Picturing American Modernity

Download Picturing American Modernity PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822391457
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Picturing American Modernity by : Kristen Whissel

Download or read book Picturing American Modernity written by Kristen Whissel and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Picturing American Modernity, Kristen Whissel investigates the relationship between early American cinema and the experience of technological modernity. She demonstrates how between the late 1890s and the eve of the First World War moving pictures helped the U.S. public understand the possibilities and perils of new forms of “traffic” produced by industrialization and urbanization. As more efficient ways to move people, goods, and information transformed work and leisure at home and contributed to the expansion of the U.S. empire abroad, silent films presented compelling visual representations of the spaces, bodies, machines, and forms of mobility that increasingly defined modern life in the United States and its new territories. Whissel shows that by portraying key events, achievements, and anxieties, the cinema invited American audiences to participate in the rapidly changing world around them. Moving pictures provided astonishing visual dispatches from military camps prior to the outbreak of fighting in the Spanish-American War. They allowed audiences to delight in images of the Pan-American Exposition, and also to mourn the assassination of President McKinley there. One early film genre, the reenactment, presented spectators with renditions of bloody battles fought overseas during the Philippine-American War. Early features offered sensational dramatizations of the scandalous “white slave trade,” which was often linked to immigration and new forms of urban work and leisure. By bringing these frequently distant events and anxieties “near” to audiences in cities and towns across the country, the cinema helped construct an American national identity for the machine age.

Spectacular Digital Effects

Download Spectacular Digital Effects PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822377144
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Spectacular Digital Effects by : Kristen Whissel

Download or read book Spectacular Digital Effects written by Kristen Whissel and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By developing the concept of the "digital effects emblem," Kristen Whissel contributes a new analytic rubric to cinema studies. An "effects emblem" is a spectacular, computer-generated visual effect that gives stunning expression to a film's key themes. Although they elicit feelings of astonishment and wonder, effects emblems do not interrupt narrative, but are continuous with story and characterization and highlight the narrative stakes of a film. Focusing on spectacular digital visual effects in live-action films made between 1989 and 2011, Whissel identifies and examines four effects emblems: the illusion of gravity-defying vertical movement, massive digital multitudes or "swarms," photorealistic digital creatures, and morphing "plasmatic" figures. Across films such as Avatar, The Matrix, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jurassic Park, Titanic, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, these effects emblems heighten the narrative drama by contrasting power with powerlessness, life with death, freedom with constraint, and the individual with the collective.

Picturing the City

Download Picturing the City PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520220188
Total Pages : 420 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (22 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Picturing the City by : Rebecca Zurier

Download or read book Picturing the City written by Rebecca Zurier and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-09-06 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Zurier vividly locates the Ashcan School artists within the early twentieth-century crosscurrents of newspaper journalism, literary realism, illustration, sociology, and urban spectatorship. Her compassionate study newly assesses the artists' rejection of 'genteel' New York, their alignments with mass media, and their innovative ways of seeing in the modern city."—Wanda M. Corn, author of The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-35 If the Ashcan School brought a special and embracing eye to the city, Rebecca Zurier in her richly contextual and impressively interdisciplinary book explains and evokes that historically specific urban vision in all its richness. Finally, in Picturing the City, we have the study these painters have long deserved. And we gain new and delightful access to New York City at the moment of its emergence as a compelling embodiment of metropolitan modernity."—Thomas Bender, Director, International Center for Advanced Studies, New York University "Picturing the City is both meticulous and wide-ranging in its assessment of the Ashcan artists and their passionate efforts to represent New York. It charts their pleasures and problems, warmth and prejudices, generosity and differences, originality and formula. It takes seriously their habits as journalists and provides the most complete sense of their immersion in a world of urban spectatorship and vision. Rebecca Zurier has written a wonderful, timely book that will be a benchmark for any future discussions of them."—Anthony W. Lee, author of Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco "Rebecca Zurier takes us on an intellectually exhilarating and breathtakingly beautiful visual voyage through turn-of-the-century New York City as the Ashcan painters saw it. As we watch them learn a new way of looking in the commercially dynamic, sensual New York of a century ago, we too see that time and place with fresh eyes. Inevitably, thanks to Zurier, the way we look at city life today will change as well."—Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

Picturing home

Download Picturing home PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526138220
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (261 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Picturing home by : Hollie Price

Download or read book Picturing home written by Hollie Price and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Picturing home examines the depiction of domestic life in British feature films made and released in the 1940s. It explores how pictorial representations of home onscreen in this period re-imagined modes of address that had been used during the interwar years to promote ideas about domestic modernity. Picturing home provides a close analysis of domestic life as constructed in eight films, contextualising them in relation to a broader, offscreen culture surrounding the suburban home, including magazines, advertisements, furniture catalogues and displays at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition. In doing so, it offers a new reading of British 1940s films, which demonstrates how they trod a delicate path balancing prewar and postwar, traditional and modern, private and public concerns.

Body Shots

Download Body Shots PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520252934
Total Pages : 214 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (22 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Body Shots by : Jonathan Auerbach

Download or read book Body Shots written by Jonathan Auerbach and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-10-09 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Auerbach places the body at the center of cinema's first decade of emergence and challenges the idea that for early audiences, the new medium's fascination rested on visual spectacle for its own sake.

Imperial Affects

Download Imperial Affects PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 0813583055
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (135 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Imperial Affects by : Jonna Eagle

Download or read book Imperial Affects written by Jonna Eagle and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-21 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imperial Affects is the first sustained account of American action-based cinema as melodrama. From the earliest war films through the Hollywood Western and the late-century action cinema, imperialist violence and mobility have been produced as sites of both visceral pleasure and moral virtue. Suffering and omnipotence operate as twinned affects in this context, inviting identification with an American national subject constituted as both victimized and invincible—a powerful and persistent conjunction traced here across a century of cinema.

Fiction and Imagination in Early Cinema

Download Fiction and Imagination in Early Cinema PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350115681
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (51 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Fiction and Imagination in Early Cinema by : Mario Slugan

Download or read book Fiction and Imagination in Early Cinema written by Mario Slugan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-11-28 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the BAFTSS 'Best Monograph' Award 2021 When watching the latest instalment of Batman, it is perfectly normal to say that we see Batman fighting Bane or that we see Bruce Wayne making love to Miranda Tate. We would not say that we see Christian Bale dressed up as Batman going through the motions of punching Tom Hardy dressed up us Bane. Nor do we say that we see Christian Bale pretending to be Bruce Wayne making love with Marion Cotillard, who is playacting the role Miranda Tate. But if we look at the history of cinema and consider contemporary reviews from the early days of the medium, we see that people thought precisely in this way about early film. They spoke of film as no more than documentary recordings of actors performing on set. In an innovative combination of philosophical aesthetics and new cinema history, Mario Slugan investigates how our default imaginative engagement with film changed over the first two decades of cinema. It addresses not only the importance of imagination for the understanding of early cinema but also contributes to our understanding of what it means for a representational medium to produce fictions. Specifically, Slugan argues that cinema provides a better model for understanding fiction than literature.

Ashcan Art, Whiteness, and the Unspectacular Man

Download Ashcan Art, Whiteness, and the Unspectacular Man PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1501325752
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (13 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Ashcan Art, Whiteness, and the Unspectacular Man by : Alexis L. Boylan

Download or read book Ashcan Art, Whiteness, and the Unspectacular Man written by Alexis L. Boylan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-04-20 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arriving in New York City in the first decade of the twentieth century, six painters-Robert Henri, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, Glackens, George Luks, and George Bellows, subsequently known as the Ashcan Circle-faced a visual culture that depicted the urban man as a diseased body under assault. Ashcan artists countered this narrative, manipulating the bodies of construction workers, tramps, entertainers, and office workers to stand in visual opposition to popular, political, and commercial cultures. They did so by repeatedly positioning white male bodies as having no cleverness, no moral authority, no style, and no particular charisma, crafting with consistency an unspectacular man. This was an attempt, both radical and deeply insidious, to make the white male body stand outside visual systems of knowledge, to resist the disciplining powers of commercial capitalism, and to simply be with no justification or rationale. Ashcan Art, Whiteness, and the Unspectacular Man maps how Ashcan artists reconfigured urban masculinity for national audiences and reimagined the possibility and privilege of the unremarkable white, male body thus shaping dialogues about modernity, gender, and race that shifted visual culture in the United States.

Aeroscopics

Download Aeroscopics PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520355482
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (23 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Aeroscopics by : Patrick Ellis

Download or read book Aeroscopics written by Patrick Ellis and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction : spotting the spot -- The panoramic altitude -- The panstereorama -- Vertigo effects -- Observation rides -- The aeroplane gaze -- Conclusion : first flights.

Universal Women

Download Universal Women PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252035224
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Universal Women by : Mark Garrett Cooper

Download or read book Universal Women written by Mark Garrett Cooper and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-03-10 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1912 and 1919, the Universal Film Manufacturing Company credited eleven women with directing at least 170 films, but by the mid-1920s all of these directors had left Universal and only one still worked in the film industry at all. This book explores how corporate movie studios interpret and act on institutional culture in deciding what it means to work as a man or woman. In focusing on issues of institutional change, the author challenges interpretations that explain women's exile from the film industry as the inevitable result of a transhistorical sexism or as an effect of a broadly cultural revision of gendered work roles. He examines the relationship between institutional organization and aesthetic conventions during the formative years when women filmmakers such as Ruth Ann Baldwin, Cleo Madison, Ruth Stonehouse, Elise Jane Wilson and Ida May Park directed films for Universal.

America First

Download America First PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136007105
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (36 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis America First by : Mandy Merck

Download or read book America First written by Mandy Merck and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when the expanded projection of US political, military, economic and cultural power draws intensified global concern, understanding how that country understands itself seems more important than ever. This collection of new critical essays tackles this old problem in a new way, by examining some of the hundreds of US films that announce themselves as titularly 'American'. From early travelogues to contemporary comedies, national nomination has been an abiding characteristic of American motion pictures, heading the work of Porter, Guy-Blaché, DeMille, Capra, Sternberg, Vidor, Minnelli and Mankiewicz. More recently, George Lucas, Paul Schrader, John Landis and Edward James Olmos have made their own contributions to Hollywood’s Americana. What does this national branding signify? Which versions of Americanism are valorized, and which marginalized or excluded? Out of which social and historical contexts do they emerge, and for and by whom are they constructed? Edited by Mandy Merck, the collection contains detailed analyses of such films as The Vanishing American, American Madness, An American in Paris, American Graffiti, American Gigolo, American Pie and many more.

Engineering Hollywood

Download Engineering Hollywood PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190885610
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (98 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Engineering Hollywood by : Luci Marzola

Download or read book Engineering Hollywood written by Luci Marzola and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engineering Hollywood tells the story of the formation of the Hollywood studio system not as the product of a genius producer, but as an industry that brought together creative practices and myriad cutting-edge technologies in ways that had never been seen before. Using extensive archival research, this book examines the role of technicians, engineers, and trade organizations in creating a stable technological infrastructure on which the studio system rested for decades. Here, the studio system is seen as a technology-dependent business with connections to the larger American industrial world. By focusing on the role played by technology, we see a new map of the studio system beyond the backlots of Los Angeles and the front offices in New York. In this study, Hollywood includes the labs of industrial manufacturers, the sales routes of independent firms, the garages of tinkerers, and the clubhouses of technicians' societies. Rather than focusing on the technical improvements in any particular motion picture tool, this book centers on the larger systems and infrastructures for dealing with technology in this creative industry. Engineering Hollywood argues that the American industry was stabilized and able to dominate the motion picture field for decades through collaboration over technologies of everyday use. Hollywood's relationship to its essential technology was fundamentally one of interdependence and cooperation-with manufacturers, trade organizations, and the competing studios. As such, Hollywood could be defined as an industry by participation in a closed system of cooperation that allowed a select group of producers and manufacturers to dominate the motion picture business for decades.

Seeing by Electricity

Download Seeing by Electricity PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478009225
Total Pages : 170 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (78 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Seeing by Electricity by : Doron Galili

Download or read book Seeing by Electricity written by Doron Galili and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-28 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Already in the late nineteenth century, electricians, physicists, and telegraph technicians dreamed of inventing televisual communication apparatuses that would “see” by electricity as a means of extending human perception. In Seeing by Electricity Doron Galili traces the early history of television, from fantastical image transmission devices initially imagined in the 1870s such as the Telectroscope, the Phantoscope, and the Distant Seer to the emergence of broadcast television in the 1930s. Galili examines how televisual technologies were understood in relation to film at different cultural moments—whether as a perfection of cinema, a threat to the Hollywood industry, or an alternative medium for avant-garde experimentation. Highlighting points of overlap and divergence in the histories of television and cinema, Galili demonstrates that the intermedial relationship between the two media did not start with their economic and institutional rivalry of the late 1940s but rather goes back to their very origins. In so doing, he brings film studies and television studies together in ways that advance contemporary debates in media theory.

Beyond the Movie Theater

Download Beyond the Movie Theater PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520391519
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (23 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Beyond the Movie Theater by : Gregory A. Waller

Download or read book Beyond the Movie Theater written by Gregory A. Waller and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Beyond the Movie Theater excavates the history of non-theatrical cinema before 1920, exploring where and how moving pictures of the 1910s were used in ways distinct from and often alternative to typical theatrical cinema. Unlike commercial cinema, non-theatrical cinema was multi-purpose in its uses and multi-sited in where it could be shown, targeted at particular audiences and, in some manner, sponsored. Relying on contemporary print sources and ephemera of the era to articulate how non-theatrical cinema was practiced and understood in the US during the 1910s, historian Gregory A. Waller charts a heterogeneous, fragmentary, and rich field that cannot be explained in terms of a master narrative concerning origin or institutionalization, progress or decline. Uncovering how and where films were put to use beyond the movie theater, this book complicates and expands our understanding of the history of American cinema, underscoring the myriad roles and everyday presence of moving pictures during the early twentieth century.

Remembering Roadside America

Download Remembering Roadside America PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN 13 : 1572338334
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (723 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Remembering Roadside America by : John A. Jakle

Download or read book Remembering Roadside America written by John A. Jakle and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2011-09-30 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The use of cars and trucks over the past century has remade American geography—pushing big cities ever outward toward suburbanization, spurring the growth of some small towns while hastening the decline of others, and spawning a new kind of commercial landscape marked by gas stations, drive-in restaurants, motels, tourist attractions, and countless other retail entities that express our national love affair with the open road. By its very nature, this landscape is ever changing, indeed ephemeral. What is new quickly becomes old and is soon forgotten. In this absorbing book, John Jakle and Keith Sculle ponder how “Roadside America” might be remembered, especially since so little physical evidence of its earliest years survives. In straightforward and lively prose, supplemented by copious illustrations—historic and modern photographs, advertising postcards, cartoons, roadmaps—they survey the ways in which automobility has transformed life in the United States. Asking how we might best commemorate and preserve this part of our past—which has been so vital economically and politically, so significant to the cultural aspirations of ordinary Americans, yet so often ignored by scholars who dismiss it as kitsch—they propose the development of an actual outdoor museum that would treat seriously the themes of our roadside history. Certainly, museums have been created for frontier pioneering, the rise of commercial agriculture, and the coming of water- and steam-powered industrialization and transportation, especially the railroad. Is now not the time, the authors ask, for a museum forcefully exploring the automobile’s emergence and the changes it has brought to place and landscape? Such a museum need not deny the nostalgic appeal of roadsides past, but if done properly, it could also tell us much about what the authors describe as “the most important kind of place yet devised in the American experience.” John A. Jakle is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Keith A. Sculle is the former head of research and education at the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. They have coauthored such books as America’s Main Street Hotels: Transiency and Community in the Early Automobile Age; Motoring: The Highway Experience in America; Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age; and The Gas Station in America.

Energy in American History

Download Energy in American History PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 1315 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (161 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Energy in American History by : Jeffrey B. Webb

Download or read book Energy in American History written by Jeffrey B. Webb and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-05-30 with total page 1315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contextualizes and analyzes the key energy transitions in U.S. history and the central importance of energy production and consumption on the American environment and in American culture and politics. Focusing on the major energy transitions in U.S. history, from the pre-industrial era to the present day, this two-volume encyclopedia captures the major advancements, events, technologies, and people synonymous with the production and consumption of energy in the United States. Expert contributors show how, for example, the introduction of electricity and petroleum into ordinary American life facilitated periods of rapid social and political change, as well as profound and ongoing impacts on the environment. These developments have in many ways defined and accelerated the pace of modern life and led to vast improvements in living conditions for millions of people, just as they have also brought new fears of resource exhaustion and fossil-fuel induced climate change. Today, as America begins to move beyond the use of fossil fuels toward a greater reliance on renewables, including wind and solar energy, there is a pressing need to understand energy in America's past in order to better understand its energy future.

A Companion to D. W. Griffith

Download A Companion to D. W. Griffith PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1118341252
Total Pages : 624 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (183 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A Companion to D. W. Griffith by : Charles Keil

Download or read book A Companion to D. W. Griffith written by Charles Keil and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-02-05 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive volume on one of the most controversial directors in American film history A Companion to D.W. Griffith offers an exhaustive look at the first acknowledged auteur of the cinema and provides an authoritative account of the director’s life, work, and lasting filmic legacy. The text explores how Griffith’s style and status advanced along with cinema’s own development during the years when narrative became the dominant mode, when the short gave way to the feature, and when film became the pre-eminent form of mass entertainment. Griffith was at the centre of each of these changes: though a contested figure, he remains vital to any understanding of how cinema moved from nickelodeon fixture to a national pastime, playing a significant role in the cultural ethos of America. With the renewed interest in Griffith’s contributions to the film industry, A Companion to D.W. Griffith offers a scholarly look at a career that spanned more than 25 years. The editor, a leading scholar on D.W. Griffith, and the expert contributors collectively offer a unique account of one of the monumental figures in film studies. Presents the most authoritative, complete account of the director’s life, work, and lasting legacy Builds on the recent resurgence in the director’s scholarly and popular reputation Edited by a leading authority on D.W. Griffith, who has published extensively on this controversial director Offers the most up-to-date, singularly comprehensive volume on one of the monumental figures in film studies