The Death of Classical Cinema

The Death of Classical Cinema
Author: Joe McElhaney
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0791481115

The Death of Classical Cinema uncovers the extremely rich yet insufficiently explored dialogue between classical and modernist cinema, examining the work of three classical filmmakers—Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and Vincente Minnelli—and the films they made during the decline of the traditional Hollywood studio system. Faced with the significant challenges posed by alternative art cinema and modernist filmmaking practices in the early 1960s, these directors responded with films that were self-conscious attempts at keeping pace with the developments in film modernism. These films—Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, Hitchcock's Marnie, and Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town—were widely regarded as failures at the time and bolstered critics' claims concerning the irrelevance of their directors in relation to contemporary filmmaking. However, author Joe McElhaney sheds new light on these films by situating them in relation to such acclaimed modernist works of the period as Godard's Contempt, Fellini's La dolce vita, Antonioni's Red Desert, and Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad. He finds that these modernist films, rather than being diametrically opposed in form to the work of Hitchcock, Lang, and Minnelli, are in fact profoundly linked to them.

Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema

Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema
Author: B. Hagin
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010-04-09
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780230236226

Boaz Hagin carries out a philosophical examination of the issue of death as it is represented and problematized in Hollywood cinema of the classical era (1920s-1950s) and in later mainstream films, looking at four major genres: the Western, the gangster film, melodrama and the war film.

Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany

Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany
Author: Steve Choe
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2014-07-31
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1441175385

Weimar cultural critics and intellectuals have repeatedly linked the dynamic movement of the cinema to discourses of life and animation. Correspondingly, recent film historians and theorists have taken up these discourses to theorize the moving image, both in analog and digital. But, many important issues are overlooked. Combining close readings of individual films with detailed interpretations of philosophical texts, all produced in Weimar Germany immediately following the Great War, Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany shows how these films teach viewers about living and dying within a modern, mass mediated context. Choe places relatively underanalyzed films such as F. W. Murnau's The Haunted Castle and Arthur Robison's Warning Shadows alongside Martin Heidegger's early seminars on phenomenology, Sigmund Freud's Reflections upon War and Death and Max Scheler's critique of ressentiment. It is the experience of war trauma that underpins these correspondences, and Choe foregrounds life and death in the films by highlighting how they allegorize this opposition through the thematics of animation and stasis.

Mourning Films

Mourning Films
Author: Richard Armstrong
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2012-09-18
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0786493143

The first in-depth study of its subject, this book seeks to account for a type of modernist film that revolves around bereavement. Identifying the roots of the genre in classical melodrama and horror cinema, and tracing perennial themes and aesthetic devices through to the European and American "intellectual melodramas" of the postwar decades, the book provides a taxonomy of characteristics. In the course of detailed case studies, the book deploys the film theory of Gilles Deleuze and Daniel Frampton while making use of Freudian psychoanalysis and present-day grief counseling theory. In making its case for the new genre, the book reflects upon the ways in which the very notion of genre has, in the post-classical period, responded to changing exhibition patterns, the rise of domestic spectatorship and the proliferation of Web-based film literature.

Letters from Hollywood

Letters from Hollywood
Author: Bill Krohn
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2020-08-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1438477651

Journalist and filmmaker Bill Krohn has been the Los Angeles correspondent for the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma for over forty years. Letters from Hollywood brings together thirty-four of his essays, many of them appearing in English for the first time. Focusing most pieces on a particular director and film, Krohn uses his inside knowledge of the studio system to illuminate an art that is also a multibillion-dollar business. He connects currents in French film criticism and theory with an unfolding account of American cinema past and present, offering penetrating insights into directors and their work. Beginning with Allan Dwan, who learned how to make movies before Hollywood was born by watching D. W. Griffith, Krohn presents a panorama that encompasses Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick and Sergio Leone, Star Wars and I Love Lucy. He covers everything from gangsters to gremlins, from blockbusters to no-budget cult films like Moon Over Harlem and Plan 9 from Outer Space, in a style that is accessible to anyone who loves movies, or has a passion for writing about them.

Engaging Film Criticism

Engaging Film Criticism
Author: Walter Metz
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2004
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780820474038

Engaging Film Criticism examines recent American cinema in relationship to its «imaginative intertexts», films from earlier decades that engage similar political and cultural themes. This historical encounter provides an unexpected and exciting way of reading popular contemporary films. Eclectic pairings include the Schwarzenegger action film True Lies with the Hitchcock classic North by Northwest, as well as the lampooned Will Smith comedy Wild, Wild West with Buster Keaton's silent feature The General. Using a theoretically and historically informed brand of criticism, Engaging Film Criticism suggests that today's Hollywood cinema is every bit as worthy of study as the classics.

The Persistence of Hollywood

The Persistence of Hollywood
Author: Thomas Elsaesser
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 677
Release: 2012-05-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1136519475

While Hollywood’s success – its persistence – has remained constant for almost one hundred years, the study of its success has undergone significant expansion and transformation. Since the 1960s, Thomas Elsaesser’s research has spearheaded the study of Hollywood, beginning with his classic essays on auteurism and cinephilia, focused around a director’s themes and style, up to his analysis of the "corporate authorship" of contemporary director James Cameron. In between, he has helped to transform film studies by incorporating questions of narrative, genre, desire, ideology and, more recently, Hollywood’s economic-technological infrastructure and its place within global capitalism. The Persistence of Hollywood brings together Elsaesser’s key writings about Hollywood filmmaking. It includes his detailed studies of individual directors (including Minnelli, Fuller, Ray, Hitchcock, Lang, Altman, Kubrick, Coppola, and Cameron), as well as essays charting the shifts from classic to corporate Hollywood by way of the New Hollywood and the resurgence of the blockbuster. The book also presents a history of the different critical-theoretical paradigms central to film studies in its analysis of Hollywood, from auteurism and cinephilia to textual analysis, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and post-industrial analysis.

Figuring the Past

Figuring the Past
Author: Belén Vidal
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2012
Genre: Art
ISBN: 908964282X

Figuring the past" geeft een nieuwe kijk op kostuumdrama's die aan het begin van deze eeuw gemaakt zijn en onderzoekt de manieren waarop de hedendaagse cinema het historische verleden herschept. De auteur verkent de relatie tussen visuele motieven en culturele representaties in een aantal belangrijke films van onder anderen James Ivory, Martin Scorsese en Jane Campion. Door te kijken naar de maniëristische voorkeur voor citatie, detail en stilering, pleit de auteur voor een esthetiek van fragmenten en figuren die centraal staan in de historische kostuumdrama's als een0internationaal genre. In gedetailleerde casestudies worden drie belangrijke kenmerken van het genre - het huis, het tableau en de brief - in relatie gebracht met de veranderende begrippen van visuele stijl, melodrama en geslacht.

American Cinema of the 1960s

American Cinema of the 1960s
Author: Barry Keith Grant
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2008
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0813542197

This book examines a range of films that characterized the decade, including Hollywood movies, documentaries, and the independent and experimental films.

ReFocus: The Films of Preston Sturges

ReFocus: The Films of Preston Sturges
Author: Jeff Jaeckle
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2015-10-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1474406564

This first collection of critical essays on Preston Sturges-director, screenwriter, comic genius of Hollywood-reawakens interest in the filmmaker's life and works and reminds readers why his movies continue to be culturally significant and immensely enjoyable.