Seductive Cinema

Seductive Cinema
Author: James Card
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Total Pages: 344
Release: 1994
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

He describes overlooked silent movies of social concern, among them The Cry of the Children, directed by George Nicholls; such classic thrillers as Herbert Brenon's Beau Geste and such early avant-garde American masterpieces as J. Sibley Watson's The Fall of the House of Usher.

Seductive Cinema

Seductive Cinema
Author: James Card
Publisher:
Total Pages: 319
Release: 1999
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780816633906

On the history of silent films.

Seduction on Screen: The 100 Sexiest Movies of All Time

Seduction on Screen: The 100 Sexiest Movies of All Time
Author: Claudia Morgan
Publisher: Richards Education
Total Pages: 287
Release:
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

Prepare to be captivated by the sultry allure and undeniable chemistry that have set cinema screens ablaze in "Seduction on Screen: The 100 Sexiest Movies of All Time." This steamy guide takes you on a journey through the most provocative and unforgettable moments in film history, showcasing the movies that have redefined sensuality, passion, and desire. Each chapter offers a tantalizing exploration of a different film, delving into the erotic artistry, mesmerizing performances, and sizzling storylines that have left audiences entranced. From the raw intensity of Basic Instinct to the romantic heat of Atonement and the bold sensuality of Call Me by Your Name, this book covers a wide range of genres and styles, all united by their electrifying appeal. Whether you're a film buff or simply in the mood for something a little more daring, "Seduction on Screen" is your ultimate companion to the world of cinematic seduction. This collection celebrates the films that have pushed boundaries, sparked conversations, and kindled the flames of passion, making them timeless classics in the realm of sensual storytelling. Dive into the 100 sexiest movies ever made, and let the magic of cinema sweep you off your feet.

King of Bollywood

King of Bollywood
Author: Anupama Chopra
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2007-10-02
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0446508985

Here is the astonishing true story of Bollywood, a sweeping portrait about a country finding its identity, a movie industry that changed the face of India, and one man's struggle to become a star. Shah Rukh Khan's larger than life tale takes us through the colorful and idiosyncratic Bollywood movie industry, where fantastic dreams and outrageous obsessions share the spotlight with extortion, murder, and corruption. Shah Rukh Khan broke into this $1.5 billion business despite the fact that it has always been controlled by a handful of legendary film families and sometimes funded by black market money. As a Muslim in a Hindu majority nation, exulting in classic Indian cultural values, Shah Rukh Khan has come to embody the aspirations and contradictions of a complicated culture tumbling headlong into American style capitalism. His story is the mirror to view the greater Indian story and the underbelly of the culture of Bollywood. "A bounty for cinema lovers everywhere." --Mira Nair, Director, The Namesake and Monsoon Wedding "King of Bollywood is the all-singing, all-dancing back stage pass to Bollywood. Anupama Chopra chronicles the political and cultural story of India with finesse and insight, through fly-on-wall access to one of its biggest, most charming and charismatic stars." -- Gurinder Chadha, director of Bend it Like Beckham "The "Easy Rider Raging Bull" of the Bollywood industry and essential reading for any Shah Rukh Khan fan." --Emma Thompson, actress "Anu Chopra infuses the pivotal moments of Shah Rukh Khan's life with an edge-of-your-seat tension worthy of the best Bollywood blockbusters." --Kirkus

Provenance and Early Cinema

Provenance and Early Cinema
Author: Joanne Bernardi
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2021-02-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0253053005

Remnants of early films often have a story to tell. As material artifacts, these film fragments are central to cinema history, perhaps more than ever in our digital age of easy copying and sharing. If a digital copy is previewed before preservation or is shared with a researcher outside the purview of a film archive, knowledge about how the artifact was collected, circulated, and repurposed threatens to become obscured. When the question of origin is overlooked, the story can be lost. Concerned contributors in Provenance and Early Cinema challenge scholars digging through film archives to ask, "How did these moving images get here for me to see them?" This volume, which features the conference proceedings from Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema, 2018, questions preservation, attribution, and patterns of reuse in order to explore singular artifacts with long and circuitous lives.

Saving Cinema

Saving Cinema
Author: Caroline Frick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2011-01-21
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 019979264X

The importance of media preservation has in recent years achieved much broader public recognition. From the vaults of Hollywood and the halls of Congress to the cash-strapped museums of developing nations, people are working to safeguard film from physical harm. But the forces at work aren't just physical. The endeavor is also inherently political. What gets saved and why? What remains ignored? Who makes these decisions, and what criteria do they use? Saving Cinema narrates the development of the preservation movement and lays bare the factors that have influenced its direction. Archivists do more than preserve movie history; they actively produce and codify cinematic heritage. At the same time, digital technologies have produced an entirely new reality, one that resists the material, artifact-driven approach that is the gold standard of preservation in the Western world. As it has become increasingly easy to capture and access moving images, increasing evidence of something many archivists have known for years has emerged: industrial and training films, amateur travel diaries, and even family videos are critical public resources. It has also raised question about the role of the profession. Is access equivalent to preservation, and, if it is, how should archivists alter their activities? The time is ripe for a reconsideration of the politics and practices of preservation. Saving Cinema is the book to guide that conversation.

Cities and Cinema

Cities and Cinema
Author: Barbara Mennel
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2019-05-13
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1351016172

The second edition of Cities and Cinema provides an updated survey of films about cities, from their significance for modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century to the contemporary relationship between virtual reality and urban space. The book demonstrates the importance of the filmic depiction of capitals for national cinemas in the twentieth century and analyzes the transnational transfer of cinematic images surrounding global cities in the twenty-first century. Cities and Cinema covers the different facets of the cinematic depiction of cities. It rehearses distinct methodologies and offers a survey of the history of the cinematic city. The book also deepens our understanding of tropes and narrative conventions that shape films about urban settings and that reflect the transformation of cities throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning with a discussion of the Weimar “street film,” it analyzes how the city film defined modernity. The book outlines the sociological context and the aesthetic features of so-called film noir, made in 1940s Hollywood and depicting Los Angeles. Paris became the site for the development of auteur cinema, which repeatedly depicts characters moving through the city. Tokyo took up noir to signal modern crime. The volume delineates how filmic genres, such as science fiction, comment on the present by imagining future forms of urban living. After analyzing how cinema captures the relationship between sexual identity and urban anonymity, migration and urban space, and marginalized ethnic and sexual identity in ghetto films, the book emphasizes transnational dynamics and global cities in the twenty-first century. Its conclusion points to the increasing virtual mediation of cities with new media. Cities and Cinema offers a historical overview of the development of films about cities and a theoretical approach to the intersection of urban studies and film studies. This title is designed as a textbook primarily for second-year undergraduate students in Film/Media studies, Urban studies, as well as Geography and Planning.

Movement as Meaning in Experimental Cinema

Movement as Meaning in Experimental Cinema
Author: Daniel Barnett
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2017-08-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1501329820

Movement as Meaning in Experimental Cinema offers sweeping and cogent arguments as to why analytic philosophers should take experimental cinema seriously as a medium for illuminating mechanisms of meaning in language. Using the analogy of the movie projector, Barnett deconstructs all communication acts into functions of interval, repetition and context. He describes how Wittgenstein's concepts of family resemblance and language games provide a dynamic perspective on the analysis of acts of reference. He then develops a hyper-simplified formula of movement as meaning to discuss, with true equivalence, the process of reference as it occurs in natural language, technical language, poetic language, painting, photography, music, and of course, cinema. Barnett then applies his analytic technique to an original perspective on cine-poetics based on Paul Valery's concept of omnivalence, and to a projection of how this style of analysis, derived from analog cinema, can help us clarify our view of the digital mediasphere and its relation to consciousness. Informed by the philosophy of Quine, Dennett, Merleau-Ponty as well as the later work of Wittgenstein, among others, he uses the film work of Stan Brakhage, Tony Conrad, A.K. Dewdney, Nathaniel Dorsky, Ken Jacobs, Owen Land, Saul Levine, Gregory Markopoulos Michael Snow, and the poetry of Basho, John Cage, John Cayley and Paul Valery to illustrate the power of his unique perspective on meaning.

Ministry of Illusion

Ministry of Illusion
Author: Eric Rentschler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 480
Release: 1996-10-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0674266625

German cinema of the Third Reich, even a half-century after Hitler's demise, still provokes extreme reactions. "Never before and in no other country," observes director Wim Wenders, "have images and language been abused so unscrupulously as here, never before and nowhere else have they been debased so deeply as vehicles to transmit lies." More than a thousand German feature films that premiered during the reign of National Socialism survive as mementoes of what many regard as film history's darkest hour. As Eric Rentschler argues, however, cinema in the Third Reich emanated from a Ministry of Illusion and not from a Ministry of Fear. Party vehicles such as Hitler Youth Quex and anti-Semitic hate films such as Jew Süss may warrant the epithet "Nazi propaganda," but they amount to a mere fraction of the productions from this era. The vast majority of the epoch's films seemed to be "unpolitical"--melodramas, biopix, and frothy entertainments set in cozy urbane surroundings, places where one rarely sees a swastika or hears a "Sieg Heil." Minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels, Rentschler shows, endeavored to maximize film's seductive potential, to cloak party priorities in alluring cinematic shapes. Hitler and Goebbels were master showmen enamored of their media images, the Third Reich was a grand production, the Second World War a continuing movie of the week. The Nazis were movie mad, and the Third Reich was movie made. Rentschler's analysis of the sophisticated media culture of this period demonstrates in an unprecedented way the potent and destructive powers of fascination and fantasy. Nazi feature films--both as entities that unreeled in moviehouses during the regime and as productions that continue to enjoy wide attention today--show that entertainment is often much more than innocent pleasure.

Down from the Attic

Down from the Attic
Author: John T. Soister
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2016-06-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476625441

Much has been written (and rewritten) about classic horror and science fiction films like Nosferatu and Metropolis, as well as not-so-classic pictures like Bride of the Monster and The Hideous Sun Demon. Yet some genre films have fallen through the cracks. The 24 films--some elusive, some easily found on YouTube--examined in this book all suffered critical neglect and were prematurely stacked in the attic. The authors bring them back into the light, beginning with Der Tunnel (1915), about the building of a transatlantic tunnel, and ending with The Emperor's Baker--The Baker's Emperor (1951), a bizarre Marxist take on the Golem legend. A variety of thrillers are covered--Fog (1933), Return of the Terror (1934), Forgotten Faces (1928)--along with such sci-fi leaps into the future as The Sky Ranger (1921), High Treason (1929) and Just Imagine (1930). Early adaptations include The Man Who Laughs (1921), The Monkey's Paw (1923), Hound of the Baskervilles (1937) and Sweeney Todd (1928). Rare stills and background material are included in a discussion of Hispanic vintage horror. The career of exploitation auteur, Bud Pollard (The Horror, 1933) is examined.