The Public Life of Cinema

The Public Life of Cinema PDF Author: Toby Lee
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520379012
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.

The Public Life of Cinema

The Public Life of Cinema PDF Author: Toby Lee
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520379012
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

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.

Abstinence Cinema

Abstinence Cinema PDF 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.

Feeling Modern

Feeling Modern PDF 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

Useful Cinema

Useful Cinema PDF 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

The Films in My Life

The Films in My Life PDF Author: François Truffaut
Publisher: Diversion Books
ISBN: 1626813965
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
From a cinematic grand master, “one of the most readable books of movie criticism, and one of the most instructive” (American Film Institute). An icon. A rebel. A legend. The films of François Truffaut defined an exhilarating new form of cinema for moviegoers the world over. But before Truffaut became a great director, he was a critic who stood at the vanguard, pioneering an innovative way to view movies and to write about the cinematic arts. Now, for the first time in eBook, the legendary director shares his own words, as one of the most influential filmmakers of all time examines the art of movie-making through engaging and deeply personal reviews about the movies he loves. Truffaut writes extensively about his heroes, from Hitchcock to Welles, Chaplin to Renoir, Buñuel to Bergman, Clouzot to Cocteau, Capra to Hawks, Guitry to Fellini, sharing analysis and insight as to what made them film legends, and how their work led Truffaut and his fellow directors into classics like The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, and the French New Wave movement. Articulate and candid, The Films in My Life is for everyone who has sat in a dark movie theater and dreamed. “Truffaut brings the same intelligence and grace to the printed page that he projects onto the screen. The Films in My Life provides a rare knowledgeable look at movies and moviemaking.” —Newsday

Patronizing the Public

Patronizing the Public PDF Author: William J. Buxton
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739138367
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
Patronizing the Public: American Philanthropy's Transformation of Culture, Communication, and the Humanities is the first detailed and comprehensive examination of how American philanthropic foundations have shaped numerous fields, including dance, drama, education, film, film-music, folklore, journalism, local history, museums, radio, television, as well as the performing arts and the humanities in general. Drawing on an impressive range of archival and secondary sources, the chapters in the volume give particular attention to the period from the late 1920s to the late 1970s, a crucial time for the development of philanthropic practice. To this end, it examines how patterns and directions of funding have been based on complex negotiations involving philanthropic family members, elite networks, foundation trustees and officers, cultural workers, academics, state officials, corporate interests, and the general public. By addressing both the contours of philanthropic power as well as the processes through which that power has been enacted, it is hoped that this collection will reinforce and amplify the critical study of philanthropy's history.

No End in Sight

No End in Sight PDF Author: Anna Krakus
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 9780822964612
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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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.

Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema

Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema PDF 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.

The Lost Cinema of Mexico

The Lost Cinema of Mexico PDF Author: Olivia Cosentino
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 1683403398
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
The Lost Cinema of Mexico is the first volume to challenge the dismissal of Mexican filmmaking during the 1960s through 1980s, an era long considered a low-budget departure from the artistic quality and international acclaim of the nation’s earlier Golden Age. This pivotal collection examines the critical implications of discovering, uncovering, and recovering forgotten or ignored films. This largely unexamined era of film reveals shifts in Mexican culture, economics, and societal norms as state-sponsored revolutionary nationalism faltered. During this time, movies were widely embraced by the public as a way to make sense of the rapidly changing realities and values connected to Mexico’s modernization. These essays shine a light on many genres that thrived in these decades: rock churros, campy luchador movies, countercultural superocheros, Black melodramas, family films, and Chili Westerns. Redefining a time usually seen as a cinematic “crisis,” this volume offers a new model of the film auteur shaped by productive tension between highbrow aesthetics, industry shortages, and national audiences. It also traces connections from these Mexican films to Latinx, Latin American, and Hollywood cinema at large. A volume in the series Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, edited by Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Juan Carlos Rodríguez Contributors: Brian Price | Carolyn Fornoff | David S. Dalton | Christopher B. Conway | Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou | Ignacio Sánchez Prado | Dolores Tierney | Dr. Olivia Cosentino Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Carceral Fantasies

Carceral Fantasies PDF Author: Alison Griffiths
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541562
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Book Description
A groundbreaking contribution to the study of nontheatrical film exhibition, Carceral Fantasies tells the little-known story of how cinema found a home in the U.S. penitentiary system and how the prison emerged as a setting and narrative trope in modern cinema. Focusing on films shown in prisons before 1935, Alison Griffiths explores the unique experience of viewing cinema while incarcerated and the complex cultural roots of cinematic renderings of prison life. Griffiths considers a diverse mix of cinematic genres, from early actualities and reenactments of notorious executions to reformist exposés of the 1920s. She connects an early fascination with cinematic images of punishment and execution, especially electrocutions, to the attractions of the nineteenth-century carnival electrical wonder show and Phantasmagoria (a ghost show using magic lantern projections and special effects). Griffiths draws upon convict writing, prison annual reports, and the popular press obsession with prison-house cinema to document the integration of film into existing reformist and educational activities and film's psychic extension of flights of fancy undertaken by inmates in their cells. Combining penal history with visual and film studies and theories surrounding media's sensual effects, Carceral Fantasies illuminates how filmic representations of the penal system enacted ideas about modernity, gender, the body, and the public, shaping both the social experience of cinema and the public's understanding of the modern prison.