Download or read book Silent era Filmmaking in Santa Barbara written by Robert S. Birchard and published by Gremese Editore. This book was released on 2007 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1910 and 1921, the American Film Company was one of the fledgling movie industry’s most successful studios, with production facilities in Santa Barbara and business offices in Chicago. Nicknamed for its distinctive winged “A” logo, the “Flying A” produced nearly 1,200 films, starring such favorites of the day as Mary Miles Minter, J. Warren Kerrigan, Wallace Reid, and King Baggot. The company’s rather patriotic motto invited patrons to “See Americans first.” The studio’s films also documented the picturesque and developing Pacific seaside community of Santa Barbara and served as a training ground for some of Hollywood’s greatest directors, including Allan Dwan, Henry King, Victor Fleming, Frank Borzage, George Marshall, William Desmond Taylor, and Marshall Neilan.
Download or read book American Silent Film Comedies written by Blair Miller and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many movie genres developed during the silent era, but none was as lasting as comedies. Actors and actresses stood in front of crude, hand-cranked cameras and invented a style that made people laugh and forget their troubles. This is an encyclopedic work to persons, institutions and terms associated with silent film comedy. For people, there is a capsule biography and a summary of their contribution. For studios and companies, there is a brief history and for terms, a full definition is given.
Download or read book The Othering of Women in Silent Film written by Barbara Tepa Lupack and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2023-11-06 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Othering of Women in Silent Film: Cultural, Historical, and Literary Contexts, Barbara Tepa Lupackexplores the rampant racial and gender stereotyping depicted in early cinema, demonstrating how those stereotypes helped shape American attitudes and practices. Using social, cultural, literary, and cinema history as a focus, this book offers insights into issues of Othering, including discrimination, exclusion, and sexism, that are as timely today as they were a century ago. Lupack not only examines the ways that dominant cinema of the era imprinted indelible and pejorative images of women—including African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and New Women/Suffragists—but also reveals the ways in which a number of pioneering early filmmakers and performers attempted to counter those depictions by challenging the imagery, interrogating the stereotypes, and re-politicizing the familiar narratives. Scholars of film, gender, history, and race studies will find this book of particular interest.
Download or read book The Man Who Made the Movies written by Vanda Krefft and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-11-28 with total page 1501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting story of ambition, greed, and genius unfolding at the dawn of modern America. This landmark biography brings into focus a fascinating brilliant entrepreneur—like Steve Jobs or Walt Disney, a true American visionary—who risked everything to realize his bold dream of a Hollywood empire. Although a major Hollywood studio still bears William Fox’s name, the man himself has mostly been forgotten by history, even written off as a failure. Now, in this fascinating biography, Vanda Krefft corrects the record, explaining why Fox’s legacy is central to the history of Hollywood. At the heart of William Fox’s life was the myth of the American Dream. His story intertwines the fate of the nineteenth-century immigrants who flooded into New York, the city’s vibrant and ruthless gilded age history, and the birth of America’s movie industry amid the dawn of the modern era. Drawing on a decade of original research, The Man Who Made the Movies offers a rich, compelling look at a complex man emblematic of his time, one of the most fascinating and formative eras in American history. Growing up in Lower East Side tenements, the eldest son of impoverished Hungarian immigrants, Fox began selling candy on the street. That entrepreneurial ambition eventually grew one small Brooklyn theater into a $300 million empire of deluxe studios and theaters that rivaled those of Adolph Zukor, Marcus Loew, and the Warner brothers, and launched stars such as Theda Bara. Amid the euphoric roaring twenties, the early movie moguls waged a fierce battle for control of their industry. A fearless risk-taker, Fox won and was hailed as a genius—until a confluence of circumstances, culminating with the 1929 stock market crash, led to his ruin.
Download or read book Kem Weber written by Christopher Alan Long and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major look at the renowned industrial designer and architect, who helped to shape the look of American modernism from the 1920s through the early 1950s For German-born Kem Weber (1889-1963), design was not about finding a new expression; it was about responding to "structural, economic, and social requirements . . . characteristic of our daily routine of living." He sought to ensure that each design he produced--whether a piece of furniture or a building or an interior--was an improvement that responded to modern needs and modern life. Weber was a leading figure of modernism on the West Coast from the 1920s through the early 1950s, and his work greatly influenced the California style of the time. His most iconic designs were his Bentlock line, the Air Line chair, the interiors for the Bixby House, and his tubular-steel furniture for Lloyd. This book, a result of significant new primary research in the Weber family's archives, represents the first major study of the life and career of this important designer. Christopher Long details the full range of Weber's contributions, focusing particularly on the part he played in the advancement of American modernism, and his role in heralding a new way of making and living.
Download or read book Early Race Filmmaking in America written by Barbara Lupack and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-26 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The early years of the twentieth century were a formative time in the long history of struggle for black representation. More than any other medium, movies reflected the tremendous changes occurring in American society. Unfortunately, since they drew heavily on the nineteenth-century theatrical conventions of blackface minstrelsy and the "Uncle Tom Show" traditions, early pictures persisted in casting blacks in demeaning and outrageous caricatures that marginalized and burlesqued them and emphasized their comic or servile behavior. By contrast, race films—that is, movies that were black-cast, black-oriented, and viewed primarily by black audiences in segregated theaters—attempted to counter the crude stereotyping and regressive representations by presenting more authentic racial portrayals. This volume examines race filmmaking from numerous perspectives. By reanimating a critical but neglected period of early cinema—the years between the turn-of-the-century and 1930, the end of the silent film era—it provides a fascinating look at the efforts of early race film pioneers and offers a vibrant portrait of race and racial representation in American film and culture.
Download or read book Medieval Art and the Look of Silent Film written by Lora Ann Sigler and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The heyday of silent film soon became quaint with the arrival of "talkies." As early as 1929, critics and historians were writing of the period as though it were the distant past. Much of the literature on the silent era focuses on its filmic art--ambiance and psychological depth, the splendor of the sets and costumes--yet overlooks the inspiration behind these. This book explores the Middle Ages as the prevailing influence on costume and set design in silent film and a force in fashion and architecture of the era. In the wake of World War I, designers overthrew the artifice of prewar style and manners and drew upon what seemed a nobler, purer age to create an ambiance that reflected higher ideals.
Download or read book Silent Serial Sensations written by Barbara Tepa Lupack and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length study of pioneering and prolific filmmakers Ted and Leo Wharton, Silent Serial Sensations offers a fascinating account of the dynamic early film industry. As Barbara Tepa Lupack demonstrates, the Wharton brothers were behind some of the most profitable and influential productions of the era, including The Exploits of Elaine and The Mysteries of Myra, which starred such popular performers as Pearl White, Irene Castle, Francis X. Bushman, and Lionel Barrymore. Working from the independent film studio they established in Ithaca, New York, Ted and Leo turned their adopted town into "Hollywood on Cayuga." By interweaving contemporary events and incorporating technological and scientific innovations, the Whartons expanded the possibilities of the popular serial motion picture and defined many of its conventions. A number of the sensational techniques and character types they introduced are still being employed by directors and producers a century later.
Download or read book Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes written by Maggie Hennefeld and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women explode out of chimneys and melt when sprayed with soda water. Feminist activists play practical jokes to lobby for voting rights, while overworked kitchen maids dismember their limbs to finish their chores on time. In early slapstick films with titles such as Saucy Sue, Mary Jane’s Mishap, Jane on Strike, and The Consequences of Feminism, comediennes exhibit the tensions between joyful laughter and gendered violence. Slapstick comedy often celebrates the exaggeration of make-believe injury. Unlike male clowns, however, these comic actresses use slapstick antics as forms of feminist protest. They spontaneously combust while doing housework, disappear and reappear when sexually assaulted, or transform into men by eating magic seeds—and their absurd metamorphoses evoke the real-life predicaments of female identity in a changing modern world. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes reveals the gender politics of comedy and the comedic potentials of feminism through close consideration of hundreds of silent films. As Maggie Hennefeld argues, comedienne catastrophes provide disturbing but suggestive images for comprehending gendered social upheavals in the early twentieth century. At the same time, slapstick comediennes were crucial to the emergence of film language. Women’s flexible physicality offered filmmakers blank slates for experimenting with the visual and social potentials of cinema. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes poses major challenges to the foundations of our ideas about slapstick comedy and film history, showing how this combustible genre blows open age-old debates about laughter, society, and gender politics.
Download or read book Magnificent Obsession written by Anthony Slide and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2018-03-02 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Magnificent Obsession: The Outrageous History of Film Buffs, Collectors, Scholars, and Fanatics, author Anthony Slide looks at the way film has dominated the minds and lives of film buffs, film collectors, film academics, and just plain fans of past movies. Based on the author's more than fifty years in the field and his personal, up-front knowledge of the subject, chapters provide unique documentation on film buffs who once created a livelihood from their hobby, including long-forgotten Chaw Mank and the vast array of film clubs that he headed and New York radio and television sensation Joe Franklin. The history of fans and their fan clubs are discussed, as well as the first and only periodical, Films in Review, which catered both to film scholars and film buffs. The histories of several legendary film collectors such as David Bradley and Herb Graff are featured, as is Hollywood's Silent Movie Theatre, where film buffs found a home from the 1940s onwards, sharing it with drug dealers, male prostitutes, fantasists, and hit men. Magnificent Obsession is vast in its approach, discussing the entire history of the phenomenon of the film buff from the early 1910s through the present and documenting the manner in which film buffs have changed--thanks to the internet--from relatively gentle and kind individuals to the obsessive, sometimes overbearing, and often self-important film buffs of today.
Download or read book The FilmMakers written by Bea Fogelman and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 1999-12 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here are the stories about the people behind the camers who create television and movie film. The book progresses from the early “Silents'to films today, telling how TV and movies are created and the professional and personal lives of the poeple who create them. These are the people whose names appear on the credits that quickly roll by on the screen following the film'i>The Filmmakers.
Download or read book A Hidden History of Film Style written by Christopher Beach and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The image that appears on the movie screen is the direct and tangible result of the joint efforts of the director and the cinematographer. A Hidden History of Film Style is the first study to focus on the collaborations between directors and cinematographers, a partnership that has played a crucial role in American cinema since the early years of the silent era. Christopher Beach argues that an understanding of the complex director-cinematographer collaboration offers an important model that challenges the pervasive conventional concept of director as auteur. Drawing upon oral histories, early industry trade journals, and other primary materials, Beach examines key innovations like deep focus, color, and digital cinematography, and in doing so produces an exceptionally clear history of the craft. Through analysis of several key collaborations in American cinema from the silent era to the late twentieth centuryÑsuch as those of D. W. Griffith and Billy Bitzer, William Wyler and Gregg Toland, and Alfred Hitchcock and Robert BurksÑthis pivotal book underlines the importance of cinematographers to both the development of cinematic technique and the expression of visual style in film.
Download or read book 100 Bible Films written by Matthew Page and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-05-19 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From The Passion of the Christ to Life of Brian, and from The Ten Commandments to Last Temptation of Christ, filmmakers have been adapting the stories of the Bible for over 120 years, from the first time the Höritz Passion Play was filmed in the Czech Republic back in 1897. Ever since, these stories have inspired musicals, comedies, sci-fi, surrealist visions and the avant-garde not to mention spawning their own genre, the biblical epic. Filmmakers across six continents and from all kinds of religious perspectives (or none at all), have adapted the greatest stories ever told, delighting some and infuriating others. 100 Bible Films is the indispensable guide to this wide and varied output, providing an authoritative but accessible history of biblical adaptations through one hundred of the most interesting and significant biblical films. Richly illustrated with film stills, this book depicts how such films have undertaken a complex negotiation between art, commerce, entertainment and religion. Matthew Page traces the screen history of the biblical stories from the very earliest silent passion plays, via the golden ages of the biblical epic, through to more innovative and controversial later films as well as covering significant TV adaptations. He discusses films made not only by some of our greatest filmmakers, artists such as Martin Scorsese, Jean Luc Godard, Alice Guy, Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lotte Reiniger, Carl Dreyer and Luis Buñuel, but also those looking to explore their faith or share it with lovers of cinema the world over.
Download or read book Leonard Maltin s 2009 Movie Guide written by Leonard Maltin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008 with total page 1668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers readers a comprehensive reference to the world of film, including more than ten thousand DVD titles, along with information on performers, ratings, running times, plots, and helpful features.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema written by S. Torriano Berry and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-05-07 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As early as 1909, African Americans were utilizing the new medium of cinema to catalogue the world around them, using the film camera as a device to capture their lives and their history. The daunting subject of race and ethnicity permeated life in America at the turn of the twentieth century and due to the effect of certain early films, specific television images, and an often-biased news media, it still plagues us today. As new technologies bring the power of the moving image to the masses, African Americans will shoot and edit on laptop computers and share their stories with a global audience via the World Wide Web. These independently produced visions will add to the diverse cache of African American images being displayed on an ever-expanding silver screen. This wide range of stories, topics, views, and genres will finally give the world a glimpse of African American life that has long been ignored and has yet to be seen. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1400 cross-referenced entries on actors, actresses, movies, producers, organizations, awards, and terminology, this book provides a better understanding of the role African Americans played in film history. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about African American cinema.
Download or read book Leonard Maltin s 2015 Movie Guide written by Leonard Maltin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-09-02 with total page 2520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEARLY 16,000 ENTRIES INCLUDING 300+ NEW ENTRIES AND MORE THAN 13,000 DVD LISTINGS Summer blockbusters and independent sleepers; masterworks of Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Martin Scorsese; the timeless comedy of the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton; animated classics from Walt Disney and Pixar; the finest foreign films ever made. This 2015 edition covers the modern era, from 1965 to the present, while including all the great older films you can’t afford to miss—and those you can—from box-office smashes to cult classics to forgotten gems to forgettable bombs, listed alphabetically, and complete with all the essential information you could ask for. NEW: • Nearly 16,000 capsule movie reviews, with 300+ new entries • More than 25,000 DVD and video listings • Up-to-date list of mail-order and online sources for buying and renting DVDs and videos MORE: • Official motion picture code ratings from G to NC-17 • Old and new theatrical and video releases rated **** to BOMB • Exact running times—an invaluable guide for recording and for discovering which movies have been edited • Reviews of little-known sleepers, foreign films, rarities, and classics • Leonard’s personal list of Must-See Movies • Date of release, running time, director, stars, MPAA ratings, color or black and white • Concise summary, capsule review, and four-star-to-BOMB rating system • Precise information on films shot in widescreen format • Symbols for DVDs, videos, and laserdiscs • Completely updated index of leading actors
Download or read book Leonard Maltin s 2013 Movie Guide written by Leonard Maltin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-09-04 with total page 2655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW More than 16,000 capsule movie reviews, with more than 300 new entries NEW More than 13,000 DVD and 13,000 video listings NEW Up-to-date list of mail-order and online sources for buying and renting DVDs and videos NEW Completely updated index of leading performers MORE Official motion picture code ratings from G to NC-17 MORE Old and new theatrical and video releases rated **** to BOMB MORE Exact running times—an invaluable guide for recording and for discovering which movies have been edited MORE Reviews of little-known sleepers, foreign films, rarities, and classics AND Leonard's personal list of fifty notable debut features Summer blockbusters and independent sleepers; masterworks of Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Martin Scorsese; the timeless comedy of the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton; animated classics from Walt Disney and Pixar; the finest foreign films ever made. This 2013 edition covers the modern era, from 1965 to the present, while including all the great older films you can’t afford to miss—and those you can—from box-office smashes to cult classics to forgotten gems to forgettable bombs, listed alphabetically, and complete with all the essential information you could ask for. • Date of release, running time, director, stars, MPAA ratings, color or black and white • Concise summary, capsule review, and four-star-to-BOMB rating system • Precise information on films shot in widescreen format • Symbols for DVD s, videos, and laserdiscs • Completely updated index of leading actors • Up-to-date list of mail-order and online sources for buying and renting DVDs and videos
