Overhearing Film Dialogue

Overhearing Film Dialogue PDF Author: Sarah Kozloff
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520924024
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Since the birth of cinema, film has been lauded as a visual rather than a verbal medium; this sentiment was epitomized by John Ford's assertion in 1964 that, "When a motion picture is at its best, it is long on action and short on dialogue." Little serious work has been done on the subject of film dialogue, yet what characters say and how they say it has been crucial to our experience and understanding of every film since the coming of sound. Through informative discussions of dozens of classic and contemporary films—from Bringing Up Baby to Terms of Endearment, from Stagecoach to Reservoir Dogs--this lively book provides the first full-length study of the use of dialogue in American film. Sarah Kozloff shows why dialogue has been neglected in the analysis of narrative film and uncovers the essential contributions dialogue makes to a film's development and impact. She uses narrative theory and drama theory to analyze the functions that dialogue typically serves in a film. The second part of the book is a comprehensive discussion of the role and nature of dialogue in four film genres: westerns, screwball comedies, gangster films, and melodramas. Focusing on topics such as class and ethnic dialects, censorship, and the effect of dramatic irony, Kozloff provides an illuminating new perspective on film genres.

Overhearing Film Dialogue

Overhearing Film Dialogue PDF Author: Sarah Kozloff
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520924024
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since the birth of cinema, film has been lauded as a visual rather than a verbal medium; this sentiment was epitomized by John Ford's assertion in 1964 that, "When a motion picture is at its best, it is long on action and short on dialogue." Little serious work has been done on the subject of film dialogue, yet what characters say and how they say it has been crucial to our experience and understanding of every film since the coming of sound. Through informative discussions of dozens of classic and contemporary films—from Bringing Up Baby to Terms of Endearment, from Stagecoach to Reservoir Dogs--this lively book provides the first full-length study of the use of dialogue in American film. Sarah Kozloff shows why dialogue has been neglected in the analysis of narrative film and uncovers the essential contributions dialogue makes to a film's development and impact. She uses narrative theory and drama theory to analyze the functions that dialogue typically serves in a film. The second part of the book is a comprehensive discussion of the role and nature of dialogue in four film genres: westerns, screwball comedies, gangster films, and melodramas. Focusing on topics such as class and ethnic dialects, censorship, and the effect of dramatic irony, Kozloff provides an illuminating new perspective on film genres.

Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling

Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling PDF Author: Mark Minett
Publisher:
ISBN: 019752382X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling reveals an Altman barely glimpsed in previous critical accounts of the filmmaker. This re-examination of his seminal work during the "Hollywood Renaissance" or "New Hollywood" period of the early 1970s (including M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Images, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, California Split, and Nashville) sheds new light on both the films and the filmmaker, reframing Altman as a complex, pragmatic innovator whose work exceeds, but is also grounded in, the norms of classical Hollywood storytelling rather than someone who rejected those norms in favor of modernist art cinema. Its findings and approach hold important implications for the study of cinematic authorship. Largely avoiding thematic exegesis, it employs an historical poetics approach, robust functionalist frameworks, archival research, and formal and statistical analysis to demystify the essential features of the standard account of Altman's filmmaking history and profile-lax narrative form, heavy reliance on the zoom, sound design replete with overlapping dialogue, improvisational infidelity to the screenplay, and a desire to subvert based in his time in the training grounds of industrial filmmaking and filmed television. The book provides a clear example of how a filmmaker might work collaboratively and pragmatically within and across media institutions to elaborate upon their sanctioned practices and aims. We misunderstand Altman's work, and the creative work of Hollywood filmmakers in general, when we insist on describing innovation as opposition to institutional norms and on describing those norms as simply assimilating innovation.

American Eccentric Cinema

American Eccentric Cinema PDF Author: Kim Wilkins
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501336932
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Since the late 1990s a new language has emerged in film scholarship and criticism in response to the popularity of American directors such as Wes Anderson, Charlie Kaufman, and David O. Russell. Increasingly, adjectives like 'quirky', 'cute', and 'smart' are used to describe these American films, with a focus on their ironic (and sometimes deliberately comical) stories, character situations and tones. Kim Wilkins argues that, beyond the seemingly superficial descriptions, 'American eccentric cinema' presents a formal and thematic eccentricity that is distinct to the American context. She distinguishes these films from mainstream Hollywood cinema as they exhibit irregularities in characterization, tone, and setting, and deviate from established generic conventions. Each chapter builds a case for this position through detailed film analyses and comparisons to earlier American traditions, such as the New Hollywood cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. American Eccentric Cinema promises to challenge the notion of irony in American contemporary cinema, and questions the relationship of irony to a complex national and individual identity.

Dialogue across Media

Dialogue across Media PDF Author: Jarmila Mildorf
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027266158
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
With chapters on social media, videogames and human-machine communication, Dialogue across Media provides a comprehensive overview of the role of dialogue in contemporary media. Drawing on the expertise of scholars and practitioners from multiple fields and disciplines, including screenwriters, literary critics, linguists and new media theorists, each chapter provides an in-depth analysis of dialogue in action. Together, these chapters demonstrate the unique energy and versatility that dialogic forms can offer artists and readers alike, and the special role that dialogue plays in helping us to understand the complexities and contradictions of human interaction. Dialogue across Media provides an essential resource for students and specialists in many fields concerned with dialogue, including language and literature, media and cultural studies, narratology and rhetoric.

The Language of Pop Culture

The Language of Pop Culture PDF Author: Valentin Werner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351685309
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This collection brings together contributions from both leading and emerging scholars in one comprehensive volume to showcase the richness of linguistic approaches to the study of pop culture and their potential to inform linguistic theory building and analytical frameworks. The book features examples from a dynamic range of pop culture registers, including lyrics, the language of fictional TV series, comics, and musical subcultures, as a means of both providing a rigorous and robust description of these forms through the lens of linguistic study but also in outlining methodological issues involved in applying linguistic approaches. The volume also explores the didactic potential of pop culture, looking at the implementation of pop culture traditions in language learning settings. This collection offers unique insights into the interface of linguistic study and the broader paradigm of pop culture scholarship, making this an ideal resource for graduate students and researchers in applied linguistics, English language, media studies, cultural studies, and discourse analysis.

What Women Watched

What Women Watched PDF Author: Marsha F. Cassidy
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292782721
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
In this pathfinding book, based on original archival research, Marsha F. Cassidy offers the first thorough analysis of daytime television's earliest and most significant women's genres, appraising from a feminist perspective what women watched before soap opera rose to prominence. After providing a comprehensive history of the early days of women's programming across the nation, Cassidy offers a critical discussion of the formats, programs, and celebrities that launched daytime TV in America—Kate Smith's variety show and the famed singer's unsuccessful transition from patriotic radio star to 1950s TV idol; the "charm boys" Garry Moore, Arthur Godfrey, and Art Linkletter, whose programs honored women's participation but in the process established the dominance of male hosts on TV; and the "misery shows" Strike It Rich and Glamour Girl and the controversy, both critical and legal, they stirred up. Cassidy then turns to NBC's Home show, starring the urbane Arlene Francis, who infused the homemaking format with Manhattan sophistication, and the ambitious daily anthology drama Matinee Theater, which strove to differentiate itself from soap opera and become a national theater of the air. She concludes with an analysis of four popular audience participation shows of the era—the runaway hit Queen for a Day; Ralph Edwards's daytime show of surprises, It Could Be You; Who Do You Trust?, starring a youthful Johnny Carson; and The Big Payoff, featuring Bess Myerson, the country's first Jewish Miss America. Cassidy's close feminist reading of these shows clearly demonstrates how daytime TV mirrored the cultural pressures, inconsistencies, and ambiguities of the postwar era.

Shakespeare and the English-speaking Cinema

Shakespeare and the English-speaking Cinema PDF Author: Russell Jackson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191665088
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Shakespeare and the English-speaking Cinema is a lively, authoritative, and innovative overview of the ways in which Shakespeare's plays have been adapted for cinema. Organised by topics rather than chronology, it offers detailed commentary on significant films, including both 'mainstream' and 'canonical' works by such directors as Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Franco Zeffirelli, and Kenneth Branagh, and such ground-breaking movies as Derek Jarman's The Tempest, Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books. Chapters on the location of films in place and time, the effect of this on characterisation, and issues of gender and political power are followed by a discussion of work that goes 'beyond Shakespeare. A filmography and suggestions for further reading complete this stimulating, fresh, and accessible account of an important aspect of Shakespeare studies.

Now a Major Motion Picture

Now a Major Motion Picture PDF Author: Christine Geraghty
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742538214
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Going beyond the process of adaptation, Geraghty is more interested in the films themselves and how they draw on our sense of recall. While a film reflects its literary source, it also invites comparisons to our memories and associations with other versions of the original. For example, a viewer may watch the 2005 big-screen production of Pride and Prejudice and remember Austen's novel as well as the BBC's 1995 television movie. Adaptations also rely on the conventions of genre, editing, acting, and sound to engage our recall--elements that many movie critics tend to forget when focusing solely on faithfulness to the written word.

Pragmatics of Fiction

Pragmatics of Fiction PDF Author: Miriam A. Locher
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110431092
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 628

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Book Description
Pragmatics of Fiction provides systematic orientation in the emerging field of studying pragmatics with/in fictional data. It provides an authoritative and accessible overview of this versatile new field in its methodological and theoretical richness. Giving center stage to fictional language allows scholars to review key concepts in sociolinguistics such as genre, style, voice, stance, dialogue, participation structure or features of orality and literariness. The contributors explore language as one of the creative tools to craft story worlds and characters by drawing on concepts such as regional, social and ethnic language variation, as well as multilingualism. Themes such as emotion, taboo language or impoliteness in fiction receive attention just as the challenges of translation and dubbing, the creation of past and future languages, the impact of fictional language on language change or the fuzzy boundaries of narratives. Each contribution, written by a leading specialist, gives a succinct, representative and up-to-date overview of research questions, theories, methods and recent developments in the field.

Genre and Contemporary Hollywood

Genre and Contemporary Hollywood PDF Author: Steve Neale
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838715894
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 581

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Book Description
This wide-ranging text is one of the first to look in detail at some of the principal genres, cycles and trends in Hollywood's output during the last two decades. It includes analysis of such films as Sense and Sensibility, Grifters, The Mask, When Harry Met Sally, Pocahontas, Titanic, Basic Instinct, Coppola's Dracula, and Malcolm X.