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Recognized as a master of Italian cinema, Vittorio De Sica is perhaps best known and most respected for his critically acclaimed neorealist films of the period 1946-55. As this anthology reveals, however, his production was remarkably multifaceted. The essays included here - some newly commissioned, some reprinted, and others in translation - look at De Sica's varied career from many perspecives. Structured chronologically, the volume begins by introducing readers to De Sica's early popularity as an actor and singer during the years of Italian Fascism, and to his initial directorial efforts before the end of World War II. It was not until the postwar era, however, that De Sica made his mark ...
Tracks the influence of Italian cinema on American film from the postwar period to the present. In The Transatlantic Gaze, Mary Ann McDonald Carolan documents the sustained and profound artistic impact of Italian directors, actors, and screenwriters on American film. Working across a variety of genres, including neorealism, comedy, the Western, and the art film, Carolan explores how and why American directors from Woody Allen to Quentin Tarantino have adapted certain Italian trademark techniques and motifs. Allens To Rome with Love (2012), for example, is an homage to the genius of Italian filmmakers, and to Federico Fellini in particular, whose Lo sceicco bianco/The White Sheik (1952) als...
Playing with Memories is the first collection of scholarly essays on the work of internationally acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. It offers extensive perspectives on his career to date, from the early experimentation of The Dead Father (1986) to the intensely intimate revelations of My Winnipeg (2007). Featuring new and updated essays from American, Canadian, and Australian scholars, collaborators, and critics, as well as an in-depth interview with Maddin, this collection explores the aesthetics and politics behind Maddin’s work, firmly situating his films within ongoing cultural debates about postmodernism, genre, and national identity.
The first collection of critical essays on HBO's The Wire - the most brilliant and socially relevant television series in years The Wire is about survival, about the strategies adopted by those living and working in the inner cities of America. It presents a world where for many even hope isn't an option, where life operates as day-to-day existence without education, without job security, and without social structures. This is a world that is only grey, an exacting autopsy of a side of American life that has never seen the inside of a Starbucks. Over its five season, sixty-episode run (2002-2008), The Wire presented several overlapping narrative threads, all set in the city of Baltimore. The...
A behind-the-scenes account of a cultural institution that made a distinctive mark on Canadian film Establishing Shots captures a diverse group of filmmakers in an immersive oral history of one of the most important and notorious artist-run centres in Canada: the Winnipeg Film Group. Both a deep dive into the life of an internationally renowned institution and an exploration of the growth of an experimental film movement, this richly illustrated collection of interviews produces a vibrant picture of the Winnipeg Film Group’s origins, successes, failures, and ongoing impact. Formed in 1974 as a membership-based film production, training, and exhibition cooperative, the Winnipeg Film Group w...
Chronicles the vitality of international film art in the last two decades Offers close readings of individual films to show how moviemakers use the resources of the medium to pursue complex, significant human goals In Search of Cinema chronicles the vitality of international film art in the last two decades. At a time when the movie review has degenerated into mere publicity for Hollywood pictures and film scholarship has become entangled in its own pseudo-scientific discourse, Bert Cardullo reclaims the territory of a certain type of film critic, somewhere between a reviewer-journalist and a scholar-theorist. With elegance, clarity, and rigour, he offers close readings of individual films to show how moviemakers use the resources of the medium to pursue complex, significant human goals.
Woody Allen: Reel to Real is the first DigiDialogue from Take2Publishing … a product and a process where the author inspires a discourse between and amongst himself and his audience … Everyone has an opinion of Woody Allen, whether those opinions come from a learned perspective, or from the tabloids … and Sheremet's excitingly exhaustive analysis is the perfect fodder to generate and further this unique form of dialogue The genesis of this DigiDialogue is the Woody Allen:Reel to Real website, established some months ago to have Sheremet and his 'readers' further explore, expand and explain the theses he presents. On that site one can find a combination of faithful summaries of the key ...
How spectacular visions of physical suffering in post–World War II Italian neorealist films redefined moviegoing as a form of political action
When the lights go down and the film starts to roll, we give ourselves over to the magic of movies. But as George Toles observes, what we experience in this house of light may strike closer to home than we imagine. In eleven essays, Toles combines aesthetic inquiry with a psychology of spectatorship to illuminate the dialogue between sentiment and irony that unfolds in every good movie. Reflecting a literary critic's and professional screenwriter's ongoing love affair with cinema, each essay plunges the reader into the experience of one or more films, inviting us to ponder the nature and implications of that experience. Toles considers a wide variety of film experience, from Frank Capra to t...
In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema delineates a new performative genre based on replay and self-awareness. The book argues that in-person reenactment, an actual person reenacting her past on camera, departs radically from other modes of mimetic reconstruction. In Person theorizes this figure's protean temporality and revisionist capabilities and it considers its import in terms of social representativity and exemplarity. Close readings of select, historicized examples define an alternate, confessional-performative vein to understand the self-reflexive nature of postwar and post-holocaust testimonial cinemas. The book contextualizes Zavattini's proposal that in neoreali...