Shot/Countershot

Shot/Countershot PDF Author: Lucy Fischer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400859956
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Do films made by women comprise a "counter-cinema" radically different from the dominant tradition? Feminist film critics contend that women filmmakers do present from a distinctive vision, or "countershot," and Lucy Fischer argues persuasively for this view. In rich detail this book relates the idea of a counter-cinema to theories of intertextuality and locates it in the broad context of recent feminist film, literary, and art criticism. Fischer also employs an original critical model of the dialogue between women's cinema and film tradition in the very organization of the book. Each chapter discusses a theme or genre (such as the musical, the "double," the myth of womanhood, and the figure of the actress), counterposing two or more works--from the feminist and from the dominant cinema. What emerges is a fascinating picture of a women's film tradition that not only addresses but reworks and remakes the mainstream cinema. Fischer successfully combines two main strains of feminist criticism: the deconstructive critique of the dominant culture from a feminist standpoint and the study of a feminist counterculture. Examining films from Persona and The Lady from Shanghai to Girlfriends and Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness, the book offers fresh interpretations of individual works and can, incidentally, serve as an introduction to the field of feminist film criticism. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Shot/Countershot

Shot/Countershot PDF Author: Lucy Fischer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400859956
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Do films made by women comprise a "counter-cinema" radically different from the dominant tradition? Feminist film critics contend that women filmmakers do present from a distinctive vision, or "countershot," and Lucy Fischer argues persuasively for this view. In rich detail this book relates the idea of a counter-cinema to theories of intertextuality and locates it in the broad context of recent feminist film, literary, and art criticism. Fischer also employs an original critical model of the dialogue between women's cinema and film tradition in the very organization of the book. Each chapter discusses a theme or genre (such as the musical, the "double," the myth of womanhood, and the figure of the actress), counterposing two or more works--from the feminist and from the dominant cinema. What emerges is a fascinating picture of a women's film tradition that not only addresses but reworks and remakes the mainstream cinema. Fischer successfully combines two main strains of feminist criticism: the deconstructive critique of the dominant culture from a feminist standpoint and the study of a feminist counterculture. Examining films from Persona and The Lady from Shanghai to Girlfriends and Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness, the book offers fresh interpretations of individual works and can, incidentally, serve as an introduction to the field of feminist film criticism. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Modernist Montage

Modernist Montage PDF Author: P. Adams Sitney
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231071833
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Tracing the history of modernism in cinema, this study provides readings of a range of classic films made between 1925 and 1980 by such filmmakers as Carl Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson. It argues that the act of vision and visual experience are problematized in literary modernism.

In the Company of Women

In the Company of Women PDF Author: Karen Hollinger
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9781452903545
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
From Desperately Seeking Susan, Steel Magnolias, and Thelma & Louise to Desert Hearts, Girl Friends, and Passion Fish, mainstream cinema has seen a wave of films focusing on friendships between women. In tire Company of Women is the first critical work to investigate the recent resurgence of this variety of the "woman's film". Examining the female friendship film since the 1970s and setting it against older films of the 1930s and 1940s, such as Mildred Pierce and Stella Dallas, Karen Hollinger studies the character of the films themselves and how they speak to female viewers. She argues that while many of these films initially seem to affirm the power of female friendship and reject traditional images of women, most of them ultimately fall back on conventional feminine roles. Hollinger argues that the female friendship film, by attempting to assimilate into the mainstream, uses ideas from the women's movement, like female autonomy and sisterhood, that are particularly susceptible to compromise. It is this blend of empowering and conservative elements that makes the female friendship film neither a true challenge to the status quo nor a mere confirmation of dominant ideology but rather a multifaceted cinematic form that reflects both of these strains. Hollinger considers all of the major issues in feminist film criticism -- from audience reception to the identification with characters, from sexuality to racial identity. Engaging and provocative, In the Company of Women is an entertaining and enlightening account of one of contemporary cinema's most vital genres.

Harun Farocki

Harun Farocki PDF Author: Thomas Elsaesser
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 905356635X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Filmmaker, film essayist, installation artist, writer: the Berlin artist Harun Farocki has devoted his life to the power of images. Over the thirty-plus years of his career, Farocki has explored not the images of life but rather the life of images that surrounds us in newspapers, cinema, books, television, and advertising. Harun Farocki examines, from different critical perspectives, his vast oeuvre, which includes three feature films, critical media pieces, children’s television features, “learning films” in the tradition of Brecht, and installation pieces. Interviews, a selection of Farocki’s own writings, and an annotated filmography complete a valuable biography of this pioneering artist and his legendary career.

Transcultural Cinema

Transcultural Cinema PDF Author: David MacDougall
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691012346
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
David MacDougall is a pivotal figure in the development of ethnographic cinema and visual anthropology. As a filmmaker, he has directed in Africa, Australia, India, and Europe. His prize-winning films (many made jointly with his wife, Judith MacDougall) include The Wedding Camels, Lorang's Way, To Live with Herds, A Wife among Wives, Takeover, PhotoWallahs, and Tempus de Baristas. As a theorist, he articulates central issues in the relation of film to anthropology, and is one of the few documentary filmmakers who writes extensively on these concerns. The essays collected here address, for instance, the difference between films and written texts and between the position of the filmmaker and that of the anthropological writer. In fact, these works provide an overview of the history of visual anthropology, as well as commentaries on specific subjects, such as point-of-view and subjectivity, reflexivity, the use of subtitles, and the role of the cinema subject. Refreshingly free of jargon, each piece belongs very much to the tradition of the essay in its personal engagement with exploring difficult issues. The author ultimately disputes the view that ethnographic filmmaking is merely a visual form of anthropology, maintaining instead that it is a radical anthropological practice, which challenges many of the basic assumptions of the discipline of anthropology itself. Although influential among filmmakers and critics, some of these essays were published in small journals and have been until now difficult to find. The three longest pieces, including the title essay, are new.

Cinematic Hypertext

Cinematic Hypertext PDF Author: Clara Mancini
Publisher: IOS Press
ISBN: 9781586035136
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Hypertext was going to revolutionize the very way in which we read and write. However, while hypertext's non-linearity has been embraced by enthusiasts keen to experiment with interactive literary genres, to date, the non-linear medium has made little impact on scholarly discourse and argumentation, which have traditionally heavily relied on linearity. Is this because hypertextual narrative is simply incompatible with the requirements of certain genres? Or could it be that hypertext's essential characteristics have yet to be fully understood and exploited? Cinematic Hypertext is for theorists and designers ready to consider a new paradigm for framing the medium and its characteristics: film. Clara Mancini guides the reader through an eclectic mix of ideas from technology, psycholinguistics, visual design, narratology and film theory. En route, Cinematic Hypertext offers an intellectual workout for media theorists and coherence relations scholars, with analyses of cinematic grammars, film clips, hypertexts, and hypertext systems, grounded in an underlying theory of Cognitive Coherence Relations.Those ready to build experimental systems will find design principles and guidelines, and the evidence reported will be of particular interest to those wondering if the theory behind cinematic hypertext is valid empirically. The result is a novel way of thinking about hypertext which complements existing hypertext paradigms, with Mancini inviting the reader to design hypertexts capable of communicating through a visual language inspired by the power of cinema.

A Dictionary of Film Studies

A Dictionary of Film Studies PDF Author: Annette Kuhn
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191034657
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
Written by experts in the field, this dictionary covers all aspects of film studies, including terms, concepts, debates, and movements in film theory and criticism, national, international and transnational cinemas, film history, film movements and genres, film industry organizations and practices, and key technical terms and concepts in 500 detailed entries. Most entries also feature recommendations for further reading and a large number also have web links. The web links are listed and regularly updated on a companion website that complements the printed book. The dictionary is international in its approach, covering national cinemas, genres, and film movements from around the world such as the Nouvelle Vague, Latin American cinema, the Latsploitation film, Bollywood, Yiddish cinema, the spaghetti western, and World cinema. The most up-to-date dictionary of its kind available, this is a must-have for all students of film studies and ancillary subjects, as well as an informative read for cinephiles and for anyone with an interest in films and film criticism.

Closed Circuits

Closed Circuits PDF Author: Garrett Stewart
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022620149X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Long before the 2013 NSA scandal about electronic surveillance, narrative cinema had become a weathervane of social phobias in regard to national security, drawing on a long history of surveillance both as theme and as audiovisual machination that saw its first heyday with the Weimar cinema of Fritz Lang. This book's analytical return to apparatus theory, and especially to suture theory's contrapuntal logic of seeing unseen, contributes to a new view of digital optics in this regard: one of contemporary cinema's most urgent cultural as well as technological flashpoints.

The Eloquent Screen

The Eloquent Screen PDF Author: Gilberto Perez
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145295965X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 564

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Book Description
A lifetime of cinematic writing culminates in this breathtaking statement on film’s unique ability to move us Cinema is commonly hailed as “the universal language,” but how does it communicate so effortlessly across cultural and linguistic borders? In The Eloquent Screen, influential film critic Gilberto Perez makes a capstone statement on the powerful ways in which film acts on our minds and senses. Drawing on a lifetime’s worth of viewing and re-viewing, Perez invokes a dizzying array of masters past and present—including Chaplin, Ford, Kiarostami, Eisenstein, Malick, Mizoguchi, Haneke, Hitchcock, and Godard—to explore the transaction between filmmaker and audience. He begins by explaining how film fits into the rhetorical tradition of persuasion and argumentation. Next, Perez explores how film embodies the central tropes of rhetoric––metaphor, metonymy, allegory, and synecdoche––and concludes with a thrilling account of cinema’s spectacular capacity to create relationships of identification with its audiences. Although there have been several attempts to develop a poetics of film, there has been no sustained attempt to set forth a rhetoric of film—one that bridges aesthetics and audience. Grasping that challenge, The Eloquent Screen shows how cinema, as the consummate contemporary art form, establishes a thoroughly modern rhetoric in which different points of view are brought into clear focus.

Reading Joss Whedon

Reading Joss Whedon PDF Author: Rhonda V. Wilcox
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815610386
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
In an age when geek chic has come to define mainstream pop culture, few writers and producers inspire more admiration and response than Joss Whedon. From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Much Ado About Nothing, from Dr. Horrible’s Sing–Along Blog to The Avengers, the works of Whedon have been the focus of increasing academic attention. This collection of articles represents some of the best work covering a wide array of topics that clarify Whedon’s importance, including considerations of narrative and visual techniques, myth construction, symbolism, gender, heroism, and the business side of television. The editors argue that Whedon’s work is of both social and aesthetic significance; that he creates “canonical television.” He is a master of his artistic medium and has managed this success on broadcast networks rather than on cable. From the focus on a single episode to the exploration of an entire season, from the discussion of a particular narrative technique to a recounting of the history of Whedon studies, this collection will both entertain and educate those exploring Whedon scholarship for the first time and those planning to teach a course on his works.