Synopses & Reviews
Largely shut out of American theaters since the 1920s, foreign films such as Open City, Bicycle Thief, Rashomon, The Seventh Seal, Breathless, La Dolce Vita and L’Avventura played after World War II in a growing number of art houses around the country and created a small but influential art film market devoted to the acquisition, distribution, and exhibition of foreign-language and English-language films produced abroad. Nurtured by successive waves of imports from Italy, Great Britain, France, Sweden, Japan, and the Soviet Bloc, the renaissance was kick-started by independent distributors working out of New York; by the 1960s, however, the market had been subsumed by Hollywood.
From Roberto Rossellini’s Open City in 1946 to Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris in 1973, Tino Balio tracks the critical reception in the press of such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Tony Richardson, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Luis Buñuel, Satyajit Ray, and Milos Forman. Their releases paled in comparison to Hollywood fare at the box office, but their impact on American film culture was enormous. The reception accorded to art house cinema attacked motion picture censorship, promoted the director as auteur, and celebrated film as an international art. Championing the cause was the new “cinephile” generation, which was mostly made up of college students under thirty.
The fashion for foreign films depended in part on their frankness about sex. When Hollywood abolished the Production Code in the late 1960s, American-made films began to treat adult themes with maturity and candor. In this new environment, foreign films lost their cachet and the art film market went into decline.
Review
"Neupert offers brilliant analyses, whether of familiar or neglected films . . . [giving] a masterful sense of the movement, its sources, character, and its continuing influence. Essential."—Choice
Review
"Refreshingly jargon-free and full of interesting details and anecdotes, this book is a pleasure to read."—Library Journal
Review
“A major contribution to film historical scholarship. Balio charts the fascinating careers of foreign films in the American market, complete with comprehensive details of their marketing, box-office success or failure, and reception by critics.”—Sarah Street, author of Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA
Review
andquot;Hearneand#39;s book is a cogent and valuable addition to the body of work on Smoke Signals and Native cinema. . . . Her extremely detailed reading of the film, her trenchant analysis of the strategies it uses to speak to multiple audiences, and her examination of the current state of Native cinema make this a valuable resource for both teachers and scholars.andquot;andmdash;Laura Beadling, Western Historical Quarterly
Review
“Jeansonne and Luhrssen have cleverly used movies about American wars to point out that what we often know—or remember—about those difficult events is what we saw in the movies. So, what the movies tell us about wars is far more important than the entertainment they provide. Does that mean our collective memories of the most dangerous and important events in American history are accurate? This well-conceived book provides a fascinating answer. If you can only read one book this season about the movies, this is it.”—James W. Cortada, senior research fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota
Synopsis
Largely shut out of American theaters since the 1920s, foreign films such as Open City, Bicycle Thief, Rashomon, The Seventh Seal, Breathless, La Dolce Vita and L'Avventura played after World War II in a growing number of art houses around the country and created a small but influential art film market devoted to the acquisition, distribution, and exhibition of foreign-language and English-language films produced abroad. Nurtured by successive waves of imports from Italy, Great Britain, France, Sweden, Japan, and the Soviet Bloc, the renaissance was kick-started by independent distributors working out of New York; by the 1960s, however, the market had been subsumed by Hollywood.
From Roberto Rossellini's Open City in 1946 to Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris in 1973, Tino Balio tracks the critical reception in the press of such filmmakers as Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Tony Richardson, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Luis Bunuel, Satyajit Ray, and Milos Forman. Their releases paled in comparison to Hollywood fare at the box office, but their impact on American film culture was enormous. The reception accorded to art house cinema attacked motion picture censorship, promoted the director as auteur, and celebrated film as an international art. Championing the cause was the new "cinephile" generation, which was mostly made up of college students under thirty.
The fashion for foreign films depended in part on their frankness about sex. When Hollywood abolished the Production Code in the late 1960s, American-made films began to treat adult themes with maturity and candor. In this new environment, foreign films lost their cachet and the art film market went into decline.
"
Synopsis
The French New Wave cinema is arguably the most fascinating of all film movements, famous for its exuberance, daring, and avant-garde techniques.
A History of the French New Wave Cinema offers a fresh look at the social, economic, and aesthetic mechanisms that shaped French film in the 1950s, as well as detailed studies of the most important New Wave movies of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Richard Neupert first tracks the precursors to New Wave cinema, showing how they provided blueprints for those who would follow. He then demonstrates that it was a core group of critics-turned-directors from the magazine Cahiers du Cinémaespecially François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godardwho really revealed that filmmaking was changing forever. Later, their cohorts Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Pierre Kast continued in their own unique ways to expand the range and depth of the New Wave.
In an exciting new chapter, Neupert explores the subgroup of French film practice known as the Left Bank Group, which included directors such as Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda. With the addition of this new material and an updated conclusion, Neupert presents a comprehensive review of the stunning variety of movies to come out of this important era in filmmaking.
Synopsis
Navajo Talking Picture, released in 1985, is one of the earliest and most controversial works of Native cinema. It is a documentary by Los Angeles filmmaker Arlene Bowman, who travels to the Navajo reservation to record the traditional ways of her grandmother in order to understand her own cultural heritage. For reasons that have often confused viewers, the filmmaker persists despite her traditional grandmotherand#8217;s forceful objections to the apparent invasion of her privacy. What emerges is a strange and thought-provoking work that abruptly calls into question the issue of insider versus outsider and other assumptions that have obscured the complexities of Native art.
Randolph Lewis offers an insightful introduction and analysis of Navajo Talking Picture, in which he shows that it is not simply the first Navajo-produced film but also a path-breaking work in the history of indigenous media in the United States. Placing the film in a number of revealing contexts, including the long history of Navajo people working in Hollywood, the ethics of documentary filmmaking, and the often problematic reception of Native art, Lewis explores the tensions and mysteries hidden in this unsettling but fascinating film.
Synopsis
Smoke Signals is a historical milestone in Native American filmmaking. Released in 1998 and based on a short-story collection by Sherman Alexie, it was the first wide-release feature film written, directed, coproduced, and acted by Native Americans. The most popular Native American film of all time,
Smoke Signals is also an innovative work of cinematic storytelling that demands sustained critical attention in its own right.and#160;Embedded in
Smoke Signalsand#8217;s universal story of familial loss and renewal are uniquely Indigenous perspectives about political sovereignty, Hollywoodand#8217;s long history of misrepresentation, and the rise of Indigenous cinema across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Joanna Hearneand#8217;s work foregrounds the voices of the filmmakers and performersand#8212;in interviews with Alexie and director Chris Eyre, among othersand#8212;to explore the filmand#8217;s audiovisual and narrative strategies for speaking to multiple audiences. In particular, Hearne examines the filmmakersand#8217; appropriation of mainstream American popular culture forms to tell a Native story. Focusing in turn on the production and reception of the film and issues of performance, authenticity, social justice, and environmental history within the filmand#8217;s text and context, this in-depth introduction and analysis expands our understanding and deepens our enjoyment of a Native cinema landmark.
and#160;
and#160;
Synopsis
Americans have been almost constantly at war since 1917. In addition to two world wars, the United States has fought proxy wars, propaganda wars, and a “war on terror,” among others. But even with the constant presence of war in American life, much of what Americans remember about those conflicts comes from Hollywood depictions.
In War on the Silver Screen Glen Jeansonne and David Luhrssen vividly demonstrate how war movies have burned the images and impressions of those wars onto the American psyche more concretely than has the reality of the wars themselves. That is, our feelings about wars are generated less by what we learn through study and discourse than by powerful cinematic images and dialogue. Films are compressed, intense, and immediate and often a collective experience rather than a solitary one. Actors and drama provide the visceral impact necessary to form perceptions of history that are much more enduring than those generated by other media or experiences.
War on the Silver Screen draws on more than a century of films and history, including classics such as All Quiet on the Western Front, Apocalypse Now, and The Hurt Locker, to examine the legacy of American cinema on twentieth- and twenty-first-century attitudes about war.
About the Author
“Balio revisits the most exciting period in the history of world cinema, reminding us how movies suddenly, briefly became a vital force in modern intellectual life.”—Richard B. Jewell, author of The Golden Age of Cinema: Hollywood, 1929–1945
“A major contribution to film historical scholarship. Balio charts the fascinating careers of foreign films in the American market, complete with comprehensive details of their marketing, box-office success or failure, and reception by critics.”—Sarah Street, author of Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA
“For movie buffs, this is an indispensable and deeply fascinating book.”—Booklist
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part One: Emergence
1 Antecedents
2 Italian Neorealism
3 British Film Renaissance
Part Two: Import Trends
4 Market Dynamics
5 French Films of the 1950s
6 Japanese Films of the 1950s
7 Ingmar Bergman: The Brand
8 French New WAve
9 Angry Young Men: British New Cinema
10 Second Italian Renaissance
11 Auteurs From Outside the Epicenter
Part Three: Changing Dynamics
12 Enter Hollywood
The Aura of the New York Film Festival
Collapse