SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema
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No Jurisdiction
Legal, Political, and Aesthetic Disorder in Post-9/11 Genre Cinema
by Fareed Ben-Youssef
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
No Jurisdiction interweaves autobiography and analysis to explore how a disabled American of French-Arab descent justifies his love for the (super)heroes who destroy brown people like himself. Framing Hollywood genre films as a key to understanding a crisis-filled world shaped by the global War on Terror, Fareed Ben-Youssef shows how, in response to 9/11, filmmakers and lawmakers mobilized iconic characters-the cowboy, the femme fatale, and the superhero-to make sense of our traumas and inspire new legal landscapes. The competing visions of power produced in this dialogue between Hollywood entertainment and mainstream politics underscore genre cinema's multivalent purpose: to normalize state violence and also to critique it.
Chapters devoted to the Western, film noir, superhero movies, and global films that deploy and comment on these genres offer compelling readings of films ranging from the more apparent (The Dark Knight, Sicario, and Logan) to the more unexpected (Sin City, Adieu Gary, The Broken Circle Breakdown, and Tokyo Sonata). Through narratives of states of emergency that include vaguely defined enemies, obscured battlefield boundaries, and blurred lines between victims and perpetrators, a new post-9/11 film canon emerges. No Jurisdiction is a deeply personal work of film scholarship, arguing that we can face our complicity and discover opportunities for resistance through our beloved genre movies.
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The Hard Sell of Paradise
Hawai'i, Hollywood, Tourism
by Jason Sperb
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
The Hard Sell of Paradise examines how mid-twentieth-century Hollywood, negotiating the rhetoric of the tourism industry, offered a complex and contradictory vision of "Hawai'i" for its audiences. From the classic studio system and elite tourism of the 1930s to a postwar era of mass travel, TV, and new leisure markets, the book explores how an eclectic group of populist media reflected the language of tourism not only through its narratives of leisure, but also through its complex engagement with larger cultural and historical questions, such as colonialism, world war, and statehood. Drawing on rare archival research, The Hard Sell of Paradise also explores the valuable role that tourism partners such as United Airlines, Matson Cruise Lines, and the Hawaii Tourist Bureau played in directly and indirectly influencing such films and television shows as Waikiki Wedding, Diamond Head, Blue Hawaii, Endless Summer, and Hawaii Five-O.
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The Human Figure on Film
Natural, Pictorial, Institutional, Fictional
by Seth Barry Watter
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
The Human Figure on Film asks what it is we look for when we look at human beings projected on a screen. People have appeared onscreen since film was invented. Nothing could be more common, and yet nothing confounds us more, than a filmed human being. Scholars and critics have attempted to reduce the mystery, creating methodologies that make this figure legible. Some of their efforts form the subject of this book.
Each chapter is devoted to a single, central concept-the natural, the pictorial, the institutional, and the fictional-that viewers have used to make sense of what they see. Each concept, in turn, is tied to the work and methods of a particular kind of historical observer: the natural historian (Ray L. Birdwhistell), the aesthete or pictorialist (Victor O. Freeburg), the anthropologist of institutions (Hortense Powdermaker), and the critic of fiction (V. F. Perkins). All of these researchers have their own interests and criteria of understanding, ranging from a microscopic look at gestures to a broad view of characters. Using a combination of critical history, biography, and formal analysis, The Human Figure on Film offers a fresh approach to the problem of figuration in an age of digital cinema. It is, at once, a cross-section of the field of film studies, a handbook of methods, and an inquiry into the nature of inquiry itself.
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Seeing Symphonically
Avant-Garde Film, Urban Planning, and the Utopian Image of New York
by Erica Stein
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Looks at how a group of aesthetically innovative independent films contested and imagined alternatives to urban planning in midcentury New York.
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The Holiday in His Eye
Stanley Cavell's Vision of Film and Philosophy
by William Rothman
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Presents an original, insightful, and compelling vision of the trajectory of Cavell's oeuvre, one that takes his kinship with Emerson as inextricably bound up with his ever-deepening thinking about movies.
From The World Viewed to Cities of Words, writing about movies was strand over strand with Stanley Cavell's philosophical work. Cavell was one of the first philosopher in the United States to make film a significant focus of his thought, and William Rothman has long been one of his most astute readers. The Holiday in His Eye collects Rothman's writings about Cavell, many of them previously unpublished-to offer a lucid, serious introduction to and overview of Cavell's work, the influence of which has been somewhat limited by both the intrinsic difficulty of his ideas and his challenging prose style. In these engaging and accessible yet philosophically serious and rigorously argued essays, Rothman presents an original, insightful, and compelling vision of the trajectory of Cavell's oeuvre, one that takes Cavell's kinship with Emerson as inextricably bound up with his ever-deepening thinking about movies.
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Miraculous Realism
The French-Walloon Cinéma du Nord
by Niels Niessen
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
An authoritative study of this postsecular film movement from the French-Belgian border region that rose to prominence at the turn of the twenty-first century.
At the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, two movies from northern-Francophone Europe swept almost all the main awards. Rosetta by the Walloon directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne won the Golden Palm, and L'humanité by the French director Bruno Dumont won the Grand Prize; both won acting awards as well. Taking this "miracle" of Cannes as the point of departure, Niels Niessen identifies a transregional film movement in the French-Belgian border region-the Cinéma du Nord or "cinema of the North." He examines this movement within the contexts of French and Belgian national cinemas from the silent era to the digital age, as well as that of the new realist tendency in world cinema of the last three decades. In addition, he traces, from a northern perspective, a secular-religious tradition in Francophone-European film and philosophy from Bresson and Pialat, via Bazin, Deleuze, and Godard, to the Dardennes and Dumont, while critiquing this tradition for its frequent use of a humanist vocabulary of grace for a secular world. Once a cradle of the Industrial Revolution, the Franco-Belgian Nord faced economic crisis for most of the twentieth century. Miraculous Realism demonstrates that the Cinéma du Nord's rise to prominence resulted from the region's endeavor to reinvent itself economically and culturally at the crossroads of Europe after decades of recession.
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Curtains of Light
Theatrical Space in Film
by George Toles
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Provides a new way of thinking about film's relation to theatre.
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Is Harpo Free?
And Other Questions of the Metaphysical Screen
by Matthew Cipa
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Is Harpo Free? is a lively appreciation of film and television's ability to artistically explore concepts typical of philosophical metaphysics, such as free will, causality, and personal identity. Rather than using films and television programs as vehicles for philosophical arguments, the book instead celebrates the artistic ways in which they give life to various metaphysical concepts and how the artistic expression of these concepts and ideas helps us understand ourselves, the world, and our place within it. Through close analysis of a varied selection of works and their use of narrative, form, and style, Is Harpo Free? exemplifies a novel approach to appreciating the philosophical substance of films and television programs. Films and television programs discussed include A Night at the Opera; Run, Lola, Run; Shane; Harvey; Three Colours: Blue; The Americans; Dark; and Fargo.
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Doing Time
Temporality, Hermeneutics, and Contemporary Cinema
by Lee Carruthers
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Proposes that cinematic time is not a fixed idea, but a dynamic exchange between film and viewer.
Doing Time addresses two areas of interest in recent film study-film temporality and film philosophy-to propose an innovative theorization of cinematic time that sees it as a dynamic process of engagement, or something we do as viewers. This active relation to cinematic time, which discloses a film's temporal character, is called its "timeliness." Here it is traced across a range of fascinating case studies from Hollywood and the global art cinema, uncovering each film's characteristic way of "doing time." Throughout, the ambiguities of filmic time are held as powerful attractions as they modulate film viewing: such pauses, gaps, repetitions, and stretches of time illuminate a living field that extends from viewing activity.
Drawing on the writings of French film critic and theorist André Bazin, as well as the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lee Carruthers forwards a claim about the value of cinematic time for thinking. She also raises the tasks of film analysis and interpretation to renewed visibility. By prioritizing the viewer's experience of filmic temporality, and offering a rich vocabulary for describing this exchange, Carruthers articulates a new sphere of theoretical inquiry that invites film viewers (and readers) to participate.
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Sounds Like Helicopters
Classical Music in Modernist Cinema
by Matthew Lau
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Explores how modernist films use classical music in ways that restore the music's original subversive energy.
Classical music masterworks have long played a key supporting role in the movies-silent films were often accompanied by a pianist or even a full orchestra playing classical or theatrical repertory music-yet the complexity of this role has thus far been underappreciated. Sounds Like Helicopters corrects this oversight through close interpretations of classical music works in key modernist films by Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog, Luis Buñuel, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Haneke, and Terrence Malick. Beginning with the famous example of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" in Apocalypse Now, Matthew Lau demonstrates that there is a significant continuity between classical music and modernist cinema that belies their seemingly ironic juxtaposition. Though often regarded as a stuffy, conservative art form, classical music has a venerable avant-garde tradition, and key films by important directors show that modernist cinema restores the original subversive energy of these classical masterworks. These films, Lau argues, remind us of what this music sounded like when it was still new and difficult; they remind us that great music remains new music. The pattern of reliance on classical music by modernist directors suggests it is not enough to watch modernist cinema: one must listen to its music to sense its prehistory, its history, and its obscure, prophetic future.
Matthew Lau is Associate Professor of English at Queensborough Community College, City University of New York.
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Hitchcock at the Source
The Auteur as Adapter
by R. Barton Palmer
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Considers the ways in which Alfred Hitchcock adapted and transformed a variety of literary works-novels, plays, and short stories-into film.
The adaptation of literary works to the screen has been the subject of increasing, and increasingly sophisticated, critical and scholarly attention in recent years, but most studies of the subject have continued to privilege literature over film by taking the literary sources as their starting point. Rather than examining the processes by which a particular author has been adapted into a diversity of films by different filmmakers, the contributors in Hitchcock at the Source consider the processes by which a varied range of literary sources have been transformed by one filmmaker into an impressive body of work.
Throughout his career, Alfred Hitchcock transformed a variety of literary sources-novels, plays, short stories-into what is arguably the most coherent and distinctive (narratively, stylistically, and thematically) of all directorial oeuvres. After an introduction surveying the nature and diversity of Hitchcock's sources and locating the current volume in the context of theoretical work on adaptation, nineteen original essays range across the entirety of Hitchcock's career, from the silent period through to the 1970s. In addition to addressing the process of adaptation in particular films in terms of plot and character, the contributors also consider less obvious matters of tone, technique, and ideology; Hitchcock's manipulation of the conventions of literary and dramatic genres such as spy fiction and romantic comedy; and more general problems, such as Hitchcock's shift from plays to novels as his major sources in the course of the 1930s.
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Rule, Britannia!
The Biopic and British National Identity
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Assesses how cinematic biographies of key figures reflect and shape what it means to be British.
Rule, Britannia! Surveys the British biopic, a genre crucial to understanding how national cinema engages with the collective experience and values of its intended audience. Offering a provocative take on an aspect of filmmaking with profound cultural significance, the volume focuses on how screen biographies of prominent figures in British history and culture can be understood as involved, if unofficially, in the shaping and promotion of an ever-protean national identity. The contributors engage with the vexed concept of British nationality, especially as this sense of collective belonging is problematized by the ethnically oriented alternatives of English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish nations. They explore the critical and historiographical issues raised by the biopic, demonstrating that celebration of conventional virtue is not the genre's only natural subject. Filmic depictions of such personalities as Elizabeth I, Victoria, George VI, Elizabeth II, Margaret Thatcher, Iris Murdoch, and Jack the Ripper are covered.
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Looking With Robert Gardner
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Assesses the range and magnitude of Robert Gardner's achievements as a filmmaker, photographer, writer, educator, and champion of independent cinema.
During his lifetime, Robert Gardner (1925—2014) was often pigeonholed as an ethnographic filmmaker, then criticized for failing to conform to the genre's conventions-conventions he radically challenged. With the release of his groundbreaking film Dead Birds in 1963, Gardner established himself as one of the world's most extraordinary independent filmmakers, working in a unique border area between ethnography, the essay film, and poetic/experimental cinema. Richly illustrated, Looking with Robert Gardner assesses the range and magnitude of Gardner's achievements not only as a filmmaker but also as a still photographer, writer, educator, and champion of independent cinema. The contributors give critical attention to Gardner's most ambitious films, such as Dead Birds (1963, New Guinea), Rivers of Sand (1975, Ethiopia), and Forest of Bliss (1986, India), as well as lesser-known films that equally exemplify his mode of seeking anthropological understanding through artistic means. They also attend to his films about artists, including his self-depiction in Still Journey OnM (2011); to his roots in experimental film and his employment of experimental procedures; and to his support of independent filmmakers through the Harvard Film Study Center and the television series Screening Room, which provided an opportunity for numerous important film and video artists to present and discuss their work.
Rebecca Meyers is a filmmaker and Academic Film Programmer at Bucknell University, where she teaches in the Film/Media Studies program. She worked with Robert Gardner as editor on his late films. William Rothman is Professor of Cinema and Interactive Media at the University of Miami. Among his numerous books are three published by SUNY Press: Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, Second Edition and as editor, Cavell on Film and Three Documentary Filmmakers: Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, and Jean Rouch. Charles Warren is Lecturer on Film at Boston University and Associate of the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard University. He writes widely on film and has edited many books, including Gardner's Making Dead Birds, Just Representations, and Human Documents: Eight Photographers.
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The Great War in Hollywood Memory, 1918-1939
by Michael Hammond
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Assesses how America's film industry remembered World War I during the interwar period.
This is the definitive account of how America's film industry remembered and reimagined World War I from the Armistice in 1918 to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Based on detailed archival research, Michael Hammond shows how the war and the sociocultural changes it brought made their way into cinematic stories and images. He traces the development of the war's memory in films dealing with combat on the ground and in the air, the role of women behind the lines, returning veterans, and through the social problem and horror genres. Hammond first examines movies that dealt directly with the war and the men and women who experienced it. He then turns to the consequences of the war as they played out across a range of films, some only tangentially related to the conflict itself. Hammond finds that the Great War acted as a storehouse of motifs and tropes drawn upon in the service of an industry actively seeking to deliver clearly told, entertaining stories to paying audiences. Films analyzed include The Big Parade, Grand Hotel, Hell's Angels, The Black Cat, and Wings. Drawing on production records, set designs, personal accounts, and the advertising and reception of key films, the book offers unique insight into a cinematic remembering that was a product of the studio system as it emerged as a global entertainment industry.
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Yiddish Cinema
The Drama of Troubled Communication
by Jonah Corne
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
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).
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The Cinematographer's Voice
Insights into the World of Visual Storytelling
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
A unique exploration of contemporary filmmaking from cinema's ultimate insiders.
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Encounters With Godard
Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics
by James S. Williams
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
A wide-ranging and accessible approach to Godard's later work, and a major intervention in the study of film and ethics.
Encounters with Godard takes the reader on a personal voyage into the sensory pleasures and polyphonic rhythms of Jean-Luc Godard's multimedia work since the late 1970s, from his feature films and video essays to his published writings, art books, and media performances. Godard, suggests James S. Williams, lays ethical claim to the cinematic, defined in the broadest terms as relationality and artistic resistance. An introductory chapter on the extended history of La Chinoise (1967), a film explicitly of montage, is followed by seven different types of critical encounters with Godard, encompassing the fields of art and photography, music and literature, and foregrounding themes of gender and sexuality, race and violence, mystery and emotion. The Godard who emerges here is a restless and radical experimenter who establishes new cinematic thresholds through new technology and expands the creative potential and free exchange of the archives. Williams examines works including Nouvelle vague (1990), Film socialisme (2010), Hélas pour moi (1993), and the magnum opus Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988—98). Wide-ranging and accessible, Encounters with Godard marks a major intervention in the study of film aesthetics and ethics while forging a vital dialogue with literature, history and politics, art and art history, music and musicology, philosophy, and aesthetics.
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Hitchcock's Moral Gaze
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Offers new and compelling perspectives on the deeply moral nature of Hitchcock's films.
In his essays and interviews, Alfred Hitchcock was guarded about substantive matters of morality, preferring instead to focus on discussions of technique. That has not, however, discouraged scholars and critics from trying to work out what his films imply about such moral matters as honesty, fidelity, jealousy, courage, love, and loyalty. Through discussions and analyses of such films as Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Frenzy, the contributors to this book strive to throw light on the way Hitchcock depicts a moral-if not amoral or immoral-world. Drawing on perspectives from film studies, philosophy, literature, and other disciplines, they offer new and compelling interpretations of the filmmaker's moral gaze and the inflection point it provides for modern cinema.
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Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors
The Child Villains of Horror Film
by Dominic Lennard
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Examines the complexities and contradictions that arise when the monsters in the movies are children.
Since the 1950s, children have provided some of horror's most effective and enduring villains, from dainty psychopath Rhoda Penmark of The Bad Seed (1956) and spectacularly possessed Regan MacNeil of The Exorcist (1973) to psychic ghost-girl Samara of The Ring (2002) and adopted terror Esther of Orphan (2009). Using a variety of critical approaches, including those of cinema studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and psychoanalysis, Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors offers the first full-length study of these child monsters. In doing so, the book highlights horror as a topic of analysis that is especially pertinent socially and politically, exposing the genre as a site of deep ambivalence toward-and even hatred of-children.
Dominic Lennard is Associate Lecturer in the Centre for University Pathways and Partnerships at the University of Tasmania, Australia.
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Ghost Faces
Hollywood and Post-Millennial Masculinity
by David Greven
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Combines psychoanalysis, queer theory, masculinity studies, and cultural studies to explore contemporary manhood in film.
Finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in the LGBT Nonfiction category presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation
Ghost Faces explores the insidious nature of homophobia even in contemporary Hollywood films that promote their own homo-tolerance and appear to destabilize hegemonic masculinity. Reframing Laura Mulvey's and Gilles Deleuze's paradigms and offering close readings grounded in psychoanalysis and queer theory, David Greven examines several key films and genre trends from the late 1990s forward. Movies considered range from the slasher film Scream to bromances and beta male comedies such as I Love You, Man to dramas such as Donnie Darko and 25th Hour to Rob Zombie's remake of the horror film Halloween. Greven also traces the disturbing connections between torture porn found in such films as Hostel and gay male Internet pornography.
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Giallo!
Genre, Modernity, and Detection in Italian Horror Cinema
by Alexia Kannas
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Traces the giallo mystery/horror genre from its genesis in Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s to its contemporary place in the global cult-film canon.
Italian giallo films have a peculiar allure. Taking their name from the Italian for "yellow"- reflecting the covers of pulp crime novels-these genre movies were principally produced between 1960 and the late 1970s. These cinematic hybrids of crime, horror, and detection are characterized by elaborate set-piece murders, lurid aesthetics, and experimental soundtracks. Using critical frameworks drawn from genre theory, reception studies, and cultural studies, Giallo! traces this historically marginalized genre's journey from Italian cinemas to the global cult-film canon. Through close textual analysis of films including The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), Blood and Black Lace (1964), The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971), and The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972), Alexia Kannas considers the rendering of urban space in the giallo and how it expresses a complex and unsettling critique of late modernity.
Alexia Kannas is Lecturer in Media and Cinema Studies in the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Deep Red.
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Letters From Hollywood
1977-2017
by Bill Krohn
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Engaging essays on a wide spectrum of Hollywood directors and the films they created.
Journalist and filmmaker Bill Krohn has been the Los Angeles correspondent for the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma for over forty years. Letters from Hollywood brings together thirty-four of his essays, many of them appearing in English for the first time. Focusing most pieces on a particular director and film, Krohn uses his inside knowledge of the studio system to illuminate an art that is also a multibillion-dollar business. He connects currents in French film criticism and theory with an unfolding account of American cinema past and present, offering penetrating insights into directors and their work. Beginning with Allan Dwan, who learned how to make movies before Hollywood was born by watching D. W. Griffith, Krohn presents a panorama that encompasses Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick and Sergio Leone, Star Wars and I Love Lucy. He covers everything from gangsters to gremlins, from blockbusters to no-budget cult films like Moon Over Harlem and Plan 9 from Outer Space, in a style that is accessible to anyone who loves movies, or has a passion for writing about them.
Bill Krohn is the Los Angeles correspondent for Cahiers du cinéma. He is the author of Hitchcock at Work, Stanley Kubrick, and Alfred Hitchcock.
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Hitchcock
The Murderous Gaze
by William Rothman
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
An expanded edition of a classic work of film criticism, with a provocative and eloquent new chapter on Marnie, Hitchcock's most heartfelt--and most controversial--film.
First published in 1982, William Rothman's Hitchcock is a classic work of film criticism. Written in an engaging style that is philosophically sophisticated yet free of jargon, and using over nine hundred images from the films to illustrate and back up its critical claims, the book follows six different Hitchcock films as they unfold, moment by moment, from first shot to last.
In addition to a thoughtful new preface and the original readings of The Lodger (1927), Murder! (1930), The 39 Steps (1935), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and Psycho (1960), this expanded edition includes a groundbreaking new chapter-now the book's longest-on Marnie (1964), Hitchcock's most heartfelt yet most controversial film. Hitchcock never tired of quoting Oscar Wilde's line, "And all men kill the thing they love." Dark moods therefore prevail in the five original chapters, culminating in the reading of Psycho, but in demonstrating how Marnie overcomes, or transcends, the murderous aspect of Hitchcock's art, this new chapter balances the scales and gives an important new dimension to the book.
With exemplary precision, Hitchcock, Second Edition shows how Hitchcock films express, cinematically, serious thoughts about such matters as the nature and relationships of love, murder, sexuality, marriage, and theater-and about their own medium. In so doing, it keeps faith with the idea that Hitchcock was a master, perhaps the master, of what he called the "art of pure cinema." However, insofar as it investigates philosophically the conditions of authorship in the medium of film, it is an auteurist study unlike any other. By attending to the films themselves and to the ways we experience them, rather than allowing some theory to dictate what to say about them, the book proves the fruitfulness of an approach that is open and responsive to the ways serious films are capable of teaching us how to think seriously about them.
William Rothman is Professor of Motion Pictures and Director of the Graduate Program in Film and Media Studies at the University of Miami. His books include Cavell on Film and Three Documentary Filmmakers: Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch, both also published by SUNY Press.
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Immanent Frames
Postsecular Cinema between Malick and von Trier
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Explores a growing number of films and filmmakers that challenge the strict boundaries between belief and unbelief.
For some time now, thinkers across the humanities and social sciences have increasingly called into question the once-dominant view of the relationship between modernity and secularism, prompting some to speak of a "postsecular turn." Until now, film studies has largely been silent about this development, even though cinema itself has been a major vehicle for such reflection. This fact became inescapable in 2011 when Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life and Lars von Trier's Melancholia were released within days of each other. While these two audacious and controversial films present seemingly opposite perspectives-the former a thoughtful meditation on faith, the latter a portrayal of nontriumphalist atheism-together they raise critical questions about transcendence and immanence in modern life. These films are, however, only the most conspicuous of a growing body of works that call forth similar and related questions-what this collection aptly calls "postsecular cinema."
Taking the nearly simultaneous release of The Tree of Life and Melancholia as its starting point and framing device, this pioneering collection sets out to establish the idea of postsecular cinema as a distinct body of films and a viable critical category. Adopting a film-philosophy approach, one group of essays examines Malick's and von Trier's films, while another looks at works by Chantal Akerman, Denys Arcand, the Dardenne brothers, and John Michael McDonagh, among others. The volume closes with two important interviews with Luc Dardenne and Jean-Luc Nancy that invite us to reflect more deeply on some of the central concerns of postsecular cinema.
John Caruana is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ryerson University. Mark Cauchi is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities at York University.
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John Huston as Adaptor
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Argues that understanding Huston's film adaptations of literary works is essential to understanding his oeuvre as a filmmaker.
John Huston as Adaptor makes the case that adaptation is the salient element in Huston's identity as a filmmaker and that his early and deep attraction to the experience of reading informed his approach to film adaptation. Thirty-four of Huston's thirty-seven films were adaptations of literary texts, and they stand as serious interpretations of literary works that could only be made by an astute reader of literature. Indeed, Huston asserted that a film director should be above all else a reader and that reading itself should be the intellectual and emotional basis for filmmaking.
The seventeen essays in this volume not only address Huston as an adaptor, but also offer an approach to adaptation studies that has been largely overlooked. How an adaptor reads, the works to which he is drawn, and how his literary interpretations can be brought to the screen without relegating film to a subservient role are some of the issues addressed by the contributors. An introductory chapter identifies Huston as the quintessential Hollywood adaptor and argues that his skill at adaptation is the mark of his authorial signature. The chapters that follow focus on fifteen of Huston's most important films, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The African Queen (1951), The Night of the Iguana (1964), Under the Volcano (1984), and The Dead (1987), and are divided into three areas: aesthetics and textuality; history and social context; and theory and psychoanalysis. By offering a more comprehensive account of the centrality of adaptation to Huston's films, John Huston as Adaptor offers a greater understanding of Huston as a filmmaker.
Douglas McFarland is a retired Professor of English at Flagler College. Wesley King is Assistant Professor of English at Flagler College.
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Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground
Nicholas Ray in American Cinema
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
A range of approaches to the director's life and work.
The director of such classic Hollywood films as In a Lonely Place, Johnny Guitar, and Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray nevertheless remained on the margins of the American studio system throughout his career, and despite his cult status among auteurist critics and cinephiles, he has also remained at the margins of film scholarship. Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground offers twenty new essays by international film historians and critics that explore the director's place in the history of the Hollywood industry and in the larger institution of cinema, as well as a 1977 interview with Ray that has never before been published in its entirety in English. In addition to readings of Ray's most celebrated films, the book provides a range of approaches to his life and work, engaging new questions of his cinematic authorship with areas that include history and culture, politics and society, gender and sexuality, style and genre, performance, technology, and popular music. The collection also looks at Ray's lesser-known and underappreciated films, and devotes attention to the highly experimental We Can't Go Home Again, his recently restored final film made in the 1970s with his students at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Rediscovering what Ray means to contemporary film studies, the essays show how his films continue to possess a vital power for film history and criticism, and for film culture.
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Invented Lives, Imagined Communities
The Biopic and American National Identity
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
How Hollywood biopics both showcase and modify various notions of what it means to be an American.
Biopics-films that chronicle the lives of famous and notorious figures from our national history-have long been one of Hollywood's most popular and important genres, offering viewers various understandings of American national identity. Invented Lives, Imagined Communities provides the first full-length examination of US biopics, focusing on key releases in American cinema while treating recent developments in three fields: cinema studies, particularly the history of Hollywood; national identity studies dealing with the American experience; and scholarship devoted to modernity and postmodernity. Films discussed include Houdini, Patton, The Great White Hope, Bound for Glory, Ed Wood, Basquiat, Pollock, Sylvia, Kinsey, Fur, Milk, J. Edgar, and Lincoln, and the book pays special attention to the crucial generic plot along which biopics traverse and showcase American lives, even as they modify the various notions of the national character.
William H. Epstein is Professor of English at the University of Arizona. His previous books include Recognizing Biography and Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biographical Criticism. R. Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature and Director of Film Studies at Clemson University. His previous books include Shot on Location: Postwar American Cinema and the Exploration of Real Place and (with William Robert Bray) Hollywood's Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America.
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Funny How?
Sketch Comedy and the Art of Humor
by Alex Clayton
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Uses comedy skits, from Monty Python to Key and Peele, to probe how humor works.
What makes something funny? This book shows how humor can be analyzed without killing the joke. Alex Clayton argues that the brevity of a sketch or skit and its typical rejection of narrative development make it comedy-concentrate, providing a rich field for exploring how humor works. Focusing on a dozen or so skits and scenes, Clayton shows precisely how sketch comedy appeals to the funny bone and engages our philosophical imagination. He suggests that since humor is about persuading an audience to laugh, it can be understood as a form of rhetoric. Through vivid, highly readable analyses of individual sketches, Clayton illustrates that Aristotle's three forms of appeal-logos, the appeal to reason; ethos, the appeal to communality; and pathos, the appeal to emotion-can form the basis for illuminating the inner workings of humor. Drawing on both popular and lesser-known examples from the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere-Monty Python's Flying Circus, Key and Peele, Saturday Night Live, Airplane!, and Smack the Pony-Clayton reveals the techniques and resonances of humor.
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Distancing Representations in Transgender Film
Identification, Affect, and the Audience
by Lucy J. Miller
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Distancing Representations in Transgender Film explores the representation of transgender identity in several important cinema genres: comedies, horror films, suspense thrillers, and dramas. In a critique that is both deeply personal and theoretically sophisticated, Lucy J. Miller examines how these representations are often narratively and visually constructed to prompt emotions of ridicule, fear, disgust, and sympathy from a cisgender audience. Created by and for cisgender people, these films do not accurately represent transgender people's experiences, and the emotions they inspire serve to distance cisgender audience members from the transgender people they encounter in their day-to-day lives. By helping to increase the distance between cisgender and transgender people, Miller argues, these films make it more difficult for cisgender people to understand the experiences of transgender people and for transgender people to fully participate in public life. The book concludes with suggestions for improving transgender representation in film.
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B Is for Bad Cinema
Aesthetics, Politics, and Cultural Value
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Considers films that lurk on the boundaries of acceptability in taste, style, and politics.
B Is for Bad Cinema continues and extends, but does not limit itself to, the trends in film scholarship that have made cult and exploitation films and other "low" genres increasingly acceptable objects for critical analysis. Springing from discussions of taste and value in film, these original essays mark out the broad contours of "bad"-that is, aesthetically, morally, or commercially disreputable-cinema. While some of the essays share a kinship with recent discussions of B movies and cult films, they do not describe a single aesthetic category or represent a single methodology or critical agenda, but variously approach bad cinema in terms of aesthetics, politics, and cultural value. The volume covers a range of issues, from the aesthetic and industrial mechanics of low-budget production through the terrain of audience responses and cinematic affect, and on to the broader moral and ethical implications of the material. As a result, B Is for Bad Cinema takes an interest in a variety of film examples-overblown Hollywood blockbusters, faux pornographic works, and European art house films-to consider those that lurk on the boundaries of acceptability.
Claire Perkins is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of American Smart Cinema and the coeditor (with Verevis) of Film Trilogies: New Critical Approaches. Constantine Verevis is Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at Monash University. His previous books include Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Volume 1: Critical Positions (coauthored with Noel King and Deane Williams); Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel (coedited with Carolyn Jess-Cooke), also published by SUNY Press; and Film Remakes.
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Ripping England!
Postwar British Satire from Ealing to the Goons
by Roger Rawlings
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Examines an all too often neglected period of postwar British cinema and popular culture.
Ripping England! Investigates a fertile moment for British satire-the period between 1947 and 1953, which produced the films Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and The Lavender Hill Mob, as well as the seminal radio program The Goon Show. Against the postwar background of fading empire, universal rationing, and the implementation of a welfare state, these satires laid the foundation for a new British cultural identity later fleshed out by the Angry Young Men, the Movement poets, the Social Realists, and those involved in the satire boom of the 1960s, which lives on even to this day.
The peculiarity of these satires and the British identity they shaped is better understood when seen in relief against postwar cinematic cultures of Italy, France, and the United States. Roger Rawlings places postwar British film in the context of contemporaneous European national film movements and contrasts it with Hollywood's comedies and satires of the same period. British satires of the late forties and early fifties held up a mirror to a nation that was in the throes of change, moving from a colonial empire to an inward-turning island culture. Ripping England! Looks at the all too often neglected miracle of postwar British cinema and popular culture.
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Native Recognition
Indigenous Cinema and the Western
by Joanna Hearne
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Offers a new interpretation of the century-long relationship between the Western film genre and Native American filmmaking.
In Native Recognition, Joanna Hearne persuasively argues for the central role of Indigenous image-making in the history of American cinema. Across the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, Indigenous peoples have been involved in cinema as performers, directors, writers, consultants, crews, and audiences, yet both the specificity and range of this Native participation have often been obscured by the on-screen, larger-than-life images of Indians in the Western. Not only have Indigenous images mattered to the Western, but Westerns have also mattered to Indigenous filmmakers as they subvert mass culture images of supposedly "vanishing" Indians, repurposing the commodity forms of Hollywood films to envision Native intergenerational continuity. Through their interventions in forms of seeing and being seen in public culture, Native filmmakers have effectively marshaled the power of visual media to take part in national discussions of social justice and political sovereignty for North American Indigenous peoples.
Native Recognition brings together a wide range of little-known productions, from the silent films of James Young Deer, to recovered prints of the 1928 Ramona and the 1972 House Made of Dawn, to the experimental and feature films of Victor Masayesva and Chris Eyre. Using international archival research and close visual analysis, Hearne expands our understanding of the complexity of Native presence in cinema both on screen and through the circuits of film production and consumption.
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Second Takes
Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel
by Carolyn Jess-Cooke
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
The first collection of essays devoted to the phenomenon of the film sequel.
Sequels, serials, and remakes have been a staple of cinema since the very beginning, and recent years have seen the emergence of dynamic and progressive variations of these multi-film franchises. Taking a broad range of sequels as case studies, from the Godfather movies to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Second Takes confronts the complications posed by film sequels and their aftermaths, proposing new critical approaches to what has become a dominant industrial mode of Hollywood cinema. The contributors explore the sequel's investments in repetition, difference, continuation, and retroactivity, and particularly those attitudes and approaches toward the sequel that hold it up as a kind of figurehead of Hollywood's commercial imperatives. An invaluable resource to the film student, critic, and fan, Second Takes offers new ways of looking at the film sequel's industrial, aesthetic, cultural, political, and theoretical contexts.
Carolyn Jess-Cooke is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom. She is the author of Shakespeare on Film: Such Things as Dreams Are Made Of and Film Sequels: Theory and Practice from Hollywood to Bollywood, and the coeditor (with Melissa Croteau) of Apocalyptic Shakespeare: Essays on Visions of Destruction and Revelation in Recent Film Adaptations. Constantine Verevis is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, and the author of Film Remakes.
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Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination
Georges Méliès's Trip to the Moon
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
An authoritative and comprehensive guide to cinema's first true blockbuster.
"Best moving pictures I ever saw." Thus did one Vaudeville theater manager describe Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon [Le Voyage dans la lune], after it was screened for enthusiastic audiences in October 1902. Cinema's first true blockbuster, A Trip to the Moon still inspires such superlatives and continues to be widely viewed on DVD, on the Internet, and in countless film courses. In Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination, leading film scholars examine Méliès's landmark film in detail, demonstrating its many crucial connecions to literature, popular culture, and visual culture of the time, as well as its long "afterlife" in more recent films, television, and music videos. Together, these essays make clear that Méliès was not only a major filmmaker but also a key figure in the emergence of modern spectacle and the birth of the modern cinematic imagination, and by bringing interdisciplinary methodologies of early cinema studies to bear on A Trip to the Moon, the contributors also open up much larger questions about aesthetics, media, and modernity.
In his introduction, Matthew Solomon traces the convoluted provenance of the film's multiple versions and its key place in the historiography of cinema, and an appendix contains a useful dossier of primary-source documents that contextualize the film's production, along with translations of two major articles written by Méliès himself.
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Gestures of Love
Romancing Performance in Classical Hollywood Cinema
by Steven Rybin
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Examines movie romance in light of our emotional bond to the actors and characters on screen.
Gestures of Love considers the viewer's enchantment with charismatic actors in film as the starting point for closely analyzing the performance of love in movies. Written with a thoughtful adoration for the actors who move us, Steven Rybin examines several of cinema's most beloved on-screen movie couples, including Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, Myrna Loy and William Powell, Carole Lombard and John Barrymore, Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, and Rock Hudson and Dorothy Malone. Using the classical genres of screwball comedy, film noir, and the family melodrama as touchstones, Rybin places the depiction of romance in films into dialogue with the viewer's own emotional bond to the actors on the screen. In doing so, he offers rich new analyses of such classic films as Bringing Up Baby, The Thin Man, Twentieth Century, Laura, To Have and Have Not, Tea and Sympathy, Written on the Wind, and more.
Steven Rybin is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Minnesota State University, Mankato. He is the author of Michael Mann: Crime Auteur and Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film; the editor of The Cinema of Hal Hartley: Flirting with Formalism; and the coeditor, with Will Scheibel, of Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground: Nicholas Ray in American Cinema, also published by SUNY Press.
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Welcome to Fear City
Crime Film, Crisis, and the Urban Imagination
by Nathan Holmes
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Analyzes how location-shot crime films of the 1970s reflected and influenced understandings of urban crisis.
The early 1970s were a moment of transformation for both the American city and its cinema. As intensified suburbanization, racial division, deindustrialization, and decaying infrastructure cast the future of the city in doubt, detective films, blaxploitation, police procedurals, and heist films confronted spectators with contemporary scenes from urban streets. Welcome to Fear City argues that the location-shot crime films of the 1970s were part of a larger cultural ambivalence felt toward urban life, evident in popular magazines, architectural discourse, urban sociology, and visual culture. Yet they also helped to reinvigorate the city as a site of variegated experience and a positively disordered public life-in stark contrast to the socially homogenous and spatially ordered suburbs. Discussing the design of parking garages and street lighting, the dynamics of mugging, panoramas of ruin, and the optics of undercover police operations in such films as Klute, The French Connection, Detroit 9000, Death Wish, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Nathan Holmes demonstrates that crime genres did not simply mirror urban settings and social realities, but actively produced and circulated new ideas about the shifting surfaces of public culture.
Nathan Holmes is a New York—based scholar and teacher, with a PhD in film and media studies from the University of Chicago.
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Mind Reeling
Psychopathology on Film
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Across a variety of genres, shows how mental disorders are depicted in cinema.
Mind Reeling investigates how cinema displays and mirrors psychological disorders, such as bipolar disorder, amnesia, psychotic delusions, obsessive compulsive behavior, trauma, paranoia, and borderline personalities. It explores a range of genres, including biopics, comedies, film noirs, contemporary dramedies, thrillers, Gothic mysteries, and docufictions. The contributors open up critical approaches to audience fascination with film depictions of serious disturbances within the human psyche. Many films examined here have had little scholarly attention and commentary. These essays focus on how cinematic techniques contribute to popular culture's conception of mental dysfunction, trauma, and illness. This book reveals the complex artistic and generic patterns that produce contemporary images of psychopathology in cinema.
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Orienting Italy
China through the Lens of Italian Filmmakers
by Mary Ann McDonald Carolan
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Orienting Italy explores contemporary Italian filmmakers' fascination with China and the Chinese in both documentary and fictional films. Delineating the contours of this fascination, the book begins with the works of Carlo Lizzani (Behind the Great Wall, 1958) and Michelangelo Antonioni (Chung Kuo-China, 1972), both of whom ventured to China with the aim of documenting new, yet physically and culturally distant, realities. Their documentary investigations yielded to fictional portrayals, from the lavish view of a historical Middle Kingdom by director Bernardo Bertolucci (The Last Emperor, 1987) to the stark consideration of Italian economic exchange with contemporary China by Gianni Amelio (The Missing Star, 2006). The wave of Chinese migration to Italy in the late twentieth century created a new sense of otherness within Italy as Chinese migrants became the subjects of fictional narratives and documentaries in the works of Stefano Incerti (Gorbaciof, 2010) and Andrea Segre (Shun Li and the Poet, 2011) and Riccardo Cremona and Vincenzo De Cecco (Miss Little China, 2009). In the twenty-first century, a new chapter in the relationship between Italy and China has emerged in the form of transnational collaborations in the art and business of filmmaking.
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Action, Action, Action
The Early Cinema of Raoul Walsh
by Tom Conley
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Studies the force of action, motion, and vision in the early cinema of Hollywood director Raoul Walsh.
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The Slapstick Camera
Hollywood and the Comedy of Self-Reference
by Burke Hilsabeck
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Demonstrates that slapstick film comedies display a canny and sometimes profound understanding of their medium.
Slapstick film comedy may be grounded in idiocy and failure, but the genre is far more sophisticated than it initially appears. In this book, Burke Hilsabeck suggests that slapstick is often animated by a philosophical impulse to understand the cinema. He looks closely at movies and gags that represent the conditions and conventions of cinema production and demonstrates that film comedians display a canny and sometimes profound understanding of their medium-from Buster Keaton's encounter with the film screen in Sherlock Jr. (1924) to Harpo Marx's lip-sync turn with a phonograph in Monkey Business (1931) to Jerry Lewis's film-on-film performance in The Errand Boy (1961). The Slapstick Camera follows the observation of philosopher Stanley Cavell that self-reference is one way in which "film exists in a state of philosophy." By moving historically across the studio era, the book looks at a series of comedies that play with the changing technologies and economic practices behind film production and describes how comedians offered their own understanding of the nature of film and filmmaking. Hilsabeck locates the hidden intricacies of Hollywood cinema in a place where one might least expect them-the clowns, idiots, and scoundrels of slapstick comedy.
Burke Hilsabeck is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Northern Colorado.
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Brechtian Cinemas
Montage and Theatricality in Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, Peter Watkins, and Lars von Trie
by Nenad Jovanovic
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Explores the influence of Bertolt Brecht's ideas on the practice and study of cinema.
In Brechtian Cinemas, Nenad Jovanovic uses examples from select major filmmakers to delineate the variety of ways in which Bertolt Brecht's concept of epic/dialectic theatre has been adopted and deployed in international cinema. Jovanovic critically engages Brecht's ideas and their most influential interpretations in film studies, from apparatus theory in the 1970s to the presently dominant cognitivist approach. He then examines a broad body of films, including Brecht's own Mysteries of a Hairdressing Salon (1923) and Kuhle Wampe (1932), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's History Lessons (1972), Peter Watkins's La Commune (2000), and Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac (2013). Jovanovic argues that the role of montage-a principal source of artistic estrangement (Verfremdung) in earlier Brechtian films-has diminished as a result of the technique's conventionalization by today's Hollywood and related industries. Operating as primary agents of Verfremdung in contemporary films inspired by Brecht's view of the world and the arts, Jovanovic claims, are conventions borrowed from the main medium of his expression, theatre. Drawing upon a vast number of sources and disciplines that include cultural, film, literature, and theatre studies, Brechtian Cinemas demonstrates a continued and broad relevance of Brecht for the practice and understanding of cinema.
Nenad Jovanovic is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Wright State University.
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Passionate Detachments
Technologies of Vision and Violence in American Cinema, 1967-1974
by Amy Rust
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Investigates the cultural value of film violence.
Passionate Detachments investigates the rise of graphic violence in American films of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the popular aesthetics and critical responses this violence inspired. Amy Rust examines four technologies adopted by commercial American cinema after the fall of the Hollywood Production Code: multiple-camera montage, squibs (small explosive devices) and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms. Approaching these technologies as figures, as opposed to mere tools, Rust traces the encounters they mediate between perception (what one sees, hears, and feels) and representation (how those sights, sounds, and feelings make meaning). These technologies, she argues, lend shape to film violence while organizing viewers' on- and off-screen relationships to it.
The result proves meaningful for an era self-consciously and perilously preoccupied with bloodshed. The post-Code period found Americans across the political spectrum demanding visual-and increasingly violent-demonstrations of presumably "authentic" realities. Corroborating fantasies of authenticity from military to counterculture, these technologies challenge them as well, pointing, however unwittingly, to the violently classed, gendered, and racialized blind spots such fantasies harbor. More broadly, the technologies answer concerns that films control violence too much or too little. Offering neither mere discourse nor mere thrills, they recover sense and sensation for all, not some, or even most, depictions of bloodshed. As figures, the devices also remediate vision and violence for film theory, which exhibits distrust for each in spite of the complexities phenomenology and psychoanalysis have brought to cinematic perception and pleasure.
Amy Rust is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida.
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Rx Hollywood
Cinema and Therapy in the 1960s
by Michael DeAngelis
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
How films of the 1960s and early 1970s framed therapeutic issues as problems of human communication, and individual psychological problems as social ones.
Rx Hollywood investigates how therapy surfaced in the themes, representations, and narrative strategies of a changing film industry. In the 1960s and early 1970s, American cinema was struggling to address adult audiences who were increasingly demanding films that confronted contemporary issues. Focusing upon five fields of therapeutic inquiry-therapist/patient dynamics, female "frigidity" and male impotence, marital discord, hallucinogenic drug use, and the dynamics of confession-Michael DeAngelis argues that the films of this period reveal an emergent, common tendency of therapy to work toward the formation of a stronger sense of interpersonal, community/social, and political engagement, counteracting alienation and social division in the spirit of connection and community.
Prior to the 1960s, therapy had been considered an introspective process, one that emphasized contemplation and insight and prompted the patient to investigate memories and past traumas. In the 1960s, however, therapy would move toward more humanistic, client-centered, community, group, and encounter models that deemphasized the "there and then" of past feelings and experiences and embraced the "here and now" of the present. These kinds of therapy promised to heal the self through a process of reaching out, helping individuals to connect with communities, support networks, and other like-minded individuals who shared a needed sense of belonging.
Drawing on a wide range of films, including Marnie, The Boston Strangler, The Chapman Report, Carnal Knowledge, Divorce American Style, Diary of a Mad Housewife, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and Five Easy Pieces, DeAngelis shows how American culture framed therapeutic issues as problems of human communication, developing treatment strategies that addressed individual psychological problems as social problems.
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From El Dorado to Lost Horizons
Traditionalist Films in the Hollywood Renaissance, 1967-1972
by Ken Windrum
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Investigates how musicals, war films, sex comedies, and Westerns dealt with contentious issues during a time of change in Hollywood.
The era known as the Hollywood Renaissance is celebrated as a time when revolutionary movies broke all the rules of the previous "classical" era as part of the ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet many films during this era did not overtly smash the system but provided more traditional entertainment, based on popular genres, for a wider audience than the youth culture who flocked to more transgressive fare. Ken Windrum focuses on four genres of traditionalist movies-big-budget musicals, war spectacles, "naughty" sex comedies, and Westerns. From El Dorado to Lost Horizons shows how even seemingly innocuous, family-oriented films still participated in the progressive aspects of the time while also holding a conservative point of view. Windrum analyzes representations of issues including gender roles, marriage, sexuality, civil rights, and Cold War foreign policy, revealing how these films dealt with changing times and reflected both status quo positions and new attitudes. He also examines how the movies continued or deviated from classical principles of structure and style. Windrum provides a counter-history of the Hollywood Renaissance by focusing on a group of important films that have nevertheless been neglected in scholarly accounts.
Ken Windrum is Assistant Professor of Cinema at Los Angeles Pierce College.
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Regarding Life
Animals and the Documentary Moving Image
by Belinda Smaill
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Contends that the narrative and aesthetic qualities of the documentary genre enable new understandings of animals and animal/human relationships.
As indicated by the success of such films as March of the Penguins and Food, Inc., the documentary has become the preeminent format for rendering animals and nature onscreen. In Regarding Life, Belinda Smaill brings together examples from a broad array of moving image contexts, including wildlife film and television, advocacy documentary, avant-garde nonfiction, and new media to identify a new documentary terrain in which the representation of animals in the wild and in industrial settings is becoming markedly more complex and increasingly more involved with pivotal ecological debates over species loss, food production, and science.
While attending to some of the most discussed documentaries of the last two decades, including Grizzly Man; Food, Inc.; Sweetgrass; Our Daily Bread; and Darwin's Nightmare, the book also draws on lesser-known film examples, and is one of the first to bring film studies understandings to new media such as YouTube. The result is a study that melds film studies and animal studies to explore how documentary films render both humans and animals, and to what political ends.
Belinda Smaill is Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University in Australia. She is the author of The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture and the coauthor (with Olivia Khoo and Audrey Yue) of Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas.
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A Very Old Machine
The Many Origins of the Cinema in India
by Sudhir Mahadevan
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Argues that Indian cinema's deep nineteenth-century past continues to play a vital role in its twenty-first-century present.
In A Very Old Machine, Sudhir Mahadevan shows how Indian cinema's many origins in the technologies and practices of the nineteenth century continue to play a vital and broad function in its twenty-first-century present. He proposes that there has never been a singular cinema in India; rather, Indian cinema has been a multifaceted phenomenon that was (and is) understood, experienced, and present in everyday life in myriad ways. Employing methods of media archaeology, close textual analysis, archival research, and cultural theory, Mahadevan digs into the history of photography, print media, practices of piracy and showmanship, and contemporary everyday imaginations of the cinema to offer an understanding of how the cinema came to be such a dominant force of culture in India. The result is an open-ended and innovative account of Indian cinema's "many origins."
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Brute Force
Animal Horror Movies
by Dominic Lennard
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Considers how dangerous beasts in horror films illuminate the human-animal relationship.
It's always been a wild world, with humans telling stories of killer animals as soon as they could tell stories at all. Movies are an especially popular vehicle for our fascination with fierce creatures. In Brute Force, Dominic Lennard takes a close look at a range of cinematic animal attackers, including killer gorillas, sharks, snakes, bears, wolves, spiders, and even a few dinosaurs. Lennard argues that animal horror is not so much a focused genre as it is an impulse, tapping into age-old fears of becoming prey. At the same time, these films expose conflicts and uncertainties in our current relationship with animals. Movies considered include King Kong, Jaws, The Grey, Them!, Arachnophobia, Jurassic Park, Snakes on a Plane, An American Werewolf in London, and many more. Drawing on insights from film studies, art history, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, Brute Force is an engaging critical exploration-and appreciation-of cinema's many bad beasts.
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Perpetual Movement
Alfred Hitchcock's Rope
by Neil Badmington
Part of the SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema series
Offers both a production history and a close analysis, with a chapter for each of the film's eleven shots.