Download or read book Warning Shadows Home Alone with Classic Cinema written by Gary Giddins and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-04-19 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliantly insightful and witty examination of beloved and little-known films, directors, and stars by one of America’s most esteemed critics. In his illuminating new work, Gary Giddins explores the evolution of film, from the first moving pictures and peepshows to the digital era of DVDs and online video-streaming. New technologies have changed our experience of cinema forever; we have peeled away from the crowded theater to be home alone with classic cinema. Recounting the technological developments that films have undergone, Warning Shadows travels through time and across genres to explore the impact of the industry’s most famous classics and forgotten gems. Essays such as “Houdini Escapes! From the Vaults! Of the Past!,” “Edward G. Robinson, See,” and “Prestige and Pretension (Pride and Prejudice)” capture the wit and magic of classic cinema. Each chapter—ranging from the horror films of Hitchcock to the fantastical frames of Disney—provides readers with engaging analyses of influential films and the directors and actors who made them possible.
Download or read book Anti Heimat Cinema written by Ofer Ashkenazi and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape studies an overlooked yet fundamental element of German popular culture in the twentieth century. In tracing Jewish filmmakers’ contemplations of “Heimat”—a provincial German landscape associated with belonging and authenticity—it analyzes their distinctive contribution to the German identity discourse between 1918 and 1968. In its emphasis on rootedness and homogeneity Heimat seemed to challenge the validity and significance of Jewish emancipation. Several acculturation-seeking Jewish artists and intellectuals, however, endeavored to conceive a notion of Heimat that would rather substantiate their belonging. This book considers Jewish filmmakers’ contribution to this endeavor. It shows how they devised the landscapes of the German “Homeland” as Jews, namely, as acculturated “outsiders within.” Through appropriation of generic Heimat imagery, the films discussed in the book integrate criticism of national chauvinism into German mainstream culture from World War I to the Cold War. Consequently, these Jewish filmmakers anticipated the anti-Heimat film of the ensuing decades, and functioned as an uncredited inspiration for the critical New German Cinema.
Download or read book Focus On 100 Most Popular United States National Film Registry Films written by Wikipedia contributors and published by e-artnow sro. This book was released on with total page 2436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Young Man with a Horn written by Dorothy Baker and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-09-11 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rick Martin loved music and the music loved him. He could pick up a tune so quickly that it didn’t matter to the Cotton Club boss that he was underage, or to the guys in the band that he was just a white kid. He started out in the slums of LA with nothing, and he ended up on top of the game in the speakeasies and nightclubs of New York. But while talent and drive are all you need to make it in music, they aren’t enough to make it through a life. Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn is widely regarded as the first jazz novel, and it pulses with the music that defined an era. Baker took her inspiration from the artistry—though not the life—of legendary horn player Bix Beiderbecke, and the novel went on to be adapted into a successful movie starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day.
Download or read book Bing Crosby written by Gary Giddins and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The best thing to happen to Bing Crosby since Bob Hope," (WSJ) Gary Giddins presents the second volume of his masterful multi-part biography Bing Crosby dominated American popular culture in a way that few artists ever have. From the dizzy era of Prohibition through the dark days of the Second World War, he was a desperate nation's most beloved entertainer. But he was more than just a charismatic crooner: Bing Crosby redefined the very foundations of modern music, from the way it was recorded to the way it was orchestrated and performed. In this much-anticipated follow-up to the universally acclaimed first volume, NBCC Winner and preeminent cultural critic Gary Giddins now focuses on Crosby's most memorable period, the war years and the origin story of White Christmas. Set against the backdrop of a Europe on the brink of collapse, this groundbreaking work traces Crosby's skyrocketing career as he fully inhabits a new era of American entertainment and culture. While he would go on to reshape both popular music and cinema more comprehensively than any other artist, Crosby's legacy would be forever intertwined with his impact on the home front, a unifying voice for a nation at war. Over a decade in the making and drawing on hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to numerous archives, Giddins brings Bing Crosby, his work, and his world to vivid life--firmly reclaiming Crosby's central role in American cultural history.
Download or read book Michael Curtiz written by Alan K. Rode and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2017-11-17 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Academy Award--winning director Michael Curtiz (1886--1962) -- whose best-known films include Casablanca (1942), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Mildred Pierce (1945) and White Christmas (1954) -- was in many ways the anti-auteur. During his unprecedented twenty-seven year tenure at Warner Bros., he directed swashbuckling adventures, westerns, musicals, war epics, romances, historical dramas, horror films, tearjerkers, melodramas, comedies, and film noir masterpieces. The director's staggering output of 180 films surpasses that of the legendary John Ford and exceeds the combined total of films directed by George Cukor, Victor Fleming, and Howard Hawks. In the first biography of this colorful, instinctual artist, Alan K. Rode illuminates the life and work of one of the film industry's most complex figures. He begins by exploring the director's early life and career in his native Hungary, revealing how Curtiz shaped the earliest days of silent cinema in Europe as he acted in, produced, and directed scores of films before immigrating to the United States in 1926. In Hollywood, Curtiz earned a reputation for his explosive tantrums, his difficulty communicating in English, and his disregard for the well-being of others. However, few directors elicited more memorable portrayals from their casts, and ten different actors delivered Oscar-nominated performances under his direction. In addition to his study of the director's remarkable legacy, Rode investigates Curtiz's dramatic personal life, discussing his enduring creative partnership with his wife, screenwriter Bess Meredyth, as well as his numerous affairs and children born of his extramarital relationships. This meticulously researched biography provides a nuanced understanding of one of the most talented filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age.
Download or read book Celebrating Bird written by Gary Giddins and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within days of Charlie “Bird” Parker’s death at the age of thirty-four, a scrawled legend began appearing on walls around New York City: Bird Lives. Gone was one of the most outstanding jazz musicians of any era, the troubled genius who brought modernism to jazz and became a defining cultural force for musicians, writers, and artists of every stripe. Arguably the most significant musician in the country at the time of his death, Parker set the standard many musicians strove to reach—though he never enjoyed the same popular success that greeted many of his imitators. Today, the power of Parker’s inventions resonates undiminished; and his influence continues to expand. Celebrating Bird is the groundbreaking and award-winning account of the life and legend of Charlie Parker from renowned biographer and critic Gary Giddins, whom Esquire called “the best jazz writer in America today.” Richly illustrated and drawing primarily from original sources, Giddins overturns many of the myths that have grown up around Parker. He cuts a fascinating portrait of the period, from Parker’s apprentice days in the 1930s in his hometown of Kansas City to the often difficult years playing clubs in New York and Los Angeles, and reveals how Parker came to embody not only musical innovation and brilliance but the rage and exhilaration of an entire generation. Fully revised and with a new introduction by the author, Celebrating Bird is a classic of jazz writing that the Village Voice heralded as “a celebration of the highest order”—a portrayal of a jazz virtuoso whose gargantuan talent was haunted by his excesses and a view into the ravishing art of one of jazz’s most commanding and remarkable figures.
Download or read book Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki written by N.A.J. Taylor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-14 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume reconsiders the importance of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki from a post-Cold War perspective. It has been argued that during the Cold War era scholarship was limited by the anxiety that authors felt about the possibility of a global thermonuclear war, and the role their scholarship could play in obstructing such an event. The new scholarship of Nuclear Humanities approaches this history and its fallout with both more nuanced and integrative inquiries, paving the way towards a deeper integration of these seminal events beyond issues of policy and ethics. This volume, therefore, offers a distinctly post-Cold War perspective on the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The chapters collected here address the memorialization and commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by officials and states, but also ordinary people’s resentment, suffering, or forgiveness. The volume presents a variety of approaches with contributions from academics and contributions from authors who are strongly connected to the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and its people. In addition, the work branches out beyond the traditional subjects of social sciences and humanities to include contributions on art, photography, and design. This variety of approaches and perspectives provides moral and political insights on the full range of vulnerabilities – such as emotional, bodily, cognitive, and ecological – that pertains to nuclear harm. This book will be of much interest to students of critical war studies, nuclear weapons, World War II history, Asian History and International Relations in general.
Download or read book Criminal Moves written by Jesper Gulddal and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Criminal Moves is a ground-breaking collection of essays that challenges the distinction between literary and popular fiction and proposes that crime fiction is a genre that constantly violates its own boundaries. Reorienting crime fiction studies towards the mobility of the genre, it has profound ramifications for how we read individual crime stories.
Download or read book Classical Literature on Screen written by Martin M. Winkler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-14 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martin M. Winkler argues for a new approach to various creative affinities between ancient verbal and modern visual narratives. He examines screen adaptations of classical epic, tragedy, comedy, myth, and history, exploring, for example, how ancient rhetorical principles regarding the emotions apply to moving images and how Aristotle's perspective on thrilling plot-turns can recur on screen. He also interprets several popular films, such as 300 and Nero, and analyzes works by international directors, among them Pier Paolo Pasolini (Oedipus Rex, Medea), Jean Cocteau (The Testament of Orpheus), Mai Zetterling (The Girls), Lars von Trier (Medea), Arturo Ripstein (Such Is Life), John Ford (westerns), Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho), and Spike Lee (Chi-Raq). The book demonstrates the undiminished vitality of classical myth and literature in our visual media, as with screen portrayals of Helen of Troy. It is important for all classicists and scholars and students of film, literature, and history.
Download or read book Natural Selection written by Gary Giddins and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long recognized as America's most brilliant jazz writer, the winner of many major awards--including the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award--and author of a highly popular biography of Bing Crosby, Gary Giddins has also produced a wide range of stimulating and original cultural criticism in other fields. With Natural Selection, he brings together the best of these previously uncollected essays, including a few written expressly for this volume. The range of topics is spellbinding. Writing with insight, humor, and a famously deft touch, he offers sharp-edged perspectives on such diverse subjects as Federico Fellini and Jean Renoir, Norman Mailer and Ralph Ellison, Marlon Brando and Groucho Marx, Duke Ellington and Bob Dylan, horror and noir, the cartoon version of Animal Farm and the comic book series Classics Illustrated. Giddins brings to criticism an uncommon ability, long demonstrated in his music writing, to address in very few words an entire career, so that we get an in-depth portrait of the artist beyond the film, book, or recording under review. For instance, Giddins offers a stunning reappraisal of Doris Day, who he terms "the coolest and sexiest female singer of slow ballads in film history." He argues eloquently for a reconsideration of the forgotten German-language novelist Soma Morgenstern. In a section on comedy, he offers fresh perspectives on the three great silent film stars--Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd--while resurrecting the legendary Jack Benny and reevaluating the controversial Jerry Lewis. There's also a memorable look at Bing Crosby's film career (he calls Crosby's blockbuster Going My Way "a neglected masterpiece") and a close examination of Marcel Carne's beloved Children of Paradise. Of course, Giddins also supplies excellent commentary on jazz: major and underrated figures, and especially the uses of jazz in film. A wonderful gathering of little-known treasures, Natural Selection will broaden the perception of Gary Giddins as one of our most important cultural critics.
Download or read book Character Actors in Horror and Science Fiction Films 1930 1960 written by Laurence Raw and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This biographical dictionary presents a stellar lineup of talented, versatile character actors who regularly appeared in horror and science fiction films during Hollywood's golden age. Many are well known by genre buffs and casual fans--they include Lionel Atwill, John Carradine, Dwight Frye, Rondo Hatton, Dick Miller, J. Carroll Naish, Maria Ouspenskaya, Glenn Strange, Edward Van Sloan, and George Zucco. Some are perhaps not so well known but equally at home in the horror and science fiction films--such as Anthony Carbone, Harry Cording, Rosemary La Planche, Dick Purcell, Elizabeth Russell and Mel Welles. The 96 entries are complete with a biography and in-depth analyses of the actor's best performances--demonstrating how important these personalities were to the success of their genre films.
Download or read book Philip Seymour Hoffman written by Peter Shelley and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-01-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967-2014) was an American film, television and stage actor, film producer, and film and stage director, best known for his memorable supporting roles in independent films. Considered one of the best actors of his generation, he died of a drug overdose at age 46 after years of sobriety. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his titular role in Capote (2005), and Best Supporting nominations for Doubt (2008) and The Master (2012). This biography covers his life and career and provides an appendix listing his film, television and stage appearances.
Download or read book Songbooks written by Eric Weisbard and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-23 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Songbooks, critic and scholar Eric Weisbard offers a critical guide to books on American popular music from William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded. Drawing on his background editing the Village Voice music section, coediting the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and organizing the Pop Conference, Weisbard connects American music writing from memoirs, biographies, and song compilations to blues novels, magazine essays, and academic studies. The authors of these works are as diverse as the music itself: women, people of color, queer writers, self-educated scholars, poets, musicians, and elites discarding their social norms. Whether analyzing books on Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, and Madonna; the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Gayl Jones, and Jennifer Egan; or varying takes on blackface minstrelsy, Weisbard charts an alternative history of American music as told through its writing. As Weisbard demonstrates, the most enduring work pursues questions that linger across time period and genre—cultural studies in the form of notes on the fly, on sounds that never cease to change meaning.
Download or read book Cinema of Shadows written by Michael West and published by . This book was released on 2011-08 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A team of parapsychologists investigate an abandoned movie theater in a small Indiana town where one of the area's most gruesome murders took place.
Download or read book Forgotten Disney written by Kathy Merlock Jackson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2023-06-19 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work demonstrates that not everything that Disney touched turned to gold. In its first 100 years, the company had major successes that transformed filmmaking and culture, but it also had its share of unfinished projects, unmet expectations, and box-office misses. Some works failed but nevertheless led to other more stunning and lucrative ones; others shed light on periods when the Disney Company was struggling to establish or re-establish its brand. In addition, many Disney properties, popular in their time but lost to modern audiences, emerge as forgotten gems. By exploring the studio's missteps, this book provides a more complex portrayal of the history of the company than one would gain from a simple recounting of its many hits. With essays by writers from across the globe, it also asserts that what endures or is forgotten varies from person to person, place to place, or generation to generation. What one dismisses, someone else recalls with deep fondness as a magical Disney memory.
Download or read book Bizarre Books written by Russell Ash and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2007-10-30 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They say you can't judge a book by its cover—but its title can tell you more than you ever needed to know! Amazing, illuminating, and gut-bustingly funny, Bizarre Books is the wonderfully twisted product of more than two decades of determined searching in forgotten corners of out-of-the-way libraries and through the literary detritus of eclectic private collections. It is certain to delight every true fan of trivia and the patently absurd.
