Special Effects and German Silent Film PDF Download

Author: Katharina Loew
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9048551714
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
In recent decades, special effects have become a major new area of research in cinema studies. For the most part, they have been examined as spectacles or practical tools. In contrast, Special Effects and German Silent Film, foregrounds their function as an expressive device and their pivotal role in cinema's emergence as a full-fledged art. Special effects not only shaped the look of iconic films like Nosferatu (1922) or Metropolis (1927), but they are central to a comprehensive understanding of German silent film culture writ large. This book examines special effects as the embodiment of a "techno-romantic" paradigm that seeks to harness technology-the epitome of modern materialism-as a means for accessing a spiritual realm. Employed to visualize ideas and emotions in a medium-specific way, special effects thus paved the way for film art.

Author: Katharina Loew
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781124868561
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Based extensively on primary sources, this study undertakes a reevaluation of the interpretative categories by which German silent cinema has been described. Revealing the correlations between the technical achievements evident in the films of this period and the dominant aesthetic philosophy among filmmakers and theorists, this study presents a re-reading of the prominent fantastic films Der Student von Prag (Deutsche Bioscop, 1913, dir. Stellan Rye), Nosferatu (Prana Film, 1921, dir. F.W. Murnau) and Faust (Ufa, 1925/1926, dir. F.W. Murnau). German silent cinema was the site of a radical redefinition of the problematic relationship between art and technology. This fundamental shift in the cultural perception was the result of a "techno-romantic" ideology that eventually rendered possible technology's integration into the aesthetic discourse. Because they made perceptible the interrelations between modern technology and Romantic ideas, special effects played a key role in corroborating the techno-romantic outlook. Techno-romanticism served as the conceptual framework in which the parameters of aesthetic modernity were negotiated. Special effects allowed cinema to become the site where the gulf between technology and art was actually bridged.

Author: Michael Wedel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : de
Pages : 0

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Book Description

Author: Samuel Frederick
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1640141294
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 111

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Book Description
A penetrating new reading of Murnau's classic silent film that shows its transitional status, both historically and stylistically, while emphasizing its innovative camerawork and the ethical stakes of its story. An undisputed masterpiece of silent cinema, F. W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924) stars the larger-than-life Emil Jannings as a proud hotel porter who is demoted to lowly washroom attendant. One worker's misfortune becomes a tragic turning point in a social drama as much about the struggling Weimar Republic, which had just overcome several years of social, political, and economic instability, as about its working-class citizens. At once clinging to the symbols of the old order while helplessly thrust into an unforgiving modern world, Jannings's fallen porter embodies the contradictions of this transitional moment for the young democracy. Samuel Frederick shows us that Murnau's film is similarly transitional: born at the crossroads between the Expressionist style of the early 1920s and the emerging aesthetics of New Objectivity, it is both soberly realistic and oneirically distorted. With only one intertitle, The Last Laugh's flow of images is complemented by cinematographer Karl Freund's innovative mobile camera, which, "unchained" from the tripod, swims effortlessly through the film's different urban spaces. Here, inanimate objects become charged with potency and architecture is animated, conveying both allure and danger. Frederick's incisive analysis of the film foregrounds the visual dynamism of its technological and aesthetic experimentation while also pursuing the ethical implications of its central figure's downfall.

Author: Michael Minden
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571131461
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Providing a broad range of materials and resources for the study of Fritz Lang's classic film Metropolist (1972), this volume includes both standard critical essays and contributions appearing for the first time.

Author: David Annwn Jones
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031386434
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
This book is the first study of the vampires in silent cinema, presenting a detailed academic yet accessible discussion of the films themselves and their sources. For the very first time, The Fire Elemental from the Wharton brothers’ The Mysteries of Myra (1916) is identified as cinema’s original vampire, his appearance initiating a rich and variegated period of film production that is currently missing from studies of horror cinema. Exciting and ground-breaking, Vampires on the Silent Screen also discusses Drakula Halála / Dracula’s death (1920), the first ever filmic female vampire in Erich Kober’s Lilith and Ly (1919), and the Dracula lookalike, Count Merlin in Alexander Korda’s Magic (1917) as well as many other productions. A socio-cultural framework with critical highlighting of eco-horror theory is used throughout to draw these unique discoveries together. This project is a must read for any horror enthusiasts out there.

Author: Nicholas Baer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520398831
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Historical Turns reassesses Weimar cinema in light of the "crisis of historicism" widely diagnosed by German philosophers in the early twentieth century. Through bold new analyses of five legendary works of German silent cinema—The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Destiny, Rhythm 21, The Holy Mountain, and Metropolis—Nicholas Baer argues that films of the Weimar Republic lent vivid expression to the crisis of historical thinking. With their experiments in cinematic form and style, these modernist films revealed the capacity of the medium to engage with fundamental questions about the philosophy of history. Reconstructing the debates over historicism that unfolded during the initial decades of moving-image culture, Historical Turns proposes a more reflexive mode of historiography and expands the field of film and media philosophy. The book excavates a rich archive of ideas that illuminate our own moment of rapid media transformation and political, economic, and environmental crises around the globe.

Author: Jean-Louis Comolli
Publisher: Film Theory in Media History
ISBN: 9789089645548
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Jean-Louis Comolli's six-part essay Technique and Ideologyhad a revolutionary effect on film theory and history when it first appeared in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1971. In 2009, Comolli revisited his earlier text, arguing that the present age, marked by the total dominance of media-filtered spectacle over image production, makes the need for an 'emancipated, critical spectator' more pressing than ever. In this volume, Daniel Fairfax presents annotated translations of these two texts to provide an overview of Comolli's activity as both a theorist and a filmmaker.

Author: Sarah Keller
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231543301
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
The advent of new screening practices and viewing habits in the twenty-first century has spurred a public debate over what it means to be a “cinephile.” In Anxious Cinephilia, Sarah Keller places these competing visions in historical and theoretical perspective, tracing how the love of movies intertwines with anxieties over the content and impermanence of cinematic images. Keller reframes the history of cinephilia from the earliest days of film through the French New Wave and into the streaming era, arguing that love and fear have shaped the cinematic experience from its earliest days. This anxious love for the cinema marks both institutional practices and personal experiences, from the curation of the moviegoing experience to the creation of community and identity through film festivals to posting on social media. Through a detailed analysis of films and film history, Keller examines how changes in cinema practice and spectatorship create anxiety even as they inspire nostalgia. Anxious Cinephilia offers a new theoretical approach to the relationship between spectator and cinema and reimagines the concept of cinephilia to embrace its diverse forms and its uncertain future.

Author: Richard I. Suchenski
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190274123
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Projections of Memory is an exploration of a body of innovative cinematic works that utilize their extraordinary scope to construct monuments to the imagination that promise profound transformations of vision, selfhood, and experience. This form of cinema acts as a nexus through which currents from the other arts can interpenetrate. By examining the strategies of these projects in relation to one another and to the larger historical forces that shape them--tracing the shifts and permutations of their forms and aspirations--Projections of Memory remaps film history around some of its most ambitious achievements and helps to clarify the stakes of cinema as a twentieth-century art form.