Book picks similar to
Writing with Light: The Muses by Vittorio Storaro
cinematography
cine
film
philosophy
Elia Kazan
Richard Schickel - 2005
In that role he manifestly shaped the conception and writing, as well as the presentation, of many of the period's iconic works, reshaping the values of the stage and bringing a new realism and intensity of performance to the screen. His various achievements include the original Broadway productions of The Skin of Our Teeth, All My Sons, and Death of a Salesman and such Hollywood films as Gentleman's Agreement, Brando's Streetcar, and Splendor in the Grass.A non–traditional biography, this book combines social and political history with a sharp critical evaluation of Kazan's work. Schickel presents Kazan as a figure of his culture and time, much in the same way that David Remnick treated Muhammed Ali and the larger picture of American history in King of the World. History's view of Kazan is now colored by a single political act –– his naming names in testimony before the House Un–American Activities Committee. By putting the actions, work, and words of this towering figure in context, Schickel not only defends his hero and his hero's work; he also helps the reader move beyond Kazan's most infamous moment to appreciate the larger American story in which he played such a pivotal role. The result is an intelligent and lively biography and social history.
The Language of New Media
Lev Manovich - 2001
He places new media within the histories of visual and media cultures of the last few centuries. He discusses new media's reliance on conventions of old media, such as the rectangular frame and mobile camera, and shows how new media works create the illusion of reality, address the viewer, and represent space. He also analyzes categories and forms unique to new media, such as interface and database.Manovich uses concepts from film theory, art history, literary theory, and computer science and also develops new theoretical constructs, such as cultural interface, spatial montage, and cinegratography. The theory and history of cinema play a particularly important role in the book. Among other topics, Manovich discusses parallels between the histories of cinema and of new media, digital cinema, screen and montage in cinema and in new media, and historical ties between avant-garde film and new media.
Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters: Inside His Films, Notebooks, and Collections
Jim Shedden - 2016
This book will be the perfect accompaniment to the exhibition, which focuses on del Toro’s creative process, including the well-defined themes that he obsessively returns to in all his films, the journals in which he logs his ideas, and the vast and inspiring collection of art and pop culture ephemera that he has amassed at his private “man cave,” Bleak House. Filled with imagery from the exhibit, including favorite pieces of art that del Toro has chosen for the exhibit, and pertinent journal pages, the book will further delve further into the director’s world through exclusive in-depth interviews and commentary from notable figures in the art world. Forming a perfect companion to the exhibition, this book will deliver an engrossing look into the mind of one of the great creative visionaries of our time.
When Hollywood Had a King: The Reign of Lew Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent into Power and Influence
Connie Bruck - 2003
The Music Corporation of America was founded in Chicago in 1924 by Dr. Jules Stein, an ophthalmologist with a gift for booking bands. Twelve years later, Stein moved his operations west to Beverly Hills and hired Lew Wasserman. From his meager beginnings as a movie-theater usher in Cleveland, Wasserman ultimately ascended to the post of president of MCA, and the company became the most powerful force in Hollywood, regarded with a mixture of fear and awe. In his signature black suit and black knit tie, Was-serman took Hollywood by storm. He shifted the balance of power from the studios—which had seven-year contractual strangleholds on the stars—to the talent, who became profit partners. When an antitrust suit forced MCA’s evolution from talent agency to film- and television-production company, it was Wasserman who parlayed the control of a wide variety of entertainment and media products into a new type of Hollywood power base. There was only Washington left to conquer, and conquer it Wasserman did, quietly brokering alliances with Democratic and Republican administrations alike. That Wasserman’s reach extended from the underworld to the White House only added to his mystique. Among his friends were Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, mob lawyer Sidney Korshak, and gangster Moe Dalitz—along with Presidents Johnson, Clinton, and especially Reagan, who enjoyed a particularly close and mutually beneficial relationship with Wasserman. He was equally intimate with Hollywood royalty, from Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart to Steven Spielberg, who began his career at MCA and once described Wasserman’s eyeglasses as looking like two giant movie screens.The history of MCA is really the history of a revolution. Lew Wasserman ushered in the Hollywood we know today. He is the link between the old-school moguls with their ironclad studio contracts and the new industry defined by multimedia conglomerates, power agents, multimillionaire actors, and profit sharing. In the hands of Connie Bruck, the story of Lew Wasserman’s rise to power takes on an almost Shakespearean scope. When Hollywood Had a King reveals the industry’s greatest untold story: how a stealthy, enterprising power broker became, for a time, Tinseltown’s absolute monarch.From the Hardcover edition.
John Wayne: The Westerns
David Morrell - 2012
He’s also a former professor of American Studies who writes in-depth profiles about film and music legends who changed our culture.Few film actors had the lasting popularity of John Wayne, especially in westerns. During his lifetime, Wayne was a top-ten box office star for twenty-four years. Three decades after his death, a 2012 Harris poll continued to place him among the top 5 most-liked film actors. In this comprehensive essay, award-winner David Morrell analyzes Wayne’s career in westerns and explores his fascinating personality, including his Latin studies in high school and his skills as a chess player. Even Wayne’s most knowledgeable fans will be surprised by this insightful study.Morrell’s fascination with Wayne motivated him to use this iconic actor as the inspiration for the main character of a historical novel LAST REVEILLE, which dramatizes America’s 1916 invasion of Mexico, supposedly to pursue the Mexican bandit, Pancho Villa, but actually to practice military exercises for America’s entry into World War I.Critical reaction:“John Wayne: the name still conjures political reaction and cinematic fascination. In this excellent e-essay, author David Morrell (First Blood) presents a thorough and evenhanded consideration of Wayne and his Westerns, from THE BIG TRAIL (1930) to THE SHOOTIST (1976). He’s precise about the narrative problems in THE SEARCHERS, insightful regarding the remarkable emotional range Wayne demonstrates in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, and mystified at the meaning critics find in RIO BRAVO. While also examining Wayne’s drinking (16 martinis before a Thanksgiving dinner), smoking (five packs a day on THE ALAMO) and expertise as a chess player, Morrell allows us to appreciate and understand how Wayne, ‘an undeniable phenomenon,’ helped create that unique film category: John Wayne Westerns.”—Tom Clagett, ROUNDUP MAGAZINE (WESTERN WRITERS OF AMERICA)David Morrell is the award-winning author of First Blood, the novel in which Rambo was created. A former professor of American literature at the University of Iowa, he has written numerous New York Times bestsellers, including the classic Brotherhood of the Rose spy trilogy. The main character in Morrell’s western novel, Last Reveille, was inspired by Wayne’s career. “David Morrell is, to me, the finest thriller writer living today, bar none.”—Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author of The Columbus Affair“Morrell, an absolute master of the thriller, plays by his on rules and leaves you dazzled.”—Dean Koontz, New York Times bestselling author of 77 Shadow Street
The Age of Movies: Selected Writings
Pauline Kael - 2011
Kael called movies "the most total and encompassing art form we have," and she made her reviews a platform for considering both film and the worlds it engages, crafting in the process a prose style of extraordinary wit, precision, and improvisatory grace. To read The Age of Movies, the first new selection in more than a generation, is to be swept up into an endlessly revealing and entertaining dialogue with Kael at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best. Her ability to evoke the essence of a great artist-an Orson Welles or a Robert Altman-or to celebrate the way even seeming trash could tap deeply into our emotions was matched by her unwavering eye for the scams and self-deceptions of a corrupt movie industry. Here in this career spanning collection are her appraisals of the films that defined an era-among them Breathless, Bonnie and Clyde, The Leopard, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, Nashville-along with many others, some awaiting rediscovery, all providing the occasion for masterpieces of observation and insight, alive on every page.
The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
Maggie Nelson - 2011
The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away?Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.
Life Moves Pretty Fast: The Lessons We Learned From Eighties Movies (And Why We Don't Learn Them From Movies Any More)
Hadley Freeman - 2015
Comedy in Three Men and a Baby, Hannah and Her Sisters, Ghostbusters, and Back to the Future; all a teenager needs to know in Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Say Anything, The Breakfast Club, and Mystic Pizza; the ultimate in action from Top Gun, Die Hard, Beverly Hills Cop, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; love and sex in 9 1/2 Weeks, Splash, About Last Night, The Big Chill, and Bull Durham; and family fun in The Little Mermaid, ET, Big, Parenthood, and Lean On Me.In Life Moves Pretty Fast, Hadley puts her obsessive movie geekery to good use, detailing the decade’s key players, genres, and tropes. She looks back on a cinematic world in which bankers are invariably evil, where children are always wiser than adults, where science is embraced with an intense enthusiasm, and the future viewed with giddy excitement. And, she considers how the changes between movies then and movies today say so much about society’s changing expectations of women, young people, and art—and explains why Pretty in Pink should be put on school syllabuses immediately.From how John Hughes discovered Molly Ringwald, to how the friendship between Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi influenced the evolution of comedy, and how Eddie Murphy made America believe that race can be transcended, this is a “highly personal, witty love letter to eighties movies, but also an intellectually vigorous, well-researched take on the changing times of the film industry” (The Guardian).
High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art
Julian Stallabrass - 2000
High Art Lite provides a sustained analysis of the phenomenal success of YBA, young British artists obsessed with commerce, mass media and the cult of personality Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Marcus Harvey, Sarah Lucas, among others. In this fully revised and expanded edition, Julian Stallabrass explores how YBA lost its critical immunity in the new millennium, and looks at the ways in which figures such as Hirst, Emin, Wearing and Landy have altered their work in recent years.
Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film
Edward Ross - 2015
In Filmish, Ross's cartoon alter-ego guides readers through the annals of cinematic history, introducing us to some of the strange and fascinating concepts at work in the movies. Each chapter focuses on a particular theme - the body, architecture, language - and explores an eclectic mix of cinematic triumphs, from A Trip to the Moon to Aliens. Sitting within the tradition of bestselling non-fiction graphic novels like Scott McClouds Understanding Comics and the Introducing...series, Filmish tackles serious issues - sexuality, race, censorship, propaganda - with authority and wit, throwing new light on some of the greatest films ever made.
Stranger Things: Worlds Turned Upside Down: The Official Behind-the-Scenes Companion
Gina McIntyre - 2018
The marks, scuffs, and tears on the cover and pages are an intentional design element.Stranger things have happened. . . .When the first season of Stranger Things debuted on Netflix in the summer of 2016, the show struck a nerve with millions of viewers worldwide and received broad critical acclaim. The series has gone on to win six Emmy Awards, but its success was driven more than anything by word of mouth, resonating across generations. Viewers feel personal connections to the characters. Now fans can immerse themselves in the world—or worlds—of Hawkins, Indiana, like never before. Inside you’ll find• original commentary and a foreword from creators Matt and Ross Duffer• exclusive interviews with the stars of the show, including Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, and David Harbour• the show’s earliest drafts, pitches to Netflix, and casting calls• insights into the Duffers’ creative process from the entire crew—from costume and set designers to composers and visual-effects specialists• deep dives into the cultural artifacts and references that inspired the look and feel of the show• a map of everyday Hawkins—with clues charting the network of the Upside Down• the Morse code disk Eleven uses, so you can decipher secret messages embedded throughout the text• a look into the future of the series—including a sneak preview of season three!Adding whole new layers to enrich the viewing experience, this keepsake is essential reading for anyone and everyone who loves Stranger Things.
The Movie Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained
Danny Leigh - 2016
Unforgettable quotes, film stills, and original posters and memorabilia transport you to the world of each film, while narrative timelines and infographics explore central themes, characters, actors, and directors.Relive classics of the silent era, such as Nosferatu, along with wartime greats like Casablanca, transformative New Wave films such as Lawrence of Arabia and Easy Rider, and modern masterpieces like Do the Right Thing, City of God, and Gravity. Each movie is placed in the broader context of the industry and its key players, making it an invaluable resource for any film fanatic.The Movie Book zooms in on the best cinematic masterpieces of all time and is a must-have for anyone with a passion for films and the history of cinema.Big Ideas Simply Explained series uses creative design and innovative graphics, along with straightforward and engaging writing, to make complex subjects easier to understand. These award-winning books provide just the information needed for students, families, or anyone interested in concise, thought-provoking refreshers on a single subject.Reviews:"[The Big Ideas Simply Explained books] are beautifully illustrated with shadow-like cartoons that break down even the most difficult concepts so they are easier to grasp. These step-by-step diagrams are an incredibly clever learning device to include, especially for visual learners." - Examiner.com"Clever and engaging" - Booklist"Perfect coffee table fodder for your home theater." - Uncrate.com"[A] great refresher for films you haven't seen in a while and an even better resource for populating your watchlist with shows you may have missed." - GeekDad"Richly illustrated." - Parade.com"A fine introduction for budding film buffs." - School Library Journal
Sidartha. a Story of Mystery.
Kathleen Behenna - 2011
A story of mystery.Publisher: British Library, Historical Print EditionsThe British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial additional collections of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC.The FICTION & PROSE LITERATURE collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. The collection provides readers with a perspective of the world from some of the 18th and 19th century's most talented writers. Written for a range of audiences, these works are a treasure for any curious reader looking to see the world through the eyes of ages past. Beyond the main body of works the collection also includes song-books, comedy, and works of satire. ++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library Behenna, Kathleen; 1896.]. vi. 352 p.; 8. 012626.ee.26.
Tattoo Culture Magazine #1
Nicki Kasper - 2013
What we have created together is truly distinctive in the tattoo media marketplace and, (in the opinion of our partners and artists ubiquitously), something long overdue- a serious and respectable publication for the entire tattoo culture, built by the tattoo community itself!Issue 1 features: Jeff Gogué, Mike Rubendall, Freddy Negrete, Valerie Vargas, Robert Ryan, Lucero and more...
Novels by Tom Robbins: Still Life With Woodpecker, Villa Incognito, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, Jitterbug Perfume
Books LLC - 2010
Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Still Life With Woodpecker, Villa Incognito, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, Jitterbug Perfume, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Skinny Legs and All, Another Roadside Attraction, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: Still Life With Woodpecker (1980) is the third novel by Tom Robbins, concerning the love affair between an environmentalist princess and an outlaw. As with most of Robbins' books, it encompasses a broad range of topics, from aliens and redheads to consumerism, the building of bombs, romance, royalty, the moon, and a pack of Camels. The novel continuously addresses the question of how to make love stay. The story is sometimes called a post-modern fairy tale. The book begins in "the final quarter of the twentieth century," at a year never specified, presumably in the early 1980s. It revolves around a family of deposed European royalty living in a small house in the suburbs outside of Seattle, under the protection of the CIA. They consist of: the father, King Max, a former gambler and poker player whose prosthetic heart valve makes a loud scraping noise when he gets excited; the mother, Queen Tilli, an opera-lover with a strong foreign accent and a fondness for saying "Oh, oh, spaghetti-o"; Gulietta, the non-English-speaking maid (and, as it turns out, Max's half-sister) and the daughter, Leigh-Cheri, a redheaded vegetarian liberal princess and former cheerleader, having pulled out of classes after being asked to resign from the cheer squad after having a miscarriage while cheering at a football game. Leigh-Cheri proclaims herself celibate, withdraws from public life and cloisters herself in her room, only to emerge to ask her parents for permission to go to the Care Fest, a lib...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=217300