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| Author | : Mark T. Conard |
| Publisher | : University Press of Kentucky |
| Total Pages | : 266 |
| Release | : 2006-01-01 |
| Genre | : Reference |
| ISBN | : 0813123771 |
Explores philosophical themes and ideas inherent in classic noir and neo-noir films, establishing connections to diverse thinkers ranging from Camus to the Frankfurt School. The authors, each focusing on a different aspect of the genre, explores the philosophical underpinnings of classic films.
| Author | : Sheri Chinen Biesen |
| Publisher | : JHU Press |
| Total Pages | : 225 |
| Release | : 2014-05 |
| Genre | : Music |
| ISBN | : 1421408384 |
Welcome to the world of noir musical films, where tormented antiheroes and hard-boiled musicians battle obsession and struggle with their music and ill-fated love triangles. Sultry divas dance and sing the blues in shrouded nightclubs. Romantic intrigue clashes with backstage careers. This book explores musical films that use film noir style and bluesy strains of jazz to inhabit a disturbing underworld and reveal the dark side of fame and the American Dream. While noir musical films like A Star Is Born include musical performances, their bleak tone and expressionistic aesthetic more closely resemble the visual style of film noir. Their narratives unfold behind a stark noir lens: distorted, erratic angles and imbalanced hand-held shots allow the audience to experience a tortured, disillusioned perspective. While many musicals glamorize the quest for the spotlight in Hollywood's star factory, brooding noir musical films such as Blues in the Night, Gilda, The Red Shoes, West Side Story, and Round Midnight stretch the boundaries of film noir and the musical as film genres collide. Deep shadows, dim lighting and visual composition evoke moodiness, cynicism, pessimism, and subjective psychological points of view.
| Author | : Sheri Chinen Biesen |
| Publisher | : Columbia University Press |
| Total Pages | : 446 |
| Release | : 2024-06-18 |
| Genre | : Performing Arts |
| ISBN | : 0231560893 |
Shadows. Smoke. Dark alleys. Rain-slicked city streets. These are iconic elements of film noir visual style. Long after its 1940s heyday, noir hallmarks continue to appear in a variety of new media forms and styles. What has made the noir aesthetic at once enduring and adaptable? Sheri Chinen Biesen explores how the dark cinematic noir style has evolved across eras, from classic Hollywood to present-day streaming services. Examining both aesthetics and material production conditions, she demonstrates how technological and industrial changes have influenced the imagery of film noir. When it emerged in the early 1940s, the visual style’s distinctive shadowy look was in part a product of wartime cinema conditions and technologies, such as blackouts and nitrate film stock. Since the 1950s, technical developments from acetate film stock and new cameras and lenses to lighting, color, and digitization have shaped the changing nature of noir style. Biesen considers the persistence of the noir legacy, discussing how neo-noirs reimagine iconic imagery and why noir style has become a touchstone in the streaming era. Drawing on a wealth of archival research, she provides insightful analyses of a wide range of works, from masterpieces directed by Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock to New Hollywood neo-noirs, the Coen brothers’ revisionist films, and recent HBO and Netflix series. A groundbreaking technological and industrial history of an essential yet slippery visual style, Through a Noir Lens shines a light into the shadows of film noir.
| Author | : Anastasia Bakogianni |
| Publisher | : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG |
| Total Pages | : 434 |
| Release | : 2024-07-22 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 3110773724 |
In a time of acute crisis when our societies face a complex series of challenges (race, gender, inclusivity, changing pedagogical needs and a global pandemic) we urgently need to re-access the nature of our engagement with the Classical World. This edited collection argues that we need to discover new ways to draw on our discipline and the material it studies to engage in meaningful ways with these new academic and societal challenges. The chapters included in the collection interrogate the very processes of reception and continue the work of destabilising the concept of a pure source text or point of origin. Our aim is to break through the boundaries that still divide our ancient texts and material culture from their reception, and interpretive communities. Our contributors engage with these questions theoretically and/or through the close examination of cultural artefacts. They problematise the concept of a Western, elitist canon and actively push the geographical boundaries of reception as both a local and a global phenomenon. Individually and cumulatively, they actively engage with the question of how to marshal the classical past in our efforts to respond to the challenges of our mutable contemporary world.
| Author | : Joshua Gleich |
| Publisher | : University of Texas Press |
| Total Pages | : 360 |
| Release | : 2018-11-14 |
| Genre | : Performing Arts |
| ISBN | : 1477317554 |
One of the country’s most picturesque cities and conveniently located just a few hours’ drive from Hollywood, San Francisco became the most frequently and extensively filmed American city beyond the production hubs of Los Angeles and New York in the three decades after World War II. During those years, the cinematic image of the city morphed from the dreamy beauty of Vertigo to the nightmarish wasteland of Dirty Harry, although San Francisco itself experienced no such decline. This intriguing disconnect gives impetus to Hollywood in San Francisco, the most comprehensive study to date of Hollywood’s move from studio to location production in the postwar era. In this thirty-year history of feature filmmaking in San Francisco, Joshua Gleich tracks a sea change in Hollywood production practices, as location shooting overtook studio-based filming as the dominant production method by the early 1970s. He shows how this transformation intersected with a precipitous decline in public perceptions of the American city, to which filmmakers responded by developing a stark, realist aesthetic that suited America’s growing urban pessimism and superseded a fidelity to local realities. Analyzing major films set in San Francisco, ranging from Dark Passage and Vertigo to The Conversation, The Towering Inferno, and Bullitt, as well as the TV show The Streets of San Francisco, Gleich demonstrates that the city is a physical environment used to stage urban fantasies that reveal far more about Hollywood filmmaking and American culture than they do about San Francisco.
| Author | : Steven Shaviro |
| Publisher | : U of Minnesota Press |
| Total Pages | : 328 |
| Release | : 2003-10-10 |
| Genre | : Technology & Engineering |
| ISBN | : 9781452906881 |
In the twenty-first century, a network society is emerging. Fragmented, visually saturated, characterized by rapid technological change and constant social upheavals, it is dizzying, excessive, and sometimes surreal. In this breathtaking work, Steven Shaviro investigates popular culture, new technologies, political change, and community disruption and concludes that science fiction and social reality have become virtually indistinguishable. Connected is made up of a series of mini-essays-on cyberpunk, hip-hop, film noir, Web surfing, greed, electronic surveillance, pervasive multimedia, psychedelic drugs, artificial intelligence, evolutionary psychology, and the architecture of Frank Gehry, among other topics. Shaviro argues that our strange new world is increasingly being transformed in ways, and by devices, that seem to come out of the pages of science fiction, even while the world itself is becoming a futuristic landscape. The result is that science fiction provides the most useful social theory, the only form that manages to be as radical as reality itself. Connected looks at how our networked environment has manifested itself in the work of J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, K. W. Jeter, and others. Shaviro focuses on science fiction not only as a form of cultural commentary but also as a prescient forum in which to explore the forces that are morphing our world into a sort of virtual reality game. Original and compelling, Connected shows how the continual experimentation of science fiction, like science and technology themselves, conjures the invisible social and economic forces that surround us.
| Author | : Wheeler Winston Dixon |
| Publisher | : Rutgers University Press |
| Total Pages | : 339 |
| Release | : 2015-11-06 |
| Genre | : Performing Arts |
| ISBN | : 0813572436 |
From the glossy monochrome of the classic Hollywood romance, to the gritty greyscale of the gangster picture, to film noir’s moody interplay of light and shadow, black-and-white cinematography has been used to create a remarkably wide array of tones. Yet today, with black-and-white film stock nearly impossible to find, these cinematographic techniques are virtually extinct, and filmgoers’ appreciation of them is similarly waning. Black and White Cinema is the first study to consider the use of black-and-white as an art form in its own right, providing a comprehensive and global overview of the era when it flourished, from the 1900s to the 1960s. Acclaimed film scholar Wheeler Winston Dixon introduces us to the masters of this art, discussing the signature styles and technical innovations of award-winning cinematographers like James Wong Howe, Gregg Toland, Freddie Francis, and Sven Nykvist. Giving us a unique glimpse behind the scenes, Dixon also reveals the creative teams—from lighting technicians to matte painters—whose work profoundly shaped the look of black-and-white cinema. More than just a study of film history, this book is a rallying cry, meant to inspire a love for the artistry of black-and-white film, so that we might work to preserve this important part of our cinematic heritage. Lavishly illustrated with more than forty on-the-set stills, Black and White Cinema provides a vivid and illuminating look at a creatively vital era.
| Author | : Erik Mortenson |
| Publisher | : SIU Press |
| Total Pages | : 328 |
| Release | : 2016-02-03 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 080933433X |
The image of the shadow in mid-twentieth-century America appeared across a variety of genres and media including poetry, pulp fiction, photography, and film. Drawing on an extensive framework that ranges from Cold War cultural histories to theorizations of psychoanalysis and the Gothic, Erik Mortenson argues that shadow imagery in 1950s and 1960s American culture not only reflected the anxiety and ambiguity of the times but also offered an imaginative space for artists to challenge the binary rhetoric associated with the Cold War. After contextualizing the postwar use of shadow imagery in the wake of the atomic bomb, Ambiguous Borderlands looks at shadows in print works, detailing the reemergence of the pulp fiction crime fighter the Shadow in the late-1950s writings of Sylvia Plath, Amiri Baraka, and Jack Kerouac. Using Freudian and Jungian conceptions of the unconscious, Mortenson then discusses Kerouac’s and Allen Ginsberg’s shared dream of a “shrouded stranger” and how it shaped their Beat aesthetic. Turning to the visual, Mortenson examines the dehumanizing effect of shadow imagery in the Cold War photography of Robert Frank, William Klein, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Mortenson concludes with an investigation of the use of chiaroscuro in 1950s film noir and the popular television series The Twilight Zone, further detailing how the complexities of Cold War society were mirrored across these media in the ubiquitous imagery of light and dark. From comics to movies, Beats to bombs, Ambiguous Borderlands provides a novel understanding of the Cold War cultural context through its analysis of the image of the shadow in midcentury media. Its interdisciplinary approach, ambitious subject matter, and diverse theoretical framing make it essential reading for anyone interested in American literary and popular culture during the fifties and sixties.
| Author | : W. E. Timner |
| Publisher | : Scarecrow Press |
| Total Pages | : 684 |
| Release | : 2000-01-01 |
| Genre | : Music |
| ISBN | : 0585040842 |
More than a discography, this book compiles the complete recorded music of Duke Ellington and his sidemen, including studio recordings, movie soundtracks, concerts, dance dates, radio broadcasts, telecasts, and private recordings, creating an easy to use reference source for Jazz collectors and scholars.
| Author | : Caryl Flinn |
| Publisher | : University of Michigan Press |
| Total Pages | : 173 |
| Release | : 2023-12-11 |
| Genre | : Performing Arts |
| ISBN | : 0472903780 |
Despite a career spanning over forty years, filmmaker Alan Rudolph has flown largely under the radar of independent film scholars and enthusiasts, often remembered as Robert Altman’s protégé. Through a reading of his 1985 film Trouble in Mind, Caryl Flinn demonstrates that Rudolph is long overdue for critical re-evaluation. Exploring Trouble in Mind’s influence on indie filmmaking, Rudolph’s dream-like style, and the external political influences of the Reagan era, Flinn effectively conveys the originality of Rudolph’s work through this multifaceted film. Utilizing archival materials and interviews with Rudolph himself and his collaborators, Flinn argues for this career-defining film’s relevance to American independent cinema and the decade of the 1980s. Amply illustrated with frame enlargements and set photographs, this book uncovers new production stories and reception contexts of a film that Flinn argues deserves a place in the limelight.
