Intensive research unearthed briefs, plans, photos, documents and personal letters that together form the basis of the essays and building description in the book. They also provide a personal and professional portrait of Martin Elsaesser, building director and creative director for communal building projects in Frankfurt. As former director of the city's Building Department he produced a wealth of remarkable work, which today stand as rich legacy to the metropolis on the River Main
Melodrama: Genre, Style and Sensibility is designed as an accessible overview of one of the most popular genres at undergraduate Film Studies. The book identifies three distinct but connected concepts through which it is possible to make sense of melodrama; either as a genre, originating in European theatre of the 18th and 19th century, as a specific cinematic style, epitomised by the work of Douglas Sirk or as a sensibility that emerges in the context of specific texts, speaking to and reflecting the desires, concerns and anxieties of audiences. Films discussed include All That Heaven Allows, Safe, Fear Eats the Soul, Black Narcissus, Suddenly Last Summer and Rebel Without a Cause. Each chapter includes overviews of key essays, analyses of significant and widely studied films and includes an annotated reading list.
Fully updated and including data from space-based observations, this Third Edition is a comprehensive compilation of the facts and figures relevant to astronomy and astrophysics. As well as a vast number of tables, graphs, diagrams and formulae it also includes a comprehensive index and bibliography, allowing readers to easily find the information they require. The book contains information covering a diverse range of topics in addition to astronomy and astrophysics, including atomic physics, nuclear physics, relativity, plasma physics, electromagnetism, mathematics, probability and statistics, and geophysics. This handbook contains the most frequently used information in modern astrophysics, and will be an essential reference for graduate students, researchers and professionals working in astronomy and the space sciences. A website with links to extensive supplementary information and databases can be found at www.cambridge.org/9780521782425.
Styles of filmmaking have changed greatly from classical Hollywood through to our digital era. So, too, have the ways in which film critics and scholars have analysed these transformations in film style. This book explores two central style concepts, mise en scène and dispositif, to illuminate a wide range of film and new media examples.
This book examines the responses of visual artists, including architects, designers and photographers, to the technological and social modernisation of Germany during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It investigates how these aspects of the modernising process inform both the subject matter and formal innovations of their work. The study analyses how these visual practices were not just the concerns of isolated and enclosed art worlds but had wider social resonances, ranging from the debates concerning the reformist objectives of the Deutscher Werkbund (1907) to the National Socialist ideological onslaught on modernist culture culminating in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibitions of 1937. Many of the artists encountered here were radicalised by the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the November 1918 Revolution in Germany, experiences which effected change in their conceptualising of cultural production and its social function: their modes of working, however, would also set challenging markers for what forms art might take for the twentieth century. The book is, therefore, both a study of art in complex political and sociocultural contexts and a reflection on how engagement with a social imagination can challenge a tradition based on the assumptions of individual imaginings.
Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance. Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty. His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, Downcast Eyes will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians.
In this sequel to The Haunting of America and The Haunting of Twentieth-Century America, national bestselling authors Joel Martin and William J. Birnes set the stage for one of the great intellectual and spiritual awakenings that is currently challenging traditional belief systems. Reaching back into events that rocked the twentieth century, the authors show that, though denying the importance of a spiritual component in national policy, even the most conservative of governments have based social and financial policy decisions on a profound belief in the existence of the paranormal. The Haunting of Twenty-First-Century America is unlike any American history you will ever read--it posits that not only is the paranormal more normal than most people think, but that it is driving current events to a new "Fourth Culture" of the twenty-first century"--
See yourself in the movies!" Prior to the advent of the home movie camera and the ubiquitousness of the camera phone, there was the local film. This cultural phenomenon, produced across the country from the 1890s to the 1950s, gave ordinary people a chance to be on the silver screen without leaving their hometowns. Through these movies, residents could see themselves in the same theaters where they saw major Hollywood motion pictures. Traveling filmmakers plied their trade in small towns and cities, where these films were received by locals as being part of the larger cinema experience. With access to the rare film clips under discussion, Main Street Movies documents the diversity and longevity of local film production and examines how itinerant filmmakers responded to industry changes to keep sponsors and audiences satisfied. From town pride films in the 1910s to Hollywood knockoffs in the 1930s, local films captured not just images of local people and places but also ideas about the function and meaning of cinema that continue to resonate today.
Most of the Directors I've worked with needed someone to talk to who is deep inside the heart of the movie. - Mick Audsley, Film Editor Film editing is understood by the industry to be one of the most crucial contributions to film-making. World-class British editors such as Antony Gibbs and Anne Coates have received recognition of their importance in Hollywood and experienced British Editors have important roles in a surprising number of major American movies . This book attempts to explain this mot elusive of roles by allowing editors to describe in their own words what they do and to bring them into the critical and public spotlight. It is the most comprehensive survey of its kind to date and is based upon interviews with many distinguished editors who have worked on films as diverse as Blade Runner and Carry on Up the Khyber, Die Hard 2 and Blow Up, American Beauty and Performance. The British Film Editor also provides a detailed history of editing, together with extensive filmographies.
Setting out to provide a definitive history of the European Film Fund (EFF), the purpose of this thesis is as follows: first, to draw attention to the many exile and refugee organisations by examining one of them, the EFF. As a study of a refugee organisation founded as a result of Nazism, my examination of the EFF not only fills an existing gap in film history as far as the EFF itself is concerned. Refugee organisations in general have received scant attention by exile scholars. By making one refugee organisation the focus of my inquiry, I am also highlighting the presence of women in the topic of exile as two women, Liesl Frank, wife of the writer Bruno Frank, and Charlotte Dieterle, wife of the director William Dieterle, were at the centre of the EFF. My investigation of this organisation demonstrates that women played a much larger role in exile and exile communities than history and literature have thus far accorded them. Additionally, I show how the political situation after 1933, including apathy by the international community, led to the founding of the EFF. Lastly, by shifting the focus away from figureheads of the émigré community to below-the-line film artists, technicians, theatre artists and so on, I foreground those refugees whose lives have hitherto been obscured by their more famous fellow émigrés.
Reading Into Cultural Studies" revisits a selection of key texts central to the formation of cultural studies as a discipline and as a project. These texts address questions of power, ideology and the possibilities and limits of resistance. Each of the eleven essays in the collection renews an early study in one area of cultural investigation, bringing such seminal texts as "Subculture" by Dick Hebdige, "Loving With a Vengeance" by Tania Modleski and "Bond and Beyond" by Tony Bennett back to the centre of attention, However the essays are not purely celebratory. Each study is critically examined in a number of ways - for its research strategy, its implicit theories of power and ideology, for the empirical evidence it draws on and its conceptual framework. Together, the essays provide an introduction to some of the central debates and issues in cultural studies.
Featuring revised and extended coverage, the second edition of A History of Modern Germany offers an accessible and engagingly written account of German history from 1800 to the present. Provides readers with a long view of modern German history, revealing its continuities and changes Features updated and extended coverage of German social change and modernization, class, religion, and gender Includes more in depth coverage of the German Democratic Republic Examines Germany's social, political, and economic history Covers the unification of Germany, the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, post-war division, the collapse of Communism, and developments since re-unification Addresses regional history rather than focusing on the dominant role of Prussia
From the Red Room in Twin Peaks to Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive, the work of David Lynch contains some of the most remarkable spaces in contemporary culture. Richard Martin's compelling study is the first sustained critical assessment of the role architecture and design play in Lynch's films. Martin combines original research at Lynchian locations in Los Angeles, London and Lódz with insights from architects including Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier and Jean Nouvel and urban theorists such as Jane Jacobs and Edward Soja. In analyzing the towns, cities, homes, roads and stages found in Lynch's work, Martin not only reveals their central importance for understanding this controversial and distinctive film-maker, but also suggests how Lynch's films can provide a deeper understanding of the places and spaces in which we live.
Scotland: Global Cinema focuses on the explosion of filmmaking in Scotland in the 1990s and 2000s. It explores the various cinematic fantasies of Scotland created by contemporary filmmakers from all over the world who braved the weather to shoot in Scotla
Laurent Cantet is of one France’s leading contemporary directors. In a series of important films, including Human Resources, Time Out, Heading South, The Class and Foxfire, he takes stock of the modern world from the workplace, through the schoolroom and the oppressive small town to the world of international sex tourism. His films drive the hidden forces that weigh on individuals and groups into view but also show characters who are capable of reflection and reaction. If the films make their protagonists rethink their place in the world, they also challenge the positions of the viewer and the director. This is what makes them so worthy of study. Combining a fine eye for detail with broad contextual awareness, this book gives an account of all Cantet’s works, from the early short films to the major works. Martin O’Shaughnessy is a leading international writer on French cinema,especially in film and politics.
When is it OK to lie about the past? If history is a story, then everyone knows that the 'official story' is told by the winners. No matter what we may know about how the past really happened, history is as it is recorded: this is what George Orwell called doublethink. But what happens to all the lost, forgotten, censored, and disappeared pasts of world history? Cinema Against Doublethink uncovers how a world of cinemas acts as a giant archive of these lost pasts, a vast virtual store of the world’s memories. The most enchanting and disturbing films of recent years – Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives, Nostalgia for the Light, Even the Rain, The Act of Killing, Carancho, Lady Vengeance – create ethical encounters with these lost pasts, covering vast swathes of the planet and crossing huge eras of time. Analysed using the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze (the time-image) and Enrique Dussel (transmodern ethics), the multitudinous cinemas of the world are shown to speak out against doublethink, countering this biggest lie of all with their myriad 'false' versions of world history. Cinema, acting against doublethink, remains a powerful agent for reclaiming the truth of history for the 'post-truth' era.
Will meat eaters get into heaven? Do trees have rights? Is it ever right to design a baby? What would you do? Would you always do the right thing? Is there a right thing? In this second edition of his thought-provoking and highly engaging introduction to ethics, Martin Cohen brings us eleven brand new ethical dilemmas including: The Dodgy Donor Clinic The Famous Footbridge Dilemma The Human Canonball. From overcrowded lifeboats to the censor's pen, Martin Cohen's stimulating and amusing dilemmas reveal the subtleties, complexities and contradictions that make up the rich tapestry of ethics. From DIY babies and breeding experiments to 'Twinkies courtroom drama' and Newgate Prison, there is a dilemma for everyone. This book may not help you become a good person, but at least you will have had a good think about it.
This book explores the critical role of urban food production in strengthening communities and in building ecosocialism. It integrates theory and practice, drawing on several local case studies from seven countries across four continents: China, Cuba, Ghana, Italy, Tanzania, the UK, and the US. Research shows that the term "urban agriculture" overstates the limited food-growing potential in cities due to a shortage of land required for growing grains, the basic human food staple. For this reason, the book suggests "urban cultivation" as an appropriate term which indicates social and political progress achieved through combined labours of urbanites to produce food. It examines how these collaborative food-growing efforts help raise local social capital, foster community organisation, and create ecological awareness in order to promote urban food production while also ensuring environmental sustainability. This book illustrates how urban cultivation constitutes a potentially important aspect of urban ecosystems, as well as offers solutions to current environmental problems. It recentres attention to the global South and debunks Eurocentric narratives, challenging capitalist commercial food-growing regimes and encouraging ecosocialist food-growing practices. Written in an accessible style, this book is recommended reading about an emergent issue which will interest students and scholars of environmental studies, geography, sociology, urban studies, politics, and economics.
Marvel Studios has provided some of the biggest worldwide cinematic hits of the last eight years, from Iron Man (2008) to the record-breaking The Avengers (2012), and beyond. Having announced plans to extend its production of connected texts in cinema, network and online television until at least 2028, the new aesthetic patterns brought about by Marvel's 'shared' media universe demand analysis and understanding. The Marvel Studios Phenomenon evaluates the studio's identity, as well as its status within the structures of parent Disney. In a new set of readings of key texts such as Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the thematics of superhero fiction and the role of fandom are considered. The authors identify milestones from Marvel's complex and controversial business history, allowing us to appraise its industrial status: from a comic publisher keen to exploit its intellectual property, to an independent producer, to successful subsidiary of a vast entertainment empire.
What is ‘the good’ of the film experience? And how does the budding field of ‘film as philosophy’ answer this question? Charting new routes for film ethics, Martin P. Rossouw develops a critical account of the transformational ethics at work within the ‘film as philosophy’ debate. Whenever philosophers claim that films can do philosophy, they also persistently put forward edifying practical effects – potential transformations of thought and experience – as the benefit of viewing such films. Through rigorous appraisals of key arguments, and with reference to the cinema of Terrence Malick, Rossouw pieces together the idea of an inner makeover through cinema – a cinemakeover – which casts a distinct vision of film spectatorship as a practice of self-transformation. "Recasting much of the existing debate, Martin Rossouw’s [...] emphasis on film’s power for enacting ethical transformation, rather than theoretical insight or discovery, gives a much-needed shot in the arm to a topic whose development has stalled in recent years. [...] This highly original book offers a unique and provocative contribution to the scholarship. Rossouw is a persistent questioner, often demonstrating sharp philosophical instincts." -Shawn Loht, Philosophy in Review, Vol. 43 no. 1 (February 2023). "At once a comprehensive record and a ceaseless meta-critique, Rossouw’s Transformational Ethics of Film is a thorough and bittersweet investigation into the aspiration and limits of this strand of film-philosophy scholarship [...]. [...] Rossouw’s detailed commitment to this critical exercise both provides a bountiful resource for film ethics scholarship, bringing organized clarity to an otherwise scattered but nonetheless commanding school of thought, and presents a potentially radical prospect for the position of meta-hermeneutics in the world of art theory." -Daniel E. Smith, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 22 no. 2 (July 2024).
What is the child for Latin American cinema? This book aims to answer that question, tracing the common tendencies of the representation of the child in the cinema of Latin American countries, and demonstrating the place of the child in the movements, genres and styles that have defined that cinema. Deborah Martin combines theoretical readings of the child in cinema and culture, with discussions of the place of the child in specific national, regional and political contexts, to develop in-depth analyses and establish regional comparisons and trends. She pays particular attention to the narrative and stylistic techniques at play in the creation of the child's perspective, and to ways in which the presence of the child precipitates experiments with film aesthetics. Bringing together fresh readings of well-known films with attention to a range of little-studied works, The Child in Contemporary Latin American Cinema examines films from the recent and contemporary period, focussing on topics such as the death of the child in ‘street child’ films, the role of the child in post-dictatorship filmmaking and the use of child characters to challenge gender and sexual ideologies. The book also aims to place those analyses in a historical context, tracing links with important precursors, and paying attention to the legacy of the child’s figuring in the mid-century movements of melodrama and the New Latin American Cinema.
Preliminary Material -- Acknowledgements -- Authors' Note -- Introduction -- Politics, Poetics, Film: The Beginnings of a Collaboration -- Parallel Texts: Language into Image in The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty -- Accompanied by Text: From Short Letter, Long Farewell to Alice in the Cities -- Mute Stories and Blind Alleys: Text, Image and Allusion in Wrong Move -- Leafing through Wings of Desire -- Conclusion -- Filmographies -- Bibliography -- Index.
Cinema and Surveillance: The Asymmetric Gaze shows how key modern filmmakers challenge and disturb the relation between film and surveillance, medium and message. Assembling readings of films by Harun Farocki, Michael Haneke, and Fritz Lang, the book considers surveillance in such different domains as urban life, religious doctrine, and law enforcement. With surveillance present in the modern world as both a technological phenomenon and a social practice, the author shows how cinema, as a visual medium, presents highly sophisticated analyses of surveillance. He suggests that “surveillance” is less an issue to be tackled from a secure spectatorial position than an experience to be rendered, an event to be dealt with. Far from offering a general model of spectatorship, the book explores how narrative moments of surveillance are complicated by specific spectatorial responses. In its intersection of well-known figures and a highly topical issue, this book will have broad appeal, especially, but not exclusively, among students and scholars in film studies, media studies, German studies, European studies, art history, and political theory.
This book traces the concept of idiocy as it has developed in fiction and film in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses particularly on visual images of idiocy and argues that writers as diverse as Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, John Steinbeck, Flannery O'Connor and Rohinton Mistry, and filmmakers such as Jean Renoir, Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Werner Herzog and John Huston have all been attracted to idiot figures as a way of thinking through issues of language acquisition, intelligence, creativity, disability, religion and social identity. Martin Halliwell provides a lively and detailed discussion of the most significant literary and cinematic uses of idiocy, arguing that scientific conceptions of the term as a classifiable medical condition are much too narrow. With the explosion of interest in idiocy among American and European filmmakers in the 1990s and the growing interest in its often overlooked history, this book offers a timely reassessment of idiocy and its distinctive place at the intersection of science and culture.
This is an exploration of the representation of Ireland and the Irish in British and US cinemas, as well as Irish-made films. The book offers readings of a wide range of key films such as The Butcher Boy (1997), Patriot Games (1992) and Angela's Ashes (1999). It discusses the full range of Irish cinematic productions from the low-budget work of Comerford and Breathnach, to the bigger Hollywood productions like Ron Howard's Far and Away (1992), and looks at the 'second' cinema of directors such as Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan where medium-sized budgets allow for greater creative control in Ireland. Feeding into wider debates about national and cultural identity, post-national cinema and the role of the state, the book provides an overview of how a relatively small film culture such as Ireland's can live successfully in the shadow of Hollywood.
The cinema of Lucrecia Martel provides a comprehensive analysis of the work of the acclaimed Argentine director, whose elusive and elliptical feature films have garnered worldwide recognition since her 2001 debut La ciénaga. This volume considers existing critical work on Martel's oeuvre, and proposes new ways of understanding it, in particular through desire, the use of the child's perspective, and through the senses and perception. Martin also offers an analysis of the politics of Martel's films, showing how they can be understood as sites of transformation and possibility, develops queer approaches to Martel's films, and shows how they offer new forms of cinematic pleasure. The cinema of Lucrecia Martel combines traditional plot and gaze analysis with an understanding of film as a material object, to explore the films' sensory experiments and their challenges to dominant cinematic forms.
Shortlisted for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Annual Book Award! Deleuze's Cinema books continue to cause controversy. Although they offer radical new ways of understanding cinema, his conclusions often seem strikingly Eurocentric. Deleuze and World Cinemas explores what happens when Deleuze's ideas are brought into contact with the films he did not discuss, those from Europe and the USA (from Georges Méliès to Michael Mann) and a range of world cinemas - including Bollywood blockbusters, Hong Kong action movies, Argentine melodramas and South Korean science fiction movies. These emergent encounters demonstrate the need for the constant adaptation and reinterpretation of Deleuze's findings if they are to have continued relevance, especially for cinema's contemporary engagement with the aftermath of the Cold War and the global dominance of neoliberal globalization.
In The Arts of Cinema, Martin Seel explores film’s connections to the other arts and the qualities that distinguish it from them. In nine concise and elegantly written chapters, he explores the cinema’s singular aesthetic potential and uses specific examples from a diverse range of films—from Antonioni and Hitchcock to The Searchers and The Bourne Supremacy—to demonstrate the many ways this potential can be realized. Seel’s analysis provides both a new perspective on film as a comprehensive aesthetic experience and a nuanced understanding of what the medium does to us once we are in the cinema.
From Facebook to the iPhone, from YouTube to Wikipedia, from Grand Auto Theft to Second Life, this book explores media's important issues and debates. It covers topics such as digital television, digital cinema, game culture, digital democracy, the World Wide Web, digital news, online social networking, music & multimedia and virtual communities.
For the 21st century, the often-quoted citation ‘past is prologue’ reads the other way around: The global present lacks a historical narrative for the global past. Focussing on a transcultural history, this book questions the territoriality of historical concepts and offers a narrative, which aims to overcome cultural essentialism by focussing on crossing borders of all kinds. Transcultural History reflects critically on the way history is constructed, asking who formed history in the past and who succeeded in shaping what we call the master narrative. Although trained European historians, the authors aim to present a useful approach to global history, showing first of all how a Eurocentric but universal historiography removed or essentialised certain topics in Asian history. As an empirical discipline, history is based on source material, analysed according to rules resulting from a strong methodological background. This book accesses the global past after World War I, looking at the well known stage of the Paris Peace Conferences, observing the multiplication of new borders and the variety of transgressing institutions, concepts, actors, men and women inventing themselves as global subjects, but sharing a bitter experience with almost all local societies at this time, namely the awareness of having relatives buried in far distant places due to globalised wars.
Introduction: Two photographs -- Sacrificial bodies : Fenton, Tennyson and the Charge of the Light Brigade -- The soldier's body and sites of mourning -- War games -- Trauma and the soldier's body -- Sophie Ristelhueber : landscape as body -- Conclusion: Future war without bodies.
Language, Media and Culture: The Key Concepts is an authoritative and indispensable guide to the essential terminology of the overlapping fields of Language, Media and Culture. Designed to give students and researchers ‘tools for thinking with’ in addressing major issues of communicative change in the 21st century, the book covers over 500 concepts as well as containing an extensive bibliography to aid further study. Subjects covered include: Authenticity Truthiness Structures of feeling Turn-taking Transitivity Validity claims With cross referencing and further reading provided throughout, this book provides an inclusive map of the discipline, and is an essential reference work for students in communication, media, journalism and cultural studies, as well as for students of language and linguistics.
In this book, a leading authority on film music examines scores of the silent film era. The first of three projected volumes investigating music written for films, this thoughtful and pathbreaking study demonstrates the richness of silent film music as it details the way in which scores were often planned from the start as an integral part of the whole cinematic experience. Following an introductory chapter that outlines several key theoretical questions and surveys eight decades of writing on film music, Martin Miller Marks focuses on those scores created between 1895 and 1924. He begins by considering two early examples, one German (written by persons unknown for Skladanowsky's Bioskop exhibitions in 1895 and 1896) and one French (scored by Camille Saint-Saëns for the 1908 film L'Assassinat du Duc de Guise). Subsequent chapters fully discuss Walter Cleveland Simon's music for the American film An Arabian Tragedy (1912) as well as the Joseph Breil accompaniment to D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915). As described in this book, Breil's memorable score--though a compilation derived from many sources--was played by an orchestra as Griffith's sweeping images filled the screen, thus contributing significantly to the great film's success while also achieving remarkable power in its own right. Marks then concludes with a look at Erik Satie's witty and innovative music for the French film Entr'acte (1924), which was the first film score of consequence by an avant-garde composer. Giving unprecedented attention to a vibrant, important, and oft-neglected facet of twentieth-century music, Music and the Silent Film will interest scholars of film theory, film history, modern music, and modern aesthetics.
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