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"Film criticism-Great Britain-History-20th century"
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The lasting influence of the war on postwar British film
\"Many of the most celebrated British films of the immediate post-war period (1945-55) seem to be occupied with \"getting on\" with life and offering distraction for postwar audiences. It is the time of the celebrated Ealing comedies, Hue and Cry (1946) and Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Dickens adaptations, and the most ambitious projects of the Archers. While the war itself is rarely mentioned in these films, the war and the conditions of postwar society lie at the heart of understanding them. While various studies have focused on lesser known realist films, few consider how deeply and completely the war affected British film. Michael W. Boyce considers the preoccupation of these films with profound anxieties and uncertainties about what life was going to be like for postwar Britain, what roles men and women would play, how children would grow up, even what it meant - and what it still means today - to be British\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Maximum Movies—Pulp Fictions
In the words of Richard Maltby . . . \"Maximum Movies--Pulp Fictions describes two improbably imbricated worlds and the piece of cultural history their intersections provoked.\" One of these worlds comprises a clutch of noisy, garish pulp movies--Kiss Me Deadly, Shock Corridor, Fixed Bayonets!, I Walked with a Zombie, The Lineup, Terror in a Texas Town, Ride Lonesome--pumped out for the grind houses at the end of the urban exhibition chain by the studios' B-divisions and fly-by-night independents. The other is occupied by critics, intellectuals, cinephiles, and filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Manny Farber, and Lawrence Alloway, who championed the cause of these movies and incited the cultural guardians of the day by attacking a rigorously policed canon of tasteful, rarified, and ossified art objects. Against the legitimate, and in defense of the illegitimate, in an insolent and unruly manner, they agitated for the recognition of lurid sensational crime stories, war pictures, fast-paced Westerns, thrillers, and gangster melodramas were claimed as examples of the true, the real, and the authentic in contemporary culture--the foundation upon which modern film studies sits.
eBook
The Great War in popular British cinema of the 1920s : before journey's end
\"This book discusses British cinema's representation of the Great War during the 1920s in both battle reconstruction films and in popular romances. It argues that popular cinematic representations of the war offered surviving audiences a language through which to interpret their recent experience, and traces the ways in which those interpretations changed during the decade. A focus on the distinctive language evolved for battle reconstruction films forms a central chapter - such films use a distinctive kind of 'staged reality' to address their veteran audiences, and were often viewed within a specific Remembrance context. Other chapters cover the representation of the returning soldier as a 'war touched man' in a range of fictional narratives, and the centrality of rituals of remembrance to many post-war narratives. 1920s British cinematic representations of the war are distinctively of their period, and are appraised as part of a wider culture of war representation in the decade. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Film and the end of empire
\"In these two volumes of original essays, scholars from around the world address the history of British colonial cinema stretching from the emergence of cinema at the height of imperalism, to moments of decolonization and the ending of formal imperialism in the post-Second World War\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Film stardom, myth and classicism : the rise of Hollywood's gods
\"Since the golden era of silent movies, stars have been described as screen gods, goddesses and idols. But why did Hollywood, that most modern industry, first look back to antiquity as it built its stars? This book presents a unique insight into the origins of screen stardom in the 1910s and 1920s to explore how the myth and iconography of ancient Greece and Rome were deployed to create modern Apollo and Venuses of the screen. Drawing from extensive research into studio production files, fan-magazines and the popular reception of stars in America and Britain, this study explores how the sculptural gods of the past enabled the flickering shadows on the screen to seem more present and alive. Classicism permitted films to encode different sexualities for their audience, and present stars who embodied traditions of the Grand Tour for a post-war context where the ruins of past civilisations had become strangely resonant. The book presents detailed discussion of leading players such as Ramon Novarro, Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino, and major films such as Ben-Hur and Flesh and the Devil, to show how classicism enabled star discourse to transform actors into icons. This is the story of how Olympus moved to Hollywood to divinise stars as icons for a modern age and defined a model of stardom that is still with us today\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book