By David Bordwell
With The Rhapsodes, renowned movie pupil and critic David Bordwell—an inheritor to either these legacies—restores to a much broader viewers the paintings of Ferguson, Agee, Farber, and Tyler, critics he calls the “Rhapsodes” for the passionate and intentionally offbeat nature in their vernacular prose. each one broke with winning currents in feedback which will locate new how one can discuss the preferred motion pictures that contemporaries usually observed at most sensible as trivial, at worst as a betrayal of paintings. Ferguson observed in Hollywood a fascinating, adroit mode of renowned storytelling. Agee sought in cinema the lyrical epiphanies present in romantic poetry. Farber, informed as a painter, introduced a pictorial intelligence to endure on movie. A surrealist, Tyler taken care of vintage Hollywood as a collective hallucination that invited either viewers and critic to discover moments of subversive excitement. along with his normal readability and brio, Bordwell takes readers in the course of the suitable cultural and demanding panorama and considers the critics’ writing types, their conceptions of flicks, and their quarrels. He concludes by means of analyzing the profound effect of Ferguson, Agee, Farber, and Tyler on later generations of movie writers.
The Rhapsodes allows readers to rediscover those outstanding critics who broke with conference to trap what they discovered relocating, crafty, or disappointing in vintage Hollywood cinema and explores their robust—and continuing—influence.
Read Online or Download The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture PDF
Similar movies books
Landscapes of loss: the national past in postwar French cinema
The way each ecu state after the WW2 reacted dealing with the interior and outer demons the bloody strains sealed in upon the collective subconscious, obviously diverse from state in country. whereas Italy made up our minds to make a profound revision of its personal nature (The Italian Neo-realism) or Germany (supported by means of a wonderful literary move and the intense elevating of memorable administrators comparable to Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, Kluge, Schlondorff or Aldon), France due in nice half to their a number of creative developments, did not' t react because it have been, unanimously at the related method.
The outline for this e-book, movie within the air of secrecy of paintings, could be approaching.
Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China
Regardless of alterations within the political, social, and monetary platforms of Taiwan and mainland China, the method of modernization in either has challenged conventional cultural norms. Tonglin Lu examines how transformations in cultural formation among Taiwan and China have stimulated reactions to modernity and the way cultural id has taken varied varieties on either side of the Taiwan straits.
Screening the Beats: Media Culture and the Beat Sensibility
Movie critic David Sterritt’s Screening the Beats: Media tradition and the Beat Sensibility showcases the social and aesthetic viewpoints of lynchpin Beat writers Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, juxtaposing their artistry with Fifties tradition and attaining what Kerouac may need referred to as a bookmovie” riff.
- Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right, and the Culture Wars
- Projections: A Forum for Film-Makers
- British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference
- You Won't Believe Your Eyes: A Front Row Look at the Sci-Fi/Horror Films of the 1950s
- Abstinence Cinema Virginity and the Rhetoric of Sexual Purity in Contemporary Film
Additional info for The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture
Sample text
3 Otis Ferguson t H e way o F t H e Ca m e r a Of my four critics, Ferguson remains the least known today. That’s a pity, because he was an exceptional writer. He had some of the pungency of H. L. Mencken, but he didn’t indulge in the Sage of Baltimore’s exhausting rhetorical barrages. Ferguson wrote in the laconic, wiseacre idiom of the generation who faced the turmoil of the 1930s and who knew the lessons of Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Jazz inflected his prose, as did the pulse of the movies, which by the time he started reviewing had finally learned to talk properly.
Ferguson added a combustible element to the political debates: his personality. Talking out of the side of his mouth, he seemed to have a perpetual chip on his shoulder. He presented himself as the tough guy who came up the hard way, who spent four years at sea and worked his way through college. Had the New Republic not picked up a (rather bad) piece of dialect reportage in his junior year at Clark, he might have wound up, in those Depression years, staying on as a pinboy in a bowling alley. An anti-intellectual intellectual, he boiled with resentment at the Fitzgeralds and Edmund Wilsons who had passed easily from prep school to the Ivy League and then to secure berths in Manhattan publishing.
Mass Art as Mass Delusion There has been no lack of critics who have proclaimed the uplifting or degrading qualities of the movies without having noticed anything whatever of what was going on in them. mar s haLL mC LU han, 1 94 7 Today, when every intellectual finds something to like in the entertainment industry, it’s hard to imagine the climate seventy years ago. Then there was a wide debate about whether mass media were simply machines of social control. From Communists to anti-Communists, the intelligentsia was largely united in the belief that “mass culture” was at best a bland solace and at worst a cruel manipulator of an unhappy populace.