Download or read book Spaces Mapped and Monstrous written by Nick Jones and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital 3D has become a core feature of the twenty-first-century visual landscape. Yet 3D cinema is a contradictory media form: producing spaces that are highly regimented and exhaustively detailed, it simultaneously relies upon distortions of vision and space that are inherently strange. Spaces Mapped and Monstrous explores the paradoxical nature of 3D cinema to offer a critical analysis of an inescapable part of contemporary culture. Considering 3D’s distinctive visual qualities and its connections to wider digital systems, Nick Jones situates the production and exhibition of 3D cinema within a web of aesthetic, technological, and historical contexts. He examines 3D’s relationship with computer interfaces, virtual reality, and digital networks as well as tracing its lineage to predigital models of visual organization. Jones emphasizes that 3D is not only a technology used in films but also a tool for producing, controlling, and distorting space within systems of surveillance, corporatization, and militarization. The book features detailed analysis of a wide range of films—including Avatar (2009), Goodbye to Language (2014), Love (2015), and Clash of the Titans (2010)—demonstrating that 3D is not merely an augmentation of 2D cinema but that it has its own unique properties. Spaces Mapped and Monstrous brings together media archaeology, digital theory, and textual analysis to provide a new account of the importance of 3D to visual culture today.
Download or read book The Jurassic Park Book written by Matthew Melia and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-11-16 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive 1990s blockbuster, Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park met with almost universal critical and popular acclaim, broke new ground with its CGI recreation of dinosaurs, and started one of the most profitable of all movie franchises. To mark the film's 30th anniversary, this exciting illustrated collection of new essays interrogates the Jurassic Park phenomenon from a diverse range of critical, historical, and theoretical angles. The primary focus is on Jurassic Park itself but there is also discussion of the franchise and its numerous spin-offs. As well as leading international scholars of film studies and history, contributors include experts in special effects, science on screen, fan studies, and palaeontology. Comprehensive, up to date, and accessible, The Jurassic Park Book appeals not only to students and scholars of Hollywood and contemporary culture, but also to the global audience of fans of the greatest of all dinosaur movies.
Download or read book Film and Place in an Intercultural Perspective written by Krzysztof Stachowiak and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book offers an interdisciplinary overview of the film and place relationship from an intercultural perspective. It explores the complex domain of place and space in cinema and the film industry's role in establishing cultural connections and economic cooperation between India and Europe. With contributions from leading international scholars, various case studies scrutinise European and Indian contexts, exploring both the established and emerging locations. The book extends the dominantly Britain-oriented focus on India’s cinema presence in Europe to European countries such as Italy, Switzerland, Poland, Slovenia, Finland, and Sweden, where the Indian film industry progressively expands its presence. The chapters of this book look at Indian film production in Europe as a cultural bridge between India and Europe, fostering mutual understanding of the culture and society of the two regions. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to researchers in film studies, cultural anthropology, cultural geography, tourism, economics, sociology, and cultural studies. It will also be interest to practitioners working in local authorities, destination management, tourism, and creative business, all of whom see the value of film production in attracting visitors, investment, and creating new networks with local economic actors. The book offers much-needed data and tools to translate their professional goals and potentials into effective regional strategies and activities.
Download or read book The Immersive Enclosure written by Paul Roquet and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2023 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics, Media Ecology Association Although virtual reality promises to immerse a person in another world, its true power lies in its ability to sever a person’s spatial situatedness in this one. This is especially clear in Japan, where the VR headset has been embraced as a way to block off existing social environments and reroute perception into more malleable virtual platforms. Is immersion just another name for enclosure? In this groundbreaking analysis of virtual reality, Paul Roquet uncovers how the technology is reshaping the politics of labor, gender, home, and nation. He examines how VR in Japan diverged from American militarism and techno-utopian visions and became a tool for renegotiating personal space. Individuals turned to the VR headset to immerse themselves in three-dimensional worlds drawn from manga, video games, and genre literature. The Japanese government promised VR-operated robots would enable a new era of remote work, targeting those who could not otherwise leave home. Middle-aged men and corporate brands used VR to reimagine themselves through the virtual bodies of anime-styled teenage girls. At a time when digital platforms continue to encroach on everyday life, The Immersive Enclosure takes a critical look at these attempts to jettison existing social realities and offers a bold new approach for understanding the media environments to come.
Download or read book Billy Wilder written by Joseph McBride and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The director and cowriter of some of the world's most iconic films—including Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd., Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment—Billy Wilder earned acclaim as American cinema's greatest social satirist. Though an influential fixture in Hollywood, Wilder always saw himself as an outsider. His worldview was shaped by his background in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and work as a journalist in Berlin during Hitler's rise to power, and his perspective as a Jewish refugee from Nazism lent his films a sense of the peril that could engulf any society. In this critical study, Joseph McBride offers new ways to understand Wilder's work, stretching from his days as a reporter and screenwriter in Europe to his distinguished as well as forgotten films as a Hollywood writer and his celebrated work as a writer-director. In contrast to the widespread view of Wilder as a hardened cynic, McBride reveals him to be a disappointed romantic. Wilder's experiences as an exile led him to mask his sensitivity beneath a veneer of wisecracking that made him a celebrated caustic wit. Amid the satirical barbs and exposure of social hypocrisies, Wilder’s films are marked by intense compassion and a profound understanding of the human condition. Mixing biographical insight with in-depth analysis of films from throughout Wilder's career as a screenwriter and director of comedy and drama, and drawing on McBride's interviews with the director and his collaborators, this book casts new light on the full range of Wilder's rich, complex, and distinctive vision.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Violence in Film and Media written by Steve Choe and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-11-09 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chapters contained in this handbook address key issues concerning the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of violence in film and media. In addition to providing analyses of representations of violence, they also critically discuss the phenomenology of the spectator, images of atrocity in international cinema, affect and documentary, violent video games, digital infrastructures, cruelty in art cinema, and media and state violence, among many other relevant topics. The Palgrave Handbook of Violence in Film and Media updates existing studies dealing with media and violence while vastly expanding the scope of the field. Representations of violence in film and media are ubiquitous but remain relatively understudied. Too often they are relegated to questions of morality, taste, or aesthetics while judgments about violence can themselves be subjected to moral judgment. Some may question whether objectionable images are worthy of serious scholarly attention at all. While investigating key examples, the chapters in this handbook consider both popular and academic discourses to understand how representations of violence are interpreted and discussed. They propose new approaches and raise novel questions for how we might critically think about this urgent issue within contemporary culture.
Download or read book Hollis Frampton written by Michael Zryd and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hollis Frampton was an American filmmaker, photographer, and theorist who bridged the experimental film and contemporary art worlds in the 1960s and 1970s. Best known for avant-garde films including Zorns Lemma (1970) and (nostalgia) (1971), Frampton spent his later years working on the unfinished epic Magellan, a monumental cycle that used the metaphor of Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world to rethink the natures and meanings of history, modernity, and cinema. Frampton’s career was cut short by cancer at age 48, with his vast ambitions for the project left incomplete. This book is a groundbreaking and comprehensive account of this remarkable figure’s work in its totality, from Frampton’s earliest films through Magellan. Michael Zryd explores the connections linking Frampton’s art and thought to other media forms, histories, and cultural frameworks. He foregrounds Frampton’s notion of the “infinite cinema,” which redefined the parameters of the medium to encompass all forms of moving image and sound media across the past and future of cinematic possibility. Zryd analyzes Frampton’s ambivalent relationship with modernism and the Enlightenment, showing how the artist navigated between attraction to radical artistic investigation and awareness of this tradition’s implication in colonialism and other oppressive power structures. Shedding new light on Frampton’s project of exploring and critiquing how cinema attempts to capture and understand the world, this book also considers his significance for contemporary art.
Download or read book The Empire of Effects written by Julie A. Turnock and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How one company created the dominant aesthetic of digital realism. Just about every major film now comes to us with an assist from digital effects. The results are obvious in superhero fantasies, yet dramas like Roma also rely on computer-generated imagery to enhance the verisimilitude of scenes. But the realism of digital effects is not actually true to life. It is a realism invented by Hollywood—by one company specifically: Industrial Light & Magic. The Empire of Effects shows how the effects company known for the puppets and space battles of the original Star Wars went on to develop the dominant aesthetic of digital realism. Julie A. Turnock finds that ILM borrowed its technique from the New Hollywood of the 1970s, incorporating lens flares, wobbly camerawork, haphazard framing, and other cinematography that called attention to the person behind the camera. In the context of digital imagery, however, these aesthetic strategies had the opposite effect, heightening the sense of realism by calling on tropes suggesting the authenticity to which viewers were accustomed. ILM’s style, on display in the most successful films of the 1980s and beyond, was so convincing that other studios were forced to follow suit, and today, ILM is a victim of its own success, having fostered a cinematic monoculture in which it is but one player among many.
Download or read book Horror Film and Otherness written by Adam Lowenstein and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do horror films reveal about social difference in the everyday world? Criticism of the genre often relies on a dichotomy between monstrosity and normality, in which unearthly creatures and deranged killers are metaphors for society’s fear of the “others” that threaten the “normal.” The monstrous other might represent women, Jews, or Blacks, as well as Indigenous, queer, poor, elderly, or disabled people. The horror film’s depiction of such minorities can be sympathetic to their exclusion or complicit in their oppression, but ultimately, these images are understood to stand in for the others that the majority dreads and marginalizes. Adam Lowenstein offers a new account of horror and why it matters for understanding social otherness. He argues that horror films reveal how the category of the other is not fixed. Instead, the genre captures ongoing metamorphoses across “normal” self and “monstrous” other. This “transformative otherness” confronts viewers with the other’s experience—and challenges us to recognize that we are all vulnerable to becoming or being seen as the other. Instead of settling into comforting certainties regarding monstrosity and normality, horror exposes the ongoing struggle to acknowledge self and other as fundamentally intertwined. Horror Film and Otherness features new interpretations of landmark films by directors including Tobe Hooper, George A. Romero, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Stephanie Rothman, Jennifer Kent, Marina de Van, and Jordan Peele. Through close analysis of their engagement with different forms of otherness, this book provides new perspectives on horror’s significance for culture, politics, and art.
Download or read book Perplexing Plots written by David Bordwell and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once regarded as “difficult” become familiar to audiences? In Perplexing Plots, David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. He shows that since the nineteenth century, detective stories and suspense thrillers have allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. Tales of crime and mystery became a training ground where audiences learned to appreciate artifice. These genres demand a sophisticated awareness of storytelling conventions: they play games with narrative form and toy with audience expectations. Bordwell examines how writers and directors have pushed, pulled, and collaborated with their audiences to change popular storytelling. He explores the plot engineering of figures such as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy Sayers, and Quentin Tarantino, and traces how mainstream storytellers and modernist experimenters influenced one another’s work. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how movies, literature, theater, and popular culture have evolved over the past century.
Download or read book The Rebirth of Suspense written by Rick Warner and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2024-09-17 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Typically, films are suspenseful when they keep us on the edge of our seats, when glimpses of a turning doorknob, a ticking clock, or a looming silhouette quicken our pulses. Exemplified by Alfred Hitchcock’s masterworks and the countless thrillers they influenced, such films captivate viewers with propulsive plots that spur emotional investment in the fates of protagonists. Suspense might therefore seem to be a curious concept to associate with art films featuring muted characters, serene landscapes, and unrushed rhythms, in which plot is secondary to mood and tone. This ambitious and wide-ranging book offers a redefinition of suspense by considering its unlikely incarnations in the contemporary films that have been called “slow cinema.” Rick Warner shows how slowness builds suspense through atmospheric immersion, narrative sparseness, and the withholding of information, causing viewers to oscillate among boredom, curiosity, and dread. He focuses on works in which suspense arises where the boundaries between art cinema and popular genres—such as horror, thriller, science fiction, and gothic melodrama—become indefinite, including Chantal Akerman’s La captive, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves, Lucrecia Martel’s Zama, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy, and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Warner investigates the pivotal role of sound in generating suspense and traces how the experience of suspense has changed in the era of digital streaming. The Rebirth of Suspense develops a fresh theory, history, typology, and analysis of suspense that casts new light on the workings of films across global cinema.
Download or read book Keep Em in the East written by Richard Koszarski and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year 1955 was a watershed one for New York’s film industry: Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront took home eight Oscars, and, more quietly, Stanley Kubrick released the low-budget classic Killer’s Kiss. A wave of films that changed how American movies were made soon followed, led by directors such as Sidney Lumet, William Friedkin, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese. Yet this resurgence could not have occurred without a deeply rooted tradition of local film production. Richard Koszarski chronicles the compelling and often surprising origins of New York’s postwar film renaissance, looking beyond such classics as Naked City, Kiss of Death, and Portrait of Jennie. He examines the social, cultural, and economic forces that shaped New York filmmaking, from city politics to union regulations, and shows how decades of low-budget independent production taught local filmmakers how to capture the city’s grit, liveliness, and allure. He reveals the importance of “race films”—all-Black productions intended for segregated African American audiences—that not only helped keep the film business afloat but also nurtured a core group of writers, directors, designers, and technicians. Detailed production histories of On the Waterfront and Killer’s Kiss—films that appear here in a completely new light—illustrate the distinctive characteristics of New York cinema. Drawing on a vast array of research—including studio libraries, censorship records, union archives, and interviews with participants—“Keep ’Em in the East” rewrites a crucial chapter in the history of American cinema.
Download or read book In the Land of the Unreal written by Lisa Messeri and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-02 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal, Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race.
Download or read book Hollywood s Embassies written by Ross Melnick and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner - 2022 Richard Wall Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association Beginning in the 1920s, audiences around the globe were seduced not only by Hollywood films but also by lavish movie theaters that were owned and operated by the major American film companies. These theaters aimed to provide a quintessentially “American” experience. Outfitted with American technology and accoutrements, they allowed local audiences to watch American films in an American-owned cinema in a distinctly American way. In a history that stretches from Buenos Aires and Tokyo to Johannesburg and Cairo, Ross Melnick considers these movie houses as cultural embassies. He examines how the exhibition of Hollywood films became a constant flow of political and consumerist messaging, selling American ideas, products, and power, especially during fractious eras. Melnick demonstrates that while Hollywood’s marketing of luxury and consumption often struck a chord with local audiences, it was also frequently tone-deaf to new social, cultural, racial, and political movements. He argues that the story of Hollywood’s global cinemas is not a simple narrative of cultural and industrial indoctrination and colonization. Instead, it is one of negotiation, booms and busts, successes and failures, adoptions and rejections, and a precursor to later conflicts over the spread of American consumer culture. A truly global account, Hollywood’s Embassies shows how the entanglement of worldwide movie theaters with American empire offers a new way of understanding film history and the history of U.S. soft power.
Download or read book 100 American Horror Films written by Barry Keith Grant and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-03-24 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[A] well-plotted survey." Total Film In 100 American Horror Films, Barry Keith Grant presents entries on 100 films from one of American cinema's longest-standing, most diverse and most popular genres, representing its rich history from the silent era - D.W. Griffith's The Avenging Conscience of 1915 - to contemporary productions - Jordan Peele's 2017 Get Out. In his introduction, Grant provides an overview of the genre's history, a context for the films addressed in the individual entries, and discusses the specific relations between American culture and horror. All of the entries are informed by the question of what makes the specific film being discussed a horror film, the importance of its place within the history of the genre, and, where relevant, the film is also contextualized within specifically American culture and history. Each entry also considers the film's most salient textual features, provides important insight into its production, and offers both established and original critical insight and interpretation. The 100 films selected for inclusion represent the broadest historical range, and are drawn from every decade of American film-making, movies from major and minor studios, examples of the different types or subgenres of horror, such as psychological thriller, monster terror, gothic horror, home invasion, torture porn, and parody, as well as the different types of horror monsters, including werewolves, vampires, zombies, mummies, mutants, ghosts, and serial killers.
Download or read book Bombay Hustle written by Debashree Mukherjee and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From starry-eyed fans with dreams of fame to cotton entrepreneurs turned movie moguls, the Bombay film industry has historically energized a range of practices and practitioners, playing a crucial and compelling role in the life of modern India. Bombay Hustle presents an ambitious history of Indian cinema as a history of material practice, bringing new insights to studies of media, modernity, and the late colonial city. Drawing on original archival research and an innovative transdisciplinary approach, Debashree Mukherjee offers a panoramic portrait of the consolidation of the Bombay film industry during the talkie transition of the 1920s–1940s. In the decades leading up to independence in 1947, Bombay became synonymous with marketplace thrills, industrial strikes, and modernist experimentation. Its burgeoning film industry embodied Bombay’s spirit of “hustle,” gathering together and spewing out the many different energies and emotions that characterized the city. Bombay Hustle examines diverse sites of film production—finance, pre-production paperwork, casting, screenwriting, acting, stunts—to show how speculative excitement jostled against desires for scientific management in an industry premised on the struggle between contingency and control. Mukherjee develops the concept of a “cine-ecology” in order to examine the bodies, technologies, and environments that collectively shaped the production and circulation of cinematic meaning in this time. The book thus brings into view a range of marginalized film workers, their labor and experiences; forgotten film studios, their technical practices and aesthetic visions; and overlooked connections among media practices, geographical particularities, and historical exigencies.
Download or read book Anxious Cinephilia written by Sarah Keller and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The advent of new screening practices and viewing habits in the twenty-first century has spurred a public debate over what it means to be a “cinephile.” In Anxious Cinephilia, Sarah Keller places these competing visions in historical and theoretical perspective, tracing how the love of movies intertwines with anxieties over the content and impermanence of cinematic images. Keller reframes the history of cinephilia from the earliest days of film through the French New Wave and into the streaming era, arguing that love and fear have shaped the cinematic experience from its earliest days. This anxious love for the cinema marks both institutional practices and personal experiences, from the curation of the moviegoing experience to the creation of community and identity through film festivals to posting on social media. Through a detailed analysis of films and film history, Keller examines how changes in cinema practice and spectatorship create anxiety even as they inspire nostalgia. Anxious Cinephilia offers a new theoretical approach to the relationship between spectator and cinema and reimagines the concept of cinephilia to embrace its diverse forms and its uncertain future.
