Download or read book Reconstructing American Historical Cinema written by J. E. Smyth and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on key films such as Cimarron (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), Scarface (1932), Ramona (1936), A Star Is Born (1937), Jezebel (1938), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939), Stagecoach (1939), and Citizen Kane (1941), Smyth explores historical cinema's connections to popular and academic historigraphy, historical fiction, and journalism, providing a rich context for the industry's commitment to American history.
Download or read book Reconstructing American Historical Cinema written by J.E. Smyth and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2006-10-27 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane, J. E. Smyth dramatically departs from the traditional understanding of the relationship between film and history. By looking at production records, scripts, and contemporary reviews, Smyth argues that certain classical Hollywood filmmakers were actively engaged in a self-conscious and often critical filmic writing of national history. Her volume is a major reassessment of American historiography and cinematic historians from the advent of sound to the beginning of wartime film production in 1942. Focusing on key films such as Cimarron (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), Scarface (1932), Ramona (1936), A Star Is Born (1937), Jezebel (1938), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939), Stagecoach (1939), and Citizen Kane (1941), Smyth explores historical cinema's connections to popular and academic historigraphy, historical fiction, and journalism, providing a rich context for the industry's commitment to American history. Rather than emphasizing the divide between American historical cinema and historical writing, Smyth explores the continuities between Hollywood films and history written during the first four decades of the twentieth century, from Carl Becker's famous "Everyman His Own Historian" to Howard Hughes's Scarface to Margaret Mitchell and David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind. Hollywood's popular and often controversial cycle of historical films from 1931 to 1942 confronted issues as diverse as frontier racism and women's experiences in the nineteenth-century South, the decline of American society following the First World War, the rise of Al Capone, and the tragic history of Hollywood's silent era. Looking at rarely discussed archival material, Smyth focuses on classical Hollywood filmmakers' adaptation and scripting of traditional historical discourse and their critical revision of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history. Reconstructing American Historical Cinema uncovers Hollywood's diverse and conflicted attitudes toward American history. This text is a fundamental challenge the prevailing scholarship in film, history, and cultural studies.
Download or read book Cinema in Democratizing Germany written by Heide Fehrenbach and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heide Fehrenbach analyzes the important role cinema played in the reconstruction of German cultural and political identity between 1945 and 1962. Concentrating on the former West Germany, she explores the complex political uses of film--and the meanings attributed to film representation and spectatorship--during a period of abrupt transition to democracy. According to Fehrenbach, the process of national redefinition made cinema and cinematic control a focus of heated ideological debate. Moving beyond a narrow political examination of Allied-German negotiations, she investigates the broader social nexus of popular moviegoing, public demonstrations, film clubs, and municipal festivals. She also draws on work in gender and film studies to probe the ways filmmakers, students, church leaders, local politicians, and the general public articulated national identity in relation to the challenges posed by military occupation, American commercial culture, and redefined gender roles. Thus highlighting the links between national identity and cultural practice, this book provides a richer picture of what German reconstruction entailed for both women and men.
Download or read book Screening Enlightenment written by Hiroshi Kitamura and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how the US's expansive attempt at cultural globalization helped transform Japan into one of Hollywood's key markets. He also demonstrates the prominent role American cinema played in the political reeducation and reorientation of the Japanese.
Download or read book American History Goes to the Movies written by W. Bryan Rommel Ruiz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-01-26 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether they prefer blockbusters, historical dramas, or documentaries, people learn much of what they know about history from the movies. In American History Goes to the Movies, W. Bryan Rommel-Ruiz shows how popular representations of historic events shape the way audiences understand the history of the United States, including American representations of race and gender, and stories of immigration, especially the familiar narrative of the American Dream. Using films from many different genres, American History Goes to the Movies draws together movies that depict the Civil War, the Wild West, the assassination of JFK, and the events of 9/11, from The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind to The Exorcist and United 93, to show how viewers use movies to make sense of the past, addressing not only how we render history for popular enjoyment, but also how Hollywood’s renderings of America influence the way Americans see themselves and how they make sense of the world.
Download or read book The Wars of Reconstruction written by Douglas R. Egerton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking new history, telling the stories of hundreds of African-American activists and officeholders who risked their lives for equality-in the face of murderous violence-in the years after the Civil War. By 1870, just five years after Confederate surrender and thirteen years after the Dred Scott decision ruled blacks ineligible for citizenship, Congressional action had ended slavery and given the vote to black men. That same year, Hiram Revels and Joseph Hayne Rainey became the first African-American U.S. senator and congressman respectively. In South Carolina, only twenty years after the death of arch-secessionist John C. Calhoun, a black man, Jasper J. Wright, took a seat on the state's Supreme Court. Not even the most optimistic abolitionists thought such milestones would occur in their lifetimes. The brief years of Reconstruction marked the United States' most progressive moment prior to the civil rights movement. Previous histories of Reconstruction have focused on Washington politics. But in this sweeping, prodigiously researched narrative, Douglas Egerton brings a much bigger, even more dramatic story into view, exploring state and local politics and tracing the struggles of some fifteen hundred African-American officeholders, in both the North and South, who fought entrenched white resistance. Tragically, their movement was met by ruthless violence-not just riotous mobs, but also targeted assassination. With stark evidence, Egerton shows that Reconstruction, often cast as a “failure” or a doomed experiment, was rolled back by murderous force. The Wars of Reconstruction is a major and provocative contribution to American history.
Download or read book An Investigative Cinema written by Fabrizio Cilento and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the development of investigative cinema, whose main characteristic lies in reconstructing actual events, political crises, and conspiracies. These documentary-like films refrain from a simplistic reconstruction of historical events and are mainly concerned with what does not immediately appear on the surface of events. Consequently, they raise questions about the nature of the “truth” promoted by institutions, newspapers, and media reports. By highlighting unanswered questions, they leave us with a lack of clarity, and the questioning of documentation becomes the actual narrative. Investigative cinema is examined in relation to the historical conjunctures of the “economic miracle” in Italy, the simultaneous decolonization and reordering of culture in France, the waves of globalization and neoliberalism in post-dictatorial Latin America, and the post-Watergate, post-9/11 climate in US society. Investigative cinema is exemplified by the films Salvatore Giuliano, The Battle of Algiers, The Parallax View, Gomorrah, Zero Dark Thirty, and Citizenfour.
Download or read book The Columbia Companion to American History on Film written by Peter C. Rollins and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 708 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 70 scholars examine how filmmakers have presented and interpreted the most important events, topics, eras and figures in the American past, often comparing the film versions of events with the interpretations of the best historians who have explored the topic.
Download or read book Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance written by J. E. Smyth and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2014-02-13 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fred Zinnemann directed some of the most acclaimed and controversial films of the twentieth century, yet he has been a shadowy presence in Hollywood history. In Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance, J. E. Smyth reveals the intellectual passion behind some of the most powerful films ever made about the rise and resistance to fascism and the legacy of the Second World War, from The Seventh Cross and The Search to High Noon, From Here to Eternity, and Julia. Smyth's book is the first to draw upon Zinnemann's extensive papers at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and brings Fred Zinnemann's vision, voice, and film practice to life. In his engagement with the defining historical struggles of the twentieth century, Zinnemann fought his own battles with the Hollywood studio system, the critics, and a public bent on forgetting. Zinnemann's films explore the role of women and communists in the antifascist resistance, the West's support of Franco after the Spanish Civil War, and the darker side of America's national heritage. Smyth reconstructs a complex and conflicted portrait of Zinnemann's cinema of resistance, examining his sketches, script annotations, editing and production notes, and personal letters. Illustrated with seventy black-and-white images from Zinnemann's collection, Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance discusses the director's professional and personal relationships with Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift, Audrey Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, and Gary Cooper; the critical reaction to his revisionist Western, High Noon; his battles over the censorship of From Here to Eternity, The Nun's Story, and Behold a Pale Horse; his unrealized history of the Communist Revolution in China, Man's Fate; and the controversial study of political assassination, The Day of the Jackal. In this intense, richly textured narrative, Smyth enters the mind of one of Hollywood's master directors, redefining our knowledge of his artistic vision and practice.
Download or read book Envisioning Freedom written by Cara Caddoo and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-13 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Viewing turn-of-the-century African American history through the lens of cinema, Envisioning Freedom examines the forgotten history of early black film exhibition during the era of mass migration and Jim Crow. By embracing the new medium of moving pictures at the turn of the twentieth century, black Americans forged a collective—if fraught—culture of freedom. In Cara Caddoo’s perspective-changing study, African Americans emerge as pioneers of cinema from the 1890s to the 1920s. Across the South and Midwest, moving pictures presented in churches, lodges, and schools raised money and created shared social experiences for black urban communities. As migrants moved northward, bound for Chicago and New York, cinema moved with them. Along these routes, ministers and reformers, preaching messages of racial uplift, used moving pictures as an enticement to attract followers. But as it gained popularity, black cinema also became controversial. Facing a losing competition with movie houses, once-supportive ministers denounced the evils of the “colored theater.” Onscreen images sparked arguments over black identity and the meaning of freedom. In 1910, when boxing champion Jack Johnson became the world’s first black movie star, representation in film vaulted to the center of black concerns about racial progress. Black leaders demanded self-representation and an end to cinematic mischaracterizations which, they charged, violated the civil rights of African Americans. In 1915, these ideas both led to the creation of an industry that produced “race films” by and for black audiences and sparked the first mass black protest movement of the twentieth century.
Download or read book A Companion to the Historical Film written by Robert A. Rosenstone and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-12-02 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Broad in scope, this interdisciplinary collection of original scholarship on historical film features essays that explore the many facets of this expanding field and provide a platform for promising avenues of research. Offers a unique collection of cutting edge research that questions the intention behind and influence of historical film Essays range in scope from inclusive broad-ranging subjects such as political contexts, to focused assessments of individual films and auteurs Prefaced with an introductory survey of the field by its two distinguished editors Features interdisciplinary contributions from scholars in the fields of History, Film Studies, Anthropology, and Cultural and Literary Studies
Download or read book American Film History written by Cynthia Lucia and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-06-25 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This authoritative collection of introductory and specialized readings explores the rich and innovative history of this period in American cinema. Spanning an essential range of subjects from the early 1900s Nickelodeon to the decline of the studio system in the 1960s, it combines a broad historical context with careful readings of individual films. Charts the rise of film in early twentieth-century America from its origins to 1960, exploring mainstream trends and developments, along with topics often relegated to the margins of standard film histories Covers diverse issues ranging from silent film and its iconic figures such as Charlie Chaplin, to the coming of sound and the rise of film genres, studio moguls, and, later, the Production Code and Cold War Blacklist Designed with both students and scholars in mind: each section opens with an historical overview and includes chapters that provide close, careful readings of individual films clustered around specific topics Accessibly structured by historical period, offering valuable cultural, social, and political contexts Contains careful, close analysis of key filmmakers and films from the era including D.W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Erich von Stroheim, Cecil B. DeMille, Don Juan, The Jazz Singer, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Scarface, Red Dust, Glorifying the American Girl, Meet Me in St. Louis, Citizen Kane, Bambi, Frank Capra's Why We Fightseries, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Rebel Without a Cause, Force of Evil, and selected American avant-garde and underground films, among many others. Additional online resources such as sample syllabi, which include suggested readings and filmographies for both general specialized courses, will be available online. May be used alongside American Film History: Selected Readings, 1960 to the Present, to provide an authoritative study of American cinema through the new millennium
Download or read book Screening the Sixties written by Oliver Gruner and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-17 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a detailed and engaging account of how Hollywood cinema has represented and ‘remembered’ the Sixties. From late 1970s hippie musicals such as Hair and The Rose through to recent civil rights portrayals The Help and Lee Daniels’ The Butler, Oliver Gruner explores the ways in which films have engaged with broad debates on America’s recent past. Drawing on extensive archival research, he traces production history and script development, showing how a group of politically engaged filmmakers sought to offer resonant contributions to public memory. Situating Hollywood within a wider series of debates taking place in the US public sphere, Screening the Sixties offers a rigorous and innovative study of cinema’s engagement with this most contested of epochs.
Download or read book Art and the Historical Film written by Gillian McIver and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-11-17 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art and the Historical Film provides an important examination of fine art's impact on filmmaking, grappling with the question of authenticity. From Eugene Delacroix's interpretation of the 1830 French revolution to Uli Edel's version of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, artistic representations of historical subjects are appealing and pervasive. Movies often adapt imagery from art history, including paintings of historical events. Films and art shape the past for us and continue to affect our interpretation of history. While historical films are often argued over for their adherence to "the facts," their real problem is realism: how can the past be convincingly depicted? Realism in the historical film genre is often nourished and given credibility by its use of painterly references. This book examines how art-historical images affect historical films by going beyond period detail and surface design to look at how profound ideas about history are communicated through pictures. Art and the Historical Film: Between Realism and the Sublime is based on case studies that explore the links between art and cinema, including American independent Western Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010), British heritage film Belle (Amma Asante, 2013), and Dutch national epic Admiral (Roel Reiné, 2014). The chapters create immersive worlds that communicate distinct ideas about the past through cinematography, production design, and direction, as the films adapt, reference, and transpose paintings by artists such as Rubens, Albert Bierstadt, and Jacques-Louis David.
Download or read book History by HBO written by Rebecca Weeks and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The television industry is changing, and with it, the small screen's potential to engage in debate and present valuable representations of American history. Founded in 1972, HBO has been at the forefront of these changes, leading the way for many network, cable, and streaming services into the "post-network" era. Despite this, most scholarship has been dedicated to analyzing historical feature films and documentary films, leaving TV and the long-form drama hungry for coverage. In History by HBO: Televising the American Past, Rebecca Weeks fills the gap in this area of media studies and defends the historiographic power of long-form dramas. By focusing on this change and its effects, History by HBO outlines how history is crafted on television and the diverse forms it can take. Weeks examines the capabilities of the long-form serial for engaging with historical stories, insisting that the shift away from the network model and toward narrowcasting has enabled challenging histories to thrive in home settings. As an examination of HBO's unique structure for producing quality historical dramas, Weeks provides four case studies of HBO series set during different periods of United States history: Band of Brothers (2001), Deadwood (2004–2007), Boardwalk Empire (2012–2014), and Treme (2010–2013). In each case, HBO's lack of advertiser influence, commitment to creative freedom, and generous budgets continue to draw and retain talent who want to tell historical stories. Balancing historical and film theories in her assessment of the roles of mise-en–scène, characterization, narrative complexity, and sound in the production of effective historical dramas, Weeks' evaluation acts as an ode to the most recent Golden Age of TV, as well as a critical look at the relationship between entertainment media and collective memory.
Download or read book Historical Film written by Jonathan Stubbs and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-03-28 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although precise definitions have not been agreed on, historical cinema tends to cut across existing genre categories and establishes an intimidatingly large group of films. In recent years, a lively body of work has developed around historical cinema, much of it proposing valuable new ways to consider the relationship between cinematic and historical representation. However, only a small proportion of this writing has paid attention to the issue of genre. In order to counter this omission, this book combines a critical analysis of the Hollywood historical film with an examination of its generic dimensions and a history of its development since the silent period. Historical Film: A Critical Introduction is concerned not simply with the formal properties of the films at hand, but also the ways in which they have been promoted, interpreted and discussed in relation to their engagement with the past.
Download or read book Classical Hollywood Film Cycles written by Zoe Wallin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-07 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the ways in which Hollywood film cycles from the 1930s to the 1960s were shaped by their surrounding industrial contexts and market environments, to build an inclusive conception of the form, operation, and function of film cycles. By foregrounding patterns of distribution, spaces of exhibition, and modes of consumption as key components of the form and mechanics of cycles, this book develops a methodology for defining cycles based on an analysis of the industry and trade discourse. Applying her unique framework to six case studies of different cycles, Zoe Wallin blends a wide range of historical sources to analyze the many cultural, social, political, aesthetic, and industrial contexts relevant to these films. This book makes an important contribution to the literature in the area of film historiography, and will be of interest to any scholars of film studies, history and media studies.
