Cinematic Uses of the Past

Cinematic Uses of the Past PDF Author: Marcia Landy
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816628254
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Cinematic Uses of the Past was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. From the first, cinema has sustained a romance with the past. The nature of this attachment, and what it reveals about our culture, is the subject of Marcia Landy's book. Cinematic Uses of the Past looks at British, American, Italian, and African films for what they can tell us about popular history and our cultural investment in certain images of the past. Landy peruses six different moments in the history of cinema, employing the theories of Nietzsche and Gramsci. Her reading of these films explores their investments in history and memory in relation to ideas of nation, sexuality, gender, and race. Among the films she discusses are A Fistful of Dynamite, The Scarlet Empress, Dance with a Stranger, Holocaust, Schindler's List, Le camp de Thiaroye, Guelwaar, The Leopard, and Veronika Voss. A thoroughly compelling reading of these emblematic films, Cinematic Uses of the Past is also a revealing interpretation of popular history, exposing the fragmentary, tentative, and invested nature of cultural memory. Marcia Landy is professor of literature and film studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of several books, including Film, Politics, and Gramsci (Minnesota, 1995).

Cinematic Uses of the Past

Cinematic Uses of the Past PDF Author: Marcia Landy
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816628254
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cinematic Uses of the Past was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. From the first, cinema has sustained a romance with the past. The nature of this attachment, and what it reveals about our culture, is the subject of Marcia Landy's book. Cinematic Uses of the Past looks at British, American, Italian, and African films for what they can tell us about popular history and our cultural investment in certain images of the past. Landy peruses six different moments in the history of cinema, employing the theories of Nietzsche and Gramsci. Her reading of these films explores their investments in history and memory in relation to ideas of nation, sexuality, gender, and race. Among the films she discusses are A Fistful of Dynamite, The Scarlet Empress, Dance with a Stranger, Holocaust, Schindler's List, Le camp de Thiaroye, Guelwaar, The Leopard, and Veronika Voss. A thoroughly compelling reading of these emblematic films, Cinematic Uses of the Past is also a revealing interpretation of popular history, exposing the fragmentary, tentative, and invested nature of cultural memory. Marcia Landy is professor of literature and film studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of several books, including Film, Politics, and Gramsci (Minnesota, 1995).

On the History of Film Style

On the History of Film Style PDF Author: David Bordwell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674634299
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Bordwell scrutinizes the theories of style launched by various film historians and celebrates a century of cinema. The author examines the contributions of many directors and shows how film scholars have explained stylistic continuity and change.

Cinema and History

Cinema and History PDF Author: Mike Chopra-Gant
Publisher: Wallflower Press
ISBN: 9781905674596
Category : Historical films
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This volume examines some of the key historical issues raised by popular film, including what film might tell us about the past, the reliability of movies as sources of historical knowledge, and how the film might compare to more 'serious' works of history.

Past for the Eyes

Past for the Eyes PDF Author: Oksana Sarkisova
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 6155211434
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
How do museums and cinema shape the image of the Communist past in today’s Central and Eastern Europe? This volume is the first systematic analysis of how visual techniques are used to understand and put into context the former regimes. After history “ended” in the Eastern Bloc in 1989, museums and other memorials mushroomed all over the region. These efforts tried both to explain the meaning of this lost history, as well as to shape public opinion on their society’s shared post-war heritage. Museums and films made political use of recollections of the recent past, and employed selected museum, memorial, and media tools and tactics to make its political intent historically credible. Thirteen essays from scholars around the region take a fresh look at the subject as they address the strategies of fashioning popular perceptions of the recent past.

A History of Italian Cinema

A History of Italian Cinema PDF Author: Peter Bondanella
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501307649
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 753

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Book Description
A History of Italian Cinema, 2nd edition is the much anticipated update from the author of the bestselling Italian Cinema - which has been published in four landmark editions and will celebrate its 35th anniversary in 2018. Building upon decades of research, Peter Bondanella and Federico Pacchioni reorganize the current History in order to keep the book fresh and responsive not only to the actual films being created in Italy in the twenty-first century but also to the rapidly changing priorities of Italian film studies and film scholars. The new edition brings the definitive history of the subject, from the birth of cinema to the present day, up to date with a revised filmography as well as more focused attention on the melodrama, the crime film, and the historical drama. The book is expanded to include a new generation of directors as well as to highlight themes such as gender issues, immigration, and media politics. Accessible, comprehensive, and heavily illustrated throughout, this is an essential purchase for any fan of Italian film.

The Cinematic Eighteenth Century

The Cinematic Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Srividhya Swaminathan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351800949
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This collection explores how film and television depict the complex and diverse milieu of the eighteenth century as a literary, historical, and cultural space. Topics range from adaptations of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (The Martian) to historical fiction on the subjects of slavery (Belle), piracy (Crossbones and Black Sails), monarchy (The Madness of King George and The Libertine), print culture (Blackadder and National Treasure), and the role of women (Marie Antoinette, The Duchess, and Outlander). This interdisciplinary collection draws from film theory and literary theory to discuss how film and television allows for critical re-visioning as well as revising of the cultural concepts in literary and extra-literary writing about the historical period.

Memory and Popular Film

Memory and Popular Film PDF Author: Paul Grainge
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719063756
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Taking Hollywood as its focus, this timely book provides a sustained, interdisciplinary perspective on memory and film from early cinema to the present. Considering the relationship between official and popular memory, the politics of memory, and the technological and representational shifts that have come to effect memory's contemporary mediation, the book contributes to the growing debate on the status and function of the past in cultural life and discourse. By gathering key critics from film studies, American studies and cultural studies, Memory and Popular Film establishes a framework for discussing issues of memory in film and of film as memory. Together with essays on the remembered past in early film marketing, within popular reminiscence, and at film festivals, the book considers memory films such as Forrest Gump, Lone Star, Pleasantville, Rosewood and Jackie Brown.

A History of Film Music

A History of Film Music PDF Author: Mervyn Cooke
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316264866
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 627

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Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive and lively introduction to the major trends in film scoring from the silent era to the present day, focussing not only on dominant Hollywood practices but also offering an international perspective by including case studies of the national cinemas of the UK, France, India, Italy, Japan and the early Soviet Union. The book balances wide-ranging overviews of film genres, modes of production and critical reception with detailed non-technical descriptions of the interaction between image track and soundtrack in representative individual films. In addition to the central focus on narrative cinema, separate sections are also devoted to music in documentary and animated films, film musicals and the uses of popular and classical music in the cinema. The author analyses the varying technological and aesthetic issues that have shaped the history of film music, and concludes with an account of the modern film composer's working practices.

Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction

Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Patricia Aufderheide
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199720398
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Documentary film can encompass anything from Robert Flaherty's pioneering ethnography Nanook of the North to Michael Moore's anti-Iraq War polemic Fahrenheit 9/11, from Dziga Vertov's artful Soviet propaganda piece Man with a Movie Camera to Luc Jacquet's heart-tugging wildlife epic March of the Penguins. In this concise, crisply written guide, Patricia Aufderheide takes readers along the diverse paths of documentary history and charts the lively, often fierce debates among filmmakers and scholars about the best ways to represent reality and to tell the truths worth telling. Beginning with an overview of the central issues of documentary filmmaking--its definitions and purposes, its forms and founders--Aufderheide focuses on several of its key subgenres, including public affairs films, government propaganda (particularly the works produced during World War II), historical documentaries, and nature films. Her thematic approach allows readers to enter the subject matter through the kinds of films that first attracted them to documentaries, and it permits her to make connections between eras, as well as revealing the ongoing nature of documentary's core controversies involving objectivity, advocacy, and bias. Interwoven throughout are discussions of the ethical and practical considerations that arise with every aspect of documentary production. A particularly useful feature of the book is an appended list of "100 great documentaries" that anyone with a serious interest in the genre should see. Drawing on the author's four decades of experience as a film scholar and critic, this book is the perfect introduction not just for teachers and students but also for all thoughtful filmgoers and for those who aspire to make documentaries themselves. About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

Lights, Camera, History

Lights, Camera, History PDF Author: Richard V. Francaviglia
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 160344503X
Category : Historical films
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
This important volume addresses a number of central topics concerning how history is depicted in film. In the preface, the volume editors emphasize the importance of using film in teaching history: students will see historical films, and if they are not taught critical viewing, they will be inclined simply to accept what they see as fact. Authors of the individual chapters then explore the portrayal of history--and the uses of history--in specific films and film genres. Robert Rosenstone's "In Praise of the Biopic" considers such films as Reds, They Died with Their Boots On, Little Big Man, Seabiscuit, Cinderella Man, and The Grapes of Wrath. In his chapter, Geoff Pingree focuses on the big questions posed in Jay Rosenblatt's 1998 film Human Remains. Richard Francaviglia's chapter on films about the Middle East is especially timely in the post-9/11 world. One chapter, by Daniel A. Nathan, Peter Berg, and Erin Klemyk, is devoted to a single film: Martin Scorsese's urban history The Gangs of New York, which the authors see as a way of exploring complex themes of the immigrant experience. Finally, Robert Brent Toplin addresses the paradox of using an art form (film) to present history. Among other themes, he considers the impact of Patton and Platoon on military decisions and interpretations, and of Birth of a Nation and Glory on race relations. The cumulative effect is to increase the reader's understanding of the medium of film in portraying history and to stimulate the imagination as to how it can and how it should not be used. Students and teachers of history and cinema will benefit deeply from this informative and thoughtful discussion.