Download or read book The Mysteries of Cinema Movies and Imagination written by Peter Conrad and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging from the late nineteenth century to the present day, this exhilarating survey by cultural critic Peter Conrad explores the ways film has changed how we see the world. This is a thematic roller-coaster ride through cinema history, with film expert Peter Conrad in the seat beside you. Thoroughly international, this book ranges from Fay Wray to Satyajit Ray, from Buster Keaton to Kurosawa, from westerns to nouvelle vague. Conrad explores the medium’s relationship to speed, technology, fantasy, horror, dream, color, sound, light, and shadow with reference to scores of films, from the earliest nineteenth-century silent experiments to the latest multisensory Hollywood blockbusters. The author’s insights are amplified by voices from inside and outside the industry: directors and critics are included alongside artists, writers, philosophers, and historians ranging from Leo Tolstoy to Salvador Dalí, Theodor Adorno to Philip Roth. Arranged by topics, such as “Meta-Movie” and “The Physics of Film,” rather than chronological events, The Mysteries of Cinema focuses on film’s otherworldly, hypnotic, and magical qualities. Perfect for both movie fans who will discover new films and directors, and for students of film who will see familiar classics in a new light, this volume is full of unique insights into the genre. Combining his vast knowledge with a forensic eye for a director’s every quirk and mannerism, Conrad offers a fascinating and thrilling exploration of film.
Download or read book Mysteries of Cinema written by Adrian Martin and published by UWA Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The major essays of the distinguished and prolific Australian-born film critic Adrian Martin have long been difficult to access, so this anthology, which collects highlights of his work in one volume, will be welcomed throughout film studies. Martin offers in-depth analysis of many genres of films while providing a broad understanding of the history of cinema and the history of film criticism and culture. These vibrant, highly personal essays, written between 1982 and 2016, balance breadth across cinema theory with almost encyclopedic detail, ranging between aesthetics, cinephilia, film genre, criticism, philosophy, and cultural politics. Mysteries of Cinema circumscribes a special cultural period that began with the dream of critique as a form of poetic writing, and today arrives at collaborative experiments in audiovisual essays. Throughout these essays, Martin pursues a particular vision of what cinema has been, what it is, and what it still could be.
Download or read book Silent Mystery and Detective Movies written by Ken Wlaschin and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2009-10-21 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The silent film era was known in part for its cliffhanger serials and air of suspense that kept audiences returning to theaters week after week. Icons such as Douglas Fairbanks, Laurel and Hardy, Lon Chaney and Harry Houdini were among those who graced the dark and shadowy screen. This reference guide to silent films with mystery and detective content lists more than 1,500 titles in one of entertainment’s most popular and enduring genres. While most of the films examined are from North America, mystery films from around the world are included.
Download or read book How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies written by Robert B. Ray and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2001-04-22 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He is a member of The Vulgar Boatmen, whose records include You and Your Sister, Please Panic, and Opposite Sex.ContentsForeword by James NaremoreImpressionism, Surrealism, and Film Theory: Path Dependence, or How a Tradition in Film Theory Gets LostThe Bordwell Regime and the Stakes of KnowledgeSnapshots: The Beginnings of PhotographyTrackingHow to Start and Avant-GardeHow to Teach Cultural StudiesThe Best Way to Understand PostmodernismThe Mystery of Edward HopperFilm and LiteratureConclusion
Download or read book The Mysteries of Cinema written by Peter Conrad and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging from the late nineteenth century to the present day, this exhilarating survey by cultural critic Peter Conrad explores the ways film has changed how we see the world. This is a thematic roller-coaster ride through cinema history, with film expert Peter Conrad in the seat beside you. Thoroughly international, this book ranges from Fay Wray to Satyajit Ray, from Buster Keaton to Kurosawa, from westerns to nouvelle vague. Conrad explores the medium’s relationship to speed, technology, fantasy, horror, dream, color, sound, light, and shadow with reference to scores of films, from the earliest nineteenth-century silent experiments to the latest multisensory Hollywood blockbusters. The author’s insights are amplified by voices from inside and outside the industry: directors and critics are included alongside artists, writers, philosophers, and historians ranging from Leo Tolstoy to Salvador Dalí, Theodor Adorno to Philip Roth. Arranged by topics, such as “Meta-Movie” and “The Physics of Film,” rather than chronological events, The Mysteries of Cinema focuses on film’s otherworldly, hypnotic, and magical qualities. Perfect for both movie fans who will discover new films and directors, and for students of film who will see familiar classics in a new light, this volume is full of unique insights into the genre. Combining his vast knowledge with a forensic eye for a director’s every quirk and mannerism, Conrad offers a fascinating and thrilling exploration of film.
Download or read book Mystery Movie Series of 1930s Hollywood written by Ron Backer and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2012-08-15 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This companion volume to Mystery Movie Series of 1940s Hollywood (McFarland, 2010) focuses on 22 series and 167 individual films, primarily released during the 1930s. It was a decade that featured some of the most famous cinema detectives of all time, among them Charlie Chan, Nick and Nora Charles, Philo Vance, Nancy Drew, and such lesser known but equally entertaining figures as Hildegarde Withers, Torchy Blane, Mr. Moto, Mr. Wong, and Brass Bancroft. Each mystery movie series is placed within its historical context, with emphasis on its source material and the changes or developments within the series over time. Also included are reviews of all the series' films, analyzing the quality and cohesiveness of the mystery plotlines. For titles based on literary sources, a comparison between the film and the written work is provided.
Download or read book King Hu s A Touch of Zen written by Stephen Teo and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Touch of Zen is one of the first Chinese-language films to gain recognition in an international film festival (the Grand Prix at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival), creating the generic mould for the "crossover" success of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in 2000. The film has achieved a cult status over the years but little has been written about it. This first book-length study of the classic martial arts film therefore redresses its critical neglect, and explores its multi-leveled dimensions and mysteries. One of the central features of the film is the enigmatic knight-lady (xia nü) whose quest for revenge leads her to cross paths with a poor scholar whose interest in military strategy seals their alliance. Teo discusses the psychological manifestations and implications of this relationship and concludes that the film's continuing relevance lies in its portrait of sexuality and the feminist desires of the heroine. Teo also analyzes the film's form as an action piece and the director's preoccupation with Zen as a creative inspiration and as a subject in its own right. As such, he argues that the film is a highly unconventional and idiosyncratic work which attempts to transcend its own genre and reach the heights of universal transcendence. Teo grounds his study in both Western and Chinese literary sources, providing a broad and comprehensive treatise based on the film's narrative concepts and symbols.
Download or read book The Movie Book written by DK and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 781 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn about the visual and performing arts in The Movie Book. Part of the fascinating Big Ideas series, this book tackles tricky topics and themes in a simple and easy to follow format. Learn about Movies in this overview guide to the subject, great for beginners looking to learn and experts wishing to refresh their knowledge alike! The Movie Book brings a fresh and vibrant take on the topic through eye-catching graphics and diagrams to immerse yourself in. This captivating book will broaden your understanding of Movies, with: - More than 100 of the best movies ever made worldwide - Packed with facts, charts, timelines and graphs to help explain core concepts - A visual approach to big subjects with striking illustrations and graphics throughout - Easy to follow text makes topics accessible for people at any level of understanding The Movie Book is the perfect introduction to the rich history of cinema like never before - from the golden age of black-and-white films to international art-house and 21st-century sci-fi, aimed at adults with an interest in the subject and students wanting to gain more of an overview. Here you’ll discover more than 100 of the best movies ever made, uncovering the key themes and big ideas behind the world's most celebrated cinematic gems. Your Movie Questions, Simply Explained This book brings cinema to life with iconic quotes and film stills, posters, biographies of directors, actors, and actresses, along with narrative timelines and infographics exploring key themes. If you thought it was difficult to learn about the best cinematic masterpieces, The Movie Book presents key information in an easy to follow layout. Learn everything about your favorite movies, as well as celebrated classics and the films to watch before you die, through iconic quotes and stills, posters, biographies, memorabilia and narrative timelines, through fantastic mind maps and step-by-step summaries. The Big Ideas Series With millions of copies sold worldwide, The Movie Book is part of the award-winning Big Ideas series from DK. The series uses striking graphics along with engaging writing, making big topics easy to understand.
Download or read book Missing Reels written by Farran Smith Nehme and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2014-11-12 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York in the late 1980s. Ceinwen Reilly has just moved from Yazoo City, Mississippi, and she’s never going back, minimum wage job (vintage store salesgirl) and shabby apartment (Avenue C walkup) be damned. Who cares about earthly matters when Ceinwen can spend her days and her nights at fading movie houses—and most of the time that’s left trying to look like Jean Harlow? One day, Ceinwen discovers that her downstairs neighbor may have—just possibly—starred in a forgotten silent film that hasn’t been seen for ages. So naturally, it’s time for a quest. She will track down the film, she will impress her neighbor, and she will become a part of movie history: the archivist as ingénue. As she embarks on her grand mission, Ceinwen meets a somewhat bumbling, very charming, 100% English math professor named Matthew, who is as rational as she is dreamy. Together, they will or will not discover the missing reels, will or will not fall in love, and will or will not encounter the obsessives that make up the New York silent film nut underworld. A novel as winning and energetic as the grand Hollywood films that inspired it, Missing Reels is an irresistible, alchemical mix of Nora Ephron and David Nicholls that will charm and delight.
Download or read book Surrealism and Film After 1945 written by Kristoffer Noheden and published by . This book was released on 2024-07-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surrealism and Film after 1945 is the first collection devoted to the vibrant culture of transnational surrealist cinema since the Second World War. Eleven chapters by leading and emerging scholars of surrealism and film studies establish the parameters of this history and situate surrealism as a major force in postwar cinema.
Download or read book Why Popcorn Costs So Much at the Movies written by Richard B. McKenzie and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-04-17 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This entertaining book seeks to unravel an array of pricing puzzles from the one captured in the book’s title to why so many prices end with "9" (as in $2.99 or $179). Along the way, the author explains how the 9/11 terrorists have, through the effects of their heinous acts on the relative prices of various modes of travel, killed more Americans since 9/11 than they killed that fateful day. He also explains how well-meaning efforts to spur the use of alternative, supposedly environmentally friendly fuels have starved millions of people around the world and given rise to the deforestation of rainforests in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Download or read book The Cinema of Christopher Nolan written by Jacqueline Furby and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-04 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past fifteen years, writer, producer and director Christopher Nolan has emerged from the margins of independent British cinema to become one of the most commercially successful directors in Hollywood. From Following (1998) to Interstellar (2014), Christopher Nolan's films explore philosophical concerns by experimenting with nonlinear storytelling while also working within classical Hollywood narrative and genre frameworks. Contextualizing and closely reading each of his films, this collection examines the director's play with memory, time, trauma, masculinity, and identity, and considers the function of music and video games and the effect of IMAX on his work.
Download or read book Moments That Made the Movies written by David Thomson and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his first fully illustrated work, David Thomson breaks new ground by focusing in on a series of moments—which his readers will also experience in beautifully reproduced imagery—from seventy-two films across a 100-year-plus span. An indispensable counterpart to both his classic Biographical Dictionary of Film (called “a miracle” by Sight and Sound) and his lauded recent history, The Big Screen (“a pungently written, brilliant book” according to David Denby), Moments takes readers on an unprecedented visual tour, where the specifics of the imagery the reader is seeing are inextricably tied to the text. Thomson's moments range from a set of Eadweard Muybridge's pioneering photographs to sequences in films from the classic—Citizen Kane, Sunset Boulevard, The Red Shoes—to the unexpected—The Piano Teacher, Burn After Reading. The excitement of Moments dynamic visuals will be matched only by the discussion it incites in film circles, as readers revisit their own list of memorable moments and then re-experience the films—both those included on Thomson's list and from their own life—as never before. Moments That Made the Movies will undoubtedly reaffirm Thomson's place as—according to John Banville—“the greatest living writer on the movies.”
Download or read book Murder at Hotel Cinema written by Daniel Edward Craig and published by Llewellyn Worldwide. This book was released on 2011-10-08 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this star-studded sequel to Murder at the Universe, Daniel Edward Craig pokes good-humored fun at the celebrity-crazed Los Angeles culture. Dedicated hotelier Trevor Lambert takes a job at Hotel Cinema, a multi-million dollar rejuvenation of an Old Hollywood motor inn. It's a fabulous opening party until Tinseltown's hottest star, Chelsea Fricks, takes a fatal dive from her penthouse balcony. Was it a reckless publicity stunt or did fame drive her to suicide? Chelsea's stab wounds tell another story. Suddenly Hotel Cinema is the setting of a hilarious Hollywood murder mystery, starring Chelsea's former pit bull publicist; a star-struck detective; tasteless tabloid reporters; and Trevor's incompetent boss, who breaks every rule in the hotel handbook. Cristal champagne is flowing. Business is booming. But when the hotel staff are targeted as murder suspects, the party turns into a publicity nightmare.
Download or read book The Cinema of Federico Fellini written by Peter Bondanella and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1992-05-05 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major artistic biography of Federico Fellini shows how his exuberant imagination has been shaped by popular culture, literature, and his encounter with the ideas of C. G. Jung, especially Jungian dream interpretation. Covering Fellini's entire career, the book links his mature accomplishments to his first employment as a cartoonist, gagman, and sketch-artist during the Fascist era and his development as a leading neo-realist scriptwriter. Peter Bondanella thoroughly explores key Fellinian themes to reveal the director's growth not only as an artistic master of the visual image but also as an astute interpreter of culture and politics. Throughout the book Bondanella draws on a new archive of several dozen manuscripts, obtained from Fellini and his scriptwriters. These previously unexamined documents allow a comprehensive treatment of Fellini's important part in the rise of Italian neorealism and the even more decisive role that he played in the evolution of Italian cinema beyond neorealism in the 1950s. By probing Fellini's recurring themes, Bondanella reinterprets the visual qualities of the director's body of work--and also discloses in the films a critical and intellectual vitality often hidden by Fellini's reputation as a storyteller and entertainer. After two chapters on Fellini's precinematic career, the book covers all the films to date in analytical chapters arranged by topic: Fellini and his growth beyond his neorealist apprenticeship, dreams and metacinema, literature and cinema, Fellini and politics, Fellini and the image of women, and La voce della luna and the cinema of poetry.
Download or read book A Light in the Dark written by David Thomson and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the celebrated film critic and author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film--an essential work on the preeminent, indispensable movie directors and the ways in which their work has forged, and continues to forge, the landscape of modern film. Directors operate behind the scenes, managing actors, establishing a cohesive creative vision, at times literally guiding our eyes with the eye of the camera. But we are often so dazzled by the visions on-screen that it is easy to forget the individual who is off-screen orchestrating the entire production--to say nothing of their having marshaled a script, a studio, and other people's money. David Thomson, in his usual brilliantly insightful way, shines a light on the visionary directors who have shaped modern cinema and, through their work, studies the very nature of film direction. With his customary candor about his own delights and disappointments, Thomson analyzes both landmark works and forgotten films from classic directors such as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, and Jean-Luc Godard, as well as contemporary powerhouses such as Jane Campion, Spike Lee, and Quentin Tarantino. He shrewdly interrogates their professional legacies and influence in the industry, while simultaneously assessing the critical impact of an artist's personal life on his or her work. He explores the male directors' dominance of the past, and describes how diversity can change the landscape. Judicious, vivid, and witty, A Light in the Dark is yet another required Thomson text for every movie lover's shelf.
Download or read book Cinema Symbolism written by Robert W. Sullivan IV and published by . This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cinema Symbolism: A Guide to Esoteric Imagery in Popular Movies is a continuation and extension of the final chapter titled, "So Dark the Con of Man," of The Royal Arch of Enoch: The Impact of Masonic Ritual, Philosophy, and Symbolism. This book presents esoteric and arcane symbolisms and themes veiled in some of Hollywood's most popular films.
