More so than any other art form, film relies on collaboration. The essays in this collection, “Film and the Art of Adaptation,” consider a range of contemporary films inspired by celebrated works of American literature, including Baz Luhrmann's spectacular take on The Great Gatsby and James Franco's faithful transposition of As I Lay Dying.Ruth Yeazell considers the difficulty of representing the interior life of one of Henry James’s orphaned children in “Updating What Maisie Knew,” while Len Gutkin’s sassy pan, “A Beatnik Animal House,” shows how John Krokidas’s adolescent romp Kill Your Darlings butchers the murder that launched the Beat movement. Lowry Pressly’s discussion of Steve McQueen’s humane and heartbreaking 12 Years A Slave defends McQueen from charges of sadism in his adaptation of Solomon Northup’s little-read slave narrative. Rounding out the collection is Jerry Christensen’s take down of historian Ben Urwand’s controversial book The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler.From adaptation to collaboration, these six essays illuminate how writers, directors, and actors work together across yawning gaps in time and space to bring history and literature to the silver screen.
Timeline Analog 1 (1860-1971) traces the amazing story of editing's evolution. Learn how filmmakers like Méliès, Griffith and Vertov used editing to craft masterpieces and how inventors like Serrurier and Steenbeck built wondrous editing machines. Part 1 of the Timeline Six Series.
Comedy is a powerful contemporary source of influence and information. In the still-evolving digital era, the opportunity to consume and share comedy has never been as available. And yet, despite its vast cultural imprint, comedy is a little-understood vehicle for serious public engagement in urgent social justice issues – even though humor offers frames of hope and optimism that can encourage participation in social problems. Moreover, in the midst of a merger of entertainment and news in the contemporary information ecology, and a decline in perceptions of trust in government and traditional media institutions, comedy may be a unique force for change in pressing social justice challenges. Comedians who say something serious about the world while they make us laugh are capable of mobilizing the masses, focusing a critical lens on injustices, and injecting hope and optimism into seemingly hopeless problems. By combining communication and social justice frameworks with contemporary comedy examples, authors Caty Borum Chattoo and Lauren Feldman show us how comedy can help to serve as a vehicle of change. Through rich case studies, audience research, and interviews with comedians and social justice leaders and strategists, A Comedian and an Activist Walk Into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice explains how comedy – both in the entertainment marketplace and as cultural strategy – can engage audiences with issues such as global poverty, climate change, immigration, and sexual assault, and how activists work with comedy to reach and empower publics in the networked, participatory digital media age.
Offering historical and theoretical positions from a variety of art historians, artists, curators, and writers, this groundbreaking collection is the first substantive sourcebook on abstraction in moving-image media. With a particular focus on art since 2000, <I>Abstract Video </I>addresses a longer history of experimentation in video, net art, installation, new media, expanded cinema, visual music, and experimental film. Editor Gabrielle Jennings—a video artist herself—reveals as never before how works of abstract video are not merely, as the renowned curator Kirk Varnedoe once put it, «pictures of nothing,» but rather amorphous, ungovernable spaces that encourage contemplation and innovation. In explorations of the work of celebrated artists such as Jeremy Blake, Mona Hatoum, Pierre Huyghe, Ryoji Ikeda, Takeshi Murata, Diana Thater, and Jennifer West, alongside emerging artists, this volume presents fresh and vigorous perspectives on a burgeoning and ever-changing arena of contemporary art.
André Bazin’s writings on cinema are among the most influential reflections on the medium ever written. Even so, his critical interests ranged widely and encompassed the «new media» of the 1950s, including television, 3D film, Cinerama, and CinemaScope. Fifty-seven of his reviews and essays addressing these new technologies—their artistic potential, social influence, and relationship to existing art forms—have been translated here for the first time in English with notes and an introduction by leading Bazin authority Dudley Andrew. These essays show Bazin’s astute approach to a range of visual media and the relevance of his critical thought to our own era of new media. An exciting companion to the essential <I>What Is Cinema?</I> volumes, <I>André Bazin’s New Media</I> is excellent for classroom use and vital for anyone interested in the history of media.
Since the mid-1980s, US audiences have watched the majority of movies they see on a video platform, be it VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, Video On Demand, or streaming media. Annual video revenues have exceeded box office returns for over twenty-five years. In short, video has become the structuring discourse of US movie culture. <i>Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens</i> examines how prerecorded video reframes the premises and promises of motion picture spectatorship. But instead of offering a history of video technology or reception, Caetlin Benson-Allott analyzes how the movies themselves understand and represent the symbiosis of platform and spectator. Through case studies and close readings that blend industry history with apparatus theory, psychoanalysis with platform studies, and production history with postmodern philosophy, <i>Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens</i> unearths a genealogy of post-cinematic spectatorship in horror movies, thrillers, and other exploitation genres. From <i>Night of the Living Dead </i>(1968) through <i>Paranormal Activity</i> (2009), these movies pursue their spectator from one platform to another, adapting to suit new exhibition norms and cultural concerns in the evolution of the video subject.<br /><br />
First Cut 2: More Conversations with Film Editors presents a new collection of twelve interviews with award-winning film editors who discuss the art and craft of editing in the twenty-first century. As a follow-up to the successful First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors (now celebrating its 20th anniversary), this new volume explores the transition of editing from the age of celluloid to the digital age. These extraordinarily articulate editors share their passion about film, offer detailed practical examples from their films to explain their process as well as their challenges, and imbue each interview with unique personality, humor, and cinematic insights. First Cut 2 continues the tradition of the first volume by interviewing both fiction and documentary editors, contributing to a rich, holistic appreciation of editing. It also introduces a significant interview with an independent filmmaker/editor to emphasize today’s multiple opportunities for aspiring filmmakers to make their own «small films» and achieve success. Together with the first volume, First Cut 2 offers a panoramic survey of film editing and preserves its history through the voices of its practitioners. The stories told will engage students, inform general filmgoers, and even enlighten industry professionals.
In <i>The Poetics of Slumberland</i>, Scott Bukatman celebrates play, plasmatic possibility, and the life of images in cartoons, comics, and cinema. Bukatman begins with Winsor McCay’s <i>Little Nemo in Slumberland </i>to explore how and why the emerging media of comics and cartoons brilliantly captured a playful, rebellious energy characterized by hyperbolic emotion, physicality, and imagination. The book broadens to consider similar «animated» behaviors in seemingly disparate media—films about Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh; the musical <i>My Fair Lady </i>and the story of Frankenstein; the slapstick comedies of Jerry Lewis; and contemporary comic superheroes—drawing them all together as the purveyors of embodied utopias of disorder.
From the beginning, Myrna Loy’s screen image conjured mystery, a sense of something withheld. «Who is she?» was a question posed in the first fan magazine article published about her in 1925. This first ever biography of the wry and sophisticated actress best known for her role as Nora Charles, wife to dapper detective William Powell in <i>The Thin Man</i>, offers an unprecedented picture of her life and an extraordinary movie career that spanned six decades. Opening with Loy’s rough-and-tumble upbringing in Montana, the book takes us to Los Angeles in the 1920s, where Loy’s striking looks caught the eye of Valentino, through the silent and early sound era to her films of the thirties, when Loy became a top box office draw, and to her robust post–World War II career. Throughout, Emily W. Leider illuminates the actress’s friendships with luminaries such as Cary Grant, Clark Gable, and Joan Crawford and her collaborations with the likes of John Barrymore, David O. Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, and William Wyler, among many others. This highly engaging biography offers a fascinating slice of studio era history and gives us the first full picture of a very private woman who has often been overlooked despite her tremendous star power.
The Garden in the Machine explores the evocations of place, and particularly American place, that have become so central to the representational and narrative strategies of alternative and mainstream film and video. Scott MacDonald contextualizes his discussion with a wide-ranging and deeply informed analysis of the depiction of place in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, painting, and photography. Accessible and engaging, this book examines the manner in which these films represent nature and landscape in particular, and location in general. It offers us both new readings of the films under consideration and an expanded sense of modern film history. Among the many antecedents to the films and videos discussed here are Thomas Cole's landscape painting, Thoreau's Walden, Olmsted and Vaux's Central Park, and Eadweard Muybridge's panoramic photographs of San Francisco. MacDonald analyzes the work of many accomplished avant-garde filmmakers: Kenneth Anger, Bruce Baillie, James Benning, Stan Brakhage, Nathaniel Dorsky, Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, Larry Gottheim, Robert Huot, Peter Hutton, Marjorie Keller, Rose Lowder, Marie Menken, J.J. Murphy, Andrew Noren, Pat O'Neill, Leighton Pierce, Carolee Schneemann, and Chick Strand. He also examines a variety of recent commercial feature films, as well as independent experiments in documentary and such contributions to independent video history as George Kuchar's Weather Diaries and Ellen Spiro's Roam Sweet Home. MacDonald reveals the spiritual underpinnings of these works and shows how issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and class are conveyed as filmmakers attempt to discover forms of Edenic serenity within the Machine of modern society. Both personal and scholarly, The Garden in the Machine will be an invaluable resource for those interested in investigating and experiencing a broader spectrum of cinema in their teaching, in their research, and in their lives.