The City Symphony Phenomenon

Author : Steven Jacobs
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317215575
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The City Symphony Phenomenon written by Steven Jacobs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-07-20 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of the city symphony, an experimental film form that presented the city as protagonist instead of mere decor. Combining experimental, documentary, and narrative practices, these films were marked by a high level of abstraction reminiscent of high-modernist experiments in painting and photography. Moreover, interwar city symphonies presented a highly fragmented, oftentimes kaleidoscopic sense of modern life, and they organized their urban-industrial images through rhythmic and associative montage that evoke musical structures. In this comprehensive volume, contributors consider the full 80 film corpus, from Manhatta and Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt to lesser-known cinematic explorations.

Author : Daniel P. Schwartz
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN 13 : 022802143X
Total Pages : 139 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book City Symphonies written by Daniel P. Schwartz and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2024-04-23 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cinema scholars categorize city symphony films of the 1920s and early 1930s as a subgenre of the silent film. Defined in visual terms, the city symphony organizes the visible elements of urban experience according to musical principles such as rhythm and counterpoint. In City Symphonies Daniel Schwartz explores the unheard sonic dimensions of these ostensibly silent films. The book turns its ear to the city symphony as an audible phenomenon, one that encompasses a multitude of works beyond the cinema, such as musical compositions, mass spectacles, radio experiments, and even paintings. What these works have in common is their treatment of the city as a medium for sound. The city is neither background nor content; rather, it is the material through which avant-garde works express themselves. In resonating through the city, these multimedia pieces perform experiments that undermine the borders between sight and sound. Applying an interdisciplinary approach, City Symphonies expands our understanding of the genre, breaking out of the confines of the cinema and onto the street.

Author : Erica Stein
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 1438486642
Total Pages : 371 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Seeing Symphonically written by Erica Stein and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-08-01 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can the cinema imagine a different way of developing, using, and living in the city? Is it possible to do so using images of the extant city? Seeing Symphonically shows how a group of independent experimental, documentary, and feature films made in and about late modern New York City did just this. Between 1939 and 1964, as the city was being utterly remade by a combination of urban renewal projects, suburbanization, and high-rise public housing, the New York avant-garde reinvented the city symphony, a modernist form that depicted a day in the life of an urban environment through complex montage, optical effects, and street portraiture. Erica Stein documents how these New York City symphonies subverted and critiqued urban redevelopment through their aesthetics, particularly their rhythms, and, through those same rhythms, envisioned a world in which urban inhabitants have the absolute right to remake the city according to their needs, outside the demands of capital.

Author : Patricia Aufderheide
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199839980
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction written by Patricia Aufderheide and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-11-28 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documentary film can encompass anything from Robert Flaherty's pioneering ethnography Nanook of the North to Michael Moore's anti-Iraq War polemic Fahrenheit 9/11, from Dziga Vertov's artful Soviet propaganda piece Man with a Movie Camera to Luc Jacquet's heart-tugging wildlife epic March of the Penguins. In this concise, crisply written guide, Patricia Aufderheide takes readers along the diverse paths of documentary history and charts the lively, often fierce debates among filmmakers and scholars about the best ways to represent reality and to tell the truths worth telling. Beginning with an overview of the central issues of documentary filmmaking--its definitions and purposes, its forms and founders--Aufderheide focuses on several of its key subgenres, including public affairs films, government propaganda (particularly the works produced during World War II), historical documentaries, and nature films. Her thematic approach allows readers to enter the subject matter through the kinds of films that first attracted them to documentaries, and it permits her to make connections between eras, as well as revealing the ongoing nature of documentary's core controversies involving objectivity, advocacy, and bias. Interwoven throughout are discussions of the ethical and practical considerations that arise with every aspect of documentary production. A particularly useful feature of the book is an appended list of "100 great documentaries" that anyone with a serious interest in the genre should see. Drawing on the author's four decades of experience as a film scholar and critic, this book is the perfect introduction not just for teachers and students but also for all thoughtful filmgoers and for those who aspire to make documentaries themselves. About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

Author : Kevin Lynch
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262620017
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Image of the City written by Kevin Lynch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1964-06-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.

Author : Robert P. McParland
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 144386644X
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Film and Literary Modernism written by Robert P. McParland and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Film and Literary Modernism, the connections between film, modernist literature, and the arts are explored by an international group of scholars. The impact of cinema upon our ways of seeing the world is highlighted in essays on city symphony films, avant-garde cinema, European filmmaking and key directors and personalities from Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein and Alain Renais to Alfred Hitchcock and Mae West. Contributors investigate the impact of film upon T. S. Eliot, time and stream of consciousness in Virginia Woolf and Henri Bergson, the racial undercurrents in the film adaptations of Ernest Hemingway’s fiction, and examine the film writing of William Faulkner, James Agee, and Graham Greene. Robert McParland assembles an international group of researchers including independent film makers, critics and professors of film, creative writers, teachers of architecture and design, and young doctoral scholars, who offer a multi-faceted look at modernism and the art of the film.

Author : Celestino Deleyto
Publisher : Wayne State University Press
ISBN 13 : 0814339867
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book From Tinseltown to Bordertown written by Celestino Deleyto and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-03 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Los Angeles is a global metropolis whose history and social narrative is linked to one of its top exports: cinema. L.A. appears on screen more than almost any city since Hollywood and is home to the American film industry. Historically, conversations of social and racial homogeneity have dominated the construction of Los Angeles as a cosmopolitan city, with Hollywood films largely contributing to this image. At the same time, the city is also known for its steady immigration, social inequalities, and exclusionary urban practices, not dissimilar to any other borderland in the world. The Spanish names and sounds within the city are paradoxical in relation to the striking invisibility of its Hispanic residents at many economic, social, and political levels, given their vast numbers. Additionally, the impact of the 1992 Los Angeles riots left the city raw, yet brought about changing discourses and provided Hollywood with the opportunity to rebrand its hometown by projecting to the world a new image in which social uniformity is challenged by diversity. It is for this reason that author Celestino Deleyto decided to take a closer look at how the quintessential cinematic city contributes to the ongoing creation of its own representation on the screen. From Tinseltown to Bordertown: Los Angeles on Film starts from the theoretical premise that place matters. Deleyto sees film as predominantly a spatial system and argues that the space of film and the space of reality are closely intertwined in complex ways and that we should acknowledge the potential of cinema to intervene in the historical process of the construction of urban space, as well as its ability to record place. The author asks to what extent this is also the city that is being constructed by contemporary movies. From Tinseltown to Bordertown offers a unique combination of urban, cultural, and border theory, as well as the author’s direct observation and experience of the city’s social and human geography with close readings of a selection of films such as Falling Down, White Men Can’t Jump, and Collateral. Through these textual analyses, Deleyto tries to situate filmic narratives of Los Angeles within the city itself and find a sense of the “real place” in their fictional fabrications. While in a certain sense, Los Angeles movies continue to exist within the rather exclusive boundaries of Tinseltown, the special borderliness of the city is becoming more and more evident in cinematic stories. Deleyto’s monograph is a fascinating case study on one of the United States’ most enigmatic cities. Film scholars with an interest in history and place will appreciate this book.

Author : Robert J. Flanagan
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300171935
Total Pages : 235 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Perilous Life of Symphony Orchestras written by Robert J. Flanagan and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-24 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the economic challenges facing symphony orchestras and contrasts the experience of orchestras in the United States (where there is little direct government support) and abroad (where governments typically provide large direct subsidies). Robert J. Flanagan explains the tension between artistic excellence and financial jeopardy that confronts most symphony orchestras. He analyzes three complementary strategies for addressing orchestras' economic challenges—raising performance revenues, slowing the growth of performance expenses, and increasing nonperformance income—and demonstrates that none of the three strategies alone is likely to provide economic security for orchestras.

Author : Daniel James Brown
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0593512308
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Boys in the Boat (Movie Tie-In) written by Daniel James Brown and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspiration for the Major Motion Picture Directed by George Clooney—exclusively in theaters December 25, 2023! The #1 New York Times bestselling true story about the American rowing triumph of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin—from the author of Facing the Mountain For readers of Unbroken, out of the depths of the Depression comes an irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times—the improbable, intimate account of how nine working-class boys from the American West showed the world at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin what true grit really meant. It was an unlikely quest from the start. With a team composed of the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the University of Washington’s eight-oar crew team was never expected to defeat the elite teams of the East Coast and Great Britain, yet they did, going on to shock the world by defeating the German team rowing for Adolf Hitler. The emotional heart of the tale lies with Joe Rantz, a teenager without family or prospects, who rows not only to regain his shattered self-regard but also to find a real place for himself in the world. Drawing on the boys’ own journals and vivid memories of a once-in-a-lifetime shared dream, Brown has created an unforgettable portrait of an era, a celebration of a remarkable achievement, and a chronicle of one extraordinary young man’s personal quest.

Author : Alex Ross
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1429932880
Total Pages : 640 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Rest Is Noise written by Alex Ross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-10-16 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.