Download or read book The Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid written by Paul Seydor and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-15 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before Sam Peckinpah finished shooting his 1973 Western, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, there was open warfare between him and the studio. In this scrupulously researched new book Paul Seydor reconstructs the riveting history of a brilliant director fighting to preserve an artistic vision while wrestling with his own self‐destructive demons. Meticulously comparing the film five extant versions, Seydor documents why none is definitive, including the 2005 Special Edition, for which he served as consultant. Viewing Peckinpah’s last Western from a variety of fresh perspectives, Seydor establishes a nearly direct line from the book Garrett wrote after he killed Billy the Kid to Peckinpah’s film ninety-one years later and shows how, even with directors as singular as this one, filmmaking is a collaborative medium. Art, business, history, genius, and ego all collide in this story of a great director navigating the treacherous waters of collaboration, compromise, and commerce to create a flawed but enduringly powerful masterpiece.
Download or read book Bob Dylan in Performance written by Keith Nainby and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-04-19 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of Bob Dylan’s art employs a performance studies lens, exploring the distinctive ways he brings words and music to life on recordings, onstage, and onscreen. Chapters focus on the relationship of Dylan’s recorded performances to the historical bardic role, to the American popular song tradition, and to rock music culture. His uses of both stage and studio to shape his performances are explored, as are his forays into cinema. Special consideration is given to his vocal performances and to his use of particular personae as a performer. The full scope of Dylan’s body of work to date is situated in terms of the influences that have shaped his performances and the ways these performances have shaped contemporary popular music.
Download or read book Peckinpah s Tragic Westerns written by John L. Simons and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of Sam Peckinpah represents a high point in American cinema. This text is the first theoretical and critical attempt to place Peckinpah within the 2,000-year-old tradition of western tragedy. The tradition, enfolding the Greeks, Shakespeare and modern tragedians, is represented in Peckinpah's art in numerous ways, and the fact that he worked in the mode throughout his career distinguishes him from most American film directors. Films covered include Ride the High Country, Noon Wine, The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.
Download or read book Sam Peckinpah written by Kevin J. Hayes and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2008 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected interviews with the combustible director of The Wild Bunch, Ride the High Country, Straw Dogs, The Getaway, and other films
Download or read book Bob Dylan on Film written by Jonathan Hodgers and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-05-03 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In May 1967, during a discussion about his yet-to-be-released film Eat the Document, Bob Dylan cryptically remarked, ‘The film is finished. It’s different.’ It would not be the last time he could make this claim. Beyond his musical prowess, Dylan’s career encompasses a lesser-explored facet – that of a filmmaker creating works that defy convention. This book delves into these cinematic forays, unravelling the intriguing interplay of Dylan’s presence both behind and in front of the camera. Dylan’s cinematic experiments, ranging from the ground-breaking Dont Look Back (1967) to the enigmatic Masked and Anonymous (2003), stand as unique and thought-provoking additions to his artistic legacy. Unveiling an experimental and inquisitive sensibility, these films draw inspiration not only from cinematic predecessors but also from Dylan’s songcraft. Often residing in the periphery of Dylan studies, a closer examination of his cinematic oeuvre reveals an underrated auteur who fearlessly transcends the boundaries of the page, stage, and screen.
Download or read book The Evolution of the Western written by Martin Kich and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-09-05 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explore the enduring influence of the Western – the quintessential American film genre – and its essential role in US and world culture. Follow the entire history of the Western, from its roots in the pulp novels of the early 20th century, through the serials of the silent era and the mid-century classics of John Ford and John Wayne, to the recent award-winning revisionist works, like Unforgiven and No Country for Old Men, that provide a more complex and nuanced take on history of the West. Perhaps more than any other pop culture genre, the Western allows us to view how Americans have seen themselves over the last 150 years. Build a foundational understanding of the genre with 5 introductory essays, exploring the development of the Western Mythos in the traditional Western, the heyday of the traditional Western in the post-WWII period, revisionist Westerns and the counterculture, race and identify, and the Western outside of the USA. Close to 100 encyclopedia entries examine one or more movies or television programs and show how their creation and plots demonstrate the overall evolution of the genre. Easily compare films and TV programs – from early genre favorites such as Gunsmoke to more recent releases like Django Unchained – with essential facts boxes accompanying each entry, with information on the director, studio, key actors, and box office receipts.
Download or read book Billy the Kid written by Richard W. Etulain and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A central character in legends and histories of the Old West, Billy the Kid rivals such western icons as Jesse James and General George Armstrong Custer for the number of books and movies his brief, violent life inspired. Billy the Kid: A Reader’s Guide introduces readers to the most significant of these written and filmed works. Compiled and written by a respected historian of the Old West and author of a masterful new biography of Billy the Kid, this reader’s guide includes summaries and evaluations of biographies, histories, novels, and movies, as well as archival sources and research collections. Surveying newspaper articles, books, pamphlets, essays, and book chapters, Richard W. Etulain traces the shifting views of Billy the Kid from his own era to the present. Etulain’s discussion of novels and movies reveals a similar shift, even as it points out both the historical inaccuracies and the literary and cinematic achievements of these works. A brief section on the authentic and supposed photographs of the Kid demonstrates the difficulties specialists and collectors have encountered in locating dependable photographic sources. This discerning overview will guide readers through the plethora of words and images generated by Billy the Kid’s life and legend over more than a century. It will prove invaluable to those interested in the demigods of the Old West—and in the ever-changing cultural landscape in which they appear to us.
Download or read book The Wild Bunch written by W. K. Stratton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the fiftieth anniversary of the film, W.K. Stratton's definitive history of the making of The Wild Bunch, named one of the greatest Westerns of all time by the American Film Institute. Sam Peckinpah's film The Wild Bunch is the story of a gang of outlaws who are one big steal from retirement. When their attempted train robbery goes awry, the gang flees to Mexico and falls in with a brutal general of the Mexican Revolution, who offers them the job of a lifetime. Conceived by a stuntman, directed by a blacklisted director, and shot in the sand and heat of the Mexican desert, the movie seemed doomed. Instead, it became an instant classic with a dark, violent take on the Western movie tradition. In The Wild Bunch, W.K. Stratton tells the fascinating history of the making of the movie and documents for the first time the extraordinary contribution of Mexican and Mexican-American actors and crew members to the movie's success. Shaped by infamous director Sam Peckinpah, and starring such visionary actors as William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O'Brien, and Robert Ryan, the movie was also the product of an industry and a nation in transition. By 1968, when the movie was filmed, the studio system that had perpetuated the myth of the valiant cowboy in movies like The Searchers had collapsed, and America was riled by Vietnam, race riots, and assassinations. The Wild Bunch spoke to America in its moment, when war and senseless violence seemed to define both domestic and international life. The Wild Bunch is an authoritative history of the making of a movie and the era behind it.
Download or read book The Gothic Peckinpah written by Tony Williams and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-03 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues for the importance of Gothic in understanding one of the key elements within the films of Sam Peckinpah (1925-1984). Although occasionally noted in the past, the Gothic has been generally overlooked when most critics consider the work of Sam Peckinpah with the exception of the Freudian based Crucified Heroes (1979) by Terence Butler. This work not only examines the films made after that date, especially the often dismissed The Osterman Weekend (1983) and the two music videos he made for Julian Lennon, but also places the director within the context of the developing work on Gothic that has since appeared. Peckinpah has been identified as the director of one undisputed masterpiece, The Wild Bunch (1969). By focussing on the key role Gothic plays in most of the director’s work, this book offers a way to see Peckinpah beyond The Wild Bunch and the Western, viewing him as a director who had the potential of evolving further, had circumstances permitted, to continue his critique of American life within the developing lens of the Gothic.
Download or read book Precarious Intimacies written by Maria Stehle and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-15 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on and responding to the writings of theorists such as Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Lisa Lowe, this book proposes the notion of “precarious intimacies” to navigate a dilemma: how to recognize, affirm, and value love, touch, and care while challenging the racialized and gendered politics in which they are embedded. Twenty-first-century Europe is undergoing dramatic political and economic transformations that produce new forms of transnational contact as well as new regimes of exclusion and economic precarity. These political and economic shifts both circumscribe and enable new possibilities for intimacy. Many European films of the last two decades depict experiences of political and economic vulnerability in narratives of precarious intimacies. In these films, stories of intimacy, sex, love, and friendship are embedded in violence and exclusion, but, as Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber show, the politics of touch and connection also offers avenues to theorize forms of attention and affection that challenge exclusive notions of race, citizenship, and belonging. Precarious Intimacies examines the aesthetic strategies that respond to this tension and proposes a politics of interpretation that identifies the potential and possibility of intimacy.
Download or read book Peckinpah Today written by Michael Bliss and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2012-06-19 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written exclusively for this collection by today’s leading Peckinpah critics, the nine essays in Peckinpah Today explore the body of work of one of America’s most important filmmakers, revealing new insights into his artistic process and the development of his lasting themes. Edited by Michael Bliss, this book provides groundbreaking criticism of Peckinpah’s work by illuminating new sources, from modified screenplay documents to interviews with screenplay writers and editors. Included is a rare interview with A. S. Fleischman, author of the screenplay for The Deadly Companions, the film that launched Peckinpah’s career in feature films. The collection also contains essays by scholar Stephen Prince and Paul Seydor, editor of the controversial special edition of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. In his essay on Straw Dogs, film critic Michael Sragow reveals how Peckinpah and co-scriptwriter David Zelag Goodman transformed a pulp novel into a powerful film. The final essay of the collection surveys Peckinpah’s career, showing the dark turn that the filmmaker’s artistic path took between his first and last films. This comprehensive approach reinforces the book’s dawn-to-dusk approach, resulting in a fascinating picture of a great filmmaker’s work.
Download or read book A Uniquely American Epic written by Michael Bliss and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2019-12-10 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most innovative films ever made, Sam Peckinpah's motion picture The Wild Bunch was released in 1969. From the outset, the film was considered controversial because of its powerful, graphic, and direct depiction of violence, but it was also praised for its lush photography, intricate camera work, and cutting-edge editing. Peckinpah's tale of an ill-fated, aging outlaw gang bound by a code of honor is often regarded as one of the most complex and impactful Westerns in American cinematic history. The issues dealt with in this groundbreaking film—violence, morality, friendship, and the legacy of American ambition and compromise—are just as relevant today as when the film first opened. To acknowledge the significance of The Wild Bunch, this collection brings together some of the leading Peckinpah scholars and critics to examine what many consider to be the director's greatest work. The book's nine essays cover an array of topics. Explored are the function of violence in the film and how its depiction is radically different from what is seen in other movies, the background of the film's production, the European response to the film's view of human nature, and the strong sense of the Texas/Mexico milieu surrounding the film's action.
Download or read book Firesign written by Jeremy Braddock and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A cultural clearinghouse of the American 1960s and '70s as told through the story of the period's most important forgotten comedy group. This expansive book reclaims the Firesign Theatre (hazily remembered as a comedy act for stoners) as critically engaged artists working in the heart of the culture industry at a time of massive social and technological change. Working at the intersection of popular music, sound and media studies, cultural history, and avant-garde literature, Jeremy Braddock reveals how this inventive group made the lowbrow comedy album a medium for registering the contradictions and collapse of the counterculture, and traces their legacies in hip-hop turntablism, computer hacking, and participatory fan culture. Focusing on Firesign's work in Los Angeles from 1967 to 1975, Braddock deploys a vast range of material sources, informed by numerous interviews and writing in tune with the group's obsessive and ludic reflections--on multitrack recording, radio, television, cinema, early artificial intelligence, and more. This ebullient act of media archaeology reveals Firesign Theatre as authors of a comic utopian pessimism that will inspire twenty-first-century recording arts and urge us to engage the massive technological changes of our own era"--
Download or read book Dervish Dust written by Robyn L. Coburn and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-12 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dervish Dust is the first biography of Academy Award–winning Hollywood actor James Coburn.
Download or read book Authenticity in North America written by Jane Lovell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-25 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary book addresses the highly relevant debates about authenticity in North America, providing a contemporary re-examination of American culture, tourism and commodification of place. Blending social sciences and humanities research skills, it formulates an examination of the geography of authenticity in North America, and brings together studies of both rurality and urbanity across the country, exposing the many commonalities of these different landscapes. Relph stated that nostalgic places are inauthentic, yet within this work several chapters explore how festivals and visitor attractions, which cultivate place heritage appeal, are authenticated by tourists and communities, creating a shared sense of belonging. In a world of hyperreal simulacra, post-truth and fake news, this book bucks the trend by demonstrating that authenticity can be found everywhere: in a mouthful of food, in a few bars of a Beach Boys song, in a statue of a troll, in a diffuse magical atmosphere, in the weirdness of the ungentrified streets. Written by a range of leading experts, this book offers a contemporary view of American authenticity, tourism, identity and culture. It will be of great interest to upper-level students, researchers and academics in Tourism, Geography, History, Cultural Studies, American Studies and Film Studies.
Download or read book The Films of Clint Eastwood written by Matt Wanat and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The indefatigable Clint Eastwood, the great old man of American film, is still controversial after all these years. Many of the critical essays in this collection focus on Eastwood's 2014 American Sniper, a particularly controversial film and a devastating personal account of the horrors of war. Additional essays within the collection address his films that deserve more recognition than they have received to date. The chapters vary by topic and identify themes ranging from aging, race, and gender to uses of Western conventions and myth to the subtleties of quieter themes and stylistic choices in Eastwood's body of cinematic work. As a collection, these essays show that none of these themes account for Eastwood's entire vision, which is multifaceted and often contradictory, dramatizing complex issues in powerful, character-driven narratives.
Download or read book Aesthetic Spaces written by Brigitte Peucker and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-15 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Films provide valuable spaces for aesthetic experimentation and analysis, for cinema's openness to other media has always allowed it to expand its own. In Aesthetic Spaces, Brigitte Peucker shows that when painterly or theatrical conventions are appropriated by the medium of film, the dissonant effects produced open it up to intermedial reflection and tell us a great deal about cinema itself. The films studied in these chapters include those by Abbas Kiarostami, Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Carl Th. Dreyer, Peter Greenaway, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ingmar Bergman, Jacques Rivette, Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, Lars von Trier, Spike Jonze, Éric Rohmer, Lech Majewski, and others. Where two media are in evidence in these films, there is usually a third, and often theater mediates between film and painting. Aesthetic Spaces interrogates issues of cinematic space and mise-en-scène from different but interconnected theoretical perspectives, organizing its chapters around some of the formal principles—space, spectator, frame, color and lighting, props, décor, and actor—that shape films. Drawing on the older arts to renew cinema, the films examined deploy paintings as material: Poussin and Bruegel, Rembrandt, Hals and Klimt, and medieval illustrations and modernist abstractions are used to expand our notions of cinematic space. Peucker shows that when different media come together in film, they create effects of dissonance out of which new modes of looking may arise.
