Download or read book The Eloquent Screen written by Gilberto Perez and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lifetime of cinematic writing culminates in this breathtaking statement on film’s unique ability to move us Cinema is commonly hailed as “the universal language,” but how does it communicate so effortlessly across cultural and linguistic borders? In The Eloquent Screen, influential film critic Gilberto Perez makes a capstone statement on the powerful ways in which film acts on our minds and senses. Drawing on a lifetime’s worth of viewing and re-viewing, Perez invokes a dizzying array of masters past and present—including Chaplin, Ford, Kiarostami, Eisenstein, Malick, Mizoguchi, Haneke, Hitchcock, and Godard—to explore the transaction between filmmaker and audience. He begins by explaining how film fits into the rhetorical tradition of persuasion and argumentation. Next, Perez explores how film embodies the central tropes of rhetoric––metaphor, metonymy, allegory, and synecdoche––and concludes with a thrilling account of cinema’s spectacular capacity to create relationships of identification with its audiences. Although there have been several attempts to develop a poetics of film, there has been no sustained attempt to set forth a rhetoric of film—one that bridges aesthetics and audience. Grasping that challenge, The Eloquent Screen shows how cinema, as the consummate contemporary art form, establishes a thoroughly modern rhetoric in which different points of view are brought into clear focus.

Download or read book Black Panther written by Scott Bukatman and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Panther was the first Black superhero in mainstream American comics. Black Panther was a cultural phenomenon that broke box office records. Yet it wasn’t just a movie led by and starring Black artists. It grappled with ideas and conflicts central to Black life in America and helped redress the racial dynamics of the Hollywood blockbuster. Scott Bukatman, one of the foremost scholars of superheroes and cinematic spectacle, brings his impeccable pedigree to this lively and accessible study, finding in the utopianism of Black Panther a way of re-envisioning what a superhero movie can and should be while centering the Black creators, performers, and issues behind it. He considers the superheroic Black body; the Pan-African fantasy, feminism, and Afrofuturism of Wakanda; the African American relationship to Africa; the political influence of director Ryan Coogler’s earlier movies; and the entwined performances of Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa and Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger. Bukatman argues that Black Panther is escapism of the best kind, offering a fantasy of liberation and social justice while demonstrating the power of popular culture to articulate ideals and raise vital questions.

Download or read book Slums on Screen written by Igor Krstic and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Near to one billion people call slums their home, making it a reasonable claim to describe our world as a 'planet of slums.' But how has this hard and unyielding way of life been depicted on screen? How have filmmakers engaged historically and across the globe with the social conditions of what is often perceived as the world's most miserable habitats?Combining approaches from cultural, globalisation and film studies, Igor Krstic outlines a transnational history of films that either document or fictionalise the favelas, shantytowns, barrios poulares or chawls of our 'planet of slums', exploring the way accelerated urbanisation has intersected with an increasingly interconnected global film culture. From Jacob Riis' How The Other Half Lives (1890) to Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008), the volume provides a number of close readings of films from different historical periods and regions to outline how contemporary film and media practices relate to their past predeccesors, demonstrating the way various filmmakers, both north and south of the equator, have repeatedly grappled with, rejected or continuously modified documentary and realist modes to convey life in our 'planet of slums'.

Download or read book Eloquent Gestures written by Roberta Pearson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1992-11-02 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Pearson writes beautifully, clearly, and entertainingly (with a touch of sardonic sarcasm here and there). This is the single best work centering on performance in film that I have read."—Thomas Gunning, author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film

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 of Disorientation written by Dominic Lash and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-06 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines disorientation and confusion, and their theoretical implications, in contemporary narrative film.

Download or read book Endings in the Cinema written by Michael Walker and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-03-13 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new way of thinking about film endings. Whereas existing works on the subject concentrate on narrative resolution, this book explores the way film endings blend together a complex of motifs, tropes and other elements to create the sense of an ending—that is, it looks at ‘endings as endings’. Drawing on a wide range of examples taken from films of different periods and national cinemas, the author identifies three key features which structure the work: thresholds and boundaries, water, and, above all, the beach. The beach combines water and a boundary and is the most resonant of the key sites to which film endings gravitate. Although beach endings go back to at least 1910, they have increased markedly in post-classical cinema, and can be found across all genres and in films from many different countries. As the leading example of the book’s argument, they illustrate both the aesthetic richness and the structural complexity of film endings.

Download or read book Cinema and Surveillance written by Martin Blumenthal-Barby and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-03 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cinema and Surveillance: The Asymmetric Gaze shows how key modern filmmakers challenge and disturb the relation between film and surveillance, medium and message. Assembling readings of films by Harun Farocki, Michael Haneke, and Fritz Lang, the book considers surveillance in such different domains as urban life, religious doctrine, and law enforcement. With surveillance present in the modern world as both a technological phenomenon and a social practice, the author shows how cinema, as a visual medium, presents highly sophisticated analyses of surveillance. He suggests that “surveillance” is less an issue to be tackled from a secure spectatorial position than an experience to be rendered, an event to be dealt with. Far from offering a general model of spectatorship, the book explores how narrative moments of surveillance are complicated by specific spectatorial responses. In its intersection of well-known figures and a highly topical issue, this book will have broad appeal, especially, but not exclusively, among students and scholars in film studies, media studies, German studies, European studies, art history, and political theory.

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 Robert Pippin and Film written by Dominic Lash and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-10 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Pippin (1948- ) is a major figure in contemporary philosophy, having published influential work on thinkers including Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. He is also an original thinker about – and critic of – film who has written books and numerous articles on canonical subjects such as the Western, Film Noir, and Hitchcock's Vertigo. In Robert Pippin and Film, Dominic Lash demonstrates the ways that film has been crucial to Pippin's thought on important philosophical topics such as political psychology, ethics, and self-knowledge. He also explores the implications of Pippin's methodological commitments to clear language and to maintaining close contact with the details of the films in question. In so doing, Lash brings Pippin's work on film to a wider audience and contributes to current debates both within film studies and beyond. This includes those concerning the relationships between film and philosophy, criticism and aesthetics, and individual subjectivity and political consciousness. Lash focuses on Pippin's major works on film – Hollywood Westerns and American Myth (2010), Fatalism in American Film Noir (2012), The Philosophical Hitchcock (2017), and Filmed Thought (2020) as well as his many shorter writings on film.

Download or read book The Lure of the Image written by Daniel Morgan and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lure of the Image shows how a close study of camera movement challenges key assumptions underlying a wide range of debates within cinema and media studies. Highlighting the shifting intersection of point of view and camera position, Daniel Morgan draws on a range of theoretical arguments and detailed analyses across cinemas to reimagine the relation between spectator and camera—and between camera and film world. With sustained accounts of how the camera moves in films by Fritz Lang, Guru Dutt, Max Ophuls, and Terrence Malick and in contemporary digital technologies, The Lure of the Image exposes the persistent fantasy that we move with the camera within the world of the film and examines the ways that filmmakers have exploited this fantasy. In so doing, Morgan provides a more flexible account of camera movement, one that enables a fuller understanding of the political and ethical stakes entailed by this key component of cinematic style.

Download or read book Curtains of Light written by George Toles and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-07-01 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Toles's Curtains of Light explores the ways in which various kinds of theatrical space in film engage with the film reality adjacent to them, and alter our understanding of the cinematic real. Film art is a dialogue between the world created for a film narrative and theatre spaces that confront it across the shadowline. This book provides a new way of thinking about film's relation to theatre, and challenges old conceptions of how cinema needs to escape the theatrical, or rise above it. Toles offers elegantly written and jargon-free readings of a rich variety of films, spanning the distance from D.W. Griffith's True Heart Susie up to David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. and Ang Lee's Lust, Caution. The methodology is predominantly aesthetic, but informed by Toles's decades of experience as a professional theatre director. Among the many topics covered are audition scenes, stage deaths on film, the close up and theatrical aloneness in film, eloquent objects, and characters who alternate between directing and playacting for each other, with tragic consequences. Curtains of Light would be an extremely useful introductory text for university students studying the relationship of cinema to theatre.

Download or read book Shadow of a Doubt written by Diane Negra and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shadow of a Doubt (1943) was British-born Alfred Hitchcock’s sixth American film and the one that he at various times identified as his favourite and his best. It seems likely that one of the reasons he liked Shadow so much is that is an extraordinarily well-ordered narrative system, a meticulous cause and effect chain that melds its various scenes and sequences together to form a unified narrative that is highly effective in building suspense and cultivating identification with characters. This scrupulously organized film operates as a masterclass on principles of narrative design while generating resonant commentary on the nature of family life. This book redresses the deficit of sustained critical attention paid to Shadow even in the large corpus of Hitchcock scholarship. Analysing the film’s narrative system, issues of genre, authorship, social history, homesickness and ‘family values’, Diane Negra shows how the film’s impeccable narrative structure is wedded to radical ideological content, linking the film’s terrors to the punishing effects of looking beyond conventional family and gender roles. This book understands Shadow as an unconventionally female-centred Hitchcock text and a milestone film that marks the director’s emergent engagement with the pathologies of violence in American life and opens a window into the placement of femininity in World War II consensus culture and more broadly into the politics of mid-century gender and family life.

Download or read book The Cinema and Its Shadow written by Alice Maurice and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2013-03-15 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cinema and Its Shadow argues that race has defined the cinematic apparatus since the earliest motion pictures, especially at times of technological transition. In particular, this work explores how racial difference became central to the resolving of cinematic problems: the stationary camera, narrative form, realism, the synchronization of image and sound, and, perhaps most fundamentally, the immaterial image—the cinema’s “shadow,” which figures both the material reality of the screen image and its racist past. Discussing early “race subjects,” Alice Maurice demonstrates that these films influenced cinematic narrative in lasting ways by helping to determine the relation between stillness and motion, spectacle and narrative drive. The book examines how motion picture technology related to race, embodiment, and authenticity at specific junctures in cinema’s development, including the advent of narratives, feature films, and sound. In close readings of such films as The Cheat, Shadows, and Hallelujah!, Maurice reveals how the rhetoric of race repeatedly embodies film technology, endowing it with a powerful mix of authenticity and magic. In this way, the racialized subject became the perfect medium for showing off, shoring up, and reintroducing the cinematic apparatus at various points in the history of American film. Moving beyond analyzing race in purely thematic or ideological terms, Maurice traces how it shaped the formal and technological means of the cinema.

Download or read book Integrated Library Systems for PCs and PC Networks written by Marshall Breeding and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Russian Aviation Space Flight and Visual Culture written by Vlad Strukov and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the many successes of the Soviet Union were inaugural space flight—ahead of the United States—and many other triumphs related to aviation. Aviators and cosmonauts enjoyed heroic status in the Soviet Union, and provided supports of the Soviet project with iconic figures which could be used to bolster the regime’s visions, self-confidence, and the image of itself as forward looking and futuristic. This book explores how the themes of aviation and space flight have been depicted in film, animation, art, architecture, and digital media. Incorporating many illustrations, the book covers a wide range of subjects, including the representations of heroes, the construction of myths, and the relationship between visual art forms and Soviet/Russian culture and society.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory written by Kyle Stevens and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 713 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite changes in the media landscape, film remains a vital force in contemporary culture, as do our ideas of what "a movie" or "the cinematic" are. Indeed, we might say that the category of film now only exists in theory. Whereas film-theoretical discussion at the turn of the 21st century was preoccupied, understandably, by digital technology's permeation of virtually all aspects of the film object, this volume moves the conversation away from a focus on film's materiality towards timely questions concerning the ethics, politics, and even aesthetics of thinking about the medium of cinema. To put it another way, this collection narrows in on the subject of film, not with a nostalgic sensibility, but with the recognition that what constitutes a film is historically contingent, in dialogue with the vicissitudes of entertainment, art, and empire. The volume is divided into six sections: Meta-Theory; Film Theory's Project of Emancipation; Apparatus and Perception; Audiovisuality; How Close is Close Reading?; and The Turn to Experience.