Download or read book The Use and Abuse of Cinema written by Eric Rentschler and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eric Rentschler's new book, The Use and Abuse of Cinema, takes readers on a series of enthralling excursions through the fraught history of German cinema, from the Weimar and Nazi eras to the postwar and postwall epochs and into the new millennium. These journeys afford rich panoramas and nuanced close-ups from a nation's production of fantasies and spectacles, traversing the different ways in which the film medium has figured in Germany, both as a site of creative and critical enterprise and as a locus of destructive and regressive endeavor. Each of the chapters provides a stirring minidrama; the cast includes prominent critics such as Siegfried Kracauer and Rudolf Arnheim; postwar directors like Wolfgang Staudte, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, and Alexander Kluge; representatives of the so-called Berlin School; and exponents of mountain epics, early sound musicals, rubble films, and recent heritage features. A film history that is both original and unconventional, Rentschler's colorful tapestry weaves together figures, motifs, and stories in exciting, unexpected, and even novelistic ways.
Download or read book Hooked in Film written by John Markert and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013-05-23 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though drug use was widespread in the nineteenth century, the negative influence of narcotics was mostly unknown. Cinema of the early twentieth century was instrumental in making viewers aware of the harmful effects of drugs. Throughout the decades, images of drugs such as marijuana, LSD, and heroin in films impacted—both negatively and positively—the national perception of their use. In fact, the use, popularity, and opinion of certain drugs often follow their status on the big screen. In Hooked in Film, John Markerttakes a close look at the correlation between social policies and the public view of drugs and their portrayals in film. In this volume, Markert examines the changing social attitudes toward illegal drugs and their cinematic depictions from as early as the 1894 film Chinese Opium Den to the present. The first section of this book focuses on the demonization of drugs between 1900 and 1959, followed by an assessment of marijuana on the big screen after 1960, when the drug was shown as part of everyday life with no serious consequences. Post-1960 depictions of heroin use, which have remained consistently negative, are also analyzed. Markert then takes a close look at the portrayals of powdered cocaine after the 1960s and the emergence of crack in the mid-1980s. Finally, Markert discusses hallucinogens, Ecstasy, and methamphetamines and their roles on the big screen. Tracking hundreds of films spanning more than a century, Hooked in Film looks at camp classics like Reefer Madness, comedies such as Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, Dazed and Confused, and Pineapple Express, and dramas, including Panic in Needle Park and Requiem for a Dream. Scholars and students of cinema, popular culture, media studies, and sociology will find this book a valuable examination of how cinematic portrayals of drugs have changed over time, and how those images have influenced public perception of drugs and even public policy.
Download or read book Violence and American Cinema written by J. David Slocum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American cinema has always been violent, and never more so than now: exploding heads, buses that blow up if they stop, racial attacks, and general mayhem. From slapstick's comic violence to film noir, from silent cinema to Tarantino, violence has been an integral part of America on screen. This new volume in a successful series analyzes violence, examining its nature, its effects, and its cinematic and social meaning.
Download or read book Transfigurations written by Asbjørn Grønstad and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many senses, viewers have cut their teeth on the violence in American cinema: from Anthony Perkins slashing Janet Leigh in the most infamous of shower scenes; to the 1970s masterpieces of Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah and Francis Ford Coppola; to our present-day undertakings in imagining global annihilations through terrorism, war, and alien grudges. Transfigurations brings our cultural obsession with film violence into a renewed dialogue with contemporary theory. Grønstad argues that the use of violence in Hollywood films should be understood semiotically rather than viewed realistically; Tranfigurations thus alters both our methodology of reading violence in films and the meanings we assign to them, depicting violence not as a self-contained incident, but as a convoluted network of our own cultural ideologies and beliefs.
Download or read book Domestic Violence in Hollywood Film written by Diane L. Shoos and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-12-19 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to critically examine Hollywood films that focus on male partner violence against women. These films include Gaslight, Sleeping with the Enemy, What’s Love Got to Do with It, Dolores Claiborne, Enough, and Safe Haven. Shaped by the contexts of postfeminism, domestic abuse post-awareness, and familiar genre conventions, these films engage in ideological “gaslighting” that reaffirms our preconceived ideas about men as abusers, women as victims, and the racial and class politics of domestic violence. While the films purport to condemn abuse and empower abused women, this study proposes that they tacitly reinforce the very attitudes that we believe we no longer tolerate. Shoos argues that films like these limit not only popular understanding but also social and institutional interventions.
Download or read book The Use and Abuse of Literature written by Marjorie Garber and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this deep and engaging meditation on the usefulness and uselessness of reading in the digital age, Harvard English professor Marjorie Garber aims to reclaim “literature” from the periphery of our personal, educational, and professional lives and restore it to the center, as a radical way of thinking. But what is literature anyway, how has it been understood over time, and what is its relevance for us today? Who gets to decide what the word means? Why has literature been on the defensive since Plato? Does it have any use at all, other than serving as bourgeois or aristocratic accoutrements attesting to one’s worldly sophistication and refinement of spirit? What are the boundaries that separate it from its “commercial” instance and from other more mundane kinds of writing? Is it, as most of us assume, good to read, much less study—and what would that mean?
Download or read book The Shape of Spectatorship written by Scott Curtis and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scott Curtis draws our eye to the role of scientific, medical, educational, and aesthetic observation in shaping modern spectatorship. Focusing on the nontheatrical use of motion picture technology in Germany between the 1890s and World War I, he follows researchers, teachers, and intellectuals as they negotiated the fascinating, at times fraught relationship between technology, discipline, and expert vision. As these specialists struggled to come to terms with motion pictures, they advanced new ideas of mass spectatorship that continue to affect the way we make and experience film. Staging a brilliant collision between the moving image and scientific or medical observation, visual instruction, and aesthetic contemplation, The Shape of Spectatorship showcases early cinema's revolutionary impact on society and culture and the challenges the new medium placed on ways of seeing and learning.
Download or read book The Zoom written by Nick Hall and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the queasy zooms in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to the avant-garde mystery of Michael Snow’s Wavelength, from the excitement of televised baseball to the drama of the political convention, the zoom shot is instantly recognizable and highly controversial. In The Zoom, Nick Hall traces the century-spanning history of the zoom lens in American film and television. From late 1920s silent features to the psychedelic experiments of the 1960s and beyond, the book describes how inventors battled to provide film and television studios with practical zoom lenses, and how cinematographers clashed over the right ways to use the new zooms. Hall demonstrates how the zoom brought life and energy to cinema decades before the zoom boom of the 1970s and reveals how the zoom continues to play a vital and often overlooked role in the production of contemporary film and television.
Download or read book The Use and Abuse of Music written by Eleanor Peters and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2019-08-23 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a critical criminological approach, this book analyses what is deviant and transgressive about music, focusing on three main parts; the concept of 'harmful' or deviant music; the use of music as punishment and the censorship and silencing of music.
Download or read book Reuse Misuse Abuse written by Jaimie Baron and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-13 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In contemporary culture, existing audiovisual recordings are constantly reused and repurposed for various ends, raising questions regarding the ethics of such appropriations, particularly when the recording depicts actual people and events. Every reuse of a preexisting recording is, on some level, a misuse in that it was not intended or at least anticipated by the original maker, but not all misuses are necessarily unethical. In fact, there are many instances of productive misuse that seem justified. At the same time, there are other instances in which the misuse shades into abuse. Documentary scholars have long engaged with the question of the ethical responsibility of documentary makers in relation to their subjects. But what happens when this responsibility is set at a remove, when the recording already exists for the taking and repurposing? Reuse, Misuse and Abuse surveys a range of contemporary films and videos that appropriate preexisting footage and attempts to theorize their ethical implications.
Download or read book Ethics at the Cinema written by Ward E. Jones and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-07 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The editors of Ethics at the Cinema invited a diverse group of moral philosophers and philosophers of film to engage with ethical issues raised within, or within the process of viewing, a single film of each contributor's choice. The result is a unique collection of considerable breadth. Discussions focus on both classic and modern films, and topics range from problems of traditional concern to philosophers (e.g. virtue, justice, and ideals) to problems of traditional concern to filmmakers (e.g. sexuality, social belonging, and cultural identity).
Download or read book Cinema and History written by Marc Ferro and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ferro discusses how film reveals the conscious values of its creators, the dominant ideology of the society in which the film was created, and also unconscious or subverted meanings and values.
Download or read book Childhood and Cinema written by Vicky Lebeau and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2008-05-15 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vicky Lebeau investigates how films use children to probe such themes as sexuality, death, imagination, the terrors of childhood, and hope.
Download or read book Cinema and Sentiment written by Clive Marsh and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2014-09-10 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cinema & Sentiment Film's challenge to Theology What do films do to people? What do people do with films? All film-watching happens within a cultural context. Exploring cinema-going as leisure activity and by comparing film-watching with worship, Clive Marsh demonstrates aspects of the religious function of film-watching in Western culture. Through a variety of case-studies, including a look at the films of Robin Williams and the Coen brothers, Marsh's study shows how film-watching as a regular practice contributes to the shaping of human living. Engaging with rapidly changing social and religious behaviour patterns in Western culture, Cinema and Sentiment suggests a need to recover a positive sense of 'sentiment', both in theology and film. Marsh locates his findings within recent studies of theology and film. In his final chapter he offers to church leaders, students of theology and film studies and all those with an interest in contemporary culture some very practical suggestions.
Download or read book The Archive Effect written by Jaimie Baron and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-13 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History examines the problems of representation inherent in the appropriation of archival film and video footage for historical purposes. Baron analyses the way in which the meanings of archival documents are modified when they are placed in new texts and contexts, constructing the viewer’s experience of and relationship to the past they portray. Rethinking the notion of the archival document in terms of its reception and the spectatorial experiences it generates, she explores the ‘archive effect’ as it is produced across the genres of documentary, mockumentary, experimental, and fiction films. This engaging work discusses how, for better or for worse, the archive effect is mobilized to create new histories, alternative histories, and misreadings of history. The book covers a multitude of contemporary cultural artefacts including fiction films like Zelig, Forrest Gump and JFK, mockumentaries such as The Blair Witch Project and Forgotten Silver, documentaries like Standard Operating Procedure and Grizzly Man, and videogames like Call of Duty: World at War. In addition, she examines the works of many experimental filmmakers including those of Péter Forgács, Adele Horne, Bill Morrison, Cheryl Dunye, and Natalie Bookchin.
Download or read book Reframing the Past written by Mia E. M. Treacey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-26 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reframing the Past traces what historians have written about film and television from 1898 until the early 2000s. Mia Treacey argues that historical engagement with film and television should be reconceptualised as Screened History: an interdisciplinary, international field of research to incorporate and replace what has been known as ‘History and Film’. It draws from the fields of Film, Television and Cultural Studies to critically analyse key works and connect past scholarship with contemporary research. Reconsidered as Screened History, the works of Pierre Sorlin, Marc Ferro, John O’Connor, Robert Rosenstone and Robert Toplin are explored alongside lesser known but equally important contributions. This book identifies a number of common themes and ideas that have been explored by historians for decades: the use of history on film and television as a way to teach the past; the challenge of filmic and televisual history to more traditional historiography; and an ongoing battle to find an ‘appropriate’ historical way to engage with Film Studies and Theory. Screened History offers an approach to exploring History, Film and Television that allows room for future developments, while connecting them to a rich and diverse body of past scholarship. Combining a narrative of historical research on film and television over the past century with a reconceptualisation of the field as Screened History, Reframing the Past is essential reading both for established scholars of History and Film, Film History and other related disciplines, and to students new to the field.
Download or read book Narrating Violence in Post 9 11 Action Cinema written by Berenike Jung and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-09-08 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work discusses the way in which action movies have responded to the visual and narrative challenge of depicting terrorist violence after 9/11, when the spectacular representation of terrorist violence – and by extension the consumers of these imagers – was considered as complicit behaviour. If terrorism is theatre, who goes to see the show? A close-reading of exemplary movies (V for Vendetta, Munich, and Children of Men) concentrates on three key aspects: How is terrorist violence justified, especially in comparison to other forms of violence? How is the audience implicitly positioned? And finally, what is the role and scope of the films’ visual short-cuts, iconic “real” images such as those from the Abu Ghraib prison? The results reaffirm popular movies' power of working through traumatic events as well as their capacity to articulate a valid political critique. Instead of inventing or preceding real acts of violence, cinema can document, witness, and encourage the spectator to explore unorthodox viewing positions and moral dilemma. This interdisciplinary work is addressed to students of Philosophy, the Humanities, Cinema, American, or Cultural Studies as well as to the interested public.
