I Died a Million Times

I Died a Million Times PDF Author: Robert Miklitsch
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252052498
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the 1950s, the gangster movie and film noir crisscrossed to create gangster noir. Robert Miklitsch takes readers into this fascinating subgenre of films focused on crime syndicates, crooked cops, and capers. With the Senate's organized crime hearings and the brighter-than-bright myth of the American Dream as a backdrop, Miklitsch examines the style and history, and the production and cultural politics, of classic pictures from The Big Heat and The Asphalt Jungle to lesser-known gems like 711 Ocean Drive and post-Fifties movies like Ocean’s Eleven. Miklitsch pays particular attention to trademark leitmotifs including the individual versus the collective, the family as a locus of dissension and rapport, the real-world roots of the heist picture, and the syndicate as an octopus with its tentacles deep into law enforcement, corporate America, and government. If the memes of gangster noir remain prototypically dark, the look of the films becomes lighter and flatter, reflecting the influence of television and the realization that, under the cover of respectability, crime had moved from the underworld into the mainstream of contemporary everyday life.

I Died a Million Times

I Died a Million Times PDF Author: Robert Miklitsch
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252052498
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the 1950s, the gangster movie and film noir crisscrossed to create gangster noir. Robert Miklitsch takes readers into this fascinating subgenre of films focused on crime syndicates, crooked cops, and capers. With the Senate's organized crime hearings and the brighter-than-bright myth of the American Dream as a backdrop, Miklitsch examines the style and history, and the production and cultural politics, of classic pictures from The Big Heat and The Asphalt Jungle to lesser-known gems like 711 Ocean Drive and post-Fifties movies like Ocean’s Eleven. Miklitsch pays particular attention to trademark leitmotifs including the individual versus the collective, the family as a locus of dissension and rapport, the real-world roots of the heist picture, and the syndicate as an octopus with its tentacles deep into law enforcement, corporate America, and government. If the memes of gangster noir remain prototypically dark, the look of the films becomes lighter and flatter, reflecting the influence of television and the realization that, under the cover of respectability, crime had moved from the underworld into the mainstream of contemporary everyday life.

Dreams & Dead Ends

Dreams & Dead Ends PDF Author: Jack Shadoian
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195142921
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Get Book Here

Book Description
Table of contents

Film Noir

Film Noir PDF Author: Andrew Spicer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317875036
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book Here

Book Description
Film Noir is an overview of an often celebrated, but also contested, body of films. It discusses film noir as a cultural phenomenon whose history is more extensive and diverse than American black and white crime thrillers of the forties. An extended Background Chapter situates film noir within its cultural context, describing its origin in German Expressionism, French Poetic Realism and in developments within American genres, the gangster/crime thriller, horror and the Gothic romance and its possible relationship to changes in American society. Five chapters are devoted to ‘classic’ film noir (1940-59): chapters explore its contexts of production and reception, its visual style, and its narrative patterns and themes chapters on character types and star performances elucidate noir’s complex construction of gender with its weak, ambivalent males and predatory femmes fatales and also provide a detailed analysis of three noir auteurs, - Anthony Mann, Robert Siodmak and Fritz Lang Three chapters investigate ‘neo-noir’ and British film noir: chapters trace the complex evolution of ‘neo-noir’ in American cinema, from the modernist critiques of Night Moves and Taxi Driver, to the postmodern hybridity of contemporary noir including Seven, Pulp Fiction and Memento the final chapter surveys the development of British film noir, a significant and virtually unknown cinema, stretching from the thirties to Mike Hodges’ Croupier Films discussed include both little known examples and seminal works such as Double Indemnity, Scarlet Street, Kiss Me Deadly and Touch of Evil. A final section provides a guide to further reading, an extensive bibliography and a list of over 500 films referred to in the text. Lucidly written, Film Noir is an accessible, informative and stimulating introduction that will have a broad appeal to undergraduates, cinéastes, film teachers and researchers.

Street with No Name

Street with No Name PDF Author: Andrew Dickos
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813137497
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book Here

Book Description
This history of film noir explores the legacy and aesthetic roots of American filmmakers including Orson Welles, John Huston, Otto Preminger, and others. Flourishing in the United States during the 1940s and 50s, the bleak, violent genre of filmmaking known as film noir reflected the attitudes of writers and auteur directors influenced by the events of the turbulent mid-twentieth century. Films such as Force of Evil, Night and the City, Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly and later on, Chinatown and The Grifters are indelibly American. Yet the sources of this genre were found in Germany and France and imported to Hollywood by emigré filmmakers. Andrew Dickos's Street with No Name traces film noir back to its roots in German Expressionist cinema and the French cinema of the interwar years. Dickos describes the development of film noir in America from 1941 through the 1970s, covering notable directors such as Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, John Huston, Nicholas Ray, Robert Aldrich, Samuel Fuller, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, Abraham Polonsky, Jules Dassin, Anthony Mann and others. Dickos also charts the genre's influence on such celebrated postwar French filmmakers as Jean-Pierre Melville, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard. Addressing the aesthetic, cultural, political, and social concerns of its creators, Street with No Name demonstrates how film noir generates a highly expressive, raw, and violent mood as it exposes the ambiguities of modern postwar society. A Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Historical Dictionary of Film Noir

Historical Dictionary of Film Noir PDF Author: Andrew Spicer
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810873788
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 533

Get Book Here

Book Description
Film noir_literally 'black cinema'_is the label customarily given to a group of black and white American films, mostly crime thrillers, made between 1940 and 1959. Today there is considerable dispute about what are the shared features that classify a noir film, and therefore which films should be included in this category. These problems are partly caused because film noir is a retrospective label that was not used in the 1940s or 1950s by the film industry as a production category and therefore its existence and features cannot be established through reference to trade documents. The Historical Dictionary of Film Noir is a comprehensive guide that ranges from 1940 to present day neo-noir. It consists of a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, a filmography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on every aspect of film noir and neo-noir, including key films, personnel (actors, cinematographers, composers, directors, producers, set designers, and writers), themes, issues, influences, visual style, cycles of films (e.g. amnesiac noirs), the representation of the city and gender, other forms (comics/graphic novels, television, and videogames), and noir's presence in world cinema. It is an essential reference work for all those interested in this important cultural phenomenon.

Within Our Gates

Within Our Gates PDF Author: Alan Gevinson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520209640
Category : Minorities in motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 1588

Get Book Here

Book Description
"[These volumes] are endlessly absorbing as an excursion into cultural history and national memory."--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Film Noir

Film Noir PDF Author: Bruce Crowther
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0753546078
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Get Book Here

Book Description
With the advent of the Second World War a new mood was discernible in film drama - an atmosphere of disillusion and a sense of foreboding, a dark quality that derived as much from the characters depicted as from the cinematographer's art. These films, among them such classics as Double Indemnity, The Woman in the Window, Touch of Evil and sunset Boulevard, emerged retrospectively as a genre in themselves when a French film critic referred to them collectively as film noir. Bruce Crowther looks into noir's literary origins (often in the novels of the so-called 'hard-boiled' school typified by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich), and at how the material translated to the screen, noting in particular influences from German expressionist films and the almost indispensable techniques of flashback and voice-over narration. He also assesses the contribution made by the players - by actors such as Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell, Alan Ladd and John Garfield and actresses such as Barbara Stanwyck, Lizabeth Scott, Joan Crawford and Gloria Grahame, together with a roll-call of supporting players whose screen presence could lend almost any film the noir imprimatur. Noir was in its heyday from 1945 to 1955, a time when paranoia and disillusion, anxiety and violence could be said to have been part of the fabric of American, and particularly Hollywood, society, yet its impact and its influence are with us still - in films as diverse as The French Connection, Chinatown and Body Heat. This Book commemorates a special period in film-making and a unique combination of talent resulting in a spectrum of films that are as welcome today on their small-screen airings as they were when first shown in cinema.

Hotel

Hotel PDF Author: Robert A. Davidson
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442610948
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Get Book Here

Book Description


Cigarette Lighter

Cigarette Lighter PDF Author: Jack Pendarvis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150130738X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 153

Get Book Here

Book Description
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Smokers, survivalists, teenagers, collectors.... The cigarette lighter is a charged, complex, yet often entirely disposable object that moves across these various groups of people, acquiring and emitting different meanings while always supplying its primary function, that of ignition. While the lighter may seem at first a niche object-only for old fashioned cigarette smokers-in this book Jack Pendarvis explodes the lighter as something with deep history, as something with quirky episodes in cultural contexts, and as something that dances with wide ranging taboos and traditions. Pendarvis shows how the lighter tarries with the cheapest ends of consumer culture as much as it displays more profound dramas of human survival, technological advances, and aesthetics. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Thrillers

Thrillers PDF Author: Martin Rubin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521588393
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
An in-depth exploration of the 'thriller' movie genre.