Yiddish Cinema

Yiddish Cinema PDF Author: Jonah Corne
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143849419X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
In this book, Jonah Corne and Monika Vrečar offer a conceptually innovative reexamination of Yiddish cinema, a crucial yet little-known diasporic phenomenon that enjoyed its "golden age" in the mid- to late 1930s. Yiddish cinema, they argue, exhibits a distinctive fascination with media forms, technologies, and institutions, and with relationality writ large. What stands behind this communication obsession, as it might be understood, is the films' engagement both with Judaic ideals and with a series of Jewish sociohistorical predicaments of troubled communication (immigration, displacement, the breakdown of tradition, and so on) that the films seek to reflect. Accordingly, the authors create a resonant conversation between Yiddish cinema, populated by an endless procession of disconnected characters ardently striving to rejoin the world of communication, and the brilliant yet underappreciated ideas of pioneering Czech-Jewish media theorist Vilém Flusser (1920–1991), who escaped Nazi persecution and built the first part of his intellectual career in Brazil. Indeed, the authors claim that the popular art of Yiddish cinema articulates in dramatic terms a version of the central Flusserian hypothesis that "the structure of communication is the infrastructure of human reality" and, by doing so, embodies a remarkable Jewish media theory "from below." Films discussed include The Wandering Jew (1933), The Dybbuk (1937), Where is My Child? (1937), A Little Letter to Mother (1938), Kol Nidre (1939), Motel the Operator (1939), Tevye (1939), The Living Orphan (1939), and Long Is the Road (1948).

Yiddish Cinema

Yiddish Cinema PDF Author: Jonah Corne
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143849419X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this book, Jonah Corne and Monika Vrečar offer a conceptually innovative reexamination of Yiddish cinema, a crucial yet little-known diasporic phenomenon that enjoyed its "golden age" in the mid- to late 1930s. Yiddish cinema, they argue, exhibits a distinctive fascination with media forms, technologies, and institutions, and with relationality writ large. What stands behind this communication obsession, as it might be understood, is the films' engagement both with Judaic ideals and with a series of Jewish sociohistorical predicaments of troubled communication (immigration, displacement, the breakdown of tradition, and so on) that the films seek to reflect. Accordingly, the authors create a resonant conversation between Yiddish cinema, populated by an endless procession of disconnected characters ardently striving to rejoin the world of communication, and the brilliant yet underappreciated ideas of pioneering Czech-Jewish media theorist Vilém Flusser (1920–1991), who escaped Nazi persecution and built the first part of his intellectual career in Brazil. Indeed, the authors claim that the popular art of Yiddish cinema articulates in dramatic terms a version of the central Flusserian hypothesis that "the structure of communication is the infrastructure of human reality" and, by doing so, embodies a remarkable Jewish media theory "from below." Films discussed include The Wandering Jew (1933), The Dybbuk (1937), Where is My Child? (1937), A Little Letter to Mother (1938), Kol Nidre (1939), Motel the Operator (1939), Tevye (1939), The Living Orphan (1939), and Long Is the Road (1948).

New York’s Yiddish Theater

New York’s Yiddish Theater PDF Author: Edna Nahshon
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541074
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
In the early decades of the twentieth century, a vibrant theatrical culture took shape on New York City's Lower East Side. Original dramas, comedies, musicals, and vaudeville, along with sophisticated productions of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov, were innovatively staged for crowds that rivaled the audiences on Broadway. Though these productions were in Yiddish and catered to Eastern European, Jewish audiences (the largest immigrant group in the city at the time), their artistic innovations, energetic style, and engagement with politics and the world around them came to influence all facets of the American stage. Vividly illustrated and with essays from leading historians and critics, this book recounts the heyday of "Yiddish Broadway" and its vital contribution to American Jewish life and crossover to the broader American culture. These performances grappled with Jewish nationalism, labor relations, women's rights, religious observance, acculturation, and assimilation. They reflected a range of genres, from tear-jerkers to experimental theater. The artists who came of age in this world include Stella Adler, Eddie Cantor, Jerry Lewis, Sophie Tucker, Mel Brooks, and Joan Rivers. The story of New York's Yiddish theater is a tale of creativity and legacy and of immigrants who, in the process of becoming Americans, had an enormous impact on the country's cultural and artistic development.

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.

Bridge of Light

Bridge of Light PDF Author: J. Hoberman
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1584658703
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
The definitive history of Yiddish cinema returns to print with additional material

Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor's Son

Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor's Son PDF Author: Shalom Aleichem
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Three Minutes in Poland

Three Minutes in Poland PDF Author: Glenn Kurtz
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374276773
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
"The author's search for the annihilated Polish community captured in his grandfather's 1938 home movie. Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome color film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community--an entire culture--that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four-year journey to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His search takes him across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; to archives, film preservation laboratories, and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield. Ultimately, Kurtz locates seven living survivors from this lost town, including an eighty-six-year-old man who appears in the film as a thirteen-year-old boy. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the sole remaining record of a vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a riveting exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival--a monument to a lost world"--

Movie-Made Jews

Movie-Made Jews PDF Author: Helene Meyers
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978821905
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Movie-Made Jews focuses on a rich, usable American Jewish cinematic tradition. This tradition includes fiction and documentary films that make Jews through antisemitism, Holocaust indirection, and discontent with assimilation. It prominently features the unapologetic assertion of Jewishness, queerness, and alliances across race and religion. Author Helene Meyers shows that as we go to our local theater, attend a Jewish film festival, play a DVD, watch streaming videos, Jewishness becomes part of the multicultural mosaic rather than collapsing into a generic whiteness or being represented as a life apart. This engagingly-written book demonstrates that a Jewish movie is neither just a movie nor for Jews only. With incisive analysis, Movie-Made Jews challenges the assumption that American Jewish cinema is a cinema of impoverishment and assimilation. While it’s a truism that Jews make movies, this book brings into focus the diverse ways movies make Jews.

A Dictionary of Film Studies

A Dictionary of Film Studies PDF Author: Annette Kuhn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192568043
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 723

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Book Description
A Dictionary of Film Studies covers all aspects of its discipline as it is currently taught at undergraduate level. Offering exhaustive and authoritative coverage, this A-Z is written by experts in the field, and covers terms, concepts, debates, and movements in film theory and criticism; national, international, and transnational cinemas; film history, movements, and genres; film industry organizations and practices; and key technical terms and concepts. Since its first publication in 2012, the dictionary has been updated to incorporate over 40 new entries, including computer games and film, disability, ecocinema, identity, portmanteau film, Practice as Research, and film in Vietnam. Moreover, numerous revisions have been made to existing entries to account for developments in the discipline, and changes to film institutions more generally. Indices of films and filmmakers mentioned in the text are included for easy access to relevant entries. The dictionary also has 13 feature articles on popular topics and terms, revised and informative bibliographies for most entries, and more than 100 web links to supplement the text.

Israeli Bourekas Films

Israeli Bourekas Films PDF Author: Rami Kimchi
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253063434
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
A genre of comic melodramas produced in the 1960s and '70s, Bourekas films are among the most popular films ever made in Israel. In Israeli Bourekas Films, author and filmmaker Rami Kimchi sets out a history of Bourekas films and discusses their origin. Kimchi considers the representation of Sephardi or Mizrahi Jews in the films, noting that the material culture reflected in the the films presented a culture that was closer to the European Yiddish culture than to the Middle Eastern world of the Mizrahim. Kimchi reflects on the enormous popularity and commercial success of Bourekas films, uncovers how they were made, who made them and why, and discusses the impact of the films on Israeli cinema today. Israeli Bourekas Films is a film insider's view of the characters, stories, and cultures that made Bourekas films such an important part of Israeli life.

Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures

Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures PDF Author: Masha Salazkina
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253052041
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
For too long, the field of amateur cinema has focused on North America and Europe. In Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures, however, editors Masha Salazkina and Enrique Fibla-Gutiérrez fill the literature gap by extending that focus and increasing inclusivity. Through carefully curated essays, Salazkina and Fibla-Gutiérrez bring wider meaning and significance to the discipline through their study of alternative cinema in new territories, fueled by different historical and political circumstances, innovative technologies, and ambitious practitioners. The essays in this volume work to realize the radical societal democratization that shows up in amateur cinema around the world. In particular, diverse contributors highlight the significance of amateur filmmaking, the exhibition of amateur films, the uses and availability of film technologies, and the inventive and creative approaches of filmmakers and advocates of amateur film. Together, these essays shed new light on alternative cinema in a wide range of cities and countries where amateur films thrive in the shadow of commercial and conventional film industries.