Cinema and Modernity


Book Description

Brings together several essays by seventeen scholars to explore the complexity of the essential connection between film and modernity. This volume shows us the significant ways that film has both grown in the context of the modern world and played a central role in reflecting and shaping our interactions with it.




Post-war Cinema and Modernity


Book Description

Both professors at the U. of Edinburgh (Scotland), Orr (sociology) and Taxidou (English) have collected a diverse selection of previously published material on film, much of it controversial and challenging, to produce a reader for the undergraduate classroom. The readings are divided into theory and form, form and process, and international cinema. The selected authors (who include such thinkers and directors as Andre Bazin, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gilles Deleuze, Fredric Jameson, Paul Virilio, Duncan Petrie, Susan Sontag, and Laura Mulvey) mull questions of film and modernity, film and poetry, film and postmodernity, cinematic perception, changing film technology, and the social and national context of international films. c. Book News Inc.




Cinema, Memory, Modernity


Book Description

Since its inception, cinema has evolved into not merely a ‘reflection’ but an indispensable index of human experience – especially our experience of time’s passage, of the present moment, and, most importantly perhaps, of the past, in both collective and individual terms. In this volume, Kilbourn provides a comparative theorization of the representation of memory in both mainstream Hollywood and international art cinema within an increasingly transnational context of production and reception. Focusing on European, North and South American, and Asian films, Kilbourn reads cinema as providing the viewer with not only the content and form of memory, but also with its own directions for use: the required codes and conventions for understanding and implementing this crucial prosthetic technology — an art of memory for the twentieth-century and beyond.




A Modernist Cinema


Book Description

"In A Modernist Cinema, edited by Scott W. Klein and Michael Valdez Moses, sixteen distinguished scholars in the field of the New Modernist Studies explore the interrelationships among modernism, cinema, and modernity. Focusing on several culturally influential films from Europe, America, and Asia produced between 1914 and 1941, this collection of essays contends that cinema was always a modernist enterprise. Examining the dialectical relationship between a modernist cinema and modernity itself, these essays reveal how the movies represented and altered our notions and practices of modern life, as well as how the so-called crises of modernity shaped the evolution of filmmaking. Attending to the technical achievements and formal qualities of the works of several prominent directors-Giovanni Pastrone, D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, F. W. Murnau, Carl Theodore Dreyer, Dziga Vertov, Luis Buänuel, Yasujiro Ozu, John Ford, Jean Renoir, Charlie Chaplin, Leni Riefenstahl, and Orson Welles-these essays investigate several interrelated topics: how a modernist cinema represented and intervened in the political and social struggles of the era; the ambivalent relationship between cinema and the other modernist arts; the controversial interconnection between modern technology and the new art; the significance of representing the mobile human body in a new medium; the gendered history of modernity; and the transformative effects of cinema on modern conceptions of temporality, spatial relations, and political geography. Contributors: Richard Begam, Maurizia Bascagli, Enda Duffy, Laura Frost, Andrzej Gasiorek, Scott W. Klein, Douglas Mao, Laura Marcus, Jesse Matz, Tyrus Miller, Michael Valdez Moses, Michael North, Elizabeth Otto, Carrie J. Preston, Lisa Siraganian, Michael Wood"--




Cinema, Audiences and Modernity


Book Description

This book confronts theoretical models on cinema as both a product and a catalyst of European modernity with new empirical work on the history of the social experience of cinema-going, film audiences and film exhibition.




Screening Modernism


Book Description

Casting fresh light on the renowned productions of auteurs like Antonioni, Fellini, and Bresson and drawing out from the shadows a range of important but lesser-known works, Screening Modernism is the first comprehensive study of European art cinema’s postwar heyday. Spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s, András Bálint Kovács’s encyclopedic work argues that cinematic modernism was not a unified movement with a handful of styles and themes but rather a stunning range of variations on the core principles of modern art. Illustrating how the concepts of modernism and the avant-garde variously manifest themselves in film, Kovács begins by tracing the emergence of art cinema as a historical category. He then explains the main formal characteristics of modern styles and forms as well as their intellectual foundation. Finally, drawing on modernist theory and philosophy along the way, he provides an innovative history of the evolution of modern European art cinema. Exploring not only modernism’s origins but also its stylistic, thematic, and cultural avatars, Screening Modernism ultimately lays out creative new ways to think about the historical periods that comprise this golden age of film.




Visions of Japanese Modernity


Book Description

In this study, Aaron Gerow focuses on the early period in which the institutional and narrational structure of Japanese cinema was in flux, arguing that the transnational intertext is less important than the power-laden operations by which the meaning of cinema itself was discursively defined. Both progressive critics of the 'pure film' movement and the more conservative Japanese cultural bureaucrats demanded a unitary text that suppressed the hybrid and unpredictable meanings attendant on early Japanese cinema's informal exhibition contexts. Gerow points out the irony that the progressive and individualist pure film movement critics worked in concert with the Japanese state to undo the 'theft' of Japanese cinema, proposing to replace representations of Japan in Western films by exporting a Japanese cinema 'reformed' to emulate the international norm.




Foundational Films


Book Description

In her authoritative new book, Maite Conde introduces readers to the crucial early years of Brazilian cinema. Focusing on silent films released during the First Republic (1889-1930), Foundational Films explores how the medium became implicated in a larger project to transform Brazil into a modern nation. Analyzing an array of cinematic forms, from depictions of contemporary life and fan magazines, to experimental avant-garde productions, Conde demonstrates the distinct ways in which Brazil’s early film culture helped to project a new image of the country.




The Demons of Modernity


Book Description

Ingmar Bergman’s films had a very broad and rich relationship with the rest of European cinema, contrary to the myth that Bergman was a peripheral figure, culturally and aesthetically isolated from the rest of Europe. This book contends that he should be put at the very center of European film history by chronologically comparing Bergman’s relationship to key European directors such as Carl Theodor Dreyer, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and also looks at Bergman’s critical relationship to key movements in film history such as the French New Wave. In so doing, it demonstrates how Ingmar Bergman’s films illustrate the demonic struggle in modernity between faith and secularity through “his intense preoccupation with the malaise of intimacy.”




Early Cinema Modernity Visual Culture Hb


Book Description

- It is based on original archival research conducted in film archives and institutions in the Balkans and Europe and employs previously undiscovered archival materials and film footage. - It constitutes a transnational and multi-faceted examination of visual culture and early cinema development in the Balkan region and its relevance to world cinema at the time. - It comprises a first cultural study in the English language on early cinema history of the various countries in the Balkan region, which can serve as a departing point for further studies in early cinema, archives, film spectatorship and a point of reference which provides a useful context for studying later historical periods in Balkan cinemas.