Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Torturous Etiquettes
"Etiquette," as noted toastmaster Herbert V. Prochnow once pointed out, "is knowing how to yawn with your mouth closed"—that is, to spare the feelings of the other person, one must stifle one's own. To be polite, therefore, is to perform. Onscreen, closeups often reveal the effort that goes into maintaining that performance: with a fleeting frown or a slight scowl, an actor reveals the "torture" of mannered behavior. In Torturous Etiquettes, Daniel Varndell examines such gestures to reveal the difficulties of the social encounter. Drawing on the history of etiquette, the book deconstructs an array of examples from classical and contemporary Hollywood and European cinema, taking a close look at onscreen representations of rudeness, ridiculing, racist and sexist etiquettes, hospitality, table manners, and more. In doing so, it reveals etiquette to be a persistent theme in cinema and questions the role it plays in either upholding or denying the basic humanity of others.
Thinking in the Dark
Today’s film scholars draw from a dizzying range of theoretical perspectives—they’re just as likely to cite philosopher Gilles Deleuze as they are to quote classic film theorist André Bazin. To students first encountering them, these theoretical lenses for viewing film can seem exhilarating, but also overwhelming. Thinking in the Dark introduces readers to twenty-one key theorists whose work has made a great impact on film scholarship today, including Rudolf Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein, Michel Foucault, Siegfried Kracauer, and Judith Butler. Rather than just discussing each theorist’s ideas in the abstract, the book shows how those concepts might be applied when interpreting specific...
The Philosophy of Michael Mann
A collection of essays exploring the philosophical themes and aesthetic vision behind blockbuster film including The Insider, Public Enemies,and more. Known for his finely crafted crime thrillers, American filmmaker Michael Mann has long been regarded as a talented triple threat capable of moving effortlessly between television and feature films as a writer, director, and executive producer. His unique visual sense and thematic approach are evident in the Emmy Award-winning The Jericho Mile, the cult favorite The Keep, the American epic The Last of the Mohicans, and the Academy Award-nominated The Insider, as well as more recent works such as Ali, Miami Vice, and Public Enemies. The Philosophy of Michael Mann provides a comprehensive account of the work of this highly accomplished filmmaker, exploring the director's recognizable visual style and the various on-screen and philosophical elements he has tested in his thirty-five-year career. The essays in this wide-ranging book will appeal to fans of the revolutionary filmmaker and to philosophical scholars interested in the themes and conflicts that drive his movies.
Through a Nuclear Lens
The Franco-Japanese coproduction Hiroshima mon amour (1959) is one of the most important films for global art cinema and for the French New Wave. In Through a Nuclear Lens, Hannah Holtzman examines this film and the transnational cycle it has inspired, as well as its legacy after the 2011 nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. In a study that includes formal and theoretical analysis, archival research, and interviews, Holtzman shows the emergence of a new kind of nuclear film, one that attends to the everyday effects of nuclear disaster and its impact on our experience of space and time. The focus on Franco-Japanese exchange in cinema since the postwar period reveals a reorientation of the primarily aesthetic preoccupations in the tradition of Japonisme to center around technological and environmental concerns. The book demonstrates how French filmmakers, ever since Hiroshima mon amour, have looked to Japan in part to better understand nuclear uncertainty in France.
Eccentric Laughter
Eccentric Laughter explores new ways to watch postwar British film comedies, arguing that their representations of eccentricity offered a set of possible queer futures for a Britain that had been destabilized by years of conflict and social upheaval. Far from being the apolitical cinema described by previous critics, these comedies—including both perennial favorites from Ealing Studios and neglected films ripe for rediscovery—make a joke of and suggest alternatives to the heterocentric home and family. Referencing a wide range of theories, the book gives details of how these films' comic queernesses are not structured on fixed identities but on an open play of possibilities, depicting eccentricity, artifice, drag, ruins, and the wild in ways that can still offer inspiration for experiments in living today. Engaging with contemporary queer theories and politics, the book argues that these films continue to address questions of urgent relevance to students and other viewers in the twenty-first century. Films discussed include The Belles of St. Trinian's, Genevieve, The Lavender Hill Mob, Simon and Laura, The Stranger Left No Card, and Young Wives' Tale.
New Silent Cinema
With the success of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) and Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist (2011) nothing seems more contemporary in recent film than the styles, forms, and histories of early and silent cinemas. This collection considers the latest return to silent film alongside the larger historical field of visual repetitions and affective currents that wind their way through 20th and 21st century visual cultures. Contributors bring together several fields of research, including early and silent cinema studies, experimental and new media, historiography and archive theory, and studies of media ontology and epistemology. Chapters link the methods, concerns, and concepts of early and silent film studies as they have flourished over the last quarter century to the most recent developments in digital culture—from YouTube to 3D—recasting this contemporary phenomenon in popular culture and new media against key debates and concepts in silent film scholarship. An interview with acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin closes out the collection.
The Human Figure on Film
The Human Figure on Film asks what it is we look for when we look at human beings projected on a screen. People have appeared onscreen since film was invented. Nothing could be more common, and yet nothing confounds us more, than a filmed human being. Scholars and critics have attempted to reduce the mystery, creating methodologies that make this figure legible. Some of their efforts form the subject of this book. Each chapter is devoted to a single, central concept—the natural, the pictorial, the institutional, and the fictional—that viewers have used to make sense of what they see. Each concept, in turn, is tied to the work and methods of a particular kind of historical observer: the n...
Representations of Child Soldiers in Contemporary African Narratives
In Representations of Child Soldiers in Contemporary African Narratives, Ademola Adesola examines the dominant factors that writers privilege in their portrayals of child soldiering in sub-Saharan Africa. In his textual-interpretive analyses of selected novels in the African child soldier genre, Adesola contends that critical discussions of African child soldier literature have depended on the interpretive frameworks supplied by Western humanitarian discourses which oversimplify and de-historicize experiences of war in Africa. The author argues that such reductive decontextualization of war realities serve to champion a narrow vision of war in African contexts centered on a moral and humanit...
Service and Dependency in Shakespeare's Plays
This is an unusual study of the nature of service and other types of dependency and patronage in Shakespeare's drama. By considering the close associations of service with childhood or youth, marriage and friendship, Judith Weil sheds light on social practice and dramatic action. Approached as dynamic explorations of a familiar custom, the plays are shown to demonstrate a surprising consciousness of obligations, and a fascination with how dependants actively change each other. They help us understand why early modern people may have found service both frightening and enabling. Attentive to a range of historical sources, and social and cultural issues, Weil also emphasises the linguistic ambiguities created by service relationships, and their rich potential for interpretation on the stage. The book includes close readings of dramatic sequences in twelve plays, including Hamlet, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew and King Lear.
Is Harpo Free?
Is Harpo Free? is a lively appreciation of film and television's ability to artistically explore concepts typical of philosophical metaphysics, such as free will, causality, and personal identity. Rather than using films and television programs as vehicles for philosophical arguments, the book instead celebrates the artistic ways in which they give life to various metaphysical concepts and how the artistic expression of these concepts and ideas helps us understand ourselves, the world, and our place within it. Through close analysis of a varied selection of works and their use of narrative, form, and style, Is Harpo Free? exemplifies a novel approach to appreciating the philosophical substance of films and television programs. Films and television programs discussed include A Night at the Opera; Run, Lola, Run; Shane; Harvey; Three Colours: Blue; The Americans; Dark; and Fargo.
