Independent Feature Film Production: A Complete Guide from Concept Through Distribution

Invaluable resource, a must-buy for all aspiring and experienced independent producers.......2006-02-17

This new edition of Routledge's definitive Key Concepts in Cinema Studies has been extentively updated and expanded.

In addition to new entries, such as pornography and adaptation, all of the genre entries reflect the changes of the past few years, and numerous changes have been made in response to feedback from students of film. Featuring some 150 entries, Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts explores a wide range of genres, movements, theories and production terms with depth and clarity. This highly readable resource is both authoritative and accessible, making it an ideal guide for film students and a pleasurable reference for film lovers.

Professor Hayward's bio says she is a Professor of French Studies. It shows in her book. If you feel like you haven't had your fill of post modernism, semiotics and structuralist/post structuralist theory, this book will get your diet straight.

This isn't the kind of book you'd just sit down and read from cover to cover. It's more of a reference. My complaint is that the book is a little dry and dense.

Steven Spielberg once said, "I like ideas, especially movie ideas, that you can hold in your hand. If a person can tell me the idea in twenty-five words or less, it's going to make a pretty good movie." Spielberg's comment embodies the essence of the high concept film, which can be condensed into one simple sentence that inspires marketing campaigns, lures audiences, and separates success from failure at the box office.

This pioneering study explores the development and dominance of the high concept movie within commercial Hollywood filmmaking since the late 1970s. Justin Wyatt describes how box office success, always important in Hollywood, became paramount in the era in which major film studios passed into the hands of media conglomerates concerned more with the economics of filmmaking than aesthetics. In particular, he shows how high concept films became fully integrated with their marketing, so that a single phrase ("Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...") could sell the movie to studio executives and provide copy for massive advertising campaigns; a single image or a theme song could instantly remind potential audience members of the movie, and tie-in merchandise could generate millions of dollars in additional income.

An impressive cast of scholars examines works and their creators across the whole spectrum of artistic expression--fiction and poetry, painting and sculpture, architecture, dance, photography, and film. In fresh and provocative essays they explore how the ideas of modernism helped shape such artistic expressions as the writings of the Harlem Renaissance, the paintings of Edward Hopper, New Deal public art projects, and George Antheil's Ballet MŽcanique. Extensive use of color and black-and-white illustrations results in a book that is as appealing visually as it is stimulating intellectually.

The contributors are Casey Nelson Blake, Robert Cantwell, Ray Carney, Thomas Fahy, Lucy Fischer, John F. Kasson, William E. Leuchtenburg, Lucinda H. MacKethan, Randy Martin, Carol J. Oja, Miles Orvell, Joan Shelley Rubin, Jon Michael Spencer, and Maren Stange.

A Concept of Dramatic Genre and the Comedy of a New Type: Chess, Literature, and Film

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A Concept of Dramatic Genre and the Comedy of a New Type: Chess, Literature, and Film
Vera Zubarev(aka Ulea)
Manufacturer: Southern Illinois University
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

History | Drama | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Comedy | Drama | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Performing Arts | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

General | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

General | Movies | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

Play & Scriptwriting | Writing | Reference | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0809324520

Applying systems theory to the comedies of Chekhov, Balzac, Kleist, Moliere, and Shakespeare, A Concept of Dramatic Genre and the Comedy of a New Type: Chess, Literature, and Film approaches dramatic genre from the point of view of the degree of richness and strength of a character’s potential. Its main focus is to establish a methodology for analyzing the potential from multidimensional perspectives, using systems thinking. The whole concept is an alternative to the Aristotelian plot-based approach and is applied to an analysis of western and eastern European authors as well as contemporary American film.

This innovative study consists of three parts: The first part is mostly theoretical, proposing a new definition of the dramatic as a category linked to general systems phenomena and offering a new classification of dramatic genre. In the second part, Ulea offers a textual analysis of some works based on this new classification. She analyzes comedies, tragedies, and dramas on the same or similar topics in order to reveal what makes them belong to opposite types of dramatic genre.

Additionally, she considers the question of fate and chance, with regard to tragedy and comedy, from the point of view of the predispositioning theory. In the third part, Ulea explores an analysis of the comedy of a new type—CNT. Her emphasis is on the integration of the part and the whole in approaching the protagonist’s potential. She introduces the term quasi-strong potential in order to reveal the illusory strength of protagonists of the CNT and to show the technique of CNT’s analysis and synthesis.

Ulea’s research begins with the notion of the comic, traditionally considered synonymous with the laughable, and attempts to approach it as independent from the laughable and laughter. The necessity to do so is dictated by the desire to penetrate the enigmatic nature of Chekhov’s comedy. The result is A Concept of Dramatic Genre and the Comedy of a New Type: Chess, Literature, and Film, a completely new approach to potential and systems thinking—which has never been a focus of dramatic theory before. Such potential is the touchstone of the comic and comedy, their permanent basic characteristic, the heart and axis around which the comedic world spins.