent epic controversy and beyond. Lindlof offers a fascinating dissection of a critical episode in the embryonic culture wars, illuminating the explosive effects of the clash between the interests of the media industry and the forces of social conservatism.
Download or read book 1980 written by Jim Cullen and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-14 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1980 was a turning point in American history. When the year began, it was still very much the 1970s, with Jimmy Carter in the White House, a sluggish economy marked by high inflation, and the disco still riding the airwaves. When it ended, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in a landslide, inaugurating a rightward turn in American politics and culture. We still feel the effects of this tectonic shift today, as even subsequent Democratic administrations have offered neoliberal economic and social policies that owe more to Reagan than to FDR or LBJ. To understand what the American public was thinking during this pivotal year, we need to examine what they were reading, listening to, and watching. 1980: America's Pivotal Year puts the news events of the era—everything from the Iran hostage crisis to the rise of televangelism—into conversation with the year’s popular culture. Separate chapters focus on the movies, television shows, songs, and books that Americans were talking about that year, including both the biggest hits and some notable flops that failed to capture the shifting zeitgeist. As he looks at the events that had Americans glued to their screens, from the Miracle on Ice to the mystery of Who Shot J.R., cultural historian Jim Cullen garners surprising insights about how Americans’ attitudes were changing as they entered the 1980s. Praise for Jim Cullen's previous Rutgers University Press books: "Informed and perceptive" —Norman Lear on Those Were the Days: Why All in the Family Still Matters "Jim Cullen is one of the most acute cultural historians writing today." —Louis P. Masur, author of The Sum of Our Dreams on Martin Scorsese and the American Dream "This is a terrific book, fun and learned and provocative....Cullen provides an entertaining and thoughtful account of the ways that we remember and how this is influenced and directed by what we watch." —Jerome de Groot, author of Consuming History on From Memory to History
