Showing 1-10 of 13 items.

Film Noir and the Arts of Lighting

Rutgers University Press

More than any other films from the classical era, the Hollywood film noir is known for its lighting. Film Noir and the Arts of Lighting offers a new account of this craft, grounded in a larger theory of cinematography as emotionally engaging storytelling. Featuring analyses of The Asphalt Jungle, Touch of Evil, and more.

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Playful Frames

Styles of Widescreen Cinema

Rutgers University Press

Playful Frames: Styles of Widescreen Cinema studies the poetics of the auteur-driven widescreen image, offering nimble, expansive analyses of the work of four distinctive filmmakers – Jean Negulesco, Blake Edwards, Robert Altman, and John Carpenter – who creatively inhabited the nooks and crannies of widescreen moviemaking during the final decades of the twentieth century.

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All for Beauty

Makeup and Hairdressing in Hollywood's Studio Era

Rutgers University Press

This book provides an industrial history that examines how and why makeup and hairdressing evolved as crafts in the studio era. Readers will never again watch Hollywood films without thinking about the roles of makeup and hairdressing in creating not just fictional characters but stars as emblems of an idealized and undeniably mesmerizing visual perfection.

 

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Soundies Jukebox Films and the Shift to Small-Screen Culture

Rutgers University Press

This is the first and only book to position what are called “Soundies” within the broader cultural and technological milieu of the 1940s. Examining the dynamics between Soundies’ short musical films, the Panoram’s film-jukebox technology, their screening spaces and their popular discourse, Kelley provides an integrative approach to historic media exhibition.  

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The Zoom

Drama at the Touch of a Lever

Rutgers University Press

From the queasy zooms in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to the avant-garde mystery of Michael Snow’s Wavelength, from the excitement of televised baseball to the drama of the political convention, the zoom shot is instantly recognizable and highly controversial. Nick Hall traces the century-spanning history of the zoom lens in American film and television.  

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The Zoom

Drama at the Touch of a Lever

Rutgers University Press

From the queasy zooms in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to the avant-garde mystery of Michael Snow’s Wavelength, from the excitement of televised baseball to the drama of the political convention, the zoom shot is instantly recognizable and highly controversial. Nick Hall traces the century-spanning history of the zoom lens in American film and television.  

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Making Believe

Screen Performance and Special Effects in Popular Cinema

Rutgers University Press

With the rise of digital effects in cinema the human performer is increasingly the only “real” element on screen. Making Believe sheds new light on screen performance by historicizing it within the context of visual and special effects cinema and technological change in filmmaking, through the silent, early sound, and current digital eras.  
 

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Designing Sound

Audiovisual Aesthetics in 1970s American Cinema

Rutgers University Press

Designing Sound demonstrates how Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, and other groundbreaking American directors of the 1970s possessed not only visionary eyes, but also keen ears that enabled them to take cinematic sound design in innovative directions. Offering detailed case studies of key films and filmmakers, Jay Beck explores how sound design was central to the era’s experimentation with new modes of cinematic storytelling and aesthetic sensibilities, from the lyricism of Terrence Malick to the gritty realism of Martin Scorsese.   

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Shot on Location

Postwar American Cinema and the Exploration of Real Place

Rutgers University Press

Renowned film scholar R. Barton Palmer explores the historical, ideological, economic, and technical developments that led Hollywood filmmakers of the late 1940s and 1950s to increasingly head outside the studio and capture footage of real places. Examining works ranging from Sunset Blvd. to The Searchers, Shot on Location discovers the massive influence that wartime newsreels had on the postwar Hollywood film, as the blurring of the formal boundaries between cinematic journalism and fiction lent a “reality effect” to otherwise implausible stories. 

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Hidden in Plain Sight

An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema

Rutgers University Press

What does it mean to describe cinematic effects as “movie magic,” or to say that the cinema is all a “trick”? To answer these questions, Colin Williamson situates the cinema within a long tradition of magical practices and devices of wonder that combine art and science, involve deception and discovery, and evoke both awe and curiosity. Hidden in Plain Sight shows how, even as they mystify audiences, cinematic illusions also encourage them to learn more about the technologies and techniques behind moving images.

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