Showing papers on "Movie theater published in 1988"

Psychiatry and the cinema

Abstract: Foreword. Preface. Introduction. Part 1. The Psychiatrist in the Movies. Typology, mythology, ideology. The alienist, the quack, and the oracle. Golden age. The fall from grace. The female psychotherapist in the movies. Clinical implications. Part 2. The Psychiatrist at the Movies. Methodology and psychoanalytic film criticism. Play it again, Sigmund: psychoanalytic approaches to the classic hollywood text. 3 Women: Robert Altman's dream world. Narcissism in the cinema I: the cinematic autobiography. Narcissism in the cinema II: the celebrity. Alien and Melanie Klein's night music. Phallic women in the contemporary cinema. Epilogue. Filmography. References. Index.

Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties

Abstract: From Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol to the underground cinema and political films, David James gives a thorough account of the growth, development, and decay of nonstudio film practices in the United States between the late fifties and the mid-seventies. Unlike other scholars who discuss these practices as totally separate from Hollywood, James argues that they were developed in various kinds of dialogue or negotiation with the commercial film industry. He also demonstrates that the formal properties of the films were determined not simply by aesthetic considerations but by the functions the films served in the various subcultures and dissident groups that produced them. After an opening chapter on film hermeneutics, the book gives detailed accounts of the contrary projects of two exemplary filmmakers: Stan Brakhage, who pioneered an artisanal, domestic film practice, and Andy Warhol, who redirected such a practice toward the film industry. James then discusses the beats and other idealist countercultures, the social groups that formed around civil rights and the Vietnam War, artists who shunned social involvement for pure film ("structural" film), and finally the women's movement.

The Cinema of Apartheid: Race and Class in South African Film

Abstract: This study analyses the historical development of South African cinema up to he book's original publication in 1988. It describes the films and comments on their relationship to South African realities, addressing all aspects of the industry, focusing on domestic production, but also discussing international film companies who use South Africa as a location. It explores tensions between English-language and Afrikaans-language films, and between films made for blacks and films made for whites. Going behind the scenes the author looks at the financial infrastructure, the marketing strategies, and the works habits of the film industry. He concludes with a discussion of independent filmmaking, the obstacles facing South Africans who want to make films with artistic and political integrity, and the possibilities of progress in the future. Includes comprehensive bibliography and filmography listing all feature films made in South Africa between 1910 and 1985 together with documentary films by South Africans, non-South Africans, and exiles about the country.

Cinema and History

Abstract: Marc Ferro argues that film is an "agent and source of history" and offers a comprehensive survey of the conceptual interrelations between cinema and history. In developing his arguments, he provides some dozen models, each focusing on a single film or set of films.

On the Perceived Functions of Movies

Abstract: The present study examined perceptions of the functions of movie attendance. One hundred American college students completed a questionnaire designed to examine their reasons for going to movies and for their enjoyment of them. In addition, each student grouped recent movie titles into categories containing movies perceived to have something in common and indicated their preference for each group created. Factor analysis revealed three general types of moviegoers, each type perceiving movie attendance as serving a different function: (a) the individual who attended movies as a means of self-escape, (b) the individual who attended as a means of self-development and, (c) the individual who attended purely for the entertainment value of the movie. These factors were systematically related to movie preference (e.g., those who attended as a means of escape preferred movies with an air of unreality). The present results have implications for why people go to movies and the functions that movies may hol...

Popular Culture and Oral Traditions in African Film

Abstract: In spite of the increasing number of African films released in the course of the last 20 years (from Borom Sarret in 1963 to Nyamanton [The Garbage Boys] in 1986), there has not been an African film criticism as enlightening and provocative as the criticism generated by the Brazilian Cinema Novo, the theories of Imperfect Cinema, and the recent debates around Third Cinema. This gap must be filled to overcome the repetitious nature of criticism which has addressed itself to African film in the last

Hollywood and the Box Office, 1895-1986

Abstract: Changing business circumstances have put pressure on the film studios and changed the nature of films they produced. Virtually every decade since the invention of the cinema has brought crisis to the industry and this book examines the reaction of the corporations who have found themselves in danger or have perceived new ways of adding to their profitability, influencing the films they produce. Included is a survey of the US film industry from the days of a small collection of studios to the vast business empires of today, as well as an analysis of the kinds of films produced.

Film Noir: Reflections in a Dark Mirror

Abstract: With the advent of the Second World War a new mood was discernible in film drama - an atmosphere of disillusion and a sense of foreboding, a dark quality that derived as much from the characters depicted as from the cinematographer's art. These films, among them such classics as Double Indemnity, The Woman in the Window, Touch of Evil and sunset Boulevard, emerged retrospectively as a genre in themselves when a French film critic referred to them collectively as film noir. Bruce Crowther looks into noir's literary origins (often in the novels of the so-called 'hard-boiled' school typified by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich), and at how the material translated to the screen, noting in particular influences from German expressionist films and the almost indispensable techniques of flashback and voice-over narration. He also assesses the contribution made by the players - by actors such as Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell, Alan Ladd and John Garfield and actresses such as Barbara Stanwyck, Lizabeth Scott, Joan Crawford and Gloria Grahame, together with a roll-call of supporting players whose screen presence could lend almost any film the noir imprimatur. Noir was in its heyday from 1945 to 1955, a time when paranoia and disillusion, anxiety and violence could be said to have been part of the fabric of American, and particularly Hollywood, society, yet its impact and its influence are with us still - in films as diverse as The French Connection, Chinatown and Body Heat. This Book commemorates a special period in film-making and a unique combination of talent resulting in a spectrum of films that are as welcome today on their small-screen airings as they were when first shown in cinema.

Hollywood, Home Movies, and Common Sense: Amateur Film as Aesthetic Dissemination and Social Control, 1950-1962

Abstract: Appearing as a photograph caption in a 1950 Eastman Kodak manual entitled How to Make Good Movies, the exchange above between a husband and wife maneuvers through multiple discourses of the 1950s like a Rototiller in a suburban garden. These discourses include a notion that moviemaking was a family activity, an idea that filmmaking goals involved attainment of correct and sanctioned aesthetic norms, and an ideology that the rewards of leisure demanded both control and skill over the family and creativity. These fragmented discourses in movie how-to manuals, photography and parenting magazines, and advertising articulated a highly codified social and aesthetic position for hobbyists to occupy, one that posed as seamless, monolithic, and immovable in the photographic enthusiasm of the popular press. However, we should remember that actual home-movie practice during the 1950s (and even now, with home video) crashes through this discursive stability: home movies ignored aesthetic prerogatives when documenting a child's birthday in favor of recording an event, many avant-garde filmmakers used amateur 16mm film equipment for visual experimentation, and marginal social groups created their own visual cultures with inexpensive equipment.2 While this article concentrates on the more mainstream articulations of amateur film discourse, accessible media technology poses a dialectical formation: on the one hand, the unlimited possibilities of resistance to dominant cultural practices and the enfranchising of groups with a public media voice; on the other hand, the movement of the market and consumer ideology to inscribe it as a commodity. The surface simplicity and nostalgic quaintness of directions that admonished home-movie enthusiasts against shooting movie film as they would randomly water their lawns applies a glossy, even veneer to the more complex social and aesthetic construction of amateur film in the 1950s in the United States. Although home-movie technology and marketing expanded dramatically during this period, the history of amateur film equipment and filmmaking reaches as far back as the origins of cinema in 1897. Indeed, the definition of amateur film, and the social construction of the term "home movies," changes and transforms during

On New German Cinema, Art, Enlightenment, and the Public Sphere: An Interview with Alexander Kluge

Abstract: Stuart Liebman: Two months from now, that is in February 1987, German filmmakers can celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Oberhausen Manifesto,' a mythical moment of birth for the New German Cinema. Yet any visitor to Munich today who is interested in German film must be struck by the fact that there are only two German films now playing in local cinemas. One is a popular comedy, Mdnner [Men], while the other is a curious "art film," Paradies [Paradise]; both are by a young woman filmmaker, Dorris D6rrie. Unfortunately, this absence of German films in German cinemas seems to be an all too common

Britain and the Cinema in the Second World War

Abstract: Preface - Notes on the Contributors - Introduction: Film, The Historian and the Second World War P.M.Taylor - British Society in the Second World War J.Ramsden - The British Film Industry: Audiences and Producers R.Murphy - National Identity in British Wartime Films J.Richards - The People as Stars: Feature Films as National Expression P.Stead - British Cinema and the Reality of War C.Coultass - British Historical Epics in the Second World War N.Mace - Cinematic Support for the Anglo-American Detente, 1939-43 K.R.M.Short - Creative Tensions: 'Desert Victory', the Army Film Unit and Anglo-American Rivalry, 1943-45 T.Aldgate - The Representation of Women in British Feature Films, 1939-45 S.Harper - Notes and References - Index

The British Post-bellum Cinema: A survey of the films relating to World War II made in Britain between 1945 and 1960

Abstract: (1988). The British Post-bellum Cinema: A survey of the films relating to World War II made in Britain between 1945 and 1960. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 39-54.

Push-pull for the video clip: a systems approach to the relationship between the phonogram/videogram industry and music television

Abstract: Using pictures to sell music is hardly a new concept. Examples of pictures being set to pre-recorded music with the aim of producing a piece of audio-visual entertainment can be found as early as the first decade of this century. At the Paris World Fair in 1900, stars of the theatre appeared in short film sketches with synchronised gramophone sound (Olsson 1986). From 1905 through to about 1914 in Sweden, a number of commercially available music recordings were used as the basis of short films which were shown in cinemas with various types of mechanical inventions and much human ingenuity being applied to ensure, though not always achieving, synchronisation. Those portrayed in the films were often actors who mimed the songs (Furhammar 1985, 1988).

Fritz Lang: Genre and Representation in His American Films

Abstract: Challenging the myth that Fritz Lang's best work ended when he reached Hollywood, Reynold Humphries takes a new look at seventeen of the director's twenty-two American films. Made between 1936 and 1956, these films -- Fury, You Only Live Once, You and Me, Man Hunt, Hangmen Also Die, The Ministry of Fear, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, Cloak and Dagger, Secret beyond the Door, House by the River, Rancho Notorious, The Blue Gardenia, The Big Heat, Moonfleet, While the City Sleeps, and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt -- broadly validate the insights of auteur theory while emphasizing the importance of the narrative and representational codes peculiar to a given genre. Humphries examines these films in light of semiotics and psychoanalysis, drawing on Freud's Wolfman case and Lacan's theories of the subject and the look to bring novel solutions to crucial theoretical problems in such areas as the spectator, classical film narrative, and genre. In applying critical theory to Lang's Hollywood-made film noirs, melodramas, Westerns, and spy films, Humphries provocatively complicates auteur theory and revitalizes an unjustly neglected phase in the career of one of cinema's boldest visionaries.

Southern Exposure: An Interview with Ross McElwee

Abstract: During the Italian Renaissance, schools of painting came to be identified with particular cities. In recent decades something similar has been occurring in North America, where "schools" of independent film-making have become identified with specific places. San Francisco, for example, has been a center for surreal forms of avant-garde cinema. For a time, New York (and subsequently Buffalo/ Toronto) was identified with what had come to be called "structural film-making." Perhaps the most persistent school of independent cinema, however, has for three decades found a home in Boston: cinema ve'rite. Many of the leading verite' film-makers-Ricky Leacock, the Maysles Brothers, Frederick Wiseman, Ed Pincus-have had and continue to have crucial ties with Boston. Over the years, the cinema verite procedure (a hand-carried 16mm rig, hand-carried tape-recording equipment for sync sound, a oneor two-person crew) has been articulated in a variety of forms within a continually developing history. For a time, the assumption of a number of the prime movers of cinema verite was that the value of the procedure was precisely its ability to capture events without the intrusion of the film-maker: the film-maker's persona, either in a visual embodiment or in narration, was to be avoided at all costs.

British Cinema and the Reality of War

Abstract: In notes written for a student screening of the feature film The Next of Kin, which he had directed in 1941 for Ealing Studios and the War Office, Thorold Dickinson had this to say about its preview at the Curzon cinema in London: The first version of The Next of Kin was so explicit that it sobered the troops who saw it and sickened many of the civilians, some of whom were carried out in a dead faint. The military cinema manager had to indent for a case of brandy and often called me from his office across the road to come and help him talk people back to calmness. The worst case we had to deal with was a most intelligent woman civil servant who had two sons serving overseas. She said that until her sons came back to Britain she would never sleep again. She insisted that all the scenes of fighting in the film were taken in genuine battles, that all the Germans were real Germans in actual military operations. I tried to explain that I alone had placed the cameras and instructed the performers, but she said I was lying and that the work was inexcusable. In the end we had to summon a military psychiatrist.1

John Wayne: Hero with A Thousand Faces

Abstract: John Wayne is, in the words of Joseph Campbell, a "hero with a thousand faces."1 This remarkable actor accomplished, through his long career in the movies, an achievement that cannot be matched by any other in the art form. He has spoken to countless numbers of people in cinema audiences around the world; he has articulated a mythic adventure with universal appeal. I use the word "faces" with figurative intent, since Wayne kept his single, impressive appearance throughout his career; his amble remained the same, his bulk was steady though increasingly greater, and his face kept its prominent features fixed upon audiences everywhere. From role to role John Wayne took his continuing image, building and growing as he changed "faces" to create, finally, a monomyth of the hero who moves from alienation through trial to victory and return. John Wayne's continuing character between films accumulated force of identity through changing roles in the films; the myth of John Wayne is larger than any single role in any single film, though within single films he enacted roles that varied the myth occasionally. As a whole, out of time, the films of Wayne compose not only a'canon of accomplishment, but they also compose themselves into a mythic pattern that marks them (and his career) as the matter of folklore and folk art. This pattern is one which has been described by several different critics of art and culture, but none more usefully than by Joseph Campbell and Northrop Frye.2 The appearance of the "star" as an image of film vision is, on an aesthetic level, an experience of the essence incarnated. Successive appearances are successive- reincarnations, transfigurations of the archetypal figure. Like the divine heroes of old, popular movie stars move through myth-making adventures which fulfill ancient patterns of human fears and human desires. Although he is not the only such star to make up the form of the monomyth, John Wayne may be the most obvious and the most universal (i.e. trans-cultural) of them all. He becomes the hero of comedy, romance, irony, and tragedy, whenever he descends to make his presence known. A success in one role may be noteworthy or not, but the real force of his performance derives from the repetition of his presence, from the cumulative power of a continuous presence. The monomyth, as Campbell has described it, is a romantic cycle of (1) separation, or departure; (2) trials and victories of initiation; and (3) return and reintegration with society. This same cycle is rendered by Northrop Frye as a scheme determined by the four seasons: spring's comedy, summer's romance, tragedy's autumn, and winter's irony. If spring is recognized as an end (as well as a beginning), it easily fulfills Campbell's third stage of transformation, return and reintegration. This accommodates both schemes very nicely, to allow for separations and departures in summer romance, trials and victories of initiation in autumn's tragedy and winter's irony, concluded again by spring's comedy of renewal. The most fully realized of his roles as a romance-hero is Wayne's mysterious avenger of The Searchers (1956). As Ethan Edwards he enacted a role that touched on points of comedy (as the blocking "father" figure in the way of Martin's joining the family), of tragedy (in his failure of complete identification with community), and even of irony (from his outsider's perspective). The character has sufficient depth to resonate through all the modes. We can appreciate the perfection of its form by occasional glances at other of Wayne's roles in this romance mode: the Ringo Kid (Stagecoach, 1939), Tom Dunson (Red River, 1948), and Rooster Cogburn (True Grit, 1969; Rooster Cogburn, 1975). All of these have in common the essential form of John Wayne, the continuous identity of the Western hero: the loner, the rugged individualist who serves the community without being completely a part of it. This is the main public conception of John Wayne as well. …

Creative Tensions: Desert Victory, the Army Film Unit and Anglo-American Rivalry, 1943–5

Abstract: Desert Victory was a considerable commercial and critical success. It was afforded a prestigious premiere at the Odeon, Leicester Square, on 5 March 1943, was put into three showcase venues for its West End run and was given a general release throughout Britain ten days later. It was first screened in New York on 31 March at the Twentieth Century Fox Building and by the end of April some 400 copies were in circulation across America. The film proved to be far and away the biggest box-office winner of all the ‘official’ British documentaries produced and released during the war, accruing receipts of £77 250 up to May 1944 alone as against total production costs of £5793.1 And it received massive acclaim from the critics in both Britain and the United States, culminating in the award of an ‘Oscar’ from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for ‘the most distinctive documentary achievement of 1943’.2 Moreover Desert Victory has withstood the test of time well. It is celebrated in most standard histories of the British cinema and is frequently included in retrospective seasons of British films on television and in cinemas. The Services Kinema Corporation holds it in sufficient esteem to retain it, still, in its Catalogue of Documentary and General Purpose Films.3

Working with Welles: An Interview with Henry Jaglom

Abstract: Amidst the tangle of obsessions, sexual hangups, and interior panic that characterize Henry Jaglom's angst-ridden comic films, Orson Welles has remained a constant figure. Acting along with Tuesday Weld and Jack Nicholson, he helped Jaglom launch his first feature film, A Safe Place (1970), and in 1985, he made what turned out to be his last public appearance in Jaglom's current film, Someone To Love (1987). Jaglom in turn, as a consequence of his lifelong admiration of Welles, has faithfully recorded their film consultations over the years in The Jaglom/Welles Tapes: How the Studios Silenced a Genius. He has also used his New York feistiness and almost naive concern with decent human values to champion Welles's failed or aborted projects. Without success, he exhorted his powerful Hollywood producer friends to support Welles's adaptations of The Dreamers (Izak Dinesen's gothic tale) and King Lear, as well as Welles's last original script, The Big Brass Ring. In fact, Jaglom's staunch advocacy of Welles, whom he considers Hollywood's most brilliant director, extended to his outspoken condemnation of the industry's treatment of Welles at the otherwise sedate Hollywood memorial ceremony after Welles's death. Never one to shirk truth-telling no matter the personal cost, Jaglom is doggedly insistent in pursuit of his goals. The story of how he induced Welles to act in his first feature film, A Safe Place, is characteristic. With a letter of introduction from his friend, Peter Bogdanovich, he flew to New York to see Welles at the Plaza Hotel. According to Jaglom, Welles was seated in purple silk pajamas, looking like a big grape, and proclaimed, "I don't do first films without scripts." Jaglom then asked, "But will you at least sit there and listen to me for an hour?" Welles royally crossed his arms and equivocally acquiesced-"I'll sit here but I won't listen." And then the resourceful Jaglom made up a part for Welles on the spot. Since he knew how much Welles liked magic, he told him he could be a magician. "And you'll make something disappear-yourself." The guru of American cinema and thereafter Jaglom's lifelong friend-advisor, perked up. "Can I wear a cape?" he asked, and that clinched it. In a highly unconventional anti-Hollywood film that probes the perilous interior world of a pubescent girl's fantasies and neuroses, Orson Welles became the quirky rabbi/magician/ grandfather who guides her through her troubled adolescence. Once again, in Someone to Love, Welles plays an oracular role. Jaglom himself is the protagonist, a film director named Danny, who invites a group of singles (most of whom are actually Jaglom's friends) to an abandoned historic theater in Santa Monica in order to xplore why each is alone and always seeking "someone to love." Periodically, Danny turns to the back of the theater where Welles, playing himself, delivers his provocative philosophy of life. Without the usual embellishments of makeup and the film "magic" he adores, Welles poses impudent misogynistic reflections on the reasons for Jaglom's generational anxieties . . . the feminist movement, for example. In this let's-make-a-movie movie, where characters and author transgress their roles, Welles is a spatially disconcerting icon-he is both in a seat in the theater and a disjunctively imposed montage. Jaglom has him open the film with an ironic post-mortem statement ("Film is always old-fashioned. It is already dead by the time it is on the screen.") and tartly pronounce the film over with the buzz word of his own foiled movie career, "Cut!" when he thinks Jaglom's film should end because it is getting too "sweet."

Remembering Charlie : the story of a friendship

Abstract: "Remembering Charlie" is the life story of Charlie Chaplin, told by one of his friends and illustrated with many previously unpublished photographs from the private collections of the author and Chaplin's wife Oona. Charlie Chaplin made his first stage appearance at the age of five and from then on his professional career went from strength to strength. He spent six years in Fred Karno's touring company and then joined the film company Keystone, appearing in 35 films in the first year, many of which he also wrote and directed. There he created his most universally well-known and loved character, the Tramp. Epstein collaborated with Chaplin in the theatre and on his last three films. He is a theatre director, film producer and screenplay writer. In this book he shares a wealth of unique anecdotes about Chaplin. Geoff Brown is the author and editor of a number of books about the British cinema and writes film reviews for the "Radio Times" and "The Times".

An encyclopedic reference guide to film noir

Abstract: A reference guide for late-night film enthusiasts, this book provides details of over 300 American films of the genre. Each entry includes the credits of cast and crew, storylines and a critical discussion of the film in the context of cinema history. The fully illustrated text includes a chronology and lists of famous directors, producers and actors such as Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis.