Download or read book Cinema and Modernity written by Murray Pomerance and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brings together several essays by seventeen scholars to explore the complexity of the essential connection between film and modernity. This volume shows us the significant ways that film has both grown in the context of the modern world and played a central role in reflecting and shaping our interactions with it.
Download or read book Migrating to the Movies written by Jacqueline Najuma Stewart and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-03-28 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of cinema as the predominant American entertainment around the turn of the last century coincided with the migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the South to the urban "land of hope" in the North. This richly illustrated book, discussing many early films and illuminating black urban life in this period, is the first detailed look at the numerous early relationships between African Americans and cinema. It investigates African American migrations onto the screen, into the audience, and behind the camera, showing that African American urban populations and cinema shaped each other in powerful ways. Focusing on Black film culture in Chicago during the silent era, Migrating to the Movies begins with the earliest cinematic representations of African Americans and concludes with the silent films of Oscar Micheaux and other early "race films" made for Black audiences, discussing some of the extraordinary ways in which African Americans staked their claim in cinema's development as an art and a cultural institution.
Download or read book Post war Cinema and Modernity written by John Orr and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2001-03 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both professors at the U. of Edinburgh (Scotland), Orr (sociology) and Taxidou (English) have collected a diverse selection of previously published material on film, much of it controversial and challenging, to produce a reader for the undergraduate classroom. The readings are divided into theory and form, form and process, and international cinema. The selected authors (who include such thinkers and directors as Andre Bazin, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gilles Deleuze, Fredric Jameson, Paul Virilio, Duncan Petrie, Susan Sontag, and Laura Mulvey) mull questions of film and modernity, film and poetry, film and postmodernity, cinematic perception, changing film technology, and the social and national context of international films. c. Book News Inc.
Download or read book Cinema Audiences and Modernity written by Daniel Biltereyst and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book confronts theoretical models on cinema as both a product and a catalyst of European modernity with new empirical work on the history of the social experience of cinema-going, film audiences and film exhibition.
Download or read book The Films of Fritz Lang written by Tom Gunning and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ln this volume Tom Gunning examines the films of Fritz Lang not only as a stylistically coherent body of work, but as an attempt to portray the modern world through cinema. The world of modernity in which systems replace individuals is conveyed by Lang's mastery of cinematic set design, composition and editing. Lang presents not only a decades-long vision of cinematic narrative which can be compared to that of Alfred Hitchcock or Jean Renoir, but a view of modernity that relates strongly to the ideas of Adorno, Brecht, Benjamin and Kracauer. From the sweeping allegorical films of the 20s to the chilly and abstract thrillers of the 50s, Lang's films, Gunning claims, are 'among the most precious records of the twentieth century'. The Films of Fritz Lang immeasurably enriches our understanding of a great artist and, in so doing, reimagines what a film arlist is: an author who fades away even in being recognised and interpreted, an enigmatic figure at the junction of aesthetics, history, biography and theory.
Download or read book Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity written by Edward Dimendberg and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004-06-15 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film noir remains one of the most enduring legacies of 1940s and ’50s Hollywood. Populated by double-crossing, unsavory characters, this pioneering film style explored a shadow side of American life during a period of tremendous prosperity and optimism. Edward Dimendberg compellingly demonstrates how film noir is preoccupied with modernity—particularly the urban landscape. The originality of Dimendberg’s approach lies in his examining these films in tandem with historical developments in architecture, city planning, and modern communications systems. He confirms that noir is not simply a reflection of modernity but a virtual continuation of the spaces of the metropolis. He convincingly shows that Hollywood’s dark thrillers of the postwar decades were determined by the same forces that shaped the city itself. Exploring classic examples of film noir such as The Asphalt Jungle, Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Naked City alongside many lesser-known works, Dimendberg masterfully interweaves film history and urban history while perceptively analyzing works by Raymond Chandler, Edward Hopper, Siegfried Kracauer, and Henri Lefebvre. A bold intervention in cultural studies and a major contribution to film history, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity will provoke debate by cinema scholars, urban historians, and students of modern culture—and will captivate admirers of a vital period in American cinema.
Download or read book Consuming Visions written by Maite Conde and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consuming Visions explores the relationship between cinema and writing in early twentieth-century Brazil, focusing on how the new and foreign medium of film was consumed by a literary society in the throes of modernization. Maite Conde places this relationship in the specific context of turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro, which underwent a radical transformation to a modern global city, becoming a concrete symbol of the country's broader processes of change and modernization. Analyzing an array of literary texts, from journalistic essays and popular women's novels to anarchist treatises and vaudeville plays, the author shows how the writers' encounters with the cinema were consistent with the significant changes taking place in the city. The arrival and initial development of the cinema in Brazil were part of the new urban landscape in which early Brazilian movies not only articulated the processes of the city's modernization but also enabled new urban spectators--women, immigrants, a new working class, and a recently liberated slave population--to see, believe in, and participate in its future. In the process, these early movies challenged the power of the written word and of Brazilian writers, threatening the hegemonic function of writing that had traditionally forged the contours of the nation's cultural life. An emerging market of consumers of the new cultural phenomena--popular theater, the department store, the factory, illustrated magazines--reflected changes that not only modernized literary production but also altered the very life and everyday urban experiences of the population. Consuming Visions is an ambitious and engaging examination of the ways in which mass culture can become an agent of intellectual and aesthetic transformation.
Download or read book Taiwan Cinema Memory and Modernity written by Ivy I-chu Chang and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-01-04 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the aesthetics and politics of Post/Taiwan-New-Cinema by examining fifteen movies by six directors and frequent award winners in international film festivals. The book considers the works of such prominent directors as Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang and Chang Tsuo-chi and their influence on Asian films, as well as emergent phenomenal directors such as Wei Te-sheng, Zero Chou, and Chung Mong-hong. It also explores the possibility of transnational and trans-local social sphere in the interstices of layered colonial legacies, nation-state domination, and global capitalism. Considering Taiwan cinema in the wake of globalization, it analyses how these films represent the socio-political transition among multiple colonial legacies, global capitalism, and the changing cross-strait relation between Taiwan and the Mainland China. The book discusses how these films represent nomadic urban middle class, displaced transnational migrant workers, roaming children and young gangsters, and explores how the continuity/disjuncture of globalization has not only carved into historical and personal memories and individual bodies, but also influenced the transnational production modes and marketing strategies of cinema.
Download or read book Visible Mind written by Christopher Hauke and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-24 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is the moving image so important in our lives? What is the link between the psychology of Jung, Freud and films? How do film and psychology address the problems of modernity? Visible Mind is a book about why film is so important to contemporary life, how film affects us psychologically as individuals, and how it affects us culturally as collective social beings. Since its inception, film has been both responsive to historical cultural conditions and reflective of changes in psychological and emotional needs. Arising at the same moment over a century ago, both film and psychoanalysis helped to frame the fragmented experience of modern life in a way that is still with us today. Visible Mind pays attention to the historical context of film for what it can tell us about our inner lives, past and present. Christopher Hauke discusses a range of themes from the perspective of film and analytical psychology, these include: The Face, The Shadow, Narrative and Story, Reality in Film, Cinema and the American Psyche, the use of Movies in the Psychotherapy Session and Archetypal themes in popular film. Unique to Visible Mind, six interviews with top film professionals from different departments both unlocks the door on the role of the unconscious in their creative process, and brings alive the reflexive critical thinking on modernity, postmodernity and Jungian psychology found throughout Visible Mind. Visible Mind is written for academics, filmmakers and students who want to understand what Jung and Freud's psychology can offer on the subject of filmmaking and the creative process, for therapists of any background who want to know more about the significance of movies in their work and for film lovers in general who are curious about what makes movies work.
Download or read book Idols of Modernity written by Patrice Petro and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-04 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With its sharp focus on stardom during the 1920s, Idols of Modernity reveals strong connections and dissonances in matters of storytelling and performance that can be traced both backward and forward, across Europe, Asia, and the United States, from the silent era into the emergence of sound. Bringing together the best new work on cinema and stardom in the 1920s, this illustrated collection showcases the range of complex social, institutional, and aesthetic issues at work in American cinema of this time. Attentive to stardom as an ensemble of texts, contexts, and social phenomena stretching beyond the cinema, major scholars provide careful analysis of the careers of both well-known and now forgotten stars of the silent and early sound era—Douglas Fairbanks, Buster Keaton, the Talmadge sisters, Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, Greta Garbo, Anna May Wong, Emil Jannings, Al Jolson, Ernest Morrison, Noble Johnson, Evelyn Preer, Lincoln Perry, and Marie Dressler.
Download or read book Melodrama and Modernity written by Ben Singer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2001-02-05 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveying the expanding conflict in Europe during one of his famous fireside chats in 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt ominously warned that "we know of other methods, new methods of attack. The Trojan horse. The fifth column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery. Spies, saboteurs, and traitors are the actors in this new strategy." Having identified a new type of war -- a shadow war -- being perpetrated by Hitler's Germany, FDR decided to fight fire with fire, authorizing the formation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to organize and oversee covert operations. Based on an extensive analysis of OSS records, including the vast trove of records released by the CIA in the 1980s and '90s, as well as a new set of interviews with OSS veterans conducted by the author and a team of American scholars from 1995 to 1997, The Shadow War Against Hitler is the full story of America's far-flung secret intelligence apparatus during World War II. In addition to its responsibilities generating, processing, and interpreting intelligence information, the OSS orchestrated all manner of dark operations, including extending feelers to anti-Hitler elements, infiltrating spies and sabotage agents behind enemy lines, and implementing propaganda programs. Planned and directed from Washington, the anti-Hitler campaign was largely conducted in Europe, especially through the OSS's foreign outposts in Bern and London. A fascinating cast of characters made the OSS run: William J. Donovan, one of the most decorated individuals in the American military who became the driving force behind the OSS's genesis; Allen Dulles, the future CIA chief who ran the Bern office, which he called "the big window onto the fascist world"; a veritable pantheon of Ivy League academics who were recruited to work for the intelligence services; and, not least, Roosevelt himself. A major contribution of the book is the story of how FDR employed Hitler's former propaganda chief, Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstengl, as a private spy. More than a record of dramatic incidents and daring personalities, this book adds significantly to our understanding of how the United States fought World War II. It demonstrates that the extent, and limitations, of secret intelligence information shaped not only the conduct of the war but also the face of the world that emerged from the shadows.
Download or read book A Modernist Cinema written by Scott W. Klein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In A Modernist Cinema, edited by Scott W. Klein and Michael Valdez Moses, sixteen distinguished scholars in the field of the New Modernist Studies explore the interrelationships among modernism, cinema, and modernity. Focusing on several culturally influential films from Europe, America, and Asia produced between 1914 and 1941, this collection of essays contends that cinema was always a modernist enterprise. Examining the dialectical relationship between a modernist cinema and modernity itself, these essays reveal how the movies represented and altered our notions and practices of modern life, as well as how the so-called crises of modernity shaped the evolution of filmmaking. Attending to the technical achievements and formal qualities of the works of several prominent directors-Giovanni Pastrone, D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, F. W. Murnau, Carl Theodore Dreyer, Dziga Vertov, Luis Buänuel, Yasujiro Ozu, John Ford, Jean Renoir, Charlie Chaplin, Leni Riefenstahl, and Orson Welles-these essays investigate several interrelated topics: how a modernist cinema represented and intervened in the political and social struggles of the era; the ambivalent relationship between cinema and the other modernist arts; the controversial interconnection between modern technology and the new art; the significance of representing the mobile human body in a new medium; the gendered history of modernity; and the transformative effects of cinema on modern conceptions of temporality, spatial relations, and political geography. Contributors: Richard Begam, Maurizia Bascagli, Enda Duffy, Laura Frost, Andrzej Gasiorek, Scott W. Klein, Douglas Mao, Laura Marcus, Jesse Matz, Tyrus Miller, Michael Valdez Moses, Michael North, Elizabeth Otto, Carrie J. Preston, Lisa Siraganian, Michael Wood"--
Download or read book H G Wells Modernity and the Movies written by Keith Williams and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates WellsOCOs interest in cinema and related media technologies, by placing it back into the contemporary cultural and scientific contexts giving rise to them. It plugs a gap in understanding WellsOCOs contribution to exploring and advancing the possibilities of cinematic narrative and its social and ideological impacts in the modern period. Previous studies concentrate on adaptations: this book accounts for the specifically (proto)cinematic techniques and concerns of WellsOCOs texts. It also focuses on contemporary film-making OCyin dialogueOCO with his ideas. Alongside HollywoodOCOs later transactions, it gives equal weight to neglected British and continental European dimensions. Chapter 1 shows how early writings ( The Time Machine and short stories) feature many kinds of radically defamiliarised vision. These constitute imaginative speculations about the forms and potentials of moving image and electronic media. Chapter 2 discusses the power of voyeurism, OCyabsent presenceOCO and the disjunction of sound-image reproduction implied in The Invisible Man and its topical politics, updated in notable screen versions. Chapter 3 extends this to dystopian warnings of systematic surveillance, broadcasting of celebrity personae and OCypost-literateOCO video culture in When the Sleeper Wakes, a crucial template for urban futures on film. Chapter 4 analyses WellsOCOs belated return to screenwriting in the 1930s. It accounts for his OCybroadbrowOCO ambition of mediating between popular and avant-garde tendencies to promote his cause and its mixed results in Things to Come, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, etc. Chapter 5 finally surveys WellsOCOs legacy on both small and large screens. It considers whether, as well as being raided for scenarios for spectacular effects, his subtexts still nourish an evolving tradition of alternative SF, which duly critiques the innovations and applications of its host media."
Download or read book Modernity at the Movies written by Camila Gatica Mizala and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2023-06-27 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cinema can both reflect the world as it is and offer escape from it. In Modernity at the Movies, Camila Gatica Mizala explores the ideas of reflection versus escapism and examines how modes of understanding the current moment emerged through the practice of going to the movies in Santiago and Buenos Aires between 1915 and 1945. Using cinema and variety magazines published in both cities, she analyzes the technology, architecture, attendance, behavior, language, censorship, and overall experience of cinema-going. These publications regularly engaged with important topics such as morality and urbanization and helped build a cinematographic audience. Gatica Mizala brings together the perception and reception of cinema as a modern art form, shifting the focus from the production of films to the experience of the audience when viewing them. By focusing on the audience instead of the films, this study is able to articulate the ways that cinema, as a modern activity, was incorporated into everyday life and discuss what it meant to be modern in early to midcentury Latin America.
Download or read book Eye of the Century written by Francesco Casetti and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008-05-14 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is it true that film in the twentieth century experimented with vision more than any other art form? And what visions did it privilege? In this brilliant book, acclaimed film scholar Francesco Casetti situates the cinematic experience within discourses of twentieth-century modernity. He suggests that film defined a unique gaze, not only because it recorded many of the century's most important events, but also because it determined the manner in which they were received. Casetti begins by examining film's nature as a medium in an age obsessed with immediacy, nearness, and accessibility. He considers the myths and rituals cinema constructed on the screen and in the theater and how they provided new images and behaviors that responded to emerging concerns, ideas, and social orders. Film also succeeded in negotiating the different needs of modernity, comparing and uniting conflicting stimuli, providing answers in a world torn apart by conflict, and satisfying a desire for everydayness, as well as lightness, in people's lives. The ability to communicate, the power to inform, and the capacity to negotiate-these are the three factors that defined film's function and outlook and made the medium a relevant and vital art form of its time. So what kind of gaze did film create? Film cultivated a personal gaze, intimately tied to the emergence of point of view, but also able to restore the immediacy of the real; a complex gaze, in which reality and imagination were combined; a piercing gaze, achieved by machine, and yet deeply anthropomorphic; an excited gaze, rich in perceptive stimuli, but also attentive to the spectator's orientation; and an immersive gaze, which gave the impression of being inside the seen world while also maintaining a sense of distance. Each of these gazes combined two different qualities and balanced them. The result was an ever inventive synthesis that strived to bring about true compromises without ever sacrificing the complexity of contradiction. As Casetti demonstrates, film proposed a vision that, in making opposites permeable, modeled itself on an oxymoronic principle. In this sense, film is the key to reading and understanding the modern experience.
Download or read book Latin American Cinema written by Lisa Shaw and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renewed interest in Latin American film industries has opened a host of paths of scholarly exploration. Productions from different countries reflect particular social attitudes, political climates and self-conceptions, and must be considered separately and as a whole. The search for national identity is a key component of Latin American films in a time of decreasing cultural diversity and pressures to westernize. Globalization and falling government support have fueled cross-border collaborations, calling into question the idea of a movie's "nationality," and leaving some nations' film industries on the brink of collapse. Whether thriving or barely surviving, struggling to remain distinct or embracing globalization on its own terms, addressing the government or society, Latin American cinema remains vibrant, offering a wealth of material to scholars of all stripes. These collected essays explore important elements of Latin American cinema and its associated national film industries. The first section of essays examines the impact of modernization on both Latin American screen images and the industry itself, offering modern and historical perspectives. The second section focuses on filmmakers who deal with issues of gender and sexuality, whether sexual transgression, the role of female characters, or societal attitudes towards sex and nudity. The final section of essays discusses the relationship between national identity and Latin American film industries: how movies are used to create a sense of self; Uruguay's ongoing identity crisis; and Brazil's use of Hollywood's stereotypical depiction of the country to depict itself. Photographs and an annotated bibliography accompany each essay, and an index supplements the text.
Download or read book The Hollywood Brand written by Peter M. Catapano and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-31 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hollywood Brand traces the development of the moving picture from its humble roots as an object of mass amusement to its transformation into an art form worthy of exhibition in museums and academic study in leading universities. This book provides historical context to the ideas that coalesce to create the iconic Hollywood brand that comes to define American identity.
