Author: Toby Lee
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520379020
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
Is culture a luxury? In this era of austerity, the value of the arts has been a topic of heated debate in Greece, where the country’s economic troubles have led to drastic cuts in public funding and much contention over the significance of cultural institutions and government-funded arts initiatives. At issue in these debates are larger questions regarding the very notions of publicness, hierarchies of value, and functions of the state that structure collective life. Beginning with the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, How to Be Public tracks this turbulence as it unfolded in the Greek film world in the early years of the crisis. Investigating the different forms of citizenship and collectivity being negotiated in cinema’s social spaces, this book considers how the arts and cultural production may illuminate the changing conditions of, and possibilities for, public and collective life in the neoliberal era.
Author: Gil Toffell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113756931X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
This book investigates a Jewish orientation to film culture in interwar Britain. It explores how pleasure, politics and communal solidarity intermingled in the cinemas of Jewish neighbourhoods, and how film was seen as a vessel through which Jewish communal concerns might be carried to a wider public. Addressing an array of related topics, this volume examines the lived expressive cultures of cinemas in Jewish areas and the ethnically specific films consumed within these sites; the reception of film stars as representations of a Jewish social body; and how an antisemitic canard that understood the cinema as a Jewish monopoly complicated its use as a base for anti-fascist activity. In shedding light on an unexplored aspect of British film reception and exhibition, Toffell provides a unique insight into the making of the modern city by migrant communities. The title will be of use to anyone interested in Britain’s interwar leisure landscape, the Jewish presence in modernity, and a cinema studies sensitised to the everyday experience of audiences.
Author: Casey Ryan Kelly
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813575133
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 211
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Book Description
From the perspective of cultural conservatives, Hollywood movies are cesspools of vice, exposing impressionable viewers to pernicious sexually-permissive messages. Offering a groundbreaking study of Hollywood films produced since 2000, Abstinence Cinema comes to a very different conclusion, finding echoes of the evangelical movement’s abstinence-only rhetoric in everything from Easy A to Taken. Casey Ryan Kelly tracks the surprising sex-negative turn that Hollywood films have taken, associating premarital sex with shame and degradation, while romanticizing traditional nuclear families, courtship rituals, and gender roles. As he demonstrates, these movies are particularly disempowering for young women, concocting plots in which the decision to refrain from sex until marriage is the young woman’s primary source of agency and arbiter of moral worth. Locating these regressive sexual politics not only in expected sites, like the Twilight films, but surprising ones, like the raunchy comedies of Judd Apatow, Kelly makes a compelling case that Hollywood films have taken a significant step backward in recent years. Abstinence Cinema offers close readings of movies from a wide spectrum of genres, and it puts these films into conversation with rhetoric that has emerged in other arenas of American culture. Challenging assumptions that we are living in a more liberated era, the book sounds a warning bell about the powerful cultural forces that seek to demonize sexuality and curtail female sexual agency.
Author: Justus Nieland
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252075463
Category : Eccentrics and eccentricities
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
A new look at modernism's relationship to human feeling and the public sphere
Author: Anna Krakus
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822986035
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 454
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Book Description
No End in Sight offers a critical analysis of Polish cinema and literature during the transformative late Socialist period of the 1970s and 1980s. Anna Krakus details how conceptions of time, permanence, and endings shaped major Polish artistic works. She further demonstrates how film and literature played a major role in shaping political consciousness during this highly-charged era. Despite being controlled by an authoritarian state and the doctrine of socialism, artists were able to portray the unsettled nature of the political and psychological climate of the period, and an undetermined future. In analyzing films by Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieslowsi, Krzysztof Zanussi, Wojciech Has, and Tadeusz Konwicki alongside Konwicki’s literary production, Anna Krakus identifies their shared penchant to defer or completely eschew narrative closure, whether in plot, theme, or style. Krakus calls this artistic tendency "aesthetic unfinalizability." As she reveals, aesthetic unfinalizability was far more than an occasional artistic preference or a passing trend; it was a radical counterpolitical act. The obsession with historical teleology saturated Polish public life during socialism to such a degree that instances of nonclosure or ambivalent endings emerged as polemical responses to official ideology.
Author: Haidee Wasson
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520331680
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
Everyday Movies documents the twentieth-century rise of portable film projectors. It demonstrates that since World War II, the vast majority of movie-watching did not happen in the glow of the large screen but rather took place alongside the glitches, distortions, and clickety-clack of small machines that transformed home, classroom, museum, community, government, industrial, and military venues into sites of moving-image display. Reorienting the history of cinema away from the magic of the movie theater, Haidee Wasson illustrates the remarkable persistence and proliferation of devices that fundamentally rejected the sleek, highly professionalized film show. She foregrounds instead another kind of apparatus, one that was accessible, affordable, adaptable, easy to use, and crucially, programmable. Revealing rich archival discoveries, this book charts a compelling and original history of film that brings to light new technologies and diverse forms of media engagement that continue to shape contemporary life.
Author: Richard Van Heertum
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780230621992
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This book provides an interdisciplinary and collaborative anthology that seeks to make a compelling and exciting analysis of contemporary Hollywood film texts (and the larger industry and society to which they are dialectically related) in light of Giroux's ideas about public pedagogy. Foreword by Lawrence Grossberg.
Author: Prof. Deborah A. Starr
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520976126
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. In this book, Deborah A. Starr recuperates the work of Togo Mizrahi, a pioneer of Egyptian cinema. Mizrahi, an Egyptian Jew with Italian nationality, established himself as a prolific director of popular comedies and musicals in the 1930s and 1940s. As a studio owner and producer, Mizrahi promoted the idea that developing a local cinema industry was a project of national importance. Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema integrates film analysis with film history to tease out the cultural and political implications of Mizrahi’s work. His movies, Starr argues, subvert dominant notions of race, gender, and nationality through their playful—and queer—use of masquerade and mistaken identity. Taken together, Mizrahi’s films offer a hopeful vision of a pluralist Egypt. By reevaluating Mizrahi’s contributions to Egyptian culture, Starr challenges readers to reconsider the debates over who is Egyptian and what constitutes national cinema.
Author: Charles R. Acland
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN: 9780822350095
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
By exploring the use of film in mid-twentieth-century institutions, including libraries, museums, classrooms, and professional organizations, the essays in Useful Cinema show how moving images became an ordinary feature of American life. In venues such as factories and community halls, people encountered industrial, educational, training, advertising, and other types of “useful cinema.” Screening these films transformed unlikely spaces, conveyed ideas, and produced subjects in the service of public and private aims. Such functional motion pictures helped to shape common sense about cinema’s place in contemporary life. Whether measured in terms of the number of films shown, the size of audiences, or the economic activity generated, the “non-theatrical sector” was a substantial and enduring parallel to the more spectacular realm of commercial film. In Useful Cinema, scholars examine organizations such as UNESCO, the YMCA, the Amateur Cinema League, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They also consider film exhibition sites in schools, businesses, and industries. As they expand understanding of this other American cinema, the contributors challenge preconceived notions about what cinema is. Contributors. Charles R. Acland, Joseph Clark, Zoë Druick, Ronald Walter Greene, Alison Griffiths, Stephen Groening, Jennifer Horne, Kirsten Ostherr, Eric Smoodin, Charles Tepperman, Gregory A. Waller, Haidee Wasson. Michael Zryd
Author: Hamid Naficy
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822348780
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 666
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Book Description
In the fourth and final volume of A History of Iranian Cinema, Hamid Naficy looks at the extraordinary efflorescence in Iranian film and other visual media since the Islamic Revolution.
