Faces, Forms, Films PDF Download

Author: Robert Gordon Anderson
Publisher: South Brunswick : A. S. Barnes
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This biography offers the vivid story of the artist and man Lon Chaney, Sr. From his beginnings on the stage to the roles that gave him a permanent place in the history of silent films (The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera) to his entry into talkies. Chaney used all of his experience on screen and off, to bring as much humanity and realism as possible to his portrayals. As his own make-up artist, he strove for a perfection that could pass the critical scrutiny of the camera eye. This is the portrait of a creative actor, who used all his skill and craftsmanship to bring memorable people to life on the silver screen.

Author: Teresa Bruś
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031368991
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This book is an interdisciplinary study of the engagement with and representation of the face across literature, photography, and theatre. It looks at how the face is an active agent, closely connected with the history of the media and the social interactions reflected in media images. Focusing on the dynamic period of the interwar years, it explores a range of case studies in Poland, UK, and the US, and examines artists like Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), Virginia Woolf, Debora Vogel, Sir Cecil Beaton, Theodore Władysław Benda, and Edward Gordon Craig. Teresa Bruś argues that these writers and photographers defended the face against threats from modern life – not least, the media. She focuses on transformations of the face in life writing across a range of media and draws attention to the artists’ autobiographical narratives.

Author: John T. Soister
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786487909
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 831

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Book Description
During the Silent Era, when most films dealt with dramatic or comedic takes on the "boy meets girl, boy loses girl" theme, other motion pictures dared to tackle such topics as rejuvenation, revivication, mesmerism, the supernatural and the grotesque. A Daughter of the Gods (1916), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Magician (1926) and Seven Footprints to Satan (1929) were among the unusual and startling films containing story elements that went far beyond the realm of "highly unlikely." Using surviving documentation and their combined expertise, the authors catalog and discuss these departures from the norm in this encyclopedic guide to American horror, science fiction and fantasy in the years from 1913 through 1929.

Author: Daniel Bernardi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313398402
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 1127

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Book Description
This expansive three-volume set investigates racial representation in film, providing an authoritative cross-section of the most racially significant films, actors, directors, and movements in American cinematic history. Hollywood has always reflected current American cultural norms and ideas. As such, film provides a window into attitudes about race and ethnicity over the last century. This comprehensive set provides information on hundreds of films chosen based on scholarly consensus of their importance regarding the subject, examining aspects of race and ethnicity in American film through the historical context, themes, and people involved. This three-volume set highlights the most important films and artists of the era, identifying films, actors, or characterizations that were considered racist, were tremendously popular or hugely influential, attempted to be progressive, or some combination thereof. Readers will not only learn basic information about each subject but also be able to contextualize it culturally, historically, and in terms of its reception to understand what average moviegoers thought about the subject at the time of its popularity—and grasp how the subject is perceived now through the lens of history.

Author: John T. Soister
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476604991
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
While Universal's Dracula and Frankenstein (both 1931) have received the most coverage of any of the studio's genre releases, it is the lesser known films that have long fascinated fans and historians alike. Starting with The Last Warning, a 1929 movie released as both a silent and a talkie, Universal provided a decade of films that entertained audiences and sometimes frustrated critics. Each of Universal's horror, science fiction and "twisted mystery" films receives an in-depth essay for each film. The focus is first on the background to the making of the movie and its place in the Universal catalog. A detailed plot synopsis with critical commentary follows. Filmographic data for the film conclude the entry. Universal's The Shadow short film series is covered in an appendix. Many rare illustrations and movie posters are also included.

Author: Angela Smith
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231527853
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Twisted bodies, deformed faces, aberrant behavior, and abnormal desires characterized the hideous creatures of classic Hollywood horror, which thrilled audiences with their sheer grotesqueness. Most critics have interpreted these traits as symptoms of sexual repression or as metaphors for other kinds of marginalized identities, yet Angela M. Smith conducts a richer investigation into the period's social and cultural preoccupations. She finds instead a fascination with eugenics and physical and cognitive debility in the narrative and spectacle of classic 1930s horror, heightened by the viewer's desire for visions of vulnerability and transformation. Reading such films as Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Freaks (1932), and Mad Love (1935) against early-twentieth-century disability discourse and propaganda on racial and biological purity, Smith showcases classic horror's dependence on the narratives of eugenics and physiognomics. She also notes the genre's conflicted and often contradictory visualizations. Smith ultimately locates an indictment of biological determinism in filmmakers' visceral treatments, which take the impossibility of racial improvement and bodily perfection to sensationalistic heights. Playing up the artifice and conventions of disabled monsters, filmmakers exploited the fears and yearnings of their audience, accentuating both the perversity of the medical and scientific gaze and the debilitating experience of watching horror. Classic horror films therefore encourage empathy with the disabled monster, offering captive viewers an unsettling encounter with their own impairment. Smith's work profoundly advances cinema and disability studies, in addition to general histories concerning the construction of social and political attitudes toward the Other.

Author: Michael F. Blake
Publisher: Vestal Press
ISBN: 1461730767
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
For the first time, you can put conjecture aside and read definitive proof about the roles Chaney had behind the scenes as well as in front of the camera.

Author: Rosemary Guiley
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438130015
Category : Monsters
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Monsters and shape-shifters have always held a special fascination in mythologies, legends, and folklore the world over. From ancient customs to famous cases of beasts and vampires and their reflections in popular culture, 600 entries provide definitions, explanations, and lists of suggested further reading.

Author: Stephen Prince
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813533636
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Focusing on recent postmodern examples, this is a collection of essays reviewing the history of the horror film and the psychological reasons for its persistent appeal.

Author: Thomas Mann
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476614091
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
Photoplay editions were usually hardcover reprints of novels that had been made into movies, illustrated with photographs from the film productions. Sometimes, instead, they were "fictionized" versions of film scripts, rewritten in narrative form. Here is an annotated checklist of more than 500 horror and mystery photoplay novels and magazine fictionizations, collected over a period of four decades. Photo-illustrated stories that are not strictly in the horror or mystery genres are included if they are linked to films with such stars as Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, or other genre figures. Mysteries are generally defined as novels or stories featuring a detective as the central character, although in some cases melodramas, thrillers, and film noir books having crime as a plot element are included. Science fiction and fantasy works, and others having outre aspects, are also within scope. With a few exceptions, the cut-off date for inclusion in the catalog is the year 1970. In an entertaining introductory essay the author reflects on the attractions of assembling such a collection, analyzes aspects of the social significance and aesthetic content of its books, and draws many surprising inferences from their advertisements, illustrations, and marks of previous ownership. The subsequent catalog is the first survey in the field to extend bibliographical coverage beyond books to movie tie-in magazine stories. Included in an appendix is the complete text of "The Gorilla," a short story version of a lost First National Film, reprinted from a rare issue of Moving Picture Stories from 1927.