Comedy Incarnate

Author: Noël Carroll
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405188324
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Book Description
COMEDY INCARNATE COMEDY INCARNATE Buster Keaton, Physical Humor and Bodily Coping “Buster Keaton was an engineer of the comic, a craftsman of gags, a mechanic of humor. While Carroll does not aspire to be as funny as Keaton, he can match (and follow) him in intricate and brilliant analysis, providing a logic of illogic. A book that will change how we think about slapstick and film style.” Tom Gunning, University of Chicago “Comedy Incarnate is a brilliant, inventive and lucid examination of Buster Keaton’s The General. Through close textual analysis, Carroll opens up a wide expanse of historical and theoretical territory – positioning The General in relation to the writings of Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and Poulet, as well as to the films of Chaplin, Lloyd, and Langdon.” Lucy Fischer, University of Pittsburgh “Building on Keaton’s directorial practice as a sort of civil engineer who engaged a mechanical universe, Carroll . . . investigates how Keaton’s emphasis on gags and their intelligibility characterize the film in specific ways. In so doing he opens up an understanding of how Keaton’s comedy of body intelligence works, especially in contrast to contemporaries like Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, and he shows how intelligence – the artist’s and the viewer’s – informs laughter.” CHOICE Comedy Incarnate explores the intricacies of Buster Keaton’s unique visual style to discover what provokes laughter in his timeless films, paying special attention to The General. Keaton’s precise body comedy, coupled with his unconventional directorial decisions, suggests a new way of analyzing the film in terms of its visual elements as opposed to its narrative. Written by one of America’s foremost film theorists, this in-depth examination of the comedy of the steam, steel, and railroad era will provide a fresh vantage point for analysis of film and comedy itself.

Comedy Incarnate

Author: Noël Carroll
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : General (Motion picture)
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description

Focus On: 100 Most Popular Vaudeville Performers

Author: Wikipedia contributors
Publisher: e-artnow sro
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1438

Book Description

Hokum!

Author: Rob King
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520288114
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Hokum! is the first book to take a comprehensive view of short-subject slapstick comedy in the early sound era. Challenging the received wisdom that sound destroyed the slapstick tradition, author Rob King explores the slapstick short’s Depression-era development against a backdrop of changes in film industry practice, comedic tastes, and moviegoing culture. Each chapter is grounded in case studies of comedians and comic teams, including the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, and Robert Benchley. The book also examines how the past legacy of silent-era slapstick was subsequently reimagined as part of a nostalgic mythology of Hollywood’s youth.

Aardman Animations

Author: Annabelle Honess Roe
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350130303
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Book Description
The Bristol-based animation company Aardman is best known for its most famous creations Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep. But despite the quintessentially British aesthetic and tone of its movies, this very British studio continues to enjoy international box office success with movies such as Shaun the Sheep Movie, Flushed Away and Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Aardman has always been closely linked with one of its key animators, Nick Park, and its stop motion, Plasticine-modelled family films, but it has more recently begun to experiment with modern digital filmmaking effects that either emulate 'Claymation' methods or form a hybrid animation style. This unique volume brings together leading film and animation scholars with children's media/animation professionals to explore the production practices behind Aardman's creativity, its history from its early shorts to contemporary hits, how its films fit within traditions of British animation, social realism and fantasy cinema, the key personalities who have formed its ethos, its representations of 'British-ness' on screen and the implications of traditional animation methods in a digital era.

Slapstick: An Interdisciplinary Companion

Author: Ervin Malakaj
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110571986
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 423

Book Description
Despite its unabated popularity with audiences, slapstick has received rather little scholarly attention, mostly by scholars concentrating on the US theater and cinema traditions. Nonetheless, as a form of physical humor slapstick has a long history across various areas of cultural production. This volume approaches slapstick both as a genre of situational physical comedy and as a mode of communicating an affective situation captured in various cultural products. Contributors to the volume examine cinematic, literary, dramatic, musical, and photographic texts and performances. From medieval chivalric romance and nineteenth-century theater to contemporary photography, the contributors study treatments of slapstick across media, periods and geographic locations. The aim of a study of such wide scope is to demonstrate how slapstick emerged from a variety of complex interactions among different traditions and by extension, to illustrate that slapstick can be highly productive for interdisciplinary research.

The General

Author: Peter Krämer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838718893
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 131

Book Description
Offering a fresh perspective on The General, arguably one of the most successful American films of the silent era, this insightful text analyses its initial critical reception and the thematic and stylistic characteristics of the film that made it difficult for critics to appreciate at the time, but led to its celebration by later generations.

Refocusing Chaplin

Author: Lawrence Howe
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 081089226X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Book Description
Widely recognized in his character of the Tramp, Charlie Chaplin transcended the role of actor to become screenwriter, director, composer, producer, and finally studio head. The subject of numerous biographical studies, Chaplin has been examined as both myth and man, but these treatments fail to adequately address the often-overlooked complexity of his filmmaking. Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon through Critical Lenses features essays that examine the actor and director through various theoretical perspectives—including Marxism, feminism, gender studies, deconstruction, psychoanalytic criticism, new historicism, performance studies, and cultural criticism. Complementing this range of intellectual inquiry is the wide reach of films discussed, from The Circus (1928), The Gold Rush (1925), and City Lights (1931) to Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and Limelight (1952). Shorter films, such as “The Pawnshop” (1916), “The Rink” (1916), and “A Dog’s Life” (1918) are also examined. These essays analyze the tensions between the carefully constructed worlds of Chaplin’s films and their cultural contexts. The varied approaches and range of materials in this volume not only comprehensively assess the screen icon but also foster a conversation that exemplifies the best of intellectual exchange. Refocusing Chaplin provides a unique view into the work of one of cinema’s most important and influential artists.

The Slapstick Camera

Author: Burke Hilsabeck
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438477317
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
Demonstrates that slapstick film comedies display a canny and sometimes profound understanding of their medium. Slapstick film comedy may be grounded in idiocy and failure, but the genre is far more sophisticated than it initially appears. In this book, Burke Hilsabeck suggests that slapstick is often animated by a philosophical impulse to understand the cinema. He looks closely at movies and gags that represent the conditions and conventions of cinema production and demonstrates that film comedians display a canny and sometimes profound understanding of their medium—from Buster Keaton’s encounter with the film screen in Sherlock Jr. (1924) to Harpo Marx’s lip-sync turn with a phonograph in Monkey Business (1931) to Jerry Lewis’s film-on-film performance in The Errand Boy (1961). The Slapstick Camera follows the observation of philosopher Stanley Cavell that self-reference is one way in which “film exists in a state of philosophy.” By moving historically across the studio era, the book looks at a series of comedies that play with the changing technologies and economic practices behind film production and describes how comedians offered their own understanding of the nature of film and filmmaking. Hilsabeck locates the hidden intricacies of Hollywood cinema in a place where one might least expect them—the clowns, idiots, and scoundrels of slapstick comedy. “From its analysis of the vaudevillian Victorian origins to early Hollywood expressions, and from defining classical performances by the likes of Keaton to recent postmodern recapitulations, Hilsabeck’s theoretically rigorous and wide-ranging study masterfully weaves a path through the historical, technical, and philosophical art of slapstick comedy. A must for scholars working in this field.” — Daniel Varndell, author ofHollywood Remakes, Deleuze and the Grandfather Paradox

A Philosophy of Comedy on Stage and Screen

Author: Shaun May
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472580451
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Book Description
As far as we know, only human beings have a sense of humour – although chimps might laugh when tickled, and dogs respond similarly in play, Seth McFarlane's fan-base is comprised exclusively of humans. Whilst animals and robots might feature as prominent characters in our favourite comic movies, shows and stand-up routines, we have no reason to suspect that their real-life brethren get the joke. Drawing on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Shaun May attempts to address this issue – suggesting that there is something distinctive about human beings which grounds our ability to make and comprehend jokes. Guiding the reader through a range of examples, including the films of Charlie Chaplin, the stand-up of Francesca Martinez, the TV show Family Guy and Samuel Beckett's Endgame, he demonstrates that in order to get the joke you have to 'be there'.