Frank Capra and the Cinema of Identity

Frank Capra and the Cinema of Identity PDF Author: Malcolm Scott
Publisher: Peter Lang Limited, International Academic Publishers
ISBN: 9781787073739
Category : National characteristics, American, in motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This study proposes a new definition of Frank Capra's work as a cinema of identity, focusing on his reflection on American national identity as well as his own positioning as a US immigrant. With chapters on films such as It's a Wonderful Life, the book offers a fresh appraisal of this celebrated director and his often problematic films.

Frank Capra and the Cinema of Identity

Frank Capra and the Cinema of Identity PDF Author: Malcolm Scott
Publisher: Peter Lang Limited, International Academic Publishers
ISBN: 9781787073739
Category : National characteristics, American, in motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This study proposes a new definition of Frank Capra's work as a cinema of identity, focusing on his reflection on American national identity as well as his own positioning as a US immigrant. With chapters on films such as It's a Wonderful Life, the book offers a fresh appraisal of this celebrated director and his often problematic films.

Frank Capra's Eastern Horizons

Frank Capra's Eastern Horizons PDF Author: Elizabeth Rawitsch
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780755694808
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Frank Capra has long had a reputation as being the quintessential American director - the man who perfectly captured the core values of the United States. However, as Elizabeth Rawitsch argues, Capra's construction of national identity did not occur within an exclusively national context. This innovative book offers a startlingly fresh perspective on one of the most iconic figures in American film history.

American Vision

American Vision PDF Author: Raymond Carney
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521326193
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
Professor Carney analyses Frank Capra's life as well as the broad cultural context of his films.

Hollywood's Italian American Filmmakers

Hollywood's Italian American Filmmakers PDF Author: Jonathan J. Cavallero
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 025203614X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
"[This book] explores the different ways in which Italian American directors from the 1920s to the present have responded to their ethnicity. While some directors have used film to declare their ethnic roots and create an Italian American 'imagined community,' others have ignored or even denied their background . . . Cavallero's exploration of the films of Capra, Scorsese, Savoca, Coppola,and Tarantino demonstrates how immigrant Italians fought prejudice, how later generations positioned themselves in relation to their predecessors, and how the American cinema, usually seen as a cultural instituion that works to assimlate, has also served as a forum where assimilation was resisted." -- Book cover.

Frank Capra's Eastern Horizons

Frank Capra's Eastern Horizons PDF Author: Elizabeth Rawitsch
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857737074
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Frank Capra has long had a reputation as being the quintessential American director - the man who perfectly captured the identity and core values of the United States with a string of classic films in the 1930s and '40s, including It Happened One Night, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life. However, as Elizabeth Rawitsch argues, Capra's construction of national identity did not occur within an exclusively national context. She points out that many of his films are actually set in, or include sequences set in, China, Latin America, the Philippines and the South Seas. Featuring in-depth textual analysis supported by original archival research, Frank Capra's Eastern Horizons explains that Capra's view of what constituted 'America' changed over time, extending its boundaries to embrace countries often far from the United States. Complicating Edward Said's theory of Orientalism as a strict binary in which the West constructs the East as an inferior 'other', it demonstrates that East and West often intermingle in films such as The Bitter Tea of General Yen and in Capra's orientation documentaries for World War II American servicemen; Capra imagined a kind of global community, albeit one with heavy undertones of British and American imperialism. Investigating shifts in what Capra's America has meant over time, both to Capra and to those who have watched and studied his films, this innovative book offers a startlingly fresh perspective on one of the most iconic figures in American film history.

Cinema and Nation

Cinema and Nation PDF Author: Mette Hjort
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134618840
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Cinema and Nation considers the ways in which film production and reception are shaped by ideas of national belonging and examines the implications of globalisation for the concept of national cinema.

Regarding Frank Capra

Regarding Frank Capra PDF Author: Eric Smoodin
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386267
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
In this innovative historical examination of the American movie audience, Eric Smoodin focuses on reactions to the films of Frank Capra. Best known for his Hollywood features—including It Happened One Night, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—Capra also directed educational films, military films, and documentaries. Based on his analysis of the reception of a broad range of Capra’s films, Smoodin considers the preferences and attitudes toward Hollywood of the people who watched movies during the “Golden Age” of studio production, from 1930 to 1960. Drawing on archival sources including fan letters, exhibitor reports, military and prison records, government and corporate documents, and trade journals, Smoodin explains how the venues where Capra’s films were seen and the strategies used to promote the films affected audience response and how, in turn, audience response shaped film production. He analyzes issues of foreign censorship and government intervention in the making of The Bitter Tea of General Yen; the response of high school students to It Happened One Night; fan engagement with the overtly political discourse of Meet John Doe and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; San Quentin prisoners’ reaction to a special screening of It’s a Wonderful Life; and at&t’s involvement in Capra’s later documentary work for the Bell Science Series. He also looks at the reception of Capra’s series Why We Fight, used by the American military to train recruits and re-educate German prisoners of war. Illuminating the role of the famous director and his films in American culture, Regarding Frank Capra signals new directions for significant research on film reception and promotion.

Racial and Ethnic Identities in the Media

Racial and Ethnic Identities in the Media PDF Author: Eleftheria Arapoglou
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137568348
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
This volume examines the role and representation of ‘race’ and ethnicity in the media with particular emphasis on the United States. It highlights contemporary work that focuses on changing meanings of racial and ethnic identity as they are represented in the media; television and film, digital and print media are under examination. Through fourteen innovative and interdisciplinary case studies written by a team of internationally based contributors, the volume identifies ways in which ethnic, racial, and national identities have been produced, reproduced, stereotyped, and contested. It showcases new emerging theoretical approaches in the field, and pays particular attention to the role of race, ethnicity, and national identity, along with communal and transnational allegiances, in the making of identities in the media. The topics of the chapters range from immigrant newspapers and gangster cinema to ethnic stand-up comedy and the use of ‘race’ in advertising.

Sinophone Cinemas

Sinophone Cinemas PDF Author: A. Yue
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137311207
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Sinophone Cinemas considers a range of multilingual, multidialect and multi-accented cinemas produced in Chinese-language locations outside mainland China. It showcases new screen cultures from Britain, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Australia.

Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption

Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption PDF Author: Sam B. Girgus
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231519494
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In his philosophy of ethics and time, Emmanuel Levinas highlighted the tension that exists between the "ontological adventure" of immediate experience and the "ethical adventure" of redemptive relationships-associations in which absolute responsibility engenders a transcendence of being and self. In an original commingling of philosophy and cinema study, Sam B. Girgus applies Levinas's ethics to a variety of international films. His efforts point to a transnational pattern he terms the "cinema of redemption" that portrays the struggle to connect to others in redeeming ways. Girgus not only reveals the power of these films to articulate the crisis between ontological identity and ethical subjectivity. He also locates time and ethics within the structure and content of film itself. Drawing on the work of Luce Irigaray, Tina Chanter, Kelly Oliver, and Ewa Ziarek, Girgus reconsiders Levinas and his relationship to film, engaging with a feminist focus on the sexualized female body. Girgus offers fresh readings of films from several decades and cultures, including Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Federico Fellini's La dolce vita (1959), Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura (1960), John Huston's The Misfits (1961), and Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988).