Search results
This book explores the theoretical and critical concept of filmic point of view. Its case studies are six acclaimed and accomplished instances of ‘classical Hollywood cinema’: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Capra, 1936), Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks, 1939), Letter from an Unknown Woman (Ophuls, 1948), Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger, 1959), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford, 1962). The book’s particular contributions to the study of filmic point of view are to use ‘communication’ as an idea which permits new ways of approaching this topic, and to offer detailed explorations of the filmic representation of character experience (including character ‘consciousness’ and interaction), and of the relationship of film to other media of communication (especially print media and the novel). With respect to character experience, it is argued that the often-held distinction between an inner realm of thought and feeling and an outer realm of behaviour and objects fails to do justice to the human experience of ‘being-in-the-world’ and film’s ability to represent it. With respect to film’s relationship to other media, it explores the traversing of the public, the private and the social that narrative fiction film represents, in a way that aligns the medium with the novel. The book is offered as a demonstration and defence of the value of a ‘conversational’ critical method that entails detailed scrutiny of our film-viewing experiences and of the language we use to describe those experiences, and eschews the construction of a taxonomy designed for general applicability.
Rehabilitation Administration, stated in his November 1943 acceptance address: ‘We must be guided not alone by the compelling force of human sentiments but also by dictates of sound common sense and of mutual interest.’ 8 However, it is to those ‘human sentiments’ that Hollywood cinema’s ‘sorrowful spectacle’ of suffering children (sorrowful meaning both showing and causing grief) is most likely (and
Daniel Calparsoro, a director who has contributed to the contemporary scene in Spanish and Basque cinema, has provoked strong reactions from the critics. Reductively dismissed as a purveyor of crude violence by those critics lamenting a ‘lost golden age’ of Spanish filmmaking, Calparsoro's films reveal in fact a more complex interaction with trends and traditions in both Spanish and Hollywood cinema. This book is a full-length study of the director's work, from his early social realist films set in the Basque Country to his later forays into the genres of the war and horror film. It offers an in-depth film-by-film analysis, while simultaneously exploring the function of the director in the contemporary Spanish context, the tension between directors and critics, and the question of national cinema in an area—the Basque Country—of heightened national and regional sensitivities.
This article explores serial production strategies and textual seriality in Hollywood cinema during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Focusing on John Hughes‘ high concept family comedies, it examines how Hughes exploited the commercial opportunities offered by serial approaches to both production and film narrative. This article first considers why Hughes‘ production set-up enabled him to standardise his movies and respond quickly to audience demand. The analysis then explores how the Home Alone films (1990–97), Dennis the Menace (1993) and Baby‘s Day Out (1994) balanced demands for textual repetition and novelty.
French literature on screen is a multi-author volume whose eleven chapters plus an introduction offer case histories of the screen versions of major literary works by such authors as Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust, Françoise Sagan, and George Simenon. Written by leading experts in the field, the various chapters in this volume offer insightful investigations of the artistic, cultural, and industrial processes that have made screen versions of French literary classics a central element of the national cinema.
French literature on screen breaks new scholarly ground by offering the first trans-national account of this important cultural development. These film adaptations have been important in both the American and British cinemas as well. English language screen adaptations of French literature evince the complexity of the relationship between the two texts, the two media, as well as opening up new avenues to explore studio decisions to contract and distribute this particular type of ‘foreign’ cinema to American and British audiences. In many respects, the ‘foreign’ quality of master works of the French literary canon remain their appeal over the decades from the silent era to the present.
The essays in this volume also address theoretical concerns about the interdependent relationship between literary and film texts; the status of the ‘author’, and the process of interpretation will be addressed in these essays, as will dialogical, intertextual, and transtextual approaches to adaptation.
As a technology able to picture and embody the temporality of the past, cinema has become central to the mediation of memory in modern cultural life. The memory of film scenes and movies screens, cinema and cinema-going, has become integral to the placement and location of film within the cultural imagination of this century and the last. This book is a sustained, interdisciplinary perspective on memory and film from early cinema to the present. The first section examines the relationship between official and popular history and the constitution of memory narratives in and around the production and consumption of American cinema. The second section examines the politics of memory in a series of chapters that take as their focus three pivotal sites of national conflict in postwar America. This includes the war in Vietnam, American race relations and the Civil Rights Movement, and the history of marginality in the geographic and cultural borderlands of the US. The book explores the articulation of Vietnam. The final section concentrates on the issue of mediation; it explores how technological and semiotic shifts in the cultural terrain have influenced the coding and experience of memory in contemporary cinema. It considers both the presence of music and colour in nostalgia films of the 1990s and the impact of digital and video technologies on the representational determinants of mediated memory. The book also examines the stakes of cultural remembering in the United States and the means by which memory has been figured through Hollywood cinema.
What did it mean to be a woman and a painter at the heart of abstract gestural painting in New York during the 1950s, if the iconic artist of that decade was Jackson Pollock, and the icon of Woman was Marilyn Monroe? Elaborating and explaining the relevance of theories of psycho-symbolic formations of sexual difference and their inscription in artistic practice, this book explores the 1950s triangulation Pollock–Monroe–Krasner, analysing how two painters of the two generations New York abstract artists, Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, negotiated this paradox artistically. Differencing a masculinized canon of Abstract Expressionism defiantly disseminated in recent blockbuster exhibitions, Pollock argues for a theoretically rich feminist reading of gestural abstract painting that centred the psycho-sexual body through gesture. She argues for a resonance with the cultural antithesis of New York gestural painting – its popular other – in the performance work of Marilyn Monroe, which exceeded the star’s iconic image of white sexuality. Igniting a still-urgent debate about difference, artmaking and artwriting, Pollock presents a transdisciplinary feminist intervention in the context of blockbuster exhibitions such as Abstract Expressionism (London and Bilbao, 2016–17) – which omitted almost entirely that school’s women members – and the women-only Women in Abstract Expressionism (USA 2018), Making Space: Women in Postwar Abstraction (New York, MoMA, 2018) and Women in Abstraction (Paris and Bilbao, 2021–22). as well as solo ‘rediscovery’ shows – Lee Krasner: Living Colour (London and Bilboa, 2019–20) and Helen Frankenthaler (Venice, 2019).
Barr’s or Perkins’s 224 The life of mise-en-scène account, offers a new way of discussing the scene under consideration. The two scenes are the incident with the bag in River of No Return and the jeep ride from Carmen Jones discussed in Film as Film. The history is motivated by an agenda which becomes clear when one realises that the article appeared in the months preceding the publication of The Classical Hollywood Cinema and Narration in the Fiction Film: I want to suggest some of the ways a historical poetics of Hollywood cinema would treat the stylistics of
the basis of a realist mode of presentation which has been called The Classical Hollywood Cinema’. 1 With the commercial implementation of synchronised sound recording in the late 1920s and early 1930s, these conventions became institutionalised, and although there have been stylistic variations at different times over the years, most films use this securely entrenched, very familiar set of realist, structural
, memorialised past is increasingly dependent upon, and recycled within, audiovisual representations such as those found in popular film. My aim is to consider how 1990s Hollywood cinema has activated a selective, revised sense of the past, and how memory approaches to film history are able to analyse this. In particular, I will stress how popular cultural memory is drawn upon as an aesthetic and commercial strategy of Hollywood