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Hollywood makes the most widely successful pleasure-giving artworks the world has ever known. The industry operates under the assumption that pleasurable aesthetic experiences, among huge populations, translate into box office success. With that goal in mind, Hollywood has systematized the delivery of aesthetic pleasure, packaging and selling it on a massive scale. In Hollywood Aesthetic, Todd Berliner accounts for the chief attraction of Hollywood cinema worldwide: its entertainment value. The book examines films such as City Lights and Goodfellas that have earned aesthetic appreciation from both fans and critics. But it also studies some curious outliers, cult films, and celebrated Hollywood experiments, such as The Killing and Starship Troopers. And it demonstrates that even ordinary popular films, from Tarzan and His Mate to Rocky III, as well as action blockbusters, like Die Hard and The Dark Knight, offer aesthetic pleasure to mass audiences. Hollywood Aesthetic explains how Hollywood engages viewers by satisfying their aesthetic desires. Visit the companion website at www.oup.com/us/hollywoodaesthetic
In the 1970s, Hollywood experienced a creative surge, opening a new era in American cinema with films that challenged traditional modes of storytelling. Inspired by European and Asian art cinema as well as Hollywood's own history of narrative ingenuity, directors such as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, William Friedkin, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, and Francis Ford Coppola undermined the harmony of traditional Hollywood cinema and created some of the best movies ever to come out of the American film industry. Critics have previously viewed these films as a response to the cultural and political upheavals of the 1970s, but until now no one has explored how the period's inventive narrative de...
Peter Larsen traces the history of music in film and discusses central theoretical questions concerning its narrative and psychological functions. He looks in depth at film classics such a Howard Hawks's 'The Big Sleep' and Hitchcock's 'North by Northwest' as well as later blockbusters such as 'Star Wars' and 'Bladerunner'.
Many films and novels defy our ability to make sense of the plot. While puzzling storytelling, strange incongruities, inviting enigmas and persistent ambiguities have been central to the effects of many literary and cinematic traditions, a great deal of contemporary films and television series bring such qualities to the mainstream—but wherein lies the attractiveness of perplexing works of fiction? This collected volume offers the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and trans-medial approach to the question of cognitive challenge in narrative art, bringing together psychological, philosophical, formal-historical, and empirical perspectives from leading scholars across these fields.
The autobiography-of-sorts of André Gregory, an iconic figure in American theater and the star of My Dinner with André This is Not My Memoir tells the life story of André Gregory, iconic theatre director, writer, and actor. For the first time, Gregory shares memories from a life lived for art, including stories from the making of My Dinner with André. Taking on the dizzying, wondrous nature of a fever dream, This is Not My Memoir includes fantastic and fantastical stories that take the reader from wartime Paris to golden-age Hollywood, from avant-garde theaters to monasteries in India. Along the way we meet Jerzy Grotowski, Helene Weigel, Gregory Peck, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, Wallace Shawn, and many other larger-than-life personalities. This is Not My Memoir is a collaboration between Gregory and Todd London who create a portrait of an artist confronting his later years. Here, too, are the reflections of a man who only recently learned how to love. What does it mean to create art in a world that often places little value on the process of creating it? And what does it mean to confront the process of aging when your greatest work of art may well be your own life?
Film Dialogue is the first anthology in film studies devoted to the topic of language in cinema, bringing together leading and emerging scholars to discuss the aesthetic, narrative, and ideological dimensions of film speech that have largely gone unappreciated and unheard. Consisting of thirteen essays divided into three sections: genre, auteur theory, and cultural representation, Film Dialogue revisits and reconfigures several of the most established topics in film studies in an effort to persuade readers that "spectators" are more accurately described as "audiences," that the gaze has its equal in eavesdropping, and that images are best understood and appreciated through their interactions with words. Including an introduction that outlines a methodology of film dialogue study and adopting an accessible prose style throughout, Film Dialogue is a welcome addition to ongoing debates about the place, value, and purpose of language in cinema.
The way we communicate with each other is vital to preserving the cultural ecology, or wellbeing, of a place and time. Do we listen to each other? Do we ask the right questions? Do we speak about each other with respect or disdain? The stories that we convey on screens, or what author Carl Plantinga calls 'screen stories, ' are one powerful and pervasive means by which we communicate with each other. Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement argues that film and media studies needs to move toward an an approach to ethics that is more appropriate for mass consumer culture and the lives of its citizens. Primarily concerned with the relationship between media and viewers, this book c...
How is affective experience produced in the cinema? And how can we write a history of this experience? By asking these questions, this study by Hauke Lehmann aims at rethinking our conception of a critical period in US film history – the New Hollywood: as a moment of crisis that can neither be reduced to economic processes of adaption nor to a collection of masterpieces. Rather, the fine-grained analysis of core films reveals the power of cinematic images to affect their audiences – to confront them with the new. The films of the New Hollywood redefine the divisions of the classical genre system in a radical way and thereby transform the way spectators are addressed affectively in the ci...
The offbeat musicals Fame 1980), Pink Floyd--The Wall (1982), The Commitments 1991) and Evita (1996)... The stylized biopics Midnight Express (1978), Mississippi Burning (1988), The Road to Wellville (1994) and Angela's Ashes (1999)... The visceral social dramas Shoot the Moon (1982), Birdy (1984), Come See the Paradise (1990) and The Life of David Gale (2003)... The one-of-kind genre films Bugsy Malone (1979) and Angel Heart (1987)... These are the films of British director, writer, producer and cartoonist Sir Alan Parker. Among many awards and a knighthood, Parker is the founding director of the Director's Guild of Great Britain, and in 2013 won the honorary British Academy of Film and Television Arts Fellowship Award. Parker is known for his humility as a director and has never considered himself an auteur: "I have total admiration for film crews. They are the true heroes of the filmmaking process, not directors." He has worked alongside producer Alan Marshall, cinematographer Michael Seresin and the late film editor, Gerry Hambling. This book is the first study of his complete body of feature films (1976-2003).