When the World Laughs

When the World Laughs PDF Author: William V. Costanzo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190925027
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
When the World Laughs is a book about the intersection of humor, history, and culture. It explores how film comedy, one of the world's most popular movie genres, reflects the values and beliefs of those who enjoy its many forms, its most enduring characters and stories, its most entertaining routines and funniest jokes. What people laugh at in Europe, Africa, or the Far East reveals important truths about their differences and common bonds. By investigating their traditions of humor, by paying close attention to what kinds of comedy cross national boundaries or what gets lost in translation, this study leads us to a deeper understanding of each other and ourselves. Section One begins with a survey of the theories and research that best explain how humor works. It clarifies the varieties of comic forms and styles, identifies the world's most archetypal figures of fun, and traces the history of the world's traditions of humor from earliest times to today. It also examines the techniques and aesthetics of film comedy: how movies use the world's rich repertoire of amusing stories, gags, and wit to make us laugh and think. Section Two offers a close look at national and regional trends. It applies the concepts set forth earlier to specific films-across a broad spectrum of sub-genres, historical eras, and cultural contexts-providing an insightful comparative study of the world's great traditions of film comedy.

When the World Laughs

When the World Laughs PDF Author: William V. Costanzo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190925027
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book Here

Book Description
When the World Laughs is a book about the intersection of humor, history, and culture. It explores how film comedy, one of the world's most popular movie genres, reflects the values and beliefs of those who enjoy its many forms, its most enduring characters and stories, its most entertaining routines and funniest jokes. What people laugh at in Europe, Africa, or the Far East reveals important truths about their differences and common bonds. By investigating their traditions of humor, by paying close attention to what kinds of comedy cross national boundaries or what gets lost in translation, this study leads us to a deeper understanding of each other and ourselves. Section One begins with a survey of the theories and research that best explain how humor works. It clarifies the varieties of comic forms and styles, identifies the world's most archetypal figures of fun, and traces the history of the world's traditions of humor from earliest times to today. It also examines the techniques and aesthetics of film comedy: how movies use the world's rich repertoire of amusing stories, gags, and wit to make us laugh and think. Section Two offers a close look at national and regional trends. It applies the concepts set forth earlier to specific films-across a broad spectrum of sub-genres, historical eras, and cultural contexts-providing an insightful comparative study of the world's great traditions of film comedy.

Male Anxiety and Psychopathology in Film

Male Anxiety and Psychopathology in Film PDF Author: Andrea Bini
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781349565535
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
The most popular film genre during the golden years of Italian cinema, the Comedy Italian Style emerged after the fall of the Facist regime, narrating the identity crisis of many Italian men. Exploring the birth, growth, and decline of this genre, Bini shows this notable style was the search for a new role in the shattered postwar middle class.

Interpreting Primo Levi

Interpreting Primo Levi PDF Author: Arthur Chapman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137435577
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
The legacy of antifascist partisan, Auschwitz survivor, and author Primo Levi continues to drive exciting interdisciplinary scholarship. The contributions to this intellectually rich, tightly organized volume - from many of the world's foremost Levi scholars - show a remarkable breadth across fields as varied as ethics, memory, and media studies.

The Global Vampire

The Global Vampire PDF Author: Cait Coker
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476675945
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
The media vampire has roots throughout the world, far beyond the shores of the usual Dracula-inspired Anglo-American archetypes. Depending on text and context, the vampire is a figure of anxiety and comfort, humor and fear, desire and revulsion. These dichotomies gesture the enduring prevalence of the vampire in mass culture; it can no longer articulate a single feeling or response, bound by time and geography, but is many things to many people. With a global perspective, this collection of essays offers something new and different: a much needed counter-narrative of the vampire's evolution in popular culture. Divided by geography, this text emphasizes the vampiric as a globetrotting citizen du monde rather than an isolated monster.

Portrait of the Artist and His Mother in Twentieth-Century Italian Culture

Portrait of the Artist and His Mother in Twentieth-Century Italian Culture PDF Author: Daniela Bini
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1683932587
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
The power exercised by the mother on the son in Mediterranean cultures has been amply studied. Italy is a special case in the Modern Era and the phenomenon of Mammismo italiano is indeed well known. Scholars have traced this obsession with the mother figure to the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary, but in fact, it is more ancient. What has not been adequately addressed however, is how Mammismo italiano has been manifested in complex ways in various modern artistic forms. Portrait of the Artist and His Mother in Twentieth-Century Italian Culture focuses on case studies of five prominent creative personalities, representing different, sometimes overlapping artistic genres (Luigi Pirandello, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dino Buzzati, Carlo Levi, Federico Fellini). The author examines how the mother-son relationship not only affected, but actually shaped their work. Although the analysis uses mainly a psychological and psychoanalytical critical approach, the belief of the author, substantiated by historians, anthropologists and sociologists, is that historical and cultural conditions contributed to and reinforced the Italian character. This book concludes with an analysis of some examples of Italian film comedies, such as Fellini's and Monicelli's where mammismo/vitellonismo is treated with a lighter tone and a pointed self irony.

Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany

Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany PDF Author: Valerie Weinstein
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253040744
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
How party propagandists worked behind the scenes to create unspoken racist messages in the German culture—even in the most lighthearted of movies. Today many Germans look back fondly on 1930s film comedies, viewing them as a part of the Nazi era that was not tainted with antisemitism. Here, Valerie Weinstein scrutinizes these comic productions and demonstrates that film comedy, despite its innocent appearance, was a critical component in the effort to separate “Jews” from “Germans” physically, economically, and artistically. Weinstein highlights how the German propaganda ministry used directives, pre- and post-production censorship, financial incentives, and influence over film critics and their judgments to replace Jewish “wit” with a slower, simpler, and more direct German “humor” that affirmed values that the Nazis associated with the Aryan race. Through contextualized analyses of historical documents and individual films, Weinstein reveals how humor, coded hints and traces, absences, and substitutes in Third Reich film comedy helped spectators imagine an abstract “Jewishness” and a “German” identity and community free from the former. As resurgent populist nationalism and overt racism continue to grow around the world today, Weinstein’s study helps us rethink racism and prejudice in popular culture and reconceptualize the relationships between film, humor, national identity, and race.

The American Father Onscreen

The American Father Onscreen PDF Author: Toby Reynolds
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429576420
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The American father is constantly depicted by contemporary Hollywood as being under pressure and forever struggling, but why? By utilising an analytical psychological approach, this fascinating book reveals the depths, complexities and nuances of the depictions of the American father and his struggles with contemporary contextual challenges and offers a fresh and intellectually exciting set of perspectives and interpretations of this key masculine figure and his effect on cinematic masculinities. Using a post-Jungian methodology and close textual analysis, the book seeks to explore the presence and impact of the American filmic father, and the effect his Shadow has on himself, his children and US society. It does this by examining the concept of ‘father hunger’, a term popularised by the mytho-poetic men’s movement that holds fathers to be an essential link to the masculine continuum and masculinity in general. Analysing the role that Hollywood plays in depicting fathers and their relationships with their children and American society, The American Father Onscreen concludes that Hollywood presents the American paternal as crucial to the construction of US society and, consequently, American cultural myths, such as the American Dream. Providing an alternative perspective into the fascinating, complex, and under-researched figure of the American father, this book will be of great interest to academics and students of film, gender studies, American studies, and post-Jungian psychology.

Italian Cinema from the Silent Screen to the Digital Image

Italian Cinema from the Silent Screen to the Digital Image PDF Author: Joseph Luzzi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 144114756X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
In this comprehensive guide, some of the world's leading scholars consider the issues, films, and filmmakers that have given Italian cinema its enduring appeal. Readers will explore the work of such directors as Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Roberto Rossellini as well as a host of subjects including the Italian silent screen, the political influence of Fascism on the movies, lesser known genres such as the giallo (horror film) and Spaghetti Western, and the role of women in the Italian film industry. Italian Cinema from the Silent Screen to the Digital Image explores recent developments in cinema studies such as digital performance, the role of media and the Internet, neuroscience in film criticism, and the increased role that immigrants are playing in the nation's cinema.

Double-Edged Comforts

Double-Edged Comforts PDF Author: Silvia Bottinelli
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228013739
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Peeking into the home through the eyes of artists and image-makers, this book unveils the untold story of Italian domestic experiences from the 1940s to the 1970s. Torn between the trauma of World War II and the frenzied optimism of the postwar decades, and haunted by the echoes of fascism, the domestic realm embodied contrasting and often contradictory meanings: care and violence, oppression and emotional fulfillment, nourishment and privation. Silvia Bottinelli casts a fresh light on domestic experiences that are easily overlooked and taken for granted, finding new expressions of home - as an idea, an emotion, a space, and a set of habits - in a variety of cultural and artistic movements, including new realism, visual poetry, pop art, arte povera, and radical architecture, among others. Double-Edged Comforts finds nuance by viewing artistic interpretations of domestic life in dialogue with contemporaneous visual culture: the advertisements, commercials, illustrations, and popular magazines that influenced and informed art, even materially, and often triggered the critical reactions of artists. Bottinelli pays particular attention to women's perspectives, discussing artworks that have fallen through the cracks of established art historical narratives and giving specific consideration to women artists: Carla Accardi, Marisa Merz, Maria Lai, Ketty La Rocca, Lucia Marcucci, and others who were often marginalized by the Italian art system in this period. From sleeping and bathing, chores, and making and eating food to the arrival of television, Double-Edged Comforts provides a fresh account of modern domesticity relevant to anyone interested in understanding how we make sense of the places we live and what we do there, showing how art complicates the familiar comforts and meanings of home.

Male Anxiety and Psychopathology in Film

Male Anxiety and Psychopathology in Film PDF Author: Andrea Bini
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137515848
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
The most popular film genre during the golden years of Italian cinema, the Comedy Italian Style emerged after the fall of the Facist regime, narrating the identity crisis of many Italian men. Exploring the birth, growth, and decline of this genre, Bini shows this notable style was the search for a new role in the shattered postwar middle class.