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Author | : Geoff King |
Publisher | : Bloomsbury Publishing |
Total Pages | : 224 |
Release | : 2000-11-24 |
Genre | : Social Science |
ISBN | : 0857716972 |
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What is the appeal of the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster? The sheer scale and impact of big special effects sequences is part of the attraction of films such as Independence Day, Jurassic Park, Titanic or Mission Impossible. But they also offer other appeals, including the dynamics of narrative. Spectacular Narratives is the first serious book-length treatment of the contemporary blockbuster, including the digital-effects-based spectacle, space fictions, the action film, war spectaculars, the recent wave of disaster movies and films evoking new technologies such as virtual reality. Consideration is also given to the impact of profitable spin-offs such as film-related theme park rides and computer games. Geoff King argues against the view that an emphasis on the spectacular has led to an erosion of the importance of narrative in Hollywood. Instead, he suggests, even the most spectacular and effects-led contemporary blockbuster offers a blend of appeals, mixing elements of spectacle and narrative. Narrative is explored at the levels of both linear story-telling and underlying thematic patterns, a particular emphasis being placed on the persistence of elements of the myth/ideology of the American frontier. Close textual analysis is combined with consideration of the industrial and social contexts of contemporary Hollywood in a readable, original and rewarding book on the cinema that dominates markets across the globe.
Author | : Giorgio Mariani |
Publisher | : American University Studies |
Total Pages | : 200 |
Release | : 1992 |
Genre | : Foreign Language Study |
ISBN | : |
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Despite Stephen Crane's great interest in social themes of his time, few critics have analyzed the historical and political significance of his work. This book demonstrates that only an analysis capable of grasping the politics of Crane's texts can adequately account for their stylistic and aesthetic qualities. Focusing on Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and The Red Badge of Courage, as well as on seldom studied bestsellers of the American 1890s such as R.H. Davis's Soldiers of Fortune and F.M. Crawford's Via Crucis, it offers new insights into the formal and ideological relationship of Crane's fiction to popular literature.
Author | : Geoff King |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 213 |
Release | : 2000 |
Genre | : Cinematography |
ISBN | : 9780755699315 |
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What makes today's Hollywood films so successful? Is it the sheer scale of special effects that gives films like "Jurassic Park" or "The Matrix" their mass audience appeal? Geoff King looks at the underexplored dynamic relationship between narrative and spectacle in contemporary Hollywood cinema. He uses the myth of the American frontier against a range of Hollywood filmsand drawes examples from the digital-effects-based and virtual-reality spectacles, space fictions, action films, war epics and disaster films that now dominate cinema.
Author | : Susan Courtney |
Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
Total Pages | : 399 |
Release | : 2021-12-07 |
Genre | : Performing Arts |
ISBN | : 0691240221 |
Download Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
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.
Author | : Kristen Whissel |
Publisher | : Duke University Press |
Total Pages | : 224 |
Release | : 2014-02-05 |
Genre | : Performing Arts |
ISBN | : 0822377144 |
Download Spectacular Digital Effects Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
By developing the concept of the "digital effects emblem," Kristen Whissel contributes a new analytic rubric to cinema studies. An "effects emblem" is a spectacular, computer-generated visual effect that gives stunning expression to a film's key themes. Although they elicit feelings of astonishment and wonder, effects emblems do not interrupt narrative, but are continuous with story and characterization and highlight the narrative stakes of a film. Focusing on spectacular digital visual effects in live-action films made between 1989 and 2011, Whissel identifies and examines four effects emblems: the illusion of gravity-defying vertical movement, massive digital multitudes or "swarms," photorealistic digital creatures, and morphing "plasmatic" figures. Across films such as Avatar, The Matrix, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jurassic Park, Titanic, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, these effects emblems heighten the narrative drama by contrasting power with powerlessness, life with death, freedom with constraint, and the individual with the collective.
Author | : Jesse Sullivan |
Publisher | : Big Dreams Kids Books |
Total Pages | : 290 |
Release | : 2021-09 |
Genre | : |
ISBN | : 9781953429131 |
Download Spectacular Stories for Curious Kids Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
DISCOVER, WONDER, EXPLORE, IMAGINE You have found the book that is a wild, whirling tornado of breathless fascination. This book, a gift for kids who revel in reading (or even those who find it tedious) is a most extraordinary, gratifying, daring affair, teeming with life and vivid stories, abundantly complete with diverse and unique marvels for the young mind, the whole forming a blazing vision of breathtaking splendor that will astonish, inspire, and capture the imagination of young readers everywhere. Each story is an adventure, each tale a discovery. Each page is dripping with captivating tales from history and scientific wonders, all of which have been specifically curated and written for YOUNG READERS. The purpose of this book is to fascinate but also to empower and uplift. These 100 stories filling over 280 pages will inspire awe and fascination in both reluctant readers as well as budding aficionados of the written word. You will be amazed at what your child excitedly learns from a book like this. Get this book today and ignite your child's curiosity. ★ Fascination is an incredible gift. ★
Author | : Susan G. Davis |
Publisher | : Univ of California Press |
Total Pages | : 328 |
Release | : 2023-09-01 |
Genre | : Social Science |
ISBN | : 052091953X |
Download Spectacular Nature Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
This is the story of Sea World, a theme park where the wonders of nature are performed, marketed, and sold. With its trademark star, Shamu the killer whale—as well as performing dolphins, pettable sting rays, and reproductions of pristine natural worlds—the park represents a careful coordination of shows, dioramas, rides, and concessions built around the theme of ocean life. Susan Davis analyzes the Sea World experience and the forces that produce it: the theme park industry; Southern California tourism; the privatization of urban space; and the increasing integration of advertising, entertainment, and education. The result is an engaging exploration of the role played by images of nature and animals in contemporary commercial culture, and a precise account of how Sea World and its parent corporation, Anheuser-Busch, succeed. Davis argues that Sea World builds its vision of nature around customers' worries and concerns about the environment, family relations, and education. While Davis shows the many ways that Sea World monitors its audience and manipulates animals and landscapes to manufacture pleasure, she also explains the contradictions facing the enterprise in its campaign for a positive public identity. Shifting popular attitudes, animal rights activists, and environmental laws all pose practical and public relations challenges to the theme park. Davis confronts the park's vast operations with impressive insight and originality, revealing Sea World as both an industrial product and a phenomenon typical of contemporary American culture. Spectacular Nature opens an intriguing field of inquiry: the role of commercial entertainment in shaping public understandings of the environment and environmental problems.
Author | : Peter Houlahan |
Publisher | : Catapult |
Total Pages | : 401 |
Release | : 2019-06-11 |
Genre | : Political Science |
ISBN | : 1640092129 |
Download Norco '80 Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
5 young men. 32 destroyed police vehicles. 1 spectacular bank robbery. This “cinematic” true crime story transports readers to the scene of one of the most shocking bank heists in U.S. history—a crime that’s almost too wild to be real (The New York Times Book Review). Norco ’80 tells the story of how five heavily armed young men—led by an apocalyptic born–again Christian—attempted a bank robbery that turned into one of the most violent criminal events in U.S. history, forever changing the face of American law enforcement. Part action thriller and part courtroom drama, this Edgar Award finalist for Best Fact Crime transports the reader back to the Southern California of the 1970s, an era of predatory evangelical gurus, doomsday predictions, megachurches, and soaring crime rates, with the threat of nuclear obliteration looming over it all. In this riveting true story, a group of landscapers transforms into a murderous gang of bank robbers armed to the teeth with military–grade weapons. Their desperate getaway turns the surrounding towns into war zones. And when it’s over, three are dead and close to twenty wounded; a police helicopter has been forced down from the sky, and thirty–two police vehicles have been completely demolished by thousands of rounds of ammo. The resulting trial shakes the community to the core, raising many issues that continue to plague society today: from the epidemic of post–traumatic stress disorder within law enforcement to religious extremism and the militarization of local police forces.
Author | : Evdokia Stefanopoulou |
Publisher | : Bloomsbury Publishing USA |
Total Pages | : 241 |
Release | : 2023-07-27 |
Genre | : Performing Arts |
ISBN | : 1501380214 |
Download The Science Fiction Film in Contemporary Hollywood Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
The Science Fiction Film in Contemporary Hollywood focuses on the American science fiction (SF) film during the period 2001-2020, in order to provide a theoretical mapping of the genre in the context of Conglomerate Hollywood. Using a social semiotics approach in a systematic corpus of films, the book argues that the SF film can be delineated by two semiotic squares -the first one centering on the genre's more-than-human ontologies (SF bodies), and the second one focusing on its imaginative worlds (SF worlds). Based on this theoretical framework, the book examines the genre in six cycles, which are placed in their historical context, and are analyzed in relation to cultural discourses, such as technological embodiment, race, animal-human relations, environmentalism, global capitalism, and the techno-scientific Empire. By considering these cycles -which include superhero films, creature films, space operas, among others-as expressions of the genre's basic oppositions, the book facilitates the comparison and juxtaposition of films that have rarely been discussed in tandem, offering a new perspective on the multiple articulations of the SF film in the new millennium.
Author | : Yvonne Tasker |
Publisher | : John Wiley & Sons |
Total Pages | : 219 |
Release | : 2015-06-15 |
Genre | : Performing Arts |
ISBN | : 0470659246 |
Download The Hollywood Action and Adventure Film Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
The Hollywood Action and Adventure Film presents a comprehensive overview and analysis of the history, myriad themes, and critical approaches to the action and adventure genre in American cinema. Draws on a wide range of examples, spanning the silent spectacles of early cinema to the iconic superheroes of 21st-century action films Features case studies revealing the genre’s diverse roots – from westerns and war films, to crime and espionage movies Explores a rich variety of aesthetic and thematic concerns that have come to define the genre, touching on themes such as the outsider hero, violence and redemption, and adventure as escape from the mundane Integrates discussion of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality alongside genre history Provides a timely and richly revealing portrait of a powerful cinematic genre that has increasingly come to dominate the American cinematic landscape