Author: John H. Lenihan Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 9780252012549 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 228
Book Description
Showdown is a study of America's oldest, most representative film genre, the Western movie from the perspective of social allegory. It assesses scores of major and minor films to show how Westerns function as vehicles for contemporary social and political critiques of American life.
Author: James Chapman Publisher: Reaktion Books ISBN: 1861895747 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 488
Book Description
The cinema has been the pre-eminent popular art form of the 20th century. In Cinemas of the World, James Chapman examines the relationship between film and society in the modern world: film as entertainment medium, film as a reflection of national cultures and preoccupations, film as an instrument of propaganda. He also explores two interrelated issues that have recurred throughout the history of cinema: the economic and cultural hegemony of Hollywood on the one hand, and, on the other, the attempts of film-makers elsewhere to establish indigenous national cinemas drawing on their own cultures and societies. Chapman examines the rise to dominance of Hollywood cinema in the silent and early sound periods. He discusses the characteristic themes of American movies from the Depression to the end of the Cold War especially those found in the western and film noir – genres that are often used as vehicles for exploring issues central to us society and politics. He looks at national cinemas in various European countries in the period between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second, which all exhibit the formal and aesthetic properties of modernism. The emergence of the so-called "new cinemas" of Europe and the wider world since 1960 are also explored. "Chapman is a tough-thinking, original writer . . . an engaging, excellent piece of work."—David Lancaster, Film and History
Author: Matthew Carter Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 1474413706 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 343
Book Description
From Destination Tokyo (1943) to The Battle of the Villa Fiorita (1965), Delmer Daves was responsible for a unique body of work, but few filmmakers have been as critically overlooked in existing scholarly literature. Often regarded as an embodiment of the self-effacing craftsmanship of classical and post-War Hollywood, films such as Broken Arrow (1950) and 3:10 to Yuma (1957) reveal a filmmaker concerned with style as much as sociocultural significance. As the first comprehensive study of Daves's career, this collection of essays seeks to deepen our understanding of his work, and also to problematize existing conceptions of him as a competent, conventional and even naAve studio man.
Author: James Combs Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443806862 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 250
Book Description
Movie Time is a study of temporal mythmaking in American popular movies. The work is rooted in American pragmatic philosophy and contemporary traditions of inquiry in the social sciences and humanities. It proceeds on the premise that social beings and social orders are interested in the mediation of time, and attempt to make sense of their present world through the reconstruciton of important pasts of interest in the present, develop new presents with the help of popular expressions which define new situations and responses for a new time, and foresee possible futures which impinge upon life in the here-and-now. In particular, the work focuses on the subsequent treatment of the American 1950's in films set in that era, beginning in the 1970's and continuing, with an effort to create a rough taxonomy of mythemes in such retrospective films, and why it is that future times would find the Fifties to be so important that people wish to revisit it. Too, the mediation of time includes the development of a new present, in this case the emergence of conservatism as a social force in the 1970's and beyond. The movies were an important form of expression in the dramatization of the conservative myth, leading to the pervasion of conservative leaders and ideologies into the new century. Finally, the unrealized but imminent future of the country and world was increasingly on people's minds, as both millennial hopes and fears and unanticipated threats began to emerge at century's end, so movies which anticipated alternative futures appeared in response to that prospective interest. It is hoped that this present inquiry will stimulate further work on the social relevance of popular expression and in particular the social mediation of time.
Author: William Grady Publisher: University of Texas Press ISBN: 1477330003 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 419
Book Description
A history of American Western genre comics and how they interacted with contemporaneous political and popular culture. Redrawing the Western charts a history of the Western genre in American comics from the late 1800s through the 1970s and beyond. Encompassing the core years in which the genre was forged and prospered in a range of popular media, Grady engages with several key historical timeframes, from the origins of the Western in the nineteenth-century illustrated press; through fin de siècle anxieties with the closing of the frontier, and the centrality of cowboy adventure across the interwar, postwar, and high Cold War years; to the revisions of the genre in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Western’s continued vitality in contemporary comics storytelling. In its study of stories about vengeance, conquest, and justice on the contested frontier, Redrawing the Western highlights how the “simplistic” conflicts common in Western adventure comics could disguise highly political undercurrents, providing young readers with new ways to think about the contemporaneous social and political milieu. Besides tracing the history, forms, and politics of American Western comics in and around the twentieth century, William Grady offers an original reassessment of the important role of comics in the development of the Western genre, ranking them alongside popular fiction and film in the process.
Author: Austin Fisher Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 0857720465 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 315
Book Description
Ever more popular in the age of DVDs, eBay and online fandom, the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s have undergone a mainstream renaissance which has nevertheless left their intimate relationship to the troubled politics of 1960s Italy unexamined. Radical Frontiers reappraises the genre in relation to the revolutionary New Left and the events of 1968 to uncover the complexities of a cinematic milieu too often dismissed as formulaic and homogeneous. Establishing the backdrop of post-war Italy in which the Roman studio system actively blended Italian and American culture, Austin Fisher looks in detail at the works of Damiano Damiani, Sergio Sollima, Sergio Corbucci, Giulio Questi and Giulio Petroni and how these directors reformatted the Hollywood Western to yield new resonance for militant constituencies and radical groups. Radical Frontiers identifies the main variants of these militant Westerns, which brazenly endorsed violent peasant insurrection in the 'Mexico' of the popular imagination, turning the camera on the hitherto heroic colonialists of the West and exposing the brutal mechanisms of a society infested with latent fascism. The ways in which the films' artistic failures reflect the ideological confusions of the radical groups is examined and the genre's legacy is reappraised, as the revolutionary energy of Italy's New Left becomes subsumed amidst the conflicting agendas of New Hollywood, blaxploitation and the 'grindhouse' revival of Tarantino, Rodriguez and Raimi. Reclaiming the Spaghetti Western from the domain of the merely cool and repositioning it within the spectrum of late-1960s radical cinema, Radical Frontiers analyses the genre's narrative and cinematographic inscriptions in their political context to uncover Far Left doctrines in these tales of outlaws and sheriffs, banditry and redemptive violence.
Author: Paul B. Rich Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350055719 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 277
Book Description
Cinematic representations of unconventional warfare have received sporadic attention to date. However, this pattern has now begun to change with the rise of insurgency and counter-insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the growing importance of jihadist terrorism in the wake of 9/11. This ground-breaking study provides a much-needed examination of global unconventional warfare in 20th-century filmmaking, with case studies from the United States, Britain, Ireland, France, Italy and Israel. Paul B. Rich examines Hollywood's treatment of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency in the United States; British post-colonial insurgencies in Malaya and Kenya and British special operations in the Second World War; the Irish conflict before and during the Troubles; French filmmaking and the reluctance to deal with the bitter war in Algeria in the 1950s; Italian neorealism and its impact on films dealing with urban insurgency by Roberto Rossellini, Nanni Loy and Gillo Pontecorvo, and Israel and the upsurge of Palestinian terrorism. Whilst only a small number of films on these conflicts have been able to rise above stereotyping insurgents and terrorists - in some cases due to a pattern of screen orientalism - Cinema and Unconventional Warfare in the Twentieth Century stresses the positive political gains to be derived from humanizing terrorists and terrorists movements, especially in the context of modern jihadist terrorism. This is essential reading for academics, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates interested in 20th-century military history, politics and international relations, and film studies.
Author: Carter Matthew Carter Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 1474402836 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 381
Book Description
What is the nature of the relationship between the Hollywood Western and American frontier mythology? How have Western films helped develop cultural and historical perceptions, attitudes and beliefs towards the frontier? Is there still a place for the genre in light of revisionist histories of the American West?Myth of the Western re-invigorates the debate surrounding the relationship between the Western and frontier mythology, arguing for the importance of the genre's socio-cultural, historical and political dimensions. Taking a number of critical-theoretical and philosophical approaches, Matthew Carter applies them to prominent forms of frontier historiography. He also considers the historiographic element of the Western by exploring the different ways in which the genre has responded to the issues raised by the frontier. Carter skilfully argues that the genre has - and continues to reveal - the complexities and contradictions at the heart of US society. With its clear analyses of and intellectual challenges to the film scholarship that has developed around the Western over a 65-year period, this book adds new depth to our understanding of specific film texts and of the genre as a whole - a welcome resource for students and scholars in both Film Studies and American Studies.
Author: Michael P. Malone Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 9780803281677 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 364
Book Description
Chronicles the history of the American West in the twentieth century, tracing economical, political, social, and cultural developments in the region from the turn of the century to the 1980s
Author: John H. Lenihan
Author: Scott Simmon
Author: James Chapman
Author: Matthew Carter
Author: James Combs
Author: William Grady
Author: Austin Fisher
Author: Paul B. Rich
Author: Carter Matthew Carter
Author: Michael P. Malone