Download or read book Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space written by Jennifer M. Bean and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-02 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this cross-cultural history of narrative cinema and media from the 1910s to the 1930s, leading and emergent scholars explore the transnational crossings and exchanges that occurred in early cinema between the two world wars. Drawing on film archives from around the world, this volume advances the premise that silent cinema freely crossed national borders and linguistic thresholds in ways that became far less possible after the emergence of sound. These essays address important questions about the uneven forces–geographic, economic, political, psychological, textual, and experiential–that underscore a non-linear approach to film history. The "messiness" of film history, as demonstrated here, opens a new realm of inquiry into unexpected political, social, and aesthetic crossings of silent cinema.
Download or read book Public Spectacles of Violence written by Rielle Navitski and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Public Spectacles of Violence Rielle Navitski examines the proliferation of cinematic and photographic images of criminality, bodily injury, and technological catastrophe in early twentieth-century Mexico and Brazil, which were among Latin America’s most industrialized nations and later developed two of the region’s largest film industries. Navitski analyzes a wide range of sensational cultural forms, from nonfiction films and serial cinema to illustrated police reportage, serial literature, and fan magazines, demonstrating how media spectacles of violence helped audiences make sense of the political instability, high crime rates, and social inequality that came with modernization. In both nations, sensational cinema and journalism—influenced by imported films—forged a common public sphere that reached across the racial, class, and geographic divides accentuated by economic growth and urbanization. Highlighting the human costs of modernization, these media constructed everyday experience as decidedly modern, in that it was marked by the same social ills facing industrialized countries. The legacy of sensational early twentieth-century visual culture remains felt in Mexico and Brazil today, where public displays of violence by the military, police, and organized crime are hypervisible.
Download or read book Studios Before the System written by Brian R. Jacobson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By 1915, Hollywood had become the epicenter of American filmmaking, with studio "dream factories" structuring its vast production. Filmmakers designed Hollywood studios with a distinct artistic and industrial mission in mind, which in turn influenced the form, content, and business of the films that were made and the impressions of the people who viewed them. The first book to retell the history of film studio architecture, Studios Before the System expands the social and cultural footprint of cinema's virtual worlds and their contribution to wider developments in global technology and urban modernism. Focusing on six significant early film corporations in the United States and France—the Edison Manufacturing Company, American Mutoscope and Biograph, American Vitagraph, Georges Méliès's Star Films, Gaumont, and Pathé Frères—as well as smaller producers and film companies, Studios Before the System describes how filmmakers first envisioned the space they needed and then sourced modern materials to create novel film worlds. Artificially reproducing the natural environment, film studios helped usher in the world's Second Industrial Revolution and what Lewis Mumford would later call the "specific art of the machine." From housing workshops for set, prop, and costume design to dressing rooms and writing departments, studio architecture was always present though rarely visible to the average spectator in the twentieth century, providing the scaffolding under which culture, film aesthetics, and our relation to lived space took shape.
Download or read book Unwatchable written by Nicholas Baer and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-14 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We all have images that we find unwatchable, whether for ethical, political, or sensory and affective reasons. From news coverage of terror attacks to viral videos of police brutality, and from graphic horror films to transgressive artworks, many of the images in our media culture might strike us as unsuitable for viewing. Yet what does it mean to proclaim something “unwatchable”: disturbing, revolting, poor, tedious, or literally inaccessible? With over 50 original essays by leading scholars, artists, critics, and curators, this is the first book to trace the “unwatchable” across our contemporary media environment, in which viewers encounter difficult content on various screens and platforms. Appealing to a broad academic and general readership, the volume offers multidisciplinary approaches to the vast array of troubling images that circulate in global visual culture.
Download or read book The Silent Cinema Reader written by Lee Grieveson and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Silent Cinema Reader brings together key writings on cinema from the beginnings of film in 1894 to the advent of sound in 1927, addressing the development of film production and exhibition technologies, methods of distribution, film form, and film culture during this critical period on film history. Thematic sections address: film projection and variety shows; storytelling and the Nickelodeon; cinema and reform; feature films and cinema programs; classical Hollywood cinema and European national cinemas. Each section is introduced by the editors, and contains suggestions for further readings and film viewings.
Download or read book Imagining the City The politics of urban space written by Christian Emden and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is based on papers given at the conference 'Imagining the City' held in Cambridge in 2004. Together they examine the city as imagined space and as a matrix for imagined worlds, using French, German, English, Italian, Russian and North American examples.
Download or read book Where Histories Reside written by Priya Jaikumar and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Where Histories Reside Priya Jaikumar examines eight decades of films shot on location in India to show how attending to filmed space reveals alternative timelines and histories of cinema. In this bold “spatial” film historiography, Jaikumar outlines factors that shape India's filmed space, from state bureaucracies and commercial infrastructures to aesthetic styles and neoliberal policies. Whether discussing how educational shorts from Britain and India transform natural landscapes into instructional lessons or how Jean Renoir’s The River (1951) presents a universal human condition through the particularities of place, Jaikumar demonstrates that the history of filming a location has always been a history of competing assumptions, experiences, practices, and representational regimes. In so doing, she reveals that addressing the persistent question of “what is cinema?” must account for an aesthetics and politics of space.
Download or read book Politics and Public Space in Contemporary Argentine Poetry written by Ben Bollig and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-06 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the connection between political themes and literary form in the most recent Argentine poetry. Ben Bollig uses the concepts of “lyric” and “state” as twin coordinates for both an assessment of how Argentinian poets have conceived a political role for their work and how poems come to speak to us about politics. Drawing on concepts from contemporary literary theory, this striking study combines textual analysis with historical research to shed light on the ways in which new modes of circulation help to shape poetry today.
Download or read book Marathi Cinema Cultural Space and Liminality written by Hrishikesh Sudhakar Ingle and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-01 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a critical history of Marathi cinema, from its formative years in the 1920s till the end of 1990s. It is the first work to explore the industrial and aesthetic dynamics of Marathi cinema, and elaborate on the idea of region as performance using the framework of critical socio-spatial analysis. Against the dominance of Hindi cinema, the Marathi film industry, as a regional film practice in India, has developed within a cultural and spatial liminality. This historical situation of the Marathi film industry is formulated here as the shaping and dispersal of a vernacular cultural space; and is traced over a period of seven decades, across genres like the saint-film, social melodramas, and the tamasha film, as well as in urban and mofussil sites of film circulation. The book aims to be a useful resource for students, researchers, and general readers, while attending to a lack of scholarly inquiries on this important regional film culture.
Download or read book Sessue Hayakawa written by Daisuke Miyao and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-28 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVCritical biography of Sessue Hayakawa, a Japanese actor who became a popular silent film star in the U.S., that looks at how Hollywood treated issues of race and nationality in the early twentieth century./div
Download or read book Static in the System written by Meredith C. Ward and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this rich study of noise in American film-going culture, Meredith C. Ward shows how aurality can reveal important fissures in American motion picture history, enabling certain types of listening cultures to form across time. Connecting this history of noise in the cinema to a greater sonic culture, Static in the System shows how cinema sound was networked into a broader constellation of factors that affected social power, gender, sexuality, class, the built environment, and industry, and how these factors in turn came to fruition in cinema's soundscape. Focusing on theories of power as they manifest in noise, the history of noise in electro-acoustics with the coming of film sound, architectural acoustics as they were manipulated in cinema theaters, and the role of the urban environment in affecting mobile listening and the avoidance of noise, Ward analyzes the powerful relationship between aural cultural history and cinema's sound theory, proving that noise can become a powerful historiographic tool for the film historian.
Download or read book Picturing American Modernity written by Kristen Whissel and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Picturing American Modernity, Kristen Whissel investigates the relationship between early American cinema and the experience of technological modernity. She demonstrates how between the late 1890s and the eve of the First World War moving pictures helped the U.S. public understand the possibilities and perils of new forms of “traffic” produced by industrialization and urbanization. As more efficient ways to move people, goods, and information transformed work and leisure at home and contributed to the expansion of the U.S. empire abroad, silent films presented compelling visual representations of the spaces, bodies, machines, and forms of mobility that increasingly defined modern life in the United States and its new territories. Whissel shows that by portraying key events, achievements, and anxieties, the cinema invited American audiences to participate in the rapidly changing world around them. Moving pictures provided astonishing visual dispatches from military camps prior to the outbreak of fighting in the Spanish-American War. They allowed audiences to delight in images of the Pan-American Exposition, and also to mourn the assassination of President McKinley there. One early film genre, the reenactment, presented spectators with renditions of bloody battles fought overseas during the Philippine-American War. Early features offered sensational dramatizations of the scandalous “white slave trade,” which was often linked to immigration and new forms of urban work and leisure. By bringing these frequently distant events and anxieties “near” to audiences in cities and towns across the country, the cinema helped construct an American national identity for the machine age.
Download or read book The Maciste Films of Italian Silent Cinema written by Jacqueline Reich and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-19 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italian film star Bartolomeo Pagano's "Maciste" played a key role in his nation's narratives of identity during World War I and after. Jacqueline Reich traces the racial, class, and national transformations undergone by this Italian strongman from African slave in Cabiria (1914), his first film, to bourgeois gentleman, to Alpine soldier of the Great War, to colonial officer in Italy's African adventures. Reich reveals Maciste as a figure who both reflected classical ideals of masculine beauty and virility (later taken up by Mussolini and used for political purposes) and embodied the model Italian citizen. The 12 films at the center of the book, recently restored and newly accessible to a wider public, together with relevant extra-cinematic materials, provide a rich resource for understanding the spread of discourses on masculinity, and national and racial identities during a turbulent period in Italian history. The volume includes an illustrated appendix documenting the restoration and preservation of these cinematic treasures.
Download or read book The City and the Moving Image written by R. Koeck and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-10-13 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection explores the relationship between urban space, architecture and the moving image. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches to film and moving image practices, the book explores the recent developments in research on film and urban landscapes, pointing towards new theoretical and methodological frameworks for discussion.
Download or read book In The Space Of A Song written by Richard Dyer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-03 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Dyer's 'In the Space of a Song' takes an in-depth look at the use of songs in film. Songs take up space and time in film and the way they do so indicates a great deal about the songs themselves, the nature of the feelings they present, and who is allowed to present feelings how, when and where. This book explores this perception.
Download or read book Classical Projections written by Eleni Palis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-02 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quotations are a standard way that the humanities make meaning; the pull-quote, epigraph, and quotation are standard for citing evidence and invoking and interrogating authority in both literary and scholarly writing. However, film studies has yet to seriously examine how moving images can quote one another, convening interaction and creating new knowledge across time. Classical Projections offers film quotation as a new concept for understanding how preexisting moving image fragments are reframed and re-viewed within subsequent films. As a visual corollary to literary quotation, film quotations embed film fragments in on-screen movie screens. Though film quotations have appeared since silent cinema, Classical Projections focuses on quotations of classical Hollywood film--mainstream American studio production, 1915-1950--as quoted in post-classical Hollywood, roughly 1960 to present. This strategic historical frame asks: how does post-classical cinema visualize its awareness of coming after a classical or golden age? How do post-classical filmmakers claim or disavow classical history? How do historically disenfranchised post-classical filmmakers, whether by gender, sexuality, or race, grapple with exclusionary and stereotype-ridden canons? As a constitutive element of post-classical authorship, film quotations amass and manufacture classical Hollywood in retrospective, highly strategic ways. By revealing how quotational tellings of film history build and embolden exclusionary, myopic canons, Classical Projections uncovers opportunities to construct more capacious cultural memory.
Download or read book Cinema Space and Polylocality in a Globalizing China written by Yingjin Zhang and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2009-10-09 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this milestone work, prominent China film scholar Yingjin Zhang proposes "polylocality" as a new conceptual framework for investigating the shifting spaces of contemporary Chinese cinema in the age of globalization. Questioning the national cinema paradigm, Zhang calls for comparative studies of underdeveloped areas beyond the imperative of transnationalism. The book begins by addressing theories and practices related to space, place, and polylocality in contemporary China before focusing on the space of scholarship and urging scholars to move beyond the current paradigm and explore transnational and comparative film studies. This is followed by a chapter that concentrates on the space of production and surveys the changing landscape of postsocialist filmmaking and the transformation of China’s urban generation of directors. Next is an examination of the space of polylocality and the cinematic mappings of Beijing and a persistent "reel" contact with polylocality in hinterland China. In the fifth chapter Zhang explores the space of subjectivity in independent film and video and contextualizes experiments by young directors with various documentary styles. Chapter 6 calls attention to the space of performance and addresses issues of media and mediation by way of two kinds of playing: the first with documentary as troubling information, the second with piracy as creative intervention. The concluding chapter offers an overview of Chinese cinema in the new century and provides production and reception statistics. Combining inspired critical insights, original observations, and new information, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China is a significant work on current Chinese film and a must-read for film scholars and anyone seriously interested in cinema more generally or contemporary Chinese culture.
