Download or read book Robert Altman s Subliminal Reality written by Robert T. Self and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With his complex and unconventional films, Robert Altman often draws an impassioned response from critics but bafflement and indifference from the general public. Some audiences have dismissed his movies as insignificant, unsatisfying, and unreadable. Ironically, Altman might agree: he makes films in order to challenge filmgoers' expectations of straightforward narratives and easily understood endings. In Robert Altman's Subliminal Reality, Robert T. Self sheds light on Altman's work and provides the most comprehensive analysis of his films to date. With close readings of classics like MASH, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and Nashville, as well as the more recent films The Player, Short Cuts, and Cookie's Fortune, Self asserts the value of Altman's work not only to film theory and the entertainment industry but to American culture. Book jacket.
Download or read book Robert Altman s Soundtracks written by Gayle Sherwood Magee and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American director Robert Altman (1925-2006) first came to national attention with the surprise blockbuster M*A*S*H (1970), and he directed more than thirty feature films in the subsequent decades. Critics and scholars have noted that music is central to Altman's films, and in addition to his feature films, Altman worked in theater, opera, and the emerging field of cable television. His treatment of sound is a hallmark of his films, alongside overlapping dialogue, improvisation, and large ensemble casts. Several of his best-known films integrate musical performances into the central plot, including Nashville (1975), Popeye (1980), Short Cuts (1993), Kansas City (1996), The Company (2003) and A Prairie Home Companion (2006), his final film. Even such non-musicals as McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) have been described as, in fellow director and protégé Paul Thomas Anderson's evocative phrase, as "musicals without people singing." Robert Altman's Soundtracks considers Altman's celebrated, innovative uses of music and sound in several of his most acclaimed and lesser-known works. In so doing, these case studies serve as a window not only into Altman's considerable and varied output, but also the changing film industry over nearly four decades, from the heyday of the New Hollywood in the late 1960s through the "Indiewood" boom of the 1990s and its bust in the early 2000s. As its frame, the book considers the continuing attractions of auteurism inside and outside of scholarly discourse, by considering Altman's career in terms of the director's own self-promotion as a visionary and artist; the film industry's promotion of Altman the auteur; the emphasis on Altman's individual style, including his use of music, by the director, critics, scholars, and within the industry; and the processes, tensions, and boundaries of collaboration.
Download or read book Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling written by Mark Minett and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling reveals an Altman barely glimpsed in previous critical accounts of the filmmaker. This re-examination of his seminal work during the "Hollywood Renaissance" or "New Hollywood" period of the early 1970s (including M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Images, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, California Split, and Nashville) sheds new light on both the films and the filmmaker, reframing Altman as a complex, pragmatic innovator whose work exceeds, but is also grounded in, the norms of classical Hollywood storytelling rather than someone who rejected those norms in favor of modernist art cinema. Its findings and approach hold important implications for the study of cinematic authorship. Largely avoiding thematic exegesis, it employs an historical poetics approach, robust functionalist frameworks, archival research, and formal and statistical analysis to demystify the essential features of the standard account of Altman's filmmaking history and profile-lax narrative form, heavy reliance on the zoom, sound design replete with overlapping dialogue, improvisational infidelity to the screenplay, and a desire to subvert based in his time in the training grounds of industrial filmmaking and filmed television. The book provides a clear example of how a filmmaker might work collaboratively and pragmatically within and across media institutions to elaborate upon their sanctioned practices and aims. We misunderstand Altman's work, and the creative work of Hollywood filmmakers in general, when we insist on describing innovation as opposition to institutional norms and on describing those norms as simply assimilating innovation.
Download or read book A Companion to Robert Altman written by Adrian Danks and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-06-22 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Robert Altman presents myriad aspects of Altman’s life, career, influence and historical context. This book features 23 essays from a range of experts in the field, providing extensive coverage of these aspects and dimensions of Altman’s work. The most expansive and wide-ranging book yet published on Altman, providing a comprehensive account of Altman’s complete career Provides discussion and analysis of generally neglected aspects of Altman’s career, including the significance of his work in television and industrial film, the importance of collaboration, and the full range and import of his aesthetic innovations Includes essays by key scholars in “Altman studies”, bringing together experts in the field, emerging scholars and writers from a broad range of fields Multi-disciplinary in design and draws on a range of approaches to Altman’s work, being the first substantial publication to make use of the recently launched Robert Altman Archive at the University of Michigan Offers specific insights into particular aspects of film style and their application, industrial and aesthetic film and TV history, and particular areas such as the theorisation of space, place, authorship and gender
Download or read book Living in the End Times written by Slavoj Žižek and published by Verso. This book was released on 2011-04-18 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economics.
Download or read book Robert Altman written by Frank Caso and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known as an iconoclast and maverick, film director Robert Altman has consistently pushed against the boundaries of genre. From refashioning film noir in The Long Goodbye, the western in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the psychological drama in Images, science fiction in Quintet, and the romantic comedy in A Perfect Couple, he has always tested the limits of what film can and should do. In this book, Frank Caso examines the development of Altman’s artistic method from his earliest days in industrial film to his work in television and feature films. Altman is one of those directors whose films audiences can easily recognize, but what exactly are the distinctive elements that have become his signature? Caso identifies more than twenty such elements in Altman’s style, tracing some—such as his use of free-hand cameras and engagement with Christian imagery—to the beginning of his career. Caso also examines Altman’s unsettling mix of offbeat comedic tone with a predominance of violence, murder, and death, showing how their counterpointing effects rendered his films at once naturalistic and otherworldly. Exploring these and other aspects of the Altmanesque style, Caso maps the innovations that have made Altman a master filmmaker. Enriched with illustration throughout, Robert Altman will appeal to fans of this distinctive American auteur or anyone interested in ground-breaking cinema.
Download or read book Robert Altman written by Rick Armstrong and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life and work of motion picture director Robert Altman (1925-2006) are interpreted from a variety of perspectives in this collection of essays. Actors, historians, film scholars, and cultural theorists reflect on Altman and his five-decade career and discuss the significance of music, history and genre in his films. Two actors who have appeared in some of the filmmaker's most important works are prominently represented, with a statement from Elliot Gould (MASH, The Long Goodbye, California Split) and an essay by Michael Murphy (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, Tanner '88). The collection ends with an essay on the importance of death in the director's final productions The Company (2003) and Prairie Home Companion (2006) by noted Altman scholar Robert T. Self.
Download or read book M A S H written by David Scott Diffrient and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-12 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the origins, cultural significance, and legacy of the groundbreaking CBS television series M*A*S*H, which aired from 1972 to 1983.
Download or read book Film Form and Culture written by Robert Kolker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-14 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film, Form, and Culture (4th edition) offers a lively introduction to both the formal and cultural aspects of film. With extensive analysis of films past and present, this textbook explores film from part to whole; from the smallest unit of the shot to the way shots are edited together to create narrative. It then examines those narratives (both fiction and non-fiction) as stories and genres that speak to the culture of their time and our perceptions of them today. Composition, editing, genres (such as the gangster film, the Western, science fiction, and melodrama) are analyzed alongside numerous images to illustrate the discussion. Chapters on the individuals who make films - the production designer, cinematographer, editor, composer, producer, director, and actor - illustrate the collaborative nature of filmmaking. This new edition includes: An expanded discussion of the digital 'revolution" in filmmaking: exploring the movement from celluloid to digital recording and editing of images, as well as the use of CGI A new chapter on international cinema that covers filmmaking from Italy to Mumbai offering students a broader understanding of cinema on a worldwide scale A new chapter on film acting that uses images to create a small catalogue of gestures and expressions that are recognizable in film after film Expanded content coverage and in-depth analysis throughout, including a visual analysis of a scene from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight An expanded chapter on the cultural contexts of film summarizes the theories of cultural and media studies, concluding with a comparative analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Judd Apatow’s This is 40 Over 260 images, many in color, that create a visual index to and illustration of the discussion of films and filmmaking Each chapter ends with updated suggestions for further reading and viewing, and there is an expanded glossary of terms. Additional resources for students and teachers can also be found on the companion website (www.routledge.com/cw/kolker), which includes additional case studies, discussion questions and links to useful websites. This textbook is an invaluable and exciting resource for students beginning film studies at undergraduate level.
Download or read book The Cinema of Robert Altman written by Robert Niemi and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a controversial and tumultuous filmmaking career that spanned nearly fifty years, Robert Altman mocked, subverted, or otherwise refashioned Hollywood narrative and genre conventions. Altman's idiosyncratic vision and propensity for formal experimentation resulted in an uneven body of work: some rank failures and intriguing near-misses, as well as a number of great films that are among the most influential works of New American Cinema. While Altman always professed to have nothing authoritative to say about the state of contemporary society, this volume surveys all of his major films in their sociohistorical context to reposition the director as a trenchant satirist and social critic of postmodern America, depicted as a lonely wasteland of fraudulent spectacle, exploitative social relations, and unfulfilled solitaries in search of elusive community.
Download or read book Sound and Affect written by Judith Lochhead and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-04-23 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is no place on earth that does not echo with the near or distant sounds of human activity. More than half of humanity lives in cities, meaning the daily soundtrack of our lives is filled with sound—whether it be sonorous, harmonious, melodic, syncopated, discordant, cacophonous, or even screeching. This new anthology aims to explore how humans are placed in certain affective attitudes and dispositions by the music, sounds, and noises that envelop us. ?Sound and Affect maps a new territory for inquiry at the intersection of music, philosophy, affect theory, and sound studies. The essays in this volume consider objects and experiences marked by the correlation of sound and affect, in music and beyond: the voice, as it speaks, stutters, cries, or sings; music, whether vocal, instrumental, or machine-made; and our sonic environments, whether natural or artificial, and how they provoke responses in us. Far from being stable, correlations of sound and affect are influenced and even determined by factors as diverse as race, class, gender, and social and political experience. Examining these factors is key to the project, which gathers contributions from a cross-disciplinary roster of scholars, including both established and new voices. This agenda-setting collection will prove indispensable to anyone interested in innovative approaches to the study of sound and its many intersections with affect and the emotions.
Download or read book American Militarism on the Small Screen written by Anna Froula and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-17 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anna Froula is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of English at East Carolina University, USA Stacy Takacs is Associate Professor and Director of American Studies at Oklahoma State University, USA
Download or read book When the Movies Mattered written by Jonathan Kirshner and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In When the Movies Mattered Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis gather a remarkable collection of authors to revisit the unique era in American cinema that was New Hollywood. Ten eminent contributors, some of whom wrote about the New Hollywood movement as it unfolded across the 1960s and 1970s, assess the convergence of film-industry developments and momentous social and political changes that created a new type of commercial film that reflected those revolutionary influences in American life. Even as New Hollywood first took shape, film industry insiders and commentators alike realized its significance. At the time, Pauline Kael compared the New Hollywood to the "tangled, bitter flowering of American letters in the 1850s" and David Thomson dubbed the era "the decade when movies mattered." Thomson's words provide the impetus for this volume in which a cohort of seasoned film critics and scholars who came of age watching the movies of this era reflect upon and reconsider this golden age in American filmmaking. Contributors: Molly Haskell, Heather Hendershot, J. Hoberman, George Kouvaros, Phillip Lopate, Robert Pippin, David Sterritt, David Thomson
Download or read book More Than a Method written by Cynthia Baron and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Insightful, focused case studies of screen performance from diverse directors with a range of contemporary styles and approaches.
Download or read book Script Culture and the American Screenplay written by Kevin Alexander Boon and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-10 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though the history of the screenplay is as long and rich as the history of film itself, critics and scholars have neglected it as a topic of serious research. Script Culture and the American Screenplay treats the screenplay as a literary work in its own right, presenting analyses of screenplays from a variety of frameworks, including feminism, Marxism, structuralism, philosophy, and psychology. In distancing the text of screenplays from the on-screen performance typically associated with them, Kevin Alexander Boon expands the scope of film studies into exciting new territory with this volume. Script Culture and the American Screenplay is divided into two parts. Part 1 provides a general background for screenplay studies, tracing the evolution of the screenplay from the early shot lists and continuities of George Méliès and Thomas Harper Ince to the more detailed narratives of contemporary works. Part 2 offers specific, primarily thematic, critical examinations of screenplays, along with discussions of the original screenplay and the screenplay adaptation. In all, Boon explains that screenplay criticism distinguishes itself from traditional film studies in three major ways. The primary focus of screenplay criticism is on the screenplay rather than the film, the focus of screenplay studies is on the screenwriter rather than the director, and screenplay criticism, like literary criticism, is written to illuminate a reader’s understanding of the text. Boon demonstrates that whether we are concerned with aesthetics and identifying rules for distinguishing the literary from the non-literary, or whether we align ourselves with more contemporary theories, which recognize texts as distinguishable in their inter-relationships and marked difference, screenplays constitute a rich cache of works worthy of critical examination. Film scholars as well as students of film, creative writing, and literary studies will appreciate this singular volume.
Download or read book The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture written by Allison Graham and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011-09-12 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture examines how mass media have shaped popular perceptions of the South--and how the South has shaped the history of mass media. An introductory overview by Allison Graham and Sharon Monteith is followed by 40 thematic essays and 132 topical articles that examine major trends and seminal moments in film, television, radio, press, and Internet history. Among topics explored are the southern media boom, beginning with the Christian Broadcast Network and CNN; popular movies, television shows, and periodicals that have shaped ideas about the region, including Gone with the Wind, The Beverly Hillbillies, Roots, and Southern Living; and southern media celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Truman Capote, and Stephen Colbert. The volume details the media's involvement in southern history, from depictions of race in the movies to news coverage of the civil rights movement and Hurricane Katrina. Taken together, these entries reveal and comment on the ways in which mass media have influenced, maintained, and changed the idea of a culturally unique South.
Download or read book The Concise New Makers of Modern Culture written by Justin Wintle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-11-28 with total page 1362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Who's Who of Western culture, from Woody Allen to Emile Zola... Containing four hundred essay-style entries, and covering the period from 1850 to the present, The Concise New Makers of Modern Culture includes artists, writers, dramatists, architects, philosophers, anthropologists, scientists, sociologists, major political figures, composers, film-makers and many other culturally significant individuals and is thoroughly international in its purview. Next to Karl Marx is Bob Marley, with John Ruskin is Salman Rushdie, alongside Darwin is Luigi Dallapiccola, Deng Xiaoping rubs shoulders with Jacques Derrida as do Julia Kristeva and Kropotkin. With its global reach, The Concise New Makers of Modern Culture provides a multi-voiced witness of the contemporary thinking world. The entries carry short bibliographies and there is thorough cross-referencing as well as an index of names and key terms.
