The Direct Cinema of David and Albert Maysles

The Direct Cinema of David and Albert Maysles PDF Author: Jonathan B. Vogels
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809386011
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Boldly signifying the cultural issues of the 1960s and 1970s in groundbreaking pieces such as Grey Gardens, Gimme Shelter, and Showman, filmmakers and brothers David and Albert Maysles used an approach to documentary film that involved spontaneous observation of naturally occurring events. With no rehearsed footage and no preconceived plots, their revolutionary work eschewed the authoritative voice-over narrator, didactic scripts, and the traditional problem-and-solution format used by the majority of their predecessors in the genre and duly influenced subsequent directors in both fiction and nonfiction film. Their collaboration from 1962 until David’s death in 1987 wrought thirteen major works in which the brothers critiqued the concept of celebrity with unglamorous footage of iconic figures, explored how commercialism hinders communication, and questioned the possibility of seeing anything clearly in a world abounding with both real and constructed images. Jonathan B. Vogels outlines how the Maysles brothers blended a unique amalgam of direct cinema characteristics, a modern humanist aesthetic, and a collaborative working process that included other directors and editors. Looking at the films as both shapers and reflections of American culture, he points out that the works offer insights into a wide range of contemporary topics including materialism, celebrity, modern art, and the American family. In addition to describing the changes in technology that made direct cinema possible, Vogels provides careful, scene-by-scene analyses that allow for a consideration of the Maysles brothers’ films as films, a tactic not frequently employed in nonfiction film studies.

The Direct Cinema of David and Albert Maysles

The Direct Cinema of David and Albert Maysles PDF Author: Jonathan B. Vogels
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809386011
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Boldly signifying the cultural issues of the 1960s and 1970s in groundbreaking pieces such as Grey Gardens, Gimme Shelter, and Showman, filmmakers and brothers David and Albert Maysles used an approach to documentary film that involved spontaneous observation of naturally occurring events. With no rehearsed footage and no preconceived plots, their revolutionary work eschewed the authoritative voice-over narrator, didactic scripts, and the traditional problem-and-solution format used by the majority of their predecessors in the genre and duly influenced subsequent directors in both fiction and nonfiction film. Their collaboration from 1962 until David’s death in 1987 wrought thirteen major works in which the brothers critiqued the concept of celebrity with unglamorous footage of iconic figures, explored how commercialism hinders communication, and questioned the possibility of seeing anything clearly in a world abounding with both real and constructed images. Jonathan B. Vogels outlines how the Maysles brothers blended a unique amalgam of direct cinema characteristics, a modern humanist aesthetic, and a collaborative working process that included other directors and editors. Looking at the films as both shapers and reflections of American culture, he points out that the works offer insights into a wide range of contemporary topics including materialism, celebrity, modern art, and the American family. In addition to describing the changes in technology that made direct cinema possible, Vogels provides careful, scene-by-scene analyses that allow for a consideration of the Maysles brothers’ films as films, a tactic not frequently employed in nonfiction film studies.

1968 and Global Cinema

1968 and Global Cinema PDF Author: Christina Gerhardt
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814342949
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
The volume is ideal for graduate and undergraduate courses on the long sixties, political cinema, 1968, and new waves in art history, cultural studies, and film and media studies.

Salesman

Salesman PDF Author: J.M. Tyree
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838717927
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
Selected by the Library of Congress as one of the most significant American films ever made, Salesman (1966–9) is a landmark in non-fiction cinema, equivalent in its impact and influence to Truman Capote's 'non-fiction novel' In Cold Blood. The film follows a team of travelling Bible salesmen on the road in Massachusetts, Chicago, and Florida, where the American dream of self-reliant entrepreneurship goes badly wrong for protagonist Paul Brennan. Long acknowledged as a high-water mark of the 'direct cinema' movement, this ruefully comic and quietly devastating film was the first masterpiece of Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, the trio who would go on to produce The Rolling Stones documentary, Gimme Shelter (1970). Based on the premise that films drawn from ordinary life could compete with Hollywood extravaganzas, Salesman was critical in shaping 'the documentary feature'. A novel cinema-going experience for its time, the film was independently produced, designed for theatrical release and presented without voiceover narration, interviews, or talking heads. Working with innovative handheld equipment, and experimenting with eclectic methods and a collaborative ethos, the Maysles brothers and Zwerin produced a carefully-orchestrated narrative drama fashioned from unexpected episodes. J. M. Tyree suggests that Salesman can be understood as a case study of non-fiction cinema, raising perennial questions about reality and performance. His analysis provides an historical and cultural context for the film, considering its place in world cinema and its critical representations of dearly-held national myths. The style of Salesman still makes other documentaries look static and immobile, while the film's allegiances to everyday subjects and working people indelibly marked the cinema. Tyree's insightful study also includes an exclusive exchange with Albert Maysles about the film.

Cinema and Secularism

Cinema and Secularism PDF Author: Mark Cauchi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501388851
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Cinema and Secularism is the first collection to make the relationship between cinema and secularism thematic, utilizing a number of different methodological approaches to examine their identification and differentiation across film theory, film aesthetics, film history, and throughout global cinema. The emergence of moving images and the history of cinema historically coincide with the emergence of secularism as a concept and discourse. More than historically coinciding, however, cinema and secularism would seem to have-and many contemporary theorists and critics seem to assume-a more intrinsic, almost ontological connection to each other. While early film theorists and critics explicitly addressed questions about secularism, religion, and cinema, once the study of film was professionalized and secularized in the Western academy in both film studies and religious studies, explicit and critical attention to the relationship between cinema and secularism rapidly declined. Indeed, if one canvases film scholarship today, one will find barely any works dedicated to thinking critically about the relationship between cinema and secularism. Extending the recent “secular turn” in the humanities and social sciences, Cinema and Secularism provokes critical reflection on its titular concepts. Making contributions to theory, philosophy, criticism, and history, the chapters in this pioneering volume collectively interrogate the assumption that cinema is secular, how secularism is conceived and related to cinema differently in different film cultures, and whether the world is disenchanted or enchanted in cinema. Coming from intellectually diverse backgrounds in film studies, religious studies, and philosophy, the interdisciplinary contributors to this book cover films and traditions of thought from America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia. In these ways, Cinema and Secularism opens new areas of inquiry in the study of film and contributes to the ongoing interrogation of secularism more broadly.

Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy

Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy PDF Author: Mathew Abbott
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748699910
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
A deflationary, anti-theoretical film-philosophy through the cinema of Abbas KiarostamiMathew Abbott presents a powerful new film-philosophy through the cinema of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Mathew Abbott argues that Kiarostamis films carry out cinematic thinking: they do not just illustrate pre-existing philosophical ideas, but do real philosophical work.Crossing the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, he draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Alice Crary, NoAl Carroll, Giorgio Agamben, and Martin Heidegger, bringing out the thinking at work in Kiarostamis most recent films: Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, ABC Africa, Ten, Five, Shirin, Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love.

Emotions, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience

Emotions, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience PDF Author: Robert Sinnerbrink
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800731469
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
Since the early 1990s, phenomenology and cognitivism have become two of the most influential approaches to film theory. Yet far from being at odds with each other, both approaches offer important insights on our subjective experience of cinema. Emotions, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience explores how these two approaches might work together to create a philosophy of film that is both descriptively rich and theoretically productive by addressing the key relationship between cinematic experience, emotions, and ethics.

Darcy Lange, Videography as Social Practice

Darcy Lange, Videography as Social Practice PDF Author: Mercedes Vicente
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031369033
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
The Videography of Darcy Lange is a critical monograph of a pivotal figure in early analogue video. Trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art, Lange developed a socially engaged video practice with remarkable studies of people at work in industrial, farming, and teaching contexts that drew from conceptual art, social documentary and structuralist filmmaking. Lange saw in portable video a democratic tool for communication and social transformation, continuing the legacy of the revolutionary avant-garde projects that merged art with social life and turned audiences into producers. This book follows Lange's trajectory from his early observational studies to the crisis of representation and socially engaged video and activism, as it is shaped by, and resists, the artistic, cultural and political preoccupations of the 1970s and 1980s. It strikes a balance between being a monographic account providing a close analysis of Lange's oeuvre and drawing from unpublished archival materials—a sort of catalogue raisonné—whilst maintaining a breadth with theoretical discourses around the themes of labour and class, education, and indigenous struggles central to his work. The book's frameworks of Conceptual Art, structuralist and ethnographic film theory, social documentary and the critique of representation, video as social practice and the notion of 'feedback', participatory socially engaged art and postcolonial and indigenous theory,—expand our understanding of video outside the predominant structuralist tendencies. Lange's transnational and nomadic career introduces notions of alterity and challenges nationalistic accounts that excluded him in the past.

The Place of Poetics within Documentary Filmmaking

The Place of Poetics within Documentary Filmmaking PDF Author: Keith Marley
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527518736
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
This collection aims to give insight to the reader as to how poetic approaches to documentary filmmaking have helped to develop the documentary form into a rich and diverse way of representing the real world in film. As such, it is the aesthetics of documentary filmmaking that becomes the primary focus of discussion within this collection. The majority of the chapters are written by documentary filmmakers who give insight into how poetics have influenced their own approach to documentary filmmaking, while other chapters are written by film scholars who analyse the work of others, in order to uncover how poetics are manifested in existing documentary films. This book will be of interest to those who produce documentary films, as well as those who have an interest in the work of other documentary filmmakers.

The Sixties

The Sixties PDF Author: Paul Monaco
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520238044
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
This book covers the 1960's as part of the definitive history of American cinema from its emergence in the 1800s to the present day.

Narrating American Gender and Ethnic Identities

Narrating American Gender and Ethnic Identities PDF Author: Aleksandra M. Różalska
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443850209
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Narrating American Gender and Ethnic Identities investigates two major issues within contemporary American Studies: cultural representations of various minorities (ethnic, religious, sexual) and of women in intersectional contexts of race, class, and sexuality. The first part of the volume, “Gender and Sexuality in Film and Literature”, analyzes different film genres and literary accounts in reference to those aspects of gender and sexuality that are related to identity. Various cultural texts are discussed from perspectives deriving from feminist, gender, and LGBT studies, intersectionality theories, as well as film studies. The second part, “American Experiences of Ethnic Diversity”, dwells upon ethnic and racial problems of American multicultural society and complex interrelationships between the dominant and the marginalized (the center and the periphery). It also focuses on the issue of one’s “(un)fitting” into the dominant culture, mainstream politics, and canon. The book is mostly addressed to scholars and students of American Studies but will also be noteworthy to anybody interested in the United States, literature, and the media. Selected chapters of this volume can be used as a point of departure for discussions – both scholarly and student – on contemporary challenges to the idea of multiculturalism, the complex role of various intersections (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender, age, sexuality, religion, class, dis/ability, etc.) in shaping minority subjectivities, as well as feminist responses to and reading of dominant women’s literary and filmic representations.