Stealing the Show is a study of African American actors in Hollywood during the 1930s, a decade that saw the consolidation of stardom as a potent cultural and industrial force. Petty focuses on five performers whose Hollywood film careers flourished during this period—Louise Beavers, Fredi Washington, Lincoln “Stepin Fetchit” Perry, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and Hattie McDaniel—to reve ...
The image that appears on the movie screen is the direct and tangible result of the joint efforts of the director and the cinematographer. <I>A Hidden History of Film Style</I> is the first study to focus on the collaborations between directors and cinematographers, a partnership that has played a crucial role in American cinema since the early years of the silent era. Christopher Beach argues that an understanding of the complex dir ...
Gathered here for the first time are Alfred Hitchcock's reflections on his own life and work. In this ample selection of largely unknown and formerly inaccessible interviews and essays, Hitchcock provides an enlivening commentary on a career that spanned decades and transformed the history of the cinema. Bringing the same exuberance and originality to his writing as he did to his films, he ranges from accounts of his own life and experience ...
The seemingly effortless integration of sound, movement, and editing in films of the late 1930s stands in vivid contrast to the awkwardness of the first talkies. <I>Film Rhythm after Sound</I> analyzes this evolution via close examination of important prototypes of early sound filmmaking, as well as contemporary discussions of rhythm, tempo, and pacing. Jacobs looks at the rhythmic dimensions of performance and sound in a diverse set ...
This second volume of Alfred Hitchcock’s reflections on his life and work and the art of cinema contains material long out of print, not easily accessible, and in some cases forgotten or unknown. Edited by Sidney Gottlieb, this new collection of interviews, articles with the great director's byline, and «as-told-to» pieces provides an enlivening perspective on a career that spanned seven decades and transformed the history of cinema.<BR ...
How do films work? How do they tell a story? How do they move us and make us think? Through detailed examinations of passages from classic films, Marilyn Fabe supplies the analytic tools and background in film history and theory to enable us to see more in every film we watch. Ranging from D. W. Griffith's <I>The Birth of a Nation</I> to James Cameron’s <I>Avatar</I>, and ending with an epilogue on digital media, < ...
From the very beginning of cinema, there have been amateur filmmakers at work. It wasn’t until Kodak introduced 16mm film in 1923, however, that amateur moviemaking became a widespread reality, and by the 1950s, over a million Americans had amateur movie cameras. In <I>Amateur Cinema,</I> Charles Tepperman explores the meaning of the «amateur» in film history and modern visual culture.<BR /><BR /> In the middle decades of ...
In 1895, Louis Lumiere supposedly said that cinema is «an invention without a future.» James Naremore uses this legendary remark as a starting point for a meditation on the so-called death of cinema in the digital age, and as a way of introducing a wide-ranging series of his essays on movies past and present. These essays include discussions of authorship, adaptation, and acting; commentaries on Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Vinc ...
Film Criticism, the Cold War, and the Blacklist examines the long-term reception of several key American films released during the postwar period, focusing on the two main critical lenses used in the interpretation of these films: propaganda and allegory. Produced in response to the hearings held by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) that resulted in the Hollywood blacklist, these films’ ideological message and rhetorical eff ...
