The Wages of Sin

The Wages of Sin PDF Author: Lea Jacobs
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520207905
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Examines how film censors and producers treated the "fallen woman" or "sex picture" subject.

The Wages of Sin

The Wages of Sin PDF Author: Lea Jacobs
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520207905
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Examines how film censors and producers treated the "fallen woman" or "sex picture" subject.

The World According to Hollywood, 1918-1939

The World According to Hollywood, 1918-1939 PDF Author: Ruth Vasey
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299151942
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
The most visible cultural institution on earth between the World Wars, the Hollywood movie industry tried to satisfy worldwide audiences of vastly different cultural, religious, and political persuasions. The World According to Hollywood shows how the industry's self-regulation shaped the content of films to make them salable in as many markets as possible. In the process, Hollywood created an idiosyncratic vision of the world that was glamorous and exotic, but also oddly narrow. Ruth Vasey shows how the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), by implementing such strategies as the industry's Production Code, ensured that domestic and foreign distribution took place with a minimum of censorship or consumer resistance. Drawing upon MPPDA archives, studio records, trade papers, and the records of the U.S. Department of Commerce, Vasey reveals the ways the MPPDA influenced the representation of sex, violence, religion, foreign and domestic politics, corporate capitalism, ethnic minorities, and the conduct of professional classes. Vasey is the first scholar to document fully how the demands of the global market frequently dictated film content and created the movies' homogenized picture of social and racial characteristics, in both urban America and the world beyond. She uncovers telling evidence of scripts and treatments that were abandoned before or during the course of production because of content that might offend foreign markets. Among the fascinating points she discusses is Hollywood's frequent use of imaginary countries as story locales, resulting from a deliberate business policy of avoiding realistic depictions of actual countries. She argues that foreign governments perceived movies not just as articles of trade, but as potential commercial and political emissaries of the United States. Just as Hollywood had to persuade its domestic audiences that its products were morally sound, its domination of world markets depended on its ability to create a culturally and politically acceptable product.

The Decline of the Cinema

The Decline of the Cinema PDF Author: John Spraos
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317928458
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
Between 1952 and 1962, when this book was originally published, the number of people visiting British cinemas had fallen by nearly two thirds and was little more than half the pre-war total. Nearly 1500 of the 4500 cinemas functioning in 1955 had closed five years later, and the author here predicts a further substantial fall. The causes of this drastic decline are traced to the competition of television but also to the dramatic halving of the number of new American films and to the difficulty of transferring a cinema’s ‘congregation’ when it is closed. This decline has few parallels in recent times and in conjunction with a disproportionate and unexpected increase in the price of seats presents a fascinating study for the economist, which the author fully exploits. But the film industry is of general interest so that the author’s conclusions and his social recommendations will appeal to the general reader as well as those in the industry.

Pre-Code Hollywood

Pre-Code Hollywood PDF Author: Thomas Doherty
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231500128
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
Pre-Code Hollywood explores the fascinating period in American motion picture history from 1930 to 1934 when the commandments of the Production Code Administration were violated with impunity in a series of wildly unconventional films—a time when censorship was lax and Hollywood made the most of it. Though more unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre than what came afterwards, the films of the period do indeed have the look of Hollywood cinema—but the moral terrain is so off-kilter that they seem imported from a parallel universe. In a sense, Doherty avers, the films of pre-Code Hollywood are from another universe. They lay bare what Hollywood under the Production Code attempted to cover up and push offscreen: sexual liaisons unsanctified by the laws of God or man, marriage ridiculed and redefined, ethnic lines crossed and racial barriers ignored, economic injustice exposed and political corruption assumed, vice unpunished and virtue unrewarded—in sum, pretty much the raw stuff of American culture, unvarnished and unveiled. No other book has yet sought to interpret the films and film-related meanings of the pre-Code era—what defined the period, why it ended, and what its relationship was to the country as a whole during the darkest years of the Great Depression... and afterward.

Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema

Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema PDF Author: Marcelline Block
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443804398
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
Marcelline Block’s Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema breaks new ground in exploring feminist film theory. It is a wide-ranging collection (re)visiting important theoretical questions as well as offering close analyses of films produced in the United States, France, England, Belgium, and Russia. This anthology investigates exciting areas of research for critical inquiry into film and gender studies as well as feminist, queer, and postfeminist theories, and treats film texts from Marguerite Duras to 21st century horror films; from Agnès Varda’s 2007 installation at the Panthéon to the post-Soviet Russian filmmakers Aleksei Balabanov and Valerii Todorovskii; from Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof to Sofia Coppola’s postfeminist trilogy; from Chantal Akerman’s “transhistorical, transgressive and transgendered gaze” to the “quantum gaze” in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park; from Hitchcock’s “good-looking blondes” to the career-woman-in-peril thriller, among others. According to the semiotician Marshall Blonsky of the New School University in New York, “given the breadth of the editor’s choices, this volume makes a splendid contribution to feminist and cinematic fields, as well as cultural and media studies, postmodernism, and postfeminism. It lends readers ‘new eyes’ to view canonical and other film texts.” David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics, states that this anthology “should be required reading for students and scholars, among other readers interested in the interaction of cinema with contemporary culture.” Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship is prefaced by Jean-Michel Rabaté’s brilliant essay, “Mulvey was the First…”

Everything Is Cinema

Everything Is Cinema PDF Author: Richard Brody
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429924314
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 721

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Book Description
From New Yorker film critic Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard presents a "serious-minded and meticulously detailed . . . account of the lifelong artistic journey" of one of the most influential filmmakers of our age (The New York Times). When Jean-Luc Godard wed the ideals of filmmaking to the realities of autobiography and current events, he changed the nature of cinema. Unlike any earlier films, Godard's work shifts fluidly from fiction to documentary, from criticism to art. The man himself also projects shifting images—cultural hero, fierce loner, shrewd businessman. Hailed by filmmakers as a—if not the—key influence on cinema, Godard has entered the modern canon, a figure as mysterious as he is indispensable. In Everything Is Cinema, critic Richard Brody has amassed hundreds of interviews to demystify the elusive director and his work. Paying as much attention to Godard's technical inventions as to the political forces of the postwar world, Brody traces an arc from the director's early critical writing, through his popular success with Breathless, to the grand vision of his later years. He vividly depicts Godard's wealthy conservative family, his fluid politics, and his tumultuous dealings with women and fellow New Wave filmmakers. Everything Is Cinema confirms Godard's greatness and shows decisively that his films have left their mark on screens everywhere.

Postcolonial Cinema Studies

Postcolonial Cinema Studies PDF Author: Sandra Ponzanesi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136592040
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
This collection of essays foregrounds the work of filmmakers in theorizing and comparing postcolonial conditions, recasting debates in both cinema and postcolonial studies. Postcolonial cinema is presented, not as a rigid category, but as an optic through which to address questions of postcolonial historiography, geography, subjectivity, and epistemology. Current circumstances of migration and immigration, militarization, economic exploitation, racial and religious conflict, enactments of citizenship, and cultural self-representation have deep roots in colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial histories. Contributors deeply engage the tense asymmetries bequeathed to the contemporary world by the multiple,diverse, and overlapping histories of European, Soviet, U.S., and multi-national imperial ventures. With interdisciplinary expertise, they discover and explore the conceptual temporalities and spatialities of postcoloniality, with an emphasis on the politics of form, the ‘postcolonial aesthetics’ through which filmmakers challenge themselves and their viewers to move beyond national and imperial imaginaries. Contributors include: Jude G. Akudinobi, Kanika Batra, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Shohini Chaudhuri, Julie F. Codell, Sabine Doran, Hamish Ford, Claudia Hoffmann, Anikó Imre, Priya Jaikumar, Mariam B. Lam, Paulo de Medeiros, Sandra Ponzanesi, Richard Rice, Mireille Rosello and Marguerite Waller.

Make Your Story a Movie

Make Your Story a Movie PDF Author: John Robert Marlow
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250001838
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
$50 Billion of Advice in One Book* Have you ever wondered why some books and stories are adapted into movies, and others aren't? Or wished you could sit down and pick the brains of the people whose stories have been adapted--or the screenwriters, producers, and directors who adapted them? Author John Robert Marlow has done it for you. He spoke to book authors, playwrights, comic book creators and publishers, as well as Hollywood screenwriters, producers and directors responsible for adapting fictional and true stories into Emmy-winning TV shows, Oscar-winning films, billion-dollar megahits and smaller independents. Then he talked to the entertainment attorneys who made the deals. He came away with a unique understanding of adaptations--an understanding he shares in this book: which stories make good source material (and why); what Hollywood wants (and doesn't); what you can (and can't) get in a movie deal; how to write and pitch your story to maximize the chances of a Hollywood adaptation--and how much (and when) you can expect to be paid. *This book contains the distilled experience of creators, storytellers and others whose works have earned over $50 billion worldwide. Whether you're looking to sell film rights, adapt your own story (alone or with help), or option and adapt someone else's property--this book is for you.

Pirate Cinema

Pirate Cinema PDF Author: Cory Doctorow
Publisher: Tor Teen
ISBN: 1429943181
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother, Cory Doctorow, comes Pirate Cinema, a new tale of a brilliant hacker runaway who finds himself standing up to tyranny. Trent McCauley is sixteen, brilliant, and obsessed with one thing: making movies on his computer by reassembling footage from popular films he downloads from the net. In the dystopian near-future Britain where Trent is growing up, this is more illegal than ever; the punishment for being caught three times is that your entire household's access to the internet is cut off for a year, with no appeal. Trent's too clever for that too happen. Except it does, and it nearly destroys his family. Shamed and shattered, Trent runs away to London, where he slowly learns the ways of staying alive on the streets. This brings him in touch with a demimonde of artists and activists who are trying to fight a new bill that will criminalize even more harmless internet creativity, making felons of millions of British citizens at a stroke. Things look bad. Parliament is in power of a few wealthy media conglomerates. But the powers-that-be haven't entirely reckoned with the power of a gripping movie to change people's minds.... At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Music and Sound in Silent Film

Music and Sound in Silent Film PDF Author: Ruth Barton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351995863
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Despite their name, the silent films of the early cinematic era were frequently accompanied by music and other sound elements of many kinds, including mechanical instruments, live performers, and audience sing-alongs. The 12 chapters in this concise book explore the multitude of functions filled by music in the rapidly changing context of the silent film era, as the concept of cinema itself developed. Examples are drawn from around the globe and across the history of silent film, both during the classic era of silent film and later uses of the silent format. With contributors drawn from film studies and music disciplines, and including both senior and emerging scholars, Music and Sound in Silent Film offers an essential introduction to the origins of film music and the cinematic art form.