Perplexing Plots

Perplexing Plots PDF Author: David Bordwell
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231556551
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 558

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Book Description
Nominated, 2024 Edgar Allan Poe Award in the category of best critical/biographical, Mystery Writers of America Shortlisted, 2024 Agatha Awards - Best Mystery Nonfiction, Malice Domestic Posthumous Winner - 2023 IFCA Book Prize, International Crime Fiction Association Narrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once regarded as “difficult” become familiar to audiences? In Perplexing Plots, David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. He shows that since the nineteenth century, detective stories and suspense thrillers have allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. Tales of crime and mystery became a training ground where audiences learned to appreciate artifice. These genres demand a sophisticated awareness of storytelling conventions: they play games with narrative form and toy with audience expectations. Bordwell examines how writers and directors have pushed, pulled, and collaborated with their audiences to change popular storytelling. He explores the plot engineering of figures such as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy Sayers, and Quentin Tarantino, and traces how mainstream storytellers and modernist experimenters influenced one another’s work. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how movies, literature, theater, and popular culture have evolved over the past century.

Perplexing Plots

Perplexing Plots PDF Author: David Bordwell
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231556551
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 558

Get Book Here

Book Description
Nominated, 2024 Edgar Allan Poe Award in the category of best critical/biographical, Mystery Writers of America Shortlisted, 2024 Agatha Awards - Best Mystery Nonfiction, Malice Domestic Posthumous Winner - 2023 IFCA Book Prize, International Crime Fiction Association Narrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once regarded as “difficult” become familiar to audiences? In Perplexing Plots, David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. He shows that since the nineteenth century, detective stories and suspense thrillers have allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. Tales of crime and mystery became a training ground where audiences learned to appreciate artifice. These genres demand a sophisticated awareness of storytelling conventions: they play games with narrative form and toy with audience expectations. Bordwell examines how writers and directors have pushed, pulled, and collaborated with their audiences to change popular storytelling. He explores the plot engineering of figures such as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy Sayers, and Quentin Tarantino, and traces how mainstream storytellers and modernist experimenters influenced one another’s work. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how movies, literature, theater, and popular culture have evolved over the past century.

Poetics of Cinema

Poetics of Cinema PDF Author: David Bordwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135867801
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
Bringing together twenty-five years of work on what he has called the "historical poetics of cinema," David Bordwell presents an extended analysis of a key question for film studies: how are films made, in particular historical contexts, in order to achieve certain effects? For Bordwell, films are made things, existing within historical contexts, and aim to create determinate effects. Beginning with this central thesis, Bordwell works out a full understanding of how films channel and recast cultural influences for their cinematic purposes. With more than five hundred film stills, Poetics of Cinema is a must-have for any student of cinema.

Narration in the Fiction Film

Narration in the Fiction Film PDF Author: David Bordwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136099166
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
In this study, David Bordwell offers a comprehensive account of how movies use fundamental principles of narrative representation, unique features of the film medium, and diverse story-telling patterns to construct their fictional narratives.

Figures Traced in Light

Figures Traced in Light PDF Author: David Bordwell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520241978
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Staging and style -- Feuillade, or, Storytelling -- Mizoguchi, or, Modulation -- Angelopoulos, or, Melancholy -- Hou, or, Constraints -- Staging and stylistics.

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.

House of Leaves

House of Leaves PDF Author: Mark Z. Danielewski
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0375420525
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 738

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Book Description
“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. Now this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices. The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction

Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction PDF Author: Meir Sternberg
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253355522
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
.."". this is one of the few books on narrative worth reading and rereading, a study that will make -- or should make -- a difference in the way we read narrative."" -- Nineteenth Century Fiction ""This is a remarkable book: original, clear-sighted, and luminously focused on a subject that has never been explored nearly so systematically or intensively.""A -- Dorrit Cohn, Harvard University This book, long out of print, is now available in a paperback edition, providing another window into one of the most exciting minds working in the areas of literary and biblical literary criticism.

Post-Theory

Post-Theory PDF Author: David Bordwell
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299149439
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 584

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Book Description
Since the 1970s, the academic study of film has been dominated by Structuralist Marxism, varieties of cultural theory, and the psychoanalytic ideas of Freud and Lacan. With Post-Theory, David Bordwell and Noel Carroll have opened the floor to other voices challenging the prevailing practices of film scholarship. Addressing topics as diverse as film scores, national film industries, and audience response. Post-Theory offers fresh directions for understanding film.

Silver Screen Fiend

Silver Screen Fiend PDF Author: Patton Oswalt
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451673221
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
"Between 1995 and 1999, Patton Oswalt lived with an unshakable addiction. It wasn't drugs, alcohol or sex: it was film. After moving to L.A., Oswalt became a huge film buff (or as he calls it, a sprocket fiend), absorbing classics, cult hits, and new releases at the New Beverly Cinema. Silver screen celluloid became Patton's life schoolbook, informing his notion of acting, writing, comedy, and relationships. Set in the nascent days of L.A.'s alternative comedy scene, Oswalt's memoir chronicles his journey from fledgling stand-up comedian to self-assured sitcom actor, with the colorful New Beverly collective and a cast of now-notable young comedians supporting him all along the way"--

The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction

The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction PDF Author: Martin Priestman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107494508
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction covers British and American crime fiction from the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth. As well as discussing the detective fiction of writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, it considers other kinds of fiction where crime plays a substantial part, such as the thriller and spy fiction. It also includes chapters on the treatment of crime in eighteenth-century literature, French and Victorian fiction, women and black detectives, crime on film and TV, police fiction and postmodernist uses of the detective form. The collection, by an international team of established specialists, offers students invaluable reference material including a chronology and guides to further reading. The volume aims to ensure that its readers will be grounded in the history of crime fiction and its critical reception.