ReFocus: The Films of Kelly Reichardt

ReFocus: The Films of Kelly Reichardt
Author: E. Dawn Hall
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2018-03-07
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1474411134

In this close reading of her films and production methods, E. Dawn Hall defines Reichardt's auteur characteristics, arguing that she offers a contemporary and sustainable model for independent filmmakers in America.

ReFocus: The Films of Kelly Reichardt

ReFocus: The Films of Kelly Reichardt
Author: E. Dawn Hall
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2018-06-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1474411142

A carefully curated selection of new and classic essays by Scottish Enlightenment expert Christopher J. Berry

The Rebirth of Suspense

The Rebirth of Suspense
Author: Rick Warner
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2024-09-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0231559526

Typically, films are suspenseful when they keep us on the edge of our seats, when glimpses of a turning doorknob, a ticking clock, or a looming silhouette quicken our pulses. Exemplified by Alfred Hitchcock’s masterworks and the countless thrillers they influenced, such films captivate viewers with propulsive plots that spur emotional investment in the fates of protagonists. Suspense might therefore seem to be a curious concept to associate with art films featuring muted characters, serene landscapes, and unrushed rhythms, in which plot is secondary to mood and tone. This ambitious and wide-ranging book offers a redefinition of suspense by considering its unlikely incarnations in the contemporary films that have been called “slow cinema.” Rick Warner shows how slowness builds suspense through atmospheric immersion, narrative sparseness, and the withholding of information, causing viewers to oscillate among boredom, curiosity, and dread. He focuses on works in which suspense arises where the boundaries between art cinema and popular genres—such as horror, thriller, science fiction, and gothic melodrama—become indefinite, including Chantal Akerman’s La captive, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves, Lucrecia Martel’s Zama, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy, and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Warner investigates the pivotal role of sound in generating suspense and traces how the experience of suspense has changed in the era of digital streaming. The Rebirth of Suspense develops a fresh theory, history, typology, and analysis of suspense that casts new light on the workings of films across global cinema.

Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers

Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers
Author: Katarzyna Paszkiewicz
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2018-06-06
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1474425275

Examining the significance of women's work in popular film genres, this test sheds light on women's contribution to genre cinema through an exploration of filmmakers like Kathryn Bigelow, Diablo Cody, Sofia Coppola, and Kelly Reichard.

Contemporary Cowboys

Contemporary Cowboys
Author: Clint W. Jones
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2023-08-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1666920185

Contemporary Cowboys: Reimagining an American Archetype in Popular Culture expands and develops an understanding of recent cultural shifts in representations of the American cowboy and “the West” as vital components of American identity and values. The chapters in this book examine they ways in which twenty-first century representations have updated the figure of the cowboy, considering not only traditionally analyzed sources, such as television, film, and literature, but also less studied areas such as comics, and music. The contributors probe the cowboy archetype and western mythology with critical theory, feminist critiques, philosophy, history, cultural analysis, and more.

Women Do Genre in Film and Television

Women Do Genre in Film and Television
Author: Mary Harrod
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2017-10-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1315526077

Winner of first Prize in the BAFTSS Best Edited Collection competition, this volume examines how different generations of women work within the genericity of audio-visual storytelling not necessarily to ‘undo’ or ‘subvert’ popular formats, but also to draw on their generative force. Recent examples of filmmakers and creative practitioners within and outside Hollywood as well as women working in non-directing authorial roles remind us that women are in various ways authoring commercially and culturally impactful texts across a range of genres. Put simply, this volume asks: what do women who are creatively engaged with audio-visual industries do with genre and what does genre do with them? The contributors to the collection respond to this question from diverse perspectives and with different answers, spanning issues of direction, screenwriting, performance and audience address/reception.

Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema

Complicating Articulation in Art Cinema
Author: Benedict Morrison
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2022-01-13
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0192894064

What is film criticism for? This book aims to answer this question It argues that art cinema's political effect is the result of indeterminacy and not character-centric meaning.

Barry Jenkins and the Legacies of Slavery

Barry Jenkins and the Legacies of Slavery
Author: Delphine Letort
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2023
Genre: African Americans on television
ISBN: 1666918415

"In this book, Delphine Letort illuminates the intertwining of fiction and history in the TV series adaptation of The Underground Railroad. Letort highlights the narrative and audio/visual strategies used by Barry Jenkins to make for an "affective moment" on television"--

The Cinema of Stephanie Rothman

The Cinema of Stephanie Rothman
Author: Alicia Kozma
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2022-09-20
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1496841018

The rare woman director working in second-wave exploitation, Stephanie Rothman (b. 1936) directed seven successful feature films, served as the vice president of an independent film company, and was the first woman to win the Directors Guild of America’s student filmmaking prize. Despite these career accomplishments, Rothman retired into relative obscurity. In The Cinema of Stephanie Rothman: Radical Acts in Filmmaking, author Alicia Kozma uses Rothman’s career as an in-depth case study, intertwining historical, archival, industrial, and filmic analysis to grapple with the past, present, and future of women’s filmmaking labor in Hollywood. Understanding second-wave exploitation filmmaking as a transitory space for the industrial development of contemporary Hollywood that also opened up opportunities for women practitioners, Kozma argues that understudied film production cycles provide untapped spaces for discovering women’s directorial work. The professional career and filmography of Rothman exemplify this claim. Rothman also serves as an apt example for connecting the structure of film histories to the persistent strictures of rhetorical language used to mark women filmmakers and their labor. Kozma traces these imbrications across historical archives. Adopting a diverse methodological approach, The Cinema of Stephanie Rothman shines a needed spotlight on the problems and successes of the memorialization of women’s directorial labor, connecting historical and contemporary patterns of gendered labor disparity in the film industry. This book is simultaneously the first in-depth scholarly consideration of Rothman, the debut of the most substantive archival materials collected on Rothman, and a feminist political intervention into the construction of film histories.