Cinema of Swords

Cinema of Swords
Author: Lawrence Ellsworth
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2023-06-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1493065637

Cinema of Swords is a history, guide, and love letter to over four hundred movies and television shows featuring swashbucklers: knights, pirates, samurai, Vikings, gladiators, outlaw heroes like Zorro and Robin Hood, and anyone else who lives by the blade and solves their problems with the point of a sword. Though swordplay thrives as a mainstay of current pop culture—whether Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings or Star Wars—swashbuckling was if anything even more ubiquitous during Hollywood’s classic period, from its foundations in the Silent Era up through the savage bursts of fantasy films in the ‘80s. With this huge cinematic backlist of classics now available online and on-demand, Cinema of Swords traces the roots and branches of this unruly genre, highlighting classics of the form and pointing fans toward thrilling new gems they never knew existed. With wry summaries and criticism from swordplay expert Lawrence Ellsworth, this comprehensive guidebook is perfect as a reference work or as a dazzling Hollywood history to be read end-to-end.

The Red Sphinx

The Red Sphinx
Author: Alexandre Dumas
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017-01-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781681772974

For the first time in English in over a century, a new translation of the forgotten sequel to Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, continuing the dramatic tale of Cardinal Richelieu and his implacable enemies. In 1844, Alexandre Dumas published The Three Musketeers, a novel so famous and still so popular today that it scarcely needs introduction. Shortly thereafter he wrote a sequel, Twenty Years After, that resumed the adventures of his swashbuckling heroes. Later, toward the end of his career, Dumas wrote The Red Sphinx, another direct sequel to The Three Musketeers that begins, not twenty years later, but a mere twenty days afterward. The Red Sphinx picks up right where the The Three Musketeers left off, continuing the stories of Cardinal Richelieu, Queen Anne, and King Louis XIII—and introducing a charming new hero, the Comte de Moret, a real historical figure from the period. A young cavalier newly arrived in Paris, Moret is an illegitimate son of the former king, and thus half-brother to King Louis. The French Court seethes with intrigue as king, queen, and cardinal all vie for power, and young Moret soon finds himself up to his handsome neck in conspiracy, danger—and passionate romance! Dumas wrote seventy-five chapters of The Red Sphinx, all for serial publication, but he never quite finished it, and so the novel languished for almost a century before its first book publication in France in 1946. While Dumas never completed the book, he had earlier written a separate novella, The Dove, that recounted the final adventures of Moret and Cardinal Richelieu. Now for the first time, in one cohesive narrative, The Red Sphinx and The Dove make a complete and satisfying storyline—a rip-roaring novel of historical adventure, heretofore unknown to English-language readers, by the great Alexandre Dumas, king of the swashbucklers.

CinemaTexas Notes

CinemaTexas Notes
Author: Louis Black
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2018-02-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1477315446

Austin’s thriving film culture, renowned for international events such as SXSW and the Austin Film Festival, extends back to the early 1970s when students in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin ran a film programming unit that screened movies for students and the public. Dubbed CinemaTexas, the program offered viewers a wide variety of films—old and new, mainstream, classic, and cult—at a time when finding and watching films after their first run was very difficult and prohibitively expensive. For each film, RTF graduate students wrote program notes that included production details, a sampling of critical reactions, and an original essay that placed the film and its director within context and explained the movie’s historical significance. Over time, CinemaTexas Program Notes became more ambitious and were distributed around the world, including to luminaries such as film critic Pauline Kael. This anthology gathers a sampling of CinemaTexas Program Notes, organized into four sections: “USA Film History,” “Hollywood Auteurs,” “Cinema-Fist: Renegade Talents,” and “America’s Shadow Cinema.” Many of the note writers have become prominent film studies scholars, as well as leading figures in the film, TV, music, and video game industries. As a collection, CinemaTexas Notes strongly contradicts the notion of an effortlessly formed American film canon, showing instead how local film cultures—whether in Austin, New York, or Europe—have forwarded the development of film studies as a discipline.

Necromancy in Naat

Necromancy in Naat
Author: Clark Ashton Smith
Publisher: eStar Books
Total Pages: 38
Release: 2012-10-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1612105882

Yadar, a princely nomad, searches for his love Dalili, only to discover her on the Island of Naat… and the horrors of the island…

Swords and Cinema

Swords and Cinema
Author: Jeremiah McCall
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2015-01-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 147387596X

A dive into the authenticity of battle scenes in epic films set in the Greco-Roman world—from Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. The battles and sieges of the Classical world have been a rich source of inspiration to film makers since the beginning of cinema and the sixties and seventies saw the golden age of the “swords and sandals” epic, with films such as Spartacus. Ridley Scott’s Gladiator led a modern revival that has continued with the release of films like 300, The Eagle and Centurion and HBO’s mini-series Rome. While Hollywood interpretations of Classical battle continue to spark interest in ancient warfare, to casual viewers and serious enthusiasts alike they also spark a host of questions about authenticity. What does Hollywood get right and wrong about weapons, organization, tactics and the experience of combat? Did the Spartans really fight clad only in their underpants and did the Persians have mysterious, silver-masked assassins in their armies? This original book discusses the merits of battle scenes in selected movies and along the way gives the reader an interesting overview of ancient battle. It should appeal to the serious student of ancient warfare, movie buffs and everyone in between. “Jeremiah McCall impresses us with detail on the motion pictures relevant to ancient history . . . an honest and informative style.” —UNRV.com “The author has managed to produce a readable, informative, and credible perspective. His work is entertaining and his conclusions have an authoritative feel to them. Enjoy.” —FIRE Project

Gun and Sword

Gun and Sword
Author: Chris D.
Publisher:
Total Pages: 822
Release: 2013-04-17
Genre: Motion pictures
ISBN: 9780615798806

"Complete with the original 2002 foreword by Kinji Fukasaku"--Cover.

Empires of the Imagination

Empires of the Imagination
Author: Alec Worley
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 698
Release: 2021-01-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476611831

The warlocks and ghosts of fantasy film haunt our popular culture, but the genre has too long been ignored by critics. This comprehensive critical survey of fantasy cinema demonstrates that the fantasy genre amounts to more than escapism. Through a meticulously researched analysis of more than a century of fantasy pictures--from the seminal work of Georges Melies to Peter Jackson's recent tours of Middle-earth--the work identifies narrative strategies and their recurring components and studies patterns of challenge and return, setting and character. First addressing the difficult task of defining the genre, the work examines fantasy as a cultural force in both film and literature and explores its relation to science fiction, horror, and fairy tales. Fantasy's development is traced from the first days of film, with emphasis on how the evolving genre reflected such events as economic depression and war. Also considered is fantasy's expression of politics, as either the subject of satire or fuel for the fires of propaganda. Discussion ventures into the subgenres, from stories of invented lands inhabited by fantastic creatures to magical adventures set in the familiar world, and addresses clashes between fantasy and faith, such as the religious opposition to the Harry Potter phenomenon. From the money-making classics to little-known arthouse films, this richly illustrated work covers every aspect of fantasy film.

Race, War, and the Cinematic Myth of America

Race, War, and the Cinematic Myth of America
Author: Eric Trenkamp
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-09-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9781793647528

This book examines how Hollywood has promoted the myth of the American White male savior and the way in which this myth has negatively affected people of color throughout U.S. history.

Classical Japanese Cinema Revisited

Classical Japanese Cinema Revisited
Author: Catherine Russell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 98
Release: 2011-06-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1441107770

Catherine Russell's highly accessible book approaches Japanese cinema as an industry closely modeled on Hollywood, focusing on the classical period - those years in which the studio system dominated all film production in Japan, from roughly 1930 to 1960. Respectful and thoroughly informed about the aesthetics and critical values of the Japanese canon, Russell is also critical of some of its ideological tendencies, and her analyses provide new insights on class and gender dynamics. Russell locates Japanese cinema within a global system of reception, and she highlights the importance of the industrial production context of these films. Including studies of landmark films by Ozu, Kurosawa and other directors, this book provides a perfect introduction to a crucial and often misunderstood area of Japanese cultural output. With a critical approach that highlights the "everydayness" of Japanese studio-era cinema, Catherine Russell demystifies the canon of great Japanese cinema, treating it with fewer auteurist and Orientalist assumptions than many other scholars and critics.

Barbarians at the Gates of Hollywood

Barbarians at the Gates of Hollywood
Author: P J Thorndyke
Publisher:
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2020-08-25
Genre:
ISBN:

Journey into the realm of VHS tapes and midnight showings where brawny barbarians rescue nubile virgins from evil wizards, giant snakes, and armies of the undead! Although originating in the era of the pulp magazines, sword and sorcery fiction enjoyed a cinematic boom in the 1980s; a decade that gave us Conan the Barbarian and The Beastmaster as well as more low-budget offerings like the Roger Corman-produced Deathstalker series and the Italian entries like Conquest and the Ator saga. Some of these movies are fondly remembered as cult classics today but many were released directly to VHS and lurked on the shelves of video rental stores before vanishing into obscurity. While some have long since lost their lustre, there are plenty of diamonds in the rough to be found. This book takes a comprehensive look at over 40 sword and sorcery movies from the 1980s, from the towering titans to the bargain basement sleaze-fests, unearthing them from their tombs and dusting them off so that they may shine once more.