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.
Hollywood in San Francisco
One of the country’s most picturesque cities and conveniently located just a few hours’ drive from Hollywood, San Francisco became the most frequently and extensively filmed American city beyond the production hubs of Los Angeles and New York in the three decades after World War II. During those years, the cinematic image of the city morphed from the dreamy beauty of Vertigo to the nightmarish wasteland of Dirty Harry, although San Francisco itself experienced no such decline. This intriguing disconnect gives impetus to Hollywood in San Francisco, the most comprehensive study to date of Hollywood’s move from studio to location production in the postwar era. In this thirty-year history ...
Hollywood on Location
Hollywood on Location is the first comprehensive history of location shooting in the American film industry, showing how this mode of filmmaking changed Hollywood business practices, production strategies, and visual style from the silent era to the present. The contributors explore how major studios came to embrace location shooting as a standard procedure.
Mobile Hollywood
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Contemporary film and television production is extraordinarily mobile. Filming large-scale studio productions in Atlanta, Budapest, London, Prague, or Australia's Gold Coast makes Hollywood jobs available to people and places far removed from Southern California--but it also requires individuals to uproot their lives as they travel around the world in pursuit of work. Drawing on interviews with a global contingent of film and television workers, Kevin Sanson weaves an analysis of the sheer scale and complexity of mobile production into a compelling account of the impact that mobility has had on job functions, working conditions, and personal lives. Mobile Hollywood captures how an expanded geography of production not only intensifies the often invisible pressures that production workers now face but also stretches the parameters of screen-media labor far beyond craftwork and creativity.
Screening the Police
"American police departments have presided over the business of motion pictures since the end of the nineteenth century. Their influence is evident not only on the screen but also in the ways movies are made, promoted, and viewed in the United States. Screening the Police explores the history of film's entwinement with law enforcement, showing the role that state power has played in the creation and expansion of a popular medium. For the New Jersey State Police in the 1930s, film offered a method of visualizing criminality and of circulating urgent information about escaped convicts. For the New York Police Department, the medium was a means of making the agency world-famous as early as 1896...
French Blockbusters
The digitised spectacles conjured by a word like `blockbuster' may create a certain cognitive dissonance with received ideas about French cinema - long celebrated as a model for philosophical, economic and aesthetic resistance to globalised popular culture. While the Gallic `cultural exception' remains a forceful current to this day, this book shows how the onslaught of Hollywood mega-franchises and new media platforms since the 1980s has also provoked an overtly commercialised response from French producers eager to redefine the stakes and scope of their own traditions. Cutting across a swath of recent French-produced cinema, French Blockbusters offers the first book-length consideration of...
Black Masculinity on Film
This book provides wide-ranging commentary on depictions of the black male in mainstream cinema. O’Brien explores the extent to which counter-representations of black masculinity have been achieved within a predominately white industry, with an emphasis on agency, the negotiation and malleability of racial status, and the inherent instability of imposed racial categories. Focusing on American and European cinema, the chapters highlight actors (Woody Strode, Noble Johnson, Eddie Anderson, Will Smith), genres (jungle pictures, westerns, science fiction) and franchises (Tarzan, James Bond) underrepresented in previous critical and scholarly commentary in the field. The author argues that although the characters and performances generated in these areas invoke popular genre types, they display complexity, diversity and ambiguity, exhibiting aspects that are positive, progressive and subversive. This book will appeal to both the academic and the general reader interested in film, race, gender and colonial issues.
Decline and Reimagination in Cinematic New York
Decline and Reimagination in Cinematic New York examines the cinematic representation of New York from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, placing the dominant discourse of urban decline in dialogue with marginal perspectives that reimagine the city along alternative paths as a resilient, adaptive, and endlessly inspiring place. Drawing on mainstream, independent, documentary, and experimental films, the book offers a multifaceted account of the power of film to imagine the city’s decline and reimagine its potential. The book analyzes how filmmakers mobilized derelict space and various articulations of “nature” as settings and signifiers that decenter traditional understandings of the city to represent New York alternately as a desolate wasteland, a hostile wilderness, a refuge and playground for outcasts, a home to resilient and resourceful communities, a studio for artistic experimentation, an arcadia conducive to alternative social arrangements, and a complex ecosystem. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of film studies, media studies, urban cinema, urban studies, and eco-cinema.
Polly Platt
This book examines the career and creative labour of production designer Polly Platt. It focuses mainly on her contributions to 1970s Hollywood, but also considers her later work. Considering films such as The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, The Bad News Bears, and The Witches of Eastwick, it argues that Platt’s construction of their visual palette and mise-en-scène was so creative and so comprehensive that it can be considered authorial. Chapters discuss Platt’s life and its influence on her work, her attention to detail, her role in location decisions and costume design, and her use of colour. An epilogue discusses her later career as a producer and her mentorship to young filmmakers like Cameron Crowe and Wes Anderson. This is the first full-length examination of the career of one of the women practitioners whose work was so important to 1970s cinema, and provides an alternative methodology to the auteur-driven framing that so regularly defines the era.
French B Movies
In the impoverished outskirts of French cities, known as the banlieues, minority communities are turning to American culture, history, and theory to make their own voices, cultures, and histories visible. Filmmakers have followed suit, turning to Hollywood genre conventions to challenge notions of identity, belonging, and marginalization in mainstream French film. French B Movies proposes that French banlieue films, far from being a fringe genre, offer a privileged site from which to understand the current state of the French film industry in an age of globalization. This gritty style appears in popular arthouse films such as Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine and Bande de filles (Girlhood) along ...
Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958-1977
Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958–1977 explores how documentarians working between the election of John F. Kennedy and the Bicentennial created conflicting visions of the recent and more distant American past. Drawing on a wide range of primary documents, Joshua Glick analyzes the films of Hollywood documentarians such as David Wolper and Mel Stuart, along with lesser-known independents and activists such as Kent Mackenzie, Lynne Littman, and Jesús Salvador Treviño. While the former group reinvigorated a Cold War cultural liberalism, the latter group advocated for social justice in a city plagued by severe class stratification and racial segregation. Glick examines how mainstream and alternative filmmakers turned to the archives, civic institutions, and production facilities of Los Angeles in order to both change popular understandings of the city and shape the social consciousness of the nation.
