Book Description
In China on Screen, Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, leaders in the field of Chinese film studies, explore more than one hundred years of Chinese cinema and nation. Providing new perspectives on key movements, themes, and filmmakers, Berry and Farquhar analyze the films of a variety of directors and actors, including Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Gong Li, Wong Kar-wai, and Ang Lee. They argue for the abandonment of "national cinema" as an analytic tool and propose "cinema and the national" as a more productive framework. With this approach, they show how movies from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora construct and contest different ideas of Chinese nation -- as empire, republic, or ethnicity, and complicated by gender, class, style, transnationalism, and more. Among the issues and themes covered are the tension between operatic and realist modes, male and female star images, transnational production and circulation of Chinese films, the image of the good foreigner -- all related to different ways of imagining nation. Comprehensive and provocative, China on Screen is a crucial work of film analysis.
Customer Reviews:
An exploration of more than one hundred years of Chinese cinema and nation.......2006-07-04
Chinese film studies experts Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar present China On Screen: Cinema And Nation, an exploration of more than one hundred years of Chinese cinema and nation. Revealing how movies from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora create different ideas of Chinese nation, whether empire, republic, or ethnically based, China On Screen touches on such issues as male and female star images, transnational production, the image of the "good foreigner" among others. A quite thought-provoking and extensively researched academic study.
Book Description
Each year more than 230,000 students apply to media studies programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The competition is tough, but this unique guide teaches you everything you need to know to launch a successful career in TV, film or digital media. It also includes 35 profiles of the industry's most successful figures. Written with the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation and featuring a foreword by HBO Chairman and CEO Chris Albrecht, this book gives industry hopefuls a true insider’s perspective.
As television and film technology becomes more sophisticated, the demand for talented actors, producers, directors, and technicians has risen dramatically. The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Foundation understands this business and presents students with valuable advice on how to acquire a solid educational foundation and navigate successful career paths.
Customer Reviews:
save your money.......2006-12-03
this book basically has nothing you cant find online, get a better book that tells you more about the college itself, like college prowler, and then look up the film program information online
Book Description
A lively celebration of the genius and power of Palestinian cinema.
Over the last quarter-century, Palestinian cinema has emerged as a major artistic force on the global scene. Deeply rooted in the historic struggles for national self-determination, this cinema is the single most important artistic expression of a much-maligned people. Despite the extraordinary social and artistic significance of Palestinian film, there is no single volume in which its political and aesthetic aspects are carefully examined. Dreams of a Nation, a collection of essays and interviews in which filmmakers, critics and scholars reflect on its production and impact, is the most comprehensive book on Palestinian cinema in any language.
Book Description
American culture after the end of World War II has been characterized by an abiding pessimism most clearly manifested in the film noirs of the period. Mike Chopra-Gant challenges this "noir and Zeitgeist" reading and proposes that the view of American cinema and society it develops relies on a retrospective re-imagining of the era, based on the erroneous promotion of selected movies. His vigorous revisionist account of the films and culture of the period also challenges traditional approaches to genre, to masculinity and the family, by focusing on key themes in the most popular films in terms of box office revenues, including Best Years of Our Lives, Night and Day, Scarlet Street and Gilda.
Customer Reviews:
New View of the Post War Movies.......2006-06-22
The commonly held opinion about American movies in the years 1946-50 is that they reflect a culture that was having a crisis of masculinity, a perception of widespread corruption in society and a prevailing sense of gloom, pesimism and cynicism.
In this book Chopra-Gant presents a revisionist view of the films of this period. He argues that the wrong films were studied to generate this view. Instead he researched the most popular films (in terms of revenue generated) of 1946 and in these films the tone is quite different. Many of these films instead show the triumph of American beliefs - democracy, classlessness and individualism.
One point he discusses is the fall off in revenue spent on movies after 1947. He does not supply a reson for this, but I suspect that it had nothing to do with the movies, instead it had to do with the start of the baby boom. Younger people, and dating people tend to go to the movies a lot more than married people who now have an infant at home.
Book Description
In discussions of postcolonial nationhood and cultural identity, Taiwan is often overlooked. Yet the island—with its complex history of colonization—presents a particularly fascinating case of the struggle to define a “nation.” While the mainland Chinese government has been unequivocal in its resistance to Taiwanese independence, in Taiwan, government control has gradually passed from mainland Chinese immigrants to the Taiwanese themselves. Two decades of democratization and the arrival of consumer culture have made the island a truly global space. Envisioning Taiwan sorts through these complexities, skillfully weaving together history and cultural analysis to give a picture of Taiwanese identity and a lesson on the usefulness and the limits of contemporary cultural theory.
Yip traces a distinctly Taiwanese sense of self vis-à-vis China, Japan, and the West through two of the island’s most important cultural movements: the hsiang-t’u (or “nativist”) literature of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Taiwanese New Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. At the heart of the book are close readings of the work of the hsiang-t’u writer Hwang Chun-ming and the New Cinema filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien. Key figures in Taiwan’s assertion of a national identity separate and distinct from China, both artists portray in vibrant detail daily life on the island. Through Hwang’s and Hou’s work and their respective artistic movements, Yip explores “the imagining of a nation” on the local, national, and global levels. In the process, she exposes a perceptible shift away from traditional models of cultural authenticity toward a more fluid, postmodern hybridity—an evolution that reflects both Taiwan’s peculiar multicultural reality and broader trends in global culture.
Book Description
In the heat of the 2004 presidential election campaign, no single work of speechmaking, writing, or media production fueled the fiery debate over George W. Bush's leadership as much as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. Certainly, no American documentary film ever provoked as much political controversy.
A noted film scholar now offers a much-needed appraisal of both the film and the furor surrounding it. Robert Brent Toplin first examines the development of Moore's ideas and the evolution of his filmmaking, then dissects Fahrenheit 9/11 and explores the many claims and disagreements about the movie's truthfulness. Toplin considers the ways in which Moore based his arguments on a diverse array of "primary sources," many of which had received scant attention in the mainstream media-including the notorious seven-minute "Pet Goat" video depicting President Bush-either deliberately calm or paralyzed-in a Florida classroom on being told of the 9/11 attacks. Finally, Toplin considers the movie's impact, noting that some enthusiasts of the film thought it would help Democrats in the 2004 elections while others argued that Moore's strident approach to issues would turn off swing voters and contribute to a Republican victory.
Critics lambasted Fahrenheit 9/11, claiming Moore violated standards of documentary filmmaking through his excessive partisanship. They also berated him for taking events out of context and getting the facts wrong. Toplin contends that partisanship is a well-established tradition in documentary filmmaking, and he shows that the major disagreements between admirers and detractors of Fahrenheit 9/11 revolved around interpretation rather than the factual record. Michael Moore took some controversial risks, Toplin demonstrates, but on many large and small matters-from his treatment of the Bush administration's reactions to 9/11 and war-making in Iraq to disputes about the Saudi flights from the United States after 9/11-Moore raised many legitimate questions.
Toplin's engaging study shows that Michael Moore's film did more than shake up a nation; it also made an indelible contribution to the esteemed tradition of agenda-driven cinema.
This book is part of the CultureAmerica series.
Book Description
Ideas of national identity, nationalism and transnationalism are now both a central feature of contemporary film studies, and a primary concern for filmmakers themselves. Embracing a range of national cinemas including those of the US, Scotland, Poland, France, Turkey, Indonesia, India and Germany Cinema and Nation considers the ways in which film production and reception are shaped by ideas of national belonging, and examines the implications of globalization for the concept of national cinema.
Book Description
Gender and nation have often served as narrative subjects and visual tropes in Chinese cinema. The intersections between the two that occur in cinematic representation, however, have received little critical attention. Women through the Lens raises the question of how gender, especially the image of woman, acts as a visual and discursive sign in the creation of the nation-state in twentieth-century China. Tracing the history of Chinese cinema through the last hundred years from the perspective of transnational feminism, Shuqin Cui reveals how women have been granted a "privileged visibility" on screen while being denied discursive positions as subjects. In addition, her careful attention to the visual language system of cinema shows how "woman" has served as the site for the narration of nation in the context of China's changing social and political climate.
Placing gender and nation in a historical framework, the book first shows how early productions had their roots in shadow plays, a popular form of public entertainment. These films were soon supplanted by cinematic narratives meant to further the causes of social reform and strident nationalism. As Leftist filmmaking turned to the female image to signify a motherland suffering foreign invasions as well as domestic afflictions, gender and nation became inextricably intertwined in the cinematic representation of China. In examining the "Red Classics" of socialist cinema as a mass cultural form, the book shows how the utopian vision of emancipating the entire proletariat, women included, produced a collective ideology that declared an end to gender difference. Sex and desire cannot be eradicated, however, and one of the most valuable contributions of this work is its consideration of the fate of gender difference in a milieu of official suppression.
The emergence of New Wave films brought heightened international attention to Chinese cinema. Filmmakers became keenly aware of visuality as a language system as they experimented with modes of representation. Cui documents and discusses the cinematic spectacle of woman as essential to such widely popular films as Chen Kaige's "Farewell My Concubine" and Zhang Yimou's "Ju Do." In these films, the screen image of the Chinese woman is both nationalized and sexualized, and for international audiences she is the exotic and erotic other, the image of China. Finally, the author brings a feminist perspective to the issues of gender and nation by turning her attention to women directors and their self-representations. She reveals a concealed female identity at the margins where women directors attempt to inject female consciousness and perspective even as they submit to the conventions necessary to get their films produced. She concludes that if Chinese women continue to count on the promises of nationalist discourse for their emancipation, they may fail to realize that the need to free feminism from nationalist narratives is a prerequisite for freeing oneself.
Well conceived and intelligently written, Women through the Lens will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of film, gender, and Asian studies, and to general readers interested in Chinese cinema.
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Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class, and Nation
Viola Shafik
Manufacturer: American University in Cairo Press
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Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity
ASIN: 9774160533 |
Product Description
In this groundbreaking work, film scholar Viola Shafik examines popular and commercial movies from Egypt's film industry, including a number of the biggest box-office hits widely distributed in Egypt and the Arab world. Turning a critical eye on a major player in Egyptian cultural life, Shafik examines these films against the backdrop of the country's overall socio-political development, from the emergence of the film industry in the 1930s, through the Nasser and Sadat eras, up to the era of globalization. This is the first comprehensive book on popular Egyptian cinema in English, a milestone at a time when numerous disciplines have shown an increasing interest in popular culture. As this book ably demonstrates, popular cinema is a form of wish-fulfillment that expresses mass audiences dreams and fears, while symbolically translating and negotiating social realities. In unearthing the largely contradictory meanings conveyed by different films, Popular Egyptian Cinema examines a broad array of themes, from gender relations to feminism, Islamism and popular ideas about sexuality and morality. Focusing on representations of religious and ethnic minorities primarily Copts, Jews, and Nubians Shafik draws out issues such as the formation of the Egyptian nation, cinematic stereotyping, and political and social taboos. Shafik also considers pivotal genres, such as melodrama, realism, and action film, in relation to public debates over highbrow and lowbrow culture and in light of local and international film criticism. Popular Egyptian Cinema marks an important contribution to international film studies while offering general readers an engrossing and informative look at some of the most popular films in Egyptian cinema.
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