The Oxford History Of World Cinema _BEST_
The book celebrates and chronicles over one hundred years of diverse achievement from westerns to the New Wave, from animation to the Avant-Garde, and from Hollywood to Hong Kong, with an international team of distinguished film historians telling the story of the major inventions and developments in the cinema business, its institutions, genres, and personnel. Other chapters outline the evolution of national cinemas round the world - the varied and distinctive filmic traditions that have developed alongside Hollywood.
The Oxford History of World Cinema
Although one might quibble with this hefty book's dust jacket claim that it is "the definitive history of cinema worldwide," the scope of Oxford's World Cinema is truly impressive. Edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, this volume displays the talents of more than seventy-five contributors--an international who's who of film scholars, including Edward Buscombe and Roberta Pearson of the UK, Douglas Gomery and Charles Musser of the USA, and Thomas Elsaesser of the Netherlands. World Cinema is the first general history of film, since the last edition of the late Gerald Mast's A Short History of the Movies, to give full justice to the so-called "silent" film.
The Oxford History of World Cinema is the most authoritative, up-to-date history of the Cinema ever undertaken. It traces the history of the twentieth-century's most enduringly popular entertainment form, covering all aspects of its development, stars, studios, and cultural impact. The book celebrates and chronicles over one hundred years of diverse achievement from westerns to the New Wave, from animation to the Avant-Garde, and from Hollywood to Hong Kong,with an international team of distinguished film historians telling the story of the major inventions and developments in the cinema business, its institutions, genres, and personnel. Other chapters outline the evolution of national cinemas round the world - the varied and distinctive filmic traditions thathave developed alongside Hollywood. Also included are over 140 special inset features on the film-makers and personalities - Garbo and Godard, Keaton and Kurosawa, Bugs Bunny and Bergman - who have had an enduring impact in popular memory and cinematic lore. With over 300 illustrations, a full bibliography, and an extensive index, The Oxford History of World Cinema is an invaluable and entertaining guide and resource for the student and general reader.
The most immediate way students engage with films is by watching and listening to them. In attempting to understand what world cinema is, it makes sense to devote a significant portion of the course to analyzing film style. Can students recognize stylistic continuities across a selection of neorealist-influenced world cinema from diverse regional, national and local contexts?
One productive approach is to situate neorealism and its diverse global iterations as a connective thread of world cinema, asking students to compare and contrast a work from the first phase of the Italian movement to any number of its geographically distant offspring. Once students have grasped the textual similarities, larger questions can be raised about the usefulness of working in a globally-identifiable film style: if neorealist style is already familiar to world cinema audiences, how is it advantageous for filmmakers working in Algeria, Argentina, or India to take up such established stylistic techniques in dealing with specificities of race, culture or politics unique to their stories. Depending on the historical parameters of the particular world cinema course, a similar approach can be employed with more contemporary world cinema. Distinct continuities will be easily recognizable to students between the minimalism of post-new wave European art cinema and its 21st century global progeny.
Ultimately, any world cinema course should give equal weight to both the text and its historical conditions. One of the most significant advantages of structuring the course around questions of world cinema as a critical category is that it gives a continuous through-line to the course and avoids the fatigue that is often felt by students when jumping from national cinema to national cinema week after week, overwhelming them with contextual details. Asking them to ask what is world cinema, and why is it important to care, anchors any film, filmmaker or national cinema discussed to the speaking/viewing position of the student.
A world cinema course structured around principles of openness and exploration, possible even in moderately-sized undergraduate lecture classes, will reveal students who are eager to debate and who possess a discursive array of perspectives. Young students should be made aware that film studies is not a fixed discipline and that much history and terminology has yet to be sufficiently scrutinized, and instructors should remember not to simply teach from above, but to explore alongside.
Within twenty years the cinema had spread to all parts of the globe; it had developed a sophisticated technology, and was on its way to becoming a major industry, providing the most popular form of entertainment to audiences in urban areas throughout the world, and attracting the attention of entrepreneurs, artists, scientists, and politicians.
Conceiving world cinema is as the sum total of all the national cinemas in the world is however equally problematic because, as Dennison & Lim cogently argue, it denies the possibility of other ways of organising the world (e.g. by gender, sexuality, economic power) and it also risks overlooking other modes of film practices (e.g. feminist cinema, queer cinema, regional, sub-state, diasporic, nomadic cinema etc). Moreover, essentialist conceptions of the nation-state and national identity have become increasingly problematised in the recent decades. Due to the accelerated transnational flows of people, technology, finance, media images and ideologies taking place worldwide, it is difficult to conceive of nation-states as retaining the political, cultural and economic autonomy and unity that they generally enjoyed prior to 1945.
Formerly staff writer for The Independent Film Magazine, Dana is a freelance journalist who covers film, tech & startup culture. Between 2013-16, she traveled to film festivals all over the world interviewing filmmakers for a book project on contemporary cinema. Dana holds a BA (Hons) in Film & Media from Birkbeck, University of London (2013), a BA / MA in English & French Language & Literature (2005) and specialist training in bio-medicine.Whatsapp: +4915125071569
"The World According to Hollywood will be a useful and important work, appealing to scholars interested in questions of national cinema and national identity, as well as the history of censorship and the MPPDA." —Lea Jacobs, author of The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928–1942
Richard I. Suchenski is an associate professor of film and electronic arts and the founder and director of the Center for Moving Image Arts at Bard College. He is the author of Projections of Memory: Romanticism, Modernism, and the Aesthetics of Film (2016) and the editor of Hou Hsiao-hsien (2014). Film programs he has curated have traveled to museums, festivals, and cinematheques in more than twenty-five cities worldwide.
Samhita Sunya is an assistant professor of cinema in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. Her research and teaching interests include world film history, Asian cinemas, intersections of (old and new) audio-visual media and literature, and sound studies. Current and planned publications include a book project (Sirens of Modernity: Post-war Cartographies of World Cinema via Hindi Film/Songs) and essays that build on research conducted at the National Film Archive of India as well as archives in the Middle East that explore transnational circuits and histories of romantic Hindi film and songs.
This book shines much-needed light on the history, structures and films of the Amharic film industry in Ethiopia. Focusing on the rise of the industry from 2002, until today, and embedded in archival, ethnographic and textual research methods, this book offers a sustained and detailed appreciation of Amharic-language cinema. Michael Thomas considers 'fiker'/love as an organising principle in national Ethiopian culture and, by extension, Amharic cinema. Placing 'fiker' as central to understanding Amharic film genres also illuminates the continuous negotiations at play between romantic, familial, patriotic and spiritual notions of love in these films. Thomas considers the production and exhibition of films in Ethiopia, charting fluctuations and continuities between the past and the present. Having done so, he offers detailed textual readings of films, identifying important junctures in the industry's development and the emergence of new genres. The findings of the book detail the affective characteristics that delineate most Amharic genres and the role culturally specific concepts, such as fiker, play in maintaining the relevance of commercial cinemas reliant on domestic audiences. 041b061a72