Showing papers on "Movie theater published in 1991"

War and cinema : the logistics of perception

Abstract: From the synchronised camera/machine-guns on the biplanes of World War One to the laser satellites of Star Wars, the technologies of cinema and warfare have developed a fatal interdependence. Hiroshima marked one conclusion of this process in the nuclear 'flash' which penetrated the city's darkest recesses, etching the images of its victims on the walls. Since the disappearance of direct vision in battle and the replacement of one-to-one combat by the remote and murderous son et lumiere of trench warfare, military strategy has been dominated by the struggle between visibility and invisibility, surveillance and camouflage. Perception and destruction have now become coterminous. Paul Virilio, one of the most radical French critics of contemporary culture, explores these conjunctions from a range of perspectives. He gives a detailed technical jistory of weaponry, photography and cinematography, illuminating it with accounts of films and military campaigns. He examines in parallel the ideas of strategists and directors, along with views on war and cinema of writers from Apollinaire to William Burrroughs. And he finds further fruitful sources of reflection in the history of cinema architecture or the wartime popularity of striptease and pin-up. The result is a rich and suggestive analysis for military 'ways of seeing', and a disturbing account of how these have now permeated our culture: 'Warsaw, Beirut, Belfast...the streets themselves have become a permanent film-set for army cameras or the tourist reporters of global civil war.

Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film

Abstract: Introduction: Cinema Spectatorship and Public Life PART I: Rebuilding the Tower of Babel: The Emergence of Spectatorship 1. A Cinema in Search of a Spectator: Film-Viewer Relations before Hollywood 2. Early Audiences: Myths and Models 3. Chameleon and Catalyst: The Cinema as an Alternative Public Sphere PART II: Babel in Babylon: D. W. Grffith's Intolerance (1916) 4. Reception, Textual System, and Self-Definition 5. "A Radiant Crazy-Quilt": Patterns of Narration and Address 6. Genesis, Causes, Concepts of History 7. Film History, Archaeology Universal Language 8. Hieroglyphics, Figurations of Writing 9. Riddles of Maternity 10. Crisis of Femininity, Fantasies of Rescue PART III: The Return of Babylon: Rudolph Valentino and Female Spectatorship (1921-1926) 11. Male Star, Female Fans 12. Patterns of Vision, Scenarios of Identification Notes Illustration Credits Index

A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam

Abstract: "One of the sharpest and most productive analyses of our contemporaneity and the place of cinema within it and of our new historical relations as spectators to the imaginary universe on the movie screen. This is a study that will be of intense interest to film theorists and historians, cultural critics, mass media analysts, and anyone concerned with the complicated place of culture in our world today."--Dana Polan, English and Film Studies, University of Pittsburgh How have modern advertising techniques, the widespread use of VCRs, conglomerate takeovers of studios and film archives, cable TV, and media coverage of the Vietnam war changed the ways we watch movies? And how, in turn, have those different habits and patterns of viewing changed the ways in which films address their viewers? Drawing on a wide variety of American and European films and on many theoretical models, Timothy Corrigan investigates what he calls "a cinema without walls," taking a close look at particular films in order to see how we watch them differently in the post-Vietnam era. He examines cult audiences, narrative structure, genre films (road movies, in particular), and contemporary politics as they engage new models of film making and viewing. He thus provides a rare, serious attempt to deal with contemporary movies. Corrigan discusses filmmakers from a variety of backgrounds and cultures, including Martin Scorsese, Raoul Ruiz, Michael Cimino, Alexander Kluge, Francis Ford Coppola, Stephen Frears, and Wim Wenders. He offers detailed analyses of films such as Platoon; Full Metal Jacket; 9-1/2 Weeks; The Singing Detective; Choose Me; After Hours; Badlands; The King of Comedy; Paris, Texas; and My Beautiful Laundrette. Orchestrating this diversity, Corrigan provides a critical basis for making sense of contemporary film culture and its major achievements. Timothy Corrigan is a professor of English and film at Temple University. He is the author of Writing about Film and New German Film: The Displaced Image, and editor of The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History.

The Principle of Hope.

Abstract: This three-volume text is a critical history of the utopian vision and an exploration of the possible reality of utopia. Even as the world has rejected the doctrine on which Bloch sought to base his utopia, his work still challenges us to think more insightfully about our own visions of a better world. Volume one lays the foundations of the philosophy of process and introduces the idea of the "not-yet-conscious" - the anticipatory element that Bloch sees as central to human thought. It also contains an account of the aesthetic interpretations of utopian "wishful images" in fairy tales, popular fiction, travel, theatre, dance and the cinema. Volume two presents "the outlines of a better world." It examines the utopian systems that progressive thinkers have developed in the fields of medicine, painting, opera, poetry, and ultimately, philosophy. It is an account of utopian thought from the Greeks to the present. Volume three offers a prescription for ways in which humans can reach their proper "homeland," where social justice is coupled with an openness to change and to the future.

In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity

Abstract: Taking issue with many orthodox views of Film Noir, Frank Krutnik argues for a reorientation of this compulsively engaging area of Hollywood cultural production. Krutnik recasts the films within a generic framework and draws on recent historical and theoretical research to examine both the diversity of film noir and its significance within American popular culture of the 1940s. He considers classical Hollywood cinema, debates on genre, and the history of the emergence of character in film noir, focusing on the hard-boiled' crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain as well as the popularisationof Freudian psychoanalysis; and the social and cultural upheavals of the 1940s. The core of this book however concerns the complex representationof masculinity in the noir tough' thriller, and where and how gender interlocks with questions of genre. Analysing in detail major thrillers like The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past and The Killers , alongside lesser known but nonetheless crucial films as Stranger on the Third Floor, Pitfall and Dead Reckoning Krutnik has produced a provocative and highly readable study of one of Hollywood most perennially fascinating groups of films.

Film as film : understanding and judging movies

Abstract: Film making is inevitably based on collaboration and often bogged down by compromise, yet the achievements of the great directors leave no doubt that the cinema is a supreme art form of the 20th century. Detailed analyses of scenes from well-known films, many of them Hollywood classics like "Psycho", show how film makers can tell a story and interpret the events at one and the same time. It is only when we understand the dual role of the camera as a ruthlessly realistic eye and creator of illusions that rational film criticism becomes possible.

Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War

Abstract: At the outbreak of the Second World War, all cinemas in Britain were closed. Ten days later, they were opened again as a valuable way of boosting morale and a principal source of recreation for the nation at war. Feature films were not just escapist entertainment; they provided instruction and information, and over the next six years, some 300 feature films and thousands of short films and news reels were produced in what is now seen as British cinema's 'finest hour'. "Britain Can Take It" charts this momentous period through the eyes of thirteen key films. Aldgate and Richards make use of key resources, from scripts and box-office returns to official Home Office documents and censorship archives, to bring these films to vivid life. In telling their stories, the authors also recreate the society, the politics and war-time conditions in which they appeared and flourished. This new edition of "Britain Can Take It" features a new chapter on Launder and Gilliat's 1943 film on women factory workers, "Millions Like Us". It will be welcomed back by film scholars and historians, students and film lovers as essential reading.

British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930-1960

Abstract: In this unprecedented survey of British cinema from the 1930s to the New Wave of the 1960s, Marcia Landy explores how cinematic representation and social history converge. Landy focuses on the genre film, a product of British mass culture often dismissed by critics as "unrealistic," showing that in England such cinema subtly dramatized unresolved cultural conflicts and was, in fact, more popular than critics have claimed. Her discussion covers hundreds of works--including historical films, films of empire, war films, melodrama, comedy, science-fiction, horror, and social problem films--and reveals their relation to changing attitudes toward class, race, national identity, sexuality, and gender. Landy begins by describing the status and value of genre theory, then provides a history of British film production that illuminates the politics and personalities connected with the major studios. In vivid accounts of the films within each genre, she analyzes styles, codes, and conventions to show how the films negotiate history, fantasy, and lived experience. Throughout Landy creates a dynamic sense of genre and of how the genres shape, not merely reflect, cultural conflicts.Originally published in 1991.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Echo and Narcissus: Women's Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema

Abstract: Do women in classical Hollywood cinema ever truly speak for themselves? In "Echo and Narcissus", Amy Lawrence examines eight classic films to show how women's speech is repeatedly constructed as a 'problem', an affront to male authority. This book expands feminist studies of the representation of women in film, enabling us to see individual films in new ways, and to ask new questions of other films. Using "Sadie Thompson" (1928), "Blackmail" (1929), "Rain" (1932), "The Spiral Staircase", "Sorry, Wrong Number", "Notorious", "Sunset Boulevard" (1950) and "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962), Lawrence illustrates how women's voices are positioned within narratives that require their submission to patriarchal roles and how their attempts to speak provoke increasingly severe repression. She also shows how women's natural ability to speak is interrupted, made difficult, or conditioned to a suffocating degree by sound technology itself. Telephones, phonographs, voice-overs, and dubbing are fore grounded, called upon to silence women and to restore the primacy of the image. Unlike the usage of 'voice' by feminist and literary critics to discuss broad issues of authorship and point of view, in film studies the physical voice itself is a primary focus. "Echo and Narcissus" shows how assumptions about the 'deficiencies' of women's voices and speech are embedded in sound's history, technology, uses and marketing. Moreover, the construction of the woman's voice is inserted into the ideologically loaded cinematic and narrative conventions governing the representation of women in Hollywood film.

Indonesian Cinema: National Culture on Screen

Abstract: A film-goer accustomed to the typical Hollywood movie plot would feel uneasy watching an Indonesian movie. Contrary to expectations, good guys do not win, bad guys are not punished, and individuals do not reach a new self-awareness. Instead, by the end of the movie order is restored, bad guys are converted, and families are reunited. Like American movies, Indonesian films reflect the understandings and concerns of the culture and era in which they are made. Thus Indonesian preoccupations with order and harmony, national unity, and modernization motivate the plots of many films. Cinema has not traditionally been within the purview of anthropologists, but Karl Heider demonstrates how Indonesian movies are profoundly Indonesian. Produced in the national language by Indonesians from various regions, the films are intended for audiences across the diverse archipelago. Heider examines these films to identify pan-Indonesian cultural patterns and to show how these cultural principles shape the movies and, sometimes, how the movies influence the culture. This anthropological approach to Indonesian film opens up the medium of Asian cinema to a new group of scholars. "Indonesian Cinema" should be of interest to social scientists, Asianists, film scholars, and anyone concerned with the role of popular culture in developing countries.

Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema

Abstract: The most universal civilian privation in World War II Britain, the blackout possessed many symbolic meanings Among its complicated implications for filmmakers was a stigmatization of film spectacle--including the display of "Hollywood women, " whose extravagant appearance connoted at best unpatriotic wastefulness and at worst collaboration with the enemy Exploring the wartime breakdown of conventional gender roles on the screen and in the audience, Antonia Lant demonstrates that many British films of the period signaled their national cinematic identity by diverging from the notion of the Hollywood star, the mainstay of commercial American motion pictures, replacing her with a deglamourized, mobilized heroine Nevertheless, the war machine demanded that British films continue to celebrate stable and reassuring gender roles Contradictions abounded, both within film narratives and between narrative and "real life" Analyzing films of all the major wartime studios, the author scrutinizes the efforts of realist and melodramatic texts to confront women's wartime experiences, including conscription By combining study of contemporary posters, advertisements, propaganda notices, and cartoons with consideration of recent feminist theoretical work on the cinema, spectatorship, and history, she has produced the first book to examine the relationships among gender, cinema, and nationality as they are affected by the stresses of war

The warrior's camera : the cinema of Akira Kurosawa

Abstract: The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa, who died at the age of 88, has been internationally acclaimed as a giant of world cinema. "Rashomon," which won both the Venice Film Festival's grand prize and an Academy Award for best foreign-language film, helped ignite Western interest in the Japanese cinema. "Seven Samurai" and "Yojimbo" remain enormously popular both in Japan and abroad. In this newly revised and expanded edition of his study of Kurosawa's films, Stephen Prince provides two new chapters that examine Kurosawa's remaining films, placing him in the context of cinema history. Prince also discusses how Kurosawa furnished a template for some well-known Hollywood directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas. Providing a new and comprehensive look at this master filmmaker, "The Warrior's Camera" probes the complex visual structure of Kurosawa's work. The book shows how Kurosawa attempted to symbolize on film a course of national development for post-war Japan, and it traces the ways that he tied his social visions to a dynamic system of visual and narrative forms. The author analyzes Kurosawa's entire career and places the films in context by drawing on the director's autobiography--a fascinating work that presents Kurosawa as a Kurosawa character and the story of his life as the kind of spiritual odyssey witnessed so often in his films. After examining the development of Kurosawa's visual style in his early work, "The Warrior's Camera "explains how he used this style in subsequent films to forge a politically committed model of filmmaking. It then demonstrates how the collapse of Kurosawa's efforts to participate as a filmmaker in the tasks of social reconstruction led to the very different cinematic style evident in his most recent films, works of pessimism that view the world as resistant to change.

Creativity and Constraint in the British Film Industry

Abstract: Creativity - the theoretical context creativity and cinema the question of cinema technology the financing and production of British films - historical background British feature film production the film-making process - sales distribution and marketing genre, aesthetics and criticism creative collaboration and the production process a critical assessment of current British cinema.

European cinemas, European societies, 1939-1990

Abstract: Images in Society 1. The Coming War 2. Resistance 3. A Golden Age 4. The Blurred Image of Cities 5. Challenging Hollywood 6. A Time for Revisions

The organization of political ideology: culture, state, and theater in fascist italy*

Abstract: The Italian fascist regime claimed that the theater was an ideal cultural vehicle for diffusing fascist ideology. Yet, the regime did not radically alter the content offascist theater. Standard accounts of the relationship between culture and the state that privilege the cultural product suggest that the Italian case was anomalous. Using archival materials, I lay out a conceptualframeworkfor discussing the interaction between states and cultural institutions and apply it to Italianfascist theatrical policyfrom 1922 to 1940. Thefascist regime pursued a policy of state paternalism towards the theater. The regime regulated producers of culture rather than cultural products and used organizational structures to legitimate a split between doing theater and writing theater -performance and text. The Italian case suggests that even a regime that claims to be totalitarian cannot create a national aesthetic. it also forces a re-examination of prior studies of states and cultural institutions. M odern states frequently mobilize social and cultural institutions to disseminate ideological beliefs and to shape the public identities of their citizens. While expenditures for cultural institutions may be a small part of state budgets, cultural products diffuse more widely than benefits that accrue to individuals. They provide the state with a symbolic infrastructure. Early in the twentieth century, regimes as diverse as Stalinist Russia, New Deal America and fascist Italy enlisted national cultural institutions in the service of ideology. Despite recent exceptions (Goldfarb 1989; Haraszti 1987; Hunt 1984; Mally 1990), the social science and historical literature lacks accounts of the process through which regimes use cultural institutions to diffuse political ideology.I Studies of Nazi art (Lane [1968] 1985), fascist cinema (Hay 1987), and totalitarian culture (Golomstock 1990), no matter how rich in descriptive value, belie the complexity of the interaction between politics and ideology and suggest that regimes can mold cultural products in their ideological images. Theater in fascist Italy is a useful venue for exploring the interaction between states and cultural institutions. When Benito Mussolini came to power in 1922, cinema was in its infancy and theater was the principal mass entertainment medium. Theorists and activists of varying political persuasions viewed the theater as an effective political tool (e.g., Goldman [1914] 1987; Rol

In a lonely street: genre, film noir, masculinity

Abstract: Taking issue with many orthodox views of Film Noir, Frank Krutnik argues for a reorientation of this compulsively engaging area of Hollywood cultural production Krutnik recasts the films within a generic framework and draws on recent historical and theoretical research to examine both the diversity of film noir and its significance within American popular culture of the 1940s He considers classical Hollywood cinema, debates on genre, and the history of the emergence of character in film noir, focusing on the hard-boiled' crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M Cain as well as the popularisationof Freudian psychoanalysis; and the social and cultural upheavals of the 1940s The core of this book however concerns the complex representationof masculinity in the noir tough' thriller, and where and how gender interlocks with questions of genre Analysing in detail major thrillers like The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past and The Killers , alongside lesser known but nonetheless crucial films as Stranger on the Third Floor, Pitfall and Dead Reckoning Krutnik has produced a provocative and highly readable study of one of Hollywood most perennially fascinating groups of films

Realism as a Style in Cinema Verite: A Critical Analysis of "Primary"

Abstract: Opening a Can of Worms. In March of 1961, Robert Drew announced what Broadcasting magazine would dub the "three commandments" of "television's school of storm and stress": "I'm determined to be there when the news happens. I'm determined to be as unobtrusive as possible. And I'm determined not to distort the situation."2 The name "school of storm and stress" was a glib reference to Drew's preference for subjects wrapped up in their own affairs and apparently oblivious to camera and crew. "I seek people driven by their own forces--forces so strong that they can forget about me," he said.3 And indeed, in 1960 Drew produced films on the candidates in the Wisconsin Democratic presidential primary, on the winner of the coveted "pole" position in the Indianapolis 500 race, on protestors in Havana's Plaza Civica after Cuba's expulsion from the Organization of American States, and on the parents of students in Louisiana schools during court-ordered desegregation.4 But the name "school of storm and stress" did not, as it turned out, stick. Neither did "living camera," the title Drew Associates preferred. Their work finally came to be known as "cinema verite," a decidedly pretentious term for which members of the group would endure much abuse, even though they seldom used it themselves.5 And it could, of course, have been worse: one critic referred to the style as "cinema manque" and another as "cinema banalite."6 But cinema verite had as many champions as critics, and the work of Drew Associates inspired a feeling, for some, that cinema was "only just beginning." "The kind of documentary Mr. Drew describes is the purest documentary of all," declared John Secondari, Executive Producer at ABC-TV in 1963. "When you can tell a story as it unfolds, with your camera and without very much need of words, you have documentary in the palm of your hands."7 Louis Marcorelles spoke of the work of Drew Associates as part of a "revolution" that would -be as important to the future of the cinema as Brecht was to the theater. "Truth no longer lies in seeming to give a 'good performance,' a star turn," he wrote for Sight & Sound in 1963, "but in seizing the individual unawares, rather as you may discover the real face of a woman in the early morning on the pillow beside you."8 With the emergence of cinema verite, something close to a modern religion was born, according to James Blue. "Cinema verite has its

Hollywood Shot by Shot: Alcoholism in American Cinema

Abstract: To what extent have Hollywood feature films shaped the meanings that Americans attach to alcoholics, their families, and the alcoholic condition? To what extent has the mass culture of the movie industry itself been conceptually shaped by a broad, external societal discourse? Norman Denzin brings to his life-long study of alcoholism a searching interest in how cultural texts signify and lend themselves to interpretation within a social nexus. Both historical and diachronic in his approach, Denzin identifies five periods in the alcoholism films made between 1932 and the end of the 1980s, and offers a detailed critical reading of thirty-seven films produced during these six decades.

Movie History : A Survey

Abstract: Contents Acknowledgements Illustrations Preface SECTION 1: The Silent Cinema 1895-1927 Chapter 1: The Invention and Innovation of the Motion Pictures Case Study 1: Who Went to See Early Movies in the USA? Chapter 2: The Triumph of Hollywood Case Study 2: Government Control of What Audiences Saw - The Battle on Film Censorship in Germany and the USA Chapter 3: Hollywood Establishes the Classic Narrative Style Case Study 3: The Acceptance of the Classical Hollywood Filmmaking Style Chapter 4: Influential Alternatives to Hollywood: European Cinema Case Study 4: Carl Dreyer - A Danish Individualist Chapter 5: Experiments in Filmmaking: The USSR Case Study 5: Evaluation in Movie History - The Case of Odessa Steps SECTION 2: The Hollywood Studio Era 1928-1950 Chapter 6: The Coming of Sound & the Studio System Case Study 6: The Coming of Sound to Europe - The Triumph of National Film Production in Holland Chapter 7: The First Golden Age of Hollywood Movie Making Case Study 7: How was the Moviegoer Affected by the Movies? - Reconstructing the Meaning of Movies and Movie Going with the Help of Oral History. Chapter 8: European Alternatives to Hollywood: France, Britain, Germany and Italy Case Study 8: What Did the European Moviegoer Really Like? - Reconstructing the taste of the Moviegoer with the Help of Film Programming and Statistics. SECTION 3: The Television Era 1951-1975 Chapter 9: Television, Wide-Screen and Colour Case Study 9: Film Societies as Alternative Spaces for Movie Exhibition Chapter 10: A Transformation of Hollywood Movie-Making Case Study 10: A Critic who Changed the Status of Hollywood Movies Chapter 11: The European Art Cinema Alternative Case Study 11: Art Movie Theaters in the USA Chapter 12: Alternative Film Industries - The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, South America, Australia and Japan Case Study 12: The Importance of Film Festivals SECTION 4: The Video to Digital Era 1975-2010 Chapter 13: Contemporary World Cinema History - 1975 and Beyond Case Study 13: Film Historical Research in the Digital Age Chapter 14: Hollywood Thrives Case Study 14: The Reception of James Cameron's Avatar Bibliography Glossary Index

In the National Interest: A Chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada from 1949 to 1989

Abstract: One of the cornerstones of Canadian culture, the National Film Board has throughout its history mirrored the social issues that preoccupy Canadians. Gary Evans traces the development of the postwar NFB, picking up the story where he left it at the end of his earlier work, John Grierson and the National Film Board: The Politics of Wartime Propaganda.Evans points out that although Ottawa has not meddled in the operation of the NFB, outside stimuli have regularly forced the Film Board to reassess its mandate, a process which often has brought about as much confusion as light. For example, the unbridled optimism and expansion of the fifties and sixties led to English Production's desire for 'democratization' of programming, an end to the power of executive producers, and an expansion of the Film Board's core of permanent employees, all of which nearly caused the organization to founder. On the French side, despite the filmmakers' preference for the feature film rather than the cinema verite documentary, many in Ottawa regarded their 'political' films as both unfair attacks on the federal system and anachronisms coming from a federal institution. Throughout, the English-French tug of war so integral to the Canadian identity is a recurring theme. Sources include interviews with former ministers, government film commissioners, policy-makers, and filmmakers, as well as archival documents and films. From them Evans has produced the first study to document the key trends in postwar Canadian filmmaking and to examine the role of film in the evolution of federal cultural policy.

Catalan cinema: Historical experience and cinematic practice

Abstract: (1991). Catalan cinema: Historical experience and cinematic practice. Quarterly Review of Film and Video: Vol. 13, No. 1-3, pp. 131-146.

Narrated Films: Storytelling Situations in Cinema History

Abstract: In Narrated Films, Avrom Fleishman explores the distinctive literary techniques often used by filmmakers to tell their stories. Through close viewings of ingeniously paired films, Fleishman documents five narrational practices in the cinema: voice-over ( Orpheus and Sunset Boulevard); dramatized narration, in which the film is a story that one character tells another ( The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Hiroshima Mon Amour); multiple narration, in which a number of characters tell the story that is the film ( Rashomon and Zelig); written narration, whether through diaries or letters ( Letter from an Unknown Woman and Diary of a Country Priest); and the cinematic version of interior monologue, which Fleishman terms mindscreen narration ( Brief Encounter and Daybreak).

The Gorgon's Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of Horror

Abstract: The Gorgon's Gaze is an interdisciplinary study of recurrent themes in German cinema as it has developed since the early twentieth century. Focusing on pertinent films of the pre- and post-World War II eras, Paul Coates explores the nature of expressionism, which is generally agreed to have ended with the advent of sound cinema, and its persistence in the styles of such modern masters of Film noir as Orson Welles and Ingmar Bergman. In considering the possibility of homologies between the necessary silence of pre-sound cinema and the widespread modernist aspiration to an aesthetic of silence, Coates relates theories of the sublime, the uncanny, and the monstrous to his subject. He also reflects upon problems of representability and the morality of representation of events that took place during the Nazi era.

Looking for trouble : on shopping, gender and the cinema

Abstract: The author of this collection of essays takes a feminist look at some of the icons of modern life - Baudrillard, "Twin Peaks", post-feminism, the New Man and a number of popular film directors, such as Steven Spielberg and Federico Fellini - and applies her own interpretations of their appeal.

Black Cinema Treasures: Lost and Found

Abstract: Focusing on a much-neglected area of film experience in America, Black Cinema Treasures furthers the preservation of America's cultural and historic heritage, especially its African-American heritage as seen through the eyes of the African-American independent filmmakers of the 1920s through the 1950s. Ossie Davis says that the collection is one of the best sources of black "self-consciousness" in America during those decades.

The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations

Abstract: This book is the companion volume to "Emotion Pictures". In the book Wenders moves from a contemplation of pure cinema, to a consideration and analysis of his own films. Beginning with the question: Why do you make films?, Wenders expresses his own unique approach to cinema. He then proceeds to discuss the full range of his work, from "Summer in the City" and his early German films, through to "Paris, Texas" and "Wings of Desire".

The Breening of America

Abstract: HE DOMINANT FORM of cinema history has been the narrative-more specifically, the Hollywood roman-fleuvethat pits heroic writers and directors against philistine industry executives in a plot as absorbing, and accurate, as Margaret Mitchell's story of the old South. The philistine of philistines has been the Production Code Administration (PCA). An intraindustry agency concerned with screen mores and values, the PCA supervised the treatment of sex (including costumes, dances, and bedroom scenes), religion, and such "repellant subjects" as executions, white slavery, and cruelty to animals. For almost thirty years the Production Code seal was the passport that motion pictures needed to enter the largest and most profitable theaters in America. In A Short History of the Movies Gerald Mast sneers at the "moralistic scissors" of the agency (295), while David Cook calls the code "awesomely repressive." From 1934 to the 1950s, Cook notes in A History of Narrative Film, the Production Code "rigidly dictated the content of American films, and in a very real sense kept them from becoming as serious as they might have, and, perhaps, should have, been" (266-67). Conventional wisdom on the Production Code and the PCA suits those who shape Hollywood history as fictional narrative. Tales of a moralistic and repressive code make the romantic artist (director or writer or actor) seem even more romantic, just as tales of Joseph Ignatius Breen-the head of the agency-and his sternness toward the moviemakers provide a focus for charges that Hollywood was antiintellectual and anti-art. The PCA archive, however, opened to scholars less than a decade ago, forces a broader interpretation of the