Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
An authoritative and comprehensive guide to cinema's first true blockbuster.
"Best moving pictures I ever saw." Thus did one Vaudeville theater manager describe Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon [Le Voyage dans la lune], after it was screened for enthusiastic audiences in October 1902. Cinema's first true blockbuster, A Trip to the Moon still inspires such superlatives and continues to be widely viewed on DVD, on the Internet, and in countless...
Author
Language
English
Description
Considers the ways in which Alfred Hitchcock adapted and transformed a variety of literary works-novels, plays, and short stories-into film.
The adaptation of literary works to the screen has been the subject of increasing, and increasingly sophisticated, critical and scholarly attention in recent years, but most studies of the subject have continued to privilege literature over film by taking the literary sources as their starting point. Rather...
Author
Language
English
Description
An expanded edition of a classic work of film criticism, with a provocative and eloquent new chapter on Marnie, Hitchcock's most heartfelt--and most controversial--film.
First published in 1982, William Rothman's Hitchcock is a classic work of film criticism. Written in an engaging style that is philosophically sophisticated yet free of jargon, and using over nine hundred images from the films to illustrate and back up its critical claims, the...
Author
Language
English
Description
The first collection of essays devoted to the phenomenon of the film sequel.
Sequels, serials, and remakes have been a staple of cinema since the very beginning, and recent years have seen the emergence of dynamic and progressive variations of these multi-film franchises. Taking a broad range of sequels as case studies, from the Godfather movies to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Second Takes confronts the complications posed by film sequels...
Author
Language
English
Description
A fresh look at the director's career.
When Martin Scorsese finally won an Academy Award in 2007, for The Departed, it was widely viewed as the crowning achievement of a remarkable film career. But what it also represented was an acceptance by Hollywood of a man who became a prestigious auteur precisely because of his status as an outsider from New York. For someone with a high-culture reputation like Scorsese's, this middlebrow sign of respectability...
Author
Language
English
Description
Offers a new interpretation of the century-long relationship between the Western film genre and Native American filmmaking.
In Native Recognition, Joanna Hearne persuasively argues for the central role of Indigenous image-making in the history of American cinema. Across the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, Indigenous peoples have been involved in cinema as performers, directors, writers, consultants, crews, and audiences, yet both the...
Author
Language
English
Description
Considers films that lurk on the boundaries of acceptability in taste, style, and politics.
B Is for Bad Cinema continues and extends, but does not limit itself to, the trends in film scholarship that have made cult and exploitation films and other "low" genres increasingly acceptable objects for critical analysis. Springing from discussions of taste and value in film, these original essays mark out the broad contours of "bad"-that is, aesthetically,...
Author
Language
English
Description
Examines the complexities and contradictions that arise when the monsters in the movies are children.
Since the 1950s, children have provided some of horror's most effective and enduring villains, from dainty psychopath Rhoda Penmark of The Bad Seed (1956) and spectacularly possessed Regan MacNeil of The Exorcist (1973) to psychic ghost-girl Samara of The Ring (2002) and adopted terror Esther of Orphan (2009). Using a variety of critical approaches,...
Author
Language
English
Description
A range of approaches to the director's life and work.
The director of such classic Hollywood films as In a Lonely Place, Johnny Guitar, and Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray nevertheless remained on the margins of the American studio system throughout his career, and despite his cult status among auteurist critics and cinephiles, he has also remained at the margins of film scholarship. Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground offers twenty new essays by...
Author
Language
English
Description
Documents a volatile and productive moment in the development of film studies.
In Binghamton Babylon, Scott M. MacDonald documents one of the crucial moments in the history of cinema studies: the emergence of a cinema department at what was then the State University of New York at Binghamton (now Binghamton University) between 1967 and 1977. The department brought together a group of faculty and students who not only produced a remarkable body of...
Author
Language
English
Description
Traces the development of Indian cinema from the 1920s to the mid-1990s, before "Bollywood" erupted onto the world stage.
Bombay before Bollywood offers a fresh, alternative look at the history of Indian cinema. Avoiding the conventional focus on India's social and mythological films, Rosie Thomas examines the subaltern genres of the "magic and fighting films"-the fantasy, costume, and stunt films popular in the decades before and immediately after...
Author
Language
English
Description
Argues that Indian cinema's deep nineteenth-century past continues to play a vital role in its twenty-first-century present.
In A Very Old Machine, Sudhir Mahadevan shows how Indian cinema's many origins in the technologies and practices of the nineteenth century continue to play a vital and broad function in its twenty-first-century present. He proposes that there has never been a singular cinema in India; rather, Indian cinema has been a multifaceted...
Author
Language
English
Description
Proposes that cinematic time is not a fixed idea, but a dynamic exchange between film and viewer.
Doing Time addresses two areas of interest in recent film study-film temporality and film philosophy-to propose an innovative theorization of cinematic time that sees it as a dynamic process of engagement, or something we do as viewers. This active relation to cinematic time, which discloses a film's temporal character, is called its "timeliness." Here...
Author
Language
English
Description
A wide-ranging and accessible approach to Godard's later work, and a major intervention in the study of film and ethics.
Encounters with Godard takes the reader on a personal voyage into the sensory pleasures and polyphonic rhythms of Jean-Luc Godard's multimedia work since the late 1970s, from his feature films and video essays to his published writings, art books, and media performances. Godard, suggests James S. Williams, lays ethical claim to...
Author
Language
English
Description
Combines psychoanalysis, queer theory, masculinity studies, and cultural studies to explore contemporary manhood in film.
Finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in the LGBT Nonfiction category presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation
Ghost Faces explores the insidious nature of homophobia even in contemporary Hollywood films that promote their own homo-tolerance and appear to destabilize hegemonic masculinity. Reframing Laura Mulvey's and...
Author
Language
English
Description
How Hollywood biopics both showcase and modify various notions of what it means to be an American.
Biopics-films that chronicle the lives of famous and notorious figures from our national history-have long been one of Hollywood's most popular and important genres, offering viewers various understandings of American national identity. Invented Lives, Imagined Communities provides the first full-length examination of US biopics, focusing on key releases...
Author
Language
English
Description
Assesses the range and magnitude of Robert Gardner's achievements as a filmmaker, photographer, writer, educator, and champion of independent cinema.
During his lifetime, Robert Gardner (1925—2014) was often pigeonholed as an ethnographic filmmaker, then criticized for failing to conform to the genre's conventions-conventions he radically challenged. With the release of his groundbreaking film Dead Birds in 1963, Gardner established himself as...
Author
Language
English
Description
Contends that the narrative and aesthetic qualities of the documentary genre enable new understandings of animals and animal/human relationships.
As indicated by the success of such films as March of the Penguins and Food, Inc., the documentary has become the preeminent format for rendering animals and nature onscreen. In Regarding Life, Belinda Smaill brings together examples from a broad array of moving image contexts, including wildlife film...
Author
Language
English
Description
Reconstructs how Ray became a "rebel auteur" in cinema culture.
How does cinema culture imagine one of its favorite figures, the rebel? The reputation of the American director Nicholas Ray provides a particularly notable example. Most famous for Rebel Without a Cause, Ray has since been canonized as a "rebel auteur" and celebrated for seeking a personal vision and signature style under the industrial pressures of Classical Hollywood during its...
Author
Language
English
Description
Identifies a new genre-misdirection films-and explains its appeal to contemporary producers and audiences.
Are You Watching Closely? is the first book to explore the recent spate of "misdirection films," a previously unidentified Hollywood genre characterized by narratives that inspire viewers to reinterpret them retrospectively. Since 1990, Hollywood has backed more of these films than ever before, many of which, including The Sixth Sense (1999),...
In Interlibrary Loan
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by Jackson County Oregon can be requested from other Interlibrary Loan libraries to be delivered to your local library for pickup.
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service. Submit Request