Book Description
The second edition of Mario Falsetto's extensive analysis of Kubrick's films carefully examines the filmmaker's oeuvre in its entirety--from smaller, early films (The Killing) through mid-career masterpieces (Dr. Strangelove; 2001: A Space Odyssey; A Clockwork Orange), later films such as Full Metal Jacket, and his final work, 1999's Eyes Wide Shut. The author, offering close readings supported by precise shot descriptions, shows us how Kubrick's body of work represents a stylistically and thematically consistent cinematic vision, one that merges formal experimentation with great philosophical complexity. Falsetto explores many of Kubrick's often-used devices, including the long-take aesthetic, voice-overs, and moving camera, and discusses the thematic uses to which these techniques are applied. Finally, he presents the very first formal analysis of Eyes Wide Shut, the director's final, very much underrated masterwork.
Customer Reviews:
Somewhere Beyond The Infinate, Stanley Kubrick is Smiling..........2003-02-19
Falsetto's guide to Kubrick is as Dante's to the Inferno: that is, DIVINE. Never mind the price, this book is worth it! Easy to read, scene breakdowns ( sometimes shot-by-shot ), and narrative patterns. Read another review for what they're like, I won't waste time trying to recite something too perfect to recite:
This is the DEFINATIVE Kubrick book. It offers descriptions from The Killing to Eyes Wide Shut, and it does a good job. Thank you God for Stanley Kubrick, and thank you God for Mario Falsetto
for telling about him!
Fresh look at Kubrick's masterpieces.......2002-11-29
Falsetto blends thoughtful, intellectual critques of Kubrick's work focusing on his editing choices and the tension between subjective and objective storytelling. It is by far the first comprehensive analysis of Eyes Wide Shut to be included in a book on Kubrick's style. Falsetto's discourse illuminates previous themes that never occurred to me such as the fact that the narrator in Barry Lyndon probably represents the eighteenth century aristocratic viewpoint, and therefore is not really an objective storyteller at all. Falsetto's articulate analysis of Kubrick's narrative themes are completely engrossing and fascinating without ever getting lost in technical jargon. His analysis is particularly right on when discussing such an underappreciated work such as Full Metal Jacket. He argues that Kubrick was aiming for hyperrealism, and that many of the scenes seem very surreal thus penetrating the heart of what war is about. I highly recommend this thoughtful and well thought out book to anyone interested in a fresh look at one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived.
Much more than an hommage........1999-05-05
Falsetto really takes us inside the creative process of the Stanley Kubrick with his book STANLEY KUBRICK: A NARRATIVE AND STYLISTIC ANALYSIS. It is more than just an hommage to the late film master (there are plenty of those out there already), rather, it is a clever and insightful excursion into what makes Kubrick one of the great film artist of all time. The author is tracing the stylistic development of Kubrick's career, through carefully selected examples from some of his powerful films (THE KILLING, PATHS OF GLORY, LOLITA, 2001, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, BARRY LYNDON among others). At the same time, he brillantly analyzes the way Kubrick is telling us story with images and sound, his method for organizing the material into a structured and conceptual cinematic "whole". STANLEY KUBRICK: A NARRATIVE AND STYLISTIC ANALYSIS should be seen as a serious (but nevertheless entertaining) investigation into the heart of Kubrick's work, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who appreciate good comprehensive writing about the master.
One of the best looks at Kubrick's work........1998-12-01
An in-depth review of the narrative and style (hence the title!) of Stan the Man. This book covers several Kubrick films(The Killing, Lolita, Barry Lyndon, etc), and it focuses on and is arranged by topic (eg filmic narration, patterns of organization, etc) rather than by individual film. An excellent study that should be on your bookshelf.
Book Description
Media Culture develops methods and analyses of contemporary film, television, music and other artifacts to discern their nature and effects, argueing that media culture is the dominant form of culture which socializes us and provides materials for identity, social reproduction and change. Through studies of Reagan and Rambo, horror films and youth films, rap music and African American culture, Madonna, fashion, television news and entertainment, MTV, Beavis and Butt-Head, the Gulf-War as cultural text, cyberpunk fiction and postmodern theory, Kellner provides a series of lively studies that both illuminate contemporary culture and provide methods of analysis and critique.
Many people today talk about cultural studies, but Kellner actually does it, carrying through a unique mixture of theoretical analyses and concrete discussions of some of the most popular and influential forms of contemporary media culture. Criticizing social context, political struggle, and the system ofcultural production, Kellner develops a multi-dimensional approach to cultural studies that broadens the field and opens it to a variety of disiplines. He also provides approaches to the vexed question of the effects of culture and provides perspectives for cultural studies.
Customer Reviews:
Great Introduction into Cultural Studies.......2005-02-06
For some time now, Douglas Kellner has been arguing for the importance of media and culture in today's politics. This book is a great introduction for students into why he has placed such an emphasis on this issue. Kellner pulls together Marxism, postmodern theory, and British Cultural Studies in conrete analyses of media culture. The downside to this book is that the objects it analyzes are a bit dated now, but nonetheless theoretically relevant.
A highly relevant, prescient and insightful book.......1999-10-27
Kellner's research examines the construction of social reality by exploring and analyzing contemporary media culture. His work on understanding how cultural identity is shaped by media is an extremely useful and fascinating critique on modern society. In addition, Kellner offers a well-written overview of some of the theory behind the big ideas and concepts used to interpret our media-based world.
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Sites Of Autopsy In Contemporary Culture (S U N Y Series in Postmodern Culture)
Elizabeth Klaver
Manufacturer: State University of New York Press
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ASIN: 0791464261 |
Book Description
Living Room Wars brings together Ien Ang's recent writings on media audiences to ask what it means to live in a world saturated by media. Ang suggests that we cannot understand media audiences without deconstructing the category of "audience" itself as an institutional and discursive construct.
Living Room Wars highlights the inherent contradictions of a `politics of pleasure' of television consumption: Ang moves beyond the traditional focus on textual meanings to explore the structural and historical representations of television audiences as an integral part of modern culture. Her wide-ranging and illuminating discussion takes in the battle between television and its audiences; the politics of empirical audience research; new technologies and the tactics of television consumption; ethnography and radical contextualism in audience studies; television and fiction and women's fantasy; feminist desire and female pleasure in media consumption; and the transnational media system.
Customer Reviews:
Living Room Wars. Rethinking media audiences for a postmoder.......2000-05-23
Written within the tradition of cultural and media studies, this book offers a wonderful resource for those interested in critical approaches to ethnographic sudies on audiences. The four chapters that constitute the first section present an in depth critical discussion of the assumptions of previous theories, research, and measuring methods used by traditional academic and commercial analysis of audiences. They situate the debate about audiences in the realm of the consumption of TV as a domestic experience and point out the limitation of those traditions which decontextualized the audience from their consumption environment. The second section provides strong evidence of how women negotiate cultural and personal meanings when watching TV. One of the articles, for example, deconstructs the traditional premise that portrays them as passive and alienated viewers of soap operas. This section intends to offer a solid theoretical basis to understand how gender is related to media consumption by giving actual examples of ethnographic interpretive research. The last section situates media reception in the complex landscapes of globalization systems. It emphasizes how local audiences "localize" global media by re-interpreting those "global" media in their local experiences, challenging the thesis of global cultural homogeneization hold by some traditions in sociology and media studies. Finally, I want to point out that the value of this book is not only the relevance of the topics that are addressed, but the solid academic base that supports their main thesis. Moreover, among the virtues of it, I can name the clarity of the language, the well organized exposition of complex ideas and, of course, the passion of the discussion that will definitely involve even those readers with no previous expertise in media or cultural studies literature. This book can definitely have a place with important advances in media and cultural studies such as David Morley's Television, Audiences and CulturalStudies or Shaun Moores' Interpreting audiences.
Book Description
Memoir meets cultural criticism in this examination of American popular culture at the end of the century.
Book Description
Sounds blare and pictures flash frantically across the screen. This may seem to be an accurate description of every commercial aired on TV, but such commercials are actually symptomatic of a much more important cultural shift. Arthur Hunt argues that there is a conceptual transformation taking place today, as we move from an emphasis on the “word” to the predominance of the “image.”
Hunt focuses on the contrast between a Judeo-Christian heritage, characteristically word-dependent—and paganism, typically image-dependent. As people trust experience and visual representations to interpret their surroundings, they focus less on content and more on sensory appeal. Hunt argues that movements like the Protestant Reformation, Puritanism, and the beginnings of the American nation were all created and sustained in an environment that transmitted its ideas through words, while historical shifts to emphasize image have occurred during periods like the Dark Ages. As the word, both written and spoken, is devalued, there is a renewed descent into paganism.
A wide range of issues—education, politics, entertainment, postmodernism—are brought together in an incisive, illuminating way. This book examines trends in today’s culture and churches that lead away from a word-centered world and into an image-soaked world ripe for propaganda and a demagogue.
Customer Reviews:
Contrast with "Everything Bad is Good for You".......2006-06-15
As a fan of Gene Veith, Neil Postman and Allan Bloom, I noted this book as inspired by the dialogue between Postman and Camille Paglia. It is an excellent book and well worth the read but following the natural urge to find something to disagree with while we walk the same road in the same direction, I would like to engage a few issues that I find especially intriguing even though they are small potatoes in the whole stew.
When AWH critiques or contrasts the Egyptians with the Hebrews by referring to the Egyptians as image based and the Hebrews based, we certainly should agree, but the images of the Egyptians were their alphabet at least at some point. Hieroglyphs apparently came to represent sounds (didn't they?). The feather in a sense becomes a letter? The shift to a phonetic aleph bet was certainly significant but they are still images - images of the letters. Perhaps images of the shape of the mouth (at least symbolically) while making the sounds - think of Greek Theta or just the letter "o". So the contrast between the Egyptians and the Hebrews is certainly there but how sharp a contrast should we think it is? I wonder.... In any case, AWH even remarks that the "Egyptians thought Toth invented writing" (p. 37) so this is certainly a matter of degree. We might also wonder why "advanced civilizations cannot exist without writing" (as AWH quotes Gelb) if this might be because they need a recording system. Would video do? (I imagine reading a book presented as a DVD, for example.) Is video text as the postmodernists might say? In which case, the vanishing word is not vanished at all but more powerful than ever in digital form.
An interesting contrast to this book is Steven Johnson's "Everything Bad is Good for You."
A thoughtful Examination .......2006-06-08
In our technologically advanced age the value of the written word is being lost. The Author shows by giving a historical account how this is leading our society into Idolatry and Paganism. The devaluation of the written word is leaving people defenseless against counterfeits and leaves them open for whatever trend comes along. This book takes a close examination of our media saturated culture.
Stemming the Tide of the Image Culture.......2004-03-19
Arthur Hunt's "The Vanishing Word" is a helpful and insightful salvo in the battle to preserve the written word in an age enamored with images. Hunt is currently a professor of speech and communications at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. Although he teaches speech and communications, his real expertise is in the fledgling discipline of Media Ecology. Media Ecology was a field pioneered by men like Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan. "The Vanishing Word" is essentially a work of Media Ecology and in it Hunt examines our cultural environment and finds it polluted with pagan image idolatry.
Hunt's work is particularly helpful because it begins with an historical analysis of the rise of the written word. Hunt condenses the important events of Western history into readable and accessible chapters. He presents this historical information in a lively fashion by including helpful illustrations and examples. Hunt's Christian presuppositions are certainly not hidden in this book. His history of the word begins with God and Moses and not with Aristotle or Gutenburg.
Following the linear unfolding of history, Hunt notes that a major shift occurred in our culture with the rise of electronic mass media. He contends that this "new" development is bringing our culture back to "old" ideas, particularly pagan idolatry. He writes:
"The old system just keeps coming back. Not that long after the Flood's waters had receded, Nimrod stretched forth his hands to receive the astrological charts from atop Babel's tower. The sands of Egypt were still between the toes of Moses when he proceeded down the mountain of thunderings and lightnings, tablets in hand, only to find the Hebrews dancing around a golden calf. The people of God multiplied under the Roman knife, but then the pantheon strangely reappeared over the church altar. The fire of the Reformation pushed the gods back until the icon-making machines of the twentieth century ushered them back again in living color (155-156)."
Hunt's book also provides a helpful analysis of the shift from modernism to post-modernism. He also makes some penetrating comments about the impact of the image culture on the church, particularly in the area of worship.
I highly recommend this book to pastors, Christian educators and anyone interested in understanding and stemming the tide of the image culture.
A wake-up call for the church.......2004-03-17
The author sees the current cultural tendency to exalt visual imagery at the expense of language as a direct assault on Christianity. He warns Christians that the church is being cut off from its word-based heritage, to its great detriment. Superb socio-cultural analysis by a keen-minded Christian scholar, along with a much-needed affirmation that "the Word is everything." Although Professor Hunt builds upon the previous studies of Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Camille Paglia, and others, his radically different spiritual perspective as a conservative evangelical makes this a highly original work with many entirely fresh insights. Required reading for all thoughtful Christians who would equip themselves better for the "spirit wars" of our time and halt the church's slippage into a mindless paganism.
The lost art of reading and thinking.......2004-01-09
This book was a fasinating history and exposition of how the image has led to the decline of civilization. Today's almost total reliance on visual communication may be a dark age greater that the olden dark ages. If you don't believe this last statement, you have not read this book or are blinded by images. This book should convince you to read more and cherish black and white print over the alluring visual medium. The trinity of violence, sex and celebrity accompanys the image. The dangers of technology and media in historical perspective awaits you in this book. Neil Postman would second the motions in this book. I'd like to see a college class on the topic.
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The Small Screen: How Television Equips Us to Live in the Information Age
Brian L. Ott
Manufacturer: Blackwell Publishing Limited
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General Broadcasting
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ASIN: 1405161558 |
Book Description
Television is one of the most important socializing forces in contemporary culture. This cultural history of primetime television in America during the 1990s documents a period of dramatic change, examining how TV helped viewers come to terms with their fears about living in a fast-paced, increasingly diverse, information-laden society.Ott considers changes that took place in programming, such as the rapid adoption of cable, the proliferation of content providers, the development of niche marketing, the introduction of high-definition television, the blurring of traditional genres, and the creation of new formats like reality-based programming. In doing so, he argues that television programmes of the 1990s afforded viewers a symbolic resource for negotiating the psychological challenges associated with the shift from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.
Book Description
Moves from Beethoven to Buffy to examine the blurred nexus of elite and popular culture in the twenty-first century.
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Counternarratives: Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies in Postmodern Spaces
Henry Giroux
Manufacturer: Routledge
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0415905842 |
Book Description
To understand contemporary times, we must appreciate the extent to which our lives are affected by the cultural and political struggle between "official" narratives and the counternarratives which emerge as oppositional responses.
Counternarratives develops a concept of "postmodern counternarratives" as a frame for exploring the politics of media, technology and education within everyday struggles for human identities and loyalties.
The authors identify two forms of counternarratives. One functions as a critique of the modernist propensity for grand narratives. The second concept, which is the focus of the book, builds on the first; the idea of "little stories" addressing cultural and political opposition to the "official" narratives used to manipulate public consciousness.
Successive chapters explore a diverse range of "little stories." Each marks an important point of contestation within contemporary education and culture: curriculum, pedagogy, literacy, media representations and applications of new technologies. Specific case studies look at the potential for cultural studies as a tool for teachers to confront the official narrative of classroom education; the "slacker" subculture as a response to official accounts of what youth should be; media accounts of the Gulf War; Paulo Freire's counternarrative of pedagogy and education and the role of the university within contemporary metropolitan and post-colonial cultures; and the possibilities for critical pedagogy in cyberspace.
Book Description
Vulture Culture presents a new and complex way of thinking about daytime television talk shows. Vulture culture is the process by which the media scavenge the personal narratives and popular discourses that make up everyday knowledge and commonsense and (re-)present them back to us as spectacle, entertainment, and information. This book explores these nuances through a probing analysis of the vast landscape of daytime television talk shows and their relation to important political, social, and economic problems. Using an approach that takes into account the multiple perspectives of political economy, cultural studies, and cultural pedagogy, Vulture Culture provides an in-depth and well-rounded examination of this mainstay of television and media culture.
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Mediated Sex: Pornography and Postmodern Culture
Brian Mcnair
Manufacturer: A Hodder Arnold Publication
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Binding: Paperback
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Striptease Culture
ASIN: 0340614285 |
Book Description
Mediated sex is about the proliferation of sexual discourse in all its variants, from pornography as narrowly defined to the "s/m chic" of advertising and the art of Jeff Koons and Madonna. It examines the place of these representations in late-20th century, post-HIV and AIDS culture, and in the context of the history of sexual representation from Greek antiquity onward. With extensive reference to examples drawn from the US and the UK, Mediated Sex attempts to make sense of and assess the many contradictory and conflicting claims made about the impact of sexual representation on individuals and societies. those
Customer Reviews:
Needs Expanding.......2005-06-24
This is a decent overview on the issue, but Mr. McNair spends too much time examining pornographic magazines, and no time at all discussing the Internet. He was quite clearly wrong in stating there has not been a trend towards more violent imagery, anyone perusing the net can attest to that. So, the book is in need of an update.
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Kubrick: The Definitive Edition
Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze
Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis
Eyes Wide Shut
Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (Cambridge Film Handbooks)
