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Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism
Robert C. (ed.) Allen Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0807843741 |
Book Description
Since its original publication in 1987, Channels of Discourse has provided the most comprehensive consideration of commercial television, drawing on insights provided by the major strands of contemporary criticism: semiotics, narrative theory, reception theory, genre theory, ideological analysis, psychoanalysis, feminist criticism, and British cultural studies.The second edition features a new introduction by Robert Allen that includes a discussion of the political economy of commercial television. Two new essays have been addedone an assessment of postmodernism and television, the other an analysis of convergence and divergence among the essaysand the original essays have been substantially revised and updated with an international audience in mind. Sixty-one new television stills illustrate the text.
Each essay lays out the general tenets of its particular approach, discusses television as an object of analysis within that critical framework, and provides extended examples of the types of analysis produced by that critical approach. Case studies range from Rescue 911 and Twin Peaks to soap operas, music videos, game shows, talk shows, and commericals.
Channels of Discourse, Reassembled suggests new ways of understanding relationships among television programs, between viewing pleasure and narrative structure, and between the world in front of the television set and that represented on the screen. The collection also addresses the qualities of popular television that traditional aesthetics and quantitative media research have failed to treat satisfactorily, including its seriality, mass production, and extraordinary popularity.
The contributors are Robert C. Allen, Jim Collins, Jane Feuer, John Fiske, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, James Hay, E. Ann Kaplan, Sarah Kozloff, Ellen Seiter, and Mimi White.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent Overview of Media Studies Methodologies.......2002-07-04
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A History of Narrative Film, Fourth Edition
David A. Cook Manufacturer: W. W. Norton ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0393978680 |
Book Description
Sophisticated in its analytical content, current and comprehensive in its coverage of all aspects of film and filmmaking, and informed throughout by fascinating historical and cultural contexts, A History of Narrative Film is widely acknowledged to be the definitive text in the field. The Fourth Edition adds an entire chapter on computer-generated imaging, updates filmographies for nearly all living directors mentioned in the text, and includes major new sections that both revisit old content and introduce contemporary trends and movements.Customer Reviews:
good reading to organize your mind about cinema.......2007-07-27
Oi!! Could you go in a straight line just once?.......2007-04-06
More like a boring textbook than a "novel"........2005-02-08
Reads like a novel.......2005-01-26
Too much of a good thing?.......2004-04-24
The book is over 900 pages long. There are twenty-one chapters. Too much for a semester-length course - probably too much for two courses! I'd estimate there are ten thousand names (film titles and filmmakers). As an instructor, I look at it all and ask myself where do I even begin cutting to make it manageable for my classes? As a student, I'd guess you would ask, "how much of what I'm paying for am I going to actually read and learn about?" Seventy dollars isn't too bad compared to other college books of this length, but if you only read a third of it...?
A lot of film classes, sadly, my own included, tend to give you the greatest hits - the same fifty or so classics and nothing more. Cook rejects this and offers you literally hundreds of films that sound fascinating and make you want to see them. However, he seems so concerned not to exclude anything, that he name-drops. He'll devote a section of the book to films from a particular country and you get the impression, he's never seen them himself. He's just including them so the book won't be incomplete. There's no easy answer. He could ignore that country's cinema entirely and someone would criticize that decision. Instead he goes on and on about films you'll never see and won't be learning anything about.
I have a few personal criticisms of the new edition. Disney's animated films, he claims, are beyond the scope of the book, but then he discusses Japanese anime at some length. He has a section devoted to "splatter" exploitation films which includes pictures of a decapitated woman, a man with a drill going through his head and something really, really bloody coming out of ... well, you get the idea. If it were me, I'd cover Disney and skip the splatter section - or at least show fewer pictures. Am I just too old fashioned?
Cook has an especially difficult job with current world cinema. Like any other aspect of history, how do we really know what contemporary films are going to be classics fifty years from now and which will be forgotten? I agree with him some of the time: his detailed analysis of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I disagree sometimes too: do you really think Moulin Rouge is going to be considered a "landmark" film even a decade from now?
Finally, a plea, not just to David Cook but to all cinema book authors: Stop including shot by shot break-down photos from classic films! Do you really think we need to see A DOZEN PAGES of the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin?!! Can we all agree that video now makes these films readily available to any film buff and certainly to any college offering a cinema class? There are SIXTY photos taken from Citizen Kane alone. I know it's supposed to be the greatest film ever made, but won't readers just go out and see it for themselves?
So for the film fan who wants an entire college-level education on world cinema in a single volume, I cannot recommend this edition highly enough. For a student choosing cinema as a major, or for their graduate studies, it's going to be a great resource. But I envision two other people who may be reading this book. One's a student standing in line at the campus bookstore overwhelmed and demoralized by the sheer size of the thing in the shopping cart. The other is an instructor like me, who's wondering how I'm ever going to chop this opus down to something usable.
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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself (The Bedford Series in History and Culture)
Frederick Douglass Manufacturer: Bedford/St. Martin's ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0312257376 |
Customer Reviews:
The Rest of the Story.......2007-07-07
Not Just a African, but an American Hero!.......2005-10-10
Required Reading.......2004-08-27
My heart broke.......2004-06-11
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Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race
Susan Courtney Manufacturer: Princeton University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 069111305X |
Book Description
Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation analyzes white fantasies of interracial desire in the history of popular American film. From the first interracial screen kiss of 1903, through the Production Code's nearly thirty-year ban on depictions of "miscegenation," to the contemplation of mixed marriage in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), this book demonstrates a long, popular, yet underexamined record of cultural fantasy at the movies.
With ambitious new readings of well-known films like D.W. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation and of key forgotten films and censorship documents, Susan Courtney argues that dominant fantasies of miscegenation have had a profound impact on the form and content of American cinema.
What does it mean, Courtney asks, that the image of the black rapist became a virtual cliché, while the sexual exploitation of black women by white men under slavery was perpetually repressed? What has this popular film legacy invited spectators to remember and forget? How has it shaped our conceptions of, and relationships to, race and gender?
Richly illustrated with more than 140 images, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation carefully attends to cinematic detail, revising theories of identity and spectatorship as it expands critical histories of race, sex, and film. Courtney's new research on the Production Code's miscegenation clause also makes an important contribution, inviting us to consider how that clause was routinely interpreted and applied, and with what effects.
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Digital Storytelling: The Narrative Power of Visual Effects in Film
Shilo T. McClean Manufacturer: The MIT Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 0262134659 |
Book Description
Computer-generated effects are often blamed for bad Hollywood movies. Yet when a critic complains that "technology swamps storytelling" (in a review of Van Helsing, calling it "an example of everything that is wrong with Hollywood computer-generated effects movies"), it says more about the weakness of the story than the strength of the technology. In Digital Storytelling, Shilo McClean shows how digital visual effects can be a tool of storytelling in film, adding narrative power as do sound, color, and "experimental" camera angles--other innovative film technologies that were once criticized for being distractions from the story. It is time, she says, to rethink the function of digital visual effects.Customer Reviews:
GREAT CRITIQUE OF CRAFT FOR VIZ F/X ARTISTS AND PRODUCERS .......2007-04-03
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A History of Narrative Film
David A. Cook Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0393968197 |
Amazon.com
Now in its third edition, A History of Narrative Film continues to be the most comprehensive and complete history of international cinema in print. This book conveys the vastness and heterogeneity of film history; it describes the extraordinary number of extraordinary films that have been made over the last hundred years. Even in 1,100 pages and more than 1,500 illustrations, Cook can but summarize the development of film narrative and film art in every major country. He has wisely complemented his survey with in-depth analyses of three hugely important movies, The Birth of a Nation, The Battleship Potemkin, and Citizen Kane. He also focuses on major films--The Rules of the Game, Tokyo Story, Vertigo, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors--when he assesses the careers of landmark directors. This edition, updated for the '90s, adds a section on "Hollywood 1965-present," as well as new chapters on "The Former Soviet Union" and "Third World Cinema."Customer Reviews:
Excellent world cinema historical survey.......2005-12-11
Nice summary of... well... film.......2004-04-01
It does its job, that's for sure.
An awesome source of information!.......2003-11-29
Extremely comprehensive!.......2003-10-06
This is the best General History available.......2002-01-31
Well Cook does, and does it better than anyone else.
The most amazing thing about this book is that is reads so well: you can literally open it up anywhere, start reading, and start learning -- and be entertained at the same time. I just love reading this book.
The second amazing thing is that Cook seems to have seen a lot of movies and taken the time to think carefully about them. As a result his comments, his sense of historical perspective, and his assertions are usually accurate, frequently insightful, and always enlightenling.
If you're studying film in ANY context, this is the book to buy. If you prefer a video store with a foreign language section instead of your local Blockbuster, this is the catalog for you. Within days of reading this book I was making lists of films that I had to see (The Red And The White, and the Wadja trilogy among them), and running out to find them.
For those in need of a text-book, this is the best value-for-money you can get. For thos FEARING a text-book, relax: it's actually a real page turner.
Any short-commings? There are some minor factual errors (the photographs demonstrating zoom, telephoto and wide lenses use inaccurate frames from Barry Lyndon, for example), but nothing to worry about -- there so much about this book that's good it really doesn't make a difference. The only real problem is that it will never be big enough.
This is the book against which the others are judged.
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Narrative in Fiction and Film: An Introduction
Jakob Lothe Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0198752326 |
Book Description
Narrative in Fiction and Film gives a clear presentation of key concepts of narrative theory. A growing field in the humanities, narrative theory (or 'narratology') studies such narratives, thus discussing central questions concerning human communication. This introductory book has a two-part structure: Part I presents key concepts of narrative theory - for example, author, narrator, time, perspective, event, characterization. The discussion is oriented towards narrative fiction and centred on literary texts, yet since film can also have an important narrative dimension, the film aspect is brought into each chapter. Part II analyses five prose texts: the parable of the sower in St. Mark's Gospel, Franz Kafka's The Trial, James Joyce's 'The Dead', Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Part II also discusses film versions of four of these texts: Orson Welles's The Trial, John Huston's The Dead, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, and Colin Gregg's To the Lighthouse. The book brings together and lucidly presents concepts and theories in narrative theory, and illustrates and tests theses theories. It will be an invaluable text for undergraduates studying narrative theory as part of a literature or film studies course.
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Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry
Jack Zipes Manufacturer: Routledge ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
Accessories: ASIN: 0415918510 |
Book Description
In Happily Ever After, Jack Zipes addresses his ongoing concern with the socialization of children, the impact of the fairy tale on children and adults, and the future development of the fairy tale as film. As a result of analyzing the historical trajectory of storytelling and the literary fairy tale, the essays in Happily Ever After move from the sixteenth century to the present, between different cultures and societies, and from specific analyses to general syntheses. Zipes demonstrates how Straparola's 16th-century Puss in Boots tale is related to Disney's 1922 film version. He examines the narrative structure of Hansel and Gretel as a rationalization for child abuse, tracing the same theme in Collad's novel Pinocchio and its Disney film version. He concludes by examining how we have come full circle from the early oral tradition in light of the rise of storytelling throughout the world. Underscoring all these essays is the question that all fairy tales raise: what does it take to bring about happiness? Is happiness only to be found in fairy tales?
Customer Reviews:
Food for thought.......2004-12-09
Helpful and Intriguing View of Tales and Culture.......2000-04-28
Weak.......2000-03-30
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Narrative Comprehension and Film (Sightlines Series)
Edward Branigan Manufacturer: Routledge ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0415075122 |
Book Description
How does cinematic fiction render the ordinary world intelligible?
Narrative is one of the ways we organize and understand the world. It is found everywhere: not only in films and books, but also in everyday conversations and in the nonfictional discourses of journalists, historians, educators, psychologists, and others.
In
Narrative Comprehension and Film, Edward Branigan presents a telling exploration of the basic concepts of narrative theory and its relation to film--and literary--analysis, bringing together theories from linguistics and cognitive science, and applying them to the screen. Individual analysis of classical narratives form the basis of a complex study of every aspect of filmic fiction, exploring, for example, subjectivity in Lady in the Lake, multiplicity in Letter from an Unknown Woman, postmodernism and documentary in Sans Soleil.
Through his exploration of film, Branigan expresses how the study of narrative should be viewed as a distinctive strategy for recognizing, isolating, and articulating the fundamental role which narrative plays in our response to the world as a whole.
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Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film As An Emotion Machine (Les's Communication Series)
Ed S. Tan Manufacturer: Lawrence Erlbaum ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items: ASIN: 0805814094 |
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