2016 a 1975
POST-CINEMA: THEORIZING 21ST-CENTURY FILM, EDITED BY SHANE DENSON AND JULIA LEYDA (1012 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
Online
http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/contents/
PDF (link abaixo)
1012 páginas, 9MB
POST-CINEMA_Theorizing-21st-Century-Film-PDF-9mb-Shane-Denson-Julia-Leyda-eds.pdf
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GOODBYE CINEMA, HELLO CINEPHILIA – POR JONATHAN ROSENBAUM (2010, 409 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
Jonathan Rosenbaum – Goodbye Cinema Hello Cinephilia (1.46MB, 409 páginas)
The esteemed film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has brought global cinema to American audiences for the last four decades. His incisive writings on individual filmmakers define film culture as a diverse and ever-evolving practice, unpredictable yet subject to analyses just as diversified as his own discriminating tastes. For Rosenbaum, there is no high or low cinema, only more interesting or less interesting films, and the pieces collected here, from an appreciation of Marilyn Monroe’s intelligence to a classic discussion on and with Jean-Luc Godard, amply testify to his broad intellect and multi-faceted talent. Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia gathers together over fifty examples of Rosenbaum’s criticism from the past four decades, each of which demonstrates his passion for the way we view movies, as well as how we write about them. Charting our changing concerns with the interconnected issues that surround video, DVDs, the Internet, and new media, the writings collected here also highlight Rosenbaum’s polemics concerning the digital age. From the rediscovery and recirculation of classic films, to the social and aesthetic impact of technological changes, Rosenbaum doesn’t disappoint in assembling a magisterial cast of little-known filmmakers as well as the familiar faces and iconic names that have helped to define our era.
As we move into this new decade of moviegoing—one in which Hollywood will continue to feel the shockwaves of the digital age—Jonathan Rosenbaum remains a valuable guide. Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia is a consummate collection of his work, not simply for fans of this seminal critic, but for all those open to the wide variety of films he embraces and helps us to elucidate. (Goodreads)
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JAPANESE COUNTERCULTURE – THE ANTIESTABLISHMENT ART OF TERAYAMA SHUJI – POR STEVEN C. RIDGELY (2010, 173 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
Japanese Counterculture – The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shuji
pdf, 2.17MB
Review by Steven C. Ridgely
Terayama Shuji (1935-1983) was an avant-garde Japanese poet, dramatist, film director, and photographer known for his highly provocative work. In this inventive and revealing work, Steven Ridgely examines Terayama’s life and art to show that a conventional notion of him does not do full justice to the meaning and importance of his wide-ranging, often playful body of work.
Ridgely places Terayama at the center of Japanese and global counterculture and finds in his work a larger story about the history of postwar Japanese art and culture. He sees Terayama as reflecting the most significant events of his day: young poets seizing control of haiku and tanka in the 1950s, radio drama experimenting with form and content after the cultural shift to television around 1960, young assistant directors given free rein in the New Wave as cinema combated television, underground theatre in the politicized late 1960s, and experimental short film through the 1970s after both the studio system and art house cinema had collapsed.
Featuring close readings of Terayama’s art, Ridgely demonstrates how across his oeuvre there are patterns that sidestep existing power structures, never offering direct opposition but nevertheless making the opposition plain. And, he claims, there is always in Terayama’s work a broad call for seeking out or creating pockets of fiction-where we are made aware that things are not what they seem-and to use otherness in those spaces to take a clearer view of reality. (goodreads)
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WHAT CINEMA IS! – POR DUDLEY ANDREW (2010)
Dudley Andrew – What Cinema Is! (182 páginas, 2.30MB)
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INGMAR BERGMAN – POR GEOFFREY MACNAB (2009, EM INGLÊS)
MACNAB, Geoffrey – Ingmar Bergman
pdf, 255 páginas, 1.56MB
Sinopsys
Ingmar Bergman was the last and arguably the greatest of the old-style European auteurs and his influence across all areas of contemporary cinema has continued to be considerable since his death in 2007. Drawing on interviews with collaborators and original research, this text puts Bergman’s career into the context of his life.
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THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY – PIER PAOLO PASSOLINI – POR ARMANDO MAGGI (2009, 420 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
MAGGI, Armando – The Resurrection of the body – Pier Paolo Passolini
pdf, 420 páginas, 1.62MB
Review
Italian novelist, poet, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was brutally killed in Rome in 1975, a macabre end to a career that often explored humanity’s capacity for violence and cruelty. Along with the mystery of his murderer’s identity, Pasolini left behind a controversial but acclaimed oeuvre as well as a final quartet of beguiling projects that signaled a radical change in his aesthetics and view of reality.
The Resurrection of the Body is an original and compelling interpretation of these final works: the screenplay Saint Paul, the scenario for Porn-Theo-Colossal, the immense and unfinished novel Petrolio, and his notorious final film, Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, a disturbing adaptation of the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Together these works, Armando Maggi contends, reveal Pasolini’s obsession with sodomy and its role within his apocalyptic view of Western society. One of the first studies to explore the ramifications of Pasolini’s homosexuality, The Resurrection of the Body also breaks new ground by putting his work into fruitful conversation with an array of other thinkers such as Freud, Strindberg, Swift, Henri Michaux, and Norman O. Brown.
Fonte: https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo5951682.html
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CLINT EASTWOOD: EVOLUTION OF A FILMMAKER – POR JOHN H. FOOTE (LIVRO DE 2008, 225 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
779KB, PDF
John H. Foote – Clint Eastwood ~ Evolution of a Filmmaker
Review:
Whilst employing an approach that is in some ways not dissimilar from Hughes’, John Foote’s book deals only with the films that Eastwood has directed. Arranged chronologically and allotting a similar amount of space to each film, it makes for similarly easy reading and covers some common territory. A key area of difference, though, is the inclusion of a lesser amount of production information and, instead, a slightly greater degree of context and critical evaluation. Rather than focusing on the key canonical titles moreover, his emphasis (in terms of passion if not space) lies in several ardent pleas for the re-evaluation of films that he considers to have been widely ignored or misunderstood, such as A Perfect World and Flags of Our Fathers (2006). Though laudable to some degree, his belief that such films as these have not received the appreciation they deserve points to his reliance on popular rather than scholarly discourses as reference points. Though fitting with the overall style of his book, this is also emblematic of the limitations of both the secondary research undertaken and analytical depth of his writing.
In endeavouring to offer some context for the films he discusses, Foote makes reference not only to other works of Eastwood’s oeuvre but also to other films of the era or genre at hand. This does indeed prove useful in places. At the same time, his style of critical evaluation, which is sometimes productive and which can make for sporadically entertaining reading, is often less helpful however. Always highly opinionated, Foote’s personal tastes are rarely measured against other critical reactions, be they similar or contrasting. For instance, he waxes lyrical about Bird (1988) and indulges in hyperbolic praise for the acting skills of Meryl Streep and Sean Penn, whilst being absolutely brutal in his responses to The Gauntlet (1977) – “a very poor film” (p. 37), “one of the worst films of his career” (p.35) – and to its star, Sondra Locke, in general. Whilst there are many instances in which it is difficult to disagree with his positions – one can hardly fault him for calling The Rookie (1990) “a bad movie” for example (p. 83) – at other times the exercise of a little more restraint and the application of a degree of critical balance would be of benefit in helping the reader appreciate the ways in which these films work on anything other than a superficial level. A typical statement compares Sudden Impact (1983) to another rape-revenge film of the era, I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978): “The only major difference between the films is that Eastwood brought good taste to his project. Although Eastwood’s film was at times violent and brutal it was not as exploitative as that other work of trash” (p. 56.). A proclamation such as this does little to enhance one’s understanding or appreciation of either film, even if one does agree with his somewhat contentious assertions. Given that the book has many admirable qualities, it is a shame that it is marred by such ill-considered comments which have the unfortunate effect of closing down readings rather than opening them up.
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DOCUMENTARY FILM: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION – POR PATRICIA AUFDERHEIDE (2008, 166 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
Patricia Aufderheide – Documentary Film – A Very Short Introduction
pdf, 1.23MB, 166 páginas
Review
Documentary film can encompass anything from Robert Flaherty’s pioneering ethnography Nanook of the North to Michael Moore’s anti-Iraq War polemic Fahrenheit 9/11, from Dziga Vertov’s artful Soviet propaganda piece Man with a Movie Camera to Luc Jacquet’s heart-tugging wildlife epic March of the Penguins. In this concise, crisply written guide, Patricia Aufderheide takes readers along the diverse paths of documentary history and charts the lively, often fierce debates among filmmakers and scholars about the best ways to represent reality and to tell the truths worth telling.
Beginning with an overview of the central issues of documentary filmmaking–its definitions and purposes, its forms and founders–Aufderheide focuses on several of its key subgenres, including public affairs films, government propaganda (particularly the works produced during World War II), historical documentaries, and nature films. Her thematic approach allows readers to enter the subject matter through the kinds of films that first attracted them to documentaries, and it permits her to make connections between eras, as well as revealing the ongoing nature of documentary’s core controversies involving objectivity, advocacy, and bias. Interwoven throughout are discussions of the ethical and practical considerations that arise with every aspect of documentary production. A particularly useful feature of the book is an appended list of “100 great documentaries” that anyone with a serious interest in the genre should see.
Drawing on the author’s four decades of experience as a film scholar and critic, this book is the perfect introduction not just for teachers and students but also for all thoughtful filmgoers and for those who aspire to make documentaries themselves
fonte: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1396892.Documentary_Film
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MAKHMALBAF AT LARGE: THE MAKING OF A REBEL FILMMAKER – POR HAMID DABASHI (2008, 282 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
Makhmalbaf at Large – Hamid Dabashi
pdf, 282 páginas, 4.13MB
Review
The name of no other filmmaker is more synonymous with the dramatic rise of Iranian cinema in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution than Mohsen Makhmalbaf. While an array of globally renowned pre-revolutionary filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami, or an equally distinguished younger generation of directors like Jafar Panahi, is widely known and justly celebrated, the cinema of Mohsen Makhmalbaf remains singularly coterminous with the vicissitude of a massive social revolution that has shaken an ancient culture to its normative foundations.
Over the last quarter of a century, the spectacular career of Mohsen Makhmalbaf has reflected the tumultuous history of his homeland and the fate of its neighboring countries and cultures. While he began his cinematic career in Iran proper, Makhmalbaf subsequently expanded the domain of his monumental and exhilarating cinema to Turkey, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and now even France and the rest of Europe. With one surprising film after another, Mohsen Makhmalbaf has extended the sphere of his effervescent imagination from one country and culture to another, experimenting with an old medium in vastly diversified and ceaselessly innovative manners.
In Makhmalbaf at Large, Hamid Dabashi, the author of the widely celebrated book on Iranian cinema, Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future, brings together the result of more than a decade of his close friendship with–and research and reflection on the tumultuous life and spectacular career of–Mohsen Makhmalbaf into one highly readable and deeply engaging narrative. Makhmalbaf at Large is as much a vastly learned and deeply cultivated reflection on the cinematic career of one of the most spectacular filmmakers in the world, as it is the story of a deeply moving and fruitful friendship between a restive cultural icon and a restless cultural critic–a story that soon after it begins transcends the domain of an ordinary cultural criticism and begins to assume the literary life of its own.
Source: http://hamiddabashi.com/makhmalbaf-at-large-the-making-of-a-rebel-filmmaker/
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MARTIN SCORSESE – POR ROGER EBERT (2008, 315 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
Roger Ebert – Martin Scorsese (2008) em inglês
pdf, 315 páginas, 1.15MB
Review
Roger Ebert wrote the first film review that director Martin Scorsese ever received—for 1967’s I Call First, later renamed Who’s That Knocking at My Door—creating a lasting bond that made him one of Scorsese’s most appreciative and perceptive commentators. Scorsese by Ebert offers the first record of America’s most respected film critic’s engagement with the works of America’s greatest living director, chronicling every single feature film in Scorsese’s considerable oeuvre, from his aforementioned debut to his 2008 release, the Rolling Stones documentary Shine a Light.
In the course of eleven interviews done over almost forty years, the book also includes Scorsese’s own insights on both his accomplishments and disappointments. Ebert has also written and included six new reconsiderations of the director’s less commented upon films, as well as a substantial introduction that provides a framework for understanding both Scorsese and his profound impact on American cinema.
“Given their career-long back-and-forth, this collection makes perfect sense. . . . In these reconsiderations, Ebert invites us into his thought processes, letting us see not just what he thinks, but how he forms his opinions. Ebert’s insights into Scorsese are terrific, but this book offers the bonus of further insights into Ebert himself.”—Time Out Chicago
“Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, is an unabashed fan of Scorsese, whom he considers ‘the most gifted director of his generation.’ . . . Of special note are interviews with Scorsese over a 25-year period, in which the director candidly discusses his body of work.”—Publishers Weekly
(Goodreads)
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MOVIE GREATS – A CRITICAL STUDY OF CLASSIC CINEMA – POR PHILIP GILLETT (2008, 239 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
Philip Gillett – Movie Greats – A Critical Study of Classic Cinema (2008) em inglês
pdf, 1.54MB, 239 páginas
Review
Philip Gillett is obsessed with canons. He doesn’t like any of the existing ones. His ostensible intent in this book is to establish a fresh set of criteria by which to evaluate films for canonization. He proposes four criteria: a film should be absorbing enough to suspend time, offer a fresh take on the familiar, linger in the emotional memory, and affect the gut, not just the mind. But rather than use these criteria to argue for a new canon – his own “best” list is demurely presented in a single paragraph – he employs them in a systematic takedown of fourteen canonized or, he fears, soon-to-be-canonized films.
The problem, of course, for a subjective approach to evaluating films (or anything) is that an evaluation, to interest others, has to be objective. That is, the evaluator has to present a reasoned analysis demonstrating why you and I, not just he, should value the films that he values. Or, in Gillett’s case, since the thrust of the book is to persuade us why we should devalue the films he regards as overrated, the challenge is to make a case against them.
Gillett’s strategy for accomplishing this is to apply a common template for his examination of each overrated film. Each gets its own chapter, which in every case is organized into four sections: synopsis; cultural context; subjective impression; and analysis. “Cultural context” consists mainly in a summary of what reviewers thought of the film at the time and over time. “Subjective impression” recounts Gillett’s feelings as the film unfolds. “Analysis” seeks some semblance of a reasoned argument for Gillett’s subjective reaction.
This turns out to be a rather elaborate and clunky structure for what could be presented more pleasingly in a straightforward personal-essay approach to each film. And often, the divisions between criteria aren’t clear. Objective reasons for devaluing a film sometimes appear under subjective impressions; under analysis we sometimes find subjective impressions. And in the statement, “One pointer to obscurantism is the difficulty of trying to summarize what happened in the film” (p. 111), he straddles three criteria, analyzing his subjective difficulty writing a synopsis. Even when it functions well as an organizing device, the template seems like an elaborate and unnecessary disguise for Gillett’s personal dislikes.
In most cases, Gillett’s criticisms are unlikely to provoke much controversy. Yes, The Battleship Potemkin(Soviet Union 1925) suffers from its crudely political message. Yes, there is stylistic excess in The Night of the Hunter (USA 1955). Yes, the angel Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life (USA 1946) is annoying. The central performances in Citizen Kane (USA 1941) and Lawrence of Arabia (UK 1962) are, yes, overbearing. But some of his criticisms set the bar awfully high: the main character in Modern Times (USA 1936) “makes no significant contribution to solving the world’s economic woes” (p. 52); Coppola, in The Godfather (USA 1972), “lacks the combination of objectivity with compassionate understanding found in … Robert Bresson or Ermanno Olmi” (p. 125). And he can be ungenerous – failing to see any depth to Wonderful Life’s Mary – or obtuse – missing that the significance of Rosebud is not as a key to Kane’s innermost soul, but that it is incinerated, rendering that soul ultimately unknowable to those peopling his cinematic world.
The one chapter in the book that might seriously raise eyebrows is on The 39 Steps (UK 1935), not for Gillett’s reasonable criticism of the film – essentially, that it is shallow – but rather for his use of this comparatively minor Hitchcock film to dismiss Hitchcock’s entire oeuvre. For Gillett, Hitchcock is “an interesting rather than a great film-maker … a marginal figure” (p. 43). This is a judgment I would have liked him to elaborate on. It would be interesting to read an attempt to dismantle the reputation of Rear Window (USA 1954), Shadow of a Doubt (USA 1943), or Vertigo (USA 1958) from someone as erudite as Gillett.
Gillett’s learning is employed not to expand the canon but to churn it, and he seems motivated, at heart, by a kind of redistributionist resentment. Early on, he suggests that “questioning the adulation given to the few might allow others to share the limelight” (p. 12). “The few,” however, exist as “the few” only in this book; the fourteen films comprising them are hardly representative (The 39 Steps for Hitchcock?) of any canon likely to enjoy widespread approval. Further, the adulation accorded to Gillett’s few occurred more in the past than it does in the present; their reputations already have been chipped away at many times over. And if the aim is to allow other films to share the limelight, why not direct some light on those other films, rather than nudge these few off-stage? When he derides Citizen Kane as “an elderly black and white film” (p. 20), Gillett sounds like a representative of an impatient younger generation trying to push the older one aside. In his preliminary discussion of what constitutes a classic, Gillett quotes Saint-Beuve’s elegant definition of classic as a work that is “’contemporary with every age’” (pp. 9-10). If Gillett’s verdict on Citizen Kane is correct – and on Saint-Beuve’s criterion it may well be – then why not present us with a rosy young new face instead of tracing the wrinkles on an obviously aging one? Why not let time take its course? Why the hurry?
D.B. Jones,
Drexel University, USA.
Fonte: http://www.screeningthepast.com/2015/01/movie-greats-a-critical-study-of-classic-cinema/
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SOUNDINGS ON CIMENA – POR BERT CARDULLO (2008, 304 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
CARDULLO, Bert – Soundings on Cinema
pdf, 304 páginas, 1.68MB
In ‘Soundings on Cimena’, film critic Bert Cardullo engages nine major international film directors – Antonioni, Bergman, Bresson, De Sica, Felini, Kaurismaki, Leigh, Renoir and Syberberg – in a series of dialogues about how they work and the meanings of their films.
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FREEDOM TO OFFEND – HOW NEW YORK REMADE MOVIE CULTURE – POR RAYMOND J. HABERSKI JR. (2007, EM INGLÊS)
Raymond J. Haberski Jr. – Freedom to Offend – How New York Remade Movie Culture (2007) em inglês
pdf, 266 páginas, 1.8MB
Review
In the postwar era, the lure of controversy sold movie tickets as much as the promise of entertainment did. In Freedom to Offend, Raymond J. Haberski Jr. investigates the movie culture that emerged as official censorship declined and details how the struggle to free the screen has influenced our contemporary understanding of art and taste. These conflicts over film content were fought largely in the theaters and courts of New York City in the decades following World War II. Many of the regulators and religious leaders who sought to ensure that no questionable content invaded the public consciousness were headquartered in New York, as were the critics, exhibitors, and activists who sought to expand the options available to moviegoers. Despite Hollywood’s dominance of film production, New York proved to be not only the arena for struggles over film content but also the market where the financial fates of movies were sealed. Advocates for a wider range of cinematic expression eventually prevailed against the forces of censorship, but Freedom to Offend is no simple homily on the triumph of freedom from repression. In his analysis of controversies surrounding films from The Bicycle Thief to Deep Throat, Haberski offers a cautionary tale about the responsible use of the twin privileges of free choice and free expression. In the libertine 1970s, arguments in favor of the public’s right to see challenging and artistic films were twisted to provide intellectual cover for movies created solely to lure viewers with outrageous or titillating material. Social critics who stood against this emerging trend were lumped in with the earlier crusaders for censorship, though their criticism was usually rational rather than moralistic in nature. Freedom to Offend calls attention to what was lost as well as what was gained when movie culture freed itself from the restrictions of the early postwar years. Haberski exposes the unquestioning defense of the doctrine of free expression as a form of absolutism that mirrors the censorial impulse found among the postwar era’s restrictive moral guardians. Beginning in New York and spreading across America throughout the twentieth century, the battles between these opposing worldviews set the stage for debates on the social effects of the work of artists and filmmakers. (goodreads)
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PHILOSOPHY OF STANLEY KUBRICK – POR JEROLD J. ABRAMS (ED) (2007, 289 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
In the course of fifty years, director Stanley Kubrick produced some of the most haunting and indelible images on film. His films touch on a wide range of topics rife with questions about human life, behavior, and emotions: love and sex, war, crime, madness, social conditioning, and technology. Within this great variety of subject matter, Kubrick examines different sides of reality and unifies them into a rich philosophical vision that is similar to existentialism. Perhaps more than any other philosophical concept, existentialism — the belief that philosophical truth has meaning only if it is chosen by the individual — has come down from the ivory tower to influence popular culture at large. In virtually all of Kubrick’s films, the protagonist finds himself or herself in opposition to a hard and uncaring world, whether the conflict arises in the natural world or in human institutions. Kubrick’s war films (Fear and Desire, Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, and Full Metal Jacket) examine how humans deal with their worst fears — especially the fear of death — when facing the absurdity of war. Full Metal Jacket portrays a world of physical and moral change, with an environment in continual flux in which attempting to impose order can be dangerous. The film explores the tragic consequences of an unbending moral code in a constantly changing universe. Essays in the volume examine Kubrick’s interest in morality and fate, revealing a Stoic philosophy at the center of many of his films. Several of the contributors find his oeuvre to be characterized by skepticism, irony, and unfettered hedonism. In such films as A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick confronts the notion that we will struggle against our own scientific and technological innovations. Kubrick’s films about the future posit that an active form of nihilism will allow humans to accept the emptiness of the world and push beyond it to form a free and creative view of humanity. Taken together, the essays in The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick are an engaging look at the director’s stark vision of a constantly changing moral and physical universe. They promise to add depth and complexity to the interpretation of Kubrick’s signature films. (Goodreads)
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AFRICAN FILMMAKING: NORTH AND SOUTH OF THE SAHARA – POR ROY ARMES (2006, 241 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
Roy Armes – African Filmmaking: North and South of the Sahara (2006) em inglês
pdf, 1.94MB, 241 páginas
Review
African cinema is a vibrant, diverse, and relatively new art form, which continues to draw the attention of an ever-expanding worldwide audience. African Filmmaking is the first comprehensive study in English linking filmmaking in the Maghreb with that in the 12 independent states of francophone West Africa. Roy Armes examines a wide range of issues common to filmmakers throughout the region: the socio-political context, filmmaking in Africa before the mid-1960s, the involvement of African and French governments, questions of national and cultural identity, the issue of globalization, and, especially, the work of the filmmakers themselves over the past 40 years, with particular emphasis on younger filmmakers. Armes offers a wealth of information and a unique perspective on the history and future of African filmmaking. (Goodreads)
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AMERICAN INDEPENDENT CINEMA – AN INTRODUCTION – POR YANNIS TZIOUMAKIS (2006, EM INGLÊS)
pdf, 1.78MB, 320 páginas
Review
From the prestige films of Cagney Productions to recent, ultra-low budget cult hits, such as Clerks and The Blair Witch Project, American independent cinema has produced some of the most distinctive films ever made. This comprehensive introduction draws on key films, filmmakers, and film companies from the early twentieth century to the present to examine the factors that shaped this vital and evolving mode of filmmaking.
Specifically, it explores the complex and dynamic relations between independent and mainstream Hollywood cinema, showing how institutional, industrial, and economic changes in the latter have shaped and informed the former. Ordered chronologically, the book begins with Independent Filmmaking in the Studio Era (examining both top-rank and low-end film production), moves to the 1950s and 1960s (discussing both the adoption of independent filmmaking as the main method of production as well as exploitation filmmaking), and finishes with contemporary American independent cinema (exploring areas such as the New Hollywood, the rise of mini-major and major independent companies and the institutionalization of independent cinema in the 1990s). Each chapter includes case studies which focus on specific films, filmmakers, and production and distribution companies. (Goodreads)
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THE CRIME WAVE: THE FILMGOERS GUIDE TO GREAT CRIME MOVIES – POR HOWARD HUGHES (2006, EM INGLÊS)
hughes, howard – the crime wave
pdf, 1.19MB
Review
Crime movies inhabit dark and desperate worlds, yet they account for many of Hollywood’s most triumphant successes. In full acknowledgement of this achievement, “Crime Wave” offers an authoritative and informative, stimulating and entertaining guide to the crime movie phenomenon, from its early days to the present, charting its history and celebrating the people who have given it a special and enduring place in cinema goers’ affections. Chapters focus on landmark Hollywood films – from 1931’s “The Public Enemy”, through “The Maltese Falcon”, “Point Blank”, “Dirty Harry”, “The Godfather” trilogy and “Goodfellas”, to “LA Confidential” and “Oceans 11” – telling their stories and on the way discussing many more crime movies, both major and lesser known. “Crime Wave” represents and investigates gangster and heist movies, blaxploitation and noir, murder mysteries, vehicles for vigilante or buddy cops, even a gangster love story. It features biographies and filmographies detailing the key participants and background details of the film’s making, locations and sets.
It also explores each film’s sources and influences, its impact on the crime genre and current fashion, including spin-offs, copies and sequels. It examines the films’ themes, style and box office fortunes. Detailed cast list information is provided for each of the main featured films. (I.B. Tauris)
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SURREALISM AND CINEMA – POR MICHAEL RICHARDSON (2006, 202 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
RICHARDSON, Michael – Surrealism and Cinema
pdf, 1.2MB
Review
Michael Richardson’s Surrealism and cinema addresses misconceptions about surrealism and dispels any limited notion of what surrealism might be. He shows that surrealism is an activity, a living thing or a tension within the work rather than it is a style, a movement or anything tied to a fixed thing. It exists in many different styles and variations: in popular film, such as some genres of the Hollywood film, the documentary and animation. Although he acknowledges that the early twentieth century period of surrealism may never be repeated, owing to the loss of the silent film and the mystery of entering a darkened room, he nevertheless shows that surrealism exists beyond that era.
Richardson’s aim is clear: “…the current work is an attempt to bring analysis to bear on the relation between surrealism and cinema precisely in a broad perspective” (7). Therefore, the significance of the title: Surrealism and cinema and not Surrealist cinema. This clarity of intent Richardson gains from André Breton’s Surrealism and painting: Breton “was seeking not to trace a ‘surrealist art’ but rather to situate surrealism within painting” (4-5). Richardson situates surrealism within cinema as a “shifting point of magnetism around which the collective activity of the surrealists revolves” (3). Surrealism is not your usual set of contradictions; it is a converging point, “a relation between things” (10). “Transformation”, “marvellous”, “provocative”, “spontaneity”, “collective” and “contagious” are just some of the major concepts that belong to surrealism.
The existing literature on surrealism and the cinema is identified as incomplete. In his survey of the literature, on the cinema and in English, Richardson shows the need to fill that gap. Ado Kyrou’s Le Surréalism au cinéma(1953, revised 1963) is considered a starting point. It has shortcomings. While it argues that the cinema “is in essence surrealist”, it fails to justify that statement. Like Breton’s Surrealism and painting, it is a definitive book; it is also incomplete and subjective. Paul Hammond’s The Shadow and its shadow (1978) is considered the most useful, but that too is seen to have shortcomings. Others limit themselves to Luis Buñuel.
Richardson sifts through different films and filmmakers and clears up common misconceptions. Buñuel’s L’Âge d’or (France 1930) is considered a key film even more so than Un chien andalou (France 1928). Most of Maya Deren’s films, he argues are not really surreal and Man Ray’s are “a little more than home movies” (11). For complex reasons, Entr’acte (René Clair, 1924) and others are said to belong to Dada. In a more recent example, the films of David Lynch are considered to be in the spirit of mind games rather than in the spirit of surrealism: “They may evoke surrealism in their visual texture, but they do so only to assimilate it to a set of empty signifiers” (73).
Surrealism and cinema covers a loose chronological pattern, a variety of countries and a range of filmmakers, many of who do not necessarily work in their country of birth. This is shown to be for different reasons: Nelly Kaplan and Alejandro Jodorowsky chose exile, while Raúl Ruiz’s exile was the consequence of Pinochet’s coup in 1973 (149). While there is a recognized overall intensity of surrealism in France, Richardson does not limit his study to France. Neither does the activity of surrealist groups within a country mean that there will be surrealist films as a result. For example, there has been a pervasive presence in Eastern Europe with surrealist groups, but not so with film. Czechoslovakia is considered an exception with animator Jan Svankmajer, who is said to be one of the most original and productive of all surrealist filmmakers (121). The chapter on Ruiz brings us to Latin America and more recent times; nevertheless, Ruiz is shown to have a disparate range of work and it is his 70s and 80s’ films that best display surrealism.
An important recognition in this book, one that opens up modern debate, is the special relation surrealism has with popular culture. Richardson informs us that the surrealist movement has always had a contradictory interest in popular culture. The surrealists were aware that popular culture was a part of the commercial apparatus; at the same time, they were interested in it as a disruption against dominant cultural traditions. Unlike postmodernism, which collapses the differences between high and low culture and tends to valorize the low, the surrealists saw popular culture as some kind of parallel to their own activity. They valued Georges Méliès, not so much for the fantasy, as for the “marvellous”. Where fantasy accepts the convention of realism, the marvellous does not: the marvellous “refuses the realist demand for verisimilitude, and reconciles – or holds tension” (20). The surrealists also liked Louis Feuillade who was considered to have an even greater sense of the marvellous than Méliès. The anarchy and spontaneity in Feuillade’s work was considered special to the surrealist attitude. Spontaneity, or “automatic writing”, is an important surrealist notion, something which, Richardson argues, has perhaps not resurfaced in such a way until Ruiz.
Richardson points out that Hollywood would seem at odds with surrealism. At the same time, he shows that the Hollywood genre films, particularly those of the early thirties, were of value, if not fascinating, to the surrealists. The overwhelming amount of films made in Hollywood were seen to regulate the dreams it produced and destroy spontaneity; on the other hand, “the Hollywood system still left a place for the imagination” (61). Even if the films were unintentionally surrealist, the surrealists found in Hollywood an ‘involuntary’ surrealism – a disruption of narrative and an opening up of meaning other than the intended one (68). Films of particular value to the surrealists were the horror films between 1932-1935: the stories of Frankenstein, Dracula and King Kong. More surprising than the horror film, was the surrealist appeal to the idea of the couple and the treatment of ‘love’ in many Hollywood films from 1920-1950. The comedy genre was also highly regarded; this was mostly for its moral value and its “taste of anarchy”. The Marx Brothers, Charles Chaplin, W.C.Fields, and especially Buster Keaton, are just some of those mentioned.
One of the most enlightening chapters is on surrealism and the documentary. Richardson explores this neglected area. He claims that while it may seem contradictory to put surrealism and documentary together, surrealism as anti-realist and documentary as realist, surrealism has always had a documentary element (77). Chris Marker and Alain Resnais would be the obvious contenders for discussion here. Richardson recognizes the contribution of these two and goes beyond the obvious. It is fascinating to read about Jean Painlevé, a natural history film maker whose films were mostly about underwater sea creatures. His films are described as having a different kind of ‘wonder’ to those of David Attenborough. Painlevé’s films are not educational. His intent is “to bring into question a human centered way of relating to the natural world” (83). Humphrey Jennings is somewhat of a surprise. Richardson informs us that he was an even more engaged surrealist than Buñuel, having been an active member of the English Surrealist Group. His films, however, are noted for their contradictions: they are anti-surrealist in the way they follow a positive line and as contributions to the British war effort.
The filmmakers Richardson chooses to write about come from a variety of artistic backgrounds and their work can often be both surrealist and anti-surrealist. This aspect seems to highlight surrealism’s inability to be pinned down to any one thing, or even one person. Jacques Prévert, amongst many other things, is a poet and a screenwriter; he worked with many directors – among them, Marcel Carné and Jean Renoir. L’Affaire est dans le sac (France 1932), a film Prévert made with his brother is thought to belong to the surrealist milieu as much as does Buñuel’s L’Âge d’or. Some of the filmmakers’ works may be considered prime examples of surrealism and others may not be surreal at all and some may develop into something else. Walerian Borowczyk, for example, a famous animator of the 60s, is noted for his surrealist films based on surrealist writers. Later in his career his films turn into pornography. Jodorowsky is shown to be comparable with Salvador Dalí with his dazzling, extravagant qualities; in other ways, Jodorowsky is divided from him for having integrity in his work that Dalí lacked (137). Moreover, Jodorowsky’s concern for ‘liberation’ is at odds with surrealism. Referring to Breton, Richardson informs us that “Surrealism denies the very idea of liberation” (141).
Richardson shows concern over where surrealism is heading: its diffuse and elusive nature may put it in danger of losing any specificity at all. Today the word surreal is often used arbitrarily and surrealism must be wary of the fashionable and the marketable. ‘Magic realism’ has clouded the picture in Latin America and we are informed that it needs to be treated with as much caution as any realism. The newly coined, ‘Black surrealism’ is also a trend to be wary of. This expansive study contributes to maintaining a notion of what surrealism within cinema might be without restricting it to a set of rules or conditions. Even if one may not have seen many of the films analyzed, and some apparently are impossible to see, it doesn’t seem to matter. It’s the ‘contagious’ spirit of surrealism that this study best conveys.
June Werrett
Flinders University, Australia
Fonte: http://www.screeningthepast.com/2015/01/surrealism-and-cinema/
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ETHNOGRAPHIC MOVIE – POR KARL G. HEIDER (EDIÇÃO REVISADA DE 2006 – 1ª EDIÇÃO DE 1976, 289 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
HEIDER, Karl G. – Ethnographic Movie (2006)
pdf, 1.14MB
Review
This revised edition of Ethnographic Film originally appeared in 1976 and its goal has not much changed over 30 years: “an attempt to develop a systematic way of thinking of ethnographic film, and in particular about the ‘ethnographicness’ of film” (ix). What is different in this edition is perhaps the person who is writing it, now an administrator in the university, who affords himself to be “polemic, repetitive, and speaking in different tongues,” characteristics which he knows “are not universally admired” (xi). Heider stays close to his original epistemological position, that ethnographic film is a reality that can be grasped in a limited number of attributes that may become instrumental in the evaluation and production of films, and in using films for teaching purposes. He is going past large and small crises and debates in anthropology, and in visual anthropology in particular, and proceeds along his own path to lend a particular perspective on ethnographic film.
The book begins with explicating the nature of ethnographic film and ethnography itself, as well as the relation between the two. For Heider, that relation can be summarized in one sentence: “Ethnographic film is film that reflects ethnographic understanding” (7). Film is thus something that follows ethnographic investigation. By extension, the role of film is seen more as a second‐order visual translation or alternative visual representation of an anterior understanding that has been “written.” When it comes to truth, Heider holds on to dogmatic principles of accurately reporting events in time and space.
Chapter 2, on the history of ethnographic film, pays tribute to early developments, especially those of Robert Flaherty, to whom he attributes the birth of ethnographic film in 1922, and to Bateson and Mead, whose attempts to use film as an integral part of anthropological research and reportage are seen “as a major advance in concept, even if that concept could not be fully realized” (30). The real coming into its own of ethnographic film is situated after World War II and is illustrated through four major figures: Jean Rouch, John Marshall, Robert Gardner, and Timothy Ash. Others are consciously omitted, and Heider appears to have little interest in new generations of filmmakers who inscribe themselves directly into an ethnographic tradition or deviate from the genre with terms such as “transcultural” or “intercultural” cinema. When it comes to qualifying knowledge, Heider only ventures in a limited way into a “reflexive approach,” as he evaluates the presence of the ethnographer as part of the focus of the film (67–70). All of this comes from sticking to an objectifying agenda, namely “the ethnographicness” of ethnographic film. The chapter is aptly closed with a scant review of interesting film projects and the institutionalization of ethnographic film in associations, prizes, journals, and centers.
The book proceeds in chapter 3 to discuss the attributes of ethnographic film, and here it becomes very practical, for both the producer and evaluator of ethnographic film. Heider makes his position very clear with regard to technical characteristics, such as the relation between image and sound and in particular to the limited role that narrative should take. Paradoxically, his purist vision of ethnographic film as “showing” (and not telling) also leads him to reconcile ethnographic film with a secondary role that follows ethnographic text, or at best when text and film are presented as complementary media. Heider recognizes ultimately that film and text are two different modes of representation and that the same person could rarely do both. In chapter 1, Heider subscribes to an objectivist empirical epistemology wherein he points out that while “truth” is the goal of both ethnographic text and film, the two media provide for a different relation with truth. He gives as an example Malinowski’s description in Argonauts of a trading expedition that “could be true” but is actually a reconstructed account yet acceptable in text. In film, Heider argues, such a construction would not work and thus would not be acceptable.
What remains are very clear views and technical appreciations of how an ethnographic film should be: visuals that speak for themselves (because they are “whole”); sound that is natural; minimal narration, backed up by written material; selective descriptive truths; context oriented with attention to whole people (who can and do stand in for their culture) and their physical contexts; and inserting the ethnographer as part of the scene. In the book, Heider does pay attention to the intrusive and distorting nature of filmmaking, but his view on ethnographic filmmaking remains informed by the possibility of a holistic representation.
Within the confines of Heider’s epistemological approach, ethnographic film is a tool that communicates ethnographic understanding. As such, it can be evaluated on an “attribute dimension grid” (109). In the earlier edition of the book, Heider stops short of translating this grid into measurable scales that would enable one to quantify such dimensions and perhaps come up with a factor that would enable an evaluator to state that “film X has a 60% rate of ethnographicness.” Further developing such a scientific path is not the case, however, in the new edition. Heider rather relies upon his experience as a filmmaker and teacher to deal with the technicalities of production, evaluation, and teaching within a narrow scientific canon. His orientation is not an appreciation of ethnography or film as art, nor does he take into account the politics of production and appreciation by audiences.
The final chapters of the book summarize the main points, as they delve further into the practicalities of making ethnographic film and using it for teaching purposes. Heider points to how difficult it remains to issue official ethical guidelines for ethnographic filmmaking. Without being specific but providing suggestive examples, he reminds filmmakers to take ethical principles into account. In line with his own epistemological principles, Heider sees the classroom as the most ideal setting for the consumption of ethnographic film, as films can be supplemented with written information. He finds it useful for films to be watched twice, in order to allow the film to fully speak for itself.
This revised edition of Ethnographic Film extends the reputation of the first edition of being a classic. It provides real answers to an understanding of and possible use for the evaluation of film and the training of filmmakers. Its epistemological objectivist focus remains too narrow, however, for effectively dealing with contemporary issues that influence the scene of filmic (re)production of culture(s). Producers of film, audiences, distributors, critics, and teachers will be satisfied to find some canonical knowledge and strategies in ethnographic filmmaking. Yet they may also find that the book offers few responses to filmmaking in the transnational global scene, the various shifting centers of film production, the fragmented and partial nature of knowledge, the intrusion, alienation, and reflection that filmmaking causes, the impact of memory and the senses, the impositions of the visual, and newly found alliances between film and art. Dealing with such issues requires a different epistemological stance and a different language that accounts for knowledge and encounter, perhaps in which filmmaking becomes an ethnoscape that documents the rizomatic parcours of a nomadic filmmaker.
Fonte: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1548-7458.2009.01013.x
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SCREENS FADE TO BLACK: CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN AMERICAN CINEMA – POR DAVID J. LEONARD (LIVRO DE 2006, 230 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
David J. Leonard – Screens Fade to Black ~ Contemporary African American Cinema
PDF, 1.04MB
Review:
The triple crown of Oscars awarded to Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, and Sidney Poitier on a single evening in 2002 seemed to mark a turning point for African Americans in cinema. Certainly it was hyped as such by the media, eager to overlook the nuances of this sudden embrace. In this new study, author David Leonard uses this event as a jumping-off point from which to discuss the current state of African-American cinema and the various genres that currently compose it. Looking at such recent films as Love and Basketball, Antwone Fisher, Training Day, and the two Barbershop films–all of which were directed by black artists, and most of which starred and were written by blacks as well–Leonard examines the issues of representation and opportunity in contemporary cinema.
In many cases, these films-which walk a line between confronting racial stereotypes and trafficking in them-made a great deal of money while hardly playing to white audiences at all. By examining the ways in which they address the American Dream, racial progress, racial difference, blackness, whiteness, class, capitalism and a host of other issues, Leonard shows that while certainly there are differences between the grotesque images of years past and those that define today’s era, the consistency of images across genre and time reflects the lasting power of racism, as well as the black community’s response to it. (Goodreads)
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TRADITIONS IN WORLD CINEMA LINDA BADLEY; BARTON R. PALMER E STEVEN JAY SCHNEIDER (ED.) (2005, 289 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
BADLEY, Linda; PALMER, Barton R.; SCHNEIDER, Steven Jay – Traditions in World Cinema
pdf, 1MB, 289 páginas
“The core volume in the Traditions in World Cinema series, this book brings together a colourful and wide-ranging collection of world cinematic traditions – national, regional and global – all of which are in need of introduction, investigation and, in some cases, critical reassessment. Topics include: German expressionism, Italian neorealism, French New Wave, British new wave, Czech new wave, Danish Dogma, post-Communist cinema, Brazilian post-Cinema Novo, new Argentine cinema, pre-revolutionary African traditions, Israeli persecution films, new Iranian cinema, Hindi film songs, Chinese wenyi pian melodrama, Japanese horror, new Hollywood cinema and global found footage cinema.”
Preface (Toby Miller)
Introduction (Linda Badley & R. Barton Palmer)
I. European Traditions
1. German Expressionism (J.P. Telotte)
2. Italian Neorealism (Peter Bondanella)
3. The French New Wave (Richard Neupert)
4. The British New Wave (R. Barton Palmer)
II. Central, Eastern and Northern European Traditions
5. The Czechoslovak New Wave (Peter Hames)
6. Danish Dogma (Linda Badley)
7. Post-Communist Cinema (Christina Stojanova)
III. South American Traditions
8. Post-Cinema Novo Brazilian Cinema (Randal Johnson)
9. New Argentine Cinema (Myrto Konstantarakos)
IV. African and Middle Eastern Traditions
10. Early Cinematic Traditions in Africa (Roy Armes)
11. Israeli Persecution Films (Nitzan Ben-Shaul)
12. New Iranian Cinema (Negar Mottahedeh)
V. Asian Traditions
13. Popular Hindi Cinema and the Film Song (Corey Creekmur)
14. Chinese Melodrama (Stephen Teo)
15. Japanese Horror Cinema (Jay McRoy)
VI. American and Transnational Traditions
16. The ‘New’ American Cinema (Robert Kolker)
17. The Global Art of Found Footage Cinema (Adrian Danks)
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A COMPANION TO LATIN AMERICAN FILM – POR STEPHEN M. GART (2004)
Stephen M. Gart – A Companion To Latin American Film (2004)
pdf, 1.9MB
Review
Latin American cinema has seen major developments in the past half-century, and some of the most exciting work in contemporary film now originates there. This Companion traces its development from the mid 1890s, with particular attention to the early period when it was dominated by foreign film makers (or foreign models such as Hollywood), through the 1960s when as a genre it found its feet – the New Latin American Cinema movement – and beyond. Detailed analysis of the best twenty-five films of Latin America follows: cast and crew, awards, plots, themes and techniques. The ‘Guide to Further Reading’ includes important books, articles and Internet sites.
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STRAY DOG OF ANIME: THE FILMS OF MAMORU OSHII – POR BRIAN RUH (2004, 241 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
Brian Ruh – Stray Dog of Anime ~ The Films of Mamoru Oshii
949KB, PDF
Review:
by Jasper Sharp
Let me begin by going out on a limb and stating quite boldly that I think Mamoru Oshii is one of the most significant individual figures working in Japanese cinema today. With the industry becoming increasingly defined by vapid, commercial “idol” movies destined for the domestic market, which, with their glossy production values matched only by the slackness of their scripts, are of little interest to anyone outside of the country’s pop-culture frame of reference, it is almost ironic that one of the most thought-provoking and introspective movies of the year, Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, was made in a medium traditionally looked down on by most mainstream viewers: animation.
Oshii is no typical anime director and it would be a big mistake to assume his works in this labour-intensive and high-risk commercial industry typify the genre. They aspire to so much more than the competition, both in terms of their content and their technical accomplishment. As Oshii himself frames it, he seems himself very much an outsider within the industry, often referring to himself as “a stray dog”. Pushing the cyberpunk genre to its very limits and beyond, Oshii doesn’t make films for a predetermined demographic. Rather, he is a director who, over the past two decades, has more or less created his own audience, and an international one at that. And not just in animation either. Let us not forget that he has brought his own highly individual vision into the live-action realm too, for example by utilising new computer technologies to investigate the levels between constructed and consumed reality in his previous movie, Avalon (2000).
It is no bold claim to say that Oshii proves a challenging director for most audiences. As the reception of Innocence at this year’s Cannes Film Festival suggests, his recent work requires such a degree of engagement that those in search of conventional plot mechanics, unambiguous characterisation and sense of being confronted in a world readily recognisable to themselves are advised to search elsewhere. The common consensus at Cannes saw most critics marvelling at Innocence’s images but left outside its cold, dramatic core.
Such reservations are understandable. One gets out of an Oshii film what one invests into it. The director makes little attempt to leave his films open to any form of explanation. By creating lavishly detailed worlds that remain open-ended enough for the individual viewer to grope around in, for those willing to immerse themselves in his oeuvre, the benefits are obvious. Throughout his career, Oshii has left a trail of crumbs of ideas, and left it up to the viewer to find out where he is going. Though one often begins to wonder if he knows himself, we do get to follow his train of thought, and shudder at the implications of where it is taking us.
Bridging the gap between thorough scholarly analysis and clear, accessible writing for the general reader, Brian Ruh’s timely book is a welcome study of a director whose works openly invite closer analysis. Taking a chapter-by-chapter look at Oshii’s individual works, beginning with his contribution to the animated TV series Urusei Yatsura (1981-84) through Angel’s Egg (1985), a thematic turning point that had some anime fans howling in frustration, he traces the themes and intellectual concerns throughout his body of work leading up to, but not including this latest film. Ruh charts the increasing centrality of such recurrent motifs as the aestheticisation of technology (especially military), the usage of mythological and religious symbolism and allegory as they become further detached from their origins, and the questions of identity and reality in a rapidly changing society – “how technology alters how one perceives the world”.
A lot of Western writing on Japanese animation has a frustrating tendency to get bogged down in the details of that tricky area of “cultural specificity” whilst missing the more interesting broader picture. Is Japanese animation really intrinsically different from the animation of other countries, and if so, why this might be? Attempts to explain away differences in the style or content of anime as if it were part of a closed system unrelated to other cultures, or indeed, other media forms, has resulted in a lot of unsatisfactory writing on the subject, and anime writers who take this approach easily lay themselves open to accusations of fetishising Japan, not to mention drawing the appreciation of the anime genre into a closed-off otaku ghetto.
Ruh opens his analysis of Oshii’s best known film Ghost in the Shell in chapter six by citing Japanese sociologist and media critic Toshiya Ueno, who in the past has been highly critical of Western fan appreciation of animation. In the quote Ueno draws attention to the implicit assumption of one author that “anime is more interesting for ‘western’ people than for the Japanese because of its cultural specificity” – that it can thus be used as an avenue to learn about “Japan” from afar.
Thankfully, for the most part, Ruh avoids such pitfalls. His observations are relevant to the films at hand, not trite generalisations. This is, after all, an auteur-based book, with the point of reference between the films being the director rather than the country in which they were produced. Obviously many of Oshii’s own political views were shaped by the events occurring in his own country as he was growing up – for example, in the struggles of the Japanese student protest against the renewing of the Anpo security pact in the 1960s, which allowed America to keep their troops on Japanese soil, and the Japanese government’s subsequent collusion in the Vietnam war. This is all valuable background information that has considerable bearing on allusions in Oshii’s films to the US presence at the Yokota Airbase, which “serves as a weak point in Japan’s landscape, permeable to dangerous imperial imports” – a possible gateway through which nuclear weapons are smuggled in Patlabor 2, and a haven for the vampires to congregate around in Blood the Last Vampire (which Oshii did not direct, but in his capacity as a Supervising Producer, most surely had some input on), as Whitby was in Bram Stoker’s original novel of Dracula.
But there is little specifically Japanese about a director who cites such eclectic visual influences as the Russian live-action director Andrei Tarkovsky or the German surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, and who is as likely to cross-reference Arthurian legend (in Avalon) as he is the Japanese folktale Urashima Taro in Urusei Yatsura. Certainly, the most interesting thing about Oshii’s work, specifically the Ghost in the Shell films, is not only that they borrow elements from foreign models (just as Western sci-fi borrows from anime in return), but the showily self-conscious way in which they do this.
In today’s image-saturated technological global media environment, where the West is seen as just as exotic for the Japanese as Japan is for westerners, Oshii consciously cross-references elements from many cultural sources within his work. These appropriations come not directly from the culture in question itself, but previous imaginings of this culture. Whilst on a stylistic level, Ghost in the Shell most clearly borrows from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, one must remember that Scott’s film, the most significant influence on an entire generation of science fiction works, itself reconstructed its world in a cinematic film noir style, with the gleaming city of Tokyo proving a significant influence on its sleek but stark production design. One can’t put it much more succinctly than in Ruh’s citation of Livia Monnet: “the many visual elements and diegetic correspondences between Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner indicate that Oshii’s anime has a conscious agenda of remediating Ridley Scott’s cult film, and that an intermedial conceptual fusion occurs between the two films”.
As mentioned, Oshii’s work is situated within the genre known as cyberpunk which began as a field of sci-fi literature in America in the 1980s pioneered by writers such as William Gibson, who in novels like Neuromancer (1984), made heavy usage of the alluring modern iconography of the city as a stand-in for any anonymous, alienating, technologically-advanced metropolis. The past twenty-five years have seen a constant discourse of both visual and philosophical ideas ping-ponged back and forth between Japanese and Western practitioners, be they novelists, animators or manga writers. Just as Gibson’s ideas were taken up by Masamune Shirow in the original manga source material for Ghost in the Shell, which suffered numerous alterations at the hands of Oshii, many of these ideas from Oshii’s animation were later adopted by the Wachowski brothers in the Matrix films.
Though Ghost in the Shell is the film that has attracted the most attention out of Oshii’s oeuvre, Ruh’s book has a lot more to say about his others, and how the elements most identified with the director were already manifesting themselves in his previous works such as Patlabor, Angel’s Egg and Twilight Q 2: Labyrinth Objects File 538. One possible criticism is that the book rather glosses over Oshii’s lesser-known live-action films Red Spectacles (1987), Stray Dog: Kerberos Panzer Cop (1991) and Talking Head (1992), which is a particular shame because so little has been written about them, but this is but a minor niggle.
The auteur-based approach of basing a chapter around a single work has the potential of setting the film in question in stone, sucking out its life, turning it into an intellectual exercise and killing off any alternate readings individual viewers might have. But for Ruh, Oshii’s films are about “the subjectivity inherent in concepts of reality”, and thankfully the author makes no secret of his own subjectivity as a viewer. As he himself points out in the introduction, this intelligent but never too highbrow or esoteric book is not intended to act as the final authority on Oshii’s works. It does however serve as a valuable guidebook in the world of a director whose films are clearly in need of much further explanation and exploration.
Source: http://www.midnighteye.com/books/stray-dog-of-anime-the-films-of-mamoru-oshii/
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FIFTY CONTEMPORARY FILMMAKERS – POR YVONNE TASKER (ED.) (2002, 472 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers (Edited by Yvonne Tasker, 2002)
pdf, 1.95MB, 472 páginas
Review:
Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers examines the work of some of today’s cinematic voices. It covers filmmakers drawn from diverse cinematic traditions from around the world. Each entry is supplemented by a filmography, references and suggestions for further reading.
The fifty filmmakers are: Allison Anders, Aoyama Shinji, Gregg Araki, Jean-Jacques Beineix, Bernardo Bertolucci, Luc Besson, Kathryn Bigelow, Charles Burnett, Tim Burton, James Cameron, Jane Campion, Jackie Chan, The Coen Brothers, Francis Ford Coppola, David Cronenberg, Julie Dash, Atom Egoyan, David Fincher, Hal Hartley, Todd Haynes, Jim Jarmusch, Neil Jordan, Kaurismaki Brothers, Abbas Kiarostami, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Diane Kurys, Ang Lee, Spike Lee, David Lynch, Michael Mann, Mira Nair, Sally Potter, John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, Coline Serreau, Steven Soderbergh, Todd Solondz, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, Quentin Tarantino, Tsui Hark, Christine Vachon, Lars von Trier, Wayne Wang, Peter Weir, Wim Wenders, Wong Kar-Wai, John Woo, Zhang Yimou and Zhang Yuan.
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MODERNITY AND METROPOLIS – WRITING, FILM AND URBAN FORMATIONS – POR PETER BROOKER (2002, 241 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
BROOKER, Peter. Modernity and Metropolis – Writing, Film and Urban Formations (2002)
724KB, PDF
This study of urban identity and community looks at selected twentieth century literary and film texts in the contexts of theorizations modernism, postmodernism, post-coloniality and globalization. Brooker draws on Beck and Giddens and Rem Koolhasas, amongst others, to propose a ‘reflexive modernism’ which rewrites and re-imagines the urban scene. Cities included are London and New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Bangkok. Writers and artists considered are: in the modernist period, Ezra Poun and T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes and Melvin B. Tolson, and in the contemporary period, Hanif Kureishi, Bernadine Evaristo and Salman Rushdie, Iain Sinclair and Patrick Keiller, Paul Auster and Sarah Schulman, William Gibson, Wong Kar-Wai and Lawrence Chua, and Alex Proyas, Latife Tekin and John Berger. (Good reads)
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ON FILM – POR STEPHEN MULHALL (2001, 285 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
pdf, 1.29MB
Synopsis
In this new edition of his acclaimed exploration of the four Alien movies, Stephen Mulhall adds several new chapters on Steven Spielberg’s Mission: Impossible trilogy and Minority Report . The first part of the book discusses the four Alien movies. Mulhall argues that the sexual significance of the aliens themselves, and of Ripley’s resistance to them, takes us deep into the question of what it is to be human. At the heart of the book is a highly original and controversial argument that films themselves can philosophize. Mulhall then applies his interpretative model to another sequence of contemporary Hollywood movies: the Mission: Impossible series. A brand new chapter is devoted to each of the three films in the series, and to other films by the relevant directors that cast light on their individual contribution to it. In this discussion, the nature of television becomes as central a concern as the nature of cinema; and the shift in generic focus from science fiction to thriller also makes room for a detailed reading of Spielberg’s Minority Report .
Long reviews:
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/film.2003.0023
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/film.2003.0024
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ANIME: FROM AKIRA TO PRINCESS MONONOKE, EXPERIENCING CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE ANIMATION – POR SUSAN J. NAPIER (2000, 320 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
susan j. napier – anime from akira to mononoke
pdf, 1.05MB
Review
Japanese animation, known as anime to its fans, has a firm hold on American pop culture. However, anime is much more than children’s cartoons. It runs the gamut from historical epics to sci-fi sexual thrillers. Often dismissed as fanciful entertainment, anime is actually quite adept at portraying important social and cultural issues like alienation, gender inequality, and teenage angst. This book investigates the ways that anime presents these issues in an in-depth and sophisticated manner, uncovering the identity conflicts, fears over rapid technological advancement, and other key themes present in much of Japanese animation. (Goodreads)
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METROPOLIS – POR THOMAS ELSAESSER [2000, 85 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS]
Thomas Elsaesser – Metropolis [BFI Film Classics] (3.21MB, 85 páginas)
Metropolis (1925) is a monumental work. When it was made it was Germany’s most expensive feature film, a canvas for director Fritz Lang’s increasingly extravagant ambitions (it took sixteen months to film). Lang, inspired by the skyline of New York, created a whole new vision of cities. One of the greatest works of science fiction, the film also tells human stories about love and family.
In this book, Thomas Elsaesser explores the cultural phenomenon of Metropolis: its different versions (there is no definitive one), its changing meanings, its role as a storehouse or database of the 20th century.
Reviews
[…] One measure of Thomas Elsaesser’s achievement in this book is that, despite its slim nature (87 pages including notes, bibliography, and appendix), he manages to survey and provide interesting discussion on most of these concerns.
More than just a formulaic introduction to the film and its place in cultural history, Elsaesser’s book is elegantly written and draws together from various archival sources and recent accounts two important histories that bear on practically every discussion of Metropolis. The first is the history of the film’s origins – a history that speaks significantly to issues of authorship, collaboration, and reputation. In the pattern of such other recent film scholarship as Klaus Kreimeier’s The UFA Story: The H istory of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918-1945 (U of California P, 1999) and Patrick McGilligan’s Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (St. Martin’s, 1997), Elsaesser cautions against accepting traditional accounts of the genesis of Metropolis, particularly Fritz Lang’s version that rather romantically attributes the film to his first glimpse of the New York skyline from onboard the SS Deutschland in October 1924, and that further implies the film is another instance of Lang’s auteurist inspiration. In fact, as Elsaesser’s sources show, Lang and his wife, noted science fiction writer Thea von Harbou, had by that time been working on the film script (as well as her simultaneous novelization) for nearly a year, and Lang’s producer Erich Pommer had publicly announced plans for the film in January 1924. The second of those histories is of the various versions of the film-versions different enough that, even after several recent efforts at restoration, we still lack a truly authoritative text. Metropolis, as it debuted in January 1927, ran for approximately three hours. Like other classics of silent cinema, most notably Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) and Von Stroheim’s Greed (1925), it was subsequently subjected to repeated cuts that transformed the film, as Elsaesser suggestively offers, into “a ruin-in-progress.” With remarkable clarity and economy, Elsaesser traces out the intricacies of those re-editings and retitlings that produced rather different American, British and Commonwealth, and general European release versions, and that subsequently resulted in the most common prints today having a running time of under 90 minutes. This sort of compact history, of both Metropolis‘s beginnings and its ends, alone makes Elsaesser’s book a valuable addition to any film library and a compulsory introduction for film students.
The volume also nicely represents the early critical reception and commentary on Metropolis. One of the book’s pleasant surprises is its ability, through a relatively brief sampling, to afford a satisfying flavor of the original reactions to the film: citing German Communists’ scathing responses to Metropolis, summarizing the technologists’ reaction to what would become one of the key “Machine Age” texts, and situating it squarely in the context of the Weimar era’s industrial politics. Because it was such a powerful film, it clearly provoked varied responses – responses that, because of the tensions t hat marked the Weimar Republic, w ere quite often strident. Placing Metropolis in a later context, Elsaesser effectively represents the complex efforts of the Nazis to disown the film (even though it was avowedly one of Hitler’s favorites) by situating it as a misguided effort by UFA “to imitate the soulless civilization of America.” He also allows us to see that effort in an ironic light cast by what is surely the most famous commentary on the work, Siegfried Kracauer’s landmark history of early German cinema, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton UP, 1947). That book would trace in Metropolis the rising spirit of National Socialism and eventually damn it as “proto-Nazi.” Certainly, this sort of quick overview of responses is critical and cultural history in a nutshell, but it is also most effectively done and a nice model for what such volumes can accomplish.
By comparing his viewings of different versions of the film with the recently unearthed original intertitles and a pre-shooting script that belonged to Lang’s composer Gottfried Huppertz, Elsaesser has put together an account of Metropolis that should become a useful resource for all students of the film. In offering his “Telling and Retelling of Metropolis” as an appendix to this volume, the author has created a companion piece that helps us better recognize the connections between various characters and plot developments, imagine the full development of particular themes( especially the sexual impact of the robotic Maria), and gauge how this film fits into other pointedly Langian concerns, such as the surveillance and manipulation that are central to such works as M (1931) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932). While this appendix alone is highly useful, its inclusion in a work that offers a concise and informative picture of the industrial and critical context of Metropolis marks the volume as a valuable addition to the critical literature on Lang and his most famous film. -Jay Telotte, Georgia Institute of Technology (From Science Fiction Studies (no 85, vol 28, part 3, Nov 2001).
In his brief introduction to the British Film Institute’s BFI Classics series, editor Rob White states that the series’ primary purpose is “to introduce, interpret, and honor” key works in the history of cinema. Writing on Metropolis, Thomas Elsaesser succeeds admirably in achieving these aims, offering a concise yet thoroughly detailed analysis of the film’s origins, reception, and subsequent cinematic influence. Elsaesser begins by considering Metropolis’ origins, taking special care to debunk a number of long-cherished canards. He addresses, for instance, Lang’s oft-quoted assertion that the source of his sci-fi vision lay in a nighttime experience of the New York skyline. (In actuality, Elsaesser points out, Lang and his wife had been working on the Metropolis-idea for nearly a year by the time the director first arrived in New York in 1924.) Having investigated this and other “origin myths,” the author then proceeds to discuss concrete particulars of the movie’s production, presenting a wealth of information on Lang’s “subtly knowing” iconography, the composition of his film crew, and the various special effects techniques developed specifically for his futuristic fable. Particularly interesting in this context is Elsaesser’s discussion of differences between German and U.S. film-making practices of the time. For example, Germany’s UFA studios did not employ a special effects department as such; instead, they operated more in the spirit of the medieval master builders and hired experts on a project-by-project basis. Often directors brought not only their own assistants, but their own trade secrets to a film.
After commenting on these and related issues, Elsaesser traces the long and troubled history of the film’s reception. Here he reflects at some length on the role played by prescreening publicity (for Elsaesser, Metropolis was the prototype of the “designer blockbuster”), audiences’ and critics’ aesthetic expectations, and the film’s numerous re-releases and “corrections” for mass consumption. In an important sense, he argues, there is no “original” version of the film, and a growing acceptance of this fact has led to Metropolis’ rebirth as a kind of postmodern “found object” (as well as a more positive reevaluation of Thea von Harbou’s scriptwriting techniques). Indeed, Elsaesser shows that since Giorgio Moroder’s pop-music Metropolis-pastiche of 1984, the one-time popular/ critical flop has actually achieved “cult classic” status. In much the same way, Metropolis has managed to weather the numerous, often diametrically opposed critiques to which it has given rise. Elsaesser concludes by considering these critiques, pausing to focus especially on now classic readings, as those by Kracauer, Sadoul, Williams, Tulloch, and Huyssen, among others. In so doing, he underscores his evaluation of Lang’s film as a “classic,” a work which “provokes ever new interpretation.”
However, a “classic” work of criticism must do more than merely enumerate the interpretations to which a text has given rise; it must also offer a compelling reading of its own. On this score, it seems to me, Elsaesser’s text falls somewhat short. Notwithstanding its anticlimactic conclusion, Elsaesser’s book nevertheless is a thoroughly readable treatise on Lang’s problematic masterpiece. As such, it should prove useful to neophyte and expert alike. (Kelly Meyer, German Studies Review 25/2 (2002). 381-2
Fonte: http://www.thomas-elsaesser.com/books/books-in-english/60-metropolis
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MOVIE WARS – POR JONATHAN ROSENBAUM (2000, EM INGLÊS)
Jonathan Rosenbaum – Movie Wars (2.06MB, 242 páginas)
Is the cinema, as writers from David Denby to Susan Sontag have claimed, really dead? Contrary to what we have been led to believe, films are better than ever—we just can’t see the good ones. Movie Wars cogently explains how movies are packaged, distributed, and promoted, and how, at every stage of the process, the potential moviegoer is treated with contempt. Using examples ranging from the New York Times’s coverage of the Cannes film festival to the anticommercial practices of Orson Welles, Movie Wars details the workings of the powerful forces that are in the process of ruining our precious cinematic culture and heritage, and the counterforces that have begun to fight back. (Goodreads)
Review:
http://sensesofcinema.com/2000/book-reviews/moviewars/
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THE ART OF THE RIDICULOUS SUBLIME: ON DAVID LYNCH’S LOST HIGHWAY – POR SLAVOJ ZIZEK (2000, 52 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
186KB, pdf, 52 páginas
Slavoj Zizek – The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime ~ On David Lynch’s Lost_Highway
Review:
Rachel Kushner – Apr 1, 2001
When I first saw David Lynch’s Lost Highway upon its theater release in 1998, I found myself seduced by what have become classic Lynchean touches: the opening sequence of bifurcated highway strip, its noirish titles, its lushly choreographed scenes and hearty use of the sexual and the grotesque—in sum, its unimpeachable stylishness. But because of its elliptical plot and a nagging sense that Lynch had constructed a complete but wholly abstruse teleology, combined with the fact that for several days after seeing the film I compulsively spooked myself by imagining the disturbingly unwholesome Mystery Man (played by Robert Blake), with his cake flour complexion and dark, glistening eyes, lurking behind various doors in my apartment, I put an end to the torture and dismissed Lost Highway from further contemplation.
But after reading Slavoj Žižek’s most recent Lacanian foray into popular culture, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway, my interest in the film has been invigorated. Žižek makes sense of the narrative’s Möbius-like temporal loop, in which the central character Fred (Bill Pullman), obsessed with his possibly-unfaithful wife (Patricia Arquette), a tacit brunette from an aseptic suburban landscape, murders her and then fantasizes that he is another person (Balthazar Getty), who is seduced by a smoldering and disingenuous blonde, also played by Patricia Arquette. In his explorations of Lynch and other popular culture references that elaborate upon the Lacanian Real, Žižek uses New Age interpretations that dismiss meaning and focus on the aesthetic and experiential qualities of the film to counterpoint his own. Although he never really makes clear who these “New Age obscurantists” are, I assume Žižek is referring to theorists who continue to invoke Jungian ideas.
Žižek’s basic premise regarding the notion of ‘ridiculous sublime’ is that Lynch is able to construct ludicrous moments whose brilliance and effectiveness lie in the fact that they are to be taken completely seriously. And part of the joy of reading Žižek’s study is a similar feeling, that he is ready to take Lynch wholly seriously—not just because of the fact that Lost Highway readily invites Lacanian interpretations, but because it’s terrific fun. Lynch’s filmic intersection of the pyrophoric German band Rammstein with California’s Death Valley was an artistic decision this writer responded to with a simple “Hell yeah!” But now Žižek has confirmed that “the musical accompaniment in the film is crucial,” and that Rammstein “renders the universe of the utmost jouissance sustained by obscene superego injunction.” Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the semiotics of a simple “Hell yeah,” but venturing into Žižek’s theoretical framework provides a satisfying complement. And for those who didn’t care for the film (or for Rammstein, for that matter) Žižek’s study is a marvelous and reader-friendly schematic of difficult Lacanian theories, rendered with lucid care and an intellectually generous, exuberant tone.
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THREE USES OF THE KNIFE: ON THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF DRAMA (POR DAVID MAMET, LIVRO DE 1998) EM INGLÊS
Three Uses of the Knife_ On the Nature and Purpose of Drama (Vintage) – David Mamet
55 páginas, 766KB, PDF
Review:
It is surprising, given his plays’ lack of introspection, how much David Mamet loves to theorise about theatre. But the ferocity of his theorising – that of the ‘possessed, vehement teacher’ – is distinctively Mametian. Three Uses of the Knife is a typically aggressive short (overpriced) treatise on our dramatic instinct. Instinct, because Mamet begins with an account of the ‘dramatic urge’ as an essential biological device by which we make sense of an impersonal world. Creating plots in which we are the hero – desiring some things and coming into conflict with others – is our way of defending ourselves from the meaninglessness of life.
Most dramas, both on stage and elsewhere, offer false consolations. (Mamet, writing during the demeaning comedy of Clinton’s second term, makes the fantasies of politicians a key example.) Most commonly they seek to make us feel more powerful than we really are. Problem or issue-based plays give us the illusions of intellectual mastery; romances give us a quasi-religious belief that, after a ‘truncated and formalistic’ period of testing, the strength to triumph over adversity will rise up within us.
What we lack is a sense of struggle and an honest acknowledgement of our ‘powerlessness’. This, says Mamet, we will find only in tragedy: ‘Tragedy celebrates the individual’s subjugation and thus his or her release from the burden of repression [of that truth] and its attendant anxiety.’ He draws explicit parallels with religion: we must ‘acknowledge our sinful, weak, impotent state’ and can then find peace.
How convincing is this? Readers of Mamet’s previous theoretical work will recognise old themes: the importance of the unconscious; the hostility to didacticism; his insistence, derived from Aristotle and Stanislavsky, on the supremacy of plot and the through-line of the protagonist. ‘That which the hero requires is the play,’ declares Mamet. But his new emphasis on tragedy as almost the only true kind of drama (with echoes of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy) signals the sharply increasing pessimism of Mamet’s vision of the emptiness and indulgence of contemporary culture. ‘In times of surplus,’ he writes, art ‘disappears.’ The result is highly readable and always interesting. Yet like many aphoristic writers, Mamet relies too often on the provocative half-truth.
Do we really think that Shakespearean tragedy is best understood in the neo-Aristotelian terms so beloved of Hollywood script consultants? What of the theatre of the absurd, which often breaks the three-act structure and begins – with a recognition of powerlessness and pointlessness – where tragedy ends? Isn’t the idea that tragedy can be reduced to a ‘cleansing lesson’ itself didactic and utilitarian? Do we still believe in the tragic hero’s accession to wisdom? Does Lear really learn? Does Cleopatra?
Perhaps most telling is the interaction between Mamet’s theories and his own work. The emphasis on power and impotence is apt: Mamet’s great dramatic theme is the contradiction between men’s great compulsion to appear strong and their actual weakness. But this is less metaphysical and more related to maleness and the American dream than his theories would suggest.
It’s striking that Mamet, a playwright famed for the flinty brilliance of his dialogue, should pay so little attention to language. The languages of salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross and of small-time crooks in American Buffalo – creating whole worlds of need and evasion – are more than an incidental pleasure. By contrast, when Mamet is preoccupied with generating clever plot reversals, as in Speed-the-Plow or The Spanish Prisoner, his work feels shallow. It’s curious, too, that such a funny writer should have so little to say about comedy.
Some writers-turned-critics offer ideas about literature that are really self-analysis (TS Eliot has this tendency). By contrast, Mamet’s theorising seems too compulsive, too belligerent, to match the complexity of his achievement. When Mamet says of Brecht that his theories ‘bear little relationship to his plays, which are extraordinarily charming and beautiful and lyrical and upsetting’, he could almost be writing about himself.
Fonte: https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2002/mar/03/davidmamet.stage
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“THIS IS ORSON WELLES”, ORSON WELLES & PETER BOGDANOVICH (1992, 533 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
Clique na capa para fazer o download. 154mb, 533 páginas
“Orson Welles (1915-1985) is today remembered for being the author of what is arguably the “best film of all-time”, but his artistic career wasn’t easy and involved a series of struggles that could have discouraged anyone. The son of a pianist and an inventor, he was exposed to the fine arts since an early age. He began his professional career as a painter in Ireland (where he sold his paintings on a donkey cart) and as a theatre actor for the Gate Theatre in Dublin. From then, he went to radio with peculiar results (his adaptation of War of the Worlds provoked a mass hysteria – altough its dimension is still debatable – in the American population at the time, who really thought that the Earth was being invaded by Martians), and finally to the studios of the RKO to make Citizen Kane (1941). There, with the precious collaboration of Gregg Toland, he showed his cinematographic experimentalism, developing a baroque visual technique of low angles, great depth of field and exposed ceilings, a style that had enthusiastic admirers such as theorist and Cahiers du Cinéma co-creator André Bazin. Welles was a director-producer-scriptwriter-actor and made the film in complete freedom, with all Hollywood facilities. Unfortunately, it was the first and last time that these circumstances would occur to Welles. His next film, The Magnificient Ambersons (1942) had the unfortunate chance of having seen Orson Welles dragged out of post-production, as the Office for Inter-American Affairs demanded RKO and Welles to make a documentary in Brazil (It’s All True) with the purpose of promoting good diplomatic relations with the country. As such, the producers of RKO made an opportunistic use of the Ambersons material, that was subjected to length mutilations and audience tests that led to the film being reduced from its original 132 minutes to 87, without Welles having the opportunity to fight for the original version. Also, a myth was created about Welles, seeing him as a figure of a difficult, extravagant and megalomaniacal personality that damaged, in an irreversible way, his filmic career.
From then on came Welles’s haunted journey, with producers interfering, in a discouraging way, in the final version of his films [Mr Arkadin (1955), Touch of Evil (1958)] and lack of financing that forced Welles to make a masterful use of his logistical capacities (the absence of money for wardrobe in Othello (1951) led him to do a scene in a Turkish bath, with some of the actors covered only by towels). Not only that, but also a series of projects that never came to be complete by the filmmaker, like his Don Quixote (there was an abominable version edited in 1992 by Jess Franco that does not respect Welles’s artistic intentions, having made an addition of material – some filmed by Franco himself – that should never have been part of the film). One of them, and his last film, is The Other Side of the Wind (Welles completed only a rough cut of 3 hours), which is expected to debut commercially in November 2018 after a multi-year legal fight and a search for financing that only came in the last few years.
This is Orson Welles is the collection of interviews that Peter Bogdanovich made to the filmmaker over several years, talking about the various biographical aspects that help to ascertain the truth about the myth that has hit (and hurt) Welles. Also, they go through the three areas where Welles left indelible marks (radio, theater, cinema) as well as his work on television, painting and his long career as a magician. It also includes an extensive chronology of his life and the original screenplay for The Magnificient Ambersons. Edited by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum.”
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AUDIO-VISION: SOUND ON SCREEN – POR MICHEL CHION (1990, EM INGLÊS)
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THE PHILOSPHY OF HORROR – POR NOEL CARROL (LIVRO DE 1990, 269 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
801KB, PDF
Noel Carrol – The Philosphy of Horror
Trecho de entrevista com Noel Carrol sobre o livro (de 2001):
The Philosophy of Horror
RP: The Philosophy of Horror is the first book of yours I read. It’s a very accessible book.
NC: Good. But it apparently hasn’t been as accessible as I thought it would be. I thought I would be able to retire on it, that it would be a much bigger seller than it has been. I even thought it might be reviewed on the higher end of the popular press. But it wasn’t. I suppose I’m irretrievably academic.
RP: It has a cult following..
NC: It has a cult following. I thought it would have a middle-range interest. It still sells very well. I make out okay with it. It’s ten years old, and still doing reasonably well.
RP: Why did you write this book?
NC: Well, I’ll give you a simple answer, and then we can talk about the bigger things. Routledge had a series of books called “British Authors.” For it, I wrote William Germano a proposal for a little book – these were to be around 100 to 120 pages – on John Wyndham, who wrote The Midwich Cuckoo, from which Village of the Damned was adapted. And Germano, the New York editor at Routledge, said that the series came out of London, and added, “Between you and me, they want British people to write on British authors.” However, he knew that I had given a couple of lectures on philosophy and horror. So, he suggested, “I would love a book on the philosophy of horror.” I wouldn’t have actually thought of the book without his suggestion, and I wouldn’t have written it at that point in my academic career because I would have been afraid that I wouldn’t be able to find a publisher. If I had sent it to a philosophy editor, he would have looked at the title and said, “We don’t publish things like that.” But the publisher asking for such a text gave me sufficient encouragement.
There were several reasons why I was attracted to this project, some connected to my other work. After all, one thing that is always said about cognitivism, a movement in film theory of which I’m supposedly a prime representative, is that it doesn’t pay attention to the emotions. I hoped people would see that the model I offered in The Philosophy of Horror was actually superior to what was available on the emotions elsewhere. So, in an indirect way, the book was an argument for cognitivism. It was also an indirect argument against psychoanalytic film theory. Probably the very best case that can be made for psychoanalysis in relation to any film genre is the case for horror. In the same vein, one of the best cases, in terms of mental phenomena, for using psychoanalysis with respect to film would probably be what is called identification, since, if there is such a thing, identification looks like it’s pretty close to a mental state that requires psychoanalytic explanation. I had taken a long time picking on illusion theory in Mystifying Movies, but I hadn’t spent a lot of time on identification theory. Some people, even after Mystifying Movies came out, said, “Look, you have to use psychoanalysis because it can account for the intensity of people’s responses, especially emotional responses. And partly it can do it through notions of identification, insofar as you can only have these emotional responses if you are identifying or somehow merging with the image.” In The Philosophy of Horror, I not only attack identification, but offer an alternative approach, thereby, once again, arguing indirectly for cognitivism. So tackling both horror and identification was, so to speak, entering enemy territory. I felt that if I could show that cognitivism was a genuine competitor with respect to such central psychoanalytic themes, then it would have to be taken seriously.
Now, I don’t want to make the horror project sound like it was so calculated. It wasn’t that I really liked musicals, but decided to do horror only for the reasons I just gave. It should be clear from the writing that I’ve enjoyed the horror genre since I was an adolescent. It wasn’t as if it was a stretch, the way that if what had been called for was to analyze 1930s Ruritanian Operettas would have been. But it did work out that by theorizing horror I was fielding rival theories in privileged domains of my traditional adversaries.
RP: Tell us about the theories you set forth.
NC: In The Philosophy of Horror, a general theory of horror is advanced that doesn’t require psychoanalytic concepts. This theory doesn’t deny that some works of horror might be approached best through psychoanalysis, but the default framework that I construct is not psychoanalytic. It is a model informed by developments in cognitive psychology and analytic philosophy. Not all emotional responses require psychoanalysis, though, as I’ve pointed out a few times, most people in film studies and other humanities departments usually move toward it immediately, and, I would argue, without proper warrant. Curiously, in earlier work, I had actually attempted a psychoanalytic theory of horror. So in some ways the book is also a reaction to my own earlier attempts to characterize horror using psychoanalytic notions, especially ones derived from Ernst Jones.
It struck me that certain genres, such as suspense, mystery, comedy, melodrama, and horror, are actually identified by their relation to certain emotions. As a case study, I went about analyzing horror. I began by looking at what kind of horror we expect from horror fiction. At the time, a leading theory of the emotions was what was called the cognitive theory of the emotions, which tries to identify emotions in terms of their object – that is, the criterion that determines whether or not a state is this or that emotion. For example, in the case of fear, in order to be afraid you have to be afraid of a certain kind of thing, namely something that meets the criterion of harmfulness. I argued that horror was made up of two emotions we are already familiar with, fear and disgust. So I crafted my theory of the nature of horror by saying that horror is defined in terms of its elicitation of fear and disgust. Then I needed to say what the object of those two component emotional states were. For fear, there was a long history of analysis of the formal criterion as the harmful, and I drew on that. For disgust, I hypothesized the criterion was the impure.
RP: You argue that in horror fictions these things that are harmful and impure are monsters.
NC: Yes, where monsters are defined as things not acknowledged to exist by scientific lights. So the emotion of horror is elicited by beings not acknowledged to exist by science that are both harmful and impure.
RP: You also deal with, more generally, why people respond emotionally to things they know do not exist, as relates to horror fictions and other fictions as well.
NC: It is widely believed that people can only be afraid of what they know exists. But at the same time, when they are reading fictions, people know that they are reading fictions. If you put those together you should get the conclusion that people can’t be afraid of horror fictions. But they are. So the theorist has to come up with an explanation. The reigning theory in film studies of course was that there is a contradiction there, and that requires us to postulate some kind of psychoanalytic state that makes it happen, such as disavowal. Postulating that state leads you to surmise that because this disavowal operation swings into place, the spectator must be under the illusion that what she sees at a fiction film is the real thing. This gets us to the illusion theory of response to fictions. To counter this theory on the negative side, I pointed out that beliefs have behavioral consequences. If people really thought that there were monsters in the movie house when they were watching horror films, they would try to escape or confront them. There would be a fight or flight response. But there isn’t. So that’s one reason not to believe this set of presuppositions, which I had also attacked in Mystifying Movies, though not in as finely directed a case as this one. That was the negative side of the attack.
The positive side required that I come up with some kind of theory of what is going on that renders non-contradictory that we are both in the state of fear when we watch horror films and at the same time we are not irrationally believing in the fiction. To do that, I proposed what I called a thought theory. I argued that we can find ourselves in emotional states by simply imagining certain things to be the case. On my view, to believe something is to hold a proposition in your mind assertively. But I suggest that we can also entertain propositions in our minds – that is, reflect upon them non-assertively. Furthermore, I argued that it’s the case that when you entertain a proposition non-assertively, you can nevertheless put yourself in an emotional state. Just think of a time when you’ve been in a high place, such as overlooking the Grand Canyon. You look at the edge and imagine yourself going over. You know you’re not going to do that to yourself, but nonetheless it can send a shiver up your spine. So it’s possible that merely entertaining a thought can put you in an emotional state like fear. Then, when we turn back to the problem of fiction, the solution seems open to us. What the filmmaker or novelist does is present to us propositional content that we entertain in our minds non-assertively. That gets us to the point where we can say unblushingly that we fear the fictions, even though we know that what the fiction alleges to exist does not and cannot harm us.
RP: You also posit that within fictions there are often characters who cue how we should respond to the fiction, including, in horror, to monsters. A canonical example might be the character played by Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. But rather than saying we identify with these characters, you say we assimilate their positions.
NC: A lot of people would say that if we asked people how they respond to horror films, the reactions would be too subjective to develop any theory. So I needed something objective. I suggested that you can get that by looking at how these characters respond, because horror, like some other genres, seems to frequently be characterized by a convergence between audience and character response. I don’t, however, claim that we always need these characters to cue us. For example, there are horror fictions where the character for some reason might not be available to or necessary for us. The monster will be portrayed effectively enough that we don’t need to be cued. If you see a nine-foot drooling spider figure advancing, you don’t necessarily need a character to cue you that this is fearsome and disgusting.
Nevertheless, there is the question of what our relationship to these characters, especially their emotional states, is. Very often in film studies, one says that the emotional state in relation to the character is identification, that you become one with the character. I thought, and I still think, that this is not the best way to model this relationship. If you look very closely at fictions, probably most of the time the psychological state of the viewer is different than the psychological state of the character. Consider the cases of tragedy and comedy. We pity the tragic figure at the end of the tragedy. The tragic figure is upset, but he or she isn’t usually feeling pity for himself. Very often he is feeling guilt or shame or remorse for something he has done. We aren’t feeling guilt or shame or remorse. We are feeling pity. Then, if you think of comedy, when the comic figure takes a pratfall, we’re amused, but generally the comic character is not. My point is that identification isn’t a good theory of our relationship to characters, because very often our emotional state in relation to the characters is not marked by shared emotions. Still, we have to have some sense of his perspective in order to actually pity him. That’s what I call assimilation. We feel bad for the character partly because we see how it is that the character, such as Oedipus, feels the way he does, such as guilty and shameful. But we don’t identify, or become one, with him, though we need some access to that viewpoint. Assimilation is access to a viewpoint without sharing the same psychological state as the character.
RP: The book explores many other issues, including characteristic horror plots and why people would actually want to expose themselves to movies that horrify them. And then you end with a fascinating comparison between postmodernism and the contemporary horror cycle.
NC: Postmodernists and horror fans would seem to share some of the same anxieties, or so I suggest. The postmodernists share them from an esoteric point, while they are manifest more exoterically or overtly in horror films. For example, in the horror film, it seems to me that there is an anxiety about the stability of the world, and it also seems that a similar anxiety is a grounds for postmodernists’ denial of any kind of foundation upon which to base knowledge.
RP: Tell me about the book’s reception. Have you heard anything about any horror filmmakers reading it? I could imagine someone like Wes Craven, the director of the Scream movies, liking it a lot and drawing on it.
NC: Not yet. I thought I made the book in such a way that, though I can’t do it, it could be tested by psychologists. And, as you suggest, the other way that it could be tested would be by filmmakers who use it to generate horror imagery and plots. The book has only been out for a little more than a decade. I know it has been used a lot as a textbook. So maybe some day down the line some freshman who didn’t want to read the book, and just wanted to watch movies, but had to read the book in order to get a film degree, will grow up to be a director, and she’ll start using the book. That would be a fond hope of mine. If anyone did that and came forward, that would be a good confirmation of the theory.
Maybe, however, a filmmaker would want to undermine some of my generalizations. I think that’s fine; it’s part of the conversation of theory. In fact, I hope that happens, because I think that film theory should be closer to the practice of filmmaking and fiction-making in general. There shouldn’t be these two cultures. I think in some ways the theorists have made these two cultures exist by being unconcerned with the problems of construction. The Philosophy of Horror is very concerned with the problems of construction. It’s a philosophy of horror, but in the same way that Aristotle’s Poetics is a philosophy of tragedy. Aristotle wrote a philosophy of tragedy, but he called it a poetics, where poetics is a notion that comes from poesis, which comes from making. So poetics is about construction. His philosophy of tragedy is a philosophy of construction of tragedy, and I had hoped that my Philosophy of Horror would be a philosophy of construction of horror in much the same way.
Fonte (e entrevista completa): http://sensesofcinema.com/2001/film-critics/carroll/
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SEEING THE LIGHT – POR JAMES BROUGHTON (1977, 81 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
James Broughton (November 10, 1913 – May 17, 1999) was a pioneer of experimental filmmaking, a central player in California’s creative literary scene, a bard of sensuality and spirituality, an invigorated gay elder, and a preacher of Big Joy. His life’s work was an attempt to discover the contradictory nature of his humanity and its roots; the result was a poetic and artistic life that inspired many. Broughton’s advice to filmmakers: Follow your own weird.
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NOTES ON CINEMATOGRAPHY – POR ROBERT BRESSON (1975, 75 PÁGINAS, EM INGLÊS)
BRESSON, Robert – Notes On Cinematography
pdf, 1.79MB, 75 páginas
Notes on the Cinematographer collects Bresson’s reflections on cinema written as short aphorisms.
Review: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/10/notes-cinematograph-robert-bresson-review-art-film
Culture Injection 