Book Description
-- American Studies International
Author : Gaylyn Studlar
Publisher :
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 26,69 MB
Release : 1996-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780231103213
-- American Studies International
Author : Ryan Jay Friedman
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 10,85 MB
Release : 2019-02-04
Category : Art
ISBN : 081359359X
The Movies as a World Force is the first analysis of utopian cinema writing; situating it in its proper intellectual contexts, theology, and political philosophy; and illustrating the ways in which its utopian imagination shapes and is shaped by the era's most prestigious film genre, the historical crowd epic.
Author : Daisuke Miyao
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 398 pages
File Size : 12,2 MB
Release : 2007-03-28
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0822389827
While the actor Sessue Hayakawa (1886–1973) is perhaps best known today for his Oscar-nominated turn as a Japanese military officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), in the early twentieth century he was an internationally renowned silent film star, as recognizable as Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks. In this critical study of Hayakawa’s stardom, Daisuke Miyao reconstructs the Japanese actor’s remarkable career, from the films that preceded his meteoric rise to fame as the star of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915) through his reign as a matinee idol and the subsequent decline and resurrection of his Hollywood fortunes. Drawing on early-twentieth-century sources in both English and Japanese, including Japanese-language newspapers in the United States, Miyao illuminates the construction and reception of Hayakawa’s stardom as an ongoing process of cross-cultural negotiation. Hayakawa’s early work included short films about Japan that were popular with American audiences as well as spy films that played upon anxieties about Japanese nationalism. The Jesse L. Lasky production company sought to shape Hayakawa’s image by emphasizing the actor’s Japanese traits while portraying him as safely assimilated into U.S. culture. Hayakawa himself struggled to maintain his sympathetic persona while creating more complex Japanese characters that would appeal to both American and Japanese audiences. The star’s initial success with U.S. audiences created ambivalence in Japan, where some described him as traitorously Americanized and others as a positive icon of modernized Japan. This unique history of transnational silent-film stardom focuses attention on the ways that race, ethnicity, and nationality influenced the early development of the global film industry.
Author : Robin Blyn
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 470 pages
File Size : 20,94 MB
Release : 2013-11-01
Category : Art
ISBN : 0816685894
Since the 1890s, American artists have employed the arts of the freak show to envision radically different ways of being. The result is a rich avant-garde tradition that critiques and challenges capitalism from within. The Freak-garde traces the arts of the freak show from P. T. Barnum to Matthew Barney and demonstrates how a form of mass culture entertainment became the basis for a distinctly American avant-garde tradition. Exploring a wide range of writers, filmmakers, photographers, and artists who have appropriated the arts of the freak show, Robin Blyn exposes the disturbing power of human curiosities and the desires they unleash. Through a series of incisive and often startling readings, Blyn reveals how such figures as Mark Twain, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, Lon Chaney, Nathanael West, and Diane Arbus use these desires to propose alternatives to the autonomous and repressed subject of liberal capitalism. Blyn explains how, rather than grounding revolutionary subjectivities in imaginary realms innocent of capitalism, freak-garde works manufacture new subjectivities by exploiting potentials inherent to capitalism. Defying conventional wisdom, The Freak-garde ultimately argues that postmodernism is not the death of the avant-garde but the inheritor of a vital and generative legacy. In doing so, the book establishes innovative approaches to American avant-garde practices and embodiment and lays the foundation for a more nuanced understanding of the disruptive potential of art under capitalism.
Author : Matthew Bernstein
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 28,16 MB
Release : 1997
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780813522951
Essays on orientalism in American and European cinema
Author : John C. Tibbetts
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 437 pages
File Size : 46,84 MB
Release : 2014-06-02
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1626741476
Douglas Fairbanks and the American Century brings to life the most popular movie star of his day, the personification of the Golden Age of Hollywood. At his peak, in the teens and 1920s, the swashbuckling adventurer embodied the new American century of speed, opportunity, and aggressive optimism. The essays and interviews in this volume bring fresh perspectives to his life and work, including analyses of films never before examined. Also published here for the first time in English is a first-hand production account of the making of Fairbanks's last silent film, The Iron Mask. Fairbanks (1883–1939) was the most vivid and strenuous exponent of the American Century, whose dominant mode after 1900 was the mass marketing of a burgeoning democratic optimism, at home and abroad. During those first decades of the twentieth century, his satiric comedy adventures shadow-boxed with the illusions of class and custom. His characters managed to combine the American easterner's experience and pretension and the westerner's promise and expansion. As the masculine personification of the Old World aristocrat and the New World self-made man—tied to tradition yet emancipated from history—he constructed a uniquely American aristocrat striding into a new age and sensibility. This is the most complete account yet written of the film career of Douglas Fairbanks, one of the first great stars of the silent American cinema and one of the original United Artists (comprising Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith). John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh's text is especially rich in its coverage of the early years of the star's career from 1915 to 1920 and covers in detail several films previously considered lost.
Author : Lee Grieveson
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 27,23 MB
Release : 2005
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780813535579
Mob Culture offers a long-awaited, fresh look at the American gangster film, exposing its hidden histories from the Black Hand gangs of the early twentieth century to The Sopranos. Departing from traditional approaches that have typically focused on the "nature" of the gangster, the editors have collected essays that engage the larger question of how the meaning of criminality has changed over time. Grouped into three thematic sections, the essays examine gangster films through the lens of social, gender, and racial/ethnic issues.
Author : Brenda Joyce
Publisher : Harlequin
Page : 463 pages
File Size : 13,19 MB
Release : 2012-09-17
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1460301919
On the evening of her first masquerade, shy Elizabeth Anne Fitzgerald is stunned by Tyrell de Warenne’s whispered suggestion of a midnight rendezvous in the gardens. Lizzie has secretly worshipped the unattainable lord for years. When fortune takes a maddening turn, she is prevented from meeting Tyrell, but she cannot foresee that this night is only the beginning…. Tyrell de Warenne is shocked when, two years later, Lizzie arrives on his doorstep with a child she claims is his. He remembers her well—and knows that he could not possibly be the father. What is this game she is playing…and why? Is Elizabeth Anne Fitzgerald a woman of experience, or the gentle innocent she seems? But neither scandal nor deception can thwart a love too passionate to be denied….
Author : Susan Nance
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 34,24 MB
Release : 2009
Category : History
ISBN : 080783274X
The leisure, abundance, and contentment that many imagined were typical of Eastern life were the same characteristics used to define "the American dream.""--BOOK JACKET.
Author : Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 371 pages
File Size : 26,36 MB
Release : 2019-11-15
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0813599318
Explores the ways Hollywood represents race, gender, class, and nationality at the intersection of aesthetics and ideology and its productive tensions