Author: Anne Nesbet Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 0857716689 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
Eisenstein delighted in unlikely juxtapositions, being apt to cite from Stalin and Disney in one breath. The heterogeneity underlying his work is breathtaking and his lack of decorum and refusal to be categorised tend to make critics uneasy but not Anne Nesbet. Based on extensive research in the Eisenstein archives, her book is an original, beautifully written exploration of Eisenstein's omnivorous consumption of high and low culture and his wide-ranging experiments in 'thinking in pictures'. Savage Junctures provides fresh insights into Eisenstein's films and writings. It examines the multiple contexts within which his films evolved and Eisenstein's appropriation of all of world culture as his source. Like Eisenstein himself, Anne Nesbet is particularly interested in the possibilities of visual image making and each chapter addresses the problem of his image-based thinking from a different perspective. Each chapter also offers a fundamentally new interpretation of the films and writings that make up his oeuvre. This is a major new contribution to studies in Soviet cinema and culture and to the field of film studies.
Author: Hannah Frank Publisher: University of California Press ISBN: 0520303628 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In this beautifully written and deeply researched study, Hannah Frank provides an original way to understand American animated cartoons from the Golden Age of animation (1920–1960). In the pre-digital age of the twentieth century, the making of cartoons was mechanized and standardized: thousands of drawings were inked and painted onto individual transparent celluloid sheets (called “cels”) and then photographed in succession, a labor-intensive process that was divided across scores of artists and technicians. In order to see the art, labor, and technology of cel animation, Frank slows cartoons down to look frame by frame, finding hitherto unseen aspects of the animated image. What emerges is both a methodology and a highly original account of an art formed on the assembly line.
Author: Robert Robertson Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1786729547 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 325
Book Description
The pioneering film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein is known for the unequalled impact his films have had on the development of cinema. Less is known about his remarkable and extensive writings, which present a continent of ideas about film. Robert Robertson presents a lucid and engaging introduction to a key area of Eisenstein's thought: his ideas about the audiovisual in cinema, which are more pertinent today than ever before. With the advent of digital technology, music and sound now act as independent variables combined with the visual medium to produce a truly audiovisual result. Eisenstein explored in his writings this complex, exciting subject with more depth and originality than any other practitioner, and this is an accessible and original exploration of his ideas. Winner of the Kraszna Krausz Foundations' And/Or Award for Best Moving Image Book of 2009, "Eisenstein on the Audiovisual" is essential reading for students and practitioners of the audiovisual in cinema and related audiovisual forms, including theatre, opera, dance and multimedia.
Author: Rimgaila Salys Publisher: Academic Studies PRess ISBN: Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 452
Book Description
This two-volume reader is intended to accompany undergraduate courses in the history of Russian cinema and Russian culture through film. Each volume consists of newly commissioned essays, excerpts from English language criticism and translations of Russian language essays on subtitled films which are widely taught in American and British courses on Russian film and culture. The arrangement is chronological: Volume one covers twelve films from the beginning of Russian film through the Stalin era; volume two covers twenty films from the Thaw era to the present. General introductions to each period of film history (Early Russian Cinema, Soviet Silent Cinema, Stalinist Cinema, Cinema of the Thaw, Cinema of Stagnation, Perestroika and Post-Soviet Cinema) outline its cinematic significance and provide historical context for the non-specialist reader. Essays are accompanied by suggestions for further reading. The reader will be useful both for film studies specialists and for Slavists who wish to broaden their Russian Studies curriculum by incorporating film courses or culture courses with cinematic material. Volumes one and two may be ordered separately to accommodate the timeframe and contents of courses. Volume one films: Sten’ka Razin, The Cameraman’s Revenge, The Merchant Bashkirov’s Daughter, Child of the Big City, The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, Battleship Potemkin, Bed and Sofa, Man with a Movie Camera, Earth, Chapaev, Circus, Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II. Volume two films: The Cranes are Flying, Ballad of a Soldier, Lenin’s Guard, Wings, Commissar, The Diamond Arm, White Sun of the Desert, Solaris, Stalker, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, Repentance, Little Vera, Burnt by the Sun, Brother, Russian Ark, The Return, Night Watch, The Tuner, Ninth Company, How I Ended This Summer. Authors: Birgit Beumers, Robert Bird, David Bordwell, Mikhail Brashinsky, Oksana Bulgakova, Gregory Carlson, Nancy Condee, Julian Graffy, Jeremy Hicks, Andrew Horton, Steven Hutchings, Vida Johnson, Lilya Kaganovsky, Vance Kepley, Jr., Susan Larsen, Mark Lipovetsky, Tatiana Mikhailova, Elena Monastireva-Ansdell, Joan Neuberger, Vlada Petrić, Graham Petrie, Alexander Prokhorov, Elena Prokhorova, Rimgaila Salys, Elena Stishova, Vlad Strukov, Yuri Tsivian, Meghan Vicks, Josephine Woll, Denise J. Youngblood
Author: C. Scott Combs Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231538030 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
The first book to unpack American cinema's long history of representing death, this work considers movie sequences in which the process of dying becomes an exercise in legibility and exploration for the camera. Reading attractions-based cinema, narrative films, early sound cinema, and films using voiceover or images of medical technology, C. Scott Combs connects the slow or static process of dying to formal film innovation throughout the twentieth century. He looks at Thomas Edison's Electrocuting an Elephant (1903), D. W. Griffith's The Country Doctor (1909), John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1941), Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby (2004), among other films, to argue against the notion that film cannot capture the end of life because it cannot stop moving forward. Instead, he shows how the end of dying occurs more than once and in more than one place, understanding death in cinema as constantly in flux, wedged between technological precision and embodied perception.
Author: Laura Marcus Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191615412 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 584
Book Description
The Tenth Muse explores writings on the cinema in the first decades of the twentieth century. Laura Marcus examines the impact of cinema on early twentieth-century literary and, more broadly, aesthetic and cultural consciousness, by bringing together the study of the terms and strategies of early writings about film with literary engagement with cinema in the same period. She gives a new understanding of the ways in which early writers about film - reviewers, critics, theorists - developed aesthetic categories to define and accommodate what was called 'the seventh art' or 'the tenth muse' and found discursive strategies adequate to the representation of the new art and technology of cinema, with its unprecedented powers of movement. In examining the writings of early film critics and commentators in tandem with those of more specifically literary figures, including H.G.Wells and Virginia Woolf, and in bringing literary texts into this field, Laura Marcus provides a new account of relationships between cinema and literature. Intertwining two major strands of research - the exploration of early film criticism and theory and cinema's presence in literary texts - The Tenth Muse shows how issues central to an understanding of cinema (including questions of time, repetition, movement, vision, sound and silence) are threaded through both kinds of writing, and the ways in which discursive and fictional writings overlapped. The movement that defined cinema was also perceived as a more fragile and unstable ephemerality that inhered at every level, from the fleeting nature of the projected images to the vagaries of cinematic exhibition. It was the anxiety over the mutability of the medium and its exhibition which, from the 1920s onwards, led to the establishment of such institutional spaces for cinema as the London-based Film Society, the new film journals, and, in the 1930s, the first film archives. The Tenth Muse explores the continuities between these sites of cinematic culture and the conceptual, literary and philosophical understandings of the filmic medium.
Author: Caroline Maclean Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 1474403506 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 163
Book Description
Explores the influence of Russian aesthetics on British modernistsIn what ways was the British fascination with Russian arts, politics and people linked to a renewed interest in the unseen? How did ideas of Russianness and the Russian soul - prompted by the arrival of the Ballets Russes and the rise of revolutionary ideals - attach themselves to the existing British fashion for theosophy, vitalism and occultism? In answering these questions, this study is the first to explore the overlap between Slavophilia and mysticism between 1900 and 1930 in Britain. The main Russian characters that emerge are Fedor Dostoevsky, Boris Anrep, Vasily Kandinsky, Petr Ouspensky and Sergei Eisenstein. The British modernists include Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf, Mary Butts, John Middleton Murry, Michael Sadleir and Katherine Mansfield. Key Features: Draws on unpublished archive material as well as on periodicals, exhibition catalogues, reviews, diaries, fiction and the visual artsAddresses the omission in modernist studies of the importance of Russian aesthetics and Russian discourses of the occult to British modernismChallenges the dominant Western European and transatlantic focus in modernist studies and provides an original contribution to our understanding of new global modernismsCombines literary studies with aesthetics, modernist history, the history of modern esotericism, film history, periodical studies and science studies
Author: Kiril Tomoff Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501701819 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 317
Book Description
In the 1940s and 1950s, Soviet musicians and ensembles were acclaimed across the globe. They toured the world, wowing critics and audiences, projecting an image of the USSR as a sophisticated promoter of cultural and artistic excellence. In Virtuosi Abroad, Kiril Tomoff focuses on music and the Soviet Union's star musicians to explore the dynamics of the cultural Cold War. He views the competition in the cultural sphere as part of the ongoing U.S. and Soviet efforts to integrate the rest of the world into their respective imperial projects.Tomoff argues that the spectacular Soviet successes in the system of international music competitions, taken together with the rapturous receptions accorded touring musicians, helped to persuade the Soviet leadership of the superiority of their system. This, combined with the historical triumphalism central to the Marxist-Leninist worldview, led to confidence that the USSR would be the inevitable winner in the global competition with the United States. Successes masked the fact that the very conditions that made them possible depended on a quiet process by which the USSR began to participate in an international legal and economic system dominated by the United States. Once the Soviet leadership transposed its talk of system superiority to the economic sphere, focusing in particular on consumer goods and popular culture, it had entered a competition that it could not win.
Author: Samuel Goff Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350411183 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 265
Book Description
What distinguished the Soviet 'look'? How did Soviet thinkers and artists reimagine the relationship between observer and observed? Soviet Spectatorship answers these questions through an in depth exploration of Soviet physical culture and its on screen representations from the end of the Civil War to the eve of the Second World War. Samuel Goff identifies the three fundamental 'structures of looking' - surveillance, aesthetics, and spectatorship - that shaped representations of the embodied Soviet subject. Close readings of understudied films such as Happy Finish (1934), The Laurels of Miss Ellen Gray (1935) and A Strict Young Man (1936), are contextualised through a theoretical analysis of the relationship between subjectivity and the body. In doing so, Goff traces the evolution of a specific Soviet 'look', examining perspectives on Soviet aesthetics and theories of body and mind, uncovering continuities within Soviet visual cultures in a period usually understood in terms of discontinuity and rupture.
Author: Marilyn Fabe Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520959019 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
How do films work? How do they tell a story? How do they move us and make us think? Through detailed examinations of passages from classic films, Marilyn Fabe supplies the analytic tools and background in film history and theory to enable us to see more in every film we watch. Ranging from D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation to James Cameron’s Avatar, and ending with an epilogue on digital media, Closely Watched Films focuses on exemplary works of fourteen film directors whose careers together span the history of the narrative film. Lively and down-to-earth, this concise introduction provides a broad, complete, and yet specific picture of visual narrative techniques that will increase readers' excitement about and knowledge of the possibilities of the film medium. Shot-by-shot analyses of short passages from each film ground theory in concrete examples. Fabe includes original and well-informed discussions of Soviet montage, realism and expressionism in film form, classical and modern sound theory, the classic Hollywood film, Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, auteur theory, modernism and postmodernism in film, political cinema, feminist film theory and practice, and narrative experiments in new digital media. Encompassing the earliest silent films as well as those that exploit the most recent technological innovations, this book gives us the particulars of how film—arguably the most influential of contemporary forms of representation—constitutes our pleasure, influences our thoughts, and informs our daily reality. Updated to include a discussion of 3-D and advanced special effects, this tenth anniversary edition is an essential film studies text for students and professors alike.
Author: Anne Nesbet
Author: Hannah Frank
Author: Robert Robertson
Author: Rimgaila Salys
Author: C. Scott Combs
Author: Laura Marcus
Author: Caroline Maclean
Author: Kiril Tomoff
Author: Samuel Goff
Author: Marilyn Fabe