Steven Spielberg's America (America Through the Lens)
by Frederick Wasser
Steven Spielberg is known as the most powerful man in New Hollywood and a pioneer of the contemporary blockbuster, America's most successful export. His career began a new chapter in mass culture. At the same time, American post war liberalism was breaking down. This fascinating new book explains the complex relationship between film and politics through the prism of an iconic filmmaker. Spielberg's early films were a triumphant emergence of the Sunbelt aesthetic that valued visceral kicks...
Popular Music and the New Auteur
Movies have never been the same since MTV. While the classic symphonic film score promised direct insight into a character's mind, the expanded role of popular music has made more ambiguous the question of when, if ever, we are allowed to see or share a character's emotions. As a result, the potential for irony and ambiguity has multiplied exponentially, and characterization and narrative capacities have fragmented. At the most basic level, this new aesthetic has required filmgoers to renegotiat...
In 1915, American filmmaker D. W. Griffith released a film that went on to become one of the most controversial of all time. Over a century later, The Birth of a Nation continues to stimulate debate on the relationship between Hollywood and racism. This volume reveals new perspectives on Griffith’s film across ten original chapters, re-considering it as text, historical milestone and influence. The volume also includes a helpful timeline that lists key publications and events in Birth’s ongoing...
Nonfiction films about sports have been around for decades, yet few scholarly articles have been published on these works. In Identity and Myth in Sports Documentaries, editors Zachary Ingle and David M. Sutera have assembled a collection of essays that show how myth and identity-national, religious, ethnic, and racial-are constructed, perpetuated, or questioned in documentaries produced in the United States, France, Australia, Germany, and Japan. This collection is divided into three sections....
Cinema Indochina: Eine (Post-)Koloniale Filmgeschichte Frankreichs
by Beate Weghofer
Winner of the 2020 Antonio Candido Prize for Best Book in the Humanities from the Brazil section of the Latin American Studies Association. This book examines the vibrant field of documentary filmmaking in Brazil from the transition to democracy in 1985 to the present. Marked by significant efforts toward the democratization of Brazil's highly unequal society, this period also witnessed the documentary's rise to unprecedented vitality in quantity, quality, and diversity of production-which inclu...
The music we hear is always inhabited by voices of previous performances. Because listening is now so often accompanied by moving images, this process is more complex than ever. Music videos, television and film music, interactive video games, and social media are now part of the contemporary listening experience. In An Eye for Music, John Richardson navigates key areas of current thought - from music theory to film theory to cultural theory - to explore what it means that the experience of musi...
Love is Colder Than Death (Paladin Books)
by Robert Katz and Peter Berling
This collection of film profiles, comprising 37 discussions, covers a variety of films from the twentieth century. It will appeal to a wide reading audience interested in exploring the relevance of films to literature, and culture more broadly. At the same time, the films under consideration are viewed as moves in mind, by which we trade with one another the look of things brought to presence by the shocking directness of eyesight.
“Yes, Kant did indeed speak of extraterrestrials.” This phrase could provide the opening for this brief treatise of philosofiction (as one speaks of science fiction). What is revealed in the aliens of which Kant speaks—and he no doubt took them more seriously than anyone else in the history of philosophy—are the limits of globalization, or what Kant called cosmopolitanism. Before engaging Kantian considerations of the inhabitants of other worlds, before comprehending his reasoned alienology, thi...
Edna Ferber's Hollywood reveals one of the most influential artistic relationships of the twentieth century—the four-decade partnership between historical novelist Edna Ferber and the Hollywood studios. Ferber was one of America's most controversial popular historians, a writer whose uniquely feminist, multiracial view of the national past deliberately clashed with traditional narratives of white masculine power. Hollywood paid premium sums to adapt her novels, creating some of the most memorabl...
"Reel Terror" is a love letter to the wildly popular yet still misunderstood genre that churns out blockbusters and cult classics year after year. From "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" to "Paranormal Activity", Konow explores its all-time highs and lows, why the genre has been overlooked, and how horror films just might help us overcome fear. His on-set stories and insights delve into each movie and its effect on American culture. For novices to all out film buffs, this is the perfect companion to...
Bordering on Fiction
by Catherine David, Kathy Halbreich, and Dean of Undergraduate Studies Bruce Jenkins
North America, Europe and the Cultural Memory of the First World War (Anglistische Forschungen, #453)
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. For the first half of the twentieth century, no American industry boasted a more motley and prolific trade press than the movie business—a cutthroat landscape that set the stage for battle by ink. In 1930, Martin Quigley, publisher of Exhibitors Herald, conspired with Hollywood studios to eliminate all competing trade papers, yet this attempt and each one thereafter collapsed. Exploring the communities of...
For over a century, cinephiles and film scholars have had to grapple with an ugly artifact that sits at the beginnings of film history. D. W. Griffith’s profoundly racist epic, The Birth of a Nation, inspired controversy and protest at its 1915 release and was defended as both a true history of Reconstruction (although it was based on fiction) and a new achievement in cinematic art. Paul McEwan examines the long and shifting history of its reception, revealing how the film became not just a cine...
Hal Ashby was one of the most renowned directors of the 1970s. In the 1980s, however, his reputation suffered amongst studios who considered him "difficult" and who removed him from projects before he could assert his right of "final cut". Ashby's final film was, uncharacteristically, a thriller. Based on the novel by Lawrence Block and starring Jeff Bridges, Rosanna Arquette and Andy Garcia, from a script originally by Oliver Stone, 8 Million Ways to Die was a troubled production. The script wa...
Amidst the socio-sexual upheavals of the 1970s, Hollywood used a re-envisioning of the detective character from traditional film noir to essay the threat to heterosexual patriarchy posed by transgressive homosexuality. Thus, in one 1972 film emerged American cinema's way of dealing with that threat - the archetype of the Killer Lesbian was cemented! Starring James Garner as the detective and Hollywood veteran June Allyson as the killer lesbian, the film was buried in a wave of detective movies....
One of the most successful books ever published and the basis of one of the most popular and highly praised Hollywood films of all time, Gone With the Wind has entered world culture in a way that few other stories have.Seventy-five years on from the cinematic release of Gone with the Wind, Helen Taylor looks at the reasons why the book and film have had such an appeal, especially for women. Drawing on letters and questionnaires from female fans, she brings together material from southern hist...