| Author | : Michael Wood |
| Publisher | : Columbia University Press |
| Total Pages | : 232 |
| Release | : 1989 |
| Genre | : Performing Arts |
| ISBN | : 9780231070997 |
On the American image in the movies
Blue Skies and Silver Linings
| Author | : Bruce Babington |
| Publisher | : Manchester University Press |
| Total Pages | : 276 |
| Release | : 1988 |
| Genre | : Moving-pictures |
| ISBN | : 9780719018480 |
Reimagining the Promised Land
| Author | : Rodney Wallis |
| Publisher | : Bloomsbury Publishing USA |
| Total Pages | : 317 |
| Release | : 2020-09-17 |
| Genre | : Performing Arts |
| ISBN | : 1501350838 |
While Israel has seemingly been a minor presence in Hollywood cinema, Reimagining the Promised Land argues that there is a long history of Hollywood deploying images of Israel as a means of articulating an idealized notion of American national identity. This argument is developed through readings of The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956), Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (William Wyler, 1959), Exodus (Otto Preminger, 1960), Cast a Giant Shadow (Melville Shavelson, 1966), Black Sunday (John Frankenheimer, 1977), The Delta Force (Menahem Golan, 1986), and Munich (Steven Spielberg, 2005). The mobilization of Israel that pervades this eclectic group of films effectively demonstrates one of the more surreptitious ways in which Hollywood has historically constructed and circulated dominant notions of American national identity. Moreover, in examining the most notable Hollywood representations of the Jewish state, the book offers an informed historical overview of the cultural forces that have contributed to popular understandings within the United States of the state of Israel, Israel's Arab neighbours, and also the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture
| Author | : Sumiko Higashi |
| Publisher | : Univ of California Press |
| Total Pages | : 284 |
| Release | : 1994-12-02 |
| Genre | : Performing Arts |
| ISBN | : 9780520914810 |
Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture demonstrates that the director, best remembered for his overblown biblical epics, was one of the most remarkable film pioneers of the Progressive Era. In this innovative work, which integrates cultural history and cultural studies, Sumiko Higashi shows how DeMille artfully inserted cinema into genteel middle-class culture by replicating in his films such spectacles as elaborate parlor games, stage melodramas, department store displays, Orientalist world's fairs, and civic pageantry. The director not only established his signature as a film author by articulating middle-class ideology across class and ethnic lines, but by the 1920's had become a trendsetter, with set and costume designs that influenced the advertising industry to create a consumer culture based on female desire. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped material from the DeMille Archives and other collections, Higashi provides imaginative readings of DeMille's early feature films, viewing them in relation to the dynamics of social change, and she documents the extent to which the emergence of popular culture was linked to the genteel tradition.
Spartacus
| Author | : Martin M. Winkler |
| Publisher | : John Wiley & Sons |
| Total Pages | : 280 |
| Release | : 2008-04-15 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 0470777265 |
This is the first book systematically to analyze Kirk Douglas’ and Stanley Kubrick’s depiction of the slave revolt led by Spartacus from different historical, political, and cinematic perspectives. Examines the film’s use of ancient sources, the ancient historical contexts, the political significance of the film, the history of its censorship and restoration, and its place in film history. Includes the most important passages from ancient authors’ reports of the slave revolt in translation.
American Film and Society since 1945
| Author | : Leonard Quart |
| Publisher | : Bloomsbury Publishing USA |
| Total Pages | : 522 |
| Release | : 2018-04-19 |
| Genre | : Performing Arts |
| ISBN | : |
From Steven Spielberg's Lincoln to Clint Eastwood's American Sniper, this fifth edition of this classic film study text adds even more recent films and examines how these movies depict and represent the feelings and values of American society. One of the few authoritative books about American film and society, American Film and Society since 1945 combines accessible, fun-to-read text with a detailed, insightful, and scholarly political and social analysis that thoroughly explores the relationship of American film to society and provides essential historical context. The historical overview provides a "capsule analysis" of both American and Hollywood history for the most recent decade as well as past eras, in which topics like American realism; Vietnam, counterculture revolutions, and 1960s films; and Hollywood depictions of big business like Wall Street are covered. Readers will better understand the explicit and hidden meanings of films and appreciate the effects of the passion and personal engagement that viewers experience with films. This new edition prominently features a new chapter on American and Hollywood history from 2010 to 2017, giving readers an expanded examination of a breadth of culturally and socially important modern films that serves student research or pleasure reading. The coauthors have also included additional analysis of classic films such as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and A Face in the Crowd (1957).
Genre and Hollywood
| Author | : Steve Neale |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 337 |
| Release | : 2005-06-20 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 1134973454 |
Genre and Hollywood provides a comprehensive introduction to the study of genre. In this important new book, Steve Neale discusses all the major concepts, theories and accounts of Hollywood and genre, as well as the key genres which theorists have written about, from horror to the Western. He also puts forward new arguments about the importance of genre in understanding Hollywood cinema. Neale takes issue with much genre criticism and genre theory, which has provided only a partial and misleading account of Hollywood's output. He calls for broader and more flexible conceptions of genre and genres, for more attention to be paid to the discourses and practices of Hollywood itself, for the nature and range of Hollywood's films to be looked at in more detail, and for any assessment of the social and cultural significance of Hollywood's genres to take account of industrial factors. In detailed, revisionist accounts of two major genres - film noir and melodrama - Neale argues that genre remains an important and productive means of thinking about both New and old Hollywood, its history, its audiences and its films.
The Epic Film in World Culture
| Author | : Robert Burgoyne |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 504 |
| Release | : 2010-09-13 |
| Genre | : Performing Arts |
| ISBN | : 113585534X |
With the recent release of spectacular blockbuster films from Gladiator to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the epic has once again become a major form in contemporary cinema. This new volume in the AFI Film Readers series explores the rebirth of the epic film genre in the contemporary period, a period marked by heightened and conflicting appeals to national, ethnic, and religious belonging.The orginal essays in this volume explore the tension between the evolving global context of film production and reception and the particular provenance of the epic as an expression of national mythology and aspirations, challenging our understanding of epics produced in the present as well as our perception of epic films from the past. The contributors will explore new critical approaches to contemporary as well as older epic films, drawing on ideas from cultural studies, historiography, classics, and film studies.
