Download or read book The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema written by Murray Leeder and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study sees the nineteenth century supernatural as a significant context for cinema’s first years. The book takes up the familiar notion of cinema as a “ghostly,” “spectral” or “haunted” medium and asks what made such association possible. Examining the history of the projected image and supernatural displays, psychical research and telepathy, spirit photography and X-rays, the skeletons of the danse macabre and the ghostly spaces of the mind, it uncovers many lost and fascinating connections. The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema locates film’s spectral affinities within a history stretching back to the beginning of screen practice and forward to the digital era. In addition to examining the use of supernatural themes by pioneering filmmakers like Georges Méliès and George Albert Smith, it also engages with the representations of cinema’s ghostly past in Guy Maddin’s recent online project Seances (2016). It is ideal for those interested in the history of cinema, the study of the supernatural and the pre-history of the horror film.
Download or read book Cinematic Ghosts written by Murray Leeder and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-07-30 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1896, Maxim Gorky declared cinema "the Kingdom of Shadows." In its silent, ashen-grey world, he saw a land of spectral, and ever since then cinema has had a special relationship with the haunted and the ghostly. Cinematic Ghosts is the first collection devoted to this subject, including fourteen new essays, dedicated to exploring the many permutations of the movies' phantoms. Cinematic Ghosts contains essays revisiting some classic ghost films within the genres of horror (The Haunting, 1963), romance (Portrait of Jennie, 1948), comedy (Beetlejuice, 1988) and the art film (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010), as well as essays dealing with a number of films from around the world, from Sweden to China. Cinematic Ghosts traces the archetype of the cinematic ghost from the silent era until today, offering analyses from a range of historical, aesthetic and theoretical dimensions.
Download or read book Horror Film written by Murray Leeder and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the horror film genre.
Download or read book The Supernatural Cinema of Guillermo del Toro written by John W. Morehead and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-05-23 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro is one of the most prolific artists working in film. His directorial work includes Cronos (1993), Mimic (1997), The Devil's Backbone (2001), Blade II (2002), Hellboy (2004), Pan's Labyrinth (2006), Hellboy II (2008) and Pacific Rim (2013). He has also worked extensively as a producer, with several screenwriting credits to his name. As a novelist he coauthored The Strain Trilogy (2009-2011), which he also developed into a television series for FX in 2014. Del Toro has spoken of the "primal, spiritual function" of his art, which gives expression to his fascination with monsters, myth, archetype, metaphor, Jungian psychology, the paranormal and religion. This collection of new essays discusses cultural, religious and literary influences on del Toro's work and explores key themes of his films, including the child's experience of humanity through encounters with the monstrous.
Download or read book Giving the Devil His Due written by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist, 2021 Bram Stoker Awards (Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction) The first collection of essays to address Satan’s ubiquitous and popular appearances in film Lucifer and cinema have been intertwined since the origins of the medium. As humankind’s greatest antagonist and the incarnation of pure evil, the cinematic devil embodies our own culturally specific anxieties and desires, reflecting moviegoers’ collective conceptions of good and evil, right and wrong, sin and salvation. Giving the Devil His Due is the first book of its kind to examine the history and significance of Satan onscreen. This collection explores how the devil is not just one monster among many, nor is he the “prince of darkness” merely because he has repeatedly flickered across cinema screens in darkened rooms since the origins of the medium. Satan is instead a force active in our lives. Films featuring the devil, therefore, are not just flights of fancy but narratives, sometimes reinforcing, sometimes calling into question, a familiar belief system. From the inception of motion pictures in the 1890s and continuing into the twenty-first century, these essays examine what cinematic representations tell us about the art of filmmaking, the desires of the film-going public, what the cultural moments of the films reflect, and the reciprocal influence they exert. Loosely organized chronologically by film, though some chapters address more than one film, this collection studies such classic movies as Faust, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, Angel Heart, The Witch, and The Last Temptation of Christ, as well as the appearance of the Devil in Disney animation. Guiding the contributions to this volume is the overarching idea that cinematic representations of Satan reflect not only the hypnotic powers of cinema to explore and depict the fantastic but also shifting social anxieties and desires that concern human morality and our place in the universe. Contributors: Simon Bacon, Katherine A. Fowkes, Regina Hansen, David Hauka, Russ Hunter, Barry C. Knowlton, Eloise R. Knowlton, Murray Leeder, Catherine O’Brien, R. Barton Palmer, Carl H. Sederholm, David Sterritt, J. P. Telotte, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Download or read book Supernatural Entertainments written by Simone Natale and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed. Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences. Addressing the overlap between spiritualism’s explosion and nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and popular culture of today.
Download or read book The Supernatural Sublime written by Raúl Rodríguez-Hernández and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-07 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Supernatural Sublime explores the long-neglected element of the supernatural in films from Spain and Mexico by focusing on the social and cultural contexts of their production and reception, their adaptations of codes and conventions for characters and plot, and their use of cinematic techniques to create the experience of emotion without explanation. Deploying the overarching concepts of the supernatural and the sublime, Raúl Rodríguez-Hernández and Claudia Schaefer detail the dovetailing of the unnatural and the experience of limitlessness associated with the sublime. The Supernatural Sublime embeds the films in the social histories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexico and Spain, both of which made a forced leap into modernity after historical periods founded on official ideologies and circumscribed visions of the nation. Evoking Kant’s definition of the experience of the sublime, Rodríguez-Hernández and Schaefer concentrate on the unrepresentable and the contradictory that oppose purported universal truths and instead offer up illusion, deception, and imagination through cinema, itself a type of illusion: writing with light.
Download or read book Seeing Things written by Kartik Nair and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In 1980s India, the Ramsay Brothers and other filmmakers produced a wave of horror movies about soul-sucking witches, knife-wielding psychopaths, and dark-caped vampires. Seeing Things is about the sudden cuts, botched prosthetic effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage in these movies. Such moments may very well be "failures" of various kinds, but in this book Kartik Nair reads them as clues to the conditions in which the films were once made, censored, and seen, offering a view from below of the world's largest film culture. Combining extensive archival research and original interviews with close readings of landmark films including Purana Mandir, Veerana, and Jaani Dushman, this book tracks the material coordinates of horror cinema's spectral images. In the process, Seeing Things discovers a spectral materiality-one that informs Bombay horror's haunted houses, grotesque bodies, and graphic violence and gives visceral force to our experience of the genre's globally familiar conventions"--
Download or read book Experimental Filmmaking and the Motion Picture Camera written by Joel Schlemowitz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-10 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experimental Filmmaking and the Motion Picture Camera is an introductory guide to experimental filmmaking, surveying the practical methods of experimental film production as well as the history, theory, and aesthetics of experimental approaches. Author Joel Schlemowitz explains the basic mechanism of the camera before going on to discuss slow and fast motion filming, single-frame time lapse, the long take, camera movement, workings of the lens, and the use of in-camera effects such as double exposure. A comprehensive guide to using the 16mm Bolex camera is provided. Strategies for making films edited in-camera are covered. A range of equipment beyond the basic non-sync camera is surveyed. The movie diary and film portrait are examined, along with the work of a range of experimental filmmakers including Stan Brakhage, Rudy Burckhardt, Paul Clipson, Christopher Harris, Peter Hutton, Takahiko Iimura, Marie Losier, Rose Lowder, Jonas Mekas, Marie Menken, Margaret Rorison, Guy Sherwin, and Tomonari Nishikawa. This is the ideal book for students interested in experimental and alternative modes of filmmaking. It provides invaluable insight into the history, methods, and concepts inherent to experimental uses of the camera, while providing students with a solid foundation of techniques and practices to foster their development as filmmakers. Supplemental material, including links to films cited in the book, can be found at www.experimentalfilmmaking.com.
Download or read book The Art of Ectoplasm written by Serena Keshavjee and published by Univ. of Manitoba Press. This book was released on 2023-11-01 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The legacy of the Hamiltons’ psychic archive In the wake of the First World War and the 1918–19 pandemic, the world was left grappling with a profound sense of loss. It was against this backdrop that a Winnipeg couple, physician T.G. Hamilton and nurse Lillian Hamilton, began their research, documenting and photographing séances they held in their home laboratory. Their extensive study of the survival of human consciousness after death resulted in a stunning collection of hundreds of photographs, including images of tables flying through the air, mediums in trances, and, most curious of all, ectoplasm—a strange, white substance through which ghosts could apparently manifest. The Art of Ectoplasm invites readers to explore the Hamiltons’ research and photographic evidence which has attracted international attention from scholars and artists alike. Notable figures like Arthur Conan Doyle participated in the Hamilton family’s séances, and their investigations garnered support among the psychical scientific community, including renowned physicist Oliver Lodge, the inventor of wireless telegraphy. In the century since their creation, the Hamilton photographs (now housed at the University of Manitoba) have continued to perplex and inspire as the subject of academic study, comedic parody, and artistic and cinematic renderings. This fascinating collection reflects on the history and legacy of the startling and uncanny images found in the Hamilton Family archive. As contemporary society continues to feel the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Art of Ectoplasm offers a compelling look at a chapter in social history not entirely unlike our own.
Download or read book Terrifying Texts written by Cynthia J. Miller and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-09-14 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Faust (1926) to The Babadook (2014), books have been featured in horror films as warnings, gateways, prisons and manifestations of the monstrous. Ancient grimoires such as the Necronomicon serve as timeless vessels of knowledge beyond human comprehension, while runes, summoning diaries, and spell books offer their readers access to the powers of the supernatural--but at what cost? This collection of new essays examines nearly a century of genre horror in which on-screen texts drive and shape their narratives, sometimes unnoticed. The contributors explore American films like The Evil Dead (1981), The Prophecy (1995) and It Follows (2014), as well as such international films as Eric Valette's Malefique (2002), Paco Cabeza's The Appeared (2007) and Lucio Fulci's The Beyond (1981).
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West written by Susan Bernardin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-19 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first major collection to remap the American West though the intersectional lens of gender and sexuality, especially in relation to race and Indigeneity. Organized through several interrelated key concepts, The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West addresses gender and sexuality from and across diverse and divergent methodologies. Comprising 34 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into four parts: Genealogies Bodies Movements Lands The volume features leading and newer scholars whose essays connect interdisciplinary fields including Indigenous Studies, Latinx and Asian American Studies, Western American Studies, and Queer, Feminist, and Gender Studies. Through innovative methodologies and reclaimed archives of knowledge, contributors model fresh frameworks for thinking about relations of power and place, gender and genre, settler colonization and decolonial resistance. Even as they reckon with the ongoing gendered and racialized violence at the core of the American West, contributors forge new lexicons for imagining alternative Western futures. This pathbreaking collection will be invaluable to scholars and students studying the origins, myths, histories, and legacies of the American West. This is a foundational collection that will become invaluable to scholars and students across a range of disciplines including Gender and Sexuality Studies, Literary Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Latinx Studies.
Download or read book Lost Souls of Horror and the Gothic written by Elizabeth McCarthy and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-10-24 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years horror and gothic themes have penetrated mainstream popular culture in a manner unseen since the horror boom of the 1970s. Primetime television viewers who before might not have shown interest in such late-night fare now happily settle down after dinner to watch zombie or serial killer shows. This collection of 54 biographical essays examines many overlooked and underrated figures who have played a role in the ever expanding world of horror and gothic entertainment. The contributors push the boundaries of how we define these terms, bringing into the discussion such diverse figures as singer-songwriter Tom Waits, occultist Dion Fortune, author Charles Beaumont, historian and bishop Gregory of Tours and video game designer Shinji Mikami.
Download or read book Deceitful Media written by Simone Natale and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Since its inception, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been nurtured by the dream - cherished by some scientists while dismissed as unrealistic by others - that it will lead to forms of intelligence similar or alternative to human life. However, AI might be more accurately described as a range of technologies providing a convincing illusion of intelligence - in other words, not much the creation of intelligent beings, but rather of technologies that are perceived by humans as such. Deceitful Media argues that AI resides also and especially in the perception of human users. Exploring the history of AI from its origins in the Turing Test to contemporary AI voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri, Simone Natale demonstrates that our tendency to project humanity into things shapes the very functioning and implications of AI. He argues for a recalibration of the relationship between deception and AI that helps recognize and critically question how computing technologies mobilize specific aspects of users' perception and psychology in order to create what we call "AI." Introducing the concept of "banal deception," which describes deceptive mechanisms and practices that are embedded in AI, the book shows that deception is as central to AI's functioning as the circuits, software, and data that make it run. Delving into the relationship between AI and deception, Deceitful Media thus reformulates the debate on AI on the basis of a new assumption: that what machines are changing is primarily us, humans. If 'intelligent' machines might one day revolutionize life, the book provocatively suggests, they are already transforming how we understand and carry out social interactions"--
Download or read book A Place of Darkness written by Kendall R. Phillips and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Horror is one of the most enduringly popular genres in cinema. The term “horror film” was coined in 1931 between the premiere of Dracula and the release of Frankenstein, but monsters, ghosts, demons, and supernatural and horrific themes have been popular with American audiences since the emergence of novelty kinematographic attractions in the late 1890s. A Place of Darkness illuminates the prehistory of the horror genre by tracing the way horrific elements and stories were portrayed in films prior to the introduction of the term “horror film.” Using a rhetorical approach that examines not only early films but also the promotional materials for them and critical responses to them, Kendall R. Phillips argues that the portrayal of horrific elements was enmeshed in broader social tensions around the emergence of American identity and, in turn, American cinema. He shows how early cinema linked monsters, ghosts, witches, and magicians with Old World superstitions and beliefs, in contrast to an American way of thinking that was pragmatic, reasonable, scientific, and progressive. Throughout the teens and twenties, Phillips finds, supernatural elements were almost always explained away as some hysterical mistake, humorous prank, or nefarious plot. The Great Depression of the 1930s, however, constituted a substantial upheaval in the system of American certainty and opened a space for the reemergence of Old World gothic within American popular discourse in the form of the horror genre, which has terrified and thrilled fans ever since.
Download or read book Horror Film written by Murray Leeder and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the history of cinema, horror has proven to be a genre of consistent popularity, which adapts to different cultural contexts while retaining a recognizable core. Horror Film: A Critical Introduction, the newest in Bloomsbury's Film Genre series, balances the discussions of horror's history, theory, and aesthetics as no introductory book ever has. Featuring studies of films both obscure and famous, Horror Film is international in its scope and chronicles horror from its silent roots until today. As a straightforward and convenient critical introduction to the history and key academic approaches, this book is accessible to the beginner but still of interest to the expert.
Download or read book The 1990s Teen Horror Cycle written by Alexandra West and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-06-08 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many critics and fans refer to the 1990s as the decade that horror forgot, with few notable entries in the genre. Yet horror went mainstream in the '90s by speaking to the anxieties of American youth during one of the country's most prosperous eras. No longer were films made on low budgets and dependent on devotees for success. Horror found its way onto magazine covers, fashion ads and CD soundtrack covers. "Girl power" feminism and a growing distaste for consumerism defined an audience that both embraced and rejected the commercial appeal of these films. This in-depth study examines the youth subculture and politics of the era, focusing on such films as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), Scream (1996), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), Idle Hands (1999) and Cherry Falls (2000).
