By David Sutton, Peter Wogan
Why do Jaws, Field of Dreams, The gigantic Lebowski, and The Godfather stay strikingly renowned during this age of fragmented audiences and ever-faster spin cycles? Hollywood Blockbusters argues that those motion pictures proceed to captivate audiences simply because they play upon underlying tensions and difficulties in American tradition, very similar to the myths that anthropologists research in non-Western contexts. In making this argument, the authors hire and expand anthropological theories approximately ritual, kinship, reward giving, strength, egalitarianism, literacy, metalinguistics, stereotypes, and the mysteries of the opposite. The results—original insights into sleek movie classics, American tradition, and anthropological theory—will attract scholars of movie, Media, Anthropology, Sociology, and Cultural Studies.
Read Online or Download Hollywood Blockbusters: The Anthropology of Popular Movies PDF
Best film books
In leisure Terror, Isabel Cristina Pinedo analyzes how the modern horror movie produces leisure terror as a fulfilling come across with violence and threat for lady spectators. She demanding situations the normal knowledge that violent horror motion pictures can simply degrade girls and incite violence, and contends as a substitute that the modern horror movie speaks to the cultural have to show rage and terror in the middle of social upheaval.
The Unruly Life of Woody Allen: A Biography (Revised and Updated Edition)
Overview
Writer, director, actor, stand-up comedian. Woody Allen stands as one among our era’s so much celebrated artists. beginning within the Nineteen Fifties, Allen begun crafting a larger-than-life neurotic personality that has when you consider that entertained and enlightened thousands. In his movies, broadly regarded as autobiographical explorations of his personal comedian fears and fixations, Allen conscientiously managed the public’s view of him as a adorable scamp. yet that every one got here crashing down the day Mia Farrow discovered a Polaroid on her mantle. What was once a flurry of sensational headlines and felony battles. His dating with Soon-Yi Previn, thirty-four years his junior and the step-daughter of his longtime female friend, prompted shockwaves within the public’s conception of the director, but few biographers and newshounds have explored what occurred and why.
In this, the 1st deep research of Allen’s existence and the occasions surrounding his cut up with Farrow, biographer Marion Meade tracks down dozens of pals, actors, acquaintances, and movie historians. They open up with insights and information infrequent on this planet of wealth and famous person. What effects is an engaging portrait of a fallacious genius, as adept at developing his personal picture as he's at crafting movies. Rereleased and up to date, this can be an unauthorized biography that neither Woody Allen’s lovers nor his detractors may be in a position to positioned down. The revised and up to date variation used to be reviewed within the Wall highway magazine in 2013 through Carl Rollyson, in a roundup of the 5 most sensible Hollywood biographies.
“B” Movies: An Informal Survey of the American Low-Budget Film 1933–1945
An unduly imprecise historical past of the minor studios, B movies gathers jointly histories of such factories as Monogram and PRC. The publication used to be cast from an essay that seemed in specialise in movie, and the publication used to be intended to be a part of a sequence below the overall editorship of Leonard Maltin. It's doubtful what number if any of the proposed titles have been released.
Those volumes research an important yet formerly ignored second in French cultural historical past: the emergence of French movie idea and feedback earlier than the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six approximately symmetrical classes that serve to "bite into" the discursive movement of early French writing at the cinema.
- A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma
- Ancient Greek Women in Film (Classical Presences)
- Fantastic Planets, Forbidden Zones, and Lost Continents: The 100 Greatest Science-Fiction Films
- Jack Hill: The Exploitation and Blaxploitation Master, Film by Film
Additional resources for Hollywood Blockbusters: The Anthropology of Popular Movies
Example text
While Drummond focuses on movies that deal specifically with the human-animal-technology nexus, and Traube tends to focus on “people” movies to explore themes of race/class/gender, we have chosen a more diverse range of movies. This diversity should help readers see the possibilities for applying insights to movies of their own choosing, such application being the ultimate test of the value of the approaches being developed here. Let us turn, then, to a preview of the movies discussed in the subsequent chapters.
G. the bloody horse’s head, in a subsequent scene). We would argue that it is precisely this confusing combination—brutal men who nicely integrate work and family, objectivity and subjectivity—that makes it hard to wrap one’s mind around the Corleones, and that such ambiguity adds to our fascination with the film. Furthermore, the film consistently offers an image of extreme male solidarity. Indeed, deep love between fathers, sons, and brothers is expressed in the course of “business” relationships: a father and his sons work at the same business, sons try to save their father, and the father affectionately hugs and kisses his sons.
As the baker’s example shows, this symbolic gift economy also involves male exchange and nurturance through food—men feeding other men. ” These words follow the Don’s lecturing Johnny on the importance of being a “family man,” and also stand in contrast to the bandleader’s exploitation. Nurturing other men and being a “family man” are all part of being a good businessman in this gift economy. Returning to the bandleader’s contract, we also see that speech performatives, rather than writing, do the work of cementing mutual commitments with the Don.