Mining the Home Movie


Book Description

Features essays that combine research, critical analyses and theoretical approaches regarding the meaning and value of amateur and archival films. This book identifies home movies as methods of visually preserving history. It defines a genre of film studies and establishes the home movie as a tool for extracting historical and social insights.




Landscape and Film


Book Description

Landscape is everywhere in film, but it has been largely overlooked in theory and criticism. This volume of new work will address fundamental questions: What kind of landscape is cinematic landscape? How is cinematic landscape different from landscape painting? How is landscape deployed in the work of such filmmakers as Greenaway, Rossellini, or Antonioni, to name just three? What are differences between the use of landscape in Western filmmaking and in the work of Middle Eastern and Asian filmmakers? How is cinematic landscape related to the idea of a national cinema and questions of identity. The first collection on the idea of landscape and film, this volume will present an impressive international cast of contributors, among them Jacques Aumont, Tom Conley, David B. Clarke, Marcus A. Doel, Peter Rist, and Antonio Costa.




Common Ground


Book Description

In this collection of seventeen essays, anthropologists, art historians, museum curators, writers, designers, and historians provide case studies exploring collaboration with community-oriented partners in order to document, interpret, and present their histories and experiences and provide a new understanding of what museums can and should be in the United States.




The Cinema of Me


Book Description

When a filmmaker makes a film with herself as a subject, she is already divided as both the subject matter of the film and the subject making the film. The two senses of the word are immediately in play - the matter and the maker--thus the two ways of being subjectified as both subject and object. Subjectivity finds its filmic expression, not surprisingly, in very personal ways, yet it is nonetheless shaped by and in relation to collective expressions of identity that can transform the cinema of 'me' into the cinema of 'we'. Leading scholars and practitioners of first-person film are brought together in this groundbreaking collection to consider the theoretical, ideological, and aesthetic challenges wrought by this form of filmmaking in its diverse cultural, geographical, and political contexts.




Documentary Filmmaking in Contemporary Brazil


Book Description

"Like Brazilian society, documentary filmmaking is undergoing transformation, becoming an increasingly inclusive and diverse field, intervening in the ongoing struggle for social justice and equal distribution of power. As the first English-language monograph to focus on this body of work, this book examines the ways in which contemporary documentaries explore the borders between centers and margins, visibilities and invisibilities, silences and speech, and forms of authority and their contestation. Centered on an eclectic cluster of documentaries -from ethnographic documentaries and indigenous videos to films concerned with social and criminal justice, including first-person, essayistic films - this book brings into view the transformations of both Brazilian society and filmmaking, ultimately examining the genre's preoccupation with archival content"--




Amateur film


Book Description

Amateur film: Meaning and practice 1927–77 plunges readers into the world of home movies making and reveals that behind popular perceptions of clichéd family scenes shakily shot at home or by the sea, there is much more to discover. Exploring who, how, where, when and why amateur enthusiasts made and shared their films provides fascinating insights into an often misunderstood aspect of national visual history. This study of how non-professional filmmakers responded to the new possibilities of moving image places decades of cine use into a history of changing visual technologies that span from Edwardian visual toys to mobile phones. Using northern cine club records, interviews and amateur films, the author reveals how film-making practices ranged from family footage to highly crafted edited productions about local life and distant places made by enthusiasts who sought to ‘educate, inspire and entertain’ armchair audiences during the early decades of British television.




Film Studies


Book Description

Film Studies: A Global Introduction reroutes film studies from its Euro-American focus and canon in order to introduce students to a medium that has always been global but has become differently and insistently so in the digital age. Glyn Davis, Kay Dickinson, Lisa Patti and Amy Villarejo’s approach encourages readers to think about film holistically by looking beyond the textual analysis of key films. In contrast, it engages with other vital areas, such as financing, labour, marketing, distribution, exhibition, preservation, and politics, reflecting contemporary aspects of cinema production and consumption worldwide. Key features of the book include: clear definitions of the key terms at the foundation of film studies coverage of the work of key thinkers, explained in their social and historical context a broad range of relevant case studies that reflect the book’s approach to global cinema, from Italian "white telephone" films to Mexican wrestling films innovative and flexible exercises to help readers enhance their understanding of the histories, theories, and examples introduced in each chapter an extensive Interlude introducing readers to formal analysis through the careful explication and application of key terms a detailed discussion of strategies for writing about cinema Films Studies: A Global Introduction will appeal to students studying film today and aspiring to work in the industry, as well as those eager to understand the world of images and screens in which we all live.




Amateur Movie Making


Book Description

A compelling regional and historical study that transforms our understanding of film history, Amateur Movie Making demonstrates how amateur films and home movies stand as testaments to the creative lives of ordinary people, enriching our experience of art and the everyday. Here we encounter the lyrical and visually expressive qualities of films produced in New England between 1915 and 1960 and held in the collections of Northeast Historic Film, a moving image repository and study center that was established to collect, preserve, and interpret the audiovisual record of northern New England. Contributors from diverse backgrounds examine the visual aesthetics of these films while placing them in their social, political, and historical contexts. Each discussion is enhanced by technical notes and the analyses are also juxtaposed with personal reflections by artists who have close connections to particular amateur filmmakers. These reflections reanimate the original private contexts of the home movies before they were recast as objects of study and artifacts of public history.




Wittgenstein at the Movies


Book Description

Ludwig Wittgenstein loved movies, and based on his remarks on watching them, there is a strong connection between his experience of watching films and his thoughts on aesthetics. Furthermore, however, Wittgenstein himself has been invoked in recent cinema. Wittgenstein at the Movies is centered on in-depth explorations of two intriguing experimental films on Wittgenstein: Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein and PZter ForgOcs' Wittgenstein Tractatus. The featured essays look at cinematic interpretations of Wittgenstein's life and philosophy in a manner bound to provoke the lively interest of Wittgenstein scholars, film theorists, and students of film aesthetics. As well, the book engages a broader audience concerned with philosophical issues about film and Wittgenstein's cultural significance, with the world of fin-de-si_cle Vienna, of Cambridge in the first half of the twentieth century, of artistic modernism.




Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures


Book Description

For too long, the field of amateur cinema has focused on North America and Europe. In Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures, however, editors Masha Salazkina and Enrique Fibla-Gutiérrez fill the literature gap by extending that focus and increasing inclusivity. Through carefully curated essays, Salazkina and Fibla-Gutiérrez bring wider meaning and significance to the discipline through their study of alternative cinema in new territories, fueled by different historical and political circumstances, innovative technologies, and ambitious practitioners. The essays in this volume work to realize the radical societal democratization that shows up in amateur cinema around the world. In particular, diverse contributors highlight the significance of amateur filmmaking, the exhibition of amateur films, the uses and availability of film technologies, and the inventive and creative approaches of filmmakers and advocates of amateur film. Together, these essays shed new light on alternative cinema in a wide range of cities and countries where amateur films thrive in the shadow of commercial and conventional film industries.