Ever since motion pictures became a crucial part of popular culture, certain consumers decided that simply watching those products and going to the theaters was not enough. Accordingly, editors of the earliest movie magazines quickly realized that gossip, behind-the-scenes talk and all sorts or rumors surrounding those new media stars obviously were at least as […]
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Tag: Film Studies
Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion, and Reception by W. Proctor and R. McCulloch (e
The movie Star Wars (1977) and the evolving Star Wars universe never were just films or simple family entertainment. To many fans, seemingly it became a surrogate religion or a way of life. The merchandise, action figurines, literature or cartoon adaptations and spin-offs earned George Lucas and Lucasfilm fortune after fortune (he directed and produced […]
Movies, Songs, and Electric Sound: Transatlantic Trends by Charles O’Brien (2019)
Sound film changed many ideas and experiences of watching motion pictures; certain aspects that concern the use of songs, musical story lines and content of films from 1930 onward are evaluated here. Author O’Brian selected a corpus of roughly 500 feature films (including musical films) from France, the US, England and Hollywood’s greatest rival at […]
Musik im klassischen Film noir by Janina Müller (German) (2019)
Janina Müller’s study (“Music in classic film noir”) takes a close look at the scores of mostly the popular films noir and a few rather unknown ones. Here it means studying, juxtaposing and evaluating the scores of several films, while their uniqueness in comparison with standard Hollywood movies is questioned. As there is hardly one […]
Terrifying Texts. Essays on Books of Good and Evil in Horror … by C. J. Miller and A. B. Van Riper (
There is hardly a book more popular with occultists or the genre of horror movies than the Necronomicon. It is filled with spells, runes and various texts to summon demons, spirits and otherworldly creatures (what actually makes it a so-called “grimoire”). The tales surrounding this fabricated text – that only was published as a joke […]
Demographic Angst: Cultural Narratives and American Films of the 1950s by Alan Nadel (2017)
Alan Nadel, probably best known for his expert writings on the Atomic Age and American everyday life in the 1950s, has come up with another study of that period. A time when not just the permanent fears of a hot war or Soviet invasion were present, but also strange (or possibly communist) activities from your […]
Out of the Past: Lacan and Film Noir by Ben Tyrer (2016)
There is little doubt today, that film noir research and the spread and development of psychoanalysis have boosted academic Film Studies to a large extent; for a short period in the early 1970s, the psychoanalytical approach to Film Studies even seemed to be the only method that brought results. For film and psychoanalysis had a […]
Class, Crime and International Film Noir: Globalizing … by Dennis Broe (2014)
There are many different approaches to the analysis of film noir, since film studies today deal with almost any facet, be it technical, stylistic or director specific. Dennis Broe, however, has the emphasis on the social-cultural and most of all the working-class aspects of these films. He locates the origins of film noir to a […]
Anxiety Muted. American Film Music … by Stanley C. Pelkey and Anthony Bushard (eds.) (2015)
In this volume the thirteen contributors research how in audiovisual media of the 1950s and 1960s (TV and cinema), the modern anxieties about conformity, urbanization, gender and family were represented audibly, that is, in sound of any kind or the lack thereof. This could be the soundtrack, music used in the media, but also all […]