Stardom and the Aesthetics of Neorealism

Stardom and the Aesthetics of Neorealism PDF Author: Ora Gelley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136323007
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
In this exciting new book, Gelley considers the collaboration between Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman in light of the neorealist aesthetic. This study re-examines the director's postwar works in relation to the contemporary discussion on Italian national identity: rather than marking a radical break with the director's early neorealist successes, Rossellini's films with Bergman in fact extend the boundaries of neorealism and challenge the standard reading of its basic tenets, especially the relationship between character and setting. Gelley reassesses the relationship between European postwar and American cinema, looking at how the image of the Hollywood star was translated and transformed when it was imported into Rossellini's Italy. Rossellini's insertion of the Hollywood star into the native landscape had a significant influence on the director's approach to the neorealist aesthetic. His filming of the encounter between Bergman and the Italian landscape involves not only a re-interpretation and transformation of the Hollywood star persona, but also a challenge to the idealized notion of an authentic Italian national collective free of foreign influence. The disruption of Bergman's character into the Italian landscape became one means whereby the director was able to explore the ambivalence inherent in any attempt to construct a national identity.

Stardom and the Aesthetics of Neorealism

Stardom and the Aesthetics of Neorealism PDF Author: Ora Gelley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136323007
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book

Book Description
In this exciting new book, Gelley considers the collaboration between Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman in light of the neorealist aesthetic. This study re-examines the director's postwar works in relation to the contemporary discussion on Italian national identity: rather than marking a radical break with the director's early neorealist successes, Rossellini's films with Bergman in fact extend the boundaries of neorealism and challenge the standard reading of its basic tenets, especially the relationship between character and setting. Gelley reassesses the relationship between European postwar and American cinema, looking at how the image of the Hollywood star was translated and transformed when it was imported into Rossellini's Italy. Rossellini's insertion of the Hollywood star into the native landscape had a significant influence on the director's approach to the neorealist aesthetic. His filming of the encounter between Bergman and the Italian landscape involves not only a re-interpretation and transformation of the Hollywood star persona, but also a challenge to the idealized notion of an authentic Italian national collective free of foreign influence. The disruption of Bergman's character into the Italian landscape became one means whereby the director was able to explore the ambivalence inherent in any attempt to construct a national identity.

Stardom and the Aesthetics of Neorealism

Stardom and the Aesthetics of Neorealism PDF Author: Ora Gelley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415890039
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
This study considers the collaboration between Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman in light of the neorealist aesthetic, re-examining the director's immediate postwar works in relation to the contemporary discussion on Italian national identity.

The Non-Professional Actor

The Non-Professional Actor PDF Author: Catherine O'Rawe
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501394371
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Provides the first critical overview of acting, stardom, and performance in post-war Italian film (1945-54), with special attention to the figure of the non-professional actor, who looms large in neorealist filmmaking. Italian post-war cinema has been widely celebrated by critics and scholars: films such as Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948) and Paisan (Rossellini, 1946) remain globally influential, particularly for their use of non-professional actors. This period of regeneration of Italian cinema initiated the boom in cinemagoing that made cinema an important vector of national and gender identity for audiences. The book addresses the casting, performance, and labour of non-professional actors, particularly children, their cultural and economic value to cinema, and how their use brought ideas of the ordinary into the discourse of stars as extraordinary. Relatedly, O'Rawe discusses critical and press discourses around acting, performance, and stardom, often focused on the 'crisis' of acting connected to the rise of non-professionals and the girls (like Sophia Loren) who found sudden cinematic fame via beauty contests.

Starmaker

Starmaker PDF Author: Milan Hain
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496846060
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
David O. Selznick (1902–1965) was one of the most prominent film producers of the Hollywood studio era, responsible for such artistic and commercial triumphs as King Kong, David Copperfield, Anna Karenina, A Star Is Born, Gone with the Wind, Rebecca, Spellbound, and The Third Man. However, film production was not his only domain. Starting in the late 1930s, he built an impressive stable of stars within his own independent company, including Ingrid Bergman, Vivien Leigh, Joan Fontaine, Jennifer Jones, and Gregory Peck. In Starmaker: David O. Selznick and the Production of Stars in the Hollywood Studio System, author Milan Hain reveals the mechanisms by which Selznick and his collaborators discovered and promoted new stars and describes how these personalities were marketed, whether for financial gain or symbolic recognition and prestige. Using a wide range of archival materials, the book significantly complements and reshapes our understanding of Selznick’s celebrated career by focusing on heretofore neglected aspects of his creative and business activities. It also sheds light on the US film industry during the Golden Age of Hollywood studios and in the postwar period when the established order began to break down. By structuring the book around Selznick and his role as a starmaker, Hain demonstrates that star production and development in the Hollywood studio system was a highly organized and systematic activity, though the respective strategies and procedures were often hidden from the public eye.

The Aesthetics of Antifascist Film

The Aesthetics of Antifascist Film PDF Author: Jennifer Lynde Barker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 041589915X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Through a series of detailed film case histories ranging from The Great Dictator to Hiroshima mon amour to The Lives of Others, The Aesthetics of Antifascist Film: Radical Projection explores the genesis and recurrence of antifascist aesthetics as it manifests in the WWII, Cold War and Post-Wall historical periods. Emerging during a critical moment in film history—1930s/1940s Hollywood— cinematic antifascism was representative of the international nature of antifascist alliances, with the amalgam of film styles generated in émigré Hollywood during the WWII period reflecting a dialogue between an urgent political commitment to antifascism and an equally intense commitment to aesthetic complexity. Opposed to a fascist aesthetics based on homogeneity, purity and spectacle, these antifascist films project a radical beauty of distortion, heterogeneity, fragmentation and loss. By juxtaposing documentation and the modernist techniques of surrealism and expressionism, the filmmakers were able to manifest a non-totalizing work of art that still had political impact. Drawing on insights from film and cultural studies, aesthetic and ethical philosophy, and socio-political theory, this book argues that the artistic struggles with political commitment and modernist strategies of representation during the 1930s and 40s resulted in a distinctive, radical aesthetic form that represents an alternate strand of post-modernism.

Italian Cinema from the Silent Screen to the Digital Image

Italian Cinema from the Silent Screen to the Digital Image PDF Author: Joseph Luzzi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 144114756X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
In this comprehensive guide, some of the world's leading scholars consider the issues, films, and filmmakers that have given Italian cinema its enduring appeal. Readers will explore the work of such directors as Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Roberto Rossellini as well as a host of subjects including the Italian silent screen, the political influence of Fascism on the movies, lesser known genres such as the giallo (horror film) and Spaghetti Western, and the role of women in the Italian film industry. Italian Cinema from the Silent Screen to the Digital Image explores recent developments in cinema studies such as digital performance, the role of media and the Internet, neuroscience in film criticism, and the increased role that immigrants are playing in the nation's cinema.

Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art

Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art PDF Author: Nilgun Bayraktar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317510720
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art explores cinematic and artistic representations of migration and mobility in Europe from the 1990s to today. Drawing on theories of migrant and diasporic cinema, moving-image art, and mobility studies, Bayraktar provides historically situated close readings of films, videos, and cinematic installations that concern migratory networks and infrastructures across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Probing the notion of Europe as a coherent entity and a borderless space, this interdisciplinary study investigates the ways in which European ideals of mobility and fluidity are deeply enmeshed with forced migration, illegalization, and xenophobia. With a specific focus on distinct forms of mobility such as labor migration, postcolonial migration, tourism, and refugee mobilities, Bayraktar studies the new counter-hegemonic imaginations invoked by the work of filmmakers such as Ayşe Polat, Fatih Akin, Michael Haneke, and Tony Gatlif as well as video essays and installations of artists such as Kutluğ Ataman, Ursula Biemann, Ergin Çavuşoğlu, Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo. Challenging aesthetic as well as national, cultural, and political boundaries, the works central to this book envision Europe as a diverse, inclusive, and unfixed continent that is reimagined from many elsewheres well beyond its borders.

Asian Cinema and the Use of Space

Asian Cinema and the Use of Space PDF Author: Lilian Chee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134629532
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Asian cinemas are connected to global networks and participate in producing international film history while at the same time influenced and engaged by spatial, cultural, social and political transformations. This interdisciplinary study forwards a productive pairing of Asian cinemas and space, where space is used as a discursive tool to understand cinemas of Asia. Concentrating on the performative potential of cinematic space in Asian films, the contributors discuss how space (re)constructs forms of identities and meanings across a range of cinematic practices. Cities, landscapes, buildings and interiors actively shape cinematic performances of such identities and their significances. The essays are structured around the spatial themes of ephemeral, imagined and contested spaces. They deal with struggles for identity, belonging, autonomy and mobility within different national and transnational contexts across East, Southeast and parts of South Asia in particular, which are complicated by micropolitics and subcultures, and by the interventions and interests of global lobbies.

American Documentary Filmmaking in the Digital Age

American Documentary Filmmaking in the Digital Age PDF Author: Lucia Ricciardelli
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135036136
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
American Documentary Filmmaking in the Digital Age examines the recent challenges to the conventions of realist documentary through the lens of war documentary films by Ken Burns, Michael Moore, and Errol Morris. During the twentieth century, the invention of new technologies of audiovisual representation such as cinema, television, video, and digital media have transformed the modes of historical narration and with it forced historians to assess the impact of new visual technologies on the construction of history. This book investigates the manner in which this contemporary Western "crisis" in historical narrative is produced by a larger epistemological shift in visual culture. Ricciardelli uses the theme of war as depicted in these directors’ films to focus her study and look at the model(s) of national identity that Burns, Morris, and Moore shape through their depictions of US military actions. She examines how postcolonial critiques of historicism and the advent of digitization have affected the narrative structure of documentary film and the shaping of historical consciousness through cinematic representation.

Popular Film Music and Masculinity in Action

Popular Film Music and Masculinity in Action PDF Author: Amanda Howell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134109342
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Amanda Howell offers a new perspective on the contemporary pop score as the means by which masculinities not seen—or heard—before become a part of post-World War II American cinema. Popular Film Music and Masculinity in Action addresses itself to an eclectic mix of film, from Elvis and Travolta star vehicles to Bruckheimer-produced blockbuster action, including the work of musically-innovative directors, Melvin Van Peebles, Martin Scorsese, Gregg Araki, and Quentin Tarantino. Of particular interest is the way these films and their representations of masculinity are shaped by generic exchanges among contemporary music, music cultures, and film, combining American cinema's long-standing investment in violence-as-spectacle with similarly body-focused pleasures of contemporary youth music. Drawing on scholarship of popular music and the pop score as well as feminist film and media studies, Howell addresses an often neglected area of gender representation by considering cinematic masculinity as an audio-visual construction. Through her analyses of music’s role in action and other film genres that share its investment in violence, she reveals the mechanisms by which the pop score has helped to reinvent gender—and gendered fictions of male empowerment—in contemporary screen entertainment.