#218 - Geoffrey Nowell-Smith - The Oxford History of World Cinema

Author or Editor: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1996
ISBN: 0198112572
Pages: 856
Size: 57MB

Most histories of the international cinema focus on the careers of prominent directors. But the authors of The Oxford History of World Cinema set cinematic genres, trends, and national themes at the fore, composing a history of the cinema that is equally a history of our multifarious world culture. Still, in deference to the older historical style, the text of this hefty book is dotted with hundreds of minibiographies on individual filmmakers. The result of this hybrid approach is one of the most comprehensive film histories ever, allowing insight into its complex subject from a number of different perspectives.

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#197 - Richard Crouse - The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen

Author or Editor: Richard Crouse
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2003
Pages: 254
Size: 16,4MB

It is almost impossible to gauge how people are going to react to things you say. An innocent little remark can trigger a whole cascade of events. Such was the case a few years ago when I introduced a segment on Reel to Real's favorite martial arts movies with, "I have to admit, martial arts films are a guilty pleasure of mine."

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#181 - Peter C. Rollins - The Columbia companion to American history on film

Author or Editor: Peter C. Rollins
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2003
Pages: 671
Size: 6.26MB

Film and television define our perceptions of our time and of historical experience. In 1973, John Harrington warned about the power of visual media to shape the contemporary sensibility, estimating that “by the time a person is fourteen, he will witness 18,000 murders on the screen. He will also see 350,000 commercials. By the time he is eighteen, he will stockpile nearly 17,000 hours of viewing experience and will watch at least twenty movies for every book he reads.

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#177 - Yannis Tzioumakis - American Independent Cinema

Author or Editor: Yannis Tzioumakis
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2006
Pages: 302
Size: 1.78MB

American independent cinema has always been a notoriously difficult concept to define. This is primarily because the label ‘independent’ has been widely used since the early years of American cinema by filmmakers, film critics, industry practitioners, trade publications, academics and cinema fans, to the extent that any attempt towards a definition is almost certainly destined to raise objections.

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#163 - Mark T. Conard - The Philosophy of Film Noir

Author or Editor: Mark T. Conard
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2006
Pages: 248
Size: 2.89MB

The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946) was adapted from a novel by the writer of hard-boiled fiction James M. Cain. Interspersed throughout the movie is voice-over narration by the protagonist, Frank Chambers (John Garfield), indicating that he is recalling events in the past. Frank is a drifter who takes a job at a remote diner owned by an older man, Nick (Cecil Kellaway), after getting a look at Nick’s stunning young wife, Cora (Lana Turner).

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#157 - Anton Chekhov - How to Write Like Chekhov

Author or Editor: Anton Chekhov
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2008
Pages: 210
Size: 0.73MB

This volume presents Anton Chekhov’s advice on how to write. Its purpose is to transmit Chekhov’s guidelines on becoming a good writer, and it is presented with the hope that these guidelines will be useful, in various ways, to novices and to experienced professional writers alike. Chekhov’s detailed suggestions draw heavily on his own experience, both as a writer of short stories, plays, novellas, and nonfiction and as a discerning reader of literary texts. He knew the burden of solitude that comes with writing, the compulsive need to write, and the dispiriting sting of an indifferent reception.

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#151 - Richard Aloysius Blake - Street Smart - The New York of Lumet Allen Scorsese and Lee

Author or Editor: Richard Aloysius Blake
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2005
Pages: 341
Size: 4.07MB

Over a week had passed since the collapse of the World Trade Center. The afternoon of September 11, I managed to contact a cousin who lives in our old neighborhood in Brooklyn but works near Ground Zero. (I’ll call her Jean, even though it isn’t her name.) She was safe. In fact, while running a bit late that morning, she heard a confused news bulletin on the radio about a fire in the area and further postponed her departure to avoid the possible inconvenience of a subway delay. Within minutes of the initial news flash, television pictures began to reveal the extent of the horror. Our conversation that afternoon was hushed and monotone, like mourners gathered at a funeral, wanting to strengthen each other but finding our words hopelessly inadequate, empty.

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#149 - Lenore DeKoven - Changing Direction

Author or Editor: Lenore DeKoven
Publisher: Focal Press
Published: 2006
Pages: 193
Size: 1.1MB

Everyone wants to be in show business. The media-driven aura of glamour and wealth is irresistible. A recent cab driver, aware that he was driving me to Columbia University, asked me what I taught there. When I told him I was in the Graduate Film Division he immediately wanted to give me a screenplay he had written. Many would love to be actors, but the obvious demands and risks are daunting. But directing! Ahhh, that looks easy...

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#141 - Isobel Artsmtrong - Victorian Poetry

Author or Editor: Isobel Artsmtrong
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1996
Pages: 543
Size: 3.39MB

The poetry and poetics of the Victorian period were intertwined, often in arresting ways, with theology, science, philosophy, theories of language and politics. As cultural and intellectual change became progressively more apparent, two traditions of poetry developed, one exploring various strategies for democratic, radical writing, the other developing, in different forms, a conservative poetry.

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#139 - Bryan Lawson - How Designers Think

Author or Editor: Bryan Lawson
Publisher: Architectural Press
Published: 2005
Pages: 321
Size: 6.66MB

The very word ‘design’ is the first problem we must confront in this book since it is in everyday use and yet given quite specific and different meanings by particular groups of people. We might begin by noting that ‘design’ is both a noun and a verb and can refer either to the end product or to the process.

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#133 - Martin Barker - From Antz to Titanic

Author or Editor: Martin Barker
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2000
Pages: 222
Size: 1.18MB

Everybody analyses films. People walking out of cinemas turn to each other and say: ‘What did you make of that, then?’ And as soon as they go past simply recording likes and dislikes, pleasures and disappointments, their answers start dealing in the coinage of analysis: talking about characters and their motivations, about acting, its convincingness and contribution to the film, about the story (did it make sense? what sense did it make? what gaps, puzzling bits, incoherences were experienced?). The more people chat about a film afterwards, the more they make analyses, collaboratively.

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#120 - Peter Ward - Picture Composition for Film and Television

Author or Editor: Peter Ward
Publisher: Focal Press
Published: 2003
Pages: 264
Size: 9.07MB

In the last years of the nineteenth century, moving pictures were viewed in penny arcades on Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope. This peepshow allowed the solo viewer to crank a handle, peer into a darkened box and watch in fascination the dim flickering silent representations of movement. This was quickly supplanted by projected images, but the mystery of a miniature world continued to have a strong attraction. After 45 years as a cameraman, I am still intrigued by a similar magic whenever I look through a viewfinder. There is a concentration of the field of view into a small intense, two-dimensional image that is quite unlike normal perception.

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#118 - Cathy Haase - Acting for film

Author or Editor: Cathy Haase
Publisher: Allworth Press
Published: 2003
Pages: 215
Size: 1.82MB

Acting for Film is a book about acting in motion pictures and the techniques that can be used to act in front of the camera. It’s written to the actor, which is what I am, and discloses some of the approaches to film acting that have been prevalent in American movies. Being an actor, I have a very practical, yet personal approach to things. Whatever the technique or philosophy is, it has to work for me in the field; it has to work when the camera is rolling. Every actor is a unique instrument that only he or she knows how to play, so my advice to you is, take everything in, keep what works for you, and leave the rest for later.

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#115 - Steven M. Sanders - The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film

Author or Editor: Steven M. Sanders
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2008
Pages: 232
Size: 3.17MB

Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998) take place in dystopic cities set in the future of what appears to be our world.1 Both literally and metaphorically, these are dark cities. Blade Runner is set in Los Angeles in 2019. The city is a gloomy, rainy, commercially driven, multiethnic megalopolis composed of street-level stall vendors, abandoned downtown buildings, and huge modernist and Mayanesque complexes housing the most powerful members of society...

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#97 - Barry Langford - Film Genre Hollywood and Beyond

Author or Editor: Barry Langford
Publisher: Pearson Education
Published: 2005
Pages: 309
Size: 13.5MB

Genre, as a police detective in a British crime film might say, has form. Aristotle opens his Politics, the foundational work of western literary criticism, by identifying it as a work of genre eriticism: 'Our suhject being Poetry, I propose to spclk not only of the art in general but also of its species and their respective capacities.

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