The Ordinary Man of Cinema

Author: Jean Louis Schefer
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1584351853
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The first English translation of a foundational work in cinema studies and the philosophy of film. When it was first published in French in 1980, The Ordinary Man of Cinema signaled a shift from the French film criticism of the 1960s to a new breed of film philosophy that disregarded the semiotics and post-structuralism of the preceding decades. Schefer describes the schizophrenic subjectivity the cinema offers us: the film as a work projected without memory, viewed by (and thereby lived by) a subject scarred and shaped by memory. The Ordinary Man of Cinema delineates the phenomenology of movie-going and the fleeting, impalpable zone in which an individual's personal memory confronts the cinema's ideological images to create a new way of thinking. It is also a book replete with mummies and vampires, tyrants and prostitutes, murderers and freaks—figures that are fundamental to Schefer's conception of the cinema, because the worlds that cinema traverses (our worlds, interior and exterior) are worlds of pain, unconscious desire, decay, repressed violence, and the endless mystery of the body. Fear and pleasure breed monsters, and such are what Schefer's emblematic “ordinary man” seeks and encounters when engaging in the disordering of the ordinary that the movie theater offers him. Among other things, Schefer considers “The Gods” in 31 brief essays on film stills and “The Criminal Life” with reflections on spectatorship and autobiography. While Schefer's book has long been standard reading in French film scholarship, until now it has been something of a missing link to the field (and more broadly, French theory) in English. It is one of the building blocks of more widely known and read translations of Gilles Deleuze (who cited this book as an influence on his own cinema books) and Jacques Rancière.

Extra-Ordinary Men

Author: Nicola Rehling
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1461633427
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Book Description
Extra-Ordinary Men analyzes popular cinematic representations of white heterosexual masculinity as the 'ordinary' form of male identity, one that enjoys considerable economic, social, political, and representational strength. Nicola Rehling argues that while this normative position affords white heterosexual masculinity ideological and political dominance, such 'ordinariness' also engenders the anxiety that it is a depthless, vacuous, and unstable identity. At a time when the neutrality of white heterosexual masculinity has been challenged by identity politics, this insightful volume offers lucid accounts of contemporary theoretical debates on masculinity in popular cinema, and explores the strategies deployed in popular films to reassert white heterosexual male hegemony through detailed readings of films as diverse as Fight Club, Boys Don't Cry, and The Matrix. Accessible to undergraduates, but also of interest to film scholars, the book makes a distinctive contribution to our understanding of the ways in which popular film helps construct and maintain many unexamined assumptions about masculinity, gender, race, and sexuality.

Movies (And Other Things)

Author: Shea Serrano
Publisher: Twelve
ISBN: 1538730200
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER BARNES & NOBLE BESTSELLER AMAZON BESTSELLER "Paging through Serrano's Movies (and Other Things) is like taking a long drive at night with a friend; there's that warmth and familiarity where the chat is more important than the fastest route from Point A to Point B...It's like a textbook gone right; your attention couldn't wander if it tried." -- Elisabeth Egan, New York Times Book Review Shea Serrano is back, and his new book, Movies (And Other Things), combines the fury of a John Wick shootout, the sly brilliance of Regina George holding court at a cafeteria table, and the sheer power of a Denzel monologue, all into one. Movies (And Other Things) is a book about, quite frankly, movies (and other things). One of the chapters, for example, answers which race Kevin Costner was able to white savior the best, because did you know that he white saviors Mexicans in McFarland, USA, and white saviors Native Americans in Dances with Wolves, and white saviors Black people in Black or White, and white saviors the Cleveland Browns in Draft Day? Another of the chapters, for a second example, answers what other high school movie characters would be in Regina George's circle of friends if we opened up the Mean Girls universe to include other movies (Johnny Lawrence is temporarily in, Claire from The Breakfast Club is in, Ferris Bueller is out, Isis from Bring It On is out...). Another of the chapters, for a third example, creates a special version of the Academy Awards specifically for rom-coms, the most underrated movie genre of all. And another of the chapters, for a final example, is actually a triple chapter that serves as an NBA-style draft of the very best and most memorable moments in gangster movies. Many, many things happen in Movies (And Other Things), some of which funny, others of which are sad, a few of which are insightful, and all of which are handled with the type of care and dedication to the smallest details and pockets of pop culture that only a book by Shea Serrano can provide.

The Enigmatic Body

Author: Jean-Louis Schefer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521372046
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Book Description
A translation of essays by French critic and theorist Jean-Louis Schefer.

Trash Cinema

Author: Guy Barefoot
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231542690
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Book Description
This volume explores the lower reaches of cinema and its paradoxical appeal. It looks at films from the B-movies of the 1930s to the mockbusters of today, and from the New York underground to the genre variations of Turkey's Yesilçam studios (and their YouTube afterlife). Critically examining the reasons for studying, denigrating, or celebrating the detritus of film history, it also considers the place of a trash aesthetic within and beyond 1960s American avant-garde and looks at the cult of trash in the fanzines of the 1980s. It draws on debates about cult, paracinema, and camp, arguing that trash cinema exists in relation to these but brings with it a particular history that includes the ordinary as well as the strange. Trash Cinema places these debates, and the strand of self-proclaimed low culture that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, within a historical and international perspective. It focuses on American cinema history but addresses Eurotrash reception as well as the related field of garbology, examining trash cinema as a distinct but fluid category.

The Ordinary Man's India

Author: Alfred Claude Brown
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description

Gone with the Glory

Author: Brian Steel Wills
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1461739578
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
From Birth of a Nation to Cold Mountain, hundreds of directors, actors, and screenwriters have used the Civil War to create compelling cinema. However, each generation of moviemakers has resolved the tug of war between entertainment value and historical accuracy differently. Historian Brian Steel Wills takes readers on a journey through the portrayal of the war in film, exploring what Hollywood got right and wrong, how the films influenced each other, and, ultimately, how the movies reflect America's changing understandings of the conflict and of the nation.

Cinema Stories

Author: Alexander Kluge
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811217354
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Book Description
The thirty-eight tales of Cinema Stories combine fact and fiction, and they all revolve around movie-making. The book compresses a lifetime of feeling, thought, and practice: Kluge -- considered the father of New German Cinema -- is an inventive wellspring of narrative notions. "The power of his prose," as Small Press noted, "exudes the sort of pregnant richness one might find in the brief scenarios of unknown films." Cinema Stories is a treasure box of cinematic lore and movie magic by "Alexander Kluge, that most enlightened of writers" (W. G. Sebald). Alexander Kluge, born in Germany in 1932, is a world-famous author and filmmaker (his 23 films include Yesterday Girl, The Female Patriot, The Candidate), a lawyer, and a media magnate. He has won Germany\'s highest literary award, the Georg Büchner Prize.

Quentin Tarantino

Author: Jeffrey Dawson
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9781557832276
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
Examines the personal life and the professional work and success of the director of "Pulp Fiction"

Ranciere and Film

Author: Paul Bowman
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748684743
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
The first collection of critical essays on the film work of the philosopher Jacques Ranciere. This book offers an exciting range of responses to and assessments of his contributions to film studies and includes a new piece by Ranciere himself on the subje