Sam B. Girgus's Books

Clint Eastwood's America

By: Sam B. Girgus

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The steady rise of Clint Eastwood’s career parallels a pressing desire in American society over the past five decades for a figure and story of purpose, meaning, and redemption. Eastwood has not only told and filmed that story, he has come to embody it for many in his public image and film persona. Eastwood responds to a national yearning for a vision of individual action and initiative, personal responsibility, and potential for renewal. An iconic director and star for his westerns, urban thrillers, and adventure stories, Eastwood has taken film art to new horizons of meaning in a series of masterpieces that engage the ethical and moral consciousness of our times, including Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, and Mystic River. He revolutionized the war film with the unprecedented achievement of filming the opposing sides of the same historic battle in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, using this saga to present a sharply critical representation of the new America that emerged out of the war, a society of images and spectacles. This timely examination of Clint Eastwood’s oeuvre against the backdrop of contemporary America will be fascinating reading for students of film and popular culture, as well as readers with interests in Eastwood’s work, American film and culture.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

288

Publisher

John Wiley & Sons

Published Date

ISBN 10

074565648X

ISBN 13

9780745656489

The Films of Woody Allen

By: Sam B. Girgus

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Films of Woody Allen

By: Sam B. Girgus

Publisher Description

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

214

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0521009294

ISBN 13

9780521009294

Hollywood Renaissance

The Cinema of Democracy in the Era of Ford, Kapra, and Kazan

By: Sam B. Girgus

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Hollywood Renaissance

The Cinema of Democracy in the Era of Ford, Kapra, and Kazan

By: Sam B. Girgus

A study of how films from the late 1930s to the early 60s portrayed the American ideal.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

280

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0521625521

ISBN 13

9780521625524

Time, Existential Presence and the Cinematic Image

Ethics and Emergence to Being in Film

By: Sam B. Girgus

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Time, Existential Presence and the Cinematic Image

Ethics and Emergence to Being in Film

By: Sam B. Girgus

In Time, Existential Presence and the Cinematic Image, Sam B. Girgus relates Laura Mulvey's theory of 'delayed cinema' to ideas on time and the relationship to the other in the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas and Julia Kristeva, among others. The sustained tension in film between, in Mulvey's phrase, 'stillness and the moving image' enacts a drama of existential emergence. The stillness of the framed image in relation to the moving image opens 'free' cinematic time and space for a fresh engagement with crucial ethical and cultural issues. With close readings of films such as The Bicycle Thieves, Two Days, One Night, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The Revenant and The Age of Innocence, this book proposes a fresh approach to reading film in the context of emerging existential presence and the ethical imperative.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

191

Publisher

Edinburgh University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1474436250

ISBN 13

9781474436250

Generations of Jewish Directors and the Struggle for America’s Soul

Wyler, Lumet, and Spielberg

By: Sam B. Girgus

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Generations of Jewish Directors and the Struggle for America’s Soul

Wyler, Lumet, and Spielberg

By: Sam B. Girgus

From generation to generation, three outstanding American Jewish directors—William Wyler, Sidney Lumet, and Steven Spielberg--advance a tradition of Jewish writers, artists, and leaders who propagate the ethical basis of the American Idea and Creed. They strive to renew the American spirit by insisting that America must live up to its values and ideals. These directors accentuate the ethical responsibility for the other as a basis of the American soul and a source for strengthening American liberal democracy. In the manner of the jeremiad, their films challenge America to achieve a liberal democratic culture for all people by becoming more inclusive and by modernizing the American Idea. Following an introduction that relates aspects of modern ethical thought to the search for America’s soul, the book divides into three sections. The Wyler section focuses on the director’s social vision of a changing America. The Lumet section views his films as dramatizing Lumet’s dynamic and aggressive social and ethical conscience. The Spielberg section tracks his films as a movement toward American redemption and renewal that aspires to realize Lincoln’s vision of America as the hope of the world. The directors, among many others, perpetuate a “New Covenant” that advocates change and renewal in the American experience.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

270

Publisher

Springer Nature

Published Date

ISBN 10

3030760316

ISBN 13

9783030760311

America on Film

Modernism, Documentary, and a Changing America

By: Sam B. Girgus

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

America on Film

Modernism, Documentary, and a Changing America

By: Sam B. Girgus

In America on Film, first published in 2002, Sam Girgus examines a selection of films made in the last quarter of the twentieth century in an effort to trace how the notion of 'American' has changed drastically from that portrayed in American cinema up to the 1950s. In works such as Mississippi Masala, Lone Star, Malcolm X, Raging Bull, When We Were Kings, and Bugsy he finds a new and ethnically varied array of characters that embody American values, ideals, and conflicts; and a transformation in the relationship of American identity and culture to race and ethnicity, as well as to sexuality, gender, and the body. America on Film charts these changes through analysis of cinematic tensions between fiction, documentary, and modernism. An art form that combines fragments of reality with imagination, film, Girgus maintains, connects the documentary realism of the photographic image to the abstraction and non-representation of modernism.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

244

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0521009316

ISBN 13

9780521009317

The Law of the Heart

Individualism and the Modern Self in American Literature

By: Sam B. Girgus

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Law of the Heart

Individualism and the Modern Self in American Literature

By: Sam B. Girgus

The Law of the Heart is a vigorous challenge to the prevailing concept of the “antidemocratic” image of the self in the American literary and cultural tradition. Sam B. Girgus counters this interpretation and attempts to develop a new understanding of democratic individualism and liberal humanism in American literature under the rubric of literary modernism. The image of the individual self who retreats inward, conforming to a distorted “law of the heart,” emerges from the works of such writers as Cooper and Poe and composer Charles Ives. Yet, as Girgus shows, other American writers relate the idea of the self to reality and culture in a more complex way: the self confronts and is reconciled to the paradox of history and reality. In Girgus’ view, the tradition of pragmatic, humanistic individualism provides a foundation for a future where individual liberty is a major priority. He uses literary modernism as a bridge for relating contemporary social conditions to crises of the American self and culture as seen in the works of writers including Emerson, Howells, Whitman, Henry James, William James, Fitzgerald, Bellow, and McLuhan.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

193

Publisher

University of Texas Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0292772947

ISBN 13

9780292772946

Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption

Time, Ethics, and the Feminine

By: Sam B. Girgus

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption

Time, Ethics, and the Feminine

By: Sam B. Girgus

In his philosophy of ethics and time, Emmanuel Levinas highlighted the tension that exists between the "ontological adventure" of immediate experience and the "ethical adventure" of redemptive relationships-associations in which absolute responsibility engenders a transcendence of being and self. In an original commingling of philosophy and cinema study, Sam B. Girgus applies Levinas's ethics to a variety of international films. His efforts point to a transnational pattern he terms the "cinema of redemption" that portrays the struggle to connect to others in redeeming ways. Girgus not only reveals the power of these films to articulate the crisis between ontological identity and ethical subjectivity. He also locates time and ethics within the structure and content of film itself. Drawing on the work of Luce Irigaray, Tina Chanter, Kelly Oliver, and Ewa Ziarek, Girgus reconsiders Levinas and his relationship to film, engaging with a feminist focus on the sexualized female body. Girgus offers fresh readings of films from several decades and cultures, including Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Federico Fellini's La dolce vita (1959), Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura (1960), John Huston's The Misfits (1961), and Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988).

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

272

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231519494

ISBN 13

9780231519496

Generations of Jewish Directors and the Struggle for America’s Soul

Wyler, Lumet, and Spielberg

By: Sam B. Girgus

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Generations of Jewish Directors and the Struggle for America’s Soul

Wyler, Lumet, and Spielberg

By: Sam B. Girgus

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

270

Publisher

Springer Nature

Published Date

ISBN 10

3030760316

ISBN 13

9783030760311

Book's by Sam B. Girgus

Clint Eastwood's America

Clint Eastwood's America

The Films of Woody Allen

The Films of Woody Allen

Hollywood Renaissance

Hollywood Renaissance

Time, Existential Presence and the Cinematic Image

Time, Existential Presence and the Cinematic Image

Generations of Jewish Directors and the Struggle for America’s Soul

Generations of Jewish Directors and the Struggle for America’s Soul

America on Film

America on Film

The Law of the Heart

The Law of the Heart

Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption

Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption

Generations of Jewish Directors and the Struggle for America’s Soul

Generations of Jewish Directors and the Struggle for America’s Soul

Username

Password

Username

Password

Password again

Birthday

Email