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Robert B. Ray examines the ideology of the most enduringly popular cinema in the world--the Hollywood movie. Aided by 364 frame enlargements, he describes the development of that historically overdetermined form, giving close readings of five typical instances: Casablanca, It's a Wonderful Life, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Godfather, and Taxi Driver. Like the heroes of these movies, American filmmaking has avoided commitment, in both plot and technique. Instead of choosing left or right, avant-garde or tradition, American cinema tries to have it both ways. Although Hollywood's commercial success has led the world audience to equate the American cinema with film itself, Hollywood filmmaking is a particular strategy designed to respond to specific historical situations. As an art restricted in theoretical scope but rich in individual variations, the American cinema poses the most interesting question of popular culture: Do dissident forms have any chance of remaining free of a mass medium seeking to co-opt them?
Alan J. Pakula's political thriller All the President's Men (1976) was met with immediate critical and commercial success upon its release, finishing second at the box office and earning seven Academy Award nominations. Through a close reading of key scenes, performances and stylistic decisions, Christian Keathley and Robert B. Ray show how the film derives its narrative power through a series of controlled oppositions: silence vs. noise; stationary vs. moving camera; dark vs. well-lit scenes and shallow vs. deep focus, tracing how these elements combine to create an underlying formal design crucial to the film's achievement. They argue that the film does not fit the auteurist model of New Hollywood film-makers such as Coppola and Scorsese. Instead, All the President's Men more closely resembles a studio-era film, the result of a collaboration between a producer (Robert Redford), multiple scriptwriters, a skilful director, important stars (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman), a distinctive cameraman (Gordon Willis), an imaginative art director (George Jenkins) and ingenious sound designers, who together created an enduringly great film.
Speaking about the kind of filmmaking now known as Classic Hollywood, the most popular and influential cinema ever invented, Vincente Minnelli once gave away its secret: "I feel that a picture that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things. They're things that the audience is not conscious of, but that accumulate." What are those hidden things? Can we invent a method that will enable us to discover them? Robert Ray attempts to answer those questions by looking closely at four movies from the 1930-1945 period when the American studio system reached the peak of its economic and cultural power: Grand Hotel, The Philadelphia Story, The Maltese Falcon, and Meet Me in St. Louis....
He is a member of The Vulgar Boatmen, whose records include You and Your Sister, Please Panic, and Opposite Sex.ContentsForeword by James NaremoreImpressionism, Surrealism, and Film Theory: Path Dependence, or How a Tradition in Film Theory Gets LostThe Bordwell Regime and the Stakes of KnowledgeSnapshots: The Beginnings of PhotographyTrackingHow to Start and Avant-GardeHow to Teach Cultural StudiesThe Best Way to Understand PostmodernismThe Mystery of Edward HopperFilm and LiteratureConclusion
and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter."
With the rise of review sites and social media, films today, as soon as they are shown, immediately become the topic of debates on their merits not only as entertainment, but also as serious forms of artistic expression. Philosopher Robert B. Pippin, however, wants us to consider a more radical proposition: film as thought, as a reflective form. Pippin explores this idea through a series of perceptive analyses of cinematic masterpieces, revealing how films can illuminate, in a concrete manner, core features and problems of shared human life. Filmed Thought examines questions of morality in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, goodness and naïveté in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, love and fantasy...
Tips and tactics for working with the media, including information about framing issues, constructing messages, writing press releases, pitching stories, creating strategic media plans, staging photo ops, speaking in sound bites, and developing positive, respectful relationships with reporters and handling hostile media.[back cover].
Chronicles two decades of war between Athens and Sparta.
In contemporary societies privatization has long ceased to be just an economic concept; rather, it must increasingly be made to refer to the ongoing shrinking of the public space under the impact of the representation of individual lives and images, which cuts across all discourses, genres and media to become one of the primary means of production of culture. This volume is intended to cover such an historical, social and intellectual ground, where self-representation comes to the fore. Targeting mostly an academic readership but certainly also of interest to the general educated public, it collects a wide range of essays dealing with diverse modes of life writing and portraying from a varie...