SUNY, Horizons of Cinema

“The Celluloid Atlantic” changes the way we look at American and Italian cinema in the postwar period. In the thirty years following World War II, American and Italian film industries came to be an integrated, transnational unit rather than two separate, nation-based entities. Written in jargon-free prose and based on previously unexplored archival sources, this book revisits the history of Neorealism, World War II combat cinema, the "Western all'Italiana," and the career of John Kitzmiller, the African American star who made Italy his home and was the first person of color to win the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival. “The Celluloid Atlantic” makes the trailblazing argument that culturally hybrid genres like the so-called spaghetti Western were less the exceptions than the norm. Giovacchini argues that the waning of “The Celluloid Atlantic” in the early 1970s was due to the economic policies of the first Nixon administration, specifically its important, but largely neglected, Revenue Act of 1971, as well as to the ideological debates between Europeans and Americans that intensified during the American intervention in Vietnam.

Beginning with a quick history of film scoring and then taking the reader backstage to interview a dozen major screen composers, Overhearing Film Music represents three generations of movie soundtrack music. Ranging from groundbreaking composers who scored classic 1940s melodramas such as Laura and the Thief of Bagdad, to the jazz-influenced modernists who worked on Rebel Without a Cause and The Pink Panther, and into the symphonic renaissance represented by films like “Star Wars” and “Harry Potter”, Caps asks the seminal questions: How did this kind of active movie scoring evolve from silent films, and where is it headed? These interviews provide a master class in how and why to score a film. Interspersed among the interviews, Caps's single-subject essays provide concise histories of the use of choral music in films, African American and female film composers, and digital composing software for a new era.

Stanley Cavell was the first philosopher in the Anglo-American tradition to make film a central concern of his work, and this volume offer a substantially complete retrospective of his writings on cinema, which continues to offer inspiration and new directions to the field of film and media studies. The essays and other writings collected here include major theoretical statements and extended critical studies of individual films and filmmakers, as well as occasional pieces, all of which illustrate Cavell's practice of film-philosophy as it developed in the decades following the publication of his landmark work, The World Viewed. This revised edition includes six additional essays, five of them previously unpublished, that illuminate his inspiring vision of a humanistic study rooted in a marriage of film and philosophy. In his introduction and in the preface to this new edition, William Rothman provides an overview of Cavell's work on film and his aims as a philosopher more generally.