Film History

Animators work within a strictly defined, limited space that requires difficult artistic decisions. The blank frame presents a dilemma for all animators, and the decision of what to include and leave out raises important questions about artistry, authorship, and cultural influence. In Animating Space: From Mickey to WALL-E, renowned scholar J. P. Telotte explores how animation has confronted the blank template, and how responses to that confrontation have changed.

Pronto una gran película de Christopher Nolan. La épica historia de Dunkirk, mayo de 1940: cuando más de 300.000 tropas aliadas atrapadas fueron dramáticamente rescatadas de la destrucción a manos de la Alemania Nazi por una extraordinaria evacuación vía marítima.

George Miller made his first film, Mad Max, in 1976 after hiring unknown Mel Gibson and editing it in his kitchen. It would become the most profitable film ever made. Miller and Max is the story of two heroes. One, a globally recognised dystopian warrior. The second, the artist who created him. Written with the cooperation of a role call of cast, crew, family and associates, author Luke Buckmaster gets behind the scenes of both the set and the man: revealing the Max in Miller.

When Anna Broinowski learned that fracking had invaded downtown Sydney, she had a brilliant idea: she would seek guidance for a kryptonite-powerful, anti-fracking movie from the world's greatest propaganda factory - apart from Hollywood. After two years of trying, she was allowed to make her case in Pyongyang and was granted full permission to film. She worked closely with the leading lights of North Korean cinema, even playing an American in a military thriller.

Rollyson fully explores Brennan's work with Hollywood's greatest directors, such as Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Fritz Lang. As a father and grandfather, Brennan instilled generations of his family with an outlook on the American Dream that remains a sustaining feature of their lives today. His conservative politics, which grew out of his New England upbringing and his devout Catholicism, receive meticulous attention and a balanced assessment in A Real American Character.

The incomparable Simone Signoret (1921 - 1985), one of the grand actresses of the twentieth century and one of France's most notable stars, considered herself the "oldest discovery" in Hollywood. After years of blacklisting during the McCarthy era, she was 38 years old when she entered Hollywood through the back door in the 1959 British blockbuster Room at the Top. Her portrayal of the endearing Alice Aisgill earned her the Academy Award in 1960, the first French actor to win a coveted Oscar.

The Camera Lies unpacks Hitchcock's legacy both as a director who continuously taught audiences to distrust appearance and as a man with an uncanny insight into the human capacity for deceit and misinterpretation.

Former physicist Andrew Maynard threads together his love of science-fiction movies with his expertise on emerging technologies to engage, entertain, and make you think about the relationship between technology and society. Through the imagination and creativity of science-fiction movies, Maynard introduces listeners to the profound capabilities presented by new and emerging technologies, and the complex personal and societal challenges they present.

Michael Koresky's most formative memories were simple ones. A movie rental. A mug of tea. And a few shared hours with his mother. Years later and now a successful film critic, Koresky set out on a journey with his mother to discover more about their shared cinematic past. They rewatched ten films that she first introduced to him as a child, one from every year of the '80s, each featuring women leads.

When Brian DePalma's operatically violent and profane Scarface debuted in 1983, the film drew almost as much fire as the relentless gunfire in the film itself. The movie was a remake of 1932's Scarface—revamped for a new era of drugs, sex, and graphic violence. Attacked as both a celebration of cocaine-fueled excess and a condemnation of it, the film's reputation only grew as the years went by. But the real story of its success started nearly a century ago—when Hollywood first fell in love with the American gangster....

Ride Lonesome, the fifth film in the "Ranown cycle," is both the best and most representative of the whole series, which has been called "the most remarkable convergence of artistic achievement in the history of low-budget moviemaking." Director Bud Boetticher captures the alienation and loneliness of an America faced with the Cold War and the daily threat of nuclear annihilation. Shot in seventeen days for under a half-million dollars, Ride Lonesome is a masterpiece of cinematic minimalism.

Based on very real and practical commentary, life experience, and occasionally, tongue-in-cheek-misfortunes of horror legends, Necessary Death explores how the horror genre offers individuals a unique opportunity for insight and understanding of their own lives.

For No Reason at All: The Changing Narrative of the First World War in American Film discusses a variety of Great War-themed films made from 1915 to the present, tracing the changing approaches to the conflict over time.

يعتبر هذا الكتاب تحليلاً سريعاً وساخراً للسينما المصرية قبل ثورة يوليو وبعد الثورة حتى النكسة، ومن النكسة حتى حرب أكتوبر، ومن أكتوبر حتى وفاة السادات، ومن هناك حتى بداية حرب الخليج، ومن حرب الخليج حتى يومنا هذا.

The inside story of San Francisco's burgeoning gay history and Hollywood's trials and tribulations. Marc Huestis' showbiz memoir is an entertaining and personal retelling of his coming out in the streets of San Francisco in the early ’70s, his relationship with Harvey Milk, his award-winning early AIDS documentary work, and 20 years of memorable experiences and behind the scenes secrets of screen icons - including Debbie Reynolds, John Waters, Patty Duke, and Tony Curtis - honored at his grand singular extravaganzas at the world-renowned Castro Theater.

Dominic Smith’s The Electric Hotel winds through the nascent days of cinema in Paris and Fort Lee, New Jersey - America’s first movie town - and on the battlefields of Belgium during World War I. A sweeping work of historical fiction, it shimmers between past and present as it tells the story of the rise and fall of a prodigious film studio and one man’s doomed obsession with all that passes in front of the viewfinder.

The American World War II film depicted a united America, a mythic America in which the average guy, the girl next door, the 4-F patriot, and the grieving mother were suddenly transformed into heroes and heroines, warriors and goddesses. The Star-Spangled Screen examines the historical accuracy—or lack thereof—of films about the Third Reich, the Resistance, and major military campaigns.

Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: "Method acting." The first reception-based analysis of film acting, Imagining the Method investigates how popular understandings of the so-called Method—what its author Justin Rawlins calls "methodness"—created an exclusive brand for white, male actors while associating such actors with rebellion and marginalization. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book maps the forces giving shape to methodness and policing its boundaries.

Wawrczeck zeichnet ein subjektives Porträt eines der größten Künstler des 20. Jahrhunderts. Man sitzt mit ihm vor dem Fernseher, wenn er den ersten Hitchcock-Film sieht, begleitet ihn ins Tonstudio zu den Aufnahmen der "Drei ???" und zieht mit ihm durch die Welt: Von Hamburg über New York, von Bodega Bay nach London, immer auf der Spur von Hitchcocks Meisterwerken. Er erzählt, wie ihm Hitchcocks Filme bei der Suche nach der eigenen Identität halfen und ihm zeigten, dass die Beantwortung der Frage "Bin ich verrückt oder sind es die anderen?" immer vom Standpunkt abhängt.

Reality TV's influence is seismic: twenty-five years ago, the concept didn't exist. Yet today, it is one of the most powerful cultural forces on earth; a multi-billion-dollar machine. Despite that, it is often derided as "trash"; a cultural McDonalds not worthy of examination. The truth is that reality TV offers a profound insight into who we are as human beings, questioning the very nature of what we deem to be entertaining. Writer, broadcaster and reality TV-obsessive Jacques Peretti goes behind the scenes of a world that has entranced and consumed him for two decades.