Download or read book Middlebrow Cinema written by Sally Faulkner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Middlebrow Cinema challenges an often uninterrogated hostility to middlebrow culture that frequently dismisses it as conservative, which it often is not, and feminized or middle-class, which it often is. The volume defines the term relationally against shifting concepts of ‘high’ and ‘low’, and considers its deployment in connection with text, audience and institution. In exploring the concept of the middlebrow, this book recovers films that were widely meaningful to contemporary audiences, yet sometimes overlooked by critics interested in popular and arthouse extremes. It also addresses the question of socially-mobile audiences, who might express their aspirations through film-watching; and traces the cultural consequences of the movement of films across borders and between institutions. The first study of its kind, the volume comprises 11 original essays that test the purchase of the term ‘middlebrow’ across cultures, including those of Europe, Asia and the Americas, from the 1930s to the present day. Middlebrow Cinema brings into view a popular and aspirational - and thus especially relevant and dynamic - area of film and film culture. Ideal for students and researchers in this area, this book: Remaps ‘Popular’ and ‘arthouse’ approaches Explores British, Chinese, French, Indian, Mexican, Spanish ‘national’ cinemas alongside Continental, Hollywood, Queer, Transnational cinemas Analyses Biopic, Heritage, Historical Film, Melodrama, Musical, Sex Comedy genres.
Download or read book Middlebrow Cinema written by Sally Faulkner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Middlebrow Cinema challenges an often uninterrogated hostility to middlebrow culture that frequently dismisses it as conservative, which it often is not, and feminized or middle-class, which it often is. The volume defines the term relationally against shifting concepts of ‘high’ and ‘low’, and considers its deployment in connection with text, audience and institution. In exploring the concept of the middlebrow, this book recovers films that were widely meaningful to contemporary audiences, yet sometimes overlooked by critics interested in popular and arthouse extremes. It also addresses the question of socially-mobile audiences, who might express their aspirations through film-watching; and traces the cultural consequences of the movement of films across borders and between institutions. The first study of its kind, the volume comprises 11 original essays that test the purchase of the term ‘middlebrow’ across cultures, including those of Europe, Asia and the Americas, from the 1930s to the present day. Middlebrow Cinema brings into view a popular and aspirational - and thus especially relevant and dynamic - area of film and film culture. Ideal for students and researchers in this area, this book: Remaps ‘Popular’ and ‘arthouse’ approaches Explores British, Chinese, French, Indian, Mexican, Spanish ‘national’ cinemas alongside Continental, Hollywood, Queer, Transnational cinemas Analyses Biopic, Heritage, Historical Film, Melodrama, Musical, Sex Comedy genres.
Download or read book A History of Spanish Film written by Sally Faulkner and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-04-11 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of Spanish Film explores Spanish film from the beginnings of the industry to the present day by combining some of the most exciting work taking place in film studies with some of the most urgent questions that have preoccupied twentieth-century Spain. It addresses new questions in film studies, like 'prestige film' and 'middlebrow cinema', and places these in the context of a country defined by social mobility, including the 1920s industrial boom, the 1940s post-Civil War depression, and the mass movement into the middle classes from the 1960s onwards. Close textual analysis of some 42 films from 1910-2010 provides an especially useful avenue into the study of this cinema for the student. - Uniquely offers extensive close readings of 42 films, which are especially useful to students and teachers of Spanish cinema. - Analyses Spanish silent cinema and films of the Franco era as well as contemporary examples. - Interrogates film's relations with other media, including literature, pictorial art and television. - Explores both 'auteur' and 'popular' cinemas. - Establishes 'prestige' and the 'middlebrow' as crucial new terms in Spanish cinema studies. - Considers the transnationality of Spanish cinema throughout its century of existence. - Contemporary directors covered in this book include Almodóvar, Bollaín, Díaz Yanes and more.
Download or read book British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years written by Lawrence Napper and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years offers an understanding of British Cinema between 1928 and 1939 through an analysis of the relationship between the British film industry and other 'culture industries' such as the radio, music recording, publishing and early television. This relationship has been seen as a weakness of the British film-making tradition, but Lawrence Napper stages a re-appraisal of that tradition, arguing that it is part of a specific strategy of differentiation from Hollywood cinema, designed to appeal to the 'middlebrow' aesthetic of the most rapidly expanding audience of the period--the lower middle class. Lawrence Napper argues that the 'middlebrow' reputation for aesthetic conservatism masks an audience and popular culture marked by dynamism. 'Middlebrow' texts addressed a British audience on the move, physically (into the new suburbs), socially (as upwardly mobile consumers), economically (employed in new and developing industries, and involved in new modes of living), and culturally (embracing new forms of mass cultural consumption, such as the cinema, the wireless and the best-selling novel). The ability of these audiences to adapt cultures of the past to the media of modern life (through stage or screen adaptations) ensured their negative reputation amongst Modernist commentators and intellectual elites.
Download or read book Spanish Erotic Cinema written by Santiago Fouz-Hernandez and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-13 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive scholarly study of Spanish erotic cinema, from the 1920s until the present dayThis book covers a significant part of the history of Spanish film, from the 1920s until the present day. Starting with a study of the kiss in silent films, the volume explores homoerotic narratives in the crusade films of the 1940s, the commodification of bodies in the late Franco period, and the so-called destape (literally aundressing) period that followed the abolition of censorship during the democratic transition.Reclaiming the importance of Spanish erotic cinema as a genre in itself, a range of international scholars demonstrate how the explicit depiction of sex can be a useful tool to illuminate current and historic social issues including ageism, colonialism, domestic violence, immigration, nationalisms, or women and LGBT rights. Covering a wide range of cinematic genres, including comedy, horror and melodrama, this book provides an innovative and provocative overview of Spanish cinema history and society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.ContributorsBrad Epps, Cambridge UniversitySally Faulkner, University of ExeterSantiago Fouz-HernA!ndez, Durham UniversityAntonio LA!zaro-Reboll, University of KentAnnabel MartA-n, Dartmouth CollegeAlejandro Melero Salvador, Universidad Carlos III in MadridJorge PA(c)rez, University of Texas, AustinCarolina Sanabria, University of Costa Rica Rob Stone, University of BirminghamTom Whittaker, University of LiverpoolEva Woods PeirA Vassar CollegeSarah Wright, Royal Holloway, University of LondonBarbara Zecchi, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Download or read book The Money Illusion written by Scott Sumner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-05-06 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length work on market monetarism, written by its leading scholar. Is it possible that the consensus around what caused the 2008 Great Recession is almost entirely wrong? It’s happened before. Just as Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz led the economics community in the 1960s to reevaluate its view of what caused the Great Depression, the same may be happening now to our understanding of the first economic crisis of the 21st century. Foregoing the usual relitigating of problems such as housing markets and banking crises, renowned monetary economist Scott Sumner argues that the Great Recession came down to one thing: nominal GDP, the sum of all nominal spending in the economy, which the Federal Reserve erred in allowing to plummet. The Money Illusion is an end-to-end case for this school of thought, known as market monetarism, written by its leading voice in economics. Based almost entirely on standard macroeconomic concepts, this highly accessible text lays the groundwork for a simple yet fundamentally radical understanding of how monetary policy can work best: providing a stable environment for a market economy to flourish.
Download or read book Mass Producing European Cinema written by Christopher Meir and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Equal parts historical study, industrial analysis and critical survey of some of the most important films and television programs in recent European history, this book gives readers an overview of the development and output of this important company while also giving them a ringside seat for the latest round of the oldest battle in the film business. With films like Lucy, The Impossible and Paddington, European studios are producing hits that are unprecedented in terms of global success. Christopher Meir delves into StudioCanal, the foremost European company in the contemporary film and television industries, and chronicles its rise from a small production subsidiary of Canal Plus to being the most important global challenger to Hollywood's dominance.
Download or read book The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture written by Tom Brown and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-17 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The biographical film or biopic is a staple of film production in all major film industries and yet, within film studies, its generic, aesthetic, and cultural significance has remained underexplored. The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture fills this gap, conceptualizing the biopic with a particular eye toward the "life" of the genre internationally. New theoretical approaches combine with specially commissioned chapters on contemporary biographical film production in India, Italy, South Korea, France, Russia, Great Britain, and the US, in order to present a selective but well-rounded portrait of the biopic’s place in film culture. From Marie Antoinette to The Social Network, the pieces in this volume critically examine the place of the biopic within ongoing debates about how cinema can and should represent history and "real lives." Contributors discuss the biopic’s grounding in the conventions of the historical film, and explore the genre’s defining traits as well as its potential for innovation. The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture expands the critical boundaries of this evolving, versatile genre.
Download or read book Threatened Masculinity from British Fiction to Cold War German Cinema written by Joseph Willis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-30 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The impact of the Cold War on German male identities can be seen in the nation’s cinematic search for a masculine paradigm that rejected the fate-centered value system of its National- Socialist past while also recognizing that German males once again had become victims of fate and fatalism, but now within the value system of the Soviet and American hegemonies that determined the fate of Cold War Germany and Central Europe. This monograph is the first to demonstrate that this Cold War cinematic search sought out a meaningful masculine paradigm through film adaptations of late-Victorian and Edwardian male writers who likewise sought a means of self-determination within a hegemonic structure that often left few opportunities for personal agency. In contrast to the scholarly practice of exploring categories of modern masculinity such as Victorian imperialist manliness or German Cold-War male identity as distinct from each other, this monograph offers an important, comparative corrective that brings forward an extremely influential century-long trajectory of threatened masculinity. For German Cold-War masculinity, lessons were to be learned from history—namely, from late-Victorian and Edwardian models of manliness. Cold War Germans, like the Victorians before them, had to confront the unknowns of a new world without fear or hesitation. In a Cold-War mentality where nuclear technology and geographic distance had trumped face-to-face confrontation between East and West, Cold-War German masculinity sought alternatives to the insanity of mutual nuclear destruction by choosing not just to confront threats, but to resolve threats directly through personal agency and self-determination.
Download or read book Picturing home written by Hollie Price and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Picturing home examines the depiction of domestic life in British feature films made and released in the 1940s. It explores how pictorial representations of home onscreen in this period re-imagined modes of address that had been used during the interwar years to promote ideas about domestic modernity. Picturing home provides a close analysis of domestic life as constructed in eight films, contextualising them in relation to a broader, offscreen culture surrounding the suburban home, including magazines, advertisements, furniture catalogues and displays at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition. In doing so, it offers a new reading of British 1940s films, which demonstrates how they trod a delicate path balancing prewar and postwar, traditional and modern, private and public concerns.
Download or read book A Companion to British and Irish Cinema written by John Hill and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stimulating overview of the intellectual arguments and critical debates involved in the study of British and Irish cinemas British and Irish film studies have expanded in scope and depth in recent years, prompting a growing number of critical debates on how these cinemas are analysed, contextualized, and understood. A Companion to British and Irish Cinema addresses arguments surrounding film historiography, methods of textual analysis, critical judgments, and the social and economic contexts that are central to the study of these cinemas. Twenty-nine essays from many of the most prominent writers in the field examine how British and Irish cinema have been discussed, the concepts and methods used to interpret and understand British and Irish films, and the defining issues and debates at the heart of British and Irish cinema studies. Offering a broad scope of commentary, the Companion explores historical, cultural and aesthetic questions that encompass over a century of British and Irish film studies—from the early years of the silent era to the present-day. Divided into five sections, the Companion discusses the social and cultural forces shaping British and Irish cinema during different periods, the contexts in which films are produced, distributed and exhibited, the genres and styles that have been adopted by British and Irish films, issues of representation and identity, and debates on concepts of national cinema at a time when ideas of what constitutes both ‘British’ and ‘Irish’ cinema are under question. A Companion to British and Irish Cinema is a valuable and timely resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of film, media, and cultural studies, and for those seeking contemporary commentary on the cinemas of Britain and Ireland.
Download or read book Francophone Belgian Cinema written by Jamie Steele and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-19 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Francophone Belgian Cinema offers an original critical analysis of filmmaking in an oft-neglected 'national' and regional cinema. The book draws key distinctions between the local, national, small national, regional and transnational frameworks in both representational and industrial terms. Alongside the Dardenne brothers, this book considers four promising Francophone Belgian filmmakers who have received limited critical attention in academic publications on contemporary European cinema: Joachim Lafosse, Olivier Masset-Depasse, Lucas Belvaux and Bouli Lanners. Exploring these filmmakers' themes of post-industrialism, paternalism, the fractured nuclear family and spatial dynamics, as well as their work in the more commercial road movie and polar genres, Jamie Steele analyses their stylistic continuities and filiation. This is complemented by an analysis of how the industrial aspects of film production, distribution and exhibition contribute to the creation of both a regional and transnational cinema.
Download or read book British Women s Cinema written by Melanie Bell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British Women’s Cinema examines the place of female-centred films throughout British film history, from silent melodrama and 1940s costume dramas right up to the contemporary British ‘chick flick’.
Download or read book Positioning Art Cinema written by Geoff King and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art cinema occupies a space in the film landscape that is accorded a particular kind of value. From films that claim the status of harsh realism to others which embody aspects of the tradition of modernism or the poetic, art cinema encompasses a variety of work from across the globe. But how is art cinema positioned in the film marketplace, or by critics and in academic analysis? Exactly what kinds of cultural value are attributed to films of this type and how can this be explained? This book offers a unique analysis of how such processes work, including the broader cultural basis of the appeal of art cinema to particular audiences. Geoff King argues that there is no single definition of art cinema, but a number of distinct and recurrent tendencies are identified. At one end of the spectrum are films accorded the most 'heavyweight' status, offering the greatest challenges to viewers. Others mix aspects of art cinema with more accessible dimensions such as uses of popular genre frameworks and 'exploitation' elements involving explicit sex and violence. Including case studies of key figures such as Michael Haneke, Pedro Almodóvar and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, this is a crucial contribution to understanding both art cinema itself and the discourses through which its value is established.
Download or read book Cinema and Brexit written by Neil Archer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neil Archer's original study makes a timely and politically-engaged intervention in debates about national cinema and national identity. Structured around key examples of 'culturally English cinema' in the years up to and following the UK's 2016 vote to leave the European Union, Cinema and Brexit looks to make sense of the peculiarities and paradoxes marking this era of filmmaking. At the same time as providing a contextual and analytical reading of 21st century filmmaking in Britain, Archer raises critical questions about popular national cinema, and how Brexit has cast both light and shadow over this body of films. Central to Archer's argument is the idea that Brexit represents not just a critical moment in how we will understand future film production, but also in how we will understand production of the recent past. Using as a point of departure the London Olympics opening ceremony of 2012, Cinema and Brexit considers the tensions inherent in a wide range of films, including Skyfall (2012), Dunkirk (2017), Their Finest (2017), Darkest Hour (2017), The Crown (Netflix, 2016), Paddington (2014), Paddington 2 (2017), Never Let Me Go (2011), Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016), The Trip (2010), The Inbetweeners Movie (2011), Mr. Bean's Holiday (2007), The World's End (2013), Sightseers (2012), One Day (2011), Attack the Block (2011), King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) and The Kid Who Would be King (2019). Archer examines the complex national narratives and representations these films expound, situating his analyses within the broader commercial contexts of film production beyond Hollywood, highlighting the negotiations or contradictions at play between the industrial imperatives of contemporary films and the varied circumstances in which they are made. Considering some of the ways a popular and globally-minded English cinema is finding means to work alongside and through the contexts of Brexit, he questions what are the stakes for, and possibilities of, a global 'culturally English cinema' in 2019 and beyond.
Download or read book The Writer on Film written by J. Buchanan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-06-03 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining films about writers and acts of writing, The Writer on Film brilliantly refreshes some of the well-worn 'adaptation' debates by inviting film and literature to engage with each other trenchantly and anew – through acts of explicit configuration not adaptation.
Download or read book Transnational European Cinema written by Huw D. Jones and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024-01-03 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how audiences in contemporary Europe engage with films from other European countries. It draws on admissions data, surveys, and focus group discussions from across the continent to explain why viewers are attracted to particular European films, nationalities, and genres, including action-adventures, family films, animations, biopics, period dramas, thrillers, comedies, contemporary drama, and romance. It also examines how these films are financed, produced, and distributed, how they represent Europe and other Europeans, and how they affect audiences. Case-studies range from mainstream movies like Skyfall, Taken, Asterix & Obelix: God Save Britannia, and Sammy’s Adventures: A Turtle’s Tale to more middlebrow and arthouse titles, such as The Lives of Others, Volver, Coco Before Chanel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Intouchables, The Angels’ Share, Ida, The Hunt, and Blue Is the Warmest Colour. The study shows that watching European films can sometimes improve people’s understandings of other countries and make them feel more European. However, this is limited by the strong preference for Anglo-American action-adventures that offer few insights into the realities of European life. While some popular European arthouse films explore a wider range of nationalities, social issues, and historical events, these mainly appeal to urban-dwelling graduates. They can also sometimes accentuate tensions between Europeans instead of bringing them together. The book discusses what these findings mean for the European film industry, audiovisual policy, and scholarship on transnational and European cinema. It also considers how surveys, focus groups, databases and other methods that go beyond traditional textual analysis can offer new insights into our understanding of film.
