Cinema and Modernity

Cinema and Modernity PDF Author: Murray Pomerance
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813538165
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book

Book Description
Brings together several essays by seventeen scholars to explore the complexity of the essential connection between film and modernity. This volume shows us the significant ways that film has both grown in the context of the modern world and played a central role in reflecting and shaping our interactions with it.

Cinema and Modernity

Cinema and Modernity PDF Author: Murray Pomerance
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813538165
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book

Book Description
Brings together several essays by seventeen scholars to explore the complexity of the essential connection between film and modernity. This volume shows us the significant ways that film has both grown in the context of the modern world and played a central role in reflecting and shaping our interactions with it.

Migrating to the Movies

Migrating to the Movies PDF Author: Jacqueline Najuma Stewart
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520936409
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 506

Get Book

Book Description
The rise of cinema as the predominant American entertainment around the turn of the last century coincided with the migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the South to the urban "land of hope" in the North. This richly illustrated book, discussing many early films and illuminating black urban life in this period, is the first detailed look at the numerous early relationships between African Americans and cinema. It investigates African American migrations onto the screen, into the audience, and behind the camera, showing that African American urban populations and cinema shaped each other in powerful ways. Focusing on Black film culture in Chicago during the silent era, Migrating to the Movies begins with the earliest cinematic representations of African Americans and concludes with the silent films of Oscar Micheaux and other early "race films" made for Black audiences, discussing some of the extraordinary ways in which African Americans staked their claim in cinema's development as an art and a cultural institution.

The Films of Fritz Lang

The Films of Fritz Lang PDF Author: Tom Gunning
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838718850
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 528

Get Book

Book Description
ln this volume Tom Gunning examines the films of Fritz Lang not only as a stylistically coherent body of work, but as an attempt to portray the modern world through cinema. The world of modernity in which systems replace individuals is conveyed by Lang's mastery of cinematic set design, composition and editing. Lang presents not only a decades-long vision of cinematic narrative which can be compared to that of Alfred Hitchcock or Jean Renoir, but a view of modernity that relates strongly to the ideas of Adorno, Brecht, Benjamin and Kracauer. From the sweeping allegorical films of the 20s to the chilly and abstract thrillers of the 50s, Lang's films, Gunning claims, are 'among the most precious records of the twentieth century'. The Films of Fritz Lang immeasurably enriches our understanding of a great artist and, in so doing, reimagines what a film arlist is: an author who fades away even in being recognised and interpreted, an enigmatic figure at the junction of aesthetics, history, biography and theory.

Cinema, Audiences and Modernity

Cinema, Audiences and Modernity PDF Author: Daniel Biltereyst
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136642005
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book

Book Description
This book confronts theoretical models on cinema as both a product and a catalyst of European modernity with new empirical work on the history of the social experience of cinema-going, film audiences and film exhibition.

Post-war Cinema and Modernity

Post-war Cinema and Modernity PDF Author: John Orr
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9780814762028
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 468

Get Book

Book Description
Both professors at the U. of Edinburgh (Scotland), Orr (sociology) and Taxidou (English) have collected a diverse selection of previously published material on film, much of it controversial and challenging, to produce a reader for the undergraduate classroom. The readings are divided into theory and form, form and process, and international cinema. The selected authors (who include such thinkers and directors as Andre Bazin, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gilles Deleuze, Fredric Jameson, Paul Virilio, Duncan Petrie, Susan Sontag, and Laura Mulvey) mull questions of film and modernity, film and poetry, film and postmodernity, cinematic perception, changing film technology, and the social and national context of international films. c. Book News Inc.

A Modernist Cinema

A Modernist Cinema PDF Author: Scott W. Klein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199379459
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book

Book Description
"In A Modernist Cinema, edited by Scott W. Klein and Michael Valdez Moses, sixteen distinguished scholars in the field of the New Modernist Studies explore the interrelationships among modernism, cinema, and modernity. Focusing on several culturally influential films from Europe, America, and Asia produced between 1914 and 1941, this collection of essays contends that cinema was always a modernist enterprise. Examining the dialectical relationship between a modernist cinema and modernity itself, these essays reveal how the movies represented and altered our notions and practices of modern life, as well as how the so-called crises of modernity shaped the evolution of filmmaking. Attending to the technical achievements and formal qualities of the works of several prominent directors-Giovanni Pastrone, D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, F. W. Murnau, Carl Theodore Dreyer, Dziga Vertov, Luis Buänuel, Yasujiro Ozu, John Ford, Jean Renoir, Charlie Chaplin, Leni Riefenstahl, and Orson Welles-these essays investigate several interrelated topics: how a modernist cinema represented and intervened in the political and social struggles of the era; the ambivalent relationship between cinema and the other modernist arts; the controversial interconnection between modern technology and the new art; the significance of representing the mobile human body in a new medium; the gendered history of modernity; and the transformative effects of cinema on modern conceptions of temporality, spatial relations, and political geography. Contributors: Richard Begam, Maurizia Bascagli, Enda Duffy, Laura Frost, Andrzej Gasiorek, Scott W. Klein, Douglas Mao, Laura Marcus, Jesse Matz, Tyrus Miller, Michael Valdez Moses, Michael North, Elizabeth Otto, Carrie J. Preston, Lisa Siraganian, Michael Wood"--

Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity

Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity PDF Author: Edward Dimendberg
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674261577
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book

Book Description
Film noir remains one of the most enduring legacies of 1940s and ’50s Hollywood. Populated by double-crossing, unsavory characters, this pioneering film style explored a shadow side of American life during a period of tremendous prosperity and optimism. Edward Dimendberg compellingly demonstrates how film noir is preoccupied with modernity—particularly the urban landscape. The originality of Dimendberg’s approach lies in his examining these films in tandem with historical developments in architecture, city planning, and modern communications systems. He confirms that noir is not simply a reflection of modernity but a virtual continuation of the spaces of the metropolis. He convincingly shows that Hollywood’s dark thrillers of the postwar decades were determined by the same forces that shaped the city itself. Exploring classic examples of film noir such as The Asphalt Jungle, Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Naked City alongside many lesser-known works, Dimendberg masterfully interweaves film history and urban history while perceptively analyzing works by Raymond Chandler, Edward Hopper, Siegfried Kracauer, and Henri Lefebvre. A bold intervention in cultural studies and a major contribution to film history, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity will provoke debate by cinema scholars, urban historians, and students of modern culture—and will captivate admirers of a vital period in American cinema.

Melodrama and Modernity

Melodrama and Modernity PDF Author: Ben Singer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231113293
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book

Book Description
Surveying the expanding conflict in Europe during one of his famous fireside chats in 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt ominously warned that "we know of other methods, new methods of attack. The Trojan horse. The fifth column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery. Spies, saboteurs, and traitors are the actors in this new strategy." Having identified a new type of war -- a shadow war -- being perpetrated by Hitler's Germany, FDR decided to fight fire with fire, authorizing the formation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to organize and oversee covert operations. Based on an extensive analysis of OSS records, including the vast trove of records released by the CIA in the 1980s and '90s, as well as a new set of interviews with OSS veterans conducted by the author and a team of American scholars from 1995 to 1997, The Shadow War Against Hitler is the full story of America's far-flung secret intelligence apparatus during World War II. In addition to its responsibilities generating, processing, and interpreting intelligence information, the OSS orchestrated all manner of dark operations, including extending feelers to anti-Hitler elements, infiltrating spies and sabotage agents behind enemy lines, and implementing propaganda programs. Planned and directed from Washington, the anti-Hitler campaign was largely conducted in Europe, especially through the OSS's foreign outposts in Bern and London. A fascinating cast of characters made the OSS run: William J. Donovan, one of the most decorated individuals in the American military who became the driving force behind the OSS's genesis; Allen Dulles, the future CIA chief who ran the Bern office, which he called "the big window onto the fascist world"; a veritable pantheon of Ivy League academics who were recruited to work for the intelligence services; and, not least, Roosevelt himself. A major contribution of the book is the story of how FDR employed Hitler's former propaganda chief, Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstengl, as a private spy. More than a record of dramatic incidents and daring personalities, this book adds significantly to our understanding of how the United States fought World War II. It demonstrates that the extent, and limitations, of secret intelligence information shaped not only the conduct of the war but also the face of the world that emerged from the shadows.

Taiwan Cinema, Memory, and Modernity

Taiwan Cinema, Memory, and Modernity PDF Author: Ivy I-chu Chang
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811335672
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Get Book

Book Description
This book investigates the aesthetics and politics of Post/Taiwan-New-Cinema by examining fifteen movies by six directors and frequent award winners in international film festivals. The book considers the works of such prominent directors as Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang and Chang Tsuo-chi and their influence on Asian films, as well as emergent phenomenal directors such as Wei Te-sheng, Zero Chou, and Chung Mong-hong. It also explores the possibility of transnational and trans-local social sphere in the interstices of layered colonial legacies, nation-state domination, and global capitalism. Considering Taiwan cinema in the wake of globalization, it analyses how these films represent the socio-political transition among multiple colonial legacies, global capitalism, and the changing cross-strait relation between Taiwan and the Mainland China. The book discusses how these films represent nomadic urban middle class, displaced transnational migrant workers, roaming children and young gangsters, and explores how the continuity/disjuncture of globalization has not only carved into historical and personal memories and individual bodies, but also influenced the transnational production modes and marketing strategies of cinema.

Latin American Cinema

Latin American Cinema PDF Author: Lisa Shaw
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 078648425X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book

Book Description
Renewed interest in Latin American film industries has opened a host of paths of scholarly exploration. Productions from different countries reflect particular social attitudes, political climates and self-conceptions, and must be considered separately and as a whole. The search for national identity is a key component of Latin American films in a time of decreasing cultural diversity and pressures to westernize. Globalization and falling government support have fueled cross-border collaborations, calling into question the idea of a movie's "nationality," and leaving some nations' film industries on the brink of collapse. Whether thriving or barely surviving, struggling to remain distinct or embracing globalization on its own terms, addressing the government or society, Latin American cinema remains vibrant, offering a wealth of material to scholars of all stripes. These collected essays explore important elements of Latin American cinema and its associated national film industries. The first section of essays examines the impact of modernization on both Latin American screen images and the industry itself, offering modern and historical perspectives. The second section focuses on filmmakers who deal with issues of gender and sexuality, whether sexual transgression, the role of female characters, or societal attitudes towards sex and nudity. The final section of essays discusses the relationship between national identity and Latin American film industries: how movies are used to create a sense of self; Uruguay's ongoing identity crisis; and Brazil's use of Hollywood's stereotypical depiction of the country to depict itself. Photographs and an annotated bibliography accompany each essay, and an index supplements the text.