Ambiguity and Film Criticism

Ambiguity and Film Criticism
Author: Hoi Lun Law
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2021-02-02
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3030629457

This book defends an account of ambiguity which illuminates the aesthetic possibilities of film and the nature of film criticism. Ambiguity typically describes the condition of multiple meanings. But we can find multiple meanings in what appears unambiguous to us. So, what makes ambiguity ambiguous? This study argues that a sense of uncertainty is vital to the concept. Ambiguity is what presses us to inquire into our puzzlement over a movie, to persistently ask “why is it as it is?” Notably, this account of the concept is also an account of its criticism. It recognises that a satisfying assessment of what is ambiguous involves both our reason and doubt; that is, reason and doubt can work together in our practice of reading. This book, then, considers ambiguity as a form of reasonable doubt, one that invites us to reflect on our critical efforts, rethinking the operation of film criticism.

Bernardo Bertolucci

Bernardo Bertolucci
Author: Claretta Tonetti
Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA
Total Pages: 312
Release: 1995
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

In 1962, the year in which he directed his first film The Grim Reaper, Bernado Bertolucci published a book of poetry entitled In cerca del mistero (In Search of Mystery) - a title which characterizes his entire cinematic work. In this study, Claretta Tonetti recognizes that Bertolucci search for knowledge is never dogmatic, and that he never claims to have all the answers, aesthetically or otherwise. The open-ended quality of his films, based on his own admitted difficulty to finish, bears witness to this. Instead, Bertolucci allows the audience to take part in the director's creative process, one that - like life itself - is ever evolving.

Fairy Tale Films

Fairy Tale Films
Author: Pauline Greenhill
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2010-08-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0874217822

This ISBN refers to the ebook edition of this text, available directly from the publisher. It has erroneously been listed as paperback by some online vendors. The true paperback edition is indeed available at online vendors. Paste this ISBN into the search box: 9780874217810. In this, the first collection of essays to address the development of fairy tale film as a genre, Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix stress, "the mirror of fairy-tale film reflects not so much what its audience members actually are but how they see themselves and their potential to develop (or, likewise, to regress)." As Jack Zipes says further in the foreword, “Folk and fairy tales pervade our lives constantly through television soap operas and commercials, in comic books and cartoons, in school plays and storytelling performances, in our superstitions and prayers for miracles, and in our dreams and daydreams. The artistic re-creations of fairy-tale plots and characters in film—the parodies, the aesthetic experimentation, and the mixing of genres to engender new insights into art and life— mirror possibilities of estranging ourselves from designated roles, along with the conventional patterns of the classical tales.” Here, scholars from film, folklore, and cultural studies move discussion beyond the well-known Disney movies to the many other filmic adaptations of fairy tales and to the widespread use of fairy tale tropes, themes, and motifs in cinema.

Gilles Deleuze and Film Criticism

Gilles Deleuze and Film Criticism
Author: Dominic Lash
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2023-08-07
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3031333055

This book is the first collection of essays to offer detailed examinations of the role that close attention to individual films plays in the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s work on cinema. In the last two decades, Deleuze's two books on film have had an enormous influence on Film Studies, profoundly affecting thinking about movement, time, history, and other topics. Theoretically ambitious and philosophically rich but clearly written by a broad range of established and emerging international film scholars, the chapters in this volume will both contribute to, and in places challenge, the vibrant field of Deleuzian film studies. Topics covered range from the relationship of Deleuze to film criticism; the role of theories of movement; and studies of works by major filmmakers including Federico Fellini, Werner Herzog, Vincente Minnelli, and Orson Welles. This book will be of interest not only to specialists in Deleuze but to anybody engaged with the close study of film and its philosophical ramifications.

Film Analysis

Film Analysis
Author: Jeffrey Geiger
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 8
Release: 2013-08-12
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 039392324X

Film Analysis offers concise analyses of fifty diverse and historically significant films—each written exclusively for the text by a leading scholar. Written with the undergraduate in mind, the essays are clear, readable, and great models for students to follow in helping them to hone their own writing. The Second Edition includes six new essays, a new, detailed guide to writing film analysis, and an extensive, up-to-date glossary of critical film terms.

The Language and Style of Film Criticism

The Language and Style of Film Criticism
Author: Andrew Klevan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2011-04-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1136728287

The Language and Style of Film Criticism brings together original essays from an international range of academics and film critics highlighting the achievements, complexities and potential of film criticism. In recent years, in contrast to the theoretical, historical and cultural study of film, film criticism has been relatively marginalised, especially within the academy. This book highlights the distinctiveness of film criticism and addresses ways in which it can take a more central place within the academy and develop in dynamic ways outside it. The Language and Style of Film Criticism is essential reading for academics, teachers, students and journalists who wish to understand and appreciate the language and style of film criticism.

Ambiguous Cinema

Ambiguous Cinema
Author: Kelli Fuery
Publisher: EUP
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-02-29
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781399504249

Utilises women's independent cinema to explore Simone de Beauvoir's notion of ambiguity in film experience

Eve Out of Her Ruins

Eve Out of Her Ruins
Author: Ananda Devi
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2016-08-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1941920411

With brutal honesty and poetic urgency, Ananda Devi relates the tale of four young Mauritians trapped in their country's endless cycle of fear and violence. Eve out of Her Ruins is a heartbreaking look at the Mauritius tourists don't see, and an exploration of the construction of personhood at the margins of society.

Ambiguous Cinema

Ambiguous Cinema
Author: Kelli Fuery
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release:
Genre: Feminism and motion pictures
ISBN: 9781399518550

Simone de Beauvoir's notion of ambiguity became a cornerstone of her philosophy and influenced a radical rethinking of freedom well into the twenty-first century. In 'Ambiguous Cinema', Fuery examines Beauvoir's notion of ambiguity in relation to film experience, exploring both the legacies and limits of her existentialist ethics through a range of films by independent women filmmakers. In doing so, Fuery deftly demonstrates the currency and relevancy of Beauvoir's ideas to contemporary debates in film-philosophy and feminist thought by examining how these women filmmakers navigate turbulent themes such as moral choice, power, adolescence, love, trauma and motherhood.