Book picks similar to
Dark Alchemy: The Films of Jan Švankmajer by Peter Hames
cinema
film
art
surrealism
The Art and Science of Digital Compositing: Techniques for Visual Effects, Animation and Motion Graphics
Ron Brinkmann - 1999
If you want to learn more, this excellent 2nd-edition is detailed with hundreds of secrets that will help make your comps seamless. For beginners or experts, Ron walks you through the processes of analysis and workflows - linear thinking which will help you become deft and successfully tackle any shot. - Dennis Muren ASC, Senior Visual Effects Supervisor, Industrial Light & MagicRon Brinkman's book is the definitive work on digital compositing and we have depended on this book as a critical part of our in-house training program at Imageworks since the 1999 Edition. We use this book as a daily textbook and reference for our lighters, compositors and anyone working with digital imagery. It is wonderful to see a new edition being released and it will certainly be required reading for all our digital artists here at Imageworks.- Sande Scoredos, Executive Director of Training & Artist Development, Sony Pictures ImageworksThe Art and Science of Digital Compositing is the only complete overview of the technical and artistic nature of digital compositing. It covers a wide range of topics from basic image creation, representation and manipulation, to a look at the visual cues that are necessary to create a believable composite. Designed as an introduction to the field, as well as an authoritative technical reference, this book provides essential information for novices and professionals alike. *17 new case-studies provide in-depth looks at the compositing work done on films such as Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Golden Compass, The Incredibles, King Kong, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Sin City, Spider-Man 2, Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and Star Wars: Episode 3-Revenge of the Sith. *The accompanying DVD-ROM features bonus resources, including example footage from hit films and projects that give readers hands-on experience with real industry materials.*Includes new sections on 3D compositing, High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging, Rotoscoping, and much more!
Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood
Mark Harris - 2008
Explores the epic human drama behind the making of the five movies nominated for Best Picture in 1967-Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Doctor Doolittle, and Bonnie and Clyde-and through them, the larger story of the cultural revolution that transformed Hollywood, and America, forever.
The Making of Kubrick's 2001
Jerome Agel - 1970
Here is the inside story of a monumental achievement conceded even by its enemies to mark a turning point in the art of cinema."If 2001 has stirred your emotions, your subconscious, your mythological yearnings, then it has succeeded."--Stanley Kubrick
Let's See: Writings on Art from The New Yorker: Writings on Art from The New Yorker
Peter Schjeldahl - 2008
Blessed with an unerring eye, he tackles a myriad of subjects with wit, poetry, and perspicacity, examining and questioning the art before him while reveling in the power and beauty of language. His writing springs from a desire to be understood by all readers, and a determination to help them engage with art of every kind.Covering subjects drawn from a broad canvas of the history of art—from ancient Greece, Mexico, and Byzantium, through Raphael, Rubens, and Rembrandt, to Bruce Nauman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and John Currin—the writings collected here seek out with precision and economy the essence of the individual artist or work under discussion, but they never lose sight of the bigger picture: What is beauty? What does it mean to be an American artist? What can the art we produce and admire tell us about ourselves?With an imaginative introduction—twenty questions, each one posed to Schjeldahl by a different artist or writer—this collection will appeal to anyone who considers the experience of art, and of writing on art, an invitation to a voyage.Coverage includes: • large-scale exhibitions at leading institutions around the world • shows at private galleries • profiles of prominent members of the art world • personal accounts of time spent with artists • the influences of museum spaces on our experience of art
What Happened to Art Criticism?
James Elkins - 2003
And while art criticism is ubiquitous in newspapers, magazines, and exhibition brochures, it is also virtually absent from academic writing. How is it that even as criticism drifts away from academia, it becomes more academic? How is it that sifting through a countless array of colorful periodicals and catalogs makes criticism seem to slip even further from our grasp? In this pamphlet, James Elkins surveys the last fifty years of art criticism, proposing some interesting explanations for these startling changes."In What Happened to Art Criticism?, art historian James Elkins sounds the alarm about the perilous state of that craft, which he believes is 'In worldwide crisis . . . dissolving into the background clutter of ephemeral cultural criticism' even as more and more people are doing it. 'It's dying, but it's everywhere . . . massively produced, and massively ignored.' Those who pay attention to other sorts of criticism may recognize the problems Elkins describes: 'Local judgments are preferred to wider ones, and recently judgments themselves have even come to seem inappropriate. In their place critics proffer informal opinions or transitory thoughts, and they shy from strong commitments.' What he'd like to see more of: ambitious judgment, reflection about judgment itself, and 'criticism important enough to count as history, and vice versa.' Amen to that."—Jennifer Howard, Washington Post Book World
How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, Multimedia
James Monaco - 1977
Now, James Monaco offers a revised and rewritten third edition incorporating every major aspect of this dynamic medium right up to the present.Looking at film from many vantage points, How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, Multimedia explores the medium as both art and craft, sensibility and science, tradition and technology. After examining film's close relation to such other narrative media as the novel, painting, photography, television, and even music, Monaco discusses those elements necessary to understand how films convey meaning and, more importantly, how we can best discern all that a film is attempting to communicate.In a key departure from the book's previous editions, the new and still-evolving digital context of film is now emphasized throughout How to Read a Film. A new chapter on multimedia brings media criticism into the twenty-first century with a thorough discussion of topics like virtual reality, cyberspace, and the proximity of both to film. Monaco has likewise doubled the size and scope of his Film and Media: A Chronology appendix. The book also features a new introduction, an expanded bibliography, and hundreds of illustrative black-and-white film stills and diagrams. It is a must for all film students, media buffs, and movie fans.
Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Filmmaking
Stan Brakhage - 2000
This major collection of writings draws primarily upon two long out-of-print books--Metaphors on Vision and Brakhage Scrapbook. Brakhage examines filmmaking in relation to social and professional contexts, the nature of influence and collaboration, the aesthetics of personal experience, and the conditions under which various films were made. Brakhage discusses his predecessors and contemporaries, relates film to dance and poetry, and in "A Moving Picture Giving and Taking Book" provides a manual for the novice filmmaker. Lectures, interviews, essays, and manifestos document Brakhage's personal vision and public persona.
Blade Runner
Scott Bukatman - 1997
The film is situated in terms of the debates about postmodernism which have informed the large body of criticism devoted to it.
Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever
Mark O'Connell - 2013
It fills our Facebook feeds. It keeps afloat a whole armada of late-night comedians, YouTube auteurs, and twitter wits … an endless stream of "Worst Things Ever." Recall, if you will, Rebecca Black's chart-topping disasterpiece, "Friday." Or “The Room”, Tommy Wiseau's cinematic tragedy turned cult farce. Or the devout Spanish septuagenarian who produced an infamously botched, and now stunningly ubiquitous, retouching of a 19th-century fresco of her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The Internet era has fueled an obsession with these and other acts of cultural cluelessness. Hardly a week goes by, it seems, without some new aesthetic travesty spreading across the globe in the form of ones and zeros, spawning countless remixes and riffs, like the world's biggest inside joke. And once more the cry goes up: Fail! Epic Fail!But what, exactly, draws us to these futile attempts at making songs, movies, and art? What are the essential ingredients that render a ridiculous failure sublime? More important, what does our seemingly insatiable appetite for the "succès d'incompetence" say about our aesthetic impulses? Our ethical ones? Is our laughter all in good fun or is something more sinister at work?
Hollywood: A Very Short Introduction
Peter Decherney - 2015
He recounts how the studio system rose out of the ashes of Thomas Edisons trust to create the handful of companies that have dominated global screens and imaginations for more than 100 years. Throughout, he reveals that the elements we take to be a natural part of the Hollywood experience--stars, genre-driven storytelling, blockbuster franchises, etc.--are really the product of cultural, political, and commercial forces. In many ways, Hollywood has remained the same for over a century. It has always been a global industry based in the U.S., and its storytelling has always unfolded across media, adapting plays, book, and comics and spinning off product tie-ins, television series, and social media campaigns. But major events have also continually remade Hollywood. The studios have weathered wars, disruptive new technologies, and competition by adopting a strategy of risk management and assimilation. This book explores the challenges of new technologies, including sound, home video, and computer graphics. And it examines Hollywoods responses to World War II, independent film movements, and regulations imposed by Washington. Hollywood: A Very Short Introduction is filled with discussions of well-known movies, stars, and directors, encapsulating the past century of research on Hollywood while adding many original insights and stories. It is the perfect introduction for readers who want to better understand the history and functioning of our screen-saturated world. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies
Manny Farber - 1971
His witty, incisive criticism later worked exacting language into an exploration of the feelings and strategies that went into low-budget and radical films as diverse as Michael Snow's Wavelength, Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana, and Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman. Expanded with an in-depth interview and seven essays written with his wife, artist Patricia Patterson, Negative Space gathers Farber's most influential writings, making this an indispensable collection for all lovers of film.
The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s '2001: A Space Odyssey'
Piers Bizony - 2014
Fifty years after the film's conception, TASCHEN looks back at the process of making the most important science-fiction film of all time. Though 2001 has arguably spawned more critical texts and scholarly analyses than any other film, this publication marks the first time that a truly exhaustive book has been devoted to it. TASCHEN readers enjoyed a sampling of previously unseen 2001 material in The Stanley Kubrick Archives; this four-volume set revisits the subject, exploring in great depth every aspect of the film and its making: the groundbreaking technical effects, the extraordinary set designs, and the fascinating collaboration between Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. Made in exclusive collaboration with the Kubrick estate and Warner Brothers, this copiously illustrated work features hundreds of unique 2001-related documents, concept artworks, and superb behind-the-scenes photographs from the Kubrick Archives most of which have never been published before as well as exclusive material from co-screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke s archives. The Making of Stanley Kubrick s '2001: A Space Odyssey' is a landmark book for film fans and a celebration of technical special-effects innovation before the digital age, conceived by the very designers of TASCHEN's instant collectible Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made. The Making of Stanley Kubrick's '2001. A Space Odyssey' Four volumes contained in a monolith-shaped case, designed by M/M Paris: Volume 1: Film stills Volume 2: Behind the scenes (including new interviews with lead actors, senior production designers, and key special-effects experts) Volume 3: Facsimile of original screenplay Volume 4: Facsimile of original 1965 production notes Limited to a total of 1,000 copies: Art Edition No 1-500 (Art Edition A and B) and Collector's Edition No. 501-1,500"
You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation
Susannah Gora - 2010
You’re a bonafide Brat Pack devotee—and you’re not alone.The films of the Brat Pack—from Sixteen Candles to Say Anything—are some of the most watched, bestselling DVDs of all time. The landscape that the Brat Packmemorialized—where outcasts and prom queens fall in love, preppies and burn-outs become buds, and frosted lip gloss, skinny ties, and exuberant optimism made us feel invincible—is rich with cultural themes and significance, and has influenced an entire generation who still believe that life always turns out the way it is supposed to.You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried takes us back to that era, interviewing key players, such as Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Andrew McCarthy, and John Cusack, and mines all the material from the movies to the music to the way the films were made to show how they helped shape our visions for romance, friendship, society, and success.
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood
Todd McCarthy - 1997
Sometime partner of the eccentric Howard Hughes, drinking buddy of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, an inveterate gambler and a notorious liar, Hawks was the most modern of the great masters and one of the first directors to declare his independence from the major studios. He played Svengali to Lauren Bacall, Montgomery Clift, and others, but Hawks's greatest creation may have been himself.As The Atlantic Monthly noted, "Todd McCarthy . . . has gone further than anyone else in sorting out the truths and lies of the life, the skills and the insight and the self-deceptions of the work." "A fluent biography of the great director, a frequently rotten guy but one whose artistic independence and standards of film morality never failed." -- The New York Times Book Review; "Hawks's life, until now rather an enigma, has been put into focus and made one with his art in Todd McCarthy's wise and funny Howard Hawks." -- The Wall Street Journal; "Excellent . . . a respectful, exhaustive, and appropriately smartass look at Hollywood's most versatile director." -- Newsweek.
The Silent Clowns
Walter Kerr - 1975
It covers such characters as Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy.