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The Lasting Picture Show
This work is the continuation of a sustained inquiry into moving pictures, conducting with an awareness of their prominence and prevalence in the contemporary world. A major indicator of the ubiquity of motion pictures is noticed by world travelers, who see the traces of their universality with the satellites on nomadic yurts in Asia and TV sets in remote and poor African villages. It is only now becoming realised that this mode of communication may well be the most pervasive, and perhaps even the most important, mass medium ever invented. With that background in mind, this book focuses on “cinematic knowing” as an expression of ludenic experience, important as a major source of “play-...
Moving Pictures
Following on from the author’s previous books treating aspects of the cinematic experience, this text reflects on what he has learned about that major innovation in the cultural life of humankind, and suggests to readers and scholars what ideas and concepts they might find useful in their own future studies. As this book argues, the most illuminating perspective for studying the movies is ‘play’, the notion that moving pictures were a major ludenic innovation in the world’s cultural life and became a definite source of human knowledge and discourse. In that way, movies became an important medium of not only popular entertainment, but also popular enlightenment. The perspective and conceptual framework developed in this work will be suggestive to future inquirers interested in understanding the power and persistence of popular movies, helping them towards further insight into this major cultural phenomenon. By using moving pictures to amend the ancient art and craft of storytelling, the future of the medium may persist in the future, if in altered and new modes of popular presentation.
Movie Time
Movie Time is a study of temporal mythmaking in American popular movies. The work is rooted in American pragmatic philosophy and contemporary traditions of inquiry in the social sciences and humanities. It proceeds on the premise that social beings and social orders are interested in the mediation of time, and attempt to make sense of their present world through the reconstruciton of important pasts of interest in the present, develop new presents with the help of popular expressions which define new situations and responses for a new time, and foresee possible futures which impinge upon life in the here-and-now. In particular, the work focuses on the subsequent treatment of the American 195...
James B. Combs
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Cinematic Schooling
This volume uses the metaphor of schooling to highlight the conviction that the widespread attention given to moving pictures in their various venues is not only diverting and entertaining, but also educative, although subtle and suggestive rather than explicit and didactic. The importance of our movie experience includes the inescapable fact of play-learning, which, for many people, becomes accumulative over time and consequential in our imagination of the world, as well as providing guidelines and cues for possible lines of action and codes of socially relevant beliefs. Most movies are not propaganda, but what is communicated onscreen can be incorporated into our ways of thinking and acting. Although this process is difficult to ascertain certainly, nevertheless, for those interested in the overwhelming impact of moving pictures as a component and source of our thinking and action, it deserves serious inquiry and invites social concern as to its power as an experience from which we learn who are and what we do.
Wit's End
This book is a study of the “Great Movies,” that fluid category of feature films deemed by various authorities—film societies, critics, academics, and movie enthusiasts—to be the enduring and memorable works of cinematic history. But what are they about? In Wit’s End, the author attempts to “make sense” of these films in order to understand their greatness in the context of their relation to other films and to the worlds they come from and recreate on screen. To that end, we employ the conceptual power of pragmatic social theory and the rich idea of aesthesis to explore and arrange these films as a means of understanding what they express about the universality of human life in our keen use of wit, organization of social wont, and direction of cultural way. It is hoped that such an inquiry will illuminate the glory of the great films and contribute to the advance of film studies.
Magical Suspension
This book builds upon the author’s extensive previous work on the movies, adopting a more comprehensive and inquisitive stance for the study of moving pictures as a cultural movement and ludenic innovation. It returns to earlier analysis and commentary on this new invention and recreation quickly termed “the movies”, and develops the initial impression of both moviegoers and observers that the movies appealed because they were fun. As such, the book examines the characteristics that made films so enjoyable, namely their use of magic, presentation of myth, and persistence of mnemonic recollection. The enduring appeal of moving pictures remains consistent, even though the medium has prol...
The Reagan Range
Combs (political science, Valparaiso U.) tries to make sense of the Reagan presidency by linking it to the American popular culture that spawned and trained him, and that he used so adeptly to his advantage. No index. Paper edition (unseen), $11.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Comic Grace
Comic Grace is Comb’s third book on the movies for Cambridge Scholars Publishing. These books hardly form a trilogy, but they do express a pragmatic interest of the author; namely, the aspects of movies that we have not adequately studied. More specifically, the first, Movie Time, examines the inadequately understood temporal appearance of movies, in movies set in the past, the present, and the future, attempting to make sense of such questions as to why certain past periods still fascinate, how an emergent present is accompanied by cinematic treatment, and what kind of futures we like to speculate about by watching alternative futures on film. This temporal interest was complemented in th...
