Valuing Films

Valuing Films
Author: L. Hubner
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2011-04-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0230305857

This volume gets to the heart of what films mean to people on personal, political and commercial levels. Exploring value judgements that underpin social, academic and institutional practices, it examines the diverse forms of worth attributed to a range of international films in relation to taste, passion, morality and aesthetics.

The Essay Film

The Essay Film
Author: Elizabeth Papazian
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2016-11-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0231851030

With its increasing presence in a continuously evolving media environment, the essay film as a visual form raises new questions about the construction of the subject, its relationship to the world, and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema. In this volume, authors specializing in various national cinemas (Cuban, French, German, Israeli, Italian, Lebanese, Polish, Russian, American) and critical approaches (historical, aesthetic, postcolonial, feminist, philosophical) explore the essay film and its consequences for the theory of cinema while building on and challenging existing theories. Taking as a guiding principle the essay form's dialogic, fluid nature, the volume examines the potential of the essayistic to question, investigate, and reflect on all forms of cinema—fiction film, popular cinema, and documentary, video installation, and digital essay. A wide range of filmmakers are covered, from Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera, 1928), Chris Marker (Description of a Struggle, 1960), Nicolás Guillén Landrián (Coffea Arábiga, 1968), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Notes for an African Oresteia, 1969), Chantal Akerman (News from Home, 1976) and Jean-Luc Godard (Notre musique, 2004) to Nanni Moretti (Palombella Rossa, 1989), Mohammed Soueid (Civil War, 2002), Claire Denis (L'Intrus, 2004) and Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life, 2011), among others. The volume argues that the essayistic in film—as process, as experience, as experiment—opens the road to key issues faced by the individual in relation to the collective, but can also lead to its own subversion, as a form of dialectical thought that gravitates towards crisis.

Quality Hollywood

Quality Hollywood
Author: Geoff King
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2015-11-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0857728857

What defines 'quality' in contemporary Hollywood film? Although often seen as inhospitable to such work, the studios of the blockbuster-franchise era continue to produce features that make claims to higher status. Films such as The Social Network, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Mystic River are marked as distinctive from the mainstream norm. But how exactly, and how are such qualities mixed with more familiar Hollywood ingredients, as found in larger doses in other examples such as Blood Diamond and the blockbuster-scale Inception? Quality Hollywood is the first book to address these issues, featuring close analysis of case study films, critical responses and the wider notions of cultural value on which these draw. Geoff King argues that such films retain a presence as a minority strand of studio output. The reasons for this combine factors relating to economics, the power of certain filmmakers and Hollywood's investment in its own prestige.

The Lost Cinema of Mexico

The Lost Cinema of Mexico
Author: Olivia Cosentino
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2022-02-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1683403398

The Lost Cinema of Mexico is the first volume to challenge the dismissal of Mexican filmmaking during the 1960s through 1980s, an era long considered a low-budget departure from the artistic quality and international acclaim of the nation’s earlier Golden Age. This pivotal collection examines the critical implications of discovering, uncovering, and recovering forgotten or ignored films. This largely unexamined era of film reveals shifts in Mexican culture, economics, and societal norms as state-sponsored revolutionary nationalism faltered. During this time, movies were widely embraced by the public as a way to make sense of the rapidly changing realities and values connected to Mexico’s modernization. These essays shine a light on many genres that thrived in these decades: rock churros, campy luchador movies, countercultural superocheros, Black melodramas, family films, and Chili Westerns. Redefining a time usually seen as a cinematic “crisis,” this volume offers a new model of the film auteur shaped by productive tension between highbrow aesthetics, industry shortages, and national audiences. It also traces connections from these Mexican films to Latinx, Latin American, and Hollywood cinema at large. A volume in the series Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, edited by Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Juan Carlos Rodríguez Contributors: Brian Price | Carolyn Fornoff | David S. Dalton | Christopher B. Conway | Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou | Ignacio Sánchez Prado | Dolores Tierney | Dr. Olivia Cosentino Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Routledge Companion to World Cinema

The Routledge Companion to World Cinema
Author: Rob Stone
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 522
Release: 2017-09-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317420586

The Routledge Companion to World Cinema explores and examines a global range of films and filmmakers, their movements and audiences, comparing their cultural, technological and political dynamics, identifying the impulses that constantly reshape the form and function of the cinemas of the world. Each of the forty chapters provides a survey of a topic, explaining why the issue or area is important, and critically discussing the leading views in the area. Designed as a dynamic forum for forty-three world-leading scholars, this companion contains significant expertise and insight and is dedicated to challenging complacent views of hegemonic film cultures and replacing outmoded ideas about production, distribution and reception. It offers both a survey and an investigation into the condition and activity of contemporary filmmaking worldwide, often challenging long-standing categories and weighted—often politically motivated—value judgements, thereby grounding and aligning the reader in an activity of remapping which is designed to prompt rethinking.

Snuff

Snuff
Author: Neil Jackson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2016-01-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1628921129

"Brings together scholars from film and media studies for the definitive academic study of 'real death' on screen - from horror cinema, to pornography, to online 'shock videos'"--

Auteurs and Authorship

Auteurs and Authorship
Author: Barry Keith Grant
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2008-02-11
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1405153342

Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader offers students an introductory and comprehensive view of perhaps the most central concept in film studies. This unique anthology addresses the aesthetic and historical debates surrounding auteurship while providing author criticism and analysis in practice. Examines a number of mainstream and established directors, including John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Douglas Sirk, Frank Capra, Kathryn Bigelow, and Spike Lee Features historically important, foundational texts as well as contemporary pieces Includes numerous student features, such as a general editor’s introduction, short prefaces to each of the sections, bibliography, alternative tables of contents, and boxed features Each essay deliberately focuses across film makers’ oeuvres, rather than on one specific film, to enable lecturers to have flexibility in constructing their syllabi

Work and Labor in World Languages, Literatures, and Film

Work and Labor in World Languages, Literatures, and Film
Author: Yves-Antoine Clemmen
Publisher: BrownWalker Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2021-05-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1599426218

The essays in this anthology represent a cross-section of current scholarship examining the complex interplay between work, in its broadest theoretical conceptualization, and the world cultures in and through which this labor is performed. Although aimed primarily at an academic audience, the included essays, written in English, Spanish, and French, are also accessible to the curious layperson interested in looking at literature, theater, cinema, and philosophy through the lens of world languages and cultures. For more than thirty years, the Southeast Conference for Languages, Literatures and Film (SCFLLF) has been a premier platform for the discussion and dissemination of the latest scholarship in the Humanities, with emphasis on non-English area studies. The current volume continues our tradition of selecting and showcasing some of the most impactful papers originally presented at the 24th SCFLLF, held in St. Petersburg, Florida, in March of 2020.

Cinema and the Swastika

Cinema and the Swastika
Author: Roel Vande Winkel
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2007-02-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230289320

This is the first publication to bring together comparative research on the international expansion of Third Reich cinema. This volume investigates various attempts to infiltrate - economically, politically and culturally - the film industries of 20 countries and regions either occupied by, friendly with or neutral towards Nazi Germany.

The Politics of Adaptation

The Politics of Adaptation
Author: D. Hassler-Forest
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2015-04-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137443855

In the age of globalization, digitization, and media convergence, traditional hierarchies between media are breaking down. This book offers new approaches to understanding the politics and their underlying ideologies that are reshaping our global media landscape, including questions of audience participation and transmedia storytelling.