The Charlie Chaplin Archives


Book Description

"This book is a visual and oral history, telling the story of Chaplin's pursuit of beauty, and how he captured it on film. Compiled primarily from documents in the Charlie Chaplin archives, as well as other archives around the world, this book shows how Chaplin's work was not only inspired by his early poverty-stricken life in London, but also by his working life in the music halls of Britain and on the vaudeville stages of America."--Introduction, page 9.




Film museum practice and film historiography


Book Description

This book is an elaborate study of the interrelationships between film historical discourse and archival practices, such as the collecting, restoration and exhibition of films. It delineates how film historiographical discourses always leave traces in the film archive, and vice versa. The book investigates and analyzes the history of three important collections from the archive of EYE Film Museum: the Uitkijk-collection, the Desmet-collection, and Dutch silent films. The histories of these collections have different connections to film historiography, and as such allow us to investigate these interrelationships from various perspectives. It shows how archival films and collections always carry the historical traces of selection policies, restoration philosophies, and exhibition strategies. As such the book aims to demonstrate how film archives cannot be innocent or neutral sources of film history. In addition, it shows that current EYE Film Museum activities semi-automatically refer to this history of which the archive carries the material traces.







Film as Film


Book Description




Painted Love


Book Description

In this engrossing book, Hollis Clayson provides the first description and analysis of French artistic interest in women prostitutes, examining how the subject was treated in the art of the 1870s and 1880s by such avant-garde painters as Cézanne, Degas, Manet, and Renoir, as well as by the academic and low-brow painters who were their contemporaries. Clayson not only illuminates the imagery of prostitution-with its contradictory connotations of disgust and fascination-but also tackles the issues and problems relevant to women and men in a patriarchal society. She discusses the conspicuous sexual commerce during this era and the resulting public panic about the deterioration of social life and civilized mores. She describes the system that evolved out of regulating prostitutes and the subsequent rise of clandestine prostitutes who escaped police regulation and who were condemned both for blurring social boundaries and for spreading sexual licentiousness among their moral and social superiors. Clayson argues that the subject of covert prostitution was especially attractive to vanguard painters because it exemplified the commercialization and the ambiguity of modern life.




Film Genre Reader IV


Book Description

From reviews of the third edition: “Film Genre Reader III lives up to the high expectations set by its predecessors, providing an accessible and relatively comprehensive look at genre studies. The anthology’s consideration of the advantages and challenges of genre studies, as well as its inclusion of various film genres and methodological approaches, presents a pedagogically useful overview.” —Scope Since 1986, Film Genre Reader has been the standard reference and classroom text for the study of genre in film, with more than 25,000 copies sold. Barry Keith Grant has again revised and updated the book to reflect the most recent developments in genre study. This fourth edition adds new essays on genre definition and cycles, action movies, science fiction, and heritage films, along with a comprehensive and updated bibliography. The volume includes more than thirty essays by some of film’s most distinguished critics and scholars of popular cinema, including Charles Ramírez Berg, John G. Cawelti, Celestino Deleyto, David Desser, Thomas Elsaesser, Steve Neale, Thomas Schatz, Paul Schrader, Vivian Sobchack, Janet Staiger, Linda Williams, and Robin Wood.




Édith Piaf


Book Description

The world-famous French singer Édith Piaf (1915-63) was never just a singer. This book suggests new ways of understanding her, her myth and her meanings over time at home and abroad, by proposing the notion of an 'imagined Piaf.




The Oxford History of World Cinema


Book Description

Featuring nearly three thousand film stills, production shots, and other illustrations, an authoritative history of the cinema traces the development of the medium, its filmmakers and stars, and the evolution of national cinemas around the world.




Women in the Silent Cinema


Book Description

This magisterial book offers comprehensive accounts of the professional itineraries of three women in the silent film in the Netherlands, France and North America. Annette Förster presents a careful assessment of the long career of Dutch stage and film actress Adriënne Solser; an exploration of the stage and screen careers of French actress and filmmaker Musidora and Canadian-born actress and filmmaker Nell Shipman; an analysis of the interaction between the popular stage and the silent cinema from the perspective of women at work in both realms; fresh insights into Dutch stage and screen comedy, the French revue and the American Northwest drama of the 1910s; and much more, all grounded in a wealth of archival research.




The Tree and the Canoe


Book Description

This personal observation of Tanna, an island in the southern part of the Vanuatu archipelago, presents an extraordinary case study of cultural resistance. Based on interviews, myths and stories collected in the field, and archival research, The Tree and the Canoe analyzes the resilience of the people of Tanna, who, when faced with an intense form of cultural contact that threatened to engulf them, liberated themselves by re-creating, and sometimes reinventing, their own kastom. Following a lengthy history of Tanna from European contact, the author discusses in detail original creation myths and how Tanna people revived them in response to changes brought by missionaries and foreign governments. The final chapters of the book deal with the violent opposition of part of the island population to the newly established National Unity government.