Perplexing Plots

Download or read book Perplexing Plots written by David Bordwell and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nominated, 2024 Edgar Allan Poe Award in the category of best critical/biographical, Mystery Writers of America Shortlisted, 2024 Agatha Awards - Best Mystery Nonfiction, Malice Domestic Posthumous Winner - 2023 IFCA Book Prize, International Crime Fiction Association Narrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once regarded as “difficult” become familiar to audiences? In Perplexing Plots, David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. He shows that since the nineteenth century, detective stories and suspense thrillers have allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. Tales of crime and mystery became a training ground where audiences learned to appreciate artifice. These genres demand a sophisticated awareness of storytelling conventions: they play games with narrative form and toy with audience expectations. Bordwell examines how writers and directors have pushed, pulled, and collaborated with their audiences to change popular storytelling. He explores the plot engineering of figures such as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy Sayers, and Quentin Tarantino, and traces how mainstream storytellers and modernist experimenters influenced one another’s work. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how movies, literature, theater, and popular culture have evolved over the past century.

Download or read book Poetics of Cinema written by David Bordwell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together twenty-five years of work on what he has called the "historical poetics of cinema," David Bordwell presents an extended analysis of a key question for film studies: how are films made, in particular historical contexts, in order to achieve certain effects? For Bordwell, films are made things, existing within historical contexts, and aim to create determinate effects. Beginning with this central thesis, Bordwell works out a full understanding of how films channel and recast cultural influences for their cinematic purposes. With more than five hundred film stills, Poetics of Cinema is a must-have for any student of cinema.

Download or read book Narration in the Fiction Film written by David Bordwell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-27 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, David Bordwell offers a comprehensive account of how movies use fundamental principles of narrative representation, unique features of the film medium, and diverse story-telling patterns to construct their fictional narratives.

Download or read book Figures Traced in Light written by David Bordwell and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-03 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staging and style -- Feuillade, or, Storytelling -- Mizoguchi, or, Modulation -- Angelopoulos, or, Melancholy -- Hou, or, Constraints -- Staging and stylistics.

Download or read book Storytelling in the New Hollywood written by Kristin Thompson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1999-11-05 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a wide range of films from the 1920s to the 1990s—from Keaton’s Our Hospitality to Casablanca to Terminator 2, Kristin Thompson offers the first in-depth analysis of Hollywood’s storytelling techniques and how they are used to make complex, easily comprehensible, entertaining films.

Download or read book House of Leaves written by Mark Z. Danielewski and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2000-03-07 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. Now this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices. The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

Download or read book Silver Screen Fiend written by Patton Oswalt and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Between 1995 and 1999, Patton Oswalt lived with an unshakable addiction. It wasn't drugs, alcohol or sex: it was film. After moving to L.A., Oswalt became a huge film buff (or as he calls it, a sprocket fiend), absorbing classics, cult hits, and new releases at the New Beverly Cinema. Silver screen celluloid became Patton's life schoolbook, informing his notion of acting, writing, comedy, and relationships. Set in the nascent days of L.A.'s alternative comedy scene, Oswalt's memoir chronicles his journey from fledgling stand-up comedian to self-assured sitcom actor, with the colorful New Beverly collective and a cast of now-notable young comedians supporting him all along the way"--