Sure Seaters

Download or read book Sure Seaters written by Barbara Wilinsky and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the end of the Second World War, a growing segment of the American filmgoing public was wearying of mainstream Hollywood films and began to seek out something different. In major cities and college towns across the country, art film theaters provided a venue for alternatives to the films playing in main-street movie palaces: British, foreign-language, and independent American films, as well as documentaries and revivals of Hollywood classics. A skeptical film industry dubbed such cinemas "sure seaters," convinced that patrons would have no trouble finding seats there. However, with the success of art films like Rossellini's Open City and Mackendrick's Tight Little Island, the meaning of the term "sure seater" changed and, by the end of the 1940s, reflected the frequency with which art house cinemas filled all their seats. Wilinsky examines the development of the theaters that introduced such challenging, personal, and artistic films as The Bicycle Thief and The Red Shoes to American audiences, and offers a more complete understanding of postwar popular culture and the often complicated relationship between art cinema and the commercial film industry that ultimately shaped both and resulted in today's vibrant film culture. -- from back cover.

Download or read book Brutal Vision written by Karl Schoonover and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How spectacular visions of physical suffering in post–World War II Italian neorealist films redefined moviegoing as a form of political action

Download or read book Global Art Cinema written by Rosalind Galt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-14 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Art cinema" has for over fifty years defined how audiences and critics imagine film outside Hollywood, but surprisingly little scholarly attention has been paid to the concept since the 1970s. And yet in the last thirty years art cinema has flourished worldwide. The emergence of East Asian and Latin American new waves, the reinvigoration of European film, the success of Iranian directors, and the rise of the film festival have transformed the landscape of world cinema. This book brings into focus art cinema's core internationalism, demonstrating its centrality to understanding film as a global phenomenon. The book reassesses the field of art cinema in light of recent scholarship on world film cultures. In addition to analysis of key regions and films, the essays cover topics including theories of the film image; industrial, aesthetic, and political histories; and art film's intersections with debates on genre, sexuality, new media forms, and postcolonial cultures. Global Art Cinema brings together a diverse group of scholars in a timely conversation that reaffirms the category of art cinema as relevant, provocative, and, in fact, fundamental to contemporary film studies.

Download or read book Rx Hollywood written by Michael DeAngelis and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-01-22 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rx Hollywood investigates how therapy surfaced in the themes, representations, and narrative strategies of a changing film industry. In the 1960s and early 1970s, American cinema was struggling to address adult audiences who were increasingly demanding films that confronted contemporary issues. Focusing upon five fields of therapeutic inquiry—therapist/patient dynamics, female "frigidity" and male impotence, marital discord, hallucinogenic drug use, and the dynamics of confession—Michael DeAngelis argues that the films of this period reveal an emergent, common tendency of therapy to work toward the formation of a stronger sense of interpersonal, community/social, and political engagement, counteracting alienation and social division in the spirit of connection and community. Prior to the 1960s, therapy had been considered an introspective process, one that emphasized contemplation and insight and prompted the patient to investigate memories and past traumas. In the 1960s, however, therapy would move toward more humanistic, client-centered, community, group, and encounter models that deemphasized the "there and then" of past feelings and experiences and embraced the "here and now" of the present. These kinds of therapy promised to heal the self through a process of reaching out, helping individuals to connect with communities, support networks, and other like-minded individuals who shared a needed sense of belonging. Drawing on a wide range of films, including Marnie, The Boston Strangler, The Chapman Report, Carnal Knowledge, Divorce American Style, Diary of a Mad Housewife, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and Five Easy Pieces, DeAngelis shows how American culture framed therapeutic issues as problems of human communication, developing treatment strategies that addressed individual psychological problems as social problems.

Download or read book How to Reach Japan by Subway written by Meghan Warner Mettler and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-06-01 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan’s official surrender to the United States in 1945 brought to an end one of the most bitter and brutal military conflicts of the twentieth century. U.S. government officials then faced the task of transforming Japan from enemy to ally, not only in top-level diplomatic relations but also in the minds of the American public. Only ten years after World War II, this transformation became a success as middle-class American consumers across the country were embracing Japanese architecture, films, hobbies, philosophy, and religion. Cultural institutions on both sides of the Pacific along with American tastemakers promoted a new image of Japan in keeping with State Department goals. Focusing on traditions instead of modern realities, Americans came to view Japan as a nation that was sophisticated and beautiful yet locked harmlessly in a timeless “Oriental” past. What ultimately led many Americans to embrace Japanese culture was a desire to appear affluent and properly “tasteful” in the status-conscious suburbs of the 1950s. In How to Reach Japan by Subway, Meghan Warner Mettler studies the shibui phenomenon, in which middle-class American consumers embraced Japanese culture while still exoticizing this new aesthetic. By examining shibui through the popularity of samurai movies, ikebana flower arrangement, bonsai cultivation, home and garden design, and Zen Buddhism, Mettler provides a new context and perspective for understanding how Americans encountered a foreign nation in their everyday lives.

Download or read book Indie written by Michael Z. Newman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-04 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's independent films often seem to defy classification. Their strategies of storytelling and representation range from raw, no-budget projects to more polished releases of Hollywood's "specialty" divisions. Yet understanding American indies involves more than just considering films. Filmmakers, distributors, exhibitors, festivals, critics, and audiences all shape the art's identity, which is always understood in relation to the Hollywood mainstream. By locating the American indie film in the historical context of the "Sundance-Miramax" era (the mid-1980s to the end of the 2000s), Michael Z. Newman considers indie cinema as an alternative American film culture. His work isolates patterns of character and realism, formal play, and oppositionality and the functions of the festivals, art houses, and critical media promoting them. He also accounts for the power of audiences to identify indie films in distinction to mainstream Hollywood and to seek socially emblematic characters and playful form in their narratives. Analyzing films such as Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996), Lost in Translation (2003), Pulp Fiction (1994), and Juno (2007), along with the work of Nicole Holofcener, Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles, Steven Soderbergh, and the Coen brothers, Newman investigates the conventions that cast indies as culturally legitimate works of art. He binds these diverse works together within a cluster of distinct viewing strategies and invites a reevaluation of the difference of independent cinema and its relationship to class and taste culture.

Download or read book The New York State Exhibitor ... written by and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 710 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: