Download or read book Cinema of Mediocrity The Representation of 1920s Mass Culture in King Vidor s The Crowd written by Peter Brüstle and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2007-03-19 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, University of Freiburg (Institut für Nordamerikastudien), course: Literature and Culture of the 1920s, language: English, abstract: What is it that cinema-goers anticipate when flocking weekday nights to the Cinemaxxes and Cinestars throughout the world? And what expected the audiences of the 1920s during the heyday of the silent film area, when 100 million people a week were drawn to the movie palaces in America? Bare amusement? Weekend enjoyment? Or rather artistically challenging avant-garde films with politically provocative messages? What we mostly expect of the movies, is to satisfy a longing for something new and extraordinary. Still today and also at the beginning of the classic Hollywood era, movies have been attractive in that they have offered an alternative reality to that of actual ordinary life; be it through romance, action, exotic scenarios or mere entertainment. Especially in the 1920, with the establishment of Hollywood, movie-going became an enormously popular form of modern mass entertainment. King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928), however, is a rare exception. Its main interest is not the unknown or exotic, it does not function as an alternative reality. In contrast to the mainstream Hollywood productions of the 1920s, the film concentrates on ‘normality’ and plainness. Thus, what The Crowd offers is a stylized and satirized portrayal of the everyday lives of exactly the audiences who where watching the film. In doing so, the film does not charm or arouse passionate feelings. On the contrary, it functions as a mirror and leaves the spectators frustrated about the meaninglessness of modern life and their own ambitions for success and consumption. With its depiction of everyday middle class life and its critique of modern mass culture, The Crowd also challenges reductionist perspectives of the ‘roaring twenties’ as a permanent orgy, of wild flappers and frenzied Jazz parties, as is still prevalent in popular discourse today. The alternative view it offers, is that of a decade characterized by rising corporate power, the pressure to adjust and the powerlessness of the individual against an increasing standardization in the work and leisure sphere. Thus, in this paper I will examine, how the The Crowd differs from the mainstream Hollywood productions of the time and in what way Vidor’s film can be interpreted as a critique of 1920s mass culture. [...]
Download or read book Culture of Class written by Matthew Benjamin Karush and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the mass arrival of European immigrants to Argentina in the early years of the twentieth century new forms of entertainment emerged including tango, films, radio and theater. While these forms of culture promoted ethnic integration they also produced a new kind of polarization that helped Juan Peron to build the mass movement that propelled him to power.
Download or read book Cinema The time image written by Gilles Deleuze and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the theoretical implications of the cinematographic image based on Henri Bergson's theories
Download or read book Media Popular Culture and the American Century written by Kingsley Bolton and published by JOHN LIBBEY PUBLISHING. This book was released on 2010 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: Mediated America: Americana as Hollywoodiana / Jan Olsson, Kingsley Bolton -- Italian marionettes meet cinematic modernity / Jan Olsson -- "A red-blooded romance"; or Americanizing early multi-reel feature cinema: the case of The spoilers / Joel Frykholm -- Song of the sonic body: noise, the audience, and early American moving picture culture / Meredith C. Ward -- Constructing the global vernacular: American English and the media / Kingsley Bolton -- You only live once: repetitions of crime as desire in the films of Sylvia Sidney, 1930-1937 / Esther Sonnet -- Punks! Topicality and the 1950s gangster bio-pic cycle / Peter Stanfield -- Importing evil: the American gangster, Swedish cinema, and anti-American propaganda / Ann-Kristin Wallengren -- Sun Yu and the early Americanization of Chinese cinema / Corrado Neri -- If America were really China or how Christopher Columbus discovered Asia / Gregory Lee -- Civil rights on the screen / Michael Renov -- Goodbye rabbit ears: visualizing and mapping the U.S. Digital TV transition / Lisa Parks -- Archival transitions: some digital propositions / Pelle Snickars -- Are Americans human? / Evelyn Ch'ien -- Afterword: Rethinking the American century / William Uricchio.
Download or read book A Tree is a Tree written by King Vidor and published by Samuel French , Incorporated. This book was released on 1989 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Follows King Vidor from his childhood, his move to Hollywood, the building of his studio, and his time at MGM.
Download or read book A Foreign Affair written by Gerd Gemünden and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2008-04-30 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With six Academy Awards, four entries on the American Film Institute's list of 100 greatest American movies, and more titles on the National Historic Register of classic films deemed worthy of preservation than any other director, Billy Wilder counts as one of the most accomplished filmmakers ever to work in Hollywood. Yet how American is Billy Wilder, the Jewish émigré from Central Europe? This book underscores this complex issue, unpacking underlying contradictions where previous commentators routinely smoothed them out. Wilder emerges as an artist with roots in sensationalist journalism and the world of entertainment as well as with an awareness of literary culture and the avant-garde, features that lead to productive and often highly original confrontations between high and low.
Download or read book Grand Design written by Tino Balio and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The advent of color, big musicals, the studio system, and the beginning of institutionalized censorship made the thirties the defining decade for Hollywood. The year 1939, celebrated as "Hollywood's greatest year," saw the release of such memorable films as Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Stagecoach. It was a time when the studios exercised nearly absolute control over their product as well as over such stars as Bette Davis, Clark Gable, and Humphrey Bogart. In this fifth volume of the award-winning series History of the American Cinema, Tino Balio examines every aspect of the filmmaking and film exhibition system as it matured during the Depression era.
Download or read book Deleuze and Cinema written by Felicity Colman and published by Berg. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gilles Deleuze published two radical books on film: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Engaging with a wide range of film styles, histories and theories, Deleuze's writings treat film as a new form of philosophy. This ciné-philosophy offers a startling new way of understanding the complexities of the moving image, its technical concerns and constraints as well as its psychological and political outcomes. Deleuze and Cinema presents a step-by-step guide to the key concepts behind Deleuze's revolutionary theory of the cinema. Exploring ideas through key directors and genres, Deleuze's method is illustrated with examples drawn from American, British, continental European, Russian and Asian cinema. Deleuze and Cinema provides the first introductory guide to Deleuze's radical methodology for screen analysis. It will be invaluable for students and teachers of Film, Media and Philosophy.
Download or read book Dal Surrealism and Cinema written by Elliott H. King and published by Oldcastle Books. This book was released on 2010-10-21 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Salvador Dali is one of the most widely recognised and most controversial artists of the twentieth century. He was also an avant-garde filmmaker -- collaborating with such giants as Luis Bunuel, Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock -- though the impetus and endurance of his fascination with film has rarely been given the attention it merits. King surveys the full range of Dali's eccentric activities with(in) the cinema. Influenced by the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton and Stanley Kubrick, Dali used the cinema to bring the 'dream subjects' of his paintings to life, providing the groundwork for revolutionary forays into television, video, photography and holography. Dali's writings continue to be relevant to discourses surrounding film and surrealism, and his embrace of academic technique partnered with contemporary technology and pop culture is a paradox still relevant today. From a movie-going experience that would incorporate all five senses to the tale of a woman's hapless love affair with a wheelbarrow, Dali's hallucinatory vision never fails to leave its indelible mark.
Download or read book The Hollywood Studio System written by Douglas Gomery and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite being one of the biggest industries in the United States, indeed the World, the internal workings of the 'dream factory' that is Hollywood is little understood outside the business. The Hollywood Studio System: A History is the first book to describe and analyse the complete development, classic operation, and reinvention of the global corporate entitles which produce and distribute most of the films we watch. Starting in 1920, Adolph Zukor, Head of Paramount Pictures, over the decade of the 1920s helped to fashion Hollywood into a vertically integrated system, a set of economic innovations which was firmly in place by 1930. For the next three decades, the movie industry in the United States and the rest of the world operated by according to these principles. Cultural, social and economic changes ensured the dernise of this system after the Second World War. A new way to run Hollywood was required. Beginning in 1962, Lew Wasserman of Universal Studios emerged as the key innovator in creating a second studio system. He realized that creating a global media conglomerate was more important than simply being vertically integrated. Gomery's history tells the story of a 'tale of two systems 'using primary materials from a score of archives across the United States as well as a close reading of both the business and trade press of the time. Together with a range of photographs never before published the book also features over 150 box features illuminating aspect of the business.
Download or read book The Shadow and Its Shadow written by Paul Hammond and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2000-11 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Shadow and Its Shadow is a classic collection of writings by the Surrealists on their mad love of moviegoing. The forty-odd theoretical, polemical, and poetical re-visions of the seventh art in this anthology document Surrealism's scandalous and nonreductive take on film. Writing between 1918 and 1977, the essayists include such names as Andréeacute; Breton, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Salvador Dalíiacute;, Luis Buñntilde;uel, and man Ray, as well as many of the less famous though equally fascinating figures of the movement. Paul Hammond's introduction limns the history of Surrealist cinemania, highlighting how these revolutionary poets, artists, and philosophers sifted the silt of commercial-often Hollywood-cinema for the odd fleck of gold, the windfall movie that, somehow slipping past the censor, questioned the dominant order. Such prospecting pivoted around the notion of lyrical behavior-as depicted on the screen and as lived in the movie house. The representation of such behavior led the Surrealists to valorize the manifest content of such denigrated genres as silent and sound comedy, romantic melodrama, film noir, horror movies. As to lived experience, moviegoing Surrealists looked to the spectacle's latent meaning, reading films as the unwitting providers of redemptive sequences that could be mentally clipped out of their narrative context and inserted into daily life-there, to provoke new adventures. "Hammond's book is a reminder of the wealth and range of surrealist writings on the cinema. . . . [T]he work represented here is still challenging and genuinely eccentric, locating itself in an 'ethic' of love, reverie and revolt." --Sight & Sound "Hammond, who is the author of the invaluable anthology The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writing on the Cinema (1978), writes about cinema independently of the changing academic and cultural fashions of film theory and abhors the dogmas of contemporary border-patrol thought. His magnetically appealing free-wheeling form of erudite film-critical writing is recognisable for its iconoclastic humour, non-authoritarian verve and playful witty discursivity." --John Conomos, Senses of Cinema Paul Hammond is a writer, editor, and translator living in Barcelona. He is the author of Constellations of Miróoacute;, Breton which was published by City Lights.
Download or read book Designs on the Past written by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-13 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood written by Kristin Thompson and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first study by an acclaimed American scholar of the artistic interdependencies between the German and the Hollywood cinema in the 1920s.
Download or read book The Oxford History of World Cinema written by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 847 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring nearly three thousand film stills, production shots, and other illustrations, an authoritative history of the cinema traces the development of the medium, its filmmakers and stars, and the evolution of national cinemas around the world.
Download or read book A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941 1953 written by Raymond Borde and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first book published on film noir established the genre--a classic, at last in translation.
Download or read book Saul Bass written by Jan-Christopher Horak and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iconic graphic designer and Academy Award–winning filmmaker Saul Bass (1920–1996) defined an innovative era in cinema. His title sequences for films such as Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959), and Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch (1955) introduced the idea that opening credits could tell a story, setting the mood for the movie to follow. Bass's stylistic influence can be seen in popular Hollywood franchises from the Pink Panther to James Bond, as well as in more contemporary works such as Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can (2002) and television's Mad Men. The first book to examine the life and work of this fascinating figure, Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design explores the designer's revolutionary career and his lasting impact on the entertainment and advertising industries. Jan-Christopher Horak traces Bass from his humble beginnings as a self-taught artist to his professional peak, when auteur directors like Stanley Kubrick, Robert Aldrich, and Martin Scorsese sought him as a collaborator. He also discusses how Bass incorporated aesthetic concepts borrowed from modern art in his work, presenting them in a new way that made them easily recognizable to the public. This long-overdue book sheds light on the creative process of the undisputed master of film title design—a man whose multidimensional talents and unique ability to blend high art and commercial imperatives profoundly influenced generations of filmmakers, designers, and advertisers.
Download or read book On the History of Film Style written by David Bordwell and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bordwell scrutinizes the theories of style launched by various film historians and celebrates a century of cinema. The author examines the contributions of many directors and shows how film scholars have explained stylistic continuity and change.
