Melodrama and Meaning
Title | Melodrama and Meaning PDF eBook |
Author | Barbara Klinger |
Publisher | Indiana University Press |
Pages | 226 |
Release | 1994-08-22 |
Genre | Drama |
ISBN | 9780253208750 |
Melodrama and Meaning is a major addition to the new historical approach to film studies. Barbara Klinger shows how institutions most associated with Hollywood cinema—academia, the film industry, review journalism, star publicity, and the mass media—create meaning and ideological identity for films. Chapters focus on Sirk's place in the development of film studies from the 1950s through the 1980s, as well as the history of the critical reception (both academic and popular) of Sirk's films, a history that outlines journalism's role in public tastemaking. Other chapters are devoted to Universal's selling of Written on the Wind, the machinery of star publicity and the changing image of Rock Hudson, and the contemporary "institutionalized" camp response to Sirk that has resulted from developments in mass culture.
Melodrama and Meaning
Title | Melodrama and Meaning PDF eBook |
Author | Barbara Klinger |
Publisher | |
Pages | 232 |
Release | 1994 |
Genre | Drama |
ISBN |
Melodrama and Meaning is a major addition to the new historical approach to film studies. Barbara Klinger shows how institutions most associated with Hollywood cinema--academia, the film industry, review journalism, star publicity, and the mass media--create meaning and ideological identity for films. Chapters focus on Sirk's place in the development of film studies from the 1950s through the 1980s, as well as the history of the critical reception (both academic and popular) of Sirk's films, a history that outlines journalism's role in public tastemaking. Other chapters are devoted to Universal's selling of Written on the Wind, the machinery of star publicity and the changing image of Rock Hudson, and the contemporary "institutionalized" camp response to Sirk that has resulted from developments in mass culture.
Melodrama and Modernity
Title | Melodrama and Modernity PDF eBook |
Author | Ben Singer |
Publisher | Columbia University Press |
Pages | 386 |
Release | 2001-02-05 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 0231113293 |
Surveying the expanding conflict in Europe during one of his famous fireside chats in 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt ominously warned that "we know of other methods, new methods of attack. The Trojan horse. The fifth column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery. Spies, saboteurs, and traitors are the actors in this new strategy." Having identified a new type of war -- a shadow war -- being perpetrated by Hitler's Germany, FDR decided to fight fire with fire, authorizing the formation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to organize and oversee covert operations. Based on an extensive analysis of OSS records, including the vast trove of records released by the CIA in the 1980s and '90s, as well as a new set of interviews with OSS veterans conducted by the author and a team of American scholars from 1995 to 1997, The Shadow War Against Hitler is the full story of America's far-flung secret intelligence apparatus during World War II. In addition to its responsibilities generating, processing, and interpreting intelligence information, the OSS orchestrated all manner of dark operations, including extending feelers to anti-Hitler elements, infiltrating spies and sabotage agents behind enemy lines, and implementing propaganda programs. Planned and directed from Washington, the anti-Hitler campaign was largely conducted in Europe, especially through the OSS's foreign outposts in Bern and London. A fascinating cast of characters made the OSS run: William J. Donovan, one of the most decorated individuals in the American military who became the driving force behind the OSS's genesis; Allen Dulles, the future CIA chief who ran the Bern office, which he called "the big window onto the fascist world"; a veritable pantheon of Ivy League academics who were recruited to work for the intelligence services; and, not least, Roosevelt himself. A major contribution of the book is the story of how FDR employed Hitler's former propaganda chief, Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstengl, as a private spy. More than a record of dramatic incidents and daring personalities, this book adds significantly to our understanding of how the United States fought World War II. It demonstrates that the extent, and limitations, of secret intelligence information shaped not only the conduct of the war but also the face of the world that emerged from the shadows.
The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
Title | The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama PDF eBook |
Author | Carolyn Williams |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 353 |
Release | 2018-10-04 |
Genre | Drama |
ISBN | 110709593X |
A lively and accessible account of the most popular form of nineteenth-century English theatre, and its continuing influence today.
Mexican Melodrama
Title | Mexican Melodrama PDF eBook |
Author | Elena Lahr-Vivaz |
Publisher | University of Arizona Press |
Pages | 232 |
Release | 2016-10-18 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 0816532516 |
Mexican Melodrama offers a timely look at critically acclaimed films that serve as key referents in discussions of Mexican cinema. Elena Lahr-Vivaz artfully portrays the dominant conventions of historical and contemporary Mexican cinema, showing how new-wave directors draw from a previous generation to produce meaning in the present.
Melodrama and Meaning
Title | Melodrama and Meaning PDF eBook |
Author | John Worden |
Publisher | |
Pages | 78 |
Release | 1987 |
Genre | Melodrama |
ISBN |
Gaslight Melodrama
Title | Gaslight Melodrama PDF eBook |
Author | Guy Barefoot |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Pages | 242 |
Release | 2016-10-06 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 1474290361 |
In 1945, a year when American crime films were apparently moving out on to the streets of contemporary Los Angeles and New York, one reviewer noted the emergence of a 'cycle of mystery and horror pictures placed in the gaslight era of the turn of the century.' For another critic, it seemed that for Hollywood there was 'no world of today save the world of London by gaslight'. In Gaslight Melodrama, Guy Barefoot examines the films that gave rise to such comments, and the pattern of discourse that gave rise to such films. The book's main focus is provided by 1940s Hollywood melodramas such as Gaslight, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Hangover Square. It also discusses a related cycle of British films that located murder and melodrama in Victorian or Edwardian settings, and then looks beyond cinema to the Gothic novels of the 18th century, 19th century discussions of gas lighting in street, home and theatre, and ambivalent 20th century responses to the Victorian era. Combining close analysis of particular film texts with attention to cinema's cultural context, Gaslight Melodrama provides an exploration of the ways in which the past has been the site of contested meaning, and an examination of the network of melodramatic narratives embedded within familiar and lesser-known examples of classical Hollywood cinema.