Showing papers on "Movie theater published in 1994"

Film History: An Introduction

Abstract: Part 1 Early cinema: the invention and early years of the cinema, 1880s-1904 the international expansion of the cinema, 1905-1912 national cinemas, Hollywood classicism and World War I, 1913-1919. Part 2 The late silent era, 1919-1928: France in the 1920s Germany in the 1920s Soviet cinema in the 1920s the late silent era in Hollywood - 1920-1928 international trends of the 1920s. Part 3 The development of sound cinema, 1926-1945: the introduction of sound the Hollywood studio system, 1930-1945 other studio systems cinema and the state - the USSR, Germany and Italy, 1930-1945 France, 1930-1945 - poetic realism, the popular front and the occupation leftist, documentary and experimental cinemas, 1930-1945. Part 4 The post-war era, 1946-1960s: American cinema in the post-war era, 1946-1967 post-war European cinema - neorealism and other trends post-war European cinema - France, Scandinavia and Britain post-war cinema beyond the West art cinema and the idea of authorship new waves and young cinemas documentary and experimental cinema in the post-war era. Part 5 The contemporary cinema since the 1960s: third world cinema, 1960s-1970s documentary and experimental film Hollywood's fall and rise - since the 1960s new cinemas and new developments - Europe, the USSR and the Pacific since the 1970s new cinemas in developing countries since the 1970s.

Romance and the Yellow Peril: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction

Abstract: Hollywood films about Asians and interracial sexuality are the focus of Gina Marchetti's provocative new work. While miscegenation might seem an unlikely theme for Hollywood, Marchetti shows how fantasy-dramas of interracial rape, lynching, tragic love, and model marriage are powerfully evident in American cinema. The author begins with a discussion of D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, then considers later films such as Shanghai Express, Madame Butterfly, and the recurring geisha movies. She also includes some fascinating "forgotten" films that have been overlooked by critics until now. Marchetti brings the theoretical perspective of recent writing on race, ethnicity, and gender to her analyses of film and television and argues persuasively that these media help to perpetuate social and racial inequality in America. Noting how social norms and taboos have been simultaneously set and broken by Hollywood filmmakers, she discusses the "orientalist" tensions underlying the construction of American cultural identity. Her book will be certain to interest readers in film, Asian, women's, and cultural studies.

Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema

Abstract: Dominant cinema rereading dominant cinema - feminism and film theory replacing dominant cinema - feminism and film practice.

Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music

Abstract: Since the days of silent films, music has been integral to the cinematic experience, serving, variously, to allay audiences' fears of the dark and to heighten a film's emotional impact. Yet viewers are often unaware of its presence. In this bold, insightful book, film and music scholar and critic Royal S. Brown invites readers not only to 'hear' the film score, but to understand it in relation to what they 'see'. Unlike earlier books, which offered historical, technical, and socio political analysis, "Overtones and Undertones" draws on film, music, and narrative theory to provide the first comprehensive aesthetics of film music. Focusing on how the film/score interaction influences our response to cinematic situations, Brown traces the history of film music from its beginnings, covering both American and European cinema. At the heart of his book are close readings of several of the best film/score interactions, including "Psycho", "Laura", "The Sea Hawk", "Double Indemnity", and "Pierrot le Fou". In revealing interviews with Bernard Herrmann, Miklos Rosza, Henry Mancini, and others, Brown also allows the composers to speak for themselves. A complete discography and bibliography conclude the volume.

The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies

Abstract: "Offers an historically detailed examination of how Hollywood has depicted the physically disabled experience ...thoughtfully argued and well documented...Anyone interested in how mainstream movies have shaped our images of the world ought to carefully read this fine book." --Douglas Gomery, author of The Hollywood Studio System "I enjoyed this book from its terrific title to its skillful interweaving of movie history with disability history...It makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of where America gets its myths and stereotypes of disability." --Joseph Shapiro, author of No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement Filmmakers have often encouraged us to regard people with physical disabilities in terms of pity, awe, humor, or fear--as "Others" who somehow deserve to be isolated from the rest of society. In this first history of the portrayal of physical disability in the movies, Martin Norden examines hundreds of Hollywood films (and notable international ones), finds their place within mainstream society, and uncovers the movie industry's practices for maintaining the status quo--keeping people with disabilities dependent and "in their place." Norden offers a dazzling array of physically disabled characters who embody or break out of these stereotypes that have both influenced and been symptomatic of society's fluctuating relationship with its physically diabled minority. He shows us "sweet innocents" like Tiny Tim, "obsessive avengers" like Quasimodo, variations on the disabled veteran, and many others. He observes the arrival of a new set of stereotypes tied to the growth of science and technology in the 1970s and 1980s, and underscores movies like My Left Foot and The Waterdance that display a newfound sensitivity. Norden's in-depth knowledge of disability history makes for a particularly intelligent and sensitive approach to this long-overlooked issue in media studies. Martin F. Norden teaches film as a professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has co-authored Movies: A Language in Light and has written many articles on moving-image media.

Black African Cinema

Abstract: From the proselytizing lantern slides of early Christian missionaries to contemporary films that look at Africa through an African lens, N. Frank Ukadike explores the development of black African cinema. He examines the impact of culture and history, and of technology and co-production, on filmmaking throughout Africa. Every aspect of African contact with and contribution to cinematic practices receives attention: British colonial cinema; the thematic and stylistic diversity of the pioneering 'francophone' films; the effects of television on the motion picture industry; and patterns of television documentary filmmaking in 'anglophone' regions. Ukadike gives special attention to the growth of independent production in Ghana and Nigeria, the unique Yoruba theater-film tradition, and the militant liberationist tendencies of 'lusophone' filmmakers. He offers a lucid discussion of oral tradition as a creative matrix and the relationship between cinema and other forms of popular culture. And, by contrasting 'new' African films with those based on the traditional paradigm, he explores the trends emerging from the eighties and nineties. Clearly written and accessible to specialist and general reader alike, "Black African Cinema's" analysis of key films and issues - the most comprehensive in English - is unique. The book's pan-Africanist vision heralds important new strategies for appraising a cinema that increasingly attracts the attention of film students and Africanists.

The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914

Abstract: Richard Abel's book aims to radically rewrite the history of French cinema between 1896 and 1914, particularly during the years when Pathe-Freres, the first major corporation in the new industry, led the world in film production and distribution Based on extensive investigation of rare archival films and documents, and drawing on recent social and cultural histories of turn-of-the-century France and the United States, his book provides insights into the earliest history of the cinema Abel tells how early French film entertainment changed from a cinema of attractions to the narrative format that Hollywood would so successfully exploit He describes the popular genres of the era - comic chases, trick films and "feeries", historical and biblical stories, family melodramas and grand guignol tales, crime and detective films - and shows the shift from short subjects to feature-length films Cinema venues evolved along with the films as live music, colour effects and other exhibiting techniques and practices drew larger and larger audiences Abel explores the ways these early films mapped significant differences in French social life, helping to produce thoroughly bourgeois, turn-of-the-century citizens for Third Republic France

Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order

Abstract: A study of the institutions and texts of Indonesian cinema after the army-led counter-revolution of 1965. Sen (communication studies, Murdoch U., Australia) demonstrates that cinema in Indonesia cannot be understood without reference to the political and economic transformations brought about by the

Discovering Form, Inferring Meaning: New Cinemas and the Film Festival Circuit

Abstract: How do we encounter cinemas, and cultures, not our own? One of the latest "discoveries" on the international film festival circuit, postrevolutionary cinema from Iran, occasions this question.' (The accompanying filmography identifies the specific films addressed here.) Usually, the context in which such films reach us is neglected as we pass on to a discussion of style, themes, auteurs, and national culture. In order to render the viewing context and its crucial mediating role less transparent, this essay provides an account of the film festival experience. It focuses on how this experience inflects and constructs the meanings we ascribe to one of the newest in a continuous succession of "new cinemas" while we at the same time constitute the very audience needed to recognize and appreciate such cinemas as distinct and valued entities.2 The usual opening gambit in the discovery of new cinemas is the claim that these works deserve international attention because of their discovery by a festival. This gambit has its echo in the writings of popular critics. Films from nations not previously regarded as prominent film-producing countries receive praise for their ability to transcend local issues and provincial tastes while simultaneously providing a window onto a different culture. We are invited to receive such films as evidence of artistic maturity-the work of directors ready to take their place within an international fraternity of auteurs-and of a distinctive national culturework that remains distinct from Hollywood-based norms both in style and theme. Examples from festival catalogues of newly discovered cinemas and auteurs:

Early cinema in Russia and its cultural reception

Abstract: In Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception Yuri Tsivian examines the development of cinematic form and culture in Russia, from its late nineteenth-century beginnings as a fairground attraction to the early post-Revolutionary years. Tsivian traces the changing perceptions of cinema and its social transition from a modernist invention to a national art form. He explores reactions to the earliest films, from actors, novelists, poets, writers, and journalists. His richly detailed study of the physical elements of cinematic performance includes the architecture and illumination of the cinema foyer, the speed of projection and film acoustics. In contrast to standard film histories, this book focuses on reflected images: rather than discussing films and film-makers, it features the historical film-goer and early writings on film. Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception presents a vivid and changing picture of cinema culture in Russia in the twilight of the tsarist era and the first decades of the twentieth century. Tsivian's study expands the whole context of reception studies and opens up questions about reception relevant to other national cinemas.

I'd rather watch the movie than read the book

Abstract: Geographers have been using film as a pedagogic device for some time, but it is not until recently that the full power of this medium has been recognised within the discipline as a forceful determinant of cultural norms. When using film in the classroom, I argue that there is not only a need to consider carefully the narrative of conventions followed by film‐makers but also a need for awareness of the possibility subtexts within the film which mark significant cultural and political biases. This is equally as true of ‘objective’ documentary cinema as it is of narrative or fictional cinema. Examples of movies that I have used in the classroom are discussed in order to suggest that narrative cinema can make an important contribution to the geography curriculum in higher education.

New Chinese cinemas : forms, identities, politics

Abstract: List of illustrations List of contributors Acknowledgments Note on the Romanisation of Chinese Introduction Nick Browne Part I. Film in the People's Republic: 1. Spatiality and subjectivity in Xie Jin's film melodrama of the new period Ma Ning 2. Society and subjectivity: on the political economy of Chinese melodrama Nick Browne 3. Huang Jianxin and the notion of post-socialism Paul G. Pickowicz 4. Neither one thing nor another? Towards a study of the viewing subject and Chinese cinema in the 1980s Chris Berry Part II. Film in Taiwan and Hong Kong: 5. Remapping Taipei Fredric Jameson 6. The Ideology of initiation: the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien William Tay 7. The return of the father: Hong Kong new wave and its Chinese context in the 1980s Li Cheuk-To 8. Border crossing: mainland China's presence in Hong Kong cinema Esther Yau 9. Two films from Hong Kong: parody and allegory Leo Ou-Fan Lee.

Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany

Abstract: The setting is 1920s Berlin, cultural heart of Europe and the era's only serious cinematic rival to Hollywood. In his engaging study, Thomas Saunders explores an outstanding example of one of the most important cultural developments of this century: global Americanization through the motion picture. The invasion of Germany by American films, which began in 1921 with overlapping waves of sensationalist serials, slapstick shorts, society pictures, and historical epics, initiated a decade of cultural collision and accommodation. On the one hand it fueled an impassioned debate about the properties of cinema and the specter of wholesale Americanization. On the other hand it spawned unprecedented levels of cooperation and exchange. In Berlin, American motion pictures not only entertained all social classes and film tastes but also served as a vehicle for American values and a source of sharp economic competition. Hollywood in Berlin correlates the changing forms of Hollywood's contributions to Weimar culture and the discourses that framed and interpreted them, restoring historical contours to a leading aspect of cultural interchange in this century. At the same time, the book successfully embeds Weimar cinema in its contemporary international setting.

The Show Starts on the Sidewalk: An Architectural History of the Movie Theatre, Starring S. Charles Lee

Abstract: From the 1890 penny arcades and the opulence and ornate movie houses of the 1920s and 1930s to the drive-in theatres of the 1950s and the multiplex cinemas of today, movie theatres have provided an environment where millions of Americans learned about life, culture, politics, romance, and sex. This book - as entertaining and lively as its subject - documents the history of the American movie theatre, tracing its evolution and exploring its role in American culture and architecture. Maggie Valentine focuses on the career of architect S. Charles Lee, who designed more than three hundred theatres between 1920 and 1950, mostly in California, and whose buildings became prototypes for movie theatres all over the country. She vividly re-creates the sights and sounds of Lee's theatres, with their huge interiors, crystal chandeliers, Art Deco motifs, and majestic organ music. She describes the colorful terrazzo patterns that set off the theatre entrance and the marquee that formed a canopy over it, design elements exploited by Lee, who insisted that the sidewalk, indeed, was where the show started. Valentine discusses how glamorous motion picture theatres helped define and vary the skyline of America, changing the shape of commercial streets in cities and towns. Examining theatres as products and symbols of their time, she presents with dramatic flair both how they influenced and were influenced by architectural trends and the economic, social, and political forces of the era. The book, richly illustrated with period photographs, will be mandatory reading for anyone who has ever reveled, popcorn in hand, in the luxury of an old-time motion picture theatre.

The films of Wim Wenders : cinema as vision and desire

Abstract: Preface Part I. The Boy with the Movie Camera: Biography Historical background Student films Part II. On the Road: Exile and Innocence: Major themes and images in Wenders' films Part III. Close analysis of Selected Films: Kings of the Road The State of Things Paris, Texas: between the winds Wings of Desire: between heaven and earth Part IV. Conclusion: A stranger in Heimat Footnotes to I-IV Filmography Bibliography.

Dreams of chaos, visions of order : understanding the American avante-garde cinema

Abstract: In spite of the difficulty of most American avant-garde films, one can read volumes and find almost no mention of how to view these films. Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order addresses precisely this question: how-and to what extent-can viewers make sense of American avant-garde films? It is a controversial book that examines the implicit assumptions of traditional scholarship, advocates on alternative to dominant approaches to the avant-garde cinema, and questions some long-standing clich's about the history of the avant-garde.

"Democracy and Burnt Cork": The End of Blackface, the Beginning of Civil Rights

Abstract: THE NEW DEAL brought the immigrant to the center of American politics. Shifting the orientation of the majority party from the hinterland to the metropolis, Franklin D. Roosevelt's victories were foreshadowed by the Catholic Al Smith's 1928 run for the presidency. The 1930s and 1940s were also the golden age of the Hollywood studio system, with the coming of talking pictures. In the standard film-history accounts, urban, Americanizing immigrants watched massproduced, studio-made, genre films purveying the quintessential national narratives-gangster pictures, musicals, screwball comedies, domestic melodramas, westerns. The 1930s left its mark on the genre mix, from this point of view, bringing together the urban milieu of gangster films and screwball comedy's class reconciliation-the movies of Frank Capra celebrating populist politics, on the one hand, and the cinema of escapist entertainment allowing moviegoers to flee the Depression, on the other. Some of the most important and popular films of the period are missing from this picture: films grounded in race. As the Jazz Age came to an end, Al Jolson's blackface TheJazz Singer (1927) and The Singing Fool (1928) broke all existing box office records. At the same time thatJolson was the top Hollywood box office star, Amos 'n' Andy was the most popular radio show. The Motion Picture Exhibitors' coveted top ten list of stars was headed in 1934 by Will Rogers, who put on Stepin Fetchit's blackvoice in the "southern"Judge Priest (1934); from 1935 through 1938 by Shirley Temple, who starred in a series of Civil War southerns with Bojangles Robinson (and put on blackface in one of them); and in 1939 by Mickey Rooney, who led a blackface minstrel show that year in Babes in Arms. Far from being a blockbuster exception to New Deal cinema, David 0. Selznick's Gone with the Wind (1939), the most popular film in Hollywood's first half century, proves the rule.' TheJazz Singer and Gone with the Wind were transformative films in the history of Hollywood, combining box office success, critical recognition of innovative significance, and shifts in the cinematic mode of production. The two earlier revolutionary moments in film history similarly addressed the fundamental conflict in American history, given in Winthrop Jordan's formulation as "white over black"; they also show, in Edmund Morgan's terms, how American freedom was born from American slavery. I have in mind the Edwin S. Porter trilogy of

Lost Angels: Psychoanalysis and Cinema

Abstract: Lost Angels: psychoanalysis and cinema was written out of the various dilemmas surrounding a psychoanalytic and feminist theory of cinema in the mid-1980s. Revisiting the concept of identification as it emerges through Freud's writing - from Studies in Hysteria to Civilisation and its Discontents - this book aims to both question and expand the use of that concept in psychoanalytic film theory and, in particular, its privileged association with so-called classic Hollywood film. Using psychoanalysis to explore a number of (more or less) mainstream American youth films of the 1980s, Lost Angels attempts to open up the questions of fantasy and sexual difference so central to feminist film theory to the critique of mass culture, its degradation of cultural investiture, in the writings of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Kluge).

The Birth of a nation : D.W. Griffith, director

Abstract: The Birth of a Nation (1915) remains the most controversial American film ever made, and its director, D. W. Griffith, one of the most extraordinary figures in film history. It was the first true feature film and did more than any other to launch Hollywood both as an industry and as an idea. The film consolidated a trend in cinematic technique and an approach to dramatic narrative that define American cinema to this day. As a great but ideologically troubled film that offers us a reflection of ourselves as Americans, The Birth of a Nation continues to intrigue, challenge, infuriate, and awe. Robert Lang's introduction to this volume explores in fascinating detail the warped view of history that this great film presents. Griffith, a Southerner, was intent on resurrecting, idealizing, and justifying the South. In The Birth of a Nation, it is racism that unites the white North and South; the protection or abolition of slavery is not the divisive issue. In a powerful synthesis of spectacle and narrative, Griffith seeks to give the Southern cause a sense of glamour and high purpose. Lang considers the film as a historical melodrama, and by examining Griffith's "historiography as ideological practice," he traces the way in which the bloody, traumatic reality of the Civil War and Reconstruction becomes melodramatic myth. This unparalleled guide to The Birth of a Nation offers a shot-by-shot continuity script; a biographical sketch of the director; a sampling of contemporary reviews; a series of essays by distinguished critics including James Chandler, Michael Rogin, Janet Staiger, and Mimi White; and a filmography and bibliography. Robert Lang is an assistant professor of English and film studies at the University of Hartford.

Walter Wanger, Hollywood independent

Abstract: The long, colorful career of producer Walter Wanger (1894-1968) represents one of Hollywood's greatest untold stories. Married to actress Joan Bennett, he is perhaps best remembered for shooting his wife's lover in a Beverly Hills parking lot and for his involvement with the catastrophic Cleopatra. But Wanger was also an intellectual sophisticate whose astute skills as a producer have received remarkably little attention. A socially conscious movie executive responsible for such film classics as "Queen Christina" with Greta Garbo, John Ford's "Stagecoach", Alfred Hitchcock's "Foreign Correspondent", and Don Siegel's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", he exemplified the figure of the glamorous, independent Hollywood producer. Matthew Bernstein's lively and exhaustive study utilizes archival correspondence and interviews with film industry veterans, including Joan Bennett, director Robert Wise, and writer-director-producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Wanger's tempestuous career serves as an incomparable window into the process of filmmaking during the heyday of the studio system. Bernstein defines the flexible nature of the term 'producer' in golden-age Hollywood and demonstrates how Wanger's efforts to produce films independently were often compromised by the omnipotent studio system. This comprehensive biography offers new insights into the producer's influence in the history of American cinema, and it makes for fascinating reading.

Framing the past : the historiography of German cinema and television

Abstract: This collection of essays was selected from those presented in October 1988 at a conference sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, "Concepts of History in German Cinema." The contributors include notable historians, film scholars, and German studies specialists who explore the complex network of social, political, and religious institutions that have influenced the historiography of German cinema and television. Before the turn of the century, Germans began to employ the medium of film to represent the past when they attempted to document their Prussian heritage. Since then, German cinema and television have promoted history as a component of personal, cultural, and national identity by consistently providing prominent treatment of historical subjects. Although it is relatively easy to document changes in the selection and handling of these subjects, it is more difficult to determine precisely which factors have motivated those changes. In attempting to define these factors, the link between German cinema, television, and history has developed around three interrelated issues: (1) the reception of Weimar cinema, which for most film scholars continues to be mediated to one extent or another by Siegfried Kracauer's work; (2) the inscribing of fascism in cinema and television; and (3) the nature of, and potential for, alternatives to mainstream cinema and television.