Film, Form, and Culture

by Kolker, Robert Phillip

• ISBN13: 9780072452976
• ISBN10: 0072452978
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-08-01
• Publisher: McGraw Hill College Div

Summary

This DVD-ROM enhances the discussions in the text with visual examples and provides close, interactive analysis of moving images from classic and recent film. It is designed to play in computer DVD drives - rather than standard DVD players - and can be used alone or in conjuntion with the text.

Table of Contents

Introduction	xi
Seeing Is Not Believing	1	(15)
Image and Reality	1	(3)
Representation	4	(6)
Perspective and the Pleasures of Tricking the Eye	5	(1)
Photography and Reality	6	(1)
Photography and the Thing Itself	7	(1)
Reality as Image	8	(1)
Manipulation of the Image	9	(1)
From the Photographic to the Cinematic Image	10	(4)
Moving Images	11	(1)
The Intersection of Photography and Film	11	(1)
Economic Processes	12	(1)
The Economics of Realism	12	(2)
Notes and References	14	(2)
Formal Structures: How Films Tell Their Stories	16	(44)
From Image to Narrative	16	(3)
The Economics of the Image	19	(5)
The System Develops: Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin	20	(2)
From the Individual to the Studio	22	(2)
The Making of the Classical Hollywood Style	24	(9)
Fabricating the Image	24	(4)
The Whole and Its Parts	28	(1)
Making the Parts Invisible	29	(1)
Ideology at Work	30	(1)
Form and Content	31	(2)
The Shot	33	(1)
The Cut	34	(9)
The Development of Continuity Cutting	35	(2)
Shot/Reverse Shot	37	(1)
Dialogue Cutting	38	(2)
Sight Lines	40	(1)
Arbitrary Conventions	41	(1)
The Hollywood Economical Style	42	(1)
Departures from the Classical Hollywood Style	43	(7)
Eisenstein Montage	44	(2)
Attending to the Shot	46	(1)
Mise-en-scene	47	(1)
The Long Take in Citizen Kane	48	(2)
Expressive Use of Mise-en-scene and Editing	50	(4)
John Ford	50	(1)
Robert Altman	50	(1)
Stanley Kubrick	51	(1)
Alfred Hitchcock	51	(1)
Martin Scorsese and Point of View	52	(2)
Movie Conventions	54	(4)
Gender Specificity	55	(2)
Convention and Consciousness	57	(1)
Notes and References	58	(2)
Film as Cultural Practice	60	(38)
Popular Culture	60	(1)
Definitions of Culture	61	(3)
Subcultures	62	(1)
The Roots of Cultural Differences	63	(1)
How Popular Culture Becomes Mass Culture	64	(1)
Radio and Print	64	(1)
Television	65	(1)
Theories of Culture	65	(7)
The Frankfurt School	66	(1)
The Frankfurt School in America	67	(1)
Masscult and Midcult	68	(1)
Benjamin and Aura	69	(3)
Cultural Studies	72	(4)
Text and Context	73	(1)
Negotiation	73	(1)
Judgment and Values	74	(1)
Intertextuality and the Postmodern	74	(2)
Cultural Criticism Applied to Cinematic Texts	76	(20)
Cultural Studies and Film	76	(1)
Vertigo and Die Hard	76	(2)
The Cultural Mix: Film and Television	78	(2)
Bruce Willis versus James Stewart: The Function of the Star	80	(2)
Vertigo and the Culture of the Fifties	82	(3)
Vertigo and Die Hard: Men in Film	85	(3)
Stories of Modernity	88	(2)
Stories of Postmodernity	90	(2)
The Buddy Film	92	(1)
The End of Redemption	93	(3)
Notes and References	96	(2)
The Stories Told by Film	98	(46)
Master Narratives and Dominant Fictions	98	(4)
Internal Tensions	98	(1)
Closure	99	(1)
Narrative Constraints	100	(2)
Genre	102	(5)
Subgenres	102	(1)
Generic Limits	102	(1)
Genre and Gesture	103	(1)
Generic Origins	103	(2)
Genre and Narrative Economy	105	(2)
Genre Analysis	107	(1)
Melodrama	107	(13)
Griffith	108	(9)
Ideological Norms	117	(1)
The Western	118	(2)
Film Noir	120	(10)
Expressionist Roots of Noir	120	(6)
Noir's Climax	126	(2)
Noir's Rebirth	128	(1)
Genre Resilience	129	(1)
European and Other Cinemas	130	(11)
Italian Neorealism	130	(3)
The French New Wave	133	(5)
The Influence of Brecht	138	(1)
Visual Pleasure	139	(2)
Notes and References	141	(3)
The Story Tellers of Film	144	(33)
Who Makes Movies?	144	(4)
Individuals and Creativity	144	(1)
The Ideal Viewer	145	(1)
Film and the Individual Talent	146	(1)
Collaboration as Creativity	146	(2)
Moviemakers	148	(14)
Craftspeople	148	(1)
Production Designer	148	(1)
Cinematographer	149	(1)
Editor	150	(1)
Composer	151	(3)
Screenwriter	154	(2)
Actors	156	(3)
Collaboration Reconsidered	159	(1)
Producer	160	(2)
The Auteur	162	(13)
European Origins	162	(1)
The Birth of the Auteur	162	(1)
The Auteur Theory	163	(10)
Auteurism Today	173	(2)
Notes and References	175	(2)
Other Screens: The Future of the Image	177	(21)
Television	178	(6)
Commercial Structures	179	(1)
The Television Gaze	179	(1)
The News and the Gaze	180	(1)
Narrative Programming	181	(1)
Flow	182	(2)
Televisual Pleasure	184	(1)
From Analogue to Digital	184	(3)
The Third Screen	187	(11)
Other Narratives	187	(5)
Film, Form, and Culture, The CD-ROM	192	(1)
The Computer and the Text	193	(1)
Modernity and the Internet	194	(4)
Notes and References	198	(3)
Index	201