Title: Romance and the "yellow peril": race, sex, and discursive strategies in Hollywood fiction
Author: Marchetti, Gina
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Hollywood films about Asians and interracial sexuality are the focus of Gina Marchetti's provocative new work. While miscegenation might seem an unlikely theme for Hollywood, Marchetti shows how fantasy-dramas of interracial rape, lynching, tragic love, and model marriage are powerfully evident in American cinema.The author begins with a discussion of D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms , then considers later films such as Shanghai Express , Madame Butterfly , and the recurring geisha movies. She also includes some fascinating "forgotten" films that have been overlooked by critics until now.Marchetti brings the theoretical perspective of recent writing on race, ethnicity, and gender to her analyses of film and television and argues persuasively that these media help to perpetuate social and racial inequality in America. Noting how social norms and taboos have been simultaneously set and broken by Hollywood filmmakers, she discusses the "orientalist" tensions underlying the construction of American cultural identity. Her book will be certain to interest readers in film, Asian, women's, and cultural studies.   [brief]
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Title: Six screenplays 
Author: Riskin, Robert
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film
Publisher's Description: Screenwriter Robert Riskin (1897-1955) was a towering figure even among the giants of Hollywood's Golden Age. Known for his unique blend of humor and romance, wisecracking and idealism, Riskin teamed with director Frank Capra to produce some of his most memorable films. Pat McGilligan has collected six of the best Riskin scripts: Platinum Blonde (1931), American Madness (1932), It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Lost Horizon (1937), and Meet John Doe (1941). All of them were directed by Capra, and although Capra's work has been amply chronicled and celebrated, Riskin's share in the collaboration has been overlooked since his death. McGilligan provides the "backstory" for the forgotten half of the team, indispensable counterpoint to the director's self-mythologizing autobiography - and incidentally the missing link in any study of Capra's career.Riskin's own career, although interrupted by patriotic duty and cut short by personal tragedy, produced as consistent, entertaining, thoughtful, and enduring a body of work as any Hollywood writer's. Those who know and love these vintage films will treasure these scripts. McGilligan's introduction offers new information and insights for fans, scholars, and general readers.   [brief]
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Title: Spectacular realities: early mass culture in fin-de-siècle Paris
Author: Schwartz, Vanessa R
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | French Studies | European History | European Literature | Women's Studies | Film
Publisher's Description: During the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris emerged as the entertainment capital of the world. The sparkling redesigned city fostered a culture of energetic crowd-pleasing and multi-sensory amusements that would apprehend and represent real life as spectacle.Vanessa R. Schwartz examines the explosive popularity of such phenomena as the boulevards, the mass press, public displays of corpses at the morgue, wax museums, panoramas, and early film. Drawing on a wide range of written and visual materials, including private and business archives, and working at the intersections of art history, literature, and cinema studies, Schwartz argues that "spectacular realities" are part of the foundation of modern mass society. She refutes the notion that modern life produced an unending parade of distractions leading to alienation, and instead suggests that crowds gathered not as dislocated spectators but as members of a new kind of crowd, one united in pleasure rather than protest.   [brief]
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Title: Sundance to Sarajevo: film festivals and the world they made
Author: Turan, Kenneth
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film
Publisher's Description: Almost every day of the year a film festival takes place somewhere in the world--from sub-Saharan Africa to the Land of the Midnight Sun. Sundance to Sarajevo is a tour of the world's film festivals by an insider whose familiarity with the personalities, places, and culture surrounding the cinema makes him uniquely suited to his role. Kenneth Turan, film critic for the Los Angeles Times, writes about the most unusual as well as the most important film festivals, and the cities in which they occur, with an eye toward the larger picture. His lively narrative emphasizes the cultural, political, and sociological aspects of each event as well as the human stories that influence the various and telling ways the film world and the real world intersect. Of the festivals profiled in detail, Cannes and Sundance are obvious choices as the biggest, brashest, and most influential of the bunch. The others were selected for their ability to open a window onto a wider, more diverse world and cinema's place in it. Sometimes, as with Sarajevo and Havana, film is a vehicle for understanding the international political community's most vexing dilemmas. Sometimes, as with Burkina Faso's FESPACO and Pordenone's Giornate del Cinema Muto, it's a chance to examine the very nature of the cinematic experience. But always the stories in this book show us that film means more and touches deeper chords than anyone might have expected. No other book explores so many different festivals in such detail or provides a context beyond the merely cinematic.   [brief]
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Title: Weimar surfaces: urban visual culture in 1920s Germany
Author: Ward, Janet 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Literature | Architecture | Film | European Studies | European History | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: Germany of the 1920s offers a stunning moment in modernity, a time when surface values first became determinants of taste, activity, and occupation: modernity was still modern, spectacle was still spectacular. Janet Ward's luminous study revisits Weimar Germany via the lens of metropolitan visual cu . . . [more]
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Title: Window shopping: cinema and the postmodern
Author: Friedberg, Anne
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | Popular Culture | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Departing from those who define postmodernism in film merely as a visual style or set of narrative conventions, Anne Friedberg develops the first sustained account of the cinema's role in postmodern culture. She explores the ways in which nineteenth-century visual experiences - photography, urban strolling, panorama and diorama entertainments - anticipate contemporary pleasures provided by cinema, video, shopping malls, and emerging "virtual reality" technologies.Comparing the visual practices of shopping, tourism, and film-viewing, Friedberg identifies the experience of "virtual" mobility through time and space as a key determinant of postmodern cultural identity. Evaluating the theories of Jameson, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and others, she adds critical insights about the role of gender and gender mobility in the configurations of consumer culture.A strikingly original work, Window Shopping challenges many of the existing assumptions about what exactly post modern is. This book marks the emergence of a compelling new voice in the study of contemporary culture.   [brief]
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Title: Women in the metropolis: gender and modernity in Weimar culture
Author: Ankum, Katharina von
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: German Studies | Women's Studies | European Literature | Film | European History
Publisher's Description: Bringing together the work of scholars in many disciplines, Women in the Metropolis provides a comprehensive introduction to women's experience of modernism and urbanization in Weimar Germany. It shows women as active participants in artistic, social, and political movements and documents the wide range of their responses to the multifaceted urban culture of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s.Examining a variety of media ranging from scientific writings to literature and the visual arts, the authors trace gendered discourses as they developed to make sense of and regulate emerging new images of femininity. Besides treating classic films such as Metropolis and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City , the articles discuss other forms of mass culture, including the fashion industry and the revue performances of Josephine Baker. Their emphasis on women's critical involvement in the construction of their own modernity illustrates the significance of the Weimar cultural experience and its relevance to contemporary gender, German, film, and cultural studies.   [brief]
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Title: Writing the character-centered screenplay
Author: Horton, Andrew
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | Writing
Publisher's Description: "We need good screenwriters who understand character." Everywhere Andrew Horton traveled in researching this book - from Hollywood to Hungary - he heard the same refrain. Yet most of the standard how-to books on screenwriting follow the film industry's earlier lead in focusing almost exclusively on plot and formulaic structures.With this book, Horton, a film scholar and successful screenwriter, provides the definitive work on the character-based screenplay. Exceptionally wide-ranging - covering American, international, mainstream, and "off-Hollywood" films, as well as television - the book offers creative strategies and essential practical information.Horton begins by placing screenwriting in the context of the storytelling tradition, arguing through literary and cultural analysis that all great stories revolve around a strong central character. He then suggests specific techniques and concepts to help any writer - whether new or experienced - build more vivid characters and screenplays. Centering his discussion around four film examples - including Thelma & Louise and The Silence of the Lambs - and the television series, Northern Exposure , he takes the reader step-by-step through the screenwriting process, starting with the development of multi-dimensional characters and continuing through to rewrite. Finally, he includes a wealth of information about contests, fellowships, and film festivals.Espousing a new, character-based approach to screenwriting, this engaging, insightful work will prove an essential guide to all of those involved in the writing and development of film scripts.   [brief]
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