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Hollywood Babylon: The Legendary Underground Classic of Hollywood's Darkest and Best Kept Secrets
Kenneth Anger Manufacturer: Dell ProductGroup: Book Binding: Mass Market Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0440153255 Release Date: 1981-11-15 |
Customer Reviews:
a very interesting book to page through.......2007-07-18
Thumbs down on the (myth-ridden) text, thumbs up on (some of) the pictures.......2007-07-12
Juicy delicious!.......2007-05-19
great book and wonderful gossip.......2007-02-18
VERY ENTERTAINING.......2007-01-12
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The Art of Howl's Moving Castle
Hayao Miyazaki Manufacturer: VIZ Media LLC ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 1421500493 |
Customer Reviews:
Don't Let The Cover Sketch Scare You Away.......2007-09-27
A Visual Feast !.......2007-06-16
The Art of Howl's Moving Castle.......2007-04-06
Excellent book.......2007-03-24
A great book.......2007-03-09
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Film Form: Essays in Film Theory
Sergei Eisenstein Manufacturer: Harvest Books ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0156309203 |
Amazon.com
After D.W. Griffith, the most important figure in the history of the international cinema is Sergei Eisenstein. Both men died in 1948, but Eisenstein left a double legacy: not only was he one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, but he was also a magnificent film theorist, perhaps the most important one ever. This book of his essays, superbly translated and edited by Jay Leyda, reprints some of his most vital writings on the art of the cinema, including articles on the language and structure of the movies, the differences between theater and film, and the author's efforts to adapt Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy for the screen. In "The Cinematic Principle and the Ideogram," Eisenstein analyzes the written symbols of the Japanese language as a model for film editing. "Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today," one of the author's most famous pieces, speaks of Griffith as a Dickensian director and then argues for a kind of filmmaking that transcends Griffith's literal style in order to touch its audience on an ideological and metaphorical level. This volume also includes the notorious "statement" on sound movies, which argues against the use of synchronous sound and in favor of jarring, contrapuntal audio that Eisenstein believed would add new dimensions to the talking picture. Idiosyncratic, engrossing, and brilliant, Eisenstein's essays will inspire you to reevaluate everything you thought you knew about the movies.Book Description
Customer Reviews:
Theories on Cinema.......2006-04-10
Film Form: Marxism, Montage and the Hegelian Dialectic.......2002-07-10
Nonetheless, it is problematic in several ways, and an understanding of the nature of its idiosyncrasies is extremely valuable. First, in an effort to "prove" his hypotheses, Eisenstein often attempts to reconcile film and physics in ways that are inappropriate and pseudo-scientific. He presents himself, in that sense, as both Eisenstein and amateur Einstein. Further, case studies are often chosen from his own work, in effect limiting the reader's freedom to disagree with his conclusions. Finally, the manner in which he expresses his thoughts is beyond elliptical. At times, it appears that one would have had to have been living in Russia at the time that these essays were written and to have been thinking about the same issues that Eisenstein was to comprehend what he is getting at. [On the other hand, for those who have had the joy of reading Wittgenstein, for example, this should be a good book to take to the beach.]
As indicated above, these problems can be explained. Communists have always had a complex relationship with the Social Darwinists. On one hand, Marxism was born out of progressive, evolutionary thinking; on the other hand, Marxists dismiss the idea of "survival of the fittest" as primitive and untenable. Soviet biologists often found themselves in the unique position of having to reconcile their theories with the party line, supported by hand selected data. In the end, of course, the value of art and science were measured by the rigid slide rule of the Communist Party. Science that did not promote its agenda was considered "anti-revolutionary."
Eisenstein is the Comrade Lysenko of cinema. He hoists high the myth of science (i.e., the systematic study of physical Truth), reduced essentially to propaganda, and borne along on the shoulders of dubious examples. The most convenient (and most incontrovertible) of these are taken from his own films, the full meanings of which belong to his own demesne. The language Eisenstein uses to construct his arguments is wisely selected: The more clearly one understands his propagandist averments and the less clearly the logic upon which they are based, the more likely one is to accept them as fact. Somewhat hypocritically, then, Eisenstein selects the voice of the intellectual elite to speak to the masses, hiding his true political intentions behind a veil of empty esotericism. Like the soothsayer, the illusionist and the ringleader, "Film Form" operates in the realm of baseless belief in which arguments gain validity relative not to WHAT they say but the WAY in which they say it. For this very reason, it is an important read... the very dogma of Bolshevik art.
Montage, Marxism and the Hegelian Dialectic.......2002-07-09
Nonetheless, it is problematic in several ways, and an understanding of the nature of its idiosyncrasies is extremely valuable. First, in an effort to "prove" his hypotheses, Eisenstein often attempts to reconcile film and physics in ways that are inappropriate and pseudo-scientific. He presents himself, in that sense, as both Eisenstein and amateur Einstein. Further, case studies are often chosen from his own work, in effect limiting the reader's freedom to disagree with his conclusions. Finally, the manner in which he expresses his thoughts is beyond elliptical. At times, it appears that one would have had to have been living in Russia at the time that these essays were written and to have been thinking about the same issues that Eisenstein was to comprehend what he is getting at. [On the other hand, for those who have had the joy of reading Wittgenstein, for example, this should be a good book to take to the beach.]
As indicated above, these problems can be explained. Communists have always had a complex relationship with the Social Darwinists. On one hand, Marxism was born out of progressive, evolutionary thinking; on the other hand, Marxists dismiss the idea of "survival of the fittest" as primitive and untenable. Soviet biologists often found themselves in the unique position of having to reconcile their theories with the party line, supported by hand selected data. In the end, of course, the value of art and science were measured by the rigid slide rule of the Communist Party. Science that did not promote its agenda was considered "anti-revolutionary."
Eisenstein is the very Comrade Lysenko of cinema. He hoists high the myth of science (i.e., the systematic study of physical Truth), reduced essentially to propaganda, and borne along on the shoulders of dubious examples. The most convenient (most incontrovertible) of these are those taken from his own films, the full meaning of which belongs to his own demesne. The language Eisenstein uses to construct his arguments is wisely selected: The more clearly one understands his propagandist averments and the less clearly the logic upon which they are based, the more likely one is to accept them as fact. Somewhat hypocritically, then, Eisenstein selects the voice of the intellectual elite to speak to the masses, hiding his true political intentions behind a veil of empty esotericism. Like the soothsayer, the illusionist and the ringleader, "Film Form" operates in the realm of baseless belief in which arguments gain validity relative not to WHAT they say but the WAY in which they say it. For this very reason, it is an important read... the very dogma of Bolshevik art.
THIS BOOK WILL NOT IMPROVE YOUR FILMMAKING.......2000-02-28
The montage explained.......1999-07-24
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Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image
Laura Mulvey Manufacturer: Reaktion Books ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 1861892632 |
Book Description
Customer Reviews:
uptodate.......2007-01-10
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Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture
Vivian Sobchack , and Univ of California Pr Manufacturer: University of California Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0520241290 |
Book Description
In these innovative essays, Vivian Sobchack considers the key role our bodies play in making sense of today's image-saturated culture. Emphasizing our corporeal rather than our intellectual engagements with film and other media, Carnal Thoughts shows how our experience always emerges through our senses and how our bodies are not just visible objects but also sense-making, visual subjects. Sobchack draws on both phenomenological philosophy and a broad range of popular sources to explore bodily experience in contemporary, moving-image culture. She examines how, through the conflation of cinema and surgery, we've all "had our eyes done"; why we are "moved" by the movies; and the different ways in which we inhabit photographic, cinematic, and electronic space. Carnal Thoughts provides a lively and engaging challenge to the mind/body split by demonstrating that the process of "making sense" requires an irreducible collaboration between our thoughts and our senses.Customer Reviews:
Phenomenology and film.......2007-08-14
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What Is Cinema? (Vol 1) (What is Cinema?)
Andre Bazin Manufacturer: University of California Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items: ASIN: 0520000927 |
Amazon.com
André Bazin is a great film critic and essayist, arguably the best France ever produced. His impact on the international cinema was monumental and continues to be felt today. He popularized the auteur theory, the idea that directors were the authors of their films. He was one of the first to take American "B"" movie genres, such as Westerns and films noir, seriously. He waxed eloquently on the Italian neorealist movement of the late '40s and '50s and inspired the "New Wave" of French directors, many of whom wrote for the journal he founded and edited, the legendary Cahiers du Cinema. François Truffaut dedicated The 400 Blows to him.Bazin had a keen eye for cinematic detail and technique, but was also one of the cinema's great sociologists, psychologists, and historians. Volume two of What Is Cinema? collects some of his most characteristic writings. It contains essays on the aesthetic of neorealism; individual neorealist films by Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, and Federico Fellini; the brilliance of Charlie Chaplin; and the mythmaking qualities of the Western. The volume ends with an appreciation of the great Jean Gabin and three essays on sex in the movies, including the delightful "Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl." Bazin's essays are short, smoothly written, revelatory, and filled with remarkable insights and a profound love for his subject.
Book Description
André Bazin's What Is Cinema? (volumes I and II) have been classics of film studies for as long as they've been available and are considered the gold standard in the field of film criticism. Although Bazin made no films, his name has been one of the most important in French cinema since World War II. He was co-founder of the influential Cahiers du Cinéma, which under his leadership became one of the world's most distinguished publications. Championing the films of Jean Renoir (who contributed a short foreword to Volume I), Orson Welles, and Roberto Rossellini, he became the protégé of François Truffaut, who honors him touchingly in his forword to Volume II. This new edition includes graceful forewords to each volume by Bazin scholar and biographer Dudley Andrew, who reconsiders Bazin and his place in contemporary film study. The essays themselves are erudite but always accessible, intellectual, and stimulating. As Renoir puts it, the essays of Bazin "will survive even if the cinema does not."Customer Reviews:
A must for any lover cinema!.......2004-08-25
Significant work - atrocious translation.......2000-12-04
The original woks deserve 5 stars; it is impossible to decide how to rate this particular version.
What Is Cinema?.......2000-06-29
Since Bazin's passing, film theory ventured more deeply into such things as semiotics, Freudian and Lacanian analyses, and sociological/Marxist perspectives. However, Bazin was one of the first and arguably most important writers to take film discourse beyond the "funny" "sexy" "scary" level. Some of the places film discourse has gone since the time of Bazin would be difficult or impossible for an unitiated person to comprehend. This is not so with Bazin, a man who also did such things as take Charlie Chaplin films to show at factories during lunch hour.
Although Bazin passed away more than 40 years ago, he remains relevant even if his writings have been subject to some critical analysis from writers like Brian Henderson and Noel Carroll. Moreover, in reading Bazin, one often has moments of recognition that are applicable to more recent things in the theatres; for example, a remark Bazin makes about Marilyn Monroe's skirt flying up is pertinent to discussion of the Austin Powers films, Bazin's remarks about such things as films about arctic expeditions, bullfighting documentaries, or films of Chinese executions may have a certain relevance in talking about the phenomenon of "The Blair Witch Project" . . .
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The Film Sense
Sergei M. Eisenstein , and Jay Leyda Manufacturer: Harcourt ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0156309351 |
Amazon.com
The theory of "montage" or editing, developed by early Soviet filmmakers, reached its deepest expression in the writings of Sergeii Eisenstein, undeniably the most profound theorist of film art. This book contains the clearest and most accessible introduction to his ideas about the cinema. Eisenstein, who directed "The Battleship Potemkin" and "Alexander Nevsky," was a master propagandist as well as a superb filmmaker. In this book, he argues passionately that these two crafts are closely related.Book Description
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, born in Riga in 1898, first achieved world fame with his silent film, Potemkin in 1925. Although he only completed six films in his lifetime, he is considered one of the most influential film-makers and film theoreticians of all time.The Film Sense draws upon Eisenstein's experience in the creation of Strike, Potemkin, Ten Days That Shook the World, Old and New and Alexander Nevsky to discuss films as a medium that would appeal to all the senses, not just the emotions and the intellect. The book also includes a complete list of his work and a bibliography.
Customer Reviews:
Tough but interesting..........2000-11-14
THIS BOOK WILL NOT IMPROVE YOUR FILMS!.......2000-02-28
A must read for all filmmakers, The basis of all great films.......1997-11-10
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Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (Culture and the Moving Image)
Paula J. Massood Manufacturer: Temple University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 1592130038 |
Book Description
In Black City Cinema, Paula Massood shows how popular films reflected the massive social changes that resulted from the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North, West, and Mid-West during the first three decades of the twentieth century. By the onset of the Depression, the Black population had become primarily urban, transforming individual lives as well as urban experience and culture.Massood probes into the relationship of place and time, showing how urban settings became an intrinsic element of African American film as Black people became more firmly rooted in urban spaces and more visible as historical and political subjects. Illuminating the intersections of film, history, politics, and urban discourse, she considers the chief genres of African American and Hollywood narrative film: the black cast musicals of the 1920s and the "race" films of the early sound era to blaxploitation and hood films, as well as the work of Spike Lee toward the end of the century. As it examines such a wide range of films over much of the twentieth century, this book offers a unique map of Black representations in film.
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Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film
Jay Leyda Manufacturer: Princeton University Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0691003467 |
Amazon.com
"The Battleship Potemkin," "By the Law," "Mother," "Earth," "Man With a Movie Camera," "Alexander Nevsky": Russia and the Soviet Union produced some of the greatest films the world has ever seen. Leyda has written a riveting history of the pioneers and artists who made these films. His acclaimed book tells the story of the industry that spawned them and the revolution that both inspired and crushed them.Book Description
This history of the turbulent destiny of Kino ("film" in Russian) documents the artistic development of the Russian and Soviet cinema and traces its growth from 1896 to the death of Sergei Eisenstein in 1948. The new Postscript surveys the directions taken by Soviet cinema since the end of World War II. Beginning with the Lumiere filming of the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II, Jay Leyda links Russia's pre-Revolutionary past with its Communist present through the observation of a major cultural phenomenon: the evolution of the Soviet film as an artistic and political instrument. The book contains 150 drawings and photographs and five appendices, including a list of selected Russian and Soviet films from 1907 to the present.
Customer Reviews:
An admirable sum of devotion and constancy!.......2005-12-16
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Moving Into Pictures
Barry Salt Manufacturer: Starword ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0950906646 |
Book Description
Articles on early film history, the style of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Cecil B. DeMille, Josef von Sternberg, and Ernst Lubitsch. Also pieces on the analysis of film style, on cartoon animation style, television drama over the last 50 years, film style and technology in the 'nineties, and much more.Books:
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