Download or read book The Direct Cinema of David and Albert Maysles written by Jonathan B. Vogels and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2010-08-20 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boldly signifying the cultural issues of the 1960s and 1970s in groundbreaking pieces such as Grey Gardens, Gimme Shelter, and Showman, filmmakers and brothers David and Albert Maysles used an approach to documentary film that involved spontaneous observation of naturally occurring events. With no rehearsed footage and no preconceived plots, their revolutionary work eschewed the authoritative voice-over narrator, didactic scripts, and the traditional problem-and-solution format used by the majority of their predecessors in the genre and duly influenced subsequent directors in both fiction and nonfiction film. Their collaboration from 1962 until David’s death in 1987 wrought thirteen major works in which the brothers critiqued the concept of celebrity with unglamorous footage of iconic figures, explored how commercialism hinders communication, and questioned the possibility of seeing anything clearly in a world abounding with both real and constructed images. Jonathan B. Vogels outlines how the Maysles brothers blended a unique amalgam of direct cinema characteristics, a modern humanist aesthetic, and a collaborative working process that included other directors and editors. Looking at the films as both shapers and reflections of American culture, he points out that the works offer insights into a wide range of contemporary topics including materialism, celebrity, modern art, and the American family. In addition to describing the changes in technology that made direct cinema possible, Vogels provides careful, scene-by-scene analyses that allow for a consideration of the Maysles brothers’ films as films, a tactic not frequently employed in nonfiction film studies.
Download or read book Albert and David Maysles written by Keith Beattie and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interviews with the brothers who created the cinéma vérité style of documentary filmmaking and the films Salesman, Gimme Shelter, and Grey Gardens
Download or read book Albert Maysles written by Joe McElhaney and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Albert Maysles has created some of the most influential documentaries of the postwar period. Such films as Salesman,Gimme Shelter, and Grey Gardens continue to generate intense debate about the ethics and aesthetics of the documentary form. In this in-depth study, Joe McElhaney offers a novel understanding of the historical relevance of Maysles. By closely focusing on Maysles's expressive use of his camera, particularly in relation to the filming of the human figure, this book situates Maysles's films within not only documentary film history but film history in general, arguing for their broad-ranging importance to both narrative film and documentary cinema. Complete with an engaging interview with Maysles and a detailed comparison of the variant releases of his documentary on the Beatles (What's Happening: The Beatles in the U.S.A. and The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit), this work is a pivotal study of a significant filmmaker.
Download or read book 1968 and Global Cinema written by Christina Gerhardt and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-17 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the political cinema of 1968 in relation to global events.
Download or read book Salesman written by J.M. Tyree and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected by the Library of Congress as one of the most significant American films ever made, Salesman (1966–9) is a landmark in non-fiction cinema, equivalent in its impact and influence to Truman Capote's 'non-fiction novel' In Cold Blood. The film follows a team of travelling Bible salesmen on the road in Massachusetts, Chicago, and Florida, where the American dream of self-reliant entrepreneurship goes badly wrong for protagonist Paul Brennan. Long acknowledged as a high-water mark of the 'direct cinema' movement, this ruefully comic and quietly devastating film was the first masterpiece of Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, the trio who would go on to produce The Rolling Stones documentary, Gimme Shelter (1970). Based on the premise that films drawn from ordinary life could compete with Hollywood extravaganzas, Salesman was critical in shaping 'the documentary feature'. A novel cinema-going experience for its time, the film was independently produced, designed for theatrical release and presented without voiceover narration, interviews, or talking heads. Working with innovative handheld equipment, and experimenting with eclectic methods and a collaborative ethos, the Maysles brothers and Zwerin produced a carefully-orchestrated narrative drama fashioned from unexpected episodes. J. M. Tyree suggests that Salesman can be understood as a case study of non-fiction cinema, raising perennial questions about reality and performance. His analysis provides an historical and cultural context for the film, considering its place in world cinema and its critical representations of dearly-held national myths. The style of Salesman still makes other documentaries look static and immobile, while the film's allegiances to everyday subjects and working people indelibly marked the cinema. Tyree's insightful study also includes an exclusive exchange with Albert Maysles about the film.
Download or read book A Maysles Scrapbook written by Albert Maysles and published by Steidl. This book was released on 2007 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is the first comprehensive monograph on the revolutionary filmmaking team that set the standards of contemporary documentary filmmaking. With Albert behind the camera and David on sound, the Maysles brothers were pivotal to the creation of the American Direct Cinema movement of the 1950s and 60s. The recent discovery of reels of original film negative, hours of outtake material, numerous photographs, production notes and personal and business correspondance is the occasion for this retrospective publication."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book American Music Documentary written by Benjamin J. Harbert and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documentary filmmakers have been making films about music for a half-century. American Music Documentary looks at five key films to begin to imagine how we might produce, edit, and watch films from an ethnomusicological point of view. Reconsidering Albert and David Maysles’s Gimme Shelter, Jill Godmilow’s Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman, Shirley Clarke’s Ornette: Made in America, D.A. Pennebaker’s and Chris Hegedus’s Depeche Mode: 101, and Jem Cohen’s and Fugazi’s Instrument, Harbert lays the foundations for the study and practice of “ciné-ethnomusicology.” Interviews with directors and rich analysis from the disciplinary perspectives of film studies and ethnomusicology make this book a critical companion to some of the most celebrated music documentaries of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Cinema and Secularism written by Mark Cauchi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-12-14 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cinema and Secularism is the first collection to make the relationship between cinema and secularism thematic, utilizing a number of different methodological approaches to examine their identification and differentiation across film theory, film aesthetics, film history, and throughout global cinema. The emergence of moving images and the history of cinema historically coincide with the emergence of secularism as a concept and discourse. More than historically coinciding, however, cinema and secularism would seem to have-and many contemporary theorists and critics seem to assume-a more intrinsic, almost ontological connection to each other. While early film theorists and critics explicitly addressed questions about secularism, religion, and cinema, once the study of film was professionalized and secularized in the Western academy in both film studies and religious studies, explicit and critical attention to the relationship between cinema and secularism rapidly declined. Indeed, if one canvases film scholarship today, one will find barely any works dedicated to thinking critically about the relationship between cinema and secularism. Extending the recent “secular turn” in the humanities and social sciences, Cinema and Secularism provokes critical reflection on its titular concepts. Making contributions to theory, philosophy, criticism, and history, the chapters in this pioneering volume collectively interrogate the assumption that cinema is secular, how secularism is conceived and related to cinema differently in different film cultures, and whether the world is disenchanted or enchanted in cinema. Coming from intellectually diverse backgrounds in film studies, religious studies, and philosophy, the interdisciplinary contributors to this book cover films and traditions of thought from America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia. In these ways, Cinema and Secularism opens new areas of inquiry in the study of film and contributes to the ongoing interrogation of secularism more broadly.
Download or read book Abbas Kiarostami and Film Philosophy written by Mathew Abbott and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deflationary, anti-theoretical film-philosophy through the cinema of Abbas KiarostamiMathew Abbott presents a powerful new film-philosophy through the cinema of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Mathew Abbott argues that Kiarostamis films carry out cinematic thinking: they do not just illustrate pre-existing philosophical ideas, but do real philosophical work.Crossing the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, he draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Alice Crary, NoAl Carroll, Giorgio Agamben, and Martin Heidegger, bringing out the thinking at work in Kiarostamis most recent films: Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, ABC Africa, Ten, Five, Shirin, Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love.
Download or read book Emotions Ethics and Cinematic Experience written by Robert Sinnerbrink and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2021-06-11 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 1990s, phenomenology and cognitivism have become two of the most influential approaches to film theory. Yet far from being at odds with each other, both approaches offer important insights on our subjective experience of cinema. Emotions, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience explores how these two approaches might work together to create a philosophy of film that is both descriptively rich and theoretically productive by addressing the key relationship between cinematic experience, emotions, and ethics.
Download or read book Darcy Lange Videography as Social Practice written by Mercedes Vicente and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-11-20 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Videography of Darcy Lange is a critical monograph of a pivotal figure in early analogue video. Trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art, Lange developed a socially engaged video practice with remarkable studies of people at work in industrial, farming, and teaching contexts that drew from conceptual art, social documentary and structuralist filmmaking. Lange saw in portable video a democratic tool for communication and social transformation, continuing the legacy of the revolutionary avant-garde projects that merged art with social life and turned audiences into producers. This book follows Lange's trajectory from his early observational studies to the crisis of representation and socially engaged video and activism, as it is shaped by, and resists, the artistic, cultural and political preoccupations of the 1970s and 1980s. It strikes a balance between being a monographic account providing a close analysis of Lange's oeuvre and drawing from unpublished archival materials—a sort of catalogue raisonné—whilst maintaining a breadth with theoretical discourses around the themes of labour and class, education, and indigenous struggles central to his work. The book's frameworks of Conceptual Art, structuralist and ethnographic film theory, social documentary and the critique of representation, video as social practice and the notion of 'feedback', participatory socially engaged art and postcolonial and indigenous theory,—expand our understanding of video outside the predominant structuralist tendencies. Lange's transnational and nomadic career introduces notions of alterity and challenges nationalistic accounts that excluded him in the past.
Download or read book The Place of Poetics within Documentary Filmmaking written by Keith Marley and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2023-07-21 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection aims to give insight to the reader as to how poetic approaches to documentary filmmaking have helped to develop the documentary form into a rich and diverse way of representing the real world in film. As such, it is the aesthetics of documentary filmmaking that becomes the primary focus of discussion within this collection. The majority of the chapters are written by documentary filmmakers who give insight into how poetics have influenced their own approach to documentary filmmaking, while other chapters are written by film scholars who analyse the work of others, in order to uncover how poetics are manifested in existing documentary films. This book will be of interest to those who produce documentary films, as well as those who have an interest in the work of other documentary filmmakers.
Download or read book The Sixties written by Paul Monaco and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-06 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book covers the 1960's as part of the definitive history of American cinema from its emergence in the 1800s to the present day.
Download or read book Direct Cinema written by Dave Saunders and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Direct Cinema' is a comprehensive study of the seminal 'direct cinema' movement of 1960s America.
Download or read book Narrating American Gender and Ethnic Identities written by Aleksandra M. Różalska and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-07-16 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narrating American Gender and Ethnic Identities investigates two major issues within contemporary American Studies: cultural representations of various minorities (ethnic, religious, sexual) and of women in intersectional contexts of race, class, and sexuality. The first part of the volume, “Gender and Sexuality in Film and Literature”, analyzes different film genres and literary accounts in reference to those aspects of gender and sexuality that are related to identity. Various cultural texts are discussed from perspectives deriving from feminist, gender, and LGBT studies, intersectionality theories, as well as film studies. The second part, “American Experiences of Ethnic Diversity”, dwells upon ethnic and racial problems of American multicultural society and complex interrelationships between the dominant and the marginalized (the center and the periphery). It also focuses on the issue of one’s “(un)fitting” into the dominant culture, mainstream politics, and canon. The book is mostly addressed to scholars and students of American Studies but will also be noteworthy to anybody interested in the United States, literature, and the media. Selected chapters of this volume can be used as a point of departure for discussions – both scholarly and student – on contemporary challenges to the idea of multiculturalism, the complex role of various intersections (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender, age, sexuality, religion, class, dis/ability, etc.) in shaping minority subjectivities, as well as feminist responses to and reading of dominant women’s literary and filmic representations.
Download or read book Forms and Functions in Documentary Filmmaking written by Alexander Röhl and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2009-09-14 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2008 in the subject Film Science, grade: 1,3 , Humboldt-University of Berlin (Anglistik und Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: The subject of this paper is documentary film and Direct Cinema as a particular movement in documentary history. Direct Cinema emerged as an innovative form of filmmaking in the United States in the early 1960s, using new technologies and revitalizing documentary in a break with both traditional forms of both documentary and classical Hollywood cinema. Direct Cinema developed an observational filmmaking method that relied on giving up control by minimizing the filmmakers’ intervention before and during the shooting, with no preconceptions of the finished product. The methods the filmmakers employed drew on realist techniques such as long takes and free-moving cameras, promoting an uncontrolled documentary of immediacy and focusing on the reality effect of the moment of shooting. The result was expressive footage, for which the filmmakers developed a form of representation that relied on the inherent continuity of the filmed event, avoiding the narration and interpretation common to traditional documentary films.
Download or read book Documentary Film A Very Short Introduction written by Patricia Aufderheide and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-11-28 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documentary film can encompass anything from Robert Flaherty's pioneering ethnography Nanook of the North to Michael Moore's anti-Iraq War polemic Fahrenheit 9/11, from Dziga Vertov's artful Soviet propaganda piece Man with a Movie Camera to Luc Jacquet's heart-tugging wildlife epic March of the Penguins. In this concise, crisply written guide, Patricia Aufderheide takes readers along the diverse paths of documentary history and charts the lively, often fierce debates among filmmakers and scholars about the best ways to represent reality and to tell the truths worth telling. Beginning with an overview of the central issues of documentary filmmaking--its definitions and purposes, its forms and founders--Aufderheide focuses on several of its key subgenres, including public affairs films, government propaganda (particularly the works produced during World War II), historical documentaries, and nature films. Her thematic approach allows readers to enter the subject matter through the kinds of films that first attracted them to documentaries, and it permits her to make connections between eras, as well as revealing the ongoing nature of documentary's core controversies involving objectivity, advocacy, and bias. Interwoven throughout are discussions of the ethical and practical considerations that arise with every aspect of documentary production. A particularly useful feature of the book is an appended list of "100 great documentaries" that anyone with a serious interest in the genre should see. Drawing on the author's four decades of experience as a film scholar and critic, this book is the perfect introduction not just for teachers and students but also for all thoughtful filmgoers and for those who aspire to make documentaries themselves. About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.
