Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors PDF Download

Author: Dominic Lennard
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438453302
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Since the 1950s, children have provided some of horror's most effective and enduring villains, from dainty psychopath Rhoda Penmark of The Bad Seed (1956) and spectacularly possessed Regan MacNeil of The Exorcist (1973) to psychic ghost-girl Samara of The Ring (2002) and adopted terror Esther of Orphan (2009). Using a variety of critical approaches, including those of cinema studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and psychoanalysis, Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors offers the first full-length study of these child monsters. In doing so, the book highlights horror as a topic of analysis that is especially pertinent socially and politically, exposing the genre as a site of deep ambivalence toward—and even hatred of—children.

Author: Scott M. MacDonald
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438458894
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Documents a volatile and productive moment in the development of film studies. In Binghamton Babylon, Scott M. MacDonald documents one of the crucial moments in the history of cinema studies: the emergence of a cinema department at what was then the State University of New York at Binghamton (now Binghamton University) between 1967 and 1977. The department brought together a group of faculty and students who not only produced a remarkable body of films and videos but went on to invigorate the American media scene for the next half-century. Drawing on interviews with faculty, students, and visiting artists, MacDonald weaves together an engaging conversation that explores the academic excitement surrounding the emergence of cinema as a viable subject of study in colleges and universities. The voices of the various participants—Steve Anker, Alan Berliner, Danny Fingeroth, Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, J. Hoberman, Ralph Hocking, Ken Jacobs, Bill T. Jones, Peter Kubelka, Saul Levine, Camille Paglia, Phil Solomon, Maureen Turim, and many others—tell the story of this remarkable period. MacDonald concludes with an analysis of the pedagogical dimensions of the films that were produced in Binghamton, including Larry Gottheim’s Horizons; Jacobs’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son; Gehr’s Serene Velocity; Frampton’s Critical Mass; and Nicholas Ray’s final film, We Can’t Go Home Again. “This is an important episode in film history and in particular the history of the cinematic avant-garde, and it is exciting to have so many voices from the time assembled in one volume. A terrific book!” — Dana Polan, Cinema Studies, New York University “Binghamton Babylon is an enormously important contribution to film, video, and media historiography.” — David Sterritt, author of The Cinema of Clint Eastwood: Chronicles of America

Author: R. Barton Palmer
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438463863
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
In his essays and interviews, Alfred Hitchcock was guarded about substantive matters of morality, preferring instead to focus on discussions of technique. That has not, however, discouraged scholars and critics from trying to work out what his films imply about such moral matters as honesty, fidelity, jealousy, courage, love, and loyalty. Through discussions and analyses of such films as Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Frenzy, the contributors to this book strive to throw light on the way Hitchcock depicts a moral—if not amoral or immoral—world. Drawing on perspectives from film studies, philosophy, literature, and other disciplines, they offer new and compelling interpretations of the filmmaker's moral gaze and the inflection point it provides for modern cinema.

Author: Seth Friedman
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438465912
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Identifies a new genre—misdirection films—and explains its appeal to contemporary producers and audiences. Are You Watching Closely? is the first book to explore the recent spate of “misdirection films,” a previously unidentified Hollywood genre characterized by narratives that inspire viewers to reinterpret them retrospectively. Since 1990, Hollywood has backed more of these films than ever before, many of which, including The Sixth Sense (1999), A Beautiful Mind (2001), and Inception (2010), were both commercial and critical successes. Seth Friedman examines this genre in its sociocultural, industrial, and technological contexts to explain why it has become more attractive to producers and audiences. The recent popularity of misdirection films, Friedman argues, is linked to new technologies that enable repeat viewings and online discussion, which makes it enticing to an industry that depends increasingly on the aftermarket, as well as to historically specific cultural developments. That is, in addition to being well suited for shifting industrial and technological conditions, these films are appealing because they suggest that it remains possible to know what “actually” occurred and who was “really” responsible for events at a time when it is also becoming increasingly recognized that “truth” is relative. Are You Watching Closely? shows how Hollywood’s effective strategies for these changing circumstances put it at the forefront of a storytelling trend that has increasingly become important across media. Through close analyses of how misdirection films have been designed, marketed, and received in relation to their contexts, Friedman demonstrates the ways in which they epitomize a kind of narrative experimentation that has become a crucial facet of twenty-first-century audiovisual storytelling.

Author: William Rothman
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438486073
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 491

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Book Description
From The World Viewed to Cities of Words, writing about movies was strand over strand with Stanley Cavell's philosophical work. Cavell was one of the first philosophers in the United States to make film a significant focus of his thought, and William Rothman has long been one of his most astute readers. The Holiday in His Eye collects Rothman's writings about Cavell—many of them previously unpublished—to offer a lucid, serious introduction to and overview of Cavell's work, the influence of which has been somewhat limited by both the intrinsic difficulty of his ideas and his challenging prose style. In these engaging and accessible yet philosophically serious and rigorously argued essays, Rothman presents an original, insightful, and compelling vision of the trajectory of Cavell's oeuvre, one that takes Cavell's kinship with Emerson as inextricably bound up with his ever-deepening thinking about movies.

Author: Amy Rust
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438465394
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Investigates the cultural value of film violence. Passionate Detachments investigates the rise of graphic violence in American films of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the popular aesthetics and critical responses this violence inspired. Amy Rust examines four technologies adopted by commercial American cinema after the fall of the Hollywood Production Code: multiple-camera montage, squibs (small explosive devices) and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms. Approaching these technologies as figures, as opposed to mere tools, Rust traces the encounters they mediate between perception (what one sees, hears, and feels) and representation (how those sights, sounds, and feelings make meaning). These technologies, she argues, lend shape to film violence while organizing viewers’ on- and off-screen relationships to it. The result proves meaningful for an era self-consciously and perilously preoccupied with bloodshed. The post-Code period found Americans across the political spectrum demanding visual—and increasingly violent—demonstrations of presumably “authentic” realities. Corroborating fantasies of authenticity from military to counterculture, these technologies challenge them as well, pointing, however unwittingly, to the violently classed, gendered, and racialized blind spots such fantasies harbor. More broadly, the technologies answer concerns that films control violence too much or too little. Offering neither mere discoursenor mere thrills, they recover sense and sensation for all, not some, or even most, depictions of bloodshed. As figures, the devices also remediate vision and violence for film theory, which exhibits distrust for each in spite of the complexities phenomenology and psychoanalysis have brought to cinematic perception and pleasure.

Author: William Rothman
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438475802
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
William Rothman has long been considered one of the seminal figures in the field of film-philosophy. From his landmark book Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, now in its second edition, to the essays collected here in Tuitions and Intuitions, Rothman has been guided by two intuitions: first, that his kind of film criticism is philosophy; and second, that such a marriage of criticism and philosophy has an essential part to play in the serious study of film. In this book, he aspires, borrowing a formulation from Emerson, to "pay the tuition" for these intuitions. Thoughtful, philosophically sophisticated, and provocative, the essays included here address a wide range of films, including classical Hollywood movies; the work of "auteur" directors like Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, Yasujirō Ozu, and Woody Allen; performances by John Barrymore and James Stewart; unconventional works by Jean Genet, Chantal Akerman, Terrence Malick, and the Dardenne brothers; the television series Justified; and documentaries by Jean Rouch, Ross McElwee, and Robert Gardner. All the essays address questions of philosophical significance and, taken together, manifest Rothman's lifelong commitment when writing about a film, to respect the film's own ideas; to remain open to the film's ways of expressing its ideas; and to let the film help teach him how to view it, how to think about it, and how to discover what he has at heart to say about it.

Author: Steven Rybin
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438465513
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Examines movie romance in light of our emotional bond to the actors and characters on screen. Gestures of Love considers the viewer’s enchantment with charismatic actors in film as the starting point for closely analyzing the performance of love in movies. Written with a thoughtful adoration for the actors who move us, Steven Rybin examines several of cinema’s most beloved on-screen movie couples, including Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, Myrna Loy and William Powell, Carole Lombard and John Barrymore, Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, and Rock Hudson and Dorothy Malone. Using the classical genres of screwball comedy, film noir, and the family melodrama as touchstones, Rybin places the depiction of romance in films into dialogue with the viewer’s own emotional bond to the actors on the screen. In doing so, he offers rich new analyses of such classic films as Bringing Up Baby, The Thin Man, Twentieth Century, Laura, To Have and Have Not, Tea and Sympathy, Written on the Wind, and more. “Steven Rybin’s Gestures of Love presents a compelling series of close readings focused on cinematic performances from the classical Hollywood era—a series of readings that not only function independently but also build and reflect on one another as the text moves forward. Engagingly written and unapologetically driven by the author’s own pleasures, the text will appeal to readers interested in cinephilia, actors in performance, and classical Hollywood more generally.” — David T. Johnson, author of Richard Linklater “Gestures of Love is the first book to explore issues of stardom and performance through the lens of cinephilia studies. Steven Rybin astutely demonstrates how a star couple’s performance of love may be refracted through a viewer’s love of performance. Lucid and invigorating, this book reconsiders celebrated duos, from Hepburn and Grant to Bogart and Bacall to Hudson and Malone, as well as the evolution of love in classical Hollywood.” — Rashna Wadia Richards, author of Cinematic Flashes: Cinephilia and Classical Hollywood

Author: Roger Rawlings
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438467338
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Examines an all too often neglected period of postwar British cinema and popular culture. Ripping England! investigates a fertile moment for British satire—the period between 1947 and 1953, which produced the films Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and The Lavender Hill Mob, as well as the seminal radio program The Goon Show. Against the postwar background of fading empire, universal rationing, and the implementation of a welfare state, these satires laid the foundation for a new British cultural identity later fleshed out by the Angry Young Men, the Movement poets, the Social Realists, and those involved in the satire boom of the 1960s, which lives on even to this day. The peculiarity of these satires and the British identity they shaped is better understood when seen in relief against postwar cinematic cultures of Italy, France, and the United States. Roger Rawlings places postwar British film in the context of contemporaneous European national film movements and contrasts it with Hollywood’s comedies and satires of the same period. British satires of the late forties and early fifties held up a mirror to a nation that was in the throes of change, moving from a colonial empire to an inward-turning island culture. Ripping England! looks at the all too often neglected miracle of postwar British cinema and popular culture.

Author: Homer B. Pettey
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438481020
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Mind Reeling investigates how cinema displays and mirrors psychological disorders, such as bipolar disorder, amnesia, psychotic delusions, obsessive compulsive behavior, trauma, paranoia, and borderline personalities. It explores a range of genres, including biopics, comedies, film noirs, contemporary dramedies, thrillers, Gothic mysteries, and docufictions. The contributors open up critical approaches to audience fascination with film depictions of serious disturbances within the human psyche. Many films examined here have had little scholarly attention and commentary. These essays focus on how cinematic techniques contribute to popular culture's conception of mental dysfunction, trauma, and illness. This book reveals the complex artistic and generic patterns that produce contemporary images of psychopathology in cinema.