Download or read book Marx at the Movies written by Lars Kristensen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marx and the Moving Image approaches cinema from a Marxist perspective. It argues that the supposed 'end of history', marked by the comprehensive triumph of capitalism and the 'end of cinema', calls for revisiting Marx's writings in order to analyse film theories, histories and practices.
Download or read book Marxism Goes to the Movies written by Mike Wayne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-28 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introducing the key concepts and thinkers within the Marxist tradition, Marxism Goes to the Movies demonstrates their relevance to film theory and practice past and present. Author Mike Wayne argues that Marxist filmmaking has engaged with and transformed this popular medium, developing its potential for stimulating revolutionary consciousness. As the crisis of capitalism deepens, this history and these resources are vital for a better future. Marxism is one of the few approaches that can bring together political, economic, formal and cultural analysis into a unified approach of studying film, and how films in turn can help us understand and even critically interrogate these forces. The book examines how filmmakers, who have been influenced by Marxism, have made some of the most significant contributions to film culture globally, and provides historical perspective on the development of Marxism and film. Each chapter covers a broad theme that is broken down into sections that are cross-referenced throughout, providing helpful navigation of the material. Clear and concise in its arguments, this is an ideal introduction for students of Marxism and film, inviting readers to deepen their knowledge and understanding of the subject.
Download or read book Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club written by Anna Kornbluh and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-05-02 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anna Kornbluh provides an overview of Marxist approaches to film, with particular attention to three central concepts in Marxist theory in general that have special bearing on film: “the mode of production,” “ideology,” and “mediation.” In explaining how these concepts operate and how they have been used and misused in film studies, the volume employs a case study to exemplify the practice of Marxist film theory. Fight Club is an exceptionally useful text with which to explore these three concepts because it so vividly and pedagogically engages with economic relations, ideological distortion, and opportunities for transformation. At the same time, it is a very typical film in terms of the conditions of its production, its marketing, and its popularity. Adapted from a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, the film is a contemporary classic that has lent itself to significant re-interpretation with every shift in the political economic landscape since its debut. Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club models a detailed cinematic interpretation that students can practice with other films, and furnishes a set of ideas about cinema and society that can be carried into other kinds of study, giving students tools for analyzing culture broadly defined.
Download or read book The Marxist and the Movies written by Larry Ceplair and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2007-11-16 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As part of its effort to expose Communist infiltration in the United States and eliminate Communist influence on movies, from 1947–1953 the House Committee on Un-American Activities subpoenaed hundreds of movie industry employees suspected of membership in the Communist Party. Most of them, including screenwriter Paul Jarrico (1915–1997), invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions about their political associations. They were all blacklisted. In The Marxist and the Movies, Larry Ceplair narrates the life, movie career, and political activities of Jarrico, the recipient of an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for Tom, Dick and Harry (1941) and the producer of Salt of the Earth (1954), one of the most politically besieged films in the history of the United States. Though Jarrico did not reach the upper eschelon of screenwriting, he worked steadily in Hollywood until his blacklisting. He was one of the movie industry's most engaged Communists, working on behalf of dozens of social and political causes. Song of Russia (1944) was one of the few assignments that allowed him to express his political beliefs through his screenwriting craft. Though MGM planned the film as a conventional means of boosting domestic support for the USSR, a wartime ally of the United States, it came under attack by a host of anti-Communists. Jarrico fought the blacklist in many ways, and his greatest battle involved the making of Salt of the Earth. Jarrico, other blacklisted individuals, and the families of the miners who were the subject of the film created a landmark film in motion picture history. As did others on the blacklist, Jarrico decided that Europe offered a freer atmosphere than that of the cold war United States. Although he continued to support political causes while living abroad, he found it difficult to find remunerative black market screenwriting assignments. On the scripts he did complete, he had to use a pseudonym or allow the producers to give screen credit to others. Upon returning to the United States in 1977, he led the fight to restore screen credits to the blacklisted writers who, like himself, had been denied screen credit from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. Despite all the obstacles he encountered, Jarrico never lost his faith in the progressive potential of movies and the possibility of a socialist future. The Marxist and the Movies details the relationship between a screenwriter’s work and his Communist beliefs. From Jarrico’s immense archive, interviews with him and those who knew him best, and a host of other sources, Ceplair has crafted an insider’s view of Paul Jarrico’s life and work, placing both in the context of U.S. cultural history.
Download or read book Why a Duck written by Richard J. Anobile and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cartographies of the Absolute written by Alberto Toscano and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2015-02-27 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can capital be seen? Cartographies of the Absolute surveys the disparate answers to this question offered by artists, film-makers, writers and theorists over the past few decades. It zones in on the crises of representation that have accompanied the enduring crisis of capitalism, foregrounding the production of new visions and artefacts that wrestle with the vastness, invisibility and complexity of the abstractions that rule our lives.
Download or read book Giraffes on Horseback Salad written by Josh Frank and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lushly illustrated graphic novel re-creates a lost Marx Brothers script written by modern art icon Salvador Dali. Grab some popcorn and take a seat...The curtain is about to rise on a film like no other! But first, the real-life backstory: Giraffes on Horseback Salad was a Marx Brothers film written by modern art icon Salvador Dali, who’d befriended Harpo. Rejected by MGM, the script was thought lost forever. Author and lost-film buff Josh Frank unearthed the original script, and Dali’s notes and sketches for the project, tucked away in museum archives. With comedian Tim Heidecker and Spanish comics creator Manuela Pertega, he’s re-created the film as a graphic novel in all its gorgeous full-color, cinematic, surreal glory. In the story, a businessman named Jimmy (played by Harpo) is drawn to the mysterious Surrealist Woman, whose very presence changes humdrum reality into Dali-esque fantasy. With the help of Groucho and Chico, Jimmy seeks to join her fantastical world—but forces of normalcy threaten to end their romance. Includes new Marx Brothers songs and antics, plus the real-world story behind the historic collaboration.
Download or read book Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film written by Daniel Mourenza and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-05 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Benjamin is today regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century. Often captured in pensive pose, his image is now that of a serious intellectual. But Benjamin was also a fan of the comedies of Adolphe Menjou, Mickey Mouse, and Charlie Chaplin. As an antidote to repressive civilization, he developed, through these figures, a theory of laughter. Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film is the first monograph to thoroughly analyse Benjamin's film writings, contextualizing them within his oeuvre whilst also paying attention to the various films, actors, and directors that sparked his interest. The book situates all these writings within Benjamin's 'anthropological materialism', a concept that analyses the transformations of the human sensorium through technology. Through the term 'innervation', Benjamin thought of film spectatorship as an empowering reception that, through a rush of energy, would form a collective body within the audience, interpenetrating a liberated technology into the distracted spectators. Benjamin's writings on Soviet film and German cinema, Charlie Chaplin, and Mickey Mouse are analysed in relation to this posthuman constellation that Benjamin had started to dream of in the early twenties, long before he started to theorize about films.
Download or read book Groucho written by Arthur Marx and published by Samuel French, Inc.. This book was released on 1988 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This inspired bio musical about The One and Only begins with Groucho as an old man doing his famous Carnegie Hall show. It then goes back to the beginnings of the Marx Brothers and their struggles to make it in vaudeville, their rise to stardom and their eventual break up. All classic Groucho songs are included. One actor plays Groucho, another plays Chico and Harpo, and one actress plays all the wives, girlfriends and Margaret Dumont. A hit in New York, across the U.S. and in London, this show will delight Marx Brothers fans and the as yet uninitiated.
Download or read book The Hidden Foundation written by David E. James and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging from the earliest days of the cinema to the present, The Hidden Foundation reestablishes class as a fundamental aspect of film history. Featuring prominent film scholars and historians, this volume is unique in its international scope, diversity of perspectives and methodologies, and the sweep of its analysis. The Hidden Foundation begins with a review of the history of class in social and political thought, going on to chronicle its disappearance from film and cultural studies. Subsequent essays consider topics ranging from American and Soviet silent film through Chinese and American film in the fifties, to the restructuring of the working class that was a feature of films of the 1980s in both the United States and Great Britain.
Download or read book Raised Eyebrows written by Steve Stoliar and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A real page-turner that is by turns startling, shocking and as engrossing as a good novel. What a splendid book it is." -- Dick Cavett "It's one of the best books about a show-business icon I've ever read...It makes Groucho live so much more than the conventional bios." -- Woody Allen "Raised Eyebrows is an intimate account of one of our national treasures - Groucho Marx. It's written by a young man who was fortunate enough to live with and work for Groucho, and if he doesn't know what he's talking about, who would? It has a unique insider's point of view and is a fascinating study of a man who was one of the kings of comedy." -- Jack Lemmon "In this delightful report, Mr. Stoliar brings the real Groucho alive with wit, tears and all." -- Steve Allen
Download or read book Children of Marx and Coca Cola written by Xiaoping Lin and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2009-11-02 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Children of Marx and Coca-Cola affords a deep study of Chinese avant-garde art and independent cinema from the mid-1990s to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Informed by the author’s experience in Beijing and New York—global cities with extensive access to an emergent transnational Chinese visual culture—this work situates selected artworks and films in the context of Chinese nationalism and post-socialism and against the background of the capitalist globalization that has so radically affected contemporary China. It juxtaposes and compares artists and independent filmmakers from a number of intertwined perspectives, particularly in their shared avant-garde postures and perceptions. Xiaoping Lin provides illuminating close readings of a variety of visual texts and artistic practices, including installation, performance, painting, photography, video, and film. Throughout he sustains a theoretical discussion of representative artworks and films and succeeds in delineating a variegated postsocialist cultural landscape saturated by market forces, confused values, and lost faith. This refreshing approach is due to Lin’s ability to tackle both Chinese art and cinema rigorously within a shared discursive space. He, for example, aptly conceptualizes a central thematic concern in both genres as "postsocialist trauma" aggravated by capitalist globalization. By thus focusing exclusively on the two parallel and often intersecting movements or phenomena in the visual arts, his work brings about a fruitful dialogue between the narrow field of traditional art history and visual studies more generally. Children of Marx and Coca-Cola will be a major contribution to China studies, art history, film studies, and cultural studies. Multiple audiences—specialists, teachers, and students in these disciplines, as well as general readers with an interest in contemporary Chinese society and culture—will find that this work fulfills an urgent need for sophisticated analysis of China’s cultural production as it assumes a key role in capitalist globalization.
Download or read book The Anatomy of Harpo Marx written by Wayne Koestenbaum and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-02-29 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Anatomy of Harpo Marx is a luxuriant, detailed play-by-play account of Harpo Marx’s physical movements as captured on screen. Wayne Koestenbaum guides us through the thirteen Marx Brothers films, from The Cocoanuts in 1929 to Love Happy in 1950, to focus on Harpo’s chief and yet heretofore unexplored attribute—his profound and contradictory corporeality. Koestenbaum celebrates the astonishing range of Harpo’s body—its kinks, sexual multiplicities, somnolence, Jewishness, "cute" pathos, and more. In a virtuosic performance, Koestenbaum’s text moves gracefully from insightful analysis to cultural critique to autobiographical musing, and provides Harpo with a host of odd bedfellows, including Walter Benjamin and Barbra Streisand.
Download or read book Groucho Marx written by Lee Siegel and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-28 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born Julius Marx in 1890, the brilliant comic actor who would later be known as Groucho was the most verbal of the famed comedy team, the Marx Brothers, his broad slapstick portrayals elevated by ingenious wordplay and double entendre. In his spirited biography of this beloved American iconoclast, Lee Siegel views the life of Groucho through the lens of his work on stage, screen, and television. The author uncovers the roots of the performer’s outrageous intellectual acuity and hilarious insolence toward convention and authority in Groucho’s early upbringing and Marx family dynamics. The first critical biography of Groucho Marx to approach his work analytically, this fascinating study draws unique connections between Groucho’s comedy and his life, concentrating primarily on the brothers’ classic films as a means of understanding and appreciating Julius the man. Unlike previous uncritical and mostly reverential biographies, Siegel’s “bio-commentary” makes a distinctive contribution to the field of Groucho studies by attempting to tell the story of his life in terms of his work, and vice versa.
Download or read book Understanding Film written by Mike Wayne and published by Pluto Press (UK). This book was released on 2005-05-20 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ideal for students looking for a radical approach to film studies.
Download or read book The Best Old Movies for Families written by Ty Burr and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2008-12-10 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If a child can watch Barney, can’t that same child also enjoy watching Charlie Chaplin or the Marx Brothers? And as they get older, wouldn’t they grow to like screwball comedies (His Girl Friday), women’s weepies (Imitation of Life), and westerns (The Searchers)? The answer is that they’ll follow because they’ll have learned that “old” does not necessarily mean “next channel, please.”Here is an impassioned and eminently readable guide that introduces the delights of the golden age of movies. Ty Burr has come up with a winning prescription for children brought up on Hollywood junk food. FOR THE LITTLE ONES (Ages 3—6): Fast-paced movies that are simple without being unsophisticated, plainspoken without being dumbed down. Singin’ in the Rain and Bringing Up Baby are perfect.FOR THE ONES IN BETWEEN (Ages 7—12): “Killer stories,” placing easily grasped characters in situations that start simply and then throw curveballs. The African Queen and Some Like It Hot do the job well.FOR THE OLDER ONES (Ages 13+): Burr recommends relating old movies to teens’ contemporary favorites: without Hitchcock, there could be no The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, without Brando, no Johnny Depp.
Download or read book Versions of Hollywood Crime Cinema written by Carl Howard Freedman and published by Intellect (UK). This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No society is without crime, prompting Nathaniel Hawthorne's narrator to make his famous statement in The Scarlet Letter that, however high its hopes are, no civilization can fail to allot a portion of its soil as the site of a prison. Crime has also been a prevailing, common theme in films that call us to consider its construction: How do we determine what is lawful and what is criminal? And how, in turn, does this often hypocritical distinction determine society? Film, argues Carl Freedman, is an especially fruitful medium for considering questions like these. With Versions of Hollywood Crime Cinema, he offers a series of critical readings spanning several genres. From among the mob movies, Freedman focuses on Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy--arguably the foremost work of crime cinema--crafting a convincing argument that the plot's action is principally driven by the shift from Sicily to America, which marks the shift to a capitalist society. Turning his attention to other genres, Freedman also looks at film noir and Westerns, in addition to films for which crime is significant but not central, from horror movies like Stanley Kubrick's The Shining to science fiction and social realist films like The Grapes of Wrath. In recent years, television has welcomed innovative works like Boardwalk Empire, The Wire, and The Sopranos, and Freedman discusses how television's increasingly congenial creative environment has allowed it to turn out productions whose ability to engage with these larger social questions rivals that of films from the height of cinema's Golden Age.
