Showing papers on "Comedy published in 1993"

American Cinema/American Culture

Abstract: Preface Introduction Part 1 The Mode of Production Chapter 1 The Emergence of the Cinema as an Institution Chapter 2 Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narration Chapter 3 Classical Hollywood Cinema: Style Chapter 4 The Studio System Chapter 5 The Star System Part 2 Genre and The Genre System Chapter 6 Silent Film Melodrama Chapter 7 The Musical Chapter 8 American Comedy Chapter 9 War and Cinema Chapter 10 Film Noir: Somewhere in the Night Chapter 11 The Making of the West Chapter 12 Horror and Science Fiction Part 3 A Postwar History Chapter 13 Hollywood and the Cold War Chapter 14 Hollywood in the Age of Television Chapter 15 The 1960s: The Counterculture Strikes Back Chapter 16 The Film School Generation Chapter 17 Into the Twenty-First Century Glossary of Technical and Other Terms Index

The Technique of Film and Video Editing: History, Theory, and Practice

Abstract: This updated sixth edition of The Technique of Film and Video Editing provides a detailed, precise look at the artistic and aesthetic principles and practices of editing for both picture and sound. Ken Dancyger puts into context the storytelling choices an editor will have to make against a background of theory, history, and practice across a range of genres, including action, comedy, drama, documentary and experimental forms, featuring analysis of dozens of classic and contemporary films. This new sixth edition includes new chapters on the influence of other media on the editing form, on the importance of surprise in editing, on the contributions of Robert Altman to the art of editing and on the experimental documentary. This edition also includes expanded coverage in technology, creative sound, point of view, and the long take. New case studies explore Whiplash (2014), Room (2015), Lincoln (2012), Tangerine (2015), The Beaches of Agnes (2008), American Sniper (2014), Son of Saul (2015), The Revenant (2015), and many more.

Comic Angels: And Other Approaches to Greek Drama through Vase-Paintings

Abstract: This book opens up a neglected chapter in the reception of Athenian drama, especially comedy; and it gives stage-centre to a particularly attractive and entertaining series of vase-paintings, which have been generally regarded as marginal curiosities. These are the so-called 'phlyax vases', nearly all painted in the Greek cities of South Italy in the period 400 t0 360 BC. Up till now, they have been taken to reflect some kind of local folk-theatre, but Oliver Taplin, prompted especially by three that have only been published in the last twelve years, argues that most, if not all, reflect Athenian comedy of the sort represented by Aristophanes. This bold thesis opens up questions of the relation of tragedy as well as comedy to vase-painting, the cultural climate of the Greek cities in Italy, and the extent to which Athenians were aware of drama as a potential 'export'. It also enriches appreciation of many key aspects of Aristophanic comedy: its metatheatre and self-reference, its use of stage-action and stage-props, its unabashed indecency, and its polarised relationship, even rivalry, with tragedy. The book has assembled thirty-six photographs of vase-paintings. Many are printed here for the first time outside specialist publications that are not readily accessible.

What's so Funny?: The Comic Conception of Culture and Society

Abstract: Jokes, puns, stories, tales, sketches, and tricks saturate our lives. And today the stuff of comedy is almost inescapable, with all-comedy cable channels and stand-up comics acting as a kind of electronic oracle. We're laughing more often, but what are we laughing at? In this book, the author uses jokes (good, bad, silly, and classic) to display the wisdoms that comedians deliver. "What's So Funny?" is less about the psychology of humour than the objects of our laughter - the cultural and social world that comics turn upside down and inside out. It also explores the logic of comedy as a formidable, critical assault on just about everything we take for granted. Drawing on a vast array of humour from cartoons to the work of comedians like Jay Leno, Lenny Bruce, Steve Allen, and Billy Crystal, Davis reminds us of the extraordinarily subversive power of comedy. When we laugh, we accept the truth of the comic moment: this is the way life really is. The book is in two parts. In the first, Davis explores the cultural conventions that even simple jokes take apart: the rules of language and logic, the distinctions between human and other beings. In the second, he looks at the components of society that jokes deconstruct: individuals, groups roles, institutions, both dominant and subordinate. Whatever their style, comedians use the tools of their trade - ambiguous meanings, incongruous characters, extreme situations - to violate our expectations about the world. Setting comedy within rich intellectual traditions - from Plato to Bergson and Freud, in philosophy as well as sociology - Davis develops comedy into a subtle, complex, and articulated theory of culture and society.

Redefining Black Film

Abstract: Can films about black characters, produced by white filmmakers, be considered 'black films'? In answering this question, Mark Reid reassesses black film history, carefully distinguishing between films controlled by blacks and films that utilize black talent, but are controlled by whites. Previous black film criticism has 'buried' the true black film industry, Reid says, by concentrating on films that are about, but not by, blacks. Reid's discussion of black independent films - defined as films that focus on the black community and that are written, directed, produced, and distributed by blacks - ranges from the earliest black involvement at the turn of the century up through the civil rights movement of the Sixties and the recent resurgence of feminism in black cultural production. His critical assessment of work by some black filmmakers such as Spike Lee notes how these films avoid dramatizations of sexism, homophobia, and classism within the black community. In the area of black commercial film controlled by whites, Reid considers three genres: African-American comedy, black family film, and black action film. He points out that even when these films use black writers and directors, a black perspective rarely surfaces. Reid's innovative critical approach, which transcends the 'black-image' language of earlier studies - and at the same time redefines black film - makes an important contribution to film history. Certain to attract film scholars, this work will also appeal to anyone interested in African-American and Women's Studies.

A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960

Abstract: Now, Voyager, Stella Dallas, Leave Her to Heaven, Imitation of Life, Mildred Pierce, Gilda...these are only a few of the hundreds of "women's films" that poured out of Hollywood during the thirties, forties, and fifties - films that not only delivered on their inherent promise to entertain but also opened a door to the Other, the Something Else, that audiences came to the theater yearning to see and feel, if only for a couple of hours. Films widely disparate in subject, sentiment, and technique, they nonetheless shared one dual purpose: to provide the audience (of women, primarily) with temporary liberation into a screen dream - of romance, sexuality, luxury, suffering, or even wickedness - and then send it home reminded of, reassured by, and resigned to the fact that no matter what else she might do, a woman's most important job was...to be a woman. Now, with boundless knowledge and infectious enthusiasm, Jeanine Basinger illuminates the various surprising and subversive ways in which women's films delivered their message. Basinger examines dozens of films, exploring the seemingly intractable contradictions at the convoluted heart of the woman's genre - among them, the dilemma of the strong and glamorous woman who cedes her power when she feels it threatening her personal happiness, and the self-abnegating woman whose selflessness is not always as "noble" as it appears. Basinger looks at the stars who played these women (Kay Francis, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Rosalind Russell, Susan Hayward, Myrna Loy, and a host of others) and helps us understand the qualities - the right off-screen personae, the right on-screen attitudes, the right faces, the right figures forcarrying the right clothes - that made them personify the woman's film and equipped them to make believable drama or comedy out of the crackpot plots, the conflicting ideas, and the exaggerations of real behavior that characterize these movies. In each of the films the author discus

John Gay and the London theatre

Abstract: The Beggar's Opera, often referred to today as the first musical comedy, was the most popular dramatic piece of the eighteenth century - and is the work that John Gay (1685-1732) is best remembered for having written. That association of popular music and satiric lyrics has proved to be continuingly attractive and variations on the Opera have flourished in this century: by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, by Duke Ellington, and most recently by Vaclav Havel. The original opera itself is played all over the world in amateur and professional productions. But John Gay's place in all this has not been well defined. His Opera is often regarded as some sort of chance event. In John Gay and the London Theatre, the first book-length study of John Gay as dramatic author, Calhoun Winton recognizes the Opera as part of an entirely self-conscious career in the theatre, a career that Gay pursued from his earliest days as a writer in London and continued to follow to his death. Winton emphasizes Gay's knowledge of and affection for music, acquired, he argues, by way of his association with Handel. Although concentrating on Gay and his theatrical career, Winton also limns a vivid portrait of London itself and of the London stage of Gay's time, a period of considerable turbulence both within and outside the theatre. Gay's plays reflect in varying ways and degrees that social, political, and cultural turmoil. Winton's study sheds new light not only on Gay and the theatre but also on the politics and culture of his era.

Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse

Abstract: SECTION I: Joking as Discourse. Joking and Discourse. Joking as the 'Ab-use' of Language. The Butt - Third Position. SECTION II: Comedy as Joking Text. Joking Operations of Textual Engagement. Exchange as the 'Language' of Comedy. Definitions of Comedy. SECTION III: Joking's Effects in the World. The Ownership of Language. Masking the Effect - Literary Accounts of Comedy. Conclusion Postscript - Cultural Relativity and Joking Structures. Bibliography

Love and Marriage in Greek New Comedy

Abstract: Writing of Terence's Andria (‘The Girl from Andros’) in 1952, Duckworth said: ‘In the Andria the second love affair is unusual; Charinus’ love for a respectable girl whose virtue is still intact has been considered an anticipation of a more modern attitude towards love and sex. More frequently in Plautus and Terence the heroine, if of respectable parentage, has been violated before the opening of the drama (Aulularia, Adelphoe), or she is a foreigner, a courtesan, or a slave girl' (Duckworth (1952), p. 158). Perhaps in 1993 it does not seem quite so ‘modern’ that Charinus is not only in love with a respectable virgin but wishes to marry her.

Barbarian Play: Plautus' Roman Comedy

Abstract: In this volume William S Anderson sets Plautus, who wrote Rome's earliest surviving poetry, in his rightful place among the Greek and Roman writers of what we know as New Comedy (fourth to second centuries) Anderson begins by defining major innovations that Plautus made on inherited Greek New Comedy (Menander, Philemon, and Diphilus), transforming it from romantic domestic drama to a celebration of rollicking family anarchy He shows how Plautus diminished the traditional importance of love and replaced it with a new major theme: 'heroic badness, ' especially embodied in the rogue slave (ancestor of the impudent servant, valet, or maid) Anderson then examines the unique verbal texture of Plautus' drama and demonstrates his revolt against realism, his drive to have his characters defy everyday circumstances and pit their intrepid linguistic wit against social order, their Roman extravagant impudence against Greek self-control Finally, Anderson explores the special form of metatheatre that we admire in Plautus, by which he undermines the assumptions of his Greek models' and replaces them with a new, confident Roman comedy

You Tarzan : masculinity, movies, and men

Abstract: In "You Tarzan", the editors set out to broaden the enquiry into masculinity, taking popular cinema as their starting point. A number of male film scholars have been invited to turn the spotlight back on themselves; to name the "un-named" feelings raised by films, stars or genres as well as importing some of the insights of feminist writing on gender to an analysis of the construction and reading of masculinity in films. Studies range from the gridiron jocks of the Hollywood sports feature, to the elegant heroes in successive versions of "The Thirty-Nine Steps". Essays on horror and the question of male masochism and pleasure rub shoulders with others on masculinity in the films of the Vietnam war, and comedy, camp and gay men in this collection which puts forward new and more complex theories of male spectatorship. Pat Kirkham is the author of "Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the 20th Century". Janet Thumim is the author of "Celluloid Sisters: Women in Popular Cinema".

Soviet Literary Culture in the 1970s: The Politics of Irony

Abstract: In this text, Vishevsky writes about the popular culture of the Soviet intellectual during the years of post-Stalinist thaw. Hope and faith were in short supply among Soviet liberals by the late 1960s, and irony was the direct product of disillusion and despair over the apparent abandonment of the promising post-thaw ideals and values. This period that ended with the beginning of "perestroika" and "glasnost", Vishevsky believes, was the incubator of many processes now prevalent in the country's literature and culture. Although censorship kept this ironic worldview off the main stage of Soviet literature, it surfaced in peripheral forms - stand-up comedy, songs of the "bards", short stories in periodicals and newspapers, radio and TV shows, local cinematography and regional literature. A major part of this book is devoted to the "ironic" stories that appeared in the late 1960s and 1970s in Soviet humour periodicals and in the humour pages of newspapers and magazines. These stories, each three to ten typed pages, were presumably tolerated by the Soviet authorities because of their brevity and their often unassuming placement in the back pages of magazines. Vishevsky's book includes an anthology of such stories, appearing here for the first time in English, several by Aksyonov, Bitov and the author himself.

Encyclopedia of arms control and disarmament

Abstract: Euryplus and Inachus; Euripides, Alexander and Cretans; and many more. Euripides, mMelanippe the Wise, an Olympian beauty who gave twin sons to Poseidon, has the heroine relate her story. "No, I must recall my tale to the point where I began?to my own name. They call me Melanippe" (14). The second major section, Old Comedy, fifth century B.C., gives fragments of Cratinus, The Plutuses; Eupolis, The Demes; Aristophanes, Fragments; Plato, Fragment; and others. Plato advises: "It is better to keep a wife at home, than antidotes bought from Eudemus" (43). Other marvelous sections deal with the Middle Comedy and New Comedy, fourth and third centuries B.C., Mime, Lyric Poems, Elegiac and Iambic Poems, and Hexameter Poems. Sappho, the Tenth Muse, sings: "The holy temple, where is a pleasant grove of apple trees, and altars fragrant with frankincense. And there cold water sounds through the apple branches, and all the place is shadowy with roses, and from the whispering leaves comes slumber down. And there a lovely meadow blooms with flowers of springtime, and to ...breathe the sweet scent.... There, Aphrodite takes up wreaths and pours nectar gracefully in golden cups, mingled with the festive joy35 (81). No wonder Sappho was known as the Tenth Muse!

Greek Table-Talk before Plato

Abstract: This essay analyses conversation at archaic and classical Greek banquets and symposia, using first epic, then elegiac and lyric poetry, and finally Old Comedy. Epic offers few topics, mostiy arising from the situation of a guest. Those of sympotic poetry, from which prose exchanges may cautiously be inferred, are more numerous: reflection, praise of the living and the dead, consolation of the bereaved, proclamations of likes and dislikes, declarations of love, narrative of one9s own erotic experiences or (scandalously) of others9, personal criticism and abuse, and the telling of fables. Many of these verbal interventions are competitive. Comedy reinforces the prevalence of an ethos of entertainment, corroborating the telling of fables and adding creditable anecdotes about one9s career, singing skolia , and playing games of "comparisons" and riddles.

Catharine and other writings

Abstract: Frederic and Elfrida Jack and Alice Edgar and Emma Henry and Eliza The adventures of Mr Harley Sir William Mountague Memoirs of Mr Clifford The Beautifull Cassandra Amelia Webster The Visit The Mystery The Three Sisters A beautiful description The generous Curate Ode to Pity Love and Friendship Lesley Castle The History of England A Collection of Letters The female philosopher The first Act of a Comedy A Letter from a Young Lady A Tour through Wales A Tle Evelyn Catharine, or the Bower

The Great Ventriloquist: A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance

Abstract: In our era of theory-saturated literary studies, it takes a tenured professor to set a clever novel in the groves of academe. Who else knows the orthodoxies cold, and has the liberty and leisure to have readable fun with them? The key is to be suitably self-conscious about anything so simple as a ‘story’ or a ‘character’, and then proceed to create just that. Handle it right, and you can offer old-fashioned mystery, comedy, and romance tricked out in newfangled, self-reflexive style. You can, as A. S. Byatt does in her tour-de-force of university fiction, write a book that is packaged like a fat, glossy romance — and win the Booker Prize, too.

“Stigmatical in Making”: The Material Character of The Comedy of Errors

Abstract: ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected haviour of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly. These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play; But I have that within which passes show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (Hamlet I . 2.77-86)

Inside Soviet film satire : laughter with a lash

Abstract: Preface Introduction Part I. The Long View: Soviet Satire in Context: 1. Soviet film satire yesterday and today 2. A Russian Munchausen: Aesopian translation 3. 'We don't know what to laugh at': comedy and satire in Soviet cinema 4. An ambivalent NEP satire of bourgeois aspirations: A Kiss of Mary Pickford 5. Closely watched drains: notes by a dilettante on the Soviet absurdist film Part II. Middle Distance Shots: 6. A subtextual reading of Kuleshov's satire, The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks 7. The strange case of the making of Volga Volga 8. Circus of 1936: ideology and entertainment under the big top 9. Laughter beyond the mirror: humour and satire in the cinema? 10. The films of Eldar Shengelaya: from subtle humour to biting satire Part III. Close Ups On Glasnost and Satire: 11. A forgotten melody: Ryzanov and remembered popular traditions 12. Perestroika of Kitsch: Vladimir Soloviev's Black Rose, Red Rose 13. Carnivals bright, dark and grotesque in the Glasnost satires of Mamin, Mustafayev and Shaknazarov 14. Quick takes on Yuri Mamin's The Fountain from the perspective of a Rumanian childhood 15. 'One should begin with zero': a discussion with Yuri Mamin Contributors Filmography Index.

The Casablanca Man: The Cinema of Michael Curtiz

Abstract: Michael Curtiz (1888-1962) was without doubt one of the most important directors in film history, yet he has never been granted his deserved recognition and no full-scale work on him has previously been published. The Casablanca Man surveys Curtiz' unequalled mastery over a variety of genres which included biography, comedy, horror, melodrama, musicals, swashbucklers and westerns, and looks at his relationship with the Hollywood studio moguls on the basis of unprecedented archive research at Warner Brothers. Concentrating on Curtiz' best-known films - Casablanca, Angels With Dirty Faces, Mildred Pearce and Captain Blood among them - Robertson explores Curtiz' practical creative struggles and his friendships and rivalries with other film celebrities including Errol Flynn, Bette Davis and James Cagney, and his discovery of future stars. Casablanca Man is the first comprehensive critical exploration of Curtiz' entire career and, linking his European work and his subsequent American work into a coherent whole, Robertson firmly re-establishes Curtiz' true standing in the history of cinema.

Jonson's Folio and the Politics of Patronage

Abstract: The publication of Jonson's collected volume of Works has rightly come to be regarded as a momentous event, rich in symbolism for the cultural transformations beginning to crystallize in early modern Eng land. When the wits jibed in 1616 that "Bens plays are works, when others works are plaies,"1 they were not merely making a joke at the expense of someone who was their most dangerous literary competi tor. Rather, the flurry of outrage and amusement which this volume sparked off acknowledged that Jonson's ambitious packaging of his theatre scripts, poems and miscellaneous entertainments as if they were classically-grounded opera was testimony to pervasive changes in the environment within which the early modern writer was work ing. In the short term, the impact of "THE WORKES OF Beniamin Jonson" may have helped to encourage the publication of similar collections to follow, for Shakespeare, Donne and Milton.2 In the longer term, the writerly self-consciousness of Jonson's volume—its establishment of a canon of definitive texts, its employment of print ing-house technology to confer physical coherence and identity on the Folio, and its elevation of the poet from playhouse employee to autonomous creator—seems to signal the emergence of a new and distinctively modern idea of the author. Its packaging enunciates with remarkable prescience themes of authorial selfhood and control that were to become dominant in the ensuing century. Jonson's self-fashioning in the Folio is clearly seen in his careful exploitation of its textual features to project the author as a stable, self-determining and consistent persona. He ignored all his early hackwork and collaborations, and suppressed the information that Sejanus had been co-authored; he made extensive revisions to his early plays, particularly upgrading Every Man In so that it appeared to be the initiation of a new way in contemporary comedy; and he organized the volume as a whole so as to imply that it delineated an inexorable advance towards professional and social acclaim. Experi mental comical satires lead into fully achieved comedies and trage

Moliere: The Theory and Practice of Comedy

Abstract: This book provides a practical and historical analysis of Moliere's comedies. Andrew Calder presents evidence and analysis to help modern readers to share the perspectives of the playwright's contemporaries. Chapter 1 to 10 define the mechanisms of comic drama, and offer answers to such questions as : what is a comic character? how does it function dramatically? how does it differ from a tragic character? what comic uses does Moliere make of domestic settings, of family relationships, of "raisonneurs", servants, tyrannical parents and young lovers? what is the relationship of the character on stage to the world outside the text...to reader and audience? The nature and functions of plot and action, of reason, the ridiculous, judgment, laughter and excessive self-love are explored. Later chapters describe the satirical and historical settings of the major plays. All of Moliere's plays are discussed, but "L'ecole des femmes", "Le tartuffe", "Don Juan", "Le misanthrope", "L'avare", "Le bourgeois gentilhomme", "Les femmes savantes" and "Le malade imaginaire" are analyzed in particular detail.

Shakespeare and Multiplicity

Abstract: Brian Gibbons presents the idea of multiplicity as a way of understanding the form and style of Shakespeare's plays: composed of many different codes, woven together in a unique pattern for each play, rather than variations on fixed notions of comedy or tragedy. Selecting from different phases of Shakespeare's career, the book's method is comparison, using an imaginative range of texts and new approaches; there is also lively discussion of modern staging. Comparison with major works by Spenser, Sidney and Marlowe is complemented by a demonstration of Shakespeare's re-use of his own previous plays and poems. Far from reducing the plays to a formula, Brian Gibbons shows how criticism articulates what popular audiences have always known, that the plays' sheer abundance and variety is their strength. This 1993 book is scholarly, yet straightforward, on an issue of central interest.

The films of Vincente Minnelli

Abstract: Introduction 1. The aesthete in the factory 2. Uptown folk: Cabin in the Sky (1943) 3. Third nature: Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) 4. Comedy, patriachy, consumerism: Father of the Bride (1950) 5. Citizen shields: The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) 6. Vincente meets Vincent: Lust for Life (1956) Notes Chronology Filmography.

One foot in the grave

Abstract: A novel based on the BBC television comedy series of the same name. After 26 years as a security officer, Victor Meldrew was on the last leg of life, with nothing to do but confront the frustrations and insanities of everyday existence.

Genre and Generic Change in English Comedy 1660-1710

Abstract: An examination of one of the most remarkable qualities of stage comedy during the late 17th-century - its stability Corman proposes a new way of looking at genre and generic change and brings a remarkable thoroughness and sensitivity to his study of individual authors and their work