Download or read book Film As Film written by V. F. Perkins and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 1993-08-22 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here at last is an introduction to film theory and its history without the jargon. Noted film scholar V. F. Perkins presents criteria for expanding our understanding and enjoyment of movies. He employs common sense words like balance, coherence, significance, and satisfaction to develop his insightful support of the subtle approach and of the unobtrusive director. Readers will learn why a scene from the humbler movie Carmen Jones is a deeper realization of filmmaking than the bravura lion sequence in the classic Battleship Potemkin. Along the way Perkins invites readers to re-experience with clarity, directness, and simplicity other famous scenes by directors like Hitchcock, Eisenstein, and Chaplin. Perkins examines the origins of movies and embraces their use of both realism and magic, their ability to record as well as to create. In the process he seeks to discover the synthesis between these opposing elements. With the delight of the fan and the perception of the critic, Perkins advances a film theory, based on the work of Bazin and other early film theorists, that is rich with suggestion for debate and further pursuit. Sit beside Perkins as he reacquaints you with cinema, heightens your awareness, deepens your pleasure, and increases your return every time you invest in a movie ticket.
Download or read book V F Perkins on Movies written by Douglas Pye and published by . This book was released on 2020-09 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collected shorter film criticism of one of the most brilliant English-language film critics.
Download or read book Breaking the Fourth Wall written by Tom Brown and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-12 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the role of direct address within fiction cinema, focusing on its role in avant-garde or experimental cinema, and popular genre traditions.
Download or read book Movies and Methods written by Bill Nichols and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1985-09-06 with total page 770 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The original Movies and Methods volume (1976) captured the dynamic evolution of film theory and criticism into an important new discipline, incorporating methods from structuralism, semiotics, and feminist thought. Now there is again ferment in the field. Movies and Methods, Volume II, captures the developments that have given history and genre studies imaginative new models and indicates how feminist, structuralist, and psychoanalytic approaches to film have achieved fresh, valuable insights. In his thoughtful introduction, Nichols provides a context for the paradoxes that confront film studies today. He shows how shared methods and approaches continue to stimulate much of the best writing about film, points to common problems most critics and theorists have tried to resolve, and describes the internal contraditions that have restricted the usefulness of post-structuralism. Mini-introductions place each essay in a larger context and suggest its linkages with other essays in the volume. A great variety of approaches and methods characterize film writing today, and the final part conveys their diversity—from statistical style analysis to phenomenology and from gay criticisms to neoformalism. This concluding part also shows how the rigorous use of a broad range of approaches has helped remove post-structuralist criticism from its position of dominance through most of the seventies and early eighties. The writings collected in this volume exhibit not only a strong sense of personal engagement but als a persistent awareness of the social importance of the cinema in our culture. Movies and Methods, Volume II, will prove as invaluable to the serious student of cinema as its predecessor; it will be an essential reference work for years to come.
Download or read book Style and Meaning written by John Gibbs and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2005-08-06 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a common focus on the decisions made by filmmakers, the essays in this collection explore different aspects of the relationship between textual detail and broader conceptual frameworks. These texts reflect not only those areas of film history which have traditionally been explored through mise-en-scène criticism, but also areas such as the avant-garde and television drama which have not tended to receive such detailed investigation. In these ways, the book conducts a series of dialogues with issues in film study which are specifically provoked by close analysis.
Download or read book V F Perkins on Movies written by Douglas Pye and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victor Perkins (1936–2016) was a foundational figure for the study of film both as a writer and as an educationalist and teacher who played a key role in establishing film within British higher education. Best known for his 1972 book Film as Film, Perkins has a worldwide reputation within film studies that has been enhanced in recent years by the interest among emerging scholars in the practices of detailed film criticism. His extensive writing in journals and edited collections, spanning sixty years, is less well known, despite its importance and quality, partly because much of it was published in small magazines with limited distribution. V. F. Perkins on Movies: Collected Shorter Film Criticism, edited by Douglas Pye, makes it possible to see his writing as a coherent body of work, developed over a long career, and to appreciate its great historical and cultural significance. Part 1 of the book covers Perkins’s early articles from 1960 to 1972, showing the emergence of ways of thinking about criticism and movies that remained constant throughout his career. Perkins was one of a small group of British writers who pioneered the serious and systematic discussion of Hollywood cinema. Beginning at the University of Oxford in the pages of Oxford Opinion, and then in Movie, the journal they established in 1962, these writers mounted a sustained critique of established writing on film, arguing for a criticism rooted in the detailed decisions that make up the complex texture of a film. The work Perkins published in the 1980s and beyond, which makes up part 2 of this volume, was resolute in upholding his critical values. It elaborated his approach in studies of individual movies and their makers and also reflected on major critical and conceptual issues, while maintaining his lifelong commitment to writing accessibly in ordinary language. V. F. Perkins on Movies gives unimpeded access to one of the most distinctive and distinguished of critical voices and will be widely welcomed by academics, students of film, and informed film enthusiasts.
Download or read book German Cinema written by Marc Silberman and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical overview of German film from the silent era to the present, presenting close readings of 14 films from five major historical periods of German cinema. Each chapter analyzes a single film, discussing filmmakers' personal styles, genre, and modes of narration, and looks at the wider contexts of film production and reception including political issues and social change. Films include a Nazi propaganda musical, Ernst Lubitsch's Passion, and Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas. Includes film credits for each film, bandw photos, and extensive notes. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book The British New Wave written by B. F. Taylor and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an opportunity to reconsider the films of the British New Wave in the light of forty years of heated debate. By eschewing the usual tendency to view films like A Kind of Loving and The Entertainer collectively and include them in broader debates about class, gender, and ideology, this book presents a new and innovative look at this famous cycle of British films. For each film, a re-distribution of existing critical emphasis also allows the problematic relationship between these films and the question of realism to be reconsidered. Drawing upon existing sources and returning to long-standing and unchallenged assumptions about these films, this book offers the opportunity for the reader to return to the British New Wave and decide for themselves where they stand in relation to the films.
Download or read book Sugar Spice and Everything Nice written by Frances K. Gateward and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Wizard of Oz to Lolita, from the Heathers to the Spice Girls, images of girlhood have been projected on the silver screen in myriad ways. Whether a girl is taught that "there is no place like home" or is seeking adventure on her own terms, whether she is a seductress or a nerd, a babysitter or a murderer, films have depicted society's problematic expectations of girls together with the dreams, anxieties, and tensions experience by girls themselves. In examining the construction of girlhood from many angles, this collection of essays not only captures the richness of meaning behind "girl films," but also explores the recent resurgence of youth-oriented cinema and the relationship of young female viewers to that medium. The twenty essays approach to the construction of girlhood from a variety of perspectives, including reception, production, star images, and textual analyses, while exploring such topics as star power, the Riot Grrrl movement, coming of age, and loss of innocence. Among the characters given special attention are those in Gidget, Crooklyn, Titanic, Freeway and Girls Town. Written for general and academic readers, this work offers a lively, unprecedented discussion of gender in youth-oriented films.
Download or read book Framing Hitchcock written by Sidney Gottlieb and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In its ten-year history, the Hitchcock Annual has established itself as a key source of historical information and critical commentary on one of the central figures in film history and arguably one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. Fans of Alfred Hitchcock-both scholars and general readers alike-will be entertained and informed by this selection of writings, which offers an overview of the current thinking on the filmmaker and his work. The articles span his career and cover a wide range of topics from archeological investigations uncovering new details about his working methods and conditions to incisive analyses of the films themselves. The collection begins with rare insights into Hitchcock's early years, including his work in Germany and his silent film Easy Virtue, which, with its metaphoric play on the concept of "being framed," dramatizes aspects of the human condition to which Hitchcock returned repeatedly. Commentators explore a variety of themes, including the centrality of kissing shots and sequences in nearly all the films, and images of women's handbags as elements of suspense and sexual tension in such films as Dial M for Murder and Psycho. Other essays examine the influence of Vertigo, The Birds, and Frenzy on Fran'ois Truffaut, the remaking of Psycho, and feminist interpretations of Shadow of a Doubt. Interviews with Jay Presson Allen and Evan Hunter illuminate Hitchcock's working relationship with screenwriters, actors, and actresses. Written by established as well as emerging critics of Hitchcock, this fascinating collection will help shape future appreciation and interpretation of an enormously important and influential filmmaker.
Download or read book Jane Campion written by Hilary Radner and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative collection of original essays on Jane Campion, renowned female auteur filmmaker. In Jane Campion: Cinema, Nation, Identity a diverse group of contributors challenge the view that Campion's body of work lacks coherence or unity to instead examine the important characteristics and themes that underlie it. Editors Hilary Radner, Alistair Fox, and Irène Bessière have compiled rich, original scholarship on Campion's oeuvre to probe issues previously neglected by scholars--like her debt to New Zealand sources and her personal views of family dynamics--and those that benefit from additional insight--such as her place in the feminist filmmaking tradition. This volume also investigates Campion's distinct cinematic style in light of these issues to examine the source of her enduring cross-cultural and international appeal. Contributors in the first section explore the creation of subjectivity and identity in Campion's films, which include well-known works like The Piano and Holy Smoke, to trace the unique perspectives of Campion's characters and Campion herself as director. In the second section, essays analyze Campion's close relationship with literature and argue that the singular vision in her literary adaptations stems from her New Zealand background and her personal mythology. Contributors in the third section argue that while Campion devotes considerable attention to the evocation of feminine internal space, she also uses the symbolic potential of her external physical locations to register what is taking place in the inner life of her characters and reflect their search for personal fulfillment. A final group of essays presents a variety of responses to Campion's films, demonstrating that Campion is a highly personal and idiosyncratic director who nonetheless manages to fascinate viewers across a broad cultural spectrum. Taken together, contributors in Jane Campion: Cinema, Nation, Identity present a compelling analysis of Campion's status as a leading female filmmaker with close attention to her distinctive cinematic style and particular mise-en-scène. The collective nature of this volume will appeal to students and teachers of film, literature, and gender studies, as well as fans of Campion's work.
Download or read book Beyond Blaxploitation written by Novotny Lawrence and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Blaxploitation, the first book-length anthology of scholarly work on blaxploitation film, sustains the momentum that blaxploitation scholarship has recently gained, giving the films an even more prominent place in cinema history. This volume is made up of eleven essays employing historical and theoretical methodologies in the examination of spectatorship, marketing, melodrama, the transition of novel to screenplay, and racial politics and identity, among other significant topics. In doing so, the book fills a substantial gap that exists in the black cinematic narrative and, more broadly, in film history. Beyond Blaxploitation is divided into three sections that feature original essays on a variety of canonical blaxploitation films and others that either influenced the movement or in some form represent a significant extension of it. The first section titled, “From Pioneer to Precursor to Blaxploitation,” centers on three films—Cotton Comes to Harlem, Watermelon Man, and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song—that ignited the African American film cycle. The second section, “The Canon and the Not so Canon,” is dedicated to forging alternative considerations of some of the most highly regarded blaxploitation films, while also bringing attention to lesser-known films in the movement. The final section, “Was, Is, or Isn’t Blaxploitation,” includes four essays that offer significant insights on films that are generally associated with blaxploitation but contest traditional definitions of the movement. Moreover, this section features chapters that address industrial factors that led to the creation of blaxploitation cinema and highlight the limitations of the term itself. Beyond Blaxploitation is a much-needed pedagogical tool, informing film scholars, critics, and fans alike, about blaxploitation’s richness and complexity.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Documentary Film written by David LaRocca and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-12-20 with total page 645 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The spirit that founded the volume and guided its development is radically inter- and transdisciplinary. Dispatches have arrived from anthropology, communications, English, film studies (including theory, history, criticism), literary studies (including theory, history, criticism), media and screen studies, cognitive cultural studies, narratology, philosophy, poetics, politics, and political theory; and as a special aspect of the volume, theorist-filmmakers make their thoughts known as well. Consequently, the critical reflections gathered here are decidedly pluralistic and heterogeneous, inviting—not bracketing or partitioning—the dynamism and diversity of the arts, humanities, social sciences, and even natural sciences (in so far as we are biological beings who are trying to track our cognitive and perceptual understanding of a nonbiological thing—namely, film, whether celluloid-based or in digital form); these disciplines, so habitually cordoned off from one another, are brought together into a shared conversation about a common object and domain of investigation. This book will be of interest to theorists and practitioners of nonfiction film; to emerging and established scholars contributing to the secondary literature; and to those who are intrigued by the kinds of questions and claims that seem native to nonfiction film, and who may wish to explore some critical responses to them written in engaging language.
Download or read book Thinking in the Dark written by Murray Pomerance and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-16 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today’s film scholars draw from a dizzying range of theoretical perspectives—they’re just as likely to cite philosopher Gilles Deleuze as they are to quote classic film theorist André Bazin. To students first encountering them, these theoretical lenses for viewing film can seem exhilarating, but also overwhelming. Thinking in the Dark introduces readers to twenty-one key theorists whose work has made a great impact on film scholarship today, including Rudolf Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein, Michel Foucault, Siegfried Kracauer, and Judith Butler. Rather than just discussing each theorist’s ideas in the abstract, the book shows how those concepts might be applied when interpreting specific films by including an analysis of both a classic film and a contemporary one. It thus demonstrates how theory can help us better appreciate films from all eras and genres: from Hugo to Vertigo, from City Lights to Sunset Blvd., and from Young Mr. Lincoln to A.I. and Wall-E. The volume’s contributors are all experts on their chosen theorist’s work and, furthermore, are skilled at explaining that thinker’s key ideas and terms to readers who are not yet familiar with them. Thinking in the Dark is not only a valuable resource for teachers and students of film, it’s also a fun read, one that teaches us all how to view familiar films through new eyes. Theorists examined in this volume are: Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs, Roland Barthes, André Bazin, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Stanley Cavell, Michel Chion, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Douchet, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Epstein, Michel Foucault, Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Lacan, Vachel Lindsay, Christian Metz, Hugo Münsterberg, V. F. Perkins, Jacques Rancière, and Jean Rouch.
Download or read book Cinema and Community written by Moya Luckett and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates how progressivism structured many aspects of understudied era of cinema.
Download or read book Epics Spectacles and Blockbusters written by Sheldon Hall and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers the history of the American blockbuster—the large-scale, high-cost film—as it evolved from the 1890s to today.
Download or read book Movies and Tone written by Douglas Pye and published by Wallflower Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Colse-Up 02' is a collection of three individual studies specialising in close readings of films and TV. Each issue is devoted to the practice of detailed textual analysis of film and visual media.
